Some Signs of Things to Come

I’m back from vacation, and ready to write. I did send in our proposal for the Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable, requesting a receipt. I didn’t get one, so I’ll send the proposal on to the other two organizers. Whether accepted for that conference or not, though, I’m ready to write this sucker.

Continental Philosophy of Social Science continues to prove a thought-provoking book. I’ll blog some more on that soon. And I may have some responses to Brabsher and/or Mulbo and/or Obiwanky. [Listing these noms de blog this way reminds me of the line from Raising Arizona: "Hear that everybody? We's using code names."] Most of all, though, I want to sketch the main move I have in mind for the article at this point: suggesting a modified hermeneutic practice as the right method for integrating and synthesizing all of the varied approaches to studying human behavior that are coalescing here under the broad heading “social science,” including those approaches that focus narrowly on causal explanations of said behavior. That is to say, rather than opposing hermeneutics to the heirs of positivism, I would like to try to meld them together. I’ll explain what that might mean tomorrow.

And now, for no particular reason, two quotes from Mark Twain:

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” [Clearly Twain was writing well before the age of modern advertising.]

and

“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.”

[On the exam you will be asked to say whether this latter quote is more similar to (a) or (b) below, justifying your answer with your own humor taxonomy:

(a) Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies -- but not before they have been hanged. -- Heinrich Heine

(b) If you find that you have offended someone, walk a mile in their shoes. Then you will have a mile head start...and they won't have any shoes. -- Dutch proverb]

Mulbo Responds to Brabsher

I tend to think that Heidegger (early, anyway) may be closer to W and Gadamer on the flexibility of background practices than you suggest. This was a claim in my diss (that he’s closer to G). The basis of my argument turns on authenticity. Ted frequently pointed out that Heidegger is clear that an authentic Dasein’s world need not change. But I believe an interpretation that couples sections 61-63 with chapter 5 yields a position in which the tradition which we inherit can be modified by us. The specific direction such modification takes is, of course, not directly guided by the subject — it happens, as you say about W and G, in the absence of rules or princples. I think Heidegger’s account of fate, in other words, is one in which Dasein is a full participant. And only authentic Dasein, as Heidegger stresses, actually has a fate.

Brabsher on Meaning Finitism

As I interpret Heidegger, things stand in unambiguous relations to one another and goals.  Using Ted’s concept of the signifying chain, it seems that the chains indicate actions as the only thing it makes sense to do somewhere.  Or that there is a clear line between it making sense to do one thing rather than another.  The bedroom as a site of activity may indicate a multitude of actions but these chains aren’t intermingled and confused.  They are definite and already in place.  I think Wittgenstein, on the other hand, allows for the development of new meanings within such sites and for the fact of ambiguity and polysemic relations.  I think there is a clear comparison here between W and Gadamer.  In Truth and Method Gadamer comes awfully close to saying that meaning is use in the section on application.  But, the implication of this is that there is no rule or universal standing over language governing it.  It develops in the very process of being used.  This is “meaning finitism.”  So ultimately, my contention is that we have overlapping, but often different background understandings of the situations we share (of course we only share them insofar as our understandings overlap to some degree).  Again I see W and Gadamer as very close here. 

Another Brandon…

Email correspondance from Brandon Absher, PhD student at the University of Kentucky, and the latest inductee in the Schatzki Ring:

Greig and Brandon, I just finished reading the paper.  And, I’m very excited that you are considering these issues in the light you are.  Probably my most important thought about the paper is that it could lead into a piece on the Gadamer/ Habermas debate.  Chris Zurn is currently writing an encyclopedia entry on this issue and I read a lot of the material over the summer (with the intention of perhaps writing a paper on the topic).  Ultimately, Habermas consistently attacks Gadamer for a perceived conservatism.  His claim is that we require theories to offer understandings of oppression.  He models this approach on psychoanalytic theory.  The point of doing the theory is to develop therapeutic practices – ultimately understood in terms of the theories developed later in TCA I and II.  Personally, I’ve been VERY concerned about the relationship between science and practical life in Heidegger’s work.  Mostly, I share his belief that practical/existential/ethical life is foundational for any theoretical interpretation of the world.  On the other hand, I don’t want to be dragged into a form of irrationalism consonant with Heidegger’s own political commitments. My work: The first chapter of the dissertation as I’m now conceiving of it will challenge a currently (perhaps perennially) popular way of thinking about language.  The basic idea is that humans have “attitudes” toward represented “content” which are “expressed” in the form of marks, utterances, and other forms of signs. As I read W and H, they present a challenge to this view.  Most importantly understanding language isn’t about associating signs with content and attitudes, rather it’s about knowing how to get along in a practical context.  Signs don’t represent content and express “attitudes” (believing vs. wishing, etc.), instead they bring about a shared practical intelligibility – my warning about the wet floor brings the floor itself to view as having a certain place within our already shared practical world, there are certain things that I’m supposed to do with regard to this floor now or with regard to the utterance itself.  The second chapter is on the concept of context.  Basically, it works out the common theme of background understanding found in W and H and the necessity of shared background understanding in understanding the utterances, etc of another.  Here, drawing on the concept of meaning finitism worked out by David Bloor in his reading of W, I’m going to argue that W’s understanding of context as fluid, ambiguous, and ever-changing is preferable to what I see as Heidegger’s more closed interpretation of context (or background understanding).  There’s a tenuous third chapter on the relation of W and H to analytic theories of semantic “externalism”, but Ted’s a little uncertain about it.  The final chapter will be about the “articulation of intelligibility” and the role of language in this articulation.  This chapter will share substantial ground with your section on narrative, theory, and argumentation.  The basic idea is as follows: the warning in the example mentioned before draws on a shared practical intelligibility.  It brings the floor to light in a new way within our ongoing practice, but our larger sense of the situation and it’s relation to other situations remains unchanged.  Other types of discourse (or maybe other discursive moments or events) allow us to re-contextualize much larger regions of our life.  With Arendt in mind, I think primarily of political discourse – which corresponds in many ways to what you’re talking about under the head of “argument.”  Certain political discourses or political moments of discourse have the power of re-shaping our background understanding of the world within which we live.  Religious discourse is also important in this way – here I think less of Arendt and more of Heidegger’s treatment of poetry in the later work and of silence in the early work.  The best way of saying it, I think, is that much of our practical discourse operates within an already shared horizon and leaves that horizon basically untouched.  There are, however, (borrowing from Gadamer) horizon shifting and horizon fusing ways of speaking.  So that’s the basic idea.

Mulberry on Normativity and ‘Hard Naturalism’

And now a message from  Visiting Assistant Blogger Greig Mulberry:

I’ve been thinking about this issue of different ways of framing some related sets of issues — or maybe it’s the same issue.  I mentioned naturalism v. non-reductive naturalism; you mentioned naturalism v. normativity. It might be worth, at some point, following out the way the latter terms differ, not only from each other in a general way, but more specifically how they differ from each other in how they differ from naturalism.
When I was working briefly on phil of mind some weeks ago for class, I learned a little more about emergentism.  It (as you may know) was in fashion in the first decades of the 20th c., but not so much now — at least under that name.  Recently I read that emergentism is essentially non-reductive naturalism, especially of the Davidsonian variety (which makes sense, for supervenience always sound similar to emergentism to me). 
One further way of framing some of these issues, especially relevant to this most recent project of ours, can be called the question over ‘the autonomy of the sciences.’  We’ve talked about the issue of the relation between, e.g. physics and psychology, but now I’ve found a name for it, by God.  The hard naturalist, to coin a phrase (this one is my own coinage, as far as I know), would argue against the autonomy of the sciences, I reckon.  If one takes normativity seriously, should one then necessarily defend the autonomy of the sciences?

Excerpts from Sherrat’s Continental Philosophy of Social Science

Yvonne Sherrat’s 2006 volume Continental Philosophy of Social Science: Hermeneutics, Genealogy, and Critical Theory from Greece to the Twenty-First Century has some passages the resonate interestingly with the naturalist-normativist debate. The core of her position is that the continental philosophies of social science are distinct from their analytic counterparts principally in having a humanitist orientation rather than a natural scientific one.

“…humanists hold that knowledge works through transmission. Understanding and knowledge are composed by the accumulation of voices handed down from the centuries. This contrasts with science’s ‘creative destruction’ approach where voices from the past are seen as holding false meanings, which need to be destroyed in order to allow new, objective knowledge to flourish…progress for humanists would be the accumluation of the knowledge from the past, not the transcendence or destruction of it. Science meanwhile holds the idea that the past contains undeveloped, primitive and indeed often false forms of knowledge” (p. 9).

And

“…humanism…holds a distinct notion of meaning from science. The human world is substantively meaningful for humanists and this includes the idea of ethical, aesthetic and even spiritual meanings…Society thus for humanists would be an intrinsically purpose-laden, ethically, aesthetically and spiritually valuable entity. This contrasts with a scientific notion of meaning, which is purely technical and pertains only to bare empirical facts. All other forms of human meaning are external, and maybe ‘tacked’ on as an ethical, aesthetic or indeed subjective addition” (p. 9)

This is a nice way of framing the issue, albeit one that might be too “supernaturalist” for at least some of the normativists (this seems very close to what Rouse himself says, at little less so to Risjord’s position, still less to Steuber’s). Let’s use this frame to look again at what’s at stake in the naturalist-normativist debate. The focuse for all participants seems to be on clarifying and grounding proper methodologies for the social sciences. It’s not clear to me that the naturalists consider it a criterion for this project that the resulting methods and implied ontologies be even consistent with other programs (scientific, philosophical, and “folk”) for understanding and explaining human behavior. I have in mind here, for instance, the broad sorts of conversations and disputes concerning right behavior (many of which occur in Western cultures under the headings “ethics” and “politics”) that seem to be part of the natural history of the human species across cultures, as well as the institutional practices of law-making, law enforcement, and trials that play such vital and prominent roles in most contemporary societies. In each sort of case not only do the people involved make normative claims, the clarification, justification, and rejection of such claims seems integral both to the specification of what sort of actions these people are engaged in and to the carrying out of those actions. But what can the naturalists say about such claims?

It seems to me that TRH simply don’t take such questions up. Perhaps they strike them as unscientific, and perhaps they are. It strikes me as essential to the task of philosophy, however, at least as I understand it, that such questions be addressed, if only to lead to a reductivist answer, i.e. that the discourses of ethics and the law are epiphenomenal to the flow of natural causality, a sort of illusion of social reason. TRH seem to feel that they’ve got RSR stuck on the horns of their dilemma, demanding that RSR clarify whether normativity is or is not causal — either way, the naturalists win. But TRH’s embrace of this dilemma seems to me to lead to absurdity.

So, perhaps the task here is simply to frame things so that this dilemma for the naturalists is made perfectly clear. I suspect that, forced to choose, they accept the epiphenomenalist charge, and like lies, this testimony will make baby Jesus cry. But forcing the issue this way seems to be the best way to advance the discussion. Otherwise, we’re just fighting on the naturalists’ chosen turf, and I question whether it’s the right turf.

Normativists vs. Naturalists Revisited

[Not exactly Highway 61, but bear with me...]

Here’s the foil for the article: Stephen Turner, Paul Roth, and David Henderson characterize their debate opponents, Joseph Rouse (for Turner), Karsten Steuber (for Roth), and Mark Risjord (for Henderson and Roth) as “normativists” (only Turner uses the term, but it fits nicely with Henderson’s and Roth’s critiques), implicitly distinguished from their own views as “naturalists” (none of these authors uses this term to characterize themselves, but it tracks well with their basis for arguing against the normativists). In short, the Turner-Roth-Henderson axis views itself as defending the social sciences and its adjunct philosophy from the “supernaturalism” of projects such as those pursued by Rouse-Steuber-Risjord, that attempt to insert “normativity” as, TRH allege, a form of non-causal causality into the causal workings of the natural world.

One point that strikes me about this presentation is that all three of TRH’s foils (RSR) take pains to defend their positions as consistent with naturalism. I won’t argue here whether I think they’re successful or not (though I definitely lean RSR’s way), but will instead simply offer a more complex, quatrite range of positions. In lieu of the binary of naturalist – normativist, I propose:

     postivist - naturalist – normativist – supernaturalist

The distinction between the positivist and naturalist camps is debatable, but certaintly TRH all are aware of the failings of positivism, and see themselves, I take it, more as post-Quineans. The critical question is whether their conception of naturalism is really rich enough for their distinction from positivism to make a difference. If TRH reduce the ontology of human social world to the operations of efficient causality, then their recommendations for the methods of the social sciences and for the philosophy of social science aren’t likely to depart dramatically from that of, say, Carnap and Hempel. It seems they could only advocate a sort of polished positivism, employing more contemporary forms of causal and ontological analysis — a “compassionate conservativism” for this subdiscipline.

Conversely, TRH similarly try to collapse the positions of the normativists into those of supernaturlists. I think “obiwanky” won’t mind me lifting part of one of his earlier comments here (thanks for the contribution):

“What is wrong with supernaturalism? The Lakota Sioux, for instance, make a distinction between the natural and supernatural, but the supernatural pervades the world. Obviously, supernatural is equivocated here, but the point I’m pushing is that the rejection of the supernatural is systematically Modern-European.”

Obi states clearly here the sort of neo-Winchean view that either (a) that some sorts of supernatural “causes” are at work in the world, (b) that because certain people believe (a), doing justice to their social worlds requires some sort of non-judgmental acknowledgement of those beliefs, or both. Winch certainly argued this way, and it’s hard to read Risjord, Steuber, and Rouse without noting the care with which they try to make thier positions consistent with naturalist approaches. They have an interesting task. In key respects they are philosophically closer to the naturalists than to the supernaturalists, yet they can’t make sense of the social world without appealing to normativity. And for their trouble, they are booted from the naturalists camp, into a supernaturalist camp that probably wouldn’t accept them either.

So, is the normativist position the truly principled one, the view that takes the best of the other two main camps and provides a satisfying synthesis that opens up new vistas for philosophical and scientific investigation? Or is it neither fish-nor-fowl (perhaps like the “squirrel fish” I saw on a menu for a Chinese restaurant near the West Virginia – Virginia border long ago, which the server could only clarify was neither squirrel nor fish), a soulless, successless attempt at a fool’s compromise?

I’m enough of a naturalist to want to avoid accepting Obiwanky’s suggestion that there’s nothing wrong with embracing supernaturalism (though I acknowledge some of the problems to which he alludes), but simply can’t make sense of the social world on purely causal terms. So I’m rooting for the normativists. They’re my peeps, as it were.

So, how to make this case best? I will grant TRH that RSR haven’t really made that case yet, for all the honor of their attempts. What’s the next step?

We’re Back

Interview done (hoping for an on campus interview now, but that won’t happen until February, if at all), semester done (it’s all over ‘cept the fighting), and now we’re six days from the deadline for proposals for 2008’s Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable. I was planning to take a leisurely stroll through this material over the past month, but now we’ll have to cram a bit to make that deadline. That’ll still leave us about three months to write before the conference — assuming we get in.

In any case, sorry to leave our fans in the lurch — both of you.

A Shameful Plea for Patience

Sorry folks. My plans for various posts have come to naught as life takes its toll. Things should settle down quite a bit after my phone interview next Monday — unless, of course, that leads to an on campus interview. If so, all bets are off.

Occasional posting will resume eventually.

A Shameless Plea for Comments

We’ve now reached the highwater mark for visitors to this site twice in three days: four! Four distinct IP addresses have made their way here on two separate days, and as many as twelve human beings may have seen this website. Yet as one of these visitors noted: no comments. Not even a “This website sucks,” nor a “Your monkey’s kung fu is weak.” This is not keeping with the radically democratic ethos of the internet age.

So c’mon folks: pony up the verbiage. Your courage shall be justly rewarded. Conversely, your reticence will be ruthlessly punished by “chain letter normativity.” You will most likely get sued by a “Maori lawyer” and attacked by a vervet monkey, possibly simultaneously. Trust me, this is not fun.