Excellent. You’re right, “dissolving the ‘error’ idea” isn’t the way to put it. How about if we said “moots the ‘error’ idea”? Disagreements may still occur, philosophers may be minded to try to explain why, but from this perspective none of it would have much bearing on the value of philosophy. It wouldn’t be something for people (like me) to worry about.
I’ve been wondering whether to reply or not for some time now. I’m a relativist of some sort (and me being a relativist is why I’m leading in with this line), and my initial take is that any sort of error has to be judged from some sort of perspective. My own intuition is to start bottom-up:
- Individual Level (When does a philosopher think he’s been wrong in the past?)
- Interactional level (When does someone else think you’ve been wrong? For example, in a teacher-student type of relationship, the student can come to conclusion that the teacher was wrong about a particular point; the teacher can react in any old way - from offended to excited and sideways in multiple ways)
- Organisational levels (Publishing, peer review, and such.)
- Instituitional level (academic philosophy as a whole - wider consensus)
- societal level (impact on daily life…)
This won’t, I think, make for the type of “theory of error” that you’d want, but thinking along these lines might give you a sense of scope and interlocking types of perceived error. It might help outline the problem better?
And this leads me to a core problem I see with top-down theory’s, and that’s when we abstract a lot, we might not have a clear idea of what we’re talking about, even though at no point we actually notice. This is somewhat hard to explain: it’s like text taking on a life of its own and removing itself from praxis enough that logic can fill the gap, but when different people relate it back to life, they tend to take their own experiences as the base line of interpretation (often without reflection).
An example from daily life that I hope helps:
I have two 2-Euro coins in pocket, and that’s all the cash I have on me. You ask me, how much money I have. I say “Five Euros.” I’m without doubt in error.
But what if I say “About five Euros”? What are the conditions of error here? If the context is that we think of going to the cinema, and ticket is substantially more expensive than five Euros, then the answer is “up to the situation”. That is life provides a limit. We could then say that four Euros counts as “about five Euros”, and I’m not in error. But If you want to borrow € 4.50? Did I mean “I’m unsure if I can lend you 4.50?”, “I think I can lend you 4.50,” or “Yeah, I got enough to lend you 4.50”? Only in the latter case I would be in error, but since the latter case isn’t necessarily expressed, even internally, it may be hard to figure out what exactly I meant. And in such cases, we tend to choose face-saving interpretations. That is: only when I find I don’t have enough will I lock in an interpretation. All this is unconsious.
And this is a one-off, real-life situation. Imagine we abstract from this and many similar situations and ask “Does € 4,-- count as ‘about five Euros’?” And then we can revisit the above possibilities and sculpt a theory, but our theory lacks grounding. We might have been unaware of things we’ve taken for granted and later might think the currently-more-fitting interpretation is the one we had all along. I think humans always make assumptions they are unaware of and thus cannot own up to. And when a situation clarifies something for you you might think that’s what you’ve been talking about all along.
Now let’s look at a problem like “free will”. What did we abstract from? What will we reconnect this to? I’m thinking the “big questions” are all (almost all? a lot of them?) very abstract questions. I don’t expect even two people to relate the question in the same way. The gaps in specificty both allow communication (we can maintain the illusion that we talk about the “same thing”), but also make sure we never quite meet up. My hunch is that a resolution is possible in principle, but it involves so much information and concentration that it is impossible in praxis. That is, I think we could resolve (or dissolve) these questions if we had enough time and resources, but we don’t and maybe can’t.
This is probably the least thought-out thing I’ve ever posted on here, and I fear that it comes out as utter nonsense. But oh well… here I go anyway. (I’m so shaky on this that I’m not sure I have answers if you find this coherent enough to ask questions.)
At the risk of reinforcing your relativism in the wrong way, I’m going to respond to your theory with mine, which is intended to reinforce your relativism in a different way. I’m not a fan of “Well in my view …” replies that aren’t replies at all but, in this case, everything I need is already in your post. I just look at it differently.
No perspectival relativism here.
Hold that thought. This is a kind of relativism, but it’s relative to the situation, the environment and your goals. (And we can be considerably more specific.)
And that’s a different situation right?
Here’s the “top-down theory” problem. Conversation is a little like a negotiation, but usually each thing you say doesn’t count as a binding offer. It doesn’t have to be complete unto itself such that it could be enforced. Even when you said what you did, you didn’t have to have settled on a specific meaning you are “transmitting” to the other person. The goal here is to come to a common understanding by whatever means, and each utterance is just a step in that process. No single utterance has to carry the burden of forging that shared understanding all on its own. (That would be the “top-down theory” view of linguistic communication, I believe.)
There’s some relativism here too: what you say is relative to various features of the situation, the environment, your goals, the person you’re talking to, your relationship with them, the previous exchanges within the conversation leading up to this point, and so on.
You may have something in mind about the discussion that you didn’t share, because this move looks unnecessary.
I’m assuming that you find you don’t have enough because you reach in your pocket and pull out the coins in question, and then you can see plainly how much you have and so can the person you’re talking to.
There’s a kind of relativism here, but it’s the kind you noted before, the constraints of the actual situation, “life providing a limit”. You can both attend to the same coins, and you can have the same knowledge of how many coins you have. There’s no perspective relativism here at all, because the situation “relativism”—that is the actual conditions of this conversation—make it unnecessary. You can both see and know the same thing, and what you see and know is determined by what’s actually there.
This is why I argued earlier in the thread that nothing produces stable agreement like facts. “See for yourself” is the move that has more success than any other. Where that move is unavailable, we try to institutionalize access to it, as the sort of final backstop of agreement. (And when those links turned out to have too much freedom, as was shown in the replication crisis and elsewhere, steps have to be taken to tighten up.)
Coming back to your face-saving point, what I would stress is that no conversation is you and someone else floating in a vacuum. There’s the third thing, the world you share, and discussion is fundamentally about managing your relationship with respect to that third thing, rather than just two separate minds trying to connect and succeeding or failing. Leaving out the world is a mistake. As you note, it’s finding out for certain whether the coins you have are enough to meet the now understood request that settles clearly where you stand.
Does “face saving” come into it because you might now count as having been mistaken or misleading or something?
Exactly, and what would give it grounding is a concrete situation. And it would be the same sort of “top down” mistake to recognize this and then try to catalog the possible situations in which the question might arise. But none of that undermines our ability to communicate or reason or solve problems; it just means that there are limits to what we can do ahead of time, when we cannot have all the relevant information and the grounding the concrete situation provides.
There’s your perspective relativism but I think everything else you wrote actually undermines this view. Underdetermination only looks like a problem if you neglect the work the other party is doing and the concrete situation that carries some of the burden too.
All that said, you’re not wrong that a lot of philosophical discussion is carried on in a very peculiar way with very peculiar intentions, largely cut loose from the kind of context that grounds ordinary discussion and agreement, and producing speech that is intended to have no particular context except what other people have said.
As I have said, the lack of resolution is not a weakness in philosophical discourse. First of all, philosophers do not (and cannot) disagree with each other on all grounds – it is nonsensical to attempt to disagree against another philosophical thesis without a common ground upon which to start the disagreement.
One has to acknowledge that at least one point made to support a thesis is widely accepted among their peers. It is not dissimilar to the ordinary way of disagreeing: I saw that you stole a cookie from the cookie jar. Here we could at least agree that stealing is not acceptable. So you say, No, it wasn’t me. It was the neighbor.
There are only a limited list of criticism that can be leveled against a philosopher (by another philosopher) and incompetence is not one of them:
reductionist, mechanistic, formalist, restrictive, etc.
Not at all, I find it very helpful, and so is @Pat 's response. Most of the disputes I had in mind between philosophers would be characterized by them as involving errors of the first, “4 Euros not 5” variety. That is, a committed scientific realist doesn’t think their opponent has a reasonable case; they think they’re wrong. The opponent thinks the realist is wrong, but on different grounds usually. That is, a non-realist is likely to say that realism is a choice, a position that can be more or less useful, and therefore relative in some of the other senses you describe. This option is not available to the realist.
Yes, I think they are abstract, in the sense of non-empirical. The problem I see with citing “different ways of relating the question” or “meaning different things by the terms, contextually” is that some of these questions are very thoroughly understood. Staying with the realism debate as exemplary, I don’t think the realist can say to the voluntarist, “You don’t understand what I’m saying” or “You and I are seeing the question differently, from different contexts” . Each understands very well what the other is saying, and each is capable of stepping into the other’s shoes and seeing the question differently. The problem is that they disagree about how this could resolve the issue. It’s that disagreement that I find intriguing, and in need of further understanding.
Right.
I’m not sure I get this. Does the “limited list” include the terms at the end? So the idea would be that I can criticize another philosopher by saying they’re a reductionist, or a formalist, etc.? And this would be my “theory of error” to explain why my (presumably non-reductionist/non-formalist etc.) arguments haven’t earned agreement?
Sorry if that’s off track, but say more.
Maybe the essence of your issue is something like this: even if I understand your terminology, and even if I accept the inferences you make, I might hold some other commitment that you don’t that prevents me from accepting your conclusion. And the problem is that the domain, not just of philosophical discourse, but even of individual problems, is unbounded. Anything can lead anywhere and connect to anything else. That can make exploration productive even while it makes agreement unlikely.
Take a typical bit of Socratic dialogue. You say justice is giving people what is owed. But, says Socrates, suppose you borrow some money from a guy, but by the time he comes to collect he’s become a meth addict; should you give it to him?
You can see there what I’ve been arguing for, that decisions don’t float free but make sense in a specific context, or a specific type of environment, etc etc. When doing philosophy, you can modify the case at will, substitute another case entirely, and you do that to stress test your proposed rule. But no rule can actually survive this procedure, because there are no bounds on the possible cases. (Maybe the guy needs the money because he’s signing himself into rehab. But maybe the clinic he’s signing himself into is a scam. But maybe …)
Yes. The “error” is that their theory or thesis or premise is limiting, restrictive, too broad, too narrow, too reductive, too mechanistic a view. Notice that all these refer to the exclusivity or inclusivity of a theory in question.
You go about your disagreement by acknowledging that these descriptions (reductive, restrictive, formal, mechanistic, even a mistake on distinction/no distinction) are understood, and that you lay down your disagreement why Kant’s theory of causation, for example, makes sense against Hume’s skeptical stance.
Sorry for the late reply. Due to my out-of-date browser I can’t post at home. I did read the posts.
Yeah, I probably left some important framing stuff out. I haven’t thought this through properly.
For starters, when I said we tend to choose the face-saving interpretations, what I didn’t have in mind is a conscious strategic approach of the individual in question. It’s complicated, and I’m unsure how to describe the process I have in mind. It’s not entirely unconscious, but it’s definitely not at the front of your mind.
I think there’s a general pressure to mean what you say, but also that language works because its adaptable to situations. I think, “locking in an interpretation” is a situation-guided process - in an interaction there’s a point when what you mean has to be concretised, and then there’s pressure to have meant that when you say it. I think that’s both normal and unreflected by default. There are two facts, here: you now see you have four coins, and you have said “about five Euros”. What’s you reaction to what you said? “Yeah, about five Euros?” or “What, only four Euros?” A spontaneous reaction like that may hint at a present background assumption, but what I’m suggesting is that often (sometimes?) there’s an unacknowledged background uncertainty that resolves as the situation goes on. If situations were just a journey from A to B this wouldn’t matter - but you’re background assumptions of what you meant might shift with the ebb and flow of the situation.
The result, for me, is that in terms of communication I’d somehow shift the focus from similarity of meaning to situational compatibility. But I’m not quite sure if that’s useful, or what to do with it.
Yes, but there’s also “what I meant when I said ‘about 5 Euros’”. What you meant back then could be a fact, but I’m saying it’s literally not. It’s in flux, shifts and gets locked in when necessary.
I’m unsure what that means for Philosophy, even in the narrower organised sense (academia). It’s even harder in the wider sense. I’m saying something like: “Philosophers may not know exactly what they talk about, but they may later on get to know what they’ve been talking about all along.” Something weird like that.
In a sense, the “error” someone accuses you of may have the benefit for you of locking in an interpetation, as you’ve now positioned yourself within a field. Of course, now you have gone from intr-personal to inter-personal, and that disagreement occurs in a wider context still…
Something like that. The fact of the four Euros doesn’t tell you what you meant when you said “about four Euros”, but it helps lock in an interpretation. That’s neither the beinning nor the end of it though.
That, too, but what I primarily thought of (I think ← heh) was more a generalised sense of “being coherent”. That is: I meant by it back then what I mean now (even though the situation clarified it for me which I might be only passingly aware of if at all). It’s the face you project outward and to some degree believe in as your utterances having fixed meaning, even when they don’t.
And with more abstraction, comes more leeway for unaware interpretational flexibility. And when it comes to philosophy, learning why someone else disagrees can clarify your position in that way. Someone else’s accusation of error becomes your anchor: you mean what he doesn’t (unless you accept the error, of course). So:
This is a “calcified” end-point of some sort. You think of it as an 4-Euros-not-5 situation, because you’ve found yourself “phase-locked” in disagreement. It’s still an about-5-Euro situation, though, because of the abstraction involved. The context is now institutional (e.g. you’ve learned of that disagreement when you got your degree - you’ve opened up the meta layer: that’s (not) what they meant. I’m sure you’ve seen examples of that, too.)
Again, I really haven’t thought this through, so take anything I say here with a pinch of salt.
I emphasized “would be characterized by them” as the “calcified” disagreement. I’m not sure myself what to make of it, which is in part why I wrote the OP.
More about this? Do you mean there wouldn’t be an apparently sharp disagreement if it didn’t take place within academia, because academia has created a context in which to frame such disagreements?
I understand what you’re saying about how conversation works and I largely agree. It’s very close to the view Christiansen and Chater put forward inThe Language Game.
What I would add is that talk isn’t everything. A shared environment is not only the anchor of our conversations, it is our capacity for shared attention and intention that makes language possible in the first place. By speaking, we add little temporary facts to the environment, these vocalized symbols, that we can both attend to as we attempt to reach a shared understanding of things.
I’ll add that I think I get where you’re coming from here. You’re situating conversation within a kind of Goffman-style social relation management. But while conversation is often somewhat loosely coupled to our shared world, that’s not the same as being decoupled.
In academic philosophy, the coupling has been loosened considerably, to the point where philosophy considers its domain precisely those questions that are not empirical. To the extent it succeeds in insulating itself from the world, to that extent talk is cheap.
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I’m heading on vacation for a week now and won’t have access to TPF. Looking forward to seeing how the conversation goes . . .
It is a good question. In a sense I don’t think they are wrong. Philosophy *is* truth apt, just not in the same way as math or science. By analogy, philosophy is somewhere between perspectives and bridges.
Perspectives: A philosophy can be a valid perspective on its subject. Or , it can be distorted, or completely divorced from what it purports to explain. Multiple philosophies can be equally valid. Or, some can offer better, clearer perspectives than others.
Bridges: A philosophy can be well crafted, or suffer from shoddy design. It can be a good or a poor fit for its particular problem. It can work all of the time, some of the time, or never. It can be pretty, functional, or ugly, independently of how well it works.
Well said. But isn’t Kant, however modestly, demonstrating a virtuous intellectual hygiene ? His opponents are not wicked. They are just less able to steer the itch. To me it makes sense that it’s this very “itch” that drove Kant “through” positive metaphysics to a criticism that still smells of that passage. I say this as a fan of the critical approach who values an inclusive positivism ( not perhaps the positivism as presented by Adorno, who is also great.)
I liked what you said about the inexhaustibility of the world. “Inclusive positivism,” as it peeks out from Ayer’s LTL, when he summarizes Mill, is perspectivism. To do explicative philosophy, we need to talk to other people. If my perception and belief are indeed ( just ) mine, then I have a mere piece of the world. That piece is as “real” as anything, but philosophy, if genial and open, wants more than just this one “face” of the world. Explication, as opposed to speculation, is satisfied with discussing and determining the “shape” of the world, which is not what it is apart from experience, but what most experiencers have in common. For instance, Husserl offers a brilliant analysis of the spatial object in terms of its adumbrations. But he never saw a lamp through my eyes. Or through his wife’s. So he was completely dependent on feedback, because his goal was not to describe only the form of his own existence. Phenomenology is essentially social and directed outward toward others. "Is the world like this for you, also ? " People sometimes speak of “inter-subjectivity,” but I object to the trace in this phrase of some notion of “overlapping internal stuff,” as if what we experience isn’t always already the world itself.
But much of philosophy presupposes the intelligibility of mirroring a “true” reality that is in principle no one’s. It’s basically an alienated position, with a baked-in “distance” from “reality.” So “truth” is projected as something “more than” the relatively tested beliefs achieved by cooperating serious investigators, etc.
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Very good point and example. Maxims can be helpful, or the opposite of helpful, but finally the rubber meets the road in an unprecedented visceral existence.
What I mean to say here is that the disagreement becomes something that is “between them”, something they can refer back to in another situation. For example, they can have the “same” disagreement about another topic. But by focussing on the disagreement as a thing in its own right they also delimit what their positions are more than before disagreeing. They create a recognisible structure.
Not what I meant here (though I might also say this in another context). What I’m saying is that while they might originally have had something to say about their respective lives, the things they don’t share fall by the wayside, and the thing they share come up front. The topic starts to be more and more about the disagreement - their respective calcified perspectives. (In sociology, an institution is any recognisable pattern: for example, a discussion could be an institution.) If this disagreement occurs in an academic context, that institutional context would have already gone into the genesis of the disagreement.
That is: attributing errors to each other is part of the game they’re playing. And that, in turn, puts the positions in sharper relief. You don’t ever need to agree for that approach to be useful to each party involved.
Finally, the “big questions” have been talked to death during their lifetime, and now the shamble on as conceptual zombies. For example, you’ll usually have heard of “the meaning of life” long before that ever becomes a problem in need of a name for yourself. That’s what it means to be a big question: it’s an institution you’re born into and appropriate for your own purposes to one degree or another. So this isn’t a game you create from scratch, but one where you take an open starting position. You take one side, not the other. I’d say attributing error is an available move in an ongoing game, maybe. To be able to attribute error to someone else is to more clearly see what your position is (except you’re always busy constructing it, and while you think you’ve figured something out you might have unknowingly changed your mind about a tacit, unacknowledged detail of some sort).
I’ve never heard of Chistiansen/Chater, but googling it, it seems the book is some kind of counter weight to Chomsky/Pinker. If so, I certainly gravitate towards that side more.
A little idiosyncarcy of mine: I’ve always preferred the word “joint” over “shared” here. Sharing seems to suggest some limited resource - but this is more doing the same thing together than it is partaking of something already there. Again, not a big deal, and I’m used to the phrases.
I very nearly mentioned Goffman actually, so that’s well spotted. A huge influence on me, when I sutdied sociology. Goffman’s focus, though, was on face-to-face interaction, which I find a little limited for the current purpose.
I think it’s a little more complex than that. If the point of contact is within academia, then the actual sitution in which the point of contact occurs has its own constraints. We’re encouraged to leave our idiosyncracies outside, precisely because we don’t share them. We don’t have that kind of contact. To what extent an abstracted topic relates back to the individual lives of the people involved is different for everyone involved, but it’s background radiation at point of contact, because the instituitional context discourages entry. As a result, it seems the “big questions” concern everyone and no-one, but that doesn’t mean that people all think of them that way.
I imagine myself as a philosophy student at university, having to hand in a paper on the “meaning of life”. It’s a question that has little personal relevance, so writing the paper in the academic manner is easy, but having anything to say about it is hard. I could then outline what people have said, and finally try to outline why for me the quesiton disappears through the cracks in the conversation. I then have a “position” on something that’s not even tangential in my meat-space, even though - as a big question - I’m supposed to be affected. Other people might enjoy taking a stance. Yet other people might enjoy playing the chronicaller.
I’ve often felt that philosophers should talk about themselves more, to anchor their positions in personality, social context and personal inclination. I’ve often talked aobut myself “too much” at university (as in: it wasn’t expected). But I thought it was necessary to anchor my postition. I’d rather not have talked about myself to be honest, but… well, that’s a relativist for you. ( ← Framing myself in recognisable terms, while worrying I’m misusing the term.)
There’s a lot of neat stuff in this post. I like the key idea of participants not just having a disagreement but making it, and having made it using it to shape their contributions, a sort of disagreement maintenance they engage in.
It’s a very “external” view though, very sociological—not wrong because of that, but incomplete maybe in a way that’s harder than it might seem to deal with.
Roughly speaking, I think the usual view, and the view that @Jay finds not quite good enough, is to treat the social situation as very thin; all the action is in the content of the positions the participants stake out, exactly what they say, the arguments they present, how it connects to other positions they or other participants hold, and so on. The basic engine of discussion here is more or less assumed to be logic, or if not quite logic then something like inference, what “follows from” what, what’s inconsistent with what. If we hold incompatible positions, we disagree; if we don’t, we don’t. There is no social element that matters, and no special consideration needed for how we communicate. The agreement and disagreement contemplated are in fact the consistency or inconsistency of ideas, and our actual argumentation just instantiates that.
Of course, that won’t fly, in part for reasons that prompted @Jay to start this thread.
Another serious issue, which philosophy is supposed to have internalized by now, is that language is not so transparent as was thought in olden times. In particular, there turns out to be a serious gap between what we might take to be true and what it sounds right to say. Mostly people have learned to be a little more careful about this, but it ought to have a little more uncertainty about the whole process than it did. How could we know that such cases can be quarantined, and that this isn’t the rule rather than the exception?
And finally we are all well aware that there are psychological and sociological factors that influence what people say in ways we are inclined to stigmatize as extra-logical. Supporting a position because of the status of another proponent, being defensive and closed-minded about your own ideas, scoring points by misrepresenting your opponent’s position and so on. And that’s before we get into the nitty-gritty of academia.
-- end part 1, since I accidentally posted, continued below –
-- continued –
Put all that together and you have the original vaguely idealized model with some worldly layers on top that seem to interfere with and distort the proper course of discussion, the pure clash of ideas, which should lead to straightforward results of agreement, acceptance of refutation and so on. If it doesn’t, it’s only because these external factors interfere.
As I see it, there is no satisfactory account present in what I’ve written so far.
On the one hand, I think we are forced to consider content. The “sociological” approach can be taken as a complete description, but it’s a complete description of the wrong thing. Specifically, if our account is content-blind, it is a faithful model of people who approach discussion in a content-blind way. What could that be? Roughly, sociopathology. Anyway, highly strategic if not outright manipulative. People who treat the social world exactly like the natural world, as presenting problems to be solved, resources to be exploited, advantages to be gained by leveraging one part against another—that’s a pathology of discussion, not the real deal.
On the other hand, discussion is built entirely on a social foundation, and linguistic communication—obviously, to my mind—serves to coordinate human behavior and enrich social life. The foundation of all of Grice’s analysis, for instance, is the Cooperative Principle. It really couldn’t be clearer. But even if we have such an account of how language and conversation work and where they come from, that of course doesn’t mean that language and conversation are restricted to their original purposes. But it does look like the new layers we might add (such as the ones you described) or new purposes we might turn language to, will have some irreducibly social element to them—how they arise and are maintained, or the purpose itself, how they are modified. The long and short of this is that whether we’re talking about the foundation of language, its foundational purpose, or later elaborations, it sure looks like in every instance we’re talking about social functions.
I’m saying we cannot reduce the phenomenon of philosophical discussion to the play of content alone, or to the work of social function alone. I think the idealized account, which treats everything but content as external, has to be wrong. But neither can you ignore content and treat discussion purely as social theater.
But I cannot say how we can comfortably meet both of these requirements. In some cases, everything aligns, but in some cases there’s clearly tension. I don’t have a theory to offer, but I wanted to lay out how I understand the issue, especially in light of your post.
There really ought to be a part 3, because your suggestion to make philosophical discussion more personal is a really interesting idea, but I’ve already written a lot.