Continental/Analytic Philosophy

Backpedalling a little

johneffay said:

Oddly, I seem to find myself in the role of defender of AP, but I feel it only fair to point out that you will not find a single analytic philosopher (and not many continental philosophers) who does not think that AP has profound concrete political/cultural implications.

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Yes (well, maybe, given the subsequent discussion, and not really the point I was making), but AP doesn't deny that it should be held up to the standards of a science. Since the 'standards of a science' are broadly speaking a way of checking that something that you claim applies to the real world actually does apply to the real world, is there a reason that I should act on (say) a CP critique of consumer capitalism?

Slothrop said:

Backpedalling a little

Yes (well, maybe, given the subsequent discussion, and not really the point I was making), but AP doesn't deny that it should be held up to the standards of a science. Since the 'standards of a science' are broadly speaking a way of checking that something that you claim applies to the real world actually does apply to the real world, is there a reason that I should act on (say) a CP critique of consumer capitalism?

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I think you are coming at this question from the wrong angle completely. You have a rather reductive view of science and what can be 'scientifically verifiable' for a start (but leave that aside as it's a completely different debating point) and you seem hung up on the point that 'philosophy' or 'philosophic claims/judgements' should be somehow 'measurable' or 'quantifiable' in a (reductively defined) 'scientific' method. (Certain aspect of AP - I'm thinking of the discipline of logic - may well aspire to the status of scientific verifiability, but whether it achieves this is entirely another question.) But what of certain key concepts absolutely central to our culture and society that are entirely shaped by, and in the realm of, philosophical debate - such as justice.

Are you seriously suggesting that there could ever be a scientifically verifiable concept of what is just that could, transparently, be validated (or not) by some sort of scientific test that could measure its application to the 'real' world? Of course not. The idea's a non-sequitur. As such, it completely undermines your argument...

First post. Nice feeling to get the first out of the way...

Not sure how to quote from two previous posts, so this is in reply to slothrop and idle rich, respectively.

The minute you bring the idea of the 'real world' into things you open a whole philosophical can of worms - indeed the original can of worms. For many - maybe most - philosophers from both traditions 'the real world' has, in Nietzsche's phrase 'at last become a fable'. Trying to test our expereince of the world against the world itself is doomed to incoherence, since the only access we have to the world is through our experience of it. This is not to deny that there is a world out there independent of our knowledge or experience of it, but we have no access to it. This position would be, broadly, shared by philosophers as diverse as Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Sellars, McDowell, Derrida; either in that form or in some linguistic version of the same thing - that we construct a world out of what we can say about it - Language would be logically prior - though not temporally prior - to thought for a lot of the names above. Thus, the idea of a scientifc method testing theories or concepts against the 'real world' is a fiction; correspondence with the real world is a way of saying a concept has a high level of consisitency with the other concepts that make up our world view. In Rorty's phrase we strive towards better, richer descriptions of the world - a collection of shared meanings - rather than towards correspondence with that which is definitively outside our experience. That's not to say that AP doesn't tend towards a certain - sometimes, to my mind,naive - scientism; but it just means that they hold that science is a rich way of describng experience with strong predictive power; not that it represents a god's eye view.

Idle rich, CP has a rich logical tradition from Kant onwards, through Hegel and Husserl; it just doesn't limit itself to the sterile discovery of tautology that analytic logic is content with. A = A is true, but not very informative; Hegel's discovery of the equivalence of being and nothing is a great deal more interesting.

CP in most of its forms is hostile to the elevation of scientific truth as a benchmark for every kind of truth; Adorno critique of instrumental reason, Heidegger's crit of technology, Derrida v. logocentrism are all versions of this; and this is where it is most valuable, i think - the thread on target culture on the politics board will illustrate the shortcomings of such instrumental thinking - the idea of quantification as the true measure of things.

D7_bohs said:

Not sure how to quote from two previous posts, so this is in reply to slothrop and idle rich, respectively.

The minute you bring the idea of the 'real world' into things you open a whole philosophical can of worms - indeed the original can of worms. For many - maybe most - philosophers from both traditions 'the real world' has, in Nietzsche's phrase 'at last become a fable'. Trying to test our expereince of the world against the world itself is doomed to incoherence, since the only access we have to the world is through our experience of it. This is not to deny that there is a world out there independent of our knowledge or experience of it, but we have no access to it. This position would be, broadly, shared by philosophers as diverse as Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Sellars, McDowell, Derrida; either in that form or in some linguistic version of the same thing - that we construct a world out of what we can say about it - Language would be logically prior - though not temporally prior - to thought for a lot of the names above. Thus, the idea of a scientifc method testing theories or concepts against the 'real world' is a fiction; correspondence with the real world is a way of saying a concept has a high level of consisitency with the other concepts that make up our world view. In Rorty's phrase we strive towards better, richer descriptions of the world - a collection of shared meanings - rather than towards correspondence with that which is definitively outside our experience. That's not to say that AP doesn't tend towards a certain - sometimes, to my mind,naive - scientism; but it just means that they hold that science is a rich way of describng experience with strong predictive power; not that it represents a god's eye view.

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Sorry, my use of 'real world' was misleading. I think I mentioned this upthread re Newton - to me (and, I think to most scientists who have thought seriously about it) 'scientific rigour' doesn't imply claims to be a God's eye view so much as an aspiration to and a means of testing for strong predictive power relative to what we observe. Does, for instance, the political part of the Frankfurt School make such claims, or is that part of scientism and thus rejected?

Obviously, in social theory, testing for predictive power is going to be much harder and less conclusive (in fact, it starts to get harder as soon as you get away from physics), since, as you pointed out, it's a lot harder to find relevant things to measure. But there are some parameters - Marxism as it was set down by Marx, for instance, predicts revolts by the proletariat as an inevitable consequence of industrial capitalism, and so presumably needs to be altered in some way in view of the fact that most of the world's industrial capitalist systems are still going strong...

IdleRich said:

Surely the idea of logic is more fundamental than scientific verifiability? I would have thought that you use logic in verifying something scientifically.
What I'm asking in both these posts is, are there times when logic doesn't apply? If it doesn't then how do you reason?

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I think you can reason without logic; which is not the same thing as reasoning 'illogically' - obviously if i claim to have seen a square circle then i am being illogical, since the concept of the predicate excludes the subject of the proposition, but if I see you beating a child and i say 'stop!, that's wrong' , it would be hard to prove that the concept of wrong definitively - logically - excluded beating a child without an appeal to usage or custom or 'thick' meaning - a century ago beating a child for theft might have been considered justifiable, even the right thing to do. Nevertheless, if you were to contend that, because i couldn't prove that what you were doing was logically wrong, you were going to continue right on doing it, it would be a strange jury that would decide that you'd won the argument.

The same holds for judgments like 'this is beautiful' or 'thet's a good book' ; it is possible to reason about such things - otherwise what would we all be doing on this board - but such reasoning, while rarely 'illogical' in the sense of contradicting itself, is not 'logical' either in the sense of provong anything by appeal to the analyticity of an argument.

Slothrop said:

Sorry, my use of 'real world' was misleading. I think I mentioned this upthread re Newton - to me (and, I think to most scientists who have thought seriously about it) 'scientific rigour' doesn't imply claims to be a God's eye view so much as an aspiration to and a means of testing for strong predictive power relative to what we observe. Does, for instance, the political part of the Frankfurt School make such claims, or is that part of scientism and thus rejected?

Obviously, in social theory, testing for predictive power is going to be much harder and less conclusive (in fact, it starts to get harder as soon as you get away from physics), since, as you pointed out, it's a lot harder to find relevant things to measure. But there are some parameters - Marxism as it was set down by Marx, for instance, predicts revolts by the proletariat as an inevitable consequence of industrial capitalism, and so presumably needs to be altered in some way in view of the fact that most of the world's industrial capitalist systems are still going strong...

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That's quite a complex question with relation to the Frankfurt School; for Adorno - who is the only figure from that milieu I know well enough to talk about - there was a clear distinction between his philosophical work and his social theory. There's an often overlooked Nietzchean edge -as well as a un- Marxist pessimism - to his philosophy, as well as a challenging style; it's safe to say that he didn't believe in the inevitability of a workers victory; what hints he gives of a life beyond domination have an unworldly, messianic edge (though, mind you, so does Marx sometimes).

As a social theorist, Adorno was concerned with analysis only, though its safe to say his prognosis was not optimistic.... as for Marxism needing adjustment in the light of the continued rude health of capitalism; this has been a concern of westerm marxists since the '20s; most would I think concede the failure of Marx's historical determinism, while attesting to the strength of his analysis, particularly of the twin concepts of alienation and reification, concepts taken from Marx, and mediated through Lukacs which were central to the Frankfurt school project.

To try and answer your question, I would guess that most social theorists from a western marxist perspective would hold that the methods of the human sciences were weakly predictive, and to attempt to formulate laws on the basis of social theory would be to commit the crime Kant calls 'illicit subsumption' ' the illegitimate extension of a category or categorial judgment beyond its territory.

IdleRich said:

You posit this as an example of reasoning without logic:


Which seems to be true and doesn't resort to using logic.
But is that reasoning? Just saying "that is wrong" is simply a statement (which may well be true in this case) but I thought that reasoning is movement from one statement to another and my question would be how do you do this without logic?

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Ok - I guess I meant that to support my initial 'that is wrong' would involve things like ' it is socially unacceptable' 'it will damage the child, make her afraid and distrustful' 'it makes society a worse place for everyone if things like this happen' and so on; all of which demand that you accept the reason in order to accept the conclusion 'this is wrong' in the manner of if' it will damage the child', then'this is wrong' ; but not as watertight hypothetical judgments such as if ' x=2' then '2x =4'; you have to accept 'this will damage the child' and that damaging children is wrong, before accepting this is wrong; this has the form of logical proposition, but and certainly some of its argumentative strength derives from this, but it also relies on other resources; affectivity, custom, rhetoric and so on ....

Nevertheless, if you were to contend that, because i couldn't prove that what you were doing was logically wrong, you were going to continue right on doing it, it would be a strange jury that would decide that you'd won the argument.

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This isn't reasoning without logic, it's as logical as can be:

Premise 1: Causing pain is wrong
Premise 2: Beating a child causes pain
therefore
Premise 3: Beating a child is wrong
and
Premise 4: You shouldn't do things that are wrong
Conclusion: You shouldn't beat a child

Logic will only fail you way further down the line, when you have to justify a foundational claim like: 'Pain is bad'.

Idle rich, CP has a rich logical tradition from Kant onwards, through Hegel and Husserl; it just doesn't limit itself to the sterile discovery of tautology that analytic logic is content with. A = A is true, but not very informative; Hegel's discovery of the equivalence of being and nothing is a great deal more interesting.

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Logic has to be tautological otherwise it wouldn't be useful, there's no point criticising AP on that basis. All that Hegel stuff is much more metaphysics than logic.

By the way Foret yes I am at Cambridge, it's a nice university but really not the place to study philosophy.

Ned said:

and
Premise 4: You shouldn't do things that are wrong


.

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always with the 'ought' ...... surely by definition 'wrong' means 'things that you shouldn't do'? so i don't really see what this step does

the problem is that you can't get from fact to value unless you smuggle in a value at the very beginning...

D7_bohs said:

always with the 'ought' ...... surely by definition 'wrong' means 'things that you shouldn't do'? so i don't really see what this step does

the problem is that you can't get from fact to value unless you smuggle in a value at the very beginning...

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Well not every moral theory would agree with that premise, even though it looks tautological. But anyway yes, I agree, you do have to smuggle in value somewhere, but the only point I'm trying to make is this sort of vague anti-AP idea of 'reasoning without logic' is incoherent.

i guess 'reasoning without logic' is not quite right....... I need to think about how to describe what i do mean

later ....

'reasoning without logic' looks ridiculous now, of course; went back over the thread to see if I picked the phrase up from someone else along the way, but no such luck; the shame is mine...

what i getting at wasn't particularly directed at AP - I was trying to answer Idle Rich's question about the priority of logic and show that certain kinds of reasoning were not expressible entirely as logically consistent propositions, but could, neverthe less represent viable forms of rationality - which is not the same as being 'without logic' of course.

Ned said:

Logic has to be tautological otherwise it wouldn't be useful, there's no point criticising AP on that basis. All that Hegel stuff is much more metaphysics than logic.

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This is simply defining your term to suit your argument. The 'Hegel stuff' has a long tradition as a form of logic (albeit related to metaphysics), which can be shown to be a direct outgrowth of Kantian logic, which can itself be shown to be, etc. Consequently, if Hegelian logic has value, logic does not need to be tautological to be useful.

That said, I agree with you that to criticize AP's use of tautological logic simply on the basis that it is tautological is something of a non-starter.

I understand a tautology to be like a truism is that correct? So why does logic have to be tautological? I have no background in philosophy at all so I'm just asking for an explanation here.

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(I wasn't trying to attribute anything to anyone in particular?) Anyway logic has to be independent of, and prior to, our empirical knowledge of the universe. The only things we can be sure of before we start making observations are - ignoring the Kantian hinterland for a moment because I don't know much about it - things that are tautologous/true by definition, like A=A (which is just like 'a bachelor is an unmarried man'), and anything derived from a tautology is also a tautology. But the important thing to note is that just because something's a tautology, that doesn't mean it can't be a surprising truth, because once you start manipulating tautologies in complex ways you get non-obvious results.