Philosophical Textuality: Studies on Issues of Discourse in Philosophy 9783110319675, 9783110319231

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Nicholas Rescher Philosophical Testuality Studies on Issues of Discourse in Philosophy

For Julian Nida-Rümelin

Nicholas Rescher

Philosophical Textuality Studies on Issues of Discourse in Philosophy

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PHILOSOPHICAL TEXTUALITY Preface Chapter 1:

Issues of Textuality

1

Chapter 2:

On Philosophical Exposition

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Chapter 3:

Issues of Precision

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Chapter 4:

The Role of Distinctions in Philosophy

37

Chapter 5:

Pronominal Issues in Philosophy

55

Chapter 6:

Deconstructionism and its Problems

61

Chapter 7:

Referential Affinity: A Study in Textual Analysis

73

Chapter 8:

On the Literature of the Free Will Problem

83

References

91

Name Index

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PREFACE

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hilosophizing is an activity—a process carried on by mindendowed creatures. But philosophy itself—the product of philosophizing—is an abstraction which, as such, exists in its own way. Like chemistry or poetry, the things it deals with may be ever so real, but it itself exists only in the realm of textuality. However the nature of philosophy’s textual domain is seldom studied as such. The present discussion will take one very small step towards filling this gap. I am grateful to Estelle Burris for her ever-competent help in preparing this material for the press.

Nicholas Rescher Pittsburgh PA May 2010

Chapter One ISSUES OF TEXTUALITY 1. INTELLIGENCE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PRODUCT

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volution is nature’s innovator. Cosmic, biological, and cultural evolution—all bring massive novelties in their wake. There were no laws of chemistry in the first nanosecond of the universe after the Big Bang—only a boiling soup of subatomic stuff in which chemicals had not yet emerged. And similarly, there were no laws of cellular biology in the first billion years of our universe’s existence, nor laws of macroeconomics in its first ten billion. But with the emergence of new modes of process, new sorts of things have continuously come into existence, and new modes of lawfulness arise in their wake. And salient if not paramount among these are intelligent creatures. Why intelligent beings? What accounts for their existence on the cosmic stage? The general direction—at any rate—of the answer to this query about intelligence is relatively straightforward. Basically, we intelligent beings are here because that is our assigned place in evolution’s scheme of things. Different sorts of creatures have different ecological niches, different specialties that enable them to find their evolutionary way down the corridor of time. Ultimately intelligent beings emerged—presumably because there was a viable niche for creatures whose survival advantage came through intelligence rather than various alternatives. Some are highly prolific, some very hard, some swift of foot, some hard to spot, some extremely shy. Homo sapiens is different. For the selective advantage that is the evolutionary mainstay of our species is intelligence with everything that this involves in the way of abilities and versatilities. If intelligence were not of evolutionary advantage, intelligent beings would not occupy the place they have achieved in nature’s scheme of things. The complexities of information management and control pose unrelenting evolutionary demands. To process a large volume of information nature must fit us out with a large brain. A battleship needs more elaborate mechanisms for guidance and governance than a row boat. A department store needs a more elaborate managerial apparatus than a corner grocery.

Nicholas Rescher • Issues of Textuality

To operate a sophisticated body you need a sophisticated brain. The evolution of the human brain is the story of nature’s struggles to provide the machinery of information management and control needed by creatures of increasing physical versatility. A feedback cycle comes into operation—a complex body requires a larger brain for command and control, and a larger brain requires a larger body. And this body of operational efficiency in its turn places greater demands on that brain for the managerial functions required to provide for survival and the assurance of a posterity. Of course, a brain that is able to do the necessary things when and as needed to sustain in the life of a complex and versatile creature will mostly remain underutilized. To cope at times of peak demand, it will have a great deal of excess capacity to spare for other issues at slack times. And so, any brain powerful enough to accomplish those occasionally necessary tasks will have the surplus capacity at most normal times to pursue various challenging projects that have nothing whatever to do with survival. Granted, for evolution to do its work, the survival problems that creatures confront have to be by and large easy for the mechanisms at their disposal. And this fundamental principle holds just as true for cognitive as for biological evolution. If cognitive problem-solving were too difficult for our mental resources, we wouldn’t have evolved as problem solving creatures. If we had to go to as great lengths to work out the sum 2 + 2 as to extract the cube root of a number, or if it took us as long to discriminate 3- from 4sided figures as it takes to discriminate between 296- and 297-sided ones, then these sorts of issues would simply remain outside our cognitive repertoire. The “average” problems to be solved for survival and thriving that are posed by our lifestyle must be of the right level of difficulty for us— that is, they must be rather easy. And that calls for excess capacity. For if our problem-solving resources were generally strained to the limit, usually groaning under the burden of difficulty of the problems they are called on by nature to resolve in the interests of our lifestyle, then we just wouldn’t have those cognitive resources at all. And so, creatures of our sort owe their presence on the world stage to their intelligence. And once intelligent creatures are there, their presence makes a difference. 2. INTELLIGENCE IS WORLD-TRANSFORMATIVE Just how does the emergence of higher-order intelligence change the universe? This is a philosophical issue which (perhaps somewhat surprising-

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ly) rather few philosophers have addressed. It is a question that can be posed in many ways: What sort of significant novelty has come into existence with the evolutionary emergence of intelligence? What massive operational difference is there between an intelligence-containing universe and its intelligence-lacking variants? Such questions highlight varying aspects of one selfsame problem. The present question is: What really big phenomena of portentous import and significance that were previously absent does the evolutionary emergence of higher-order intelligence on the cosmic scene bring into being? There are, of course, a great many of them—art and morality included. But prominent among these is certainly cognition: the awareness of facts. After all, a universe without intelligence is one from which knowledge as such is absent. Earlier on, there certainly were things to be known, but there was no knowledge of them. Absent intelligence, the world is a cognitive vacuum. But once thinking minds enter upon the scene, there comes to realization something rather different from the bare realities and facts, namely the thought-perspectives at issue with ideas, opinions, and views about them. And so with the evolution of intelligence and its development a new dimension of being is added. For what we now have is not only the works of Nature but the works of intelligence-contrived Artifice—and in particular of that thought-artifice with respect to the nature of things. And with us humans this thought ultimately expanded from living, active thinking to recorded thought—thought embodied in broadly textual form. And this development poses the way for a group—and ultimately a contrast of—the ways of nature and the ways of textuality—of language encoded information. The first and most fundamental fact is that our cognitive hold in nature and its laws is always textually mediated. In dealing with nature we do not grasp it in a direct and mediated way. We never reach more than our ideas about it—our conception of nature. “Tell me what reality is like apart from and independently of what you think it to be” is an unimplementable injunction. And the next fundamental fact is that we deem nature to function in ways different from the ways of textuality. For we are committed to the idea that nature is stable in its ways. That the laws of nature are unchanging—no matter how greatly our ideas about them may change. And that the fundamental types of things that there are in the physical world can exhibit fixity even when our ideas about them change. And so there is a fun-

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damental divide between the realm of nature and the realm of thought about it—or if you will: between reality and textuality. The laws of nature are stable—even where they relate to change, and certain even where they relate to probabilities. By contrast textuality—and human artifice in general—is changeably anarchic, lacking in stable laws and even devoid of statistical regularities that are stable and unchanging over time. To be sure we can—indeed must—investigate it by statistical means. But statistics themselves are works in progress—that even exhibit the sort of stability we encounter with nature. In the realm of textuality— and of social statistics in general—we never encounter actual probabilities and never meet with the stable fixture that we take ourselves to meet within the study of nature. Social statistics never give rise to probabilities as we understand them in the study of natural processes. The phenomena of the textual domain are always transitory. To put it in the form of the popular paradox, the only unchanging fact of this domain is the fact of change itself. And this means that the role of social-technical statistics is never actually nomic and normative—never more than merely descriptive. The historically realized forms and taxonomies of the social realm are always variable items that realize transitory relationships geared to changing different conditions. Here we never have laws but only descriptive generalizations. The explanatory situation of the textual domain is thus something radically different from that which we encounter in the realm of natural phenomena. Granted—as such intelligent beings as there are in the world are themselves products of nature. But their productions are something else again— factors whose realization is not due to nature itself but involve the intermediation of yet another productive force—namely intelligence. And so it should occasion no surprise that at this level—the level of intelligent artifice—matters should play out differently. 3. WHERE ARE TEXTS LOCATED? Just where do those products of intelligent artifice find their place? Where in the framework of space and time is a text—say that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be located? As regards time, Hamlet clearly has a beginning, viz. when Shakespeare finished writing it. Does it also have an end? Texts do not come to a natural end. It would be puzzling to say that they die—in that they are annihilated. If they ever became “lost”—if every liv-

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ing trace of them had vanished from the world—we can no longer class them as extant. But what about spatial placement? Where are texts located? Copies, inscriptions, recordings of a text certainly have spatial placement. But these are not the text itself, they are records OF the text. And what of the memorizations of the text by people? There too are not the text itself but memory-traces OF it. But how is the text oriented to its memorized thought manifestations? Note here that while the thinking (we process) takes place in various minds (and here, perhaps, by affiliation in various brains) the thought that is at issue in these thinkings is an abstract object which, as such, has no spatial position at all. It is this that seems to be at issue with texts—they are abstractions that are exemplified in various concrete manifesting embodiments. And just as thoughts-of-green have spatiotemporal positioning, but green itself not, so those OF-representations of the text have spatiotemporal positions, but the text itself not. In creating a text, its author projects it into existence in the realm of abstractions. But thereafter it exists there—permanent and indestructible. A text can become forgotten, and even lost forever, but it cannot be destroyed. A text—and even the very language in which it is articulated can lose its entire connection with the realm of living thought. But it itself cannot—as a piece of text—be annihilated. Perhaps the very questions we are posing (“When, if at all, does a text come to a temporal end?” “Where is a text to be located in space?”) are inappropriate. Perhaps what we have here is a category mistake which improperly takes certain questions about a text to be meaningful that are actually not so. We must refrain from assimilating texts to the sort of thing that have a finite temporal existence and a specific task in space and time. Texts in sum are not part of spatiotemporal reality. They belong to their own abstract sphere and have to be understood on their own terms. They are projectively envisioned by beings who live in time and space. But they themselves are abstract rather than physical artifacts and have to be understood on their own terms. 4. TEXTUAL EXPLANATION Coming to cognitive terms with texts is a complicated business. Even simple texts can spawn endless explanations. “The cat is on the mat.” But

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Nicholas Rescher • Issues of Textuality

which cat? And which mat? And why is the cat there? And how did it get there? And what sort of cat is it—a tiger or a domestic feline? With complicated texts—the Bible, the dialogues of Plato, the plays of Shakespeare—the process of interpretive explanation is literally endless. The volume of commentary literature soon outruns the length of the text being discussed. Let it be that the original text states that the cat is on the mat. A later commentator points out that the mat is not really that large, and the cat is rather big, so that we must presume that its tail runs off the mat. It then does not do justice to the situation to say flatly that the cat is on the mat. In due course there comes along yet another, third commentator to critique commentator No. 2. Pointing out that cats rarely extend their tails straightout, he suggests that it is more than likely that the cat’s tail curls back onto the mat. Commentator No. 2 exaggerated the extent to which the original text needs to be reinterpreted. And so on and on. And as those commentators increasingly critic and emend the findings of their predecessors the thinner the thread of connection to that original text becomes. The commentary on any text is simply yet another text which that itself invites further commentary. The process of clarification feeds upon itself in providing ever-newer materials that are themselves in need of clarification. Fundamentally one finds that there are now two distinct objects at hand: (1) the original test that provides the original occasion for commentary, and (2) the ever-expanding manifold that is spawned through a commentatorial tradition. And such a tradition has much in common with an everexpanding snowball that is rolling downhill. And in particular one feature is important here, namely this—that the new natural being added is ever further removed from the original cove that lies at the center of it all. We can move ever onwards towards the fuller and more complicated explanation. In matters of philosophical substance, the process of elucidation, explanation, quantification runs on without end, with emendation to emendations, clarification of clarifications, qualifications of qualifications. Textual elucidation is in these matters a process of unending complexity. In trying to get to the bottom of things one finds a bottomless pit opening up beneath one. And philosophy is particularly open to this exfoliative process. For it lies in the nature of the field that someone who espouses a position is committed to reasons, and beyond any reason there is always yet another to underpin it.

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Textual exposition has no natural end. A text is prismatic in nature, it reflects different features depending upon the point of view from which it is regarded. The process at issue has two inputs: text and context. And interpretations themselves change the context. They form part of a developmental feedback process. This helps to explain why the annual crop of new discussions of the works of a major figure—be it Shakespeare or Plato— will exceed the entirety of the collected works of the author himself. However, as far as the understanding of the original texts goes, what we confront here is a law of diminishing returns. Granted, something is always being added. But the quantity of actual addition is ever-diminishing in scope and scale. The expository project has no natural end, but beyond a certain juncture it has no real point either. The explanation and confirmation of already established claims to knowledge is something rather different from the origination of new knowledge or originative inquiry. For explanation is geared to an initial fixity of text—the finite production of a finite mind. Granted, the realm of knowledge is politically boundless—ever new horizons lie before us in the sphere of pioneering inquiry. But textual exegesis is limited by a tether that ties it to an original text. No doubt that tether can always be stretched just a wee bit further. But it is still limited—and decisively governed by a law of diminishing returns. Initial explanation may add 10 percent to our understanding, and its next sequence may add 10 percent to that 10 percent. But this ongoing exfoliation—endless though it is—is nevertheless decisively limited in its capacity to elucidated the text—whatever it be— that lies at the base of the process.

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Chapter Two ON PHILOSOPHICAL EXPOSITION 1. MODES OF EXPOSITION

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hilosophical exposition can take many formats: the dialogue (Plato), the expository textbook (Aristotle), the axiomatic account (Spinoza), the expository essay (Russell), the discursive treatise (Kant), the prophetic rant (Nietzsche), the Dewey-decimal exfoliation of theses (Wittgenstein). But none of these is as naturally suited to philosophical discourse as the medieval scholastic treatise. Standard scholarly exposition has two significant disadvantages: 1.

It is linear—a string of sentences: one at a time.

2.

Everything proceeds in one sequence with each contention of seemingly equal importance—each statement equally engaging the field of attention.

The axiomatic mode of exposition seeks to make a virtue of these disadvantages via the coordination of linearity with importance. It does so by the straightforward device of always putting the more fundamental and important “up front”—in advance of what is less so. At the same time, linear, it has the critical disadvantage of using what is most fundamental and important as a base premiss—expounded up front, so to speak, without any justificatory basis to make it into a conclusion based upon justificatory consideration. Starting points represent a dogmatism that is unsuited to philosophy. One might simply say “to each his own” and accept the status quo where virtually every philosopher has his own, personally favored mode of exposition. He has his and I have mine: it is all a matter of personal preference. Let’s put the matter of rational justification aside. But this is a view that a philosopher, deeply committed as he is, to the demands of reason, simply cannot accept. There is actually good reason to think that one particular mode of exposition is particularly well-suited to the methodology of philosophy. This is the scholastic treatise.

Nicholas Rescher • On Philosophical Exposition

By the very nature of the subject it is, philosophy has an inherent family of goals that pivot on posing certain fundamental questions, providing answers to them, and explaining why these answers—rather than alternative possibilities—are the correct ones. Now the significant fact is that the medieval scholastic treatise has a structure that naturally parallels this picture of the discipline’s inherent mission. For its structure is: • Spelling out in due explanatory detail the question that is at issue. • Canvassing the range of plausible alternative answers to this question. • In each case, spelling out the considerations that speak for and against the answer being considered. • Providing an account of how it is that the balance of pro vs. con most favors one particular alternative. It is clear that such a dialectic process of a contrastive exchange among the pro- and con-considerations of the rival alternatives exactly postulates the structure of philosophical deliberations itself. It would thus seem to be optimally suited to accommodate the requirements of cogent philosophizing. There is one circumstance that bedevils philosophical exposition in general and in all of its forms, namely the need for repetition and redundancy. For philosophy demands reasons and rationales and here—as elsewhere— it often transpires that part of the reason for maintaining A is also part of the reason for maintaining B. So a full and adequate account of the rational of the one calls for going over the same ground that was already covered in preexisting the rationale of the other. Overall, in elaborate systems crossreferencing is thus required. This feature is automatically provided for in the methodology of axiomatic exposition. (This is one of the salient asserts and advantages of that mode). Elsewhere it can only be accomplished by explicit cross-reference, or by redundancy insofar as the discussion is to stand self-sufficiently on its own rather than depending upon material covered elsewhere. Analogy is among the most commonly employed and useful tools for the substantiation of philosophical contentions. The reasoning involved runs as follows.

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• The issues of the range R are clearly and obviously to be resolved Xwise. • The issue of the more fundamentally problematic domain R′ which is presently under consideration are in the presently relevant respects fundamentally akin (i.e., analogous) to those of the range R. • Therefore the now-relevant issues of R′ are also to be resolved Xwise. Philosophical reasoning, after all, is replete with recourse to analogies. Plato analyzed thought to sight and cognitive illumination to sunlight; De la Mettrie analogized men and machines, Marx analogized the conflict among economic doctrines to the struggle among nations; our contemporaries analogized the mind to a computer. And this use of analogies holds for refutatory reasoning as well. For in philosophy we constantly meet with argumentation of the following structure: “But if you say X in this setting, then you would have to say X also in that (fundamentally analogous) setting, which you would evidently be unwilling to do.” However, it is—or should be—clear that analogy is not really a probative device of demonstration but rather one of rhetorical persuasions. And this opens the door to a broader line of deliberation. 2. RHETORIC VERSUS ARGUMENTATION: THE GENERAL SITUATION In these deliberations, the term rhetoric is going to be understood in a rather special sense. It will not mean the theory or practice of languagedeploying exposition in general, but rather it will function as a contrast term to argumentation—which in its turn is here understood as the project of seeking to elicit the acceptance of certain contentions by means of explicitly adduced substantiating reasons. Rhetoric accordingly endeavors to induce agreement by representing certain contentions in a favorable light, seeking to elicit their acceptance by one’s interlocutors through noting their intrinsically appealing features in the context at issue rather than through substantiating them on the basis of their relationship to other indicated propositions that are intended to provide probative or evidential

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grounds for them. Thus, while argumentation deploys the resources of inferential reasoning (be it inductive or deductive) to substantiate some claims on the basis of others, rhetoric is seen as a matter of noninferential substantiative appeal. Accordingly, when one seeks to motivate the acceptance of claims by drawing attention to such positive intrinsic attributes as these claims may exhibit on their own by placing them in a favorable light in the sight of one’s interlocutors, one is proceeding rhetorically. This means that certain dialectical moves are available to the rhetorician that are unavailable to the demonstrative reasoner. The reasoner must relate the assertoric content of the proposition to that of those other, substantiating propositions. The rhetorician, by contrast, has the option of abstracting from a claim’s specific content altogether, addressing himself to its source or its nature rather than to its assertoric substance. For example, the fact that a proposition issues from a reliable source can bring grist to the rhetorician’s mill, although it clearly involves no reference to the content of the proposition at issue, and a fortiori no inference to this content from the asserted content of otherwise available information. This use of the term rhetoric may perhaps seem somewhat idiosyncratic, but it nevertheless has certain significant merits and advantages. If dictionaries can be believed, general usage understands rhetoric as something like the “art of speaking or writing persuasively.” But this seems altogether too wide since overtly demonstrative discourse can also serve the interests of persuasion. Aristotle, on the other hand, construed rhetoric as imperfect demonstration, construing it as specifically enthymematic reasoning. But this seems too narrow. Rhetoric as we generally understand it is clearly something very different from incomplete demonstration. The best compromise seems to consist in viewing rhetoric as a matter of the nondemonstrative (or more generally) noninferential substantiation of claims. This enables us at once to understand the enterprise as a persuasive endeavor and to contrast it with specifically demonstrative argumentation in the inductive and deductive modes. This at any rate will be the line we take in these present deliberations. Virtually every substantial philosophical text seeks to come to terms with some of the objections to the views that it espouses and makes attempts at their rebuttal. And the standard way to refute a philosophical thesis is to argue that its acceptance leads to unacceptable consequences. How does this work? What is it that makes certain contentions unacceptable? The following considerations come into operation here—listed in order of seriousness.

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• Logico-conceptual self-contradiction. • Inconsistency with what the writer has said elsewhere. • Conflict with our scientific understanding of Nature. • Violations of common sense and common knowledge. All in all, then, the most basic demands that should be made of a philosophical text is that it maintains overall consistency and coherence with what is endorsed by its author and accepted as being the case in extraphilosophical areas of inquiry. But all of these are negative virtues. They correspond to injunctions of the traditional Commandment format: “Thou shall not …” But what about positive virtues? These will clearly include: • Informativeness—answering our questions. • Unraveling the knots of thought by resisting paradoxes and puzzlements and encouragement providing incentives to create an ampler and deeper range of understanding. • Fostering positivities in human interaction, providing aid and support to efforts at making the world a better place to live in. What is the crux here is the matter of support for constructive efforts in cognitive and practical matters. It is a key rhetorical aspiration of philosophizing to guide the recipient through the landscape of relevant considerations to show that it is only normal, natural, and to be expected that one should endorse the view being argued for. 3. AN UNEASY UNION Interestingly enough, this perspective on the matter leads to the rather startling conclusion that reasoned argumentation is ultimately dependent on rhetoric. Let us consider how this comes about. It is a fundamental fact of cognitive—as also of practical—life that ex nihilo nihil: that throughout human affairs one cannot make something

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from nothing. Be it in written form or in verbal discourse, to secure something by rational argumentation we must ultimately proceed from conceded premises. And inferential rationality is of no further avail here, given its indispensable recourse to premises. After all, abstract rationality does not tell us what we must unconditionally accept, but only what we must or must not accept if and when we accept certain other things. Here the role of conditionalization becomes crucial. But to engage the wheels of inferential reason we need inputs— unconditional commitments that can turn our if-thens into sinces. And while this input can be, and generally is itself discursively grounded by derivation from other claims—that is, obtained by rational inference from elsewhere—it cannot be so “all the way down.” All these are matters that Aristotle already saw as clearly as anyone, recognizing that reason must always proceed from prior concessions in attaining its purposes. This state of affairs at once leads to the question of how such requisite concessions are to be obtained. In any dialectical situation we can reason only from what is available— and this ultimately means proceeding from claims that have been conceded. The regress of rationally justified conclusions will and must always come to a stop at some point in unreasoned premises. Reason’s inferential takens must end up in conceded and uninferred givens. And here rhetoric comes to play an important and indispensable role, for one of its salient tasks is to secure such givens that are supported not by inference but by considerations of contextual plausibility. For we pretty generally adopt the cognitive policy of postulating those contentions which fit most smoothly into the general fabric of our duly systematized convictions. And here those “basic premises” themselves come not through prior demonstration but rather through persuasion motivated by examples, analogies, and such signposts whose problem force is indicative rather than demonstrative. It is clear that in every context of deliberation various claims can and should be taken for granted as realized givens. They come free of charge, so to speak, as commonplaces of the domain—presumptive truths that hold by the topically prevailing conventions. Definitions and traditionary usages afford one example, and the realm of familiar fact and accepted knowledge yet another. But this sort of thing does not take us very far. The range of the noninferential input into our inferential argumentation must clearly be expanded beyond the sphere of local commonplaces.

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Like most workmen, the rational dialectician needs materials with which to fashion products, and in this case it is the rhetorician who can provide the requisite input. The key work of rhetoric in rational dialectic is accordingly to elicit from our interlocutors a variety of concessions on whose basis the work of actual inference can come into operation. At this point we must make the transit from reason to judgment and from demonstration to motivation. That is, we must proceed by way of reminders and appeals that amplify the minimal range of the locally unproblematic givens of the context at hand. Here, as everywhere, the issue of normative propriety crops up. Beyond concerning oneself with what people do accept (a strictly factual issue), one can turn to the matter what they should accept (a distinctly normative one). Conscientious rhetoricians will accordingly endeavor to awaken their interlocutors to a proper sense of what they should accept. The lesson that emerges from these deliberations is that the probative situation of philosophy is such that rational dialectic cannot dispense with rhetoric. In the overall setting of rational argumentation, it is not the presence but the extent of a recourse to rhetoric that is at issue: the only question—the pivotal issue, so to speak—is not whether but how much. Against this background of the situation in probative dialectics in general, let us turn to the particular lay of the land that obtains in philosophy. After all, philosophy cannot provide a cogent explanation for everything, rationalizing all of its claims “all the way down.” Here, as elsewhere the process of explanation and rationalization must—to all appearances— sooner or later come to a halt in the acceptance of at least locally unexplained explainers. David Hume, for example, acknowledged that the power of the imagination in collecting ideas and presenting them to consciousness is directed “by a kind of magical faculty in the soul, which, tho’ it be most perfect in the greatest geniuses, and is properly what we call a genius, is however inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding.”1 And in a similar vein, Immanuel Kant proclaimed “how in a thinking subject outer intuition, namely that of space, with its filling in of shape and motion, is possible … is a question which no man can possibly answer” (CPuR A 393). And again “the question … of how in general a communion of [interacting] substances is possible … is a question which … [one] will not hesitate to regard as likewise lying outside the field of all human knowledge” (ibid., B 428). Among 17th century philosophers (Descartes, Berkely, Leibniz) such insolubilia were standardly laid at the door of God. Nor

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have the philosophers of a more recent time given up on characterizing certain facts as inexplicable. Given that, explanation is—as Aristotle already stressed—a process that proceeds linearly, in the manner of logical derivation, by explaining A in terms of B, which is in its turn explained in terms of C, and this in turn referred to D, then of course we must accept some inexplicable ultimate— unless we are to descend into an infinite regress, a process that is not particularly satisfying, and especially not so in philosophy. At some point, then, we must turn from the discursive to the rhetorical mode and be prepared to accept some things as explanation-observing “facts of life” of the domain under discussion. There are thus two very different modes of philosophical proceeding—the evocative and the discursive. Discursive philosophy pivots on inferential expressions such as because, since, therefore, has the consequence that, and so cannot, must accordingly, and the like. Evocative philosophizing, by contrast, bristles with adjectives of approbation or derogation—evident, sensible, untenable, absurd, inappropriate, unscientific, and comparable adverbs such as evidently, obviously, foolishly, ill advisedly, and the like. To be sure, this rhetorical process is also a venture in justificatory systematization—just like inferential reasoning—but it is one of a rather different kind. Discursive philosophizing relies primarily on inference and argumentation to substantiate its claims; evocative philosophizing relies primarily on the rhetoric of persuasion. The one seeks to secure the reader’s (or auditor’s) assent by inferential reasoning, the other by an appeal to values and appraisals—and above all by an appeal to fit and consonance within the overall scheme of things. The inferential, argumentative mode of philosophical exposition is by nature directed at enlisting the reader’s assent to certain theses or theories by way of reasoning. It is thus most efficient for securing a reader’s assent to certain claims on the basis of the evidential or predictive relations among one’s beliefs. It is coordinated to a view of philosophy that sees the discipline in information-oriented terms, as preoccupied with the answering of certain questions: the solution of certain cognitive problems. By contrast, the rhetorical, evocative mode of philosophical exposition is by nature geared to securing acceptance with respect to evaluations. It is preoccupied with forming—or reforming—our sensibilities with respect to the value and, above all, with shaping or influencing one’s priorities and evaluations. It is bound up with a view of philosophy that sees the discipline in axiological terms. It does not proceed by reasoning from prior phi-

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losophical givens, but rather exerts its impetus directly on cognitive values and sympathies that we have fixed on the basis of our experience of the world’s ways.2 Only indirectly—that is, only insofar as our beliefs and opinions are shaped by and reflective of our values—does the rhetorical mode of procedure impact on beliefs. As these considerations indicate, the rhetorical method comes into its own by enabling an exposition to make an appeal to—and if need be influence and modify—the recipient’s preestablished outlook in order to induce a suitable adjustment of evaluations. In thus appealing to an interlocutor’s evaluative sensibilities, the rhetorician must enlist the persuasive impetus of this person’s body of experiences—vicarious experiences included. Here providing information can help—but only by way of influencing the sensibility, the reader’s established way of looking at things and appraising them. There are, of course, many ways to pursue this project. A collection of suitably constituted illustrations and examples, a survey of selected historical episodes that serve as instructive case studies (history teaching by examples), or a vividly articulated fiction can all orient a reader’s evaluative sentiments in a chosen direction—as Voltaire’s Candide or the philosophical methodology of Ludwig Wittgenstein amply illustrate. And, of course, pure invective can also prove rhetorically effective if sufficiently clever in its articulation. What matters is that agreement is elicited through a contention’s being rendered plausible and acceptable by its consonance with duly highlighted aspects of our experience—so that the course of our contextually preestablished experience becomes the determinative factor. And so in the end the irony of the situation is that philosophers simply cannot dispense—once and for all and totally—with the methodology they affect to reject and despise. Even the most demonstration-minded philosopher cannot avoid entanglement in rhetorical devices, for even the most rationalistic of thinkers cannot argue demonstratively for everything, all the way down, so to speak. At some point a philosopher must invite assent through an appeal to sympathetic acquiescence based on experience as such. On the other hand, even the most value-ideological philosopher cannot altogether avert all argumentation insofar as his work is to be done thoroughly and well. A reliance on suitable standards of assessment is inescapably present in those proffered evaluations, and this issue of appropriateness cannot be addressed satisfactorily without some recourse to reasons. This important point deserves due emphasis; a means for appraisal and evaluation is a fundamental precondition of rational controversy. Rational controversy is inherently impossible without objective standards of

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adequacy. Argumentation is pointful as a rational process only if the extent to which a good case has been made out can be assessed in retrospect on a common, shared basis of judgment. Lacking the guidance of an assessment mechanism for evaluating relevancy and cogency—one whose appropriateness to the discussion at hand is, if not preestablished, at any rate capable of being rationally validated—the whole enterprise of deliberation and discussion becomes futile. The upshot of these considerations, then, is that while rhetoric without reason in indeed unphilosophical, nevertheless in philosophy reasoning itself becomes impracticable without rhetorically provided materials. Ironically, then, the two modes of philosophy are locked into an uneasy but indissoluble union. While neither the discursive (inferential) nor the rhetorical (evocative) school can feel altogether comfortable about using the methodology favored by its rival, it lies in the rational structure of the situation that neither side can manage altogether to free itself from entanglement with the opposition. The practice of philosophy is ultimately a matter of striving for a smooth systemic closure between the cognitive projections of reason and the value-formative data of experience—a harmonization in which these two competing modes of philosophizing have to be brought into a mutually supportive overall harmonization.3 NOTES 1

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 24.

2

Compare Henry W. Johnstone, Philosophy and Argument (State College, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1959).

3

This discussion was initially presented as a paper at the conference on “Argumentation and Rhetoric” held under the auspices of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation at Brock University in May 1997.

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Chapter Three ISSUES OF PRECISION 1. PRECISION

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n matters of informative discourse there is a crucial connectivity between precision and informativeness. If I want to know how many trees there are in the forest, it will not help to be told that there are “more than two”—however true this contention may be. If I want to know when the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed it will not help much to be told that it was before the battle of Waterloo—correct though that is. In matters of information we want not only truth and reliability but also detail and accuracy. There is a complementary trade-off between precision/informativeness on the one hand, and tenability/probability on the other: When there is more of the one there is proportionately less of the other. For this reason it is surprising that while philosophers and logicians have had a great deal to say about truth, the matter of precision—of detail and accuracy—is seldom if ever maintained by them. It is a basic principle of epistemology that increased confidence in the correctness of our estimates can always be secured at the price of decreased accuracy. For in general an inverse relationship obtains between the definiteness or precision of our information and its substantiation: detail and security stand in a competing relationship. We estimate the height of the tree at around 25 feet. We are quite sure that the tree is 25X5 feet high. We are virtually certain that its height is 25X10 feet. But we can be completely and absolutely sure that its height is between 1 inch and 100 yards. Of this we are “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 your 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 detail (definiteness, exactness, precision, etc.). And so a relationship of reciprocal complementarity obtains here. This was adumbrated in the ideas of the French physicist Pierre Maurice Duhem

Nicholas Rescher • Issues of Precision

(1981–1916) and may accordingly be called “Duhem’s Law.”1 In his classic work on the aim and structure of physical theory,2 Duhem wrote as follows: A law of physics possesses a certainty much less immediate and much more difficult to estimate than a law of common sense, but it surpasses the latter by the minute and detailed precision of its predictions … The laws of physics can acquire this minuteness of detail only by sacrificing something of the fixed and absolute certainty of common-sense laws. There is a sort of teetertotter of balance between precision and certainty: one cannot be increased except to the detriment of the other.3

In effect, these two factors—security and detail—stand in a relation of inverse proportionality. As Duhem acutely notes, there is a crucial different between the operative principle of science and that of ordinary everyday life. In science we seek detail. Our operating principle is “Be as precise, detailed, and accurate as you probably can be in the circumstances.” We here have to do with a theoretical enterprise where informativeness is the key. Here precision is viewed as being of the essence. Here we would not rest with rough values for the speed of light or the melting point of lead. In matters of proven theory we generally feel free to ask for detailed precision. In everyday life, by contrast, the groundrules are very different. For the crucial factor here is the preservation of our truthworthiness and reliability. The operative principle is that of caution: “Supply no superfluous detail: Do not aim at more accuracy and possession than the circumstance at hand requires.” And the fact of it is that in practical matters we can often dispense with precision. To decide to carry an umbrella you do not need to know just how many inches of rain there will be. To decide to invest in a stock you need not sharpen your expectation of its rise to five decimal places. Medicaments are always prescribed in exact dosages, though there is generally no need for such precision here. To be sure, sometimes precision has an aura of the spurious about it. The law specified the maturity needed for legal consent, for driving eligibility, or for responsible drinking of alcoholic beverages at some exact age. But apart from administrative convenience there is really no ground for such precision here. To be sure, even in matters of formal reasoning precision is not always of the essence. In inference too we often encounter its irrelevancy. Thus consider the argument:

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• Most A is B • Most B is C ∴ Some A is C The validity of this argument and the tenability of its conclusion is independent of whether the “most” of the premises is actually “virtually all” or “a bare majority”. There is no need for precision here: the conclusion will be forthcoming either way. All in all, then, the need for precision is a matter of context. Truth is all important—caring to it is necessary in all communicative situations. But precision is negotiable. We generally ask for only so much of it as is needful in the context and the situation at issue. Truth is a strategical factor; precision is a tactical one. In every informative issue we care for, truth is a crucially imputed factor. But precision is negotiable. We generally do not require that much of it—except in those cases where, as in law, it comes to acquire—artificially as it were—a degree of importance that is not inherently its own. In scientific discourse there is really only one word that conveys imprecision—the term approximately. Ordinary language, by contrast, affords a considerable array of locutions that accomplish this job: roughly, around, somewhat, rather, something like, and many others. The first—and in some ways also the best or last—word of wisdom regarding precision comes from Aristotle: A discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subjectmatter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political sciences investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. … We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most past true and with premises of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statements be received for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.4

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Different areas of activity and deliberation will differ in the extent to which they admit of precision and exactness. Different areas will differ in point of what they allow and what they require. But where does philosophy stand here? It is an exact science. Or is it a matter of stark speculation. 2. STANDARDISM The issues of philosophy—those big problems regarding life, the world, and the human condition—are rooted in the questions that we pose in the language of our everyday experience and discourse. And if they are to be answered satisfactorily, they must, in the end, be answered in these ordinary terms in which they are posed. But ordinary language—our familiar instrument of everyday communication—is designed for practical purposes. It is a medium for the transmission of opinion and sentiment about the workaday world of our everyday experience. It thus embodies the assumptions and presuppositions built into our commonplace view of things reflective of the common course of our experience. The development of ordinary language and its transmission across generations root in the necessity and desirability of our communicating with one another about the world we live in. The conceptions we generally employ in everyday life inhere in a language that is designed with a view to its application to reality. Their very reason for being is to enable us to categorize, describe, and explain what goes on in the world about us. They are predicated on beliefs and assumptions geared to the actual as we experience and interpret it, enabling us to orient ourselves cognitively in our world. If this concept-machinery were not adjusted to the real—if it were not fitted to our experience of the world about us—it would be much useless baggage which, for that reason, would have been abandoned long ago even if, per impossibile, it had evolved in the first place. The linguistic mechanisms of ordinary discourse thus have to reflect the general course of our shared experiences because they would not exist as such if they did not do so. The gearing of our language to our experience is a precondition of its very being. The familiar and prominent concepts we find enshrined in the language are literally mundane in that they reflect our beliefs as to how matters stand and how things work in this world. And, in particular, they are bound to reflect the normal, ordinary course of things in which various theoretically separable factors actually go together. It is a truism that life consists primarily of the ordinary and commonplace. And the obvious corollary is that

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the conceptual instruments we devise for handling our experiences—which are initiated, developed, and transmitted precisely because they fit the requirements set by our communicative needs—are, in consequence, geared to the ordinary, commonplace, and normal. This state of affairs endows our concept with a certain imprecision that always leaves room for conflict and incompatibility. In consequence of this, the conception of non-rigidly standardistic generalizations provides a powerful tool for philosophical problem solving. For philosophy arises not so much from wonder as from puzzlement. Many—if not most— philosophical problems root in aporetic situations where we face a hard choice among individually plausible but collectively inconsistent contentions.5 Consider, for example, the following aporetic cluster of individually plausible but collectively incompatible theses: • Promise breaking is morally wrong: promise breakings are always moral transgressions. • It is never morally wrong to do what we cannot possibly help doing: doing something one cannot help is never a case of moral transgression. • In some circumstances one cannot help breaking a promise (for example: when circumstances beyond one’s control preclude one from honoring it). It is clear on purely logical grounds that these three plausible-seeming theses are collectively incompatible—one or another of them must be rejected. And, considering that the third thesis is simply a fact of life, it results that, to all appearances, considerations of mere logical consistency constrain us to abandon one of those two initial contentions. But of course if one is willing to give those initial two generalizations a standardistic (rather than rigidly universal) reading, the incompatibility at issue at once vanishes. By softening these generalizations we preserve their tenability. Here, as often, the edge of conflict can be blunted by a standardistic construction of our generalizations, enabling us to retain what we wish to maintain substantially intact in the face of collective inconsistencies. And there is good reason of general principles why philosophical generalizations should be softened in this sort of way.

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Attuned in the first instance to the requirements of practical purpose and the needs of efficient communication in real-life conditions, our concepts are geared to factual presuppositions—and, above all, to factual assumptions as to how things normally and ordinarily run in the world. Those concepts of ours admit of the sort of slack that is pervasive—and eminently useful—in matters of everyday life communication. (Who can say how many grains of sand it takes to make a pile—just as the ancient sorties paradox reminds us.) Not that philosophy as such is a standardly factual inquiry. Its deliberations are basically conceptual and the empirical aspect comes in through the back door, as it were. The salient point is that the concepts it addresses operate in such a way as to incorporate a view of the empirical facts. One cannot satisfactorily elaborate their conceptual relationships without taking account of the empirical facts in which they are predicated. With the factoriented concepts of philosophical relevancy, semantical and factual considerations become intertwined: pure analysis can at best sort them out—it can bring to light the factual aspect of the concept, but it can in no way mitigate or remove this empirical aspect of reference to a factual background of experience. Where our concepts have factual presuppositions, any prospect of a neat dichotomy of “empirical” vs. “conceptual” goes by the board. At such points, the two issues become fused into a seamless whole. And philosophizing itself then becomes a (partially) empirical enterprise— notwithstanding its basic nature as “conceptology.”6 3. PHILOSOPHY IS GEARED TO THE CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE ORDINARY COURSE OF LIFE In the course of their explanatory efforts, philosophers generally invoke generalizations. They deploy theses like: • All factual knowledge originates in the senses: nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. • All duties are rooted in rules: Whenever X has an obligation to do A, this is so in virtue of an appropriate general rule R stipulating that in X’s circumstances A is the obligatory thing to do. • All existence is substance-connected: whatever exists is either a substance (a thing of some sort) or else a property or feature of things.

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Generalizations of this sort constitute the heart and core of philosophical doctrines. But need they—nay, should they—be taken as strictly universal contentions? Or might it make better sense to construe them as stating not how things must always be rather than as maintaining how things do normally stand? The motivating rationale for such a change of approach to philosophical generalizations lies deep in the nature of the concerns of this discipline. The complex spiders’ webs spun in philosophical theorizing are always attached to “the real world” of everyday life and its scientific refinements. Even a superficial look at the various subdivisions or branches of philosophy shows that they are virtually always rooted in matters of prephilosophical, everyday life concern. The materials of “human experience,” in all the manifold senses of this conception, constitute the raison d’être of our philosophizing. The reflexive, second-order discipline of metaphilosophy aside, the issues of philosophy revolve about extraphilosophical concerns. Preeminently, philosophical questions arise in terms of the concepts of common life. The central concepts of philosophy (“mind,” “matter,” “causality,” “nature,” “reality,” “truth,” “knowledge,” “agency,” “personhood,” “good,” “right,” “justice,” etc.) are importations from the thought-world of everyday life where they serve us in the cognitive manipulation of everyday experience. When philosophers deal with truth, or beauty, or goodness, or justice, they are concerned with these ideas as they function in our everyday discussions and deliberations, they are certainly not proposing to address technical conceptions that are disjoint or distinct from the ways in which we ordinarily deliberate and talk about the issues. To be sure, they may be seeking a “rational reconstruction” of everyday usage in the manner of Carnap.7 But here too the nature of the usage one is attempting to reconstruct remains the focal point. Philosophy—after all—addresses itself to problems that arise out of our attempts to make sense of the world as our experience presents it to us. Now, the basic concepts in whose terms we transact our experiential business are in general infused with our understanding of the world’s facts. These concepts are not designed for use in “every possible world,” but for use in this world. They arise from the need to handle communicatively the materials of our experience, and are geared to the realities that we encounter and manipulate in the course of everyday life. Their import and their applicability relate to how matters do stand, and not to how they might conceivably stand by some “stretch of the imagination.” They are con-

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cerned with our understanding of the world’s actual arrangements and their component elements are connected by contingent rather than necessary linkages. Even when philosophers deliberate normatively about how things should be (in contrast to how they actually are), they are nevertheless concerned primarily with some aspect of the real (with how you or I should behave, and not how the nonexistent individuals of some nonexistent world should comport themselves). In consequence, philosophical deliberations rest on a basis of reality-oriented fact or supposition, connected to the world as our experience indicates it to be.8 4. THE EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS The issues of philosophy are rooted in the questions we confront in everyday life. They arise in the setting of common experience, and the concepts we standardly use to think about the arrangements of the real—and which accordingly lie at the basis of our philosophical reflections—are of an essentially composite character. But rather than representing a combination of elements united by purely theoretical considerations, the concurrence involved in such concepts rests on a strictly empirical or experiential foundation. Their unity is a unity of experience—as the following illustrations show. (1) Our concept of PERSONAL IDENTITY views the sameness of persons through a fusion of bodily continuity (tracking through space and time) and continuity of personality (memory, habits, tastes, dispositions, skills, etc.). (Moreover, each of these is itself composite.) (2) Our concept of PERSONS involves the conjoining of mind and body, and preserves a mutually accordant functioning of mental and bodily activity, thus manifesting two very different sets of characteristic powers and dispositions. (3) Our concept of VALUE (in the sense of “social justice is something he values”) fuses three sorts of factors: covert (“mentalistic” thought, motivation, rationalization), transitional (verbal behavior in affording vis-à-vis others some defense, explanation, or justification of one’s acts), and overt (actual physical behavior).

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(4) Our concept of BELIEF coordinates mentalistic dispositions to think and overt physicalistic dispositions to action. Let us consider just one example in detail. Observe that both key factors at issue in belief—mental disposition and overt behavior in appropriate circumstances—must come together before it is proper to speak of believing. His mental condition alone does not establish that actually X believes that a bomb is shortly to go off in the room if his every act belies this (under suitable conditions—e.g., he has no wish to commit suicide). But evasive behavior alone will not clinch the matter either, if there is sufficient evidence that X’s every thought—tacit and professed—indicates that he is nowise under an impression that a bomb is present. Both sets of factors—mind states and action dispositions—must be suitably coordinated before we can unproblematically speak of X’s having a belief. Otherwise, we could not appropriately say that X believes that P, but would have to use some complex circumlocution, “X, while not accepting P is the case, acts as though it were,” “X, while maintaining that P is the case, certainly does not behave (say, by betting) in an accordant fashion,” or the like. Both of these factors—cognitive and behavioral dispositions—come together in the composite idea of a belief. Their consilience and consonance is not a matter of logic, however, but rather one of fact—of how experience shows us what things do in the world. And this case is typical. For the fact is that all of those various philosophically critical concepts are both multicriterial and fact-coordinative: (i) They are multicriterial because in each case a plurality of (in principle separable) components is involved, for example, in the case of personal identity, both bodily continuity and continuity of personality play a pivotal role.9 (ii) They are fact-coordinative because in each case the theoretically separable but concept-joined criterial factors are held together in an integrative fusion by facts or purported facts—that is, by our view of how the world actually works. (Thus in the case of personal identity we find that bodily continuity and continuity of personality generally and standardly go together.) Concepts of this fact-coordinative sort conjoin factors whose unity is a matter of experience. They rest on presuppositions whose content is fac-

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tual, reflecting a view of how things go in the world. They are empirically conditioned, being developed and deployed against an experiential backdrop—a Weltanschauung, or rather some miniscule sector thereof. The crucial contribution of such an empirical basis is to underwrite the de facto conjoining of a plurality of factors that are in principle separable from one another. Because these factors are thus coordinated, we are spared any need to make up our mind as to which of them is ultimately determinative or decisive for the concept’s applicability. Experience assures that certain purely theoretical possibilities are of no effective practical concern because the things they split apart actually go together. The experience-centrism of empiricism may or may not be the bestavailable position IN the field of philosophy, but it is certainly the best position for deliberating ABOUT the field. In our philosophizing, the concepts in whose terms theses and theories are articulated are accordingly fact-laden through their gearing to “the domain of experience”—that is, to the way in which things usually and normally go. Such conceptual machinery hinges on “the ordinary course of things” as we actually encounter it. It reflects our experience of the world by indicating how things standardly go in the domain of what comes to our notice. And this feature of its conceptual frame of reference must inevitably inform and condition the way in which we can transact our philosophical business. It means that we must—or should—recognize philosophy’s commitment to “the real world,” albeit in a way very different from the commitment of classical science and traditional philosophy. 5. AN ILLUSTRATION: SIDELINING THE GETTIER PROBLEM The idea of construing philosophical generalizations standardistically may appear strange at first sight, since this is certainly not how philosophers themselves—traditionally intent on universality and necessity—have usually thought of their generalizations. Nevertheless, there is much to be said for such an approach. To see this, let us consider some concrete examples, beginning with one taken from the theory of knowledge. Since the time of Plato’s Theaetetus (201c ff.) a prominent role has been played in the history of philosophical epistemology by the doctrine at issue in the following thesis:

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(T) Knowledge is true justified belief: Someone knows that P just exactly when a belief that P is both true and provided with a suitable justificatory account. After all, we cannot say of a false proposition that someone knows it to be so: “X knows that p, but p is not true” is clearly untenable (although its qualified cousin “X thinks he knows that p, but p is not true” is obviously not). Again, we would not acknowledge that X knows that p—no matter how firmly he believes it—if this individual lacks good reason to justify the belief (let alone if all the information at his disposal actually points the other way). Thus (T) seems quite in order. Nevertheless, as an example of Bertrand Russell’s indicates,10 there are convincing counter examples to (T) which clearly indicate the untenability of this otherwise plausible generalization. For consider the case of a person who believes Q-or-R but does so because (i) she has sound justification for believing Q (and thus, a fortiori, for believing Q-or-R), although Q is in actual fact false, while nevertheless, (ii) Q-or-R is indeed true, albeit only because R is true, which our subject has no reason whatever to believe (and may even explicitly reject). In such a case, where the basis of a belief’s justification and the basis of its truth are entirely out of alignment with one another, we would certainly not say that the person knows the item at issue, despite its status as a true justified belief. Counterexamples of this sort were made prominent on the contemporary epistemological agenda by an influential paper of Edmund Gettier’s, which set afoot a diversified effort to repair or replace (T) through the addition of various further qualifying and complicating provisos—for example, that the justification at issue is provided specifically by factors capable of guaranteeing the truth of the belief.11 And so, epistemologists have in recent years embarked on a seemingly endless series of ever more convoluted revisions of (T), introducing epicycle upon epicycle of further complication to meet ever more sophisticated counter examples that bring to light flaws in the earlier proposals. For, on traditional principles, a single false instance of course falsifies a generalization, so that a solitary valid counterinstance refutes a general thesis in one decisive blow. A strictly universal generalization that is counterexampled must in consequence either be abandoned or revised. But a standardistic approach alters the situation drastically. For when an epistemological standardism is adopted, it would have us construe the rela-

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tionship between knowledge and true justified belief not as a definition but as a (merely standardistic) generalized linkage: (K) Standardly, knowledge is true justified belief. And this generalization is perfectly in order; it is not only plausible but largely unproblematic.12 It is thus clear that the (T)-annihilative strategy of Russell and Gettier will not work in the context of an epistemological standardism that proposes to interpret such epistemological generalizations in a standardistic way. To see this more vividly, let us return to basics and analyze the source of the difficulty. It is clear—and pretty much conceded on all sides—that for X to know that P, three conditions must be fulfilled: (i)

P is indeed true. (One cannot actually know a falsehood—one can only think that one knows it.)

(ii) X believes/accepts that P. One cannot be said to know a fact—in the overt, explicit sense of “knowledge-that” which is here at issue—if one does not acknowledge its truth. (iii) X’s acceptance of P is appropriately grounded in the facts of the situation: the factors that ensure P’s being true play an appropriate part in the rationale for X’s acceptance of P. (That is, point (ii) must be appropriately grounded in point (i).) These conditions are seen as necessary and also—puzzle cases posing recherché problems apart—as sufficient. Now, in the normal and ordinary circumstances of the human cognitive condition, (i) and (ii) carry the whole weight in knowledge situations, and (iii) comes free of charge—because that is in fact how the matter normally stands. Moreover on a standardistic reading of the generalization those marginal puzzle cases are put aside. Thus, on a standardistic construction, the (T)-thesis is perfectly appropriate, seeing that all those exceptions (optical illusion, etc.) can be consigned to the remote regions of the abnormal. Accordingly, subject to a standardistic construction of (T), the counter examples at issue in the critique of the classic inception of knowledge lose their bite. For now the existence of certain types of exceptions—such as cases exhibiting the aforementioned disconnection between the grounds of truth and those—will be neither surprising nor fatal to an acceptance of (T) in its standardized construction. The entire discouraging and convoluted

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post-Gettier dialectic of introducing ever more complex epicycles into successive reformulations of (T) in the attempt to block ever more refined— and complex—counter examples is aborted at the very outset. Once we approach epistemology from the angle of standardism, (T) becomes an unproblematically acceptable contention, able to dispense with the elaborate efforts that have been lavished on its revision in the Gettier-inspired literature. (Or rather, more generously, one now can and should reconstrue this literature in a constructive light—as an instructive attempt to map out the region of the exception categories that are at issue.13) This example concretely illustrates the utility of a recourse to standardism in epistemology. 6. ANOTHER ILLUSTRATION: AN EMPIRICIST VIEW OF MEANINGFULNESS An approach of much the same format could also be used to reinvigorate the empiricist criterion of meaning espoused by the logical positivism of the 1920–50 era. According to this positivistic standard, a fact-purporting statement is meaningful (informatively viable) if it is possible, in principle, for it to be supported or counterindicated by experientially accessible data.14 In the subsequent philosophical literature this thesis too was undermined by a series of (successively complex) counter examples that undermined its tenability.15 But if the empiricist criterion of factual meaningfulness is reconstrued, again as providing not a definition but a standardistically construed generalization about the matter (“Meaningful factual statements can normally be confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of observational evidence”) then the proposed sorts of criticism would simply be beside the point. For there is no difficulty with the idea that, in normal circumstances and ordinary cases, factually meaningful contentions are potentially vulnerable to contrary evidence. To be sure, the positivistic empiricism at issue would now sacrifice much of its critical bite, since the thesis at issue is no longer available for service as an automatic guillotine able to kill off as factually meaningless those statements that resist straightforwardly empirical verification. But it would nevertheless still provide a useful dialectical resource for allocating the burden of proof against fact-purporting theses that defy empirical testing. For anyone who sought to maintain an evidence-impervious contention would now have to assume the obligation of consigning it to some validatable exception-category. Standardism clearly militates for an empiricist/verificationist approach to meaning, seeing that our statements

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standardly function in an experiential setting that is crucial and alike to their meaning and their meaningfulness. 7. ADVANTAGES OF EPISTEMIC STANDARDISM Epistemic standardism as a general policy operative across the board would consist in approaching the subject on the basis of the following principle: (S) General epistemic theses are always to be construed in the standardist (rather than strictly universal) mode. In line with this principle, epistemological theses of the format “The A’s are (are not) B’s” are to be interpreted as saying: “Standardly, normally, ordinarily: A’s are (are not) B’s.” This doctrine takes the line that epistemology is an inquiry whose generalizations cannot lay claim to strict universality but have to be construed in the standardist, exception-admitting mode. And there is much to be said for such a view. After all, strictly universal generalizations that are unproblematically acceptable are very hard to come by in epistemology. But once we shift to standardistically construed generalizations, the matter stands differently. A profusion of tenable generalizations now becomes available. “People understand what they are told” (for clearly, they ordinarily do so), “We remember facts of crucial importance to ourselves” (for clearly this is normally so), “People are more confident of what they know than of what they merely surmise” (for clearly, this is so as a rule). Most such epistemic generalizations admit of occasional exceptions—in ways that are readily understandable. But they are true almost always—and indeed always “in normal circumstances” and “when other things are equal.” Such informative epistemic generalizations cry out for a standardist interpretation. The domain of performative selfcontradictions is another case in point. Here we find statements on the order of that made by the person who shouts, “I never raise my voice,” or— more interestingly—the person who declares, “Everything I say is false.” As soon as we construe such statements in the standardistic sense (subject to the prefix “In the normal course of things …”) all is well and the element of paradox vanishes. To be sure, there doubtless are some rigidly universal generalizations that obtain in epistemology. For example, one would clearly not want to

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give a merely standardist reading to self-applicative epistemic generalizations that happen to be true (or false) on strictly logico-conceptual grounds—such as the principle, already discussed above, to the effect that “All statements that are known to be true are indeed true.” But epistemological standardism is comfortably situated to accommodate this situation. For true to its own principles, its thesis “Generalizations about knowledge are only acceptable in a standardistic construction,” itself being an epistemological thesis, must be interpreted as falling within its own scope. It too should therefore be interpreted standardistically and is thus perfectly compatible with the existence of rigidly universal generalizations of the sort illustrated by the “analytic” (i.e. meaning-explicative) principle of the aforementioned example. The advantages of epistemic standardism are thus clear. For it relieves the theory of knowledge of a commitment to the impossible task of fitting the complex phenomena at issue in our customary ways of talking and thinking about knowledge into the Procrustean bed of totally unexceptionless universality. On standardistic principles, epistemology becomes a venture in clarifying the conception of knowledge actually at issue in the cognitive ground-rules that prevail in the normal or usual course of things. As a more “realistic,” epistemologically less absolutistic doctrine, standardism transposes those overblown classical epistemological theses into a more plausible and tenable format in a way that contributes substantially to their viability. On its basis, the diversity and complexity of the phenomena no longer impedes the prospect of achieving viable generalizations about them, and the oversimplifications inherent in our everyday knowledge no longer condemns to falsity the generalizations articulated in its terms.16 NOTES 1

It is alike common and convenient in matters of learning and science to treat ideas and principles eponymously. An eponym, however, is a person for whom something is named, and not necessarily after whom this is done, seeing that eponyms can certainly be honorific as well as genetic. Here at any rate eponyms are sometimes used to make the point that the work of the person at issue has suggested rather than originated the idea or principle at issue.

2

La théorie physique: son objet, et sa structure (Paris: Chevalier & Rivière, 1906); tr. by Philip P. Wiener, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1954.) This principle 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

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NOTES

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

Duhem, op. cit., pp. 178–79. Italics supplied.

4

Aristotle, Niconachaen Ethics 1094a12-23. It is to Aristotle’s credit that (as the Index Aristotleicus of Bonitz indicates (he devotes almost as much attention to precision (aknbeia etc.) as to truth (alêstheine etc.).

5

The reasons for this situation and the modalities of its management is examined in detail in the author’s The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh, 1985).

6

Some of the considerations of this section are dealt with in greater detail in the author’s Metaphilosophical Inquiries (Princeton, 1993).

7

See Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Foundations of Probability, 2nd edition (Chicago, 1962), sect. 2.

8

This is least clear with respect to those philosophical theories that address issues of “pure” mathematics and logic—those at work meta-mathematics and meta-logic, and those appertaining to regions very far removed from our everyday experience of the physical world. But they are not, of course, comparably removed from the realm of our conceptualizing experience. The objects of mathematics (numbers and structures) may have no “natural history”—but this is clearly not the case with respect to our conceptualizing thought about such objects.

9

The discussion of cluster concepts in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953) bears upon this issue.

10

See the opening discussion of the chapter on “Knowledge, Error, and Probable Opinion” in The Problems of Philosophy (London, 1912).

11

Edmund L. Gettier’s original paper was entitled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, vol. 23 (1963), pp. 121–123. For a sampling of the resultant literature see Michael D. Roth and Leon Gallis, Knowing: Essays in the Analysis of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1970). A detailed survey of the controversy, complete with bibliography, is given in Robert K. Shope, The Analysis of Knowing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

12

To be sure, it is not always easy to present the considerations that justify one’s knowledge in anything like their full scope. When I am pressed to substantiate my

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NOTES

(correct) claim to know that maison is French for house, I can do little better than “That’s what I learned in school and recall having got on with all these years.” But that is good enough “for all practical purposes”—which is exactly the point. 13

One family of exceptions, for example, turns on the lack of a causal connection between the true facts at issue and the obtaining of the grounds that constitute the rationale of the agent’s belief. (See Shope, op cit, for details.)

14

The “in principle” carries an important burden here. For in the case of historical statements for example, we clearly cannot return to the past. But we can, of course, discover present traces of past occurrences, as with tree rings on the radiation “echo” left by the “big bang” that gave birth to our cosmos.

15

See C. G. Hempel, “Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes,” in Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York, 1965), pp. 101–119.

16

This chapter’s line of thought was initially set out in a discussion of “Epistemology as an Inexact Science” in the author’s Baffling Phenomena (Savage, MD, 1991), pp. 59–74.

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Chapter Four THE ROLE OF DISTINCTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY 1. THE FUNCTION OF DISTINCTIONS

A

group of individuals can differ all that it wants, but a single mind is rationally bound to strive for a coherent and consistent position. And yet even a single mind is, often as not, pulled in different and discordant directions. Restoring consistency among incompatible beliefs calls for abandoning some of them as they stand. But philosophical theses will generally have some basis in fact—there is almost always something to be said for them. And so philosophers will generally seek to effect consistency restoration not by a mere thesis abandonment that leaves one totally empty-handed, but rather they will take recourse to thesis modification. Recourse to modification, replacing the abandoned belief with a duly qualified revision thereof. Since (by hypothesis) each thesis belonging to an aporetic cluster is individually attractive, simple rejection lets the case for the rejected thesis go unacknowledged. Only by modifying the thesis through a resort to distinctions can one manage to give proper recognition to the full range of considerations that initially led the discussion into difficulty. Distinction is a prime instrument of damage control in philosophical matters. Philosophy endeavors to answer “the big questions” regarding the place of man in the world’s scheme of things. And in doing so it begins by framing its questions in the ordinary concepts of everyday communication. And when the questions that arise are posed in the terms of reference afforded by everyday concepts then it is only reasonable and proper to provide answers within the same conceptual framework seeing that those answers (if answers they are) must address those questions. But here the difficulty begins. For the world’s complexity is such that we are never able to achieve a perfect fit here, because the world’s phenomena are so complex and variegated that there will always be problem cases that just do not fit smoothly into the concepts and patterns that characterize the general run of things. And so in their striving for maximum generality, the generalizations of philosophy are virtually always over-generalizations involving a certain

Nicholas Rescher • The Role of Distinctions in Philosophy

amount of oversimplification. For if “All X’s are Y’s” is an overgeneralization, then it must transpire that some X’s—certain extra-ordinary ones—will not be Y’s. And in taking these into account an inconsistency is bound to result. Against this background, distinctions are particularly prominent in philosophy because in the interests of generality the theorists of this domain are given to overgeneralization. But whenever they propose a generalization of the format “All X’s are Y’s” an opponent all too readily springs to the fore with example that X’s that just are not Y’s. And at this point distinction becomes a natural defensive measure, it being tempting to respond: I spoke somewhat hastily. It is not, of course, the case the all X’s are Y’s; rather it is the X’s of type-1—the ordinary X’s—that are Y’s. The type-2 X’s— the contextually extraordinary ones—can indeed fail to be Y’s.

And so a thematic shift from • All X’s are Y’s to • All X’s are Y’s effectively salvaging (much of) that initial generalization through recourse to the distinction between the type-1 X’s and those of type-2. Restoring consistency among the incompatible beliefs calls for abandoning some of them as they stand. However, philosophers resist consistency-restoration by resorting to the brute force of outright rejection. When a philosophically plausible contention runs into problems through the emergence of counter examples, philosophers do not abandon their theories. Rather, they have recourse to modification, replacing the problematic thesis with a duly qualified revision thereof. They salvage their theses by introducing distinctions. Distinctions enable the philosopher to remove inconsistencies not just by the brute negativism of thesis rejection but by the more subtle and constructive device of thesis qualification. The crux of a distinction is not mere negation or denial, but the amendment of an untenable thesis into something positive that does the job better. By way of example, consider the following aporetic cluster:

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(1) All events are caused. (2) If an action issues from free choice, then it is causally unconstrained. (3) Free will exists—people can and do make and act upon free choices. Clearly one way to exit from inconsistency is to abandon thesis (2). We might well, however, do this not by way of outright abandonment but rather by speaking of the “causally unconstrained” only in Spinoza’s manner of externally originating casualty. For consider the result of deploying a distinction that divides the second premise into two parts: (2.1) Actions based on free choice are unconstrained by external causes. (2.2) Actions based on free choice are unconstrained by internal causes. Once (2) is so divided, the initial inconsistent triad (1)–(3) gives way to the quartet (1), (2.1), (2.2), (3). But we can resolve this aporetic cluster by rejecting (2.2) while yet retaining (2.1)—thus in effect replacing (2) by a weakened version. Such recourse to a distinction—here that between internal and external causes—makes it possible to avert the aporetic inconsistency and does so in a way that minimally disrupts the plausibility situation. To examine the workings of this sort of process somewhat further, consider an aporetic cluster that set the stage for various theories of early Greek philosophy: (1) Reality is one (homogeneous). (2) Matter is real. (3) Form is real. (4) Matter and form are distinct sorts of things (heterogeneous).

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In seeking a resolution here, one might consider rejecting (2). This could be done, however, by not simply abandoning it, but rather by replacing it—on the idealistic precedent of Zeno and Plato—with something along the following lines: (2’) Matter is not real as an independent mode of existence; rather it is merely quasi-real, a mere phenomenon, an appearance somehow grounded in immaterial reality. The new quartet (1), (2’), (3), (4) is entirely cotenable. Now in adopting this resolution, one again resorts to a distinction, namely that between (i) Strict reality as self-sufficiently independent existence and (ii) Derivative or attenuated reality as a (merely phenomenal) product of the operation of the unqualifiedly real. Use of such a distinction between unqualified and phenomenal reality makes it possible to resolve an aporetic cluster—yet not by simply abandoning one of those paradox-engendering theses but rather by qualifying it. (Note, however, that once we follow Zeno and Plato in replacing (2) by (2’)—and accordingly reinterpret matter as representing a “mere phenomenon”—the substance of thesis (4) is profoundly altered; the old contention can still be maintained, but it now gains a new significance in the light of new distinctions.) Again one might—alternatively—abandon thesis (3). However, one would then presumably not simply adopt “form is not real” but rather would go over to the qualified contention that “form is not independently real; it is no more than a transitory (changeable) state of matter.” And this can be looked at the other way around, as saying “form is (in a way) real, although only insofar as it is taken to be no more than a transitory state of matter.” This, in effect, would be the position of the atomists, who incline to see as implausible any recourse to mechanisms outside the realm of the material. The aporetic inconsistency of philosophical positions can always be resolved in this way; one can always “save the phenomena”—that is, retain

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the crucial core of relevant beliefs in the face of apparent consideration— by introducing suitable distinctions and qualifications. Once inconsistency breaks out, we can thus salvage our philosophical commitments by complicating them, through revisions in the light of appropriate distinctions, rather than abandoning them altogether. Consider the following aporetic cluster of individually plausible but collectively inconsistent contentions, which sets the stage for the traditional “problem of evil.” 1.

The world was created by God.

2.

The world contains evil.

3.

A creator is responsible for all defects of his creation.

4.

God is not responsible for the evils of this world.

On this basis we have it that God, who by thesis 1 is responsible for all aspects of nature, is by 3 also responsible for evil. And this contradicts contention 4. To restore consistency, at least one of 1–4 must be abandoned. But now suppose that one introduces the distinction between causal responsibility and moral responsibility, holding that the causal responsibility of an agent does not necessarily entail a moral responsibility for the consequences of his acts. Then for causal responsibility, 3 is true but 4 false. And for moral responsibility, the reverse holds: 4 is true but 3 false. Once the distinction at issue is introduced, then no matter which way one turns on construing “responsibility,” the inconsistency operative in the apory at issue is averted. Thus someone who adopts this distinction can retain all the aporetic theses—1 and 2 unproblematically and, as it were, half of each of 3 and 4—each in the sense of one side of the distinction at issue. The distinction enables us to make peace in the aporetic family at issue, by splitting certain aporetic theses into acceptable and unacceptable parts. To be sure, distinctions are not needed if all that concerns us is averting inconsistency; simple thesis abandonment, mere refusal to assert, will suffice for that end. But distinctions are necessary if we are to maintain informative positions and provide answers to our questions. Granted, one can guard against inconsistency by avoiding commitment. But such skeptical refrainings leave us empty handed. Distinctions are the instruments we use

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in the (potentially never-ending) work of rescuing our assertoric commitments from inconsistency while yet salvaging what we can. A distinction accordingly reflects a concession, an acknowledgment of some element of acceptability in the thesis that is being rejected. However, distinctions always bring a new concept upon the stage of consideration and thus put a new topic on the agenda. And they thereby present invitations to carry the discussion further, opening up new issues that were heretofore inaccessible. Distinctions are the doors through which philosophy moves on to new questions and problems.1 2. WHAT DISTINCTIONS ARE Distinctions are concepts used to effect a division among items in line with real or perceived significant descriptive differences among them. Thus truly meaningful distinction should not merely reflect a difference but a real or genuine difference: in the language of Plato’s Phaedrus and Sophist, a distinction (dihairesis) should “cut nature at its joints.” Ideally, a distinction would reflect a significant contrast in the operational or functional nature of the items at issue. In the scholastic terminology still used by Suarez, it should be real (distinctio realis) rather than merely mental (distinctio rationis), representing a difference in the things themselves rather than merely in how we think and talk about them. (Think here of the distinction between paintings and sculptures on the one hand, and between good paintings and bad paintings on the other.) Fundamentally there are two sorts of distinctions: identifying distinctions and classifying distinctions. Identifying distinctions are those that dichotomously distinguish the X’s from the non-X’s. Classifying distinctions are those that sortally distinguish the X’s from the Y’s (and possibly from the Z’s and W’s as well.) Classifying distinctions presuppose identifying distinctions. For if we cannot even identify the X’s by distinguishing them from the non-X’s, we obviously cannot confidently hope to be successful in distinguishing the X’s from the Y’s. From a logical point of view, distinctions are closely bound up with generalizations. For one thing, to succeed in distinguishing the X’s from the Y’s we must have it that “All X’s are non-Y’s” (and conversely). Moreover, there is no point to and no prospect of a generalization of the form “All X’s are Y’s” if we cannot distinguish the X’s from the non-X’s or the Y’s from the non-Y’s. The Aristotelian categories, for example, that differentiate the sorts of question one can raise about things (What? When? Where? Why?,

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etc.), will only make sense if we have the means for distinguishing one relevant base (e. g., when-questions) from the rest. In view of their dichotomous nature, identifying distinctions are universal through their aspiration to exhaustiveness: whatever it be, an item is either an X or a non-X. However, classificatory distinctions are generally drawn with respect to a limited range of objects. Even so basic a distinction as animal/vegetable/mineral is drawn only with respect to physical objects: numbers say, or colors do not fall within its scope. Only rarely is a classificatory distinction synoptic; that is, drawn with respect to things or items in general, irrespective of kind. In general, classification proceeds by kinds and succeeds sortalization. Moreover, a meaningful distinction will always be drawn with regard to some respect (even as sameness—the opposite of difference—is differentiated in point of respect, as per “the same age” or “the same shape”). Thus we can draw distinctions between, say, animals in point of construction (backbone or non-backbone), in point of habitat (wild or domesticated), in point of diet (meat-eating or non-carnivorous), in point of use (beast of burden), etc. The identifying distinction between X’s and the non-X’s can accomplish its intended work in being smoothly and unproblematically applicable only when the world is duly cooperative. The essentially ontological requirement that is at issue here means that the X’s constitute a natural kind in that nature affords a descriptively determinate manifold of items, a natural category as it were, to which the X’s belong. A proper distinction must have a rationale—a rational basis that constitutes an appropriate ground for the distinction—that is traditionally characterized as the fundamantum divisionis). Noting that cognition is re-cognition, psychologists have long stressed the fundamental role of distinctions in human cognition. In the nineteenth Century Alexander Bain proclaimed in his “Law of Relativity”—(actually, “Law of Contrast” would have been better) that all awareness—all human consciousness and thought—consists in the noting of differences, with the concepts at issue in distinctions providing the requisite instrumentalities.2 However, it is specifically the role of distinction in philosophy that will be the focus of concern in the present discussion. In this context, one particularly important distinction was initiated by the philosophers of ancient Greece who divided the range of fact into two components: those that obtain by nature (physis) and those that obtain by convention (nomos). This classical distinction between facts in general

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bears specifically upon distinctions as well. Their being drawn by people is a matter of artifice, of convention with respect to some purpose or other. But their efficacy for the purpose at hand is an objective, naturedetermined fact that exerts the objective impetus of quality control over our conventional proceedings. 3. HOW DISTINCTIONS FAIL The process of distinction confronts the reality that whenever the phenomena reflect a continuous series of shadings, any point of division is bound to be arbitrary, failing to provide for the clear separateness needed for effective distinctions. Furniture ages one day at a time, so when does it begin to be “antique”? A person ages and develops one year at a time, so when does someone suitably develop to qualify as being “of age” in point of maturity for marriage or for voting. An aggregation of grains of sand grows one grain at a time, so when does it qualify as constituting “a heap”? Just this phenomenon of continuity engenders difficulty for distinctions thanks to what might be called applicative variability. After all, one individual is mature at age twelve while another fails to be so at twenty-four. One individual is an old man at fifty while another is quite spry and youthful at seventy. In such cases there is no natural line of separation, no clearly appropriate way of effecting distinctions. Whenever issues of sheer contingency arise, nature just does not afford convenient joints for our distinctions to cut. All the same, a society must often make artificially separating determinations in the interests of an efficient and effective conduct of its business. For reasons of administrative convenience it must resolve by the artifice of lawful fiat that which nature does not decide in a natural and principled way. Voting age, drinking age, age of consent for contracts or for marriage, and the like, all effect an essentially Procrustean determination that determines by conventional fiat that which nature leaves undetermined. So here distinctions are defective because they do not strictly abide by the rules. Distinctions can fail either through formal flaws of definition or through material flaws of application. Formal flaws of definition arise when the very meaning of what is involved in being an X is indecisively determined and the concept itself fails to be well-defined. The principal flaws of this sort are imprecision, nonexclusivity and nonexhausitveness. They arise as follows:

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FORMAL FLAWS OF DISTINCTION

• Imprecision: An attempt to distinguish X’s from other items is bound to fail when the X’s are not delineated with precision. For example, a distinction between fated and non-fated occurrences or between usual and unusual occurrences will be virtually useless until such time (if ever) when the conditions of being fated or of being usual are appropriately specified. • Nonexclusivity. The classifactory distinction between X’s and Y’s is nonexclusive when there are items that are—or seem to be—both X’s and Y’s. Thus the distinction between sea-creatures and mammals is vitiated by the existence of whales which are both. The very fact of nonexclusiveness shows that the distinction is flawed in failing to “cut nature at the joints.” • Nonexhaustiveness. Classifictory distinctions can also fail through lack of exhaustiveness. For example, the distinction between random and lawfully necessitated occurrences is nonexhaustive because occurrences that are governed by probabilistic laws are neither lawfully necessitated nor random. The distinction between works of fact vs. fiction is vitiated by works that purport to be factual but have substantial fictional components or vice versa. The material flaws of distinction in point of applicability are mainly three: vacuity, triviality, and pointlessness. MATERIAL FLAWS OF DISTINCTION

• Vacuity. The distinction between X’s and non-X’s—or between X’s and Y’s—fails in point of applicability when there just are no clearly identifiable X’s so that the group is vacuous. For example, the distinction between spectral and substantial beings or between witches and non-witches. • Triviality. A distinction between X’s and Y’s is trivial if there just are no substantially significant differences between the two. When this happens and whatever differences there are are insignificant, then the

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distinction is also said to be “merely virtual,” “quibbling,” and, more picturesquely, “pettifogging.” • Pointlessness. A distinction between the X’s and Y’s is pointless when even though there is some notable difference between the two, this difference serves no further explanatory or instructive function (as, for example, the contrast between days whose dates are prime number and those that are not). Such a distinction has no larger implications in point of cognitive utility. There is a significant difference in color between red things and green things (between tomatoes and sunsets on the one hand and lawns and unripe apples on the other). But no further purpose is served by drawing this distinction which lumps together objects that have no further significant features in common. Occam’s razor had it that “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity: entia non praeter necessitatem multiplicanda sunt.” And just this also obtains for distinctions. Distinguishing is only a meaningful measure where a significant context-relevant advantage results. The lack of functional utility typified by pointlessness is among the principal ways in which distinctions can fail. 4. MISASSIMILATION While distinctions can commit error of commission through being flawed and inappropriate, there is, however, also the other side of the coin—to wit, the errors of omission arising through a failure to draw appropriate distinctions in not distinguishing between things that are significantly distinct. This sort of error of putting together things that should be kept apart is generally characterized as confusion or conflation. What then occurs is a fallacy of misassimilation—of running together things that should be kept apart. This of course is one of the gravest errors that can be made in regard to distinctions. To misassimilate is to ignore a necessary distinction by unifying into a single item (kind, entity, process, idea, or whatever) things that are different in kind and distinct in character, treating significantly distinct things uniformly in riding roughshod over significant differences. Misassimilation is an invitation to error. For it underwrote the mistaken idea that a uniform account—a monolithic analysis or explanation—is possible where quite

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different situations actually prevail. We become enmeshed in a confusion—a mistaking of what is a mere analogy or a mere similarity as a ground for claiming an identity of nature. A fallacy is thus at issue because one is now led to saying of one thing what only holds for another. To render the idea graphic, it helps to think of what is going on here as a kind of cognitive myopia. Thus someone who is unable to distinguish (say on an eye chart) between E and H might as a result of this visual deficiency impose a spurious order on the reading series EHEEHHHEH… by seeing this as EHEHEHEHEH… Or conversely he might impose on an orderly series of this sort the randomness reflected in that initial series. Cognitive myopia just like visual myopia engenders either conflict or confusion. In particular, at the conceptual level at issue in philosophical deliberations misassimilation can result whenever there is in fact an insignificant circularity between concepts or ideas to sustain their appropriate unification. Specifically, this will result where • there is only an imperfect analogy that is sufficient to sustain actual identification, • there is only a family resemblance among the items at issue rather than a pervasive unity of aspect, • the coordination between the items at issue is the product of mere connection rather than an uniformity of nature. Uniformity of treatment is appropriate only where there is a uniformity of nature—a functional sameness based on an uniformity (isomorphism) of comportment or constitution that leaves no room for item-destabilizing distinctions. Uniformity in such cases is simply an optical illusion. Misassimulation links together items that are fundamentally desperate. The flaw is one of oversimplification through ignoring the subtleties of differentiation. Misas-

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similation leads to the deeply mistaken idea that in the case at hand a onesize-fits-all account is practicable. Regrettably this sort of thing occurs all too often in philosophy. One example of a plausible candidate for the title of misassimilation is the idea of causality. Many philosophers talk as thought “X causes Y” would be accommodated through a uniform explanatory account, perhaps along the lines of “X happened in the wake of Y and without Y’s happening, X would not have happened.” But a zillion scenarios can be constituted that would falsify this. (Example: “The dropping of water from the trees during the rainstorm cause the patio to get wet.”) The idea of causality is just too many sided for any one account to hold good. There is, after all, • The causality of physical process. (“The sunshine caused the water to evaporate.”) • The causality of psychological reaction. (“The insult caused his cheeks to flush.) • The causality of intention. (“As the time neared the dog went to the front gate to await his master.”) • The causality of probabilistic connection. (“His drinking caused the chances of an accident to increase.”) There are just too many different ways in which one process or state can be bound up with various results for any one single account of causation to be viable across the board. That one word “cause” is simply too versatile for one account of its modus operandi to be viable. The idea of evidentiation and evidence affords another example of potential philosophical misassimilation. For the idea at issue exfoliates in a plethora of different directions. We have —the evidence of our senses (sight, touch, etc.), —the evidence of witness (“eyewitness testimony”), —evidence secured via deductive or inductive reasoning from given data,

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—documentary evidence. To be sure, something is shared in common here in that all of these varied forms of evidence serve to provide grounds for believing (or disbelieving) something to be the case. But the discussion to believe—like the decision to marry—is something that can be based upon so wide a variety of different grounds and reasonings that there is nothing in common leave apart the result produced. The concept of knowledge affords another setting for philosophical misassimilation. To begin with there is the obvious distinction when performative how-to knowledge (how to open a can with a can-opener; how to hit a backhand in tennis) and factual knowledge (that Paris is the capital of France; that the Empire State buildings has more than 60 stairs). But even with just the latter there are problems. Various theorists to the contrary notwithstanding, there just is no one uniform account to explain “X knows that p,” which, after all, would be used for any one of the following sorts of things. • Would say “yes” if asked “Is p the case?” • Has at times accurately thought p to be the case. • Has had entertained thoughts from which p can be derived (or: can be derived easily). It is understandable that misassimilation should occur in such cases, seeing that what is at issue instantiates the grammatical phenomenon of polysemy that occurs when a single word does a considerable variety of (generally interrelated) jobs. One common way in which misassimilation comes into play is that which might be termed the misintegration that expresses itself by speaking of “the X” where what is actually at issue is a complex and diversified plurality. Thus it makes no sense to speak of “the ground of World War I” or “the cause of the common cold” or “the invention of the automobile” or “the reason for eating a good diet.” In such cases there just is no one factor that plays the role allocated to it by that unifying “the.” And so in philosophy to ask for “the rationale of morality” or “the meaning of life” is to put the discussion off to a wrong start prejudging the issue via a problematic presumption of morality. And similarly we encounter in contemporary phi-

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losophy a widespread proliferation of “the”—locutions. “The skeptic maintains X,” “The empiricists holds Y,” etc. There is a plethora of skeptical and empirical positions, and only some of them maintain X or hold Y. The flaw of insufficient specificity manifested in such locutions is yet another way in which the following of misassimilation becomes operative. To assimilate—to co-sortalize under one common rubric—is to vouch for the idea of significant commonalities, of a cover sameness or identity of condition. And when there is misassimilation this implicit promise is simply not fulfilled because critical distinctions have been overlooked or neglected. The proper cure for this sort of thing is of course only too obvious. One must take care to draw the appropriate distinctions. So much for the nature of distinctions and their problems. Let us now turn to the crux of our present concerns—their role in philosophy. 5. THE USE OF DISTINCTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY The history of philosophy is replete with distinctions introduced to avert the aporetic difficulties inherent in oversimplification. Already in the dialogues of Plato, the first systematic writings in philosophy, we encounter distinctions at every turn. In Book I of Plato’s Republic, for example, Socrates’ interlocutor quickly falls into the following apory: (1) Rational people always pursue their own interests. (2) Nothing that is in a person’s interest can be disadvantageous to him. (3) Even rational people sometimes do things that prove disadvantageous. However, the evident inconsistency that arises here can be averted by distinguishing between two senses of the “interests” of a person—namely the real and the apparent, what is actually advantageous to him and what he merely thinks to be so. Again, in the discussion of “nonbeing” in Plato’s Sophist, the Eleatic stranger entraps Socrates in an inconsistency from which he endeavors to extricate himself by distinguishing between “nonbeing” in the sense of not existing at all and in the sense of not existing in a certain mode, that is, between absolute and sorted nonexistence. Through-

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out the Platonic dialogues present a dramatic unfolding of one distinction after another. Distinctions enable us to implement the idea that a satisfactory resolution of problems of aporetics inconsistency must somehow make room for all parties to the contradiction. The introduction of distinctions thus represents a Hegelian ascent-rising above the level of antagonistic positions to that of a “higher” conception, in which the opposites are reconciled. In introducing the qualifying distinction, we abandon the initial thesis and move toward its counterthesis, but we do so only by way of a duly hedged synthesis. In this regard, distinction is a “dialectical” process. This role of distinctions is also connected with the principle that is sometimes designated as “Ramsey’s Maxim.” With regard to disputes about fundamental questions that do not seem capable of a decisive settlement, Frank Plumpton Ramsey wrote: “In such cases it is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputed views but in some third possibility which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both disputants.”3 On this view, too, distinctions provide for a higher synthesis of opposing views. They prevent thesis abandonment from being an entirely negative process, affording us a way of salvaging something, of “giving credit where credit is due” even to those contentions we ultimately reject. They make it possible to remove inconsistency not just by the brute force of thesis rejection, but by the more subtle and constructive device of thesis qualification. A distinction reflects a concession, an acknowledgement of some element of acceptability in the thesis that is being rejected. However, distinctions always involve us in bringing a new concept onto the stage of consideration and thus put a new topic on the agenda. They accordingly always afford invitations to carry the discussion further, opening up new issues that were heretofore conceptually inaccessible. Distinctions are the doors through which philosophy passes into new topics and problems. New concepts and new theses standardly come to the fore in the wake of further distinctions. While distinctions serve to avert conflict, nevertheless they always leave a crucial evaluative issue hanging in the air: the issue of priority. The pivotal question always arises, given that the term T can be split apart into the two senses T1 and T2, which of these two captures the “standard” or “normal” use of the word? Which construction is it that we should generally give to the equivocal word when we meet it in the relevant discussions? (For example: is it belief-as-true or belief-as-plausible that is at issue in

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standard cases?) Which sense predominates? Consider the following apory: 1.

Only observationally verifiable sentences are (genuinely) meaningful. (Positivism)

2.

The speculative claims of traditional metaphysics are not observationally verifiable.

3.

The speculative claims of traditional metaphysics are meaningful. (Metaphysical traditionalism)

Given that (2) is “fact of life,” we are driven to a choice between (1) and (3). Now a peacemaker might propose a distinction here, offering the following proposal: Let us introduce the (somewhat technical) idea of empirical meaningfulness—that is, let us distinguish between what is specifically empirically meaningful (“experientially resolvable” in some way) and what is not. Then one can accept (1) and abandon (3) in this particular sense, while, on the other hand, retaining (3) and abandoning (1) with respect to “loose, oldfashioned meaningfulness-at-large.”

But it is clear that such a distinction, which enables us to “have it both ways,” will not really make peace between the metaphysical traditionalist and his positivist adversary. Even while agreeing to “split the difference” in the face of the distinction, the positivist will say in his heart: “It is empirical meaningfulness that really counts, it is in this that true-blue authentic meaningfulness consists.” The metaphysician, on the other hand, will say: “This idea of ‘empirical meaningfulness’ is a mere technical construction that is really beside the point. It is meaningfulness-at-large that captures the authentic core of the idea.” There is now a fight, of sorts, for the right to the succession. Each of the new distinction-generated conceptions seeks to establish itself as the principal heir of the root concept. The quarrel now becomes one of which side represents the prime, main, most important aspect of the root distinction-antecedent idea? The issue becomes one of evaluation—of emphasis and priorities. Philosophical distinctions are thus creative innovations. There is nothing routine or automatic about them—their discernment is an act of inventive ingenuity. They do not elaborate preexisting ideas but introduce new

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ones. They not only provide a basis for understanding better something heretofore grasped imperfectly, but they shift the discussion to a new level of sophistication and complexity. Thus, to some extent they “change the subject.” (In this regard they are like the conceptual innovations of science, which revise rather than explain prior ideas.) The continual introduction of new concepts via new distinctions means that the ground of philosophy is always shifting beneath our feet. New distinctions for our concepts and new contexts for our theses alter the very substance of the old theses. The development is dialectical—an exchange of objection and response that constantly moves the discussion onto new ground. The resolution of antinomies through new distinctions is a matter of innovations whose outcomes cannot be foreseen in advance. And it is just this circumstance that renders distinction so creative a resource in philosophy. NOTES 1

For further deliberations regarding the role of distinctions in philosophy see Chapter 9 of Philosophical Reasoning (Oxford: Blackwells, 2001), and also Chapter 3 of Philosophical Dialectics.

2

See Alexander Bain, Mental Science, (1868; reptd. New York: Arno Press, 1973), Vol. 2, pp. 82ff, and compare William James, Principles of Psychology, (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1890), pp. 242 ff.

3

Frank P. Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics, ed. R. B. Braithwaite (London: Routledge, 1931), 115–16.

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Chapter Five PRONOMINAL ISSUE IN PHILOSOPHY 1. THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

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escartes placed the I front and center on the philosophical stage. In fact, as he saw it, it is only by the grace of God that we get from there to anywhere else. Berkeley deemed the whole world a collection of I’s. They call to each other across the matterless void like coyotes howling across an empty plain. Throughout philosophy, the I is of good repute and thorough respectability. Metaphysics would miss it sorely. Philosophical psychology would be stymied without it. Its absence would leave a great void in epistemology. But stylistically the matter stands on a very different footing. Here an I omitted is a merit gained. Philosophical writers, alas, are all too fond of the first person. “I find this unintelligible.” “I find it difficult to see how X gets from A to B.” “I think one must agree that …“One is tempted to respond: “Do tell us more about yourself, you sound interesting.” Seriously, though, just what are all those I’s doing there? If something is clear—or the reverse—the author can surely tell us so without bringing himself into it. He is ostensibly discussing an issue, not writing an autobiography. Where did the modern philosopher catch this I-itis? Perhaps from G. E. Moore, that master of self-reference. (The opening paragraph of “Is Time Real?”—admittedly an uncommonly long one—contains thirty-three I’s— six of them in that most dispensable of all contexts. “I think.”) Times change. Matters stood very differently in the time of Moore and William James. In that heyday of academic pomposity, the chatty use of the first person pronoun had a certain unpretentious charm evocative of faculty club informality. It carried a useful message: “Let’s not do philosophy by pretending and speak ex cathedra in the name of the World Spirit. Let’s stop being Herr Professor, and admit we’re speaking for ourselves, not for the universe.”

Nicholas Rescher • Pronominal Issues in Philosophy

At the time, such an approach was laudable and constructive-unassuming, modest, ingratiating, arid all that. But enough is enough. For better or worse, academia is no longer what it was in the 190x’s. The time has come for philosophers to put aside a mannerism that has long outlived its usefulness. Rare is the philosophical point that cannot be made without bringing oneself into it. But the said reality of it is that indulgence in self-reference is one of the banes of contemporary philosophical exposition. As a quick glance at the journal literature soon substantiates, contemporary philosophers are addicted to avowals: “I shall try to show,” “I think that it is clear,” “It seems strange to me that,” and a myriad of such self-referential locutions pervade the writings of our colleagues. Such statements, of course, say nothing about the issues: whatever claims they make relate to the state of the author’s mind and not to a substantive question. To address an issue one must make a statement, rather than presenting an attitudinal or intentional avowal. To place that cat one must assert “The cat is on the mat”; it will not do to state that X says so or that Y thinks so (oneself included). Avowals, clearly, are autobiographical and not substantive instrumentalities. What accounts for all this I-reference? Surely it is not that philosophers are more self-concerned than others. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that academic philosophers spend so much time reading term papers. Deeply enmeshed in sophomore relativism, contemporary undergraduates hold the opinion that “It’s all just a matter of what someone happens to think.” And in this frame of mind they load their essays with selfreferential reportage. But academics who ought to know better do ill to follow in their footsteps. 2. THE FIRST PERSON PLURAL Philosophers frequently speak in the first person plural. “We cannot but realize that …,” “We nowadays accept that …” But who are we? It seems only too obvious—those who form a group gathered together in some shared setting. Alas it is not so simple. And philosophers, in particular, actually take a different and rather diversified view of the matter. For one thing, there is the royal WE at work in Queen Victoria’s celebrated remark, “We are not amused.” Then there is the aforementioned social WE, consisting of oneself and the people who are one’s fellow interagents. But there are various other WE’s as well.

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The basic issue here is that of what one might call the we-catchment— the range of individuals included in the location we/us and thereby contrasted with those who are not—“the others.” In the popular thought and discourse of the ancient Greeks, “we” tended to be one’s fellow Hellenes, contrasted with the “barbarians” outside the pale of Hellenic civilization. The prime inaugurator of a more inclusive and generous conception of the matter was the great neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus (204–270 AD). The idea of we/us lay at the center of his philosophy, and for him the wecatchment was to include all those self-aware beings who qualify as rational agents.1 Sometimes that we-group will contract to within pretty narrow limits. When people say “We [whose knowledge] is nowadays known that Fermat’s Last Theorem is provable”—those actually at issue form a small group indeed. This broader, “philosophical” conception of we-catchment became standardized in Western philosophy through the influence of the Church Fathers. And it comes to particular prominence in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). For while Kant speaks regularly of “us humans” (wir Menschen) in relation to matters of sense-perception, it is when he turns to matters of thought the we-catchment becomes rational beings at large. (To be sure, he does not here take into account the extra-terrestrial “planetarians” of Christiaan Huygens, but takes God to afford a contrastcase.) Running alongside this ethical tradition of us-conception (as it might be called) there is also a rhetorical tradition in which the matter is more narrowly concerned. With the medieval scholastic theologians “we” often figured as short from “we Christians”. With humanistic philosophers it stood place for “we humans”. And with the ordinary language philosophers of the Oxonian type typified by J. L. Austen and J. Urmson—for whom “what we would say” in everyday speech is the canonical guide to proper usage—“we” came down to “we properly trained Oxbidgeans.”2 At this state the wecatchment turns from the like-situated to the like-minded—an affinity not of natural condition but of thought-orientation. There is here a shift from the affinity of kindred being to one of kindred spirits. And this primarily reflects our values—the view of what is most important to us, what we prize the most about ourselves.

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After all, “we” does not really require physical co-presence or genealogical kinship: the affirmative established by one’s identification will do. What is perhaps one of the most dramatic episodes in matters of wecatchment deliberation played itself out in the 16th century Spain of Philip II. It pivoted on the conflict between the conquistadors and the friars regarding the status of the Amerindian natives of the newly discovered hemisphere. The question at issue was this: Were they simply higher primates like the big apes of Africa, and thereby fit to be used as beasts of burden, satiable for exploration in the fields and mines, or were they fellow humans, needful of conversion to and instantiation in “the one true faith,” and entitled to the rights of his majesty’s subjects? Did they, in short, belong to the “we-us” catchment of the human community? This profound question was submitted at the king’s instruction to the scholars of theologians of the University of Salamanca, and to their credit they yielded to the arguments of Bartolomeo de Las Casas and ultimately arrived at the humane decision that fellow humans were at issue. The reality of it is that a we-group is established by a principle of affiliation and there is a literally endless range of possibility here: • physical co-presence • genealogical kinship • shared expensed group (Civil war veterans, Old Estonians) • shared membership in a natural kind or socially grounded classifying group (humans, Americans, musicians, physicians, etc.) • an affinity group: friends, soul mates (we Catholics, we socialists) There is really no end to such an inventory. Overall, it might be said that there are as many we-groups as there are ties that bind. And as far as philosophers are concerned, the we-group is what unites them with their academic fellow scholars—the educated sophisticates who assemble in the faculty dining room—and above all the departmental colleagues assembled at their own table.

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3. THE SECOND PERSON The second person makes an occasional appearance in philosophical discourse. In a chatty moment philosophers make claims that begin with locations like “You will surely reject the idea that —” or “You will acknowledge that —.” Such claims make a directly personal appeal to the reader. But who is that individual whom the writer sees as encompassed in audience? Whom does he see as an individual within his readership? We have to suppose that this collective second-person addresses will simply concern the we-group of individuals already considered in the manifold of first-person plural congeners: the we-group constituted along the lines of the preceding discussion. 4. THE THIRD PERSON (PLURAL) The third person too is coordinated to the first-person plural which defines the boundary we/they. That third-person plural is simply: they—those others. And preeminently this includes one’s doctrinal opponents—those we cannot bring ourselves to see as “kindred spirits.” “All affirmation is negation,” Spinoza very rightly maintained.3 And in consequence the we-group of those who hold the position in question will find opposite in a they-group that is opposed. In philosophy it is effectively inevitable that the group of “us” who adopt a particular position will be confined in dialectical opposition with a comparable group of “them” who oppose it with no less enthusiasm and—often as not—with no less commitment, conviction, and eloquence. All in all, then, the role of pronoun in philosophy is more complex— and more insidious—than one might ordinarily think. NOTES 1

See Paulina Remes, Plotinus on Self: The Philosophy of the ‘We’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.)

2

They pointed out that the verb “to know” has no present continuous: one cannot answer the question “What are you doing” by replying “I am knowing this-or-that.” So—they conclude—theorists who speak of “the process of knowing” are barking up an inappropriate tree.

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NOTES 3

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The problems of philosophy being the complex issues they are, and human beings being the complex creatures they are, it transpires that virtually any philosophical doctrine or position admits of a substantive contrary that is likely to find its advocates and supporters.

Chapter Six DECONSTRUCTIONISM AND ITS PROBLEMS

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hilosophy has been one of the key targets of the relativism of the age. And there are few areas where the contemporary denial of objectivity has been more prominent than in the study of philosophical discourse. The “deconstructionism” associated with the name of Jacques Derrida is Exhibit No. 1 here.1 Deconstructionism is a doctrinal stance with regard to the interpretation of texts that denies any prospect of objectivity in this domain. Initially projected as a theory about literary texts, the enthusiasm of its more ambitious exponents soon led them to expand the theory’s application to texts in general—historical, biographical, philosophical, what have you. The doctrinal core of the position involves two theses, first, that a text always allows many alternative interpretative constructions whose elaboration is the proper mission of the interpretative enterprise, and second, that all these various interpretations are effectively coequal in merit—that none can be rejected as unsuitable, inappropriate, incompetent without much ado. At the core of this doctrinal stance lies a view of textual plasticity—that as the enterprise of text interpretation proceeds, it brings to view an ever increasing range of viable and more or less equivalent alternative interpretations. As deconstructionism sees the matter, the enterprise of text interpretation accordingly confronts us with an inevitable plethora of coequal alternative possibilities. On this basis, the partisans of deconstructionism condemn with the dismissive epithet of textualism the view that a given text has a meaning in such a stable and objective way as to favor one particular interpretation over the rest. They insist that there is no room for objectivity here: interpretation is a matter of to each his own. Insofar as deconstructionist theory represents a doctrine rather than a methodological attitude about text interpretation, it is a position based on a group of hermeneutical views or contentions that may be sketched roughly as follows: In the domain of text interpretation we face a situation of —

Nicholas Rescher • Deconstructionism and its Problems

1. Omnitextuality: Any proposed interpretation of a text must itself take the form of simply another text. In the hermeneutical sphere there is no way of exiting from the textual domain. 2. Plasticity: Every text has multiple interpretations—it admits a plurality of diverse constructions. 3. Equivalency: Every interpretation is as good as any other. These various interpretative constructions of a text are all of equal or roughly equal merit: none is definitive, canonical, discriminatively appropriate—indeed none is substantially more cogent or tenable than the others. It follows from these theses that in interpreting texts we always confront a plurality of (roughly co-meritorious) variants. Text interpretation admits of no rational validation or invalidation for one resolution over against another. It is always simply an exercise of free imagination: a project in which we can do no more than to explore interesting possibilities and cannot hope to validate a particular result as optimal in a cogent and stable way. Where issues of interpretation are concerned, we can only explore alternatives and cannot substantiate particular resolutions; we can project possibilities but cannot reduce them by eliminative processes of plausibility assessment. Accordingly, we should never ask what a text does mean, but only what it can or might mean. In the realm of text interpretation there are no forced choices: it is an inherently indecisive enterprise—a fact that, happily, manages to “liberate us from the prison-house of language.”2 Deconstructionism is, in sum, a doctrine of indifferentist relativism with respect to textual interpretation. In its refusal to let those restrictive considerations of rational cogency come into play, it is the diametric opposite of objectivism in this domain. How can a more discriminating rationalism come to grips with such an anarchical position? Clearly, there is little point in quarreling with premises (1) and (2) of the preceding argumentation, seeing that the former is an obvious and evident truth, and that the latter a fact amply substantiated by historical evidence. And it follows from these two theses that any interpretation itself admits of variant interpretations. The problematic crux of deconstructionism’s argument for a relativistic indifferentiation of text interpretation is thus premise (3), with its assertion of merit equivalency. But is this premise tenable? Is the hermeneutic realm indeed a free-for-all ruled

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by the idea that all interpretations are created equal? Is the textual interpreter indeed wandering through a hall of mirrors, wholly unable to implement the distinction between appearance and reality? 1. THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT: THE FLAW IN THE DECONSTRUCTION’S OINTMENT The idea that a merit-annihilating indifferentism holds reign in the sphere of textual interpretation is willfully blind to a crucial reality. Interpretations—and the texts through which they are conveyed—are emphatically not created equal: Some make sense, some only nonsense; some are ambiguous (have many plausible interpretations), others are more definite; some convey much information, others little; some state truths, some falsehoods. What the fallacy of indifferentist relativism of text interpretation overlooks, to its own decisive detriment, is the crucial matter of context. The process of deconstruction—of interpretatively dissolving any and every text into a plurality of supposedly merit-equivalent constructions— can and should be offset by the process of reconstruction, which calls for viewing texts within their larger contexts. After all, texts inevitably have a setting—historical, cultural, authorial—on which their actual meaning is critically dependent. And this contextual setting projects beyond the textual realm itself in comprising both processes (know-how) and products (artifacts) relating to human action in relevant regards. In particular, it encompasses both noncommunicatively behavioral practices and specifically communicative practices, the products of noncommunicative processes and practices (material involvements), and the relevant social traditions. To the extent that we do not understand the ways and means of a people’s mode of living—what they are concerned to do and to produce—we will have great difficulty in understanding their texts. In sum, texts have a wider functional context, and this means that text interpretation is not a matter of free-floating imagination—it is a matter of scholarship. The crucial point that has to be urged against deconstructionism’s hermeneutical egalitarianism is not that every reality is virtual. The textual realm is not closed because texts often as not concern themselves with the real world. They can and do bear on noncommunicative processes and interactions with artifacts of a text-external realm. There are not only tennis rulebooks and tennis manuals but also tennis courts and players and games. Texts interconnect with reality through the mediation of intelligent agents. Neglect of this crucial contextual dimension leads to what is perhaps the

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most severe shortcoming of deconstructionism, betokening its deeply problematic commitment to the idea that the textual realm is self-sufficient and autonomous. Such a stance reflects the bias of academics committed to a logocentrism that sees the world in terms of discourse and forgets that it is not the case that everything is a matter of language through and through. Our texts and our use of words are, for the most part, no more than just one other instrumentality by which we function in a nontextual world—in this instance previously the social world of human interaction. To see texts and the libraries that warehouse them as context-disconnectedly self-sufficient is akin to contemplating the molehills without the mole.3 2. COHERENCE AS AN INTERPRETATIVE STANDARD To be sure, all of the various interpretations of a text that are not totally bizarre have (by assumption) some sort of merit—there is almost always something to be said for them. But to affirm this is not, of course, to say that all those different (nonabsurd) interpretations are thereby equally meritorious. To concede the prospect of a hermeneutical underdetermination that allows for a plurality of alternative nonabsurd interpretations is certainly not to say that any such interpretation is every bit as viable as any other. The situation here is akin to the old story that trades on the Talmudic idea that each passage of the Torah contains forty-nine possible meanings. The story has it that once a student offered an interpretation of a passage to the rabbi who was giving him instruction. “No, you are quite wrong,” the rabbi proclaimed. “How can you say that?” protested the student. “Didn’t you say there are forty-nine meanings for each passage?” “Yes,” replied the rabbi, “but yours isn’t one of them.” Given the often underdeterminative impetus of our contextual resources, the interpretation of texts is sometimes somewhat flexible. But there are definite limits to the elasticity that is available here. Any viable approach to the theory of text interpretation must accordingly be normative: it must be predicated on standards and criteria that provide for the evaluation of better and worse, of sensible and foolish, of responsible and irresponsible. Sensible text interpretation is not a matter of anything-goes imaginative flights into the never-never world of freefloating fancy; it is tethered to the down-to-earth realities of the case imposed by rational standards of validity and appropriateness. The idea that any and every construal of a text—any bending or twisting of its message—is as good as any other is particularly dubious with any

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text that has a how-to aspect, whether this be small scale (recipes for baking bread, instructions for cleaning a rifle) or large scale (prescriptions for successful salesmanship, guidelines to scanning Spanish poetry). In such matters there is no anything-goes plasticity; some ways of interpreting that text and implementing the lessons of such an interpretation are materially better than others. The merit of deconstructionism lies in its stress on the importance of texts in humanistic studies and on the pluralism of interesting, discussible, and attention-worthy interpretations. But its defect lies in the idea that interpretations are created equal—that issues of quality and cogency are out of place in this domain. The crucial task of text interpretation is one of not merely examining possibilities but of evaluating them. One must go beyond the survey of possible interpretations to assess which of them are plausible and—going even beyond this—to endeavor to decide which (if any) among them is optimal. But how to implement this project? It is a profound error to see the textual sector as closed—to take the line that it is all a matter of texts “all the way through.” Texts come into contact with contexts. The cardinal instrumentality of text interpretation is represented by the principle of hermeneutical optimization according to a standard of merit provided by the coherence of the proposed interpretation of a text with its overall context. Whatever interpretation best harmonizes with a text’s overall context is ipso facto a superior interpretation that thereby has greater claims on our acceptance. In the light of such contextual considerations, text interpretations are emphatically not created equal. The most sensible approach to the existence of a variety of alternative text interpretations is what might be called the coherence theory of interpretation.4 After all, text interpretation is a practice that can be more or less adequate in the light of the ultimate good of systematization: of fitting texts into context in a way that realizes a systemic learning. Not only can a text have a subtext of implicit but inarticulated messages but it also—and more usually—has a supertext, a wider contextual environment within which its own message must be construed. It is in fact coherence with the resources of context (in the widest sense of this term) that is at once the appropriate instrument of text interpretation and the impetus to objectivity in this domain. It is thus necessary for a sensible venture in text interpretation to reject the mistaken idea that we can afford to forget about the existence of an extratextual world with which we humans interrelate on the basis of texts. The use of words is not something free-wheeling that stands disconnected

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from the verbal and behavioral environment in which they figure. The textual realm is not disconnected from the realm of human praxis. (Indeed, even moving into and through that textual realm is a matter of praxis— producing and consuming texts is a matter of doing things.) The context of a text is set not only by other related texts but also by the artifacts that constitute its material environment and by the common elements of experience that we are ourselves inclined to share with that text’s author in virtue of the fact of sharing a common experiential framework in a shared human setting in a common world. And this endows texts with an objective aspect. To be sure, with textual interpretation as with all other branches of rational endeavor we can obtain no categorical guarantees. Here, as in any other inductive situation, all that rationality can do for us is to offer us the best available prospect of successful goal realization. But insofar as we are reasonable this circumstance should also satisfy us, seeing that it is absurd to ask for more than can possibly be had. 3. AGAINST TEXTUAL EGALITARIANISM IN COMMUNICATIVE CONTEXTS Jacques Derrida maintained in his Speech and Phenomena5 that Western scholarship has privileged voice (authorial thought and intention) over writing (the resultant objective text)—process over product. But this involves a profound misconception. It overlooks the import of the hermeneutic circle: the lesson that in the endeavor to understand texts issues of process and product are coordinate, that neither can be subordinated to the other—let alone consigned to oblivion. To agree with Derrida in subordinating process (voice) to product (the textual product in writing) would be to ignore the crucial lesson that what a text is depends on its function, on what it sets out to do. And that at this point the author’s own position is dominant. The texts being of the author’s making, we need to take the context of its production into account to determine what it actually is as a product. The reason why interpretations are not created equal lies in circumstance of their contextual embedding in voice-related matters. Texts are produced with a view to their communicative mission; they are instruments of communication—of conveying information and canalizing to action— even where the only action at issue is one of deliberation or discussion. Even merely “belles-lettristic” texts can guide people toward implementation of beliefs and values in ways that can be pointless and meretricious—

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or the reverse (to say nothing about matters of teaching and writing). Texts can be veridical or mendacious, helpful or hurtful. They are not disconnected from life: they can be life enhancing or life degrading, can impel us to take views that conduce to self-enhancement or to self-loathing. Medical texts influence the medications we take. Engineering texts influence the projects we construct. Literary texts influence the values we maintain and the lives we lead on their basis. Philosophical texts influence our priorities and the way we conduct our intellectual affairs. Texts have a bearing not only on what we think but also on what we do: our actions and activities, our experiments and observations, our predictions and ventures at control. And insofar as texts are elements of a wider teleological domain, their adequate interpretation will pivot on this fact. The textual world is not self-contained; it is inextricably interconnected with the realm of action, activity, and living. And actions (even intellectual action such as understanding) can be more or less successful. Accordingly, we can evaluate texts (representations) because they have a pragmatic dimension in the communicative domain. To be sure one cannot leave writing out of it. The public dimension is uneliminable. In using language to produce his text, the author avails himself of a public instrumentality. What words mean is a matter of convention—of the social and, as it were, decisional modus operandi of human linguistic and symbolic arrangements. And of course what can appropriately (warrantedly, correctly) be said once those controversial arrangements are in place is something that is itself no longer free-floating and decisional. Once we decide what cat and mat mean, the question of whether one can appropriately assert, “The cat is on the mat,” is not an issue open for decisional resolution: our contribution has come to an end and the rest lies with the nature of things. What our words stand for—what we mean by cat or mat or dog—is entirely a matter of human arrangements, of the decision of linguistic communities. But once these matters are fixed, the question of whether and where and how frequently dogs and cats are to be encountered in nature—and in the proximity of one another and of mats—is something that only nature can resolve; the conventional arrangements of language-using communities have nothing further to do with it. The world’s concrete realities now gain the upper hand. Here text interpretation once more requires an objective and, as it were, contextual dimension. The critical flaw of a deconstructionist relativism regarding texts and their interpretations lies in the fact that rational evaluation is possible also in this interpretative sphere. Texts can and should be evaluated in terms of

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their contextual ramifications. The appropriateness of thought and assertion in matters of communication will generally depend on objective factors outside the domain of individual wish or action. It simply is not the case that everything in the textual realm is created equal—as deconstructionist relativism would have us believe. The resources of systemic coherence within an overall purposive context preclude an indifferentist egalitarianism of textual interpretation and provide for an interpretative objectivism. It is thus necessary for a sensible venture in text interpretation—in philosophy at least—to reject the mistaken idea that the use of words is something free-wheeling that spins along disconnected from the larger verbal and behavioral environment in which they figure. It is a profound error to see the textual sector as closed—to take the line that it is all a matter of texts “all the way through,” seeing that texts come equipped with contexts. 4. IRENIC CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS There is, of course, always the prospect of a halfway house between personal subjectivity and impersonal objectivity that goes with the interpersonal agreement that can obtain within particular communities.6 But this halfway house does not afford a really habitable space in the present context. Communities and their practices and traditions are almost as fickle and fallible as individuals. They, too, can overlook and neglect crucial considerations. Even when we know how the community does comport itself we can still ask how it should comport itself. And this is something we can do—though admittedly only within limits—with respect to the community to which we ourselves belong. Objectivity is an ideal toward which we can and should strive, but no one says that the process is easy. The prospect of different questions looms before us. “What does the text mean?” is one sort of issue, and “What might the text mean?” another. Here as elsewhere the answer pivots on what the question at issue is. The situation is not, however, entirely one-sided. There is something, after all, that can be said for the deconstructionist perspective. But interestingly enough, this something falls wholly outside the sphere of meaningoriented hermeneutics. When we speak of interpreting a literary text, two distinctly different things can be at issue. It is crucial to distinguish between: • exegetical interpretation—the endeavor to elucidate the meaning of a

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text in relation to the intentions of its producer vis-à-vis the intended audience then and there, • imaginative (re-)interpretation—the recasting or re-presentation of a text in an endeavor to evoke aesthetic responses and affective resonances in a current (present-day) recipient. In doing actual (exegetical) interpretation we operate in the domain of scholarship. Here issues of context become central, because the pivotal question is: What did the author mean by the text? The point of concern is with the original meaning and purport of the text. The issue of historical authenticity is paramount. But a text—and not only a text but any artifact that has an esthetic such as a painting or sculpture—can be regarded abstractly, in a context-independent way. Here the issue is not one of producer centrality but one of consumer centrality, and the issue is not “What does the text mean for its author?” but rather “What can the text mean for us?” Insofar as interpretation is at issue, this is not the hermeneutical interpretation of meaning explanation at all, but rather the sort of thing at issue when we speak of a performer’s interpretation of a musical composition or the director’s interpretation of a play. What we do here is not so much to interpret the text as to creatively reinterpret it or endeavor to endow it with current relevancy and interest. Producing a play or a musical composition affords a paradigm example. Here we are (usually) not trying for historical authenticity but for the enlistment of interest. We are not addressing issues of scholarship but issues of edification or entertainment. Here authorship (and with it context) becomes of subsidiary importance—and imaginative creativity comes to the forefront. Where this sort of enterprise is at issue, the free-wheeling inventiveness envisioned by deconstructionism has something to be said for it. But the hermeneutical commerce with texts geared to the enterprise of understanding their actual meaning as concrete historical artifacts is of course something quite different. Viewed in this light, the principal thesis of our deliberations emerges with greater clarity. It is that while philosophical texts often are interpretatively underdeterminative and admit a variety of theoretically possible interpretations, this range is generally narrowed—and often drastically reduced—by considerations of plausibility of the sort at issue with considerations of contextual fit, which is to say by the processes and procedures of good old-fashioned scholarship. The crux, then, is the contrast between text interpretation as conscien-

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tious scholarly exegesis as against an imaginative de- (or perhaps better re-) construction of texts freed from the constraint of considerations of historical context—and thus with issues of scholarly exegesis in suspension. And behind this duality of approach looms a far-reaching quarrel in the area of educational approach and policy. The question is who owns the texts—by whose ground rules of textual interpretation is the game to be played. Are we to deal in scholarly exegesis or in imaginative edification? Are the text consumers at issue expected to bring scholarly industry to bear, or are they being invited to indulge in imaginative flights of fancy? And, in particular, in conjuring with texts in the educational process, are we to advantage the philologically and historically well informed, or are we to create a more level playing field of imaginative sensibility where anyone can play. In sum, then, the fact has to be recognized that texts come into being in relation to rather different sorts of aims and purposes. In particular, they can be made either for the transmission of information and ideas or for thought provocation and the stimulation of the inventive imagination. And therefore two quite different interpretative enterprises can be at issue. Only where we put substantive (let alone scholarly) concerns aside and use textinterpretation as a means to thought provocation—as a training ground for the free-ranging imagination—does a free-floating deconstructionist approach to texts make any sense. The prospect of a theoretical reconciliation is thus at hand: It’s all a matter of how you understand interpretation. Different things can be at stake. Scholarly exegesis is one, deconstructively imaginative innovation is another. In the communicative use of texts, where the transmission of information is the most important factor, the impetus to objectivity is paramount. And this holds even for literary texts—given that the authors of such works generally desire and endeavor to be understood in their own terms. Ultimately, it is a matter of ownership. Hermeneuticists recognize the ownership rights of authors and the scholars who address their products. Deconstructionists think that texts belong to interpreters to do with as they wish in using texts as springboards for ventures in the imaginative expansion of sensitivity. To be sure, life is not there for toil alone. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. There will be time for serious thought and time for imaginative fancy. But it is only when of intellectual endeavor takes a playful turn that deconstructivism comes into play. When it is the informative aspect in any of its dimensions that is at issue in the texts with which we deal, then our interpretative efforts will have to take the more scholarly

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road where objectivity once again comes to the fore. It must, of course, be granted that there are some grains of truth in the deconstructionist position. In matters of text interpretation, perfection— and thus the knock-down, drag-out augmentation that goes with it—will often indeed be unachievable. We thus do well to concede that perfection and decisive completeness may well not be attainable in this domain. Still the fact remains that while we may not be able to complete our interpretative tasks in a final and definite way we can—and should—labor to improve on what we have. Progress without the prospect of perfection is the watchword in the realm of hermeneutic as in that of moral endeavor. Granted, all of the various interpretations of a text that are not totally bizarre have (by hypothesis) some sort of merit—there is almost always something to be said for them. In view of the generally underdeterminative impetus of our contextual resources, the interpretation of texts is usually somewhat flexible. But there are definite limits to the elasticity that is available here. The partisans of a hermeneutical relativism that maintains the equivalency of possible interpretations are talking through their deconstructionist hats.7 NOTES 1

See especially his De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), trans. G. Spivak as Of Grammatology, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

2

J. Hillis Miller in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 229.

3

This a propos of the quip that a book no more shows where its author is presently located in thought than a molehill shows where its maker is presently located in nature.

4

See pp. 168–69 above.

5

Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973). Original: Le voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972).

6

In the context of textual interpretation the case for this halfway house position is cogently formulated in Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class: The Anthology of Interpersonal Computers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

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NOTES 7

72

For further deliberations along the lines of this chapter see Chapter 11 of Communicative Pragmatism.

Chapter Seven REFERENTIAL AFFINITY (A Study in Textual Analysis) 1. AN ILLUSTRATIVE CASE

T

his study of referential affinity in philosophy seeks to illustrate a statistical methodology for looking at the relation of a philosopher to his influences and sources. The leading idea is to obtain a statistical view of the extent to which a given thinker discusses his precursors in juxtaposition with one another. For illustrative purposes we begin with the Meiner edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Display 1 tabulates the pages on which Kant mentions those other thinkers to whom he refers five or more times overall. So in this context we may note that respect to this Kantian text 1.

Leibniz is the most cited philosopher, followed at some distance by Hume,

2.

Of the 68 total mentions of these seven most-mentioned philosophers (i.e., with 5 or more mentions) ten occur on pages where others are mentioned,

3.

Hume stands alone in never being mentioned in the proximity of others.

Display 1 further indicates, there are just four pages where Kant conjointly mentions two or more of these philosophers, namely 316: Aristotle, Leibniz 575: Descartes, Leibniz 764: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Leibniz 765: Aristotle, Locke

Nicholas Rescher • Referential Affinity

Display 1 MOST CITED PHILOSOPHERS IN KANT’S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON PLATO: (total 10) Pages 43, 349, 350, 531, 352, 353, 477, 500, 549, 764 ARISTOTLE: (total 7) Pages 14, 118, 119, 316, 349, 764, 765 DESCARTES: (total 7) Pages 272, 273, 375, 383, 396, 417, 575 EPICURUS: (total 5) Pages 221, 465, 477, 764, 785 HUME: (total 13) Pages 41, 51, 52, 135, 136, 682, 683, 694, 697, 698, 699, 700, 766 LEIBNIZ: (total 18) Pages 286, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 325, 460, 575, 576, 621, 733, 764, 758 LOCKE: (total 7) Pages 6, 126, 135, 136, 317, 764, 765

It is clear on this basis that Aristotle and Leibniz have the strongest degree of referential connectivity in Kant’s great work, with Aristotle being mentioned on two of the 18 pages where Leibniz is mentioned, and Leibniz being mentioned on two of the 7 pages where Aristotle is mentioned. This is clearly something that might well have please Leibniz, given his own attitude to his antecedents. 2. SOME GENERAL APPARATUS Let [A] be the number of texts (books or articles, pages, or paragraphs) in which the item A (be it a name or word or idea) is mentioned. And correspondingly let [A ∩ B] be the number of those in which both are mentioned. We may say that one item (A) dominates one with (B) to the extent of the situation of [A] of [B]. Thus in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Leibniz dominates over Plato to the extent of the first 286:43 or roughly 7 to 1. It is

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clear that in writing the book Leibniz was on Kant’s mind a good deal more than Plato. The interpretative significance of occurrence-counting emerges through the comparison of [A] with [A ∩ B]. For if A is hardly ever mentioned without B coming alongside, it is clear that B is to be seen as highly significant for A. Accordingly, the proportion of [A] – [A & B] to [A] can be viewed as a measure of B’s affinity to A. So now consider: [A] – [A ∩ B] [A ∩ B] = 1 – [A] [A] The closer this is to zero, that is, the closer

[A ∩ B] [A] is to 1, the greater the

affinity. Accordingly the ratio =

[A ∩ B] [A]

can be taken as a measure of this factor, with 1 as maximal and 0 as minimal. Seeing that is the proportion of A-mentioning items that also mention B, one might also think of quantity as a probability, namely the probability that a random encounter with A will also involve one with B, symbolically pr(B | A). Exactly as in the situation with romantic affinity, so also in the textual case, affinity may not be reciprocated. That is can be high and low. Illustratively, if 60 % of A-references correlate with B-references, while only 10 % of B-references correlate with A-references, we may plausibly conjecture some degree of thematic dependency or subordination of B to A. For we may then conclude that B is dependently important to A in a way not really reciprocated in terms of A’s importance to B. (Consider, for example, that you cannot really discuss Aquinas without bringing Aristotle into it, while the reverse is not the case.) We could say that A is in a position of textual preponderance over B to the extent of the different between and . Thus if A is almost always mentioned where B is, while B is only seldom mentioned where A is, then B dominates textually over A to the extent of the difference between these quantities.

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3. A FURTHER ILLUSTRATION: THE CASE OF WHITEHEAD’S PROCESS AND REALITY Tables A, B and C summarize the referential situation for the most-cited philosophers in A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Realty. Among much else, they reveal that Kant is a decidedly pivotal figure here to whom other philosophers are clearly tied, while the reverse fails to be the case. Moreover, given the differences in time and doctrine, it is striking that of the seven most-cited philosophers in Kant’s book four recur similarly in that of Whitehead’s. On the other hand, given the kinship of their positions, it is rather odd that Whitehead does not cite Leibniz more frequently. TABLE A MOST-CITED PHILOSOPHERS IN WHITEHEAD’S PROCESS AND REALITY ARISTOTLE: [total 15] Pages 10, 39, 40, 50–51, 84, 96, 137, 159, 209, 332, 339, 342–344 DESCARTES: [total 48] Pages xi–xiii, 6, 11, 19, 39, 41, 48–50, 53–55, 62, 69, 72–77, 80–81, 91, 122, 128, 130, 136–137, 140, 144–145, 150, 154, 158-160, 171, 173, 179, 190, 209, 219, 238, 288, 309, 325 LOCKE: [total 61] Pages xi, xiv, 11, 13, 17–19, 25, 29, 39, 51, 54–60, 73, 75, 79–80, 113, 117, 123, 128, 130, 138–147, 149, 151–157, 159, 161, 188, 210, 213, 219, 228, 234, 242–243, 267, 268, 274, 260, 315, 325 NEWTON: [total 19] Pages xi, xiv, 10, 70–73, 76–77, 80–81, 93–96, 177, 209, 210, 309 SPINOZA: [total 12] Pages 6–7, 11, 48, 73–74, 81, 88, 150, 200, 222, 247 HUME: [total 69] Pages xi, 11, 39–40, 48–49, 51, 54–55, 57, 73, 81, 83–87, 91, 94, 113–114, 117–118, 123–124, 128, 133–141, 147–148, 151–153, 156, 159–160, 162, 167, 171–179, 210, 226, 228, 230, 242, 247–250, 260–261, 315–316, 326, 343 KANT: [total 28] Pages xi, 11, 29, 39, 49–50, 72, 83, 88, 91, 113, 123, 130, 152–157, 173–174, 178, 190, 210, 215, 242, 248, 332 BRADLEY: [total 8] Pages xiii–xiv, 54, 156, 184, 190, 200, 229

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TABLE B PAGE REFERENCES TO PHILOSOPHERS IN WHITEHEAD’S PROCESS AND REALITY Individual Mentions

Joint Mentions

Descartes Locke Hume Kant

Descartes and Locke Descartes and Hume Descartes and Kant Locke and Hume Locke and Kant Hume and Kant

48 61 69 28

18 19 11 26 13 17

TABLE C REFERENTIAL PARAMETERS FOR A. N. WHITEHEAD’S PROCESS AND REALITY A, B

[A

∩ B]

[A]

[A

∩ B]

[B]

[A ∩ B] [A] + [B] – [A, B]

= _______________________________________________________________________ 18 18 18 Descartes, Locke 48 ≅ .4 61 ≅ .3 91 ≅ .2 Descartes, Hume

19 69 ≅ .3

19 48 ≅ .4

19 98 ≅ .2

Descartes, Kant

11 28 ≅ .4

11 48 ≅ .2

11 65 ≅ .2

Locke, Hume

26 69 ≅ .4

26 61 ≅ .4

26 104 ≅ .3

Locke, Kant

13 28 ≅ .5

13 61 ≅ .2

13 76 ≅ .2

Hume, Kant

17 28 ≅ .6

17 69 ≅ .1

17 80 ≅ .2

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It is interesting to see how stable that last column of Table C is, with the Locke-Hume case reflecting a particularly tight linkage. 4. A VARIANT APPROACH VIA SEARCH ENGINES Let us now shift our statistical approach from book indices or author concordances to the vastly greater mention-space afforded by internet accessible search engines. We shall thus be dealing not with a single book or even an author’s collected works, but with the mega-text constituted by “the literature at large.” A search engine such as Google or Yahoo in effect provides a map of the textual reference-space of loci where a given item (person, place, thing, idea) is mentioned in the printed literature. And this encompasses, in particular, those persons and ideas that figure in the history of philosophy. What we can thus secure (however imperfectly) is an inventory that defines the reference range of a given item of philosophical relevancy. The present discussion will endeavor to exploit the potential of this resource from examining the “referential affinity” between two philosophers for a given individual to have the “mention-manifold” of texts that refer to this individual, and a search engine provides an entrée to this manifold. Given such a mention-manifold for A we at once determine the quantity [A] of its number of entries. Thus, for example, with Google as a source we have it that when A = Plato, [A] = 30.4 million, and when B = Aristotle, [B] = 13.1 million. The comparison of [A] and [B] is clearly an item of interest in matters. A B

In comparing the size of regions A and B we shall use the standard Boolean operators and in addition shall let [X] represent the count/size of a given region X—exactly as above. Given two individuals A and B it is also of interest to pose the question: “What proportion of the texts that mentions A also makes mention of B as well?” Our concern here is thus once more with the proportion: [A ∩ B] = [A]

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This is a quality that can vary from 0 (“B never occurs in the manifold of A-mentioning texts”) to 1 (“B is ever-present throughout all A-meriting texts”). This ratio effectively measures what might be called the extent of B-attachment to A.” In this way, we have it that on the basis of Google statistics the attachment of Aristotle to Plato is 12 percent and that of Plato to Aristotle is 28 percent. This ratio of [A ∩ B] to [A] measures the extent to which A has to share its domain with B. The issue here is simply one of the extent to which B penetrates into A. (For perspectivity we now shift from fractions to percentages.) It is clear that the two quantities [A ∩ B] and [A]

[A ∩ B] [B]

are reciprocally determined, seeing that they will stand to one another as [B] stands to [A]. Display 2 illustrates how this issue stands for several pairs of important philosophical figures. Analogous to this question of the proportion of A that is B-included is the question: “How does the A-excluded part of B compare in size to A itself?” In the present context this question about the size of the ratio [¯ A ∩ B] A Will effectively ask “What proportion of the B reference fails to make mention of A?” Since [¯ A ∩ B] = [B] – [A ∩ B] this ratio comes to: [B] – [A ∩ B] [B] [A ∩ B ] = A [A] [A] – This quantity is readily calculated in terms of the ratios we have already taken into consideration, and thus involves no conceptual innovations. Yet another mode of assessing referential kinship is envisioned when we ask: “What proportion of the overall references to a given pair of authors are references to them jointly?” This mode of epistemic proximity is a matter of comparing the size of A ∩ B with that of A ∪ B. The ratio which measures this yields:

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Nicholas Rescher • Referential Affinity

Display 2 MENTION STATISTICS FROM GOOGLE (APRIL 2010) A

B

[A]

[B]

[A ∩ B]

[A ∩ B] [A]

[A ∩ B] [B]

Plato

Aristotle

30.4

13.1

3.7

12 %

28 %

Descartes

Spinoza

11.2

6.5

3.7

33 %

57 %

Leibniz

Kant

5.9

30.4

4.2

71 %

14 %

Locke

Hume

15.6

15.7

7.7

49 %

49 %

Hegel

Nietzsche

11.2

12.4

2.7

24 %

22 %

Carnap

Quine

0.7

1.7

0.3

43 %

18 %

Γ(A, B) =

[A ∩ B] [A ∩ B] = [A] + [B] – [A ∩ B] [A ∪ B]

In our previous examples we have Plato/Aristotle Descartes/Spinoza Leibniz/Kant Locke/Hume Hegel/Nietzsche Carnap/Quine

80

3.7 39.8 = 0.09 3.7 33.0 = 0.11 4.2 37.1 = 0.13 7.7 23.6 = 0.33 2.7 20.9 = 0.13 0.3 0.1 = 0.14

TEXTUALITY

It leaps to view that the philosophical literature clearly regards Locke and Hume as subjects of an unusually tight linkage—even as in the case of Kant above. The referential distance between A and B might be defined as the extent to which one gets mentioned without the other: Δ(A, B) =

=

Subtotal of mentions of one without the other [¯ A ∩ B] + [A ∩ B ¯] = Grand total of either-one mentions [A] + [B] – [A ∩ B]

[A] + [B] –2[A + B] [A] + [B] –[A ∩ B] – [A ∩ B] = = 1 – Γ(A, B) [A] + [B] – [A ∩ B] [A] + [B] – [A ∩ B]

In the previous examples this would be Δ (Plato/Aristotle)

≅ 91 %

Δ (Descartes/Spinoza) ≅ 89 % Δ (Leibniz/Kant)

≅ 87 %

Δ (Locke/Hume)

≅ 67 %

Δ (Hegel/Nietzsche)

≅ 87 %

Δ (Carnap/Quine)

≅ 86 %

These figures reflect the circumstances that the Locke/Hume linkage is substantially less than obtains in most cases. These two thinkers seem to be tied at their philosophical waists. What is one to make of these statistical connections among philosophers? What is the point of such statistics? First and foremost we must acknowledge that they do not relate in any direct way to their philosophical views as such: they relate to how the envisioning community of discussants proceed in regard to them. They are, in effect instrumentalities of reception theory, reflective of the community’s views of people rather than ideas of those people themselves. Be this as it may, those referential statistics are usefully instrumental in raising instructive questions. What is the nature of the linkage envisioned to obtain between those thinkers—is it a matter of influence, of confluence,

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or of opposition? It actually may do best justice to the situation to concede that those statistical relationships do not so much manage to succeed in outright informativeness as in suggesting instructive questions.

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Chapter Eight ON THE LITERATURE OF THE FREE WILL PROBLEM

I

t was said of Helen of Troy that she had a beauty that launched a thousand ships. And it can be said with understatement, that the problem of free will has a fascination that has launched a thousand books. Rare indeed is the philosophical problem that has engendered a literature of comparable scope. Anyone who takes the present volume into hand cannot fail to be impressed by the amount of philosophical productivity on this topic. Nor is this all due to the problem’s two and a half millennia of existence. For four-fifths of the writing ever done on the topic is the work of the past single generation. And even a casual look at such an extensive bibliography will suffice to show that a change of tectonic proportions has come over the subject during the past two generations. The explosion of the literature has rendered it impossible to do “business as usual.” No longer can even the most dedicated of scholars take the literature of the subject into adequate account—not even where one single particular problem-issue is concerned.1 The problem of free will was put on the agenda of philosophy in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, where it was posed in the following classic formulation, Socrates being the speaker: I felt very much as I should feel if someone said, ‘Socrates does by mind all he does’; and then, in telling the causes of what I am doing should say first that the reason why I sit here now is, that my body consists of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints between them, and the sinews can be tightened and slackened, surrounding the bones along with flesh and the skin which holds them together; so when the bones are uplifted in their sockets, the sinews slackening and tightening make me able to bend my limbs now, and for this cause I have bent together and sit here; and if next he should give you other such causes of my conversing with you, alleging as causes voices and airs and hearings and a thousand others like that, and neglecting to give the real causes … But by the Dog! these bones and sinews, I think, would have been somewhere near Megara or Boeotia long ago, carried there by an opinion of what is best, if I had not believed it better and more just to submit to any sentence which my city gives than to take to my heels

Nicholas Rescher • On the Literature of the Free Will Problem

and run. To call all those things the causes is strange indeed. If one should say that unless I had such things, bones and sinews and all the rest I have, I should not have been able to do what I thought best, that would indeed be true. But to say that these, and not my choice of the best, are the causes of my doing what I do (and when I act, by mind, too!), would be a very heedless way of speaking.2

The question at issue is effectively the following. Do people have the power to determine their actions through the choices they make on the basis of deliberations based on their own preferences and wishes, or is what we do always the result of the operation of larger external forces beyond our control. The issue of the freedom of the will is of paramount importance in philosophy primarily for two reasons. The first is its bearing on the self-image of ourselves and our fellows as rational agents, beings whose actions are, or can be, autonomously determined by making thought-guided choices in a responsible way. The other is its bearing on the correlative issue of the moral—and subsequently legal—responsibility for our actions. Without claiming free will for humans, so it has generally been held, the prospect of viewing ourselves as responsible intelligent agents becomes hopelessly compromised. It is with some deliberation that I have chosen to characterize my free will bibliography as extensive rather than comprehensive. For even though it registers some 5,000 works dealing with freedom of the will, it cannot but inevitably remain incomplete. Completeness is a state virtually unachievable here, since no matter how carefully one does one’s inclusiontrawling in a venture of this sort, it is just about impossible to avoid having some fish slip by the net. Moreover, the boundaries of the topic are sufficiently indefinite that no exact line of demarcation can be drawn between “appropriately in” and “appropriately out.” Various errors of omission and commission are effectively unavoidable given the vast compass of relevant literature. The problem of free will vividly illustrates the dialectic of philosophical development in general. For philosophical deliberation is usually rooted with aporetic situations of individually plausible but collectively inconsistent theses, as per: (1) Whatever happens in the world is the product of the inexorable operation of nature’s causal laws. (The Principle of Causality)

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(2) The causality of nature’s processes proceeds independently of our thought-operated decisions and resolutions. (Naturalistic determinism) (3) Our thought processes—our deliberations and decisions—control our actions in the world. (Free will) Given the incompatibility of these considerations as they stand, a limited number of alternative approaches present themselves: (1)-abandonment: Some occurrences stand outside the domain of causality. (Causality-exemption) (2)-abandonment: Our thought can control the flow of natural causality. (Mental causation) (3)-abandonment: Our thought is itself the product of natural causality. (Causal determinism) Many of the issues that concern us here are spanned by the range of these three propositions. The history of the subject is such that every possible response to its questions has found an advocate. But as a given alternative was espoused, it immediately attracted objections and challenges that its proponents then seek to meet by means of due qualifications and refinement. Such a dialectal development produced an ongoing elaboration—and complexification—of the theory in the wake of objections. The result has been an armsrace reminiscent escalation of ongoing sophistication and potency, where ever more elaborate refinements in the theory are in response to the challenges of its opponents. The fundamental positions remain the same, but their articulation and exposition become ever more complex and its defenses ever more subtle and sophisticated. The present bibliography manifests how this process is clearly and strikingly at work in the literature of the problem of free will. The English philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood spoke for a plethora of theorists in maintaining that different eras and cultures cannot address the same question. This doctrine—generally called historicism—has it that even where a contention is formulated in the same words, the concepts at work in different culture-contexts are incommensurable. And if

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this is so, then there can be no perennial philosophical issues, because as the historico-cultural context changes, this change of setting induces a change of subject. Across the boundaries of eras and places there is bound to be conceptual discontinuity. The problem of free will is a perfect test-case for this position, seeing that to all appearances it has constantly been on the agenda of philosophical concern—alike in Mediterranean antiquity, in medieval Islam and Christian Europe, in the modern world’s industrialized societies. Is it or is it not the same problems that have been addressed throughout by all those participants in the discussion? Are not those lawyers who wrangle about responsibility for action in its legal bearing throughout the years addressing the same issue? No doubt, saying that “the same question” is at issue is far from unproblematic. After all, what a position affirms and favors is determined by what it denies and rejects: its substance emerges via its oppositions. And as regards free will, this target has ongoingly changed over time. The ancient voluntarists sought to defend the will’s freedom against the powers of fate. The medievals defended it in the face of divine omniscience and omnipotence. The moderns feel called upon to defend it against the powers of nature as portrayed in science. The opposition has certainly been a moving target, running from Fate to God to Nature. But nevertheless there is a key element of commonality throughout. For all of these mighty potencies have been viewed as determining the course of events in ways that far outrun the modest reach of our feebler powers as human individuals. Throughout, the salient issue has been of our capacity at least on some occasions to determine the range of our action and the unfolding of our destiny through the active implementation of our beliefs and wishes. So in the final analysis the issue is one and the same throughout—the capacity of humans to determine their actions through their own reflectively deliberated decision rather than being pawns at the beck and call of some mighty external potency. The core issue is simply this: Is it at least sometimes the case that our own, autonomously formed thoughts are the controllers of our actions? As with so many of these deep conundrums, the situation is complex. What happens in this matter of the question of “the same issue” is something of continuity amidst change—sameness in fundamentals upon which an ongoing change of detail is superimposed. Along with the ancients— and everyone else—we have to eat, to sleep, and also to decide among alternatives. And with them as with us these decisions are made sometimes for self-provided reasons and sometimes as the result of causal factors

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beyond the individual’s control. The basic categories under which the issues can be classed are elements of the human condition that are invariant through time and circumstance—and readily recognized as such. To be sure the detail—how the causality of nature works, what sort of undue influence can affect human decisions—all this sort of things represents matters of subordinate detail about which there can be differences of thought in the wake of a changing way of doing things. The issue of personal decision is in this regard much like the issue of bridge-building. What a bridge is, clearly is a matter of commonality as between the ancient Romans and ourselves, although issues of the planning, design, material provision, construction, etc. of bridges are all matters of historical variation and contextualization. Analogously, this situation of a sameness of fundamentals combined with a variation of detail holds with free-will even as it does with bridges. The very reason for being of many a philosopher’s work is generally to take issue with what a predecessor has said and to disagree with it. (It was, after all, to refute the cognitive nihilism of Pyrrhonian skepticism that Descartes labored: it was exactly what those ancients affirmed that Descartes sought to refute.) To deny cognitive continuity across the divides of time and space is to abandon the effort to achieve explanatory understanding. To be sure, what is here required is an endeavor to understand others on their own terms. But to deny the prospect of doing so is to embark on a slippery slope into a cognitive solipsism that ultimately locks each thinker into his own impenetrable thought-world. If I cannot get at what Aquinas says about free will, then you cannot get at what I say about it either. The issue of free will exhibits in miniature a problem that confronts philosophers in the present era with an explosion in “the literature” of their subject. And in a way this bibliography affords a reductio ad absurdum of a certain concept of philosophical mastery—a concept typified by the German Habilitationschrift. The traditional idea of such a megadissertation was to make contact with the totality of extant work on a given issue or topic. But in the present state of the field—where even a single problem can, like Free Will, be the subject of some 5,000 publications— this objective of “taking an adequate account of the literature” is no longer practicable. In embarking upon such a bibliographic enterprise, one opens oneself up to the plaintive question “But have you yourself actually read all of those books.” No, dear reader, I cannot claim that I have. But what I can

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Nicholas Rescher • On the Literature of the Free Will Problem

safely claim, I think, is that I have read more of these works than the majority of those who wrote them. What are individual investigators to do when confronting an unmanageably large literature on the particular problem they have in view? They have little choice but to accept that the literature of the field is a haystack in which many a good insight is an unfindable needle. Perhaps hope can be placed on the idea that the task can be scaled down to dealing with the important work. If one invokes “Rousseau’s Law” to the effect that in a field of N publications the sub-group of “truly important publications” can be fixed at N ; this amount can be fixed at roughly 70—which is just barely still manageable. However the problem still remains that different investigators will have very different opinions about which of those many works at issue will fall into this top priority group. After all, from the standpoint of a concern for this or that particular aspect of the matter the relevancy and significance of publications will be subject to a law of diminishing returns. Only a fraction of the literature will be highly material to any specific concern, and as one goes beyond this, the contextual importance of the items will decay rapidly. Basically three alternatives confront us with such an unresolved and seemingly irresolvable controversy: •

To dismiss the whole matter as meaningless.

•

To deny the conflict and accept all of the rival positions.

•

To opt for—and reason one’s way into—one of the alternatives as best suited to one’s own assessment of the issues.

Skepticism, syncretism, and doctrinalism seem to be the only available options, and as the vast literature of the subject clearly indicates, whichever way one turns, one has one’s work cut out.3 Vast though the free will literature is, a great deal yet remains to be said and done. It strikes me as a surprising fact about the mass of philosophical literature regarding free will that so little attention has been devoted to evolutionary considerations. Given the evolutionary development of mankind’s intellect, nothing would seem more natural than to expect that a resource like free will—if actually present in homo sapiens—would be a feature arising in the course of this creature’s evolutionary emergence in nature’s scheme of things, much like intelligence, language, and aesthetic

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sensibly. Somehow this rather obviously relevant line of thinking seems to have remained very much on the back burner. A striking feature of the topic is its inherent contentiousness. One might think that most discussants would favor this seemingly unique feature of homo sapiens as the crown of creation. Not so! For every friend to free will there is an equal and opposite foe. It seems that Newton’s second law is also in operation in philosophy—every action on such a topic evokes an equal and opposite reaction. Yet, when confronted with such a vast bibliography, what is one to make of the situation that it represents? It soon becomes all too clear that every book or article favoring free will is matched by in opposition—and conversely. If voting on a philosophical issue were to be doctrinally determinative—which fortunately it is not—then the free will controversy (like so many others!) would end in a tie. And just this phenomenon is, in fact, a vivid counterindication to the historicist idea that every philosopher—and indeed every thinker—is locked into the thought-world of his own contemporaneous culture so that the thinkers of different eras and cultures never actually discuss the same issues, idea, or question. For in no era on philosophic history has the free will problem fallen from view—every era and virtually every important thinker throughout the history of philosophy has addressed the question. And despite the diversity of answers across the whole spectrum of yes-nomaybe-so responses, there has been a substantial agreement in keeping the question broadly in line with its original articulation. Notwithstanding, the variety of views about the existence and bearing of freedom of the will, there has throughout been an ongoing identity of concern with one such essentially selfsame issue, namely that posed in the deliberations of the Platonic Socrates in the Phaedo passage cited at the outset—to wit, the comparative role of external agencies vs. personal choice in the determination of human actions. The perduring identity of the question at issue mandates the problem of free will as a clear illustration of the identity model of conceptual development. Even those who sought to reject the problem of the will’s freedom as ultimately meaningless have been in substantial agreement with their opponents as regards what the controversy over free will is actually about. The issue of freedom of the will thus affords a vivid and telling illustration of the possibility of a conceptual commonality of philosophical concern across the divide of time and place.

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NOTES 1

This chapter is adopted from the introduction to Nicholas Rescher, Free Will: An Extensive Bibliography (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2010). The bibliography lists about 5000 items.

2

Plato, Phaedo 98C.

3

On this issue see Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).

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REFERENCES Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Bain, Alexander, Mental Science, (1868; reptd. New York: Arno Press, 1973). Bonitz, Index Aristotelicus. Carnap, Rudolf, The Logical Foundations of Probability, 2nd edition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962). Derrida, Jacques, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), trans. G. Spivak as Of Grammatology, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973). Original: Le voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). Duhem, Pierre Maurice, La théorie physique: son objet, et sa structure (Paris: Chevalier and Rivière, 1906); tr. by Philip P. Wiener, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1954.) Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class: The Anthology of Interpersonal Computers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Gettier, Edmund L., “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, vol. 23 (1963), pp. 121–123. Hempel, C. G., “Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes,” in Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York, 1965), pp. 101–119. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). James, William, Principles of Psychology, (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1890).

Nicholas Rescher • References

Johnstone, Henry W., Philosophy and Argument (State College, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1959). Miller, J. Hillis, Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979). Plato, Phaedo. Ramsey, Frank P., The Foundations of Mathematics, ed. R. B. Braithwaite (London: Routledge, 1931). Remes, Paulina, Plotinus on Self: The Philosophy of the ‘We’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.) Rescher, Nicholas, Baffling Phenomena (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991). Rescher, Nicholas, Communicative Pragmatism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1998). Rescher, Nicholas, Free Will: An Extensive Bibliography (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2010). Rescher, Nicholas, Metaphilosophical Inquiries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Rescher, Nicholas, Philosophical Dialectics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006). Rescher, Nicholas, Philosophical Reasoning (Oxford: Blackwells, 2001). Rescher, Nicholas, The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). Roth, Michael D. and Leon Gallis, Knowing: Essays in the Analysis of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1970). Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1912).

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Shope, Robert K., The Analysis of Knowing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Weinberg, Stephen, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).

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Name Index Aquinas, St. Thomas, 75, 87 Aristotle, 9, 12, 14, 16, 21, 34n4, 73-81, 91 Austen, J. O., 57 Bain, Alexander, 43, 53n2, 91 Berkeley, George, 15, 55 Bohr, Neils, 33-34n2 Bonitz, Hermann, 34n4, 91 Bradley, F. H., 76 Carnap, Rudolf, 25, 34n7, 80-81, 91 Collingwood, R. G., 85 De la Mettrie, J. O., 11 De las Cases, Bartolomeo, 58 Derrida, Jacques, 61, 66, 71n5, 91 Descartes, René, 15, 55, 73-77, 80-81, 87 Duhem, Pierre Maurice, 19-20, 34n3, 91 Epicurus, 73-74 Fermat, Pierre, 57 Fish, Stanley, 71n6, 91 Gallis, Leon, 34n11, 92 Gettier, Edmund L., 29-30, 34n11, 91 Hempel, C. G., 35n15, 91 Hume, David, 15, 18n1, 73-81, 91 Huygens, Christiaan, 57 James, William, 53n2, 55, 91 Johnstone, Henry W., 18n3, 92 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 15, 57, 73-77, 80-81

Nicholas Rescher • References

Leibniz, G. W., 15, 73-78, 80-81 Marx, Karl, 11 Miller, J. Hillis, 71n2, 92 Moore, G. E., 55 Newton, Isaac, 76 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 80-81 Occam, William of, 46 Philip II, 58 Plato, 6-7, 9, 11, 28, 40, 42, 50, 73-81, 83, 90, 92 Plotinus, 57 Victoria (Queen), 56 Quine, W. V., 80-81 Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, 51, 53n3, 92 Remes, Paulina, 59n1, 92 Rescher, Nicholas, 90n1, 90n3, 92 Roth, Michael D., 34n11, 92 Russell, Bertrand, 9, 29-30, 92 Shakespeare, William. 4, 6-7 Shope, Robert K., 34n11, 92 Socrates, 39, 50, 59, 76, 80-81, 83, 89 Suarez, Francisco, 42 Urmson, J. O., 57 Voltaire, F, M. A. de, 17 Weinberg, Steven, 33-34n2, 92 Whitehead, A. N., 76-77 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 17, 34n9, 92 Zeno, 40

96

New Book

Nicholas Rescher

Studies in Quantitative Philosophizing The present book brings together several case studies, dealing with relevant facets of the work of some of philosophy’s all-time greats. The subject-matter topic being addressed differs significantly, but in each case there is an attempt to apply mathematical methods and perspectives to the solution of a key philosophical issue in a way that throws instructive light upon it. On this basis it emerges that the question “Are mathematical methods useful in philosophy?” finds a suggestive response in the fact that over two millennia key figures in the history of the subject have indeed thought so. And they have substantiated this view not so much by abstract argumentation on the basis of general principles, but by making this point through actual practice. Preface Chapter 1: On the Epistemology of Plato’s Divided Line Chapter 2: Aristotle’s Golden Mean and the Epistemology of Ethical Understanding Chapter 3: Ockham’s Razor and Ontological Economy Chapter 4: Pascal’s Wager in Religion Chapter 5: Leibniz on Coordinating Epistemology and Ontology Chapter 6: Ethical Quantities

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NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Free Will An Extensive Bibliography With the Cooperation of Estelle Burris

Few philosophical issues have had as long and elaborate a history as the problem of free will, which has been contested at every stage of the history of the subject. The present work practices an extensive bibliography of this elaborate literature, listing some five thousand items ranging from classical antiquity to the present.

About the author Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Americna Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received six honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. In November 2007 Nicholas Rescher was awarded by the American Catholic Philosophical Association with the „Aquinas Medal“

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Ontos

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Collected Paper. 14 Volumes Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the American Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received seven honorary degrees from universities on three continents (2006 at the University of Helsinki). Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. ontos verlag has published a series of collected papers of Nicholas Rescher in three parts with altogether fourteen volumes, each of which will contain roughly ten chapters/essays (some new and some previously published in scholarly journals). The fourteen volumes would cover the following range of topics: Volumes I - XIV STUDIES IN 20TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-937202-78-1 · 215 pp. Hardcover, EUR 75,00

STUDIES IN VALUE THEORY ISBN 3-938793-03-1 . 176 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN PRAGMATISM ISBN 3-937202-79-X · 178 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN METAPHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-938793-04-X . 221 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN IDEALISM ISBN 3-937202-80-3 · 191 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF LOGIC ISBN 3-938793-19-8 . 178 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY ISBN 3-937202-81-1 · 206 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ISBN 3-938793-20-1 . 273 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN COGNITIVE FINITUDE ISBN 3-938793-00-7 . 118 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN METAPHYSICAL OPTIMALISM ISBN 3-938793-21-X . 96 pp. Hardcover, EUR 49,00

STUDIES IN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-938793-01-5 . 195 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN LEIBNIZ'S COSMOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-22-8 . 229 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-02-3 . 165 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-23-6 . 180 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

ontos verlag Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2006. 14 Volumes, Approx. 2630 pages. Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover EUR 798,00 ISBN 10: 3-938793-25-2 Due October 2006 Please order free review copy from the publisher Order form on the next page

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