Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 11:09:50 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Primacy of practice, sophistry, and other fun stuff


Hi  Tobin

Great stuff, thanks. (I agree with nearly everything, including re James 
speaking for himself and the appropriateness of white lies, so I would 
say that, woudn't I? :)).

Just one thing:

>reasons are (or can be) causes, but not all causes come from
>reasoning, unless one presupposes a God directing everything's existence.

Why couldn't the universe just be like that (apart from the 'directing' 
bit, i.e. the process is open and causes are immanent), compatible with 
a religious belief but also a non-religious one? Having just watched an 
interesting (if patronizing) doco on contemporary physics' quest for a 
unified theory of everything, I'm more than ever convinced that the old 
metaphysical materialism vs idealism problematic is past its use-by date 
and that something like what Bhaskar says must be the case: that mind 
qua possibility is enfolded in matter 'all the way down'; how otherwise 
could being be intelligible, and by extraordinarily elegant and complex 
theories. If one accepts this as a realist rather than materialist view, 
it still leaves intact -- or can do -- practical, epistemological, 
historical and SEP materialism. Providing 'physical' is understood in 
the above way, ontological or metaphysical realism could even still have 
the same definition as ontological materialism: it 'asserts the 
unilateral dependence of social upon biological (and more generally 
physical) being and the emergence of the former from the latter.'  And 
while not all causes come from reasoning, the dualistic gulf between 
reasons and and other kinds of causes would be bridged in an 
emergentist, stratified ontology. The world, moreover, would be 
re-enchanted...

Blissful blessings, :)

Mervyn

Tobin Nellhaus <nellhaus-AT-gis.net> writes
>Hi Mervyn, James and Phil--
>
>Shoot, you've given me some interesting but hard nuts to crack, and at the
>moment I have neither time nor tongs nor tongue to open them further.  But
>I'll give it a valiant effort as briefly as I can (and I promise not to go
>on another alliterative binge -- fun as it was, it also took lots of work!).
>
>I think I'll start with Phil's points (hey, Phil, that choice of "Pragma"
>and "Metaphysic" was a kick!).  I'm afraid I can't give a strong reply to
>your comments on Hegel, who I haven't read and probably never will, being
>little more than an educated dog myself (sorry, I'm alluding to a joke that
>perhaps only Howard will remember, though come to think of it, it should
>also bring a wry smile to anyone who knows the history of the word "cynic").
>In any case, I agree that reason is crucial to the improvement of human
>affairs, although as that annoying Mr Marx once said, thinking about the
>world is ducky but you also gotta change it.  I'll also agree that Marx
>sometimes slid toward a pragmatic view of truth.  My point however lies
>elsewhere: and that is, reason doesn't come out of nowhere, ex nihilo (but
>Mervyn, I'll get to your question about nihilo vs novo).  Reason *emerges*
>from practical (bodily) engagements with the world, starting with our most
>basic interactions like crawling from point A to point B, putting things
>into boxes and pulling them out again, and playing peek-a-boo.  I have to
>both agree and disagree with your argument that cooking involves theories.
>Our embodied interactions with the material world lead us to *develop*
>categories (cats are distinguishable from mats), which involve theories
>(cats are more like rats than they are like mats in that they're both
>*alive*).  However, on the one hand, I don't believe categories exist
>outside semiosis, or if you like, outside consciousness (that would be the
>epistemic fallacy -- powers, relationships and events do, but not
>categories).  And on the other hand, beyond categorization I'm skeptical
>that noticing phenomena (e.g., fermentation or antibiosis) or asking a
>question ("I wonder what'll happens if I mix an egg into the flour?")
>demands a theory or even a hypothesis; on the contrary, they both depend on
>a *lack* of prior knowledge or theory.  So it's from those two perspectives
>(embodied activity and the absence of knowledge) that I maintain the primacy
>of practice.  In fact, for embodied activity to yield knowledge it must
>start from ignorance and error, so ultimately it depends on absences too.
>
>I hope it's clear that the primacy of practice thesis does not -- or at
>least need not -- devolve into simple pragmatism.  As for Peirce, he
>objected to William James's verson of pragmatism (and in response renamed
>his own view the intentionally ugly "pragmaticism").  His eventual concept
>of truth was a type of consensus theory, but with a crucial qualification:
>truth is what the community of minds determines it to be over the entire
>course of history, *including the future*.  In other words, the
>understanding of reality which we've attained in the present is always
>fallible and subject to later correction.
>
>To respond quickly to Mervyn's inquiry about my view of "de novo" vs "ex
>nihilo," my answer is "Yes."  Put less flippantly, my understanding of
>emergence (including intrastructural emergence) is that it depends upon
>pre-existing materials and conditions, and so in that sense is not "ex
>nihilo."  However, since the emergent power or relationship is contingent
>and cannot be directly derived from or reduced to the level from which it
>arose, it is both new _and_ "from nothing/nowhere."  I think this view
>coheres with my comment about the dependence of knowledge upon absences.
>(Re RB, I think *From East to West* is a mess, but I haven't gotten to any
>subsequent works yet.  I intend to, however.)
>
>Mervyn, I wish I were as confident as you that James's statement was not
>anthropocentric.  But he can speak for himself.
>
>Be that as it may, I think both you and James oversimplify the Sophists a
>bit -- there was quite a variety among them, and Plato had an axe to grind
>when he vilified them in contrast to his hero.  Not all Sophists were
>market-oriented, and some were politically subversive.  Some were anthropic,
>but some were naturalistic.  And some were of a scientific bent.  But
>evidently what both of you really have in mind are the rhetoricians.  Let me
>quote James:
>
>> The Sophists [...] did not teach logic or science, but
>> rhetoric, the art of persuasion, i.e. demagoguery and sales technique,
>> which Gorgias said was superior to science; the physician could tell
>> you what would cure you, but could not make you take it, whereas the
>> rhetorician, although ignorant of medicine, could.
>
>I don't identify with or endorse the rhetorician Sophists, but I don't
>simply condemn them either.  Clearly, if the patient won't take the
>medicine, you'll have one very sick and possibly dead patient.  We'd be
>fools not to acknowledge that.  But this is not to say that persuasion is
>"superior" to science, only that it has its role, and an important one.  I'm
>sure it'll surprise no-one that I'm deeply interested in language and
>representation (and delight in them as well), and that I'm convinced of
>their cultural, social and political power.  However, precisely because
>they're powerful, I see them as having a crucial ethical aspect.  (At the
>risk of re-opening the argument, this is a key reason why I complain about
>RB's writing: I think there's an ethical dimension to *everyone's* use of
>language, and that RB undercuts the social power of his ideas by not
>communicating them well.)
>
>But ethics is a complicated matter.  For example, sometimes lying is the
>right thing to do.  Consider politeness: it is really necessary to tell
>sweet aged Aunt Betsy that her coffee makes you gag?  So even if we prize
>truth and truthfulness, here's a situation in which the worser argument, the
>one for the merits of lying, is (and I think should be) the stronger.  I
>suspect that some of you are a little shocked by this argument -- and by the
>fact that you know it's true!  But lying can be good because it can sustain
>a deeper truth, one concerning our humanity: sustaining the bonds of
>sociability, friendship and love is generally more vital to us as people
>than is an absolute allegiance to honesty.  In short, virtually all of
>civility requires accepting the situational propriety of lying.  (Let me
>emphasize *situational*, since I'm not at all advocating lying as a
>universal good -- far from it.)
>
>The ethics of language is complex in another direction as well.  Here's
>James again:
>
>> Faith for Kierkegaard meant something like "trust" -- Abraham is his
>> model. Faith is akin to hope, but not hope for something finite. It is
>> more like what is expressed in the phrase "Everything has a reason".
>> Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty.
>
>James plays on words in order to advance his argument: he first uses the
>term "reason" in the sense of "cause," and then uses it in the sense of
>"reasoning."  Now, I disagree with him when he connects the two senses this
>way -- reasons are (or can be) causes, but not all causes come from
>reasoning, unless one presupposes a God directing everything's existence.
>Nevertheless I don't think playing on words this way is necessarily
>unethical.  On the contrary, it can be vital to the imagination and creative
>thinking.  Consequently, if we strictly obeyed distinctions in meaning, we
>would gravely impoverish our ability to wonder about the world; and that, I
>think, *would* be woefully unethical.
>
>Cripes, I've spent way more time than I meant to, so I'm going to split.
>
>Thanks,
>
>T.
>
>---
>Tobin Nellhaus
>nellhaus-AT-mail.com
>"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
>
>
>
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