Furthering Philippa Foot

Ethics
463

I’m not sure where this is coming from. Reality? I wasn’t talking about reality. Even to use such a term begs the question against me, don’t you think? My point was that there is no line of necessity that can be drawn from a particular way we constitute our world, to the assurances that a) the picture that results shows how things must be, and b) the force of “must” is from the world, not from our constitutive capacities. It seems you want “reality” to refer to the way things are and must be constituted, but I hoped that was the very point under consideration.

I agree. The errors occur when we confuse the two different metaphysics, as described.

An interesting question: If we go a level up and either accept or reject the kind of metaphysics I’m proposing, or that you’re proposing, would that be an error? Honestly, I’m not sure. At this very abstract level of philosophical inquiry, “error” begins to become self-referential, since the metaphysics in question is going to have something to say about what counts as an error. In any event, I can only speak for myself and say that the metaphysics you favor doesn’t seem to me to be “in error” in the sense that I, or anyone, could demonstrate it to be incorrect. We don’t have the luxury of doing that, at that level. And so we enter the fascinating arena of how primary philosophical choices are in fact made.

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464

OK, we can certainly let Sider & Co. go.

Yes, this was the gist of my post to @Pierre-Normand above.

Yes, happy to participate. I’ve sharpened my critiques of Davidson after reading McDowell, though their agreements are as significant as their differences.

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465

Sider explicitly considers and rejects this approach, which is no surprise given that it would be impossible for him to assent to an objective structure while leaving the choice of domain purely subjective. @Banno’s approach of stipulative domains leads directly to the quantifier variance that Sider rejects:

What are these “candidate meanings”? Great care must be taken here. The natural tendency is to think of the variety of candidate meanings as resulting from different choices of a domain for the quantifiers to range over. But this is a mistake.

Sider, Ontological Realism, 11

When we read philosophers we have to read what they say, not what we want them to say.

466

You are quoting what Foot wrote 30 years before she wrote Natural Goodness, though you have conveniently omitted the source. This has been a problem throughout this thread, namely the problem of quoting outdated works and pretending that Foot did not move beyond them. Again, here is what she later wrote about the then-30-year-old idea you quote:

If we want to “further Philippa Foot” then maybe we should begin with her mature works, no?

Anyone who has a desire to understand Foot’s mature position will not take long in realizing that she is not eschewing the normativity that attaches to objective theories of moral evaluation. Here is a positive example:

The problem is about the rationality of doing what virtue demands. And it has seemed to some to be an especially difficult problem for any­one who has an objective theory of moral evaluation as I do myself.

(Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 53)

467

You are packing a great deal into this post! Much of what you say strikes me as very important, such as the “lesson from pragmatism” about the way that the functional form of an apparatus is presupposed by law-statements. This has long been my caution about those who rely excessively on formalistic methodologies, although the status of natural language and the extent of its difference from a formal apparatus would be another question to ask.

I don’t think I disagree with any of this. Presumably you are saying, at the very least, that our structure/Welt affords us the possibility of recognizing other substances which are transversally constituted with their Umwelt, and that we do this with, say, frogs. Out of curiosity, what does your thesis make of the fact that we are also able to recognize what you call a “physical aggregate exhibiting a pattern”? When we recognize something like this while at the same time affirming that it is not an organism, what does this recognition imply about our ‘Welt’?

Regarding the possible enthymeme, how does the “kinship” play into this? Is the idea that Thompson is expecting other similar-situated creatures to immediately recognize the aptness of natural-historical judgments? That no explicit argumentation is necessary for such recognition? Or else, given what he does say, that the inference to the truth of natural-historical judgments is available even if no formal inferential rule is being appealed to?

Yes, this is important and I see it as another outgrowth of the realism vs. nominalism split.

Speaking more generally, it seems to me that there is a trend in contemporary philosophy where one seeks to do away with substance or object-based metaphysics in favor of a purely relational model (and this sounds like what Bitbol wants to do with physical laws). One seeks to somehow fully describe relations while prescinding from the relata to one extent or another. I think your post gives a fairly robust argument against this move, emphasizing that the frog’s transversal unity cannot be adequately accommodated by lateral relations alone.

Incidentally, Wiggins’ view sounds interesting to me. SEP classes him as a “conceptualist” when it comes to sortals, which places him between the realist and the nominalist, yet where “realism” is being read in modern terms as “property realism.” His position may be fairly close to Aquinas or Aristotle, especially if he is able to distinguish the “discovered” from the “constituted,” or what I would call the difference between an organic/substantial whole and an accidental whole (or organism vs. aggregate), in this case read as a spectrum.

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468

Sage advice. You might apply it to what I write.

In the next paragraph of that paper, we have

The sentence ‘D is a domain containing everything; and some domain contains an object that is not contained in D’ is a logical falsehood.

He uses this in a reductio against the possibility of quantifier variance. But there is another way to view it, as a diagonalisation, showing how the very idea of a domain containing everything is subject to the obvious Russelian paradox. What it shows is that the idea of a domain containing everything is inherently contradictory.

Sider acknowledges the situation in footnote 45 but thinks he can get around this by stipulating that he can have a domain of just “any quantifier wholly unrestricted in its application to individuals (nonsets)”. Can he? I think not; or better, even if he does so, the real problem for his account lies not in individuals vs sets but in the items he is discussing being iterative. As soon as he admits iteration he becomes subject to Cantor’s theorem; and he does so in §5.

More generally, one would replace singular quantifiers over composites with plural quantifiers over simples, and replace each predicate, F , of composites with its irreducibly plural form pl(F ) (e.g., pl(‘is a table’) is ‘are arranged table-wise’; pl(‘x is on y’) is ‘the X s are on the Y s’.)

First-level plural quantification is (arguably) safe under the individuals/nonsets restriction; the plural quantifications Sider’s own translation scheme requires are not obviously safe, and he never extends his footnote 45 defence to cover it.

Wittgenstien’s §48 in Philosophical Investigations encourages us to see that what counts as a simple is iterative in a way that debars any one domain being inherently an absolute. The entire dispute presupposes that “simple” picks out a determinate, language-independent class for the plural quantifiers to range over. Wittgenstein shows that the class is not language independent in the way required by both sides of the debate.

So two objections, the first that the notion of a domain of everything is a non starter, the second that what counts as an individual in the domain is itself a part of the language being used, and not separable in the way required.

Here’s the article, for convenience:

ontological_realism.pdf (273.6 KB)

Agrippa's Trilemma and Foundationalism
Agrippa's Trilemma and Foundationalism
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The goal seems to be to never have to talk about the goal directly, so the way we reach this goal is to keep moving the goal post.

To hold tightly the relation as the relata slip through the same fingers, by simply renaming what a the relation is a relation of (as if relata by any other name chan).

None of these arguments seem to do the work of dissolving substance without dissolving relation as well. Or, none of these arguments seem to uphold anything meaningful about “relation” without upholding the substances thereby related.

But we may be getting closer to saying something.

470

Right, and I think the approach is something like, “Focusing too much on substances does not give enough due to relations between things.” That’s fine, but we don’t want to go to the opposite extreme where we think that one can simply focus on relations or “grammar” or “logic” and ignore questions about substances or metaphysics. I think most philosophers realize this.

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I don’t think I can be begging any question because I left it entirely open. I’m just pointing out two consequences of different positions:

A. If we constitute the world and there is no “reality” in any sense prior “appearances,” then appearances just are the reality and there is a necessary linkage between language/thought and being. To say that language or cognition and being are “co-constituting” or that reality is “always already interpreted” is to posit such a necessary connection. To say that “the limits of our language are the limits of the world” (how Wittgenstein’s statement is often transformed) is likewise to posit such a connection. “Being that can be understood is language” has been (but is not always) taken in this direction too.

B. If any such necessary connection is denied, then one is positing something like a “noumenal reality” than can never even be thought or spoken of, which would seem to make it a bare posit. This was Fichte, Hegel, and pretty every other successor of Kant’s big problem with Kant, that he just dogmatically assets appearances are appearances (with a reality behind them) as a given. The entire “critical turn” stands on this presupposition, which is why they try to be “truly critical” by questioning that too.

472

OK. So by introducing the term “reality,” you didn’t mean to be referring to “the way things are and must be constituted,” as I suggested? That was my best guess, since I myself hadn’t used the term in this context.

473

When you spoke your strawman-esque phrase “the way that things must be” you were inevitably referring to reality (i.e. “some allegedly correct insight about how things must be constituted, which the structuring is supposed to reveal”). @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus is just following your own ideas when he brings up the idea of reality. We must take responsibility for the things we say when we do philosophy. We cannot speak about (alleged) reality and then pretend that we have not spoken about reality. To do so would be bad-faith dialogue.

474

Well, I’ve had this sort of conversation with Joshs before. I guess a difficulty I see is that the position that one cannot be in error about metaphysics itself presupposes a particular metaphysics. So, on something like Joshs account where intelligibility itself is posterior to different human metaphysical systems, even though it can say “Avicenna and Plotinus are equally correct,” it does so by introducing a meta-framing that I think actually, charitably interpreting those figures, has to say they are simply in error.

That is, even to say “everyone is right” (or “no one is in error”) is still to say many are in error, since they surely reject this.

That metaphysics is unable to transcend self-reference also seems to me like a particular metaphysical position at any rate.

475

Absolutely, and that casts a shadow over the entire issue. That’s why the question is a fascinating one: Given that this is so, how can we proceed?

One point that may be helpful: Notice I said, “The metaphysics you favor doesn’t seem to me to be ‘in error’ in the sense that I, or anyone, could demonstrate it to be incorrect.” I chose that formulation carefully. It doesn’t say that no one is or could be in error. It says that they cannot be shown to be so within the context of rational philosophy – for the reasons you give. There will always be a “higher context” that calls the judgment of error into question, within this system.

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476

Neither of Tim’s two options appears to be similar to what you were proposing.

477

No, they weren’t, but I wanted to stay focused on what I thought was the most interesting point, and one that might lead to mutual understanding.

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478

So do you think it’s presuppositionless that no one can ever be “shown” to be incorrect about such issues within the confines of “rational philosophy?” Are positions contrary to this, of which there are surely many, not “rational philosophy” then?

I don’t see how switching from a metaphysical to an epistemic framing changes anything. The epistemic framing has to assume some metaphysics, no?

Or it at least needs some formal definition for what counts as “rational,” to do the same work as a metaphysics.

More formally, “one cannot be shown to be correct or incorrect about metaphysical claims,” would seem to refer to itself, such that one cannot be correct or incorrect about it either (or else it would have to be some sort of meta-metaphysical claim, and I’m not sure how that would be cashed out).

At any rate, the confusion you mentioned earlier re the relationship between thought (or language) and being seems to be precisely the sort of thing no one can be shown to be in error about, no?

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That’s the inference Watkins makes from the logical structure of the “haunted Universe Doctrines” treated in his paper “Confirmable and Influential Metaphysics”. He shows how the logical structure of such claims renders them neither provable nor disprovable, provides examples from science and philosophy, and suggests this logical structure makes a decent way to demarcate physics from metaphysics. Al this without vicious self-reference.

480

Of course not. My dictum can’t be shown to be incorrect (or correct) either. No one gets out alive, at this level of discourse! :slightly_smiling_face:

Not quite. Again, be careful with the difference between being incorrect or correct and being shown to be correct or incorrect. I think it’s highly likely that the claim, “One cannot be shown to be correct or incorrect about foundational metaphysical claims” (and that change is important too) is true. But I don’t think it can be shown to be true.

It would be important to clarify what the process of “showing to be true” consists of. Or more broadly, what we each mean to include in “rational philosophy.” We might not be all that far apart, really.

Taking a step back, it’s pretty clear that, for you, what I’m describing looks now like a bug in the system, if it were true, whereas for me it’s a feature! And an extremely important and suggestive feature at that.

481

I get that. That’s a common maneuver, right? “Since x cannot be known, we must default to y.” Yet I’d say that just as ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing) so too ex nihilo nihil sequitur (nothing follows from nothing), so there must always be some implicit premise that comes alongside the denial of epistemic access to support any conclusion (and indeed, the denial of epistemic access itself must assume something). Total absence is silence, not the positive assertion of a negation.

482

“Common maneuver”?

I can’t follow most of that, except for:

to which I would offer Witt’s reminder:

“That which cannot be spoken must be passed over in silence.”

In philosophical silence, anyway.

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