In light of my experience of being plagiarized, it should be noted that this essay was first posted in 2006. I am unable to provide images of the paintings that are integral to my argument in this essay. However, I can supply links to sites where these paintings may be seen. Part of the cybercrime directed against me and my writings is to obstruct and block communication efforts, denying readers access to my sites, preventing all publications of my writings. My struggle is a daily one. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" and "Jim Florio and the Mafia in Atlantic City.")
Spacing has been affected in this essay. Other defacements must be expected. My primary sources for this essay are:
Donald Davidson, "Gadamer and Plato's Philebus," "Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects," and "Thinking Causes," in Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 261-277, 295-315, pp. 185-201.
Donald Davidson, "The Method of Truth in Metaphysics," in K. Baynes, J. Bohman, & T. McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 161-185.
Kirk Ludwig, ed., Donald Davidson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1-35, pp. 113-163.
I. "Internal realism is not compatible with conceptual relativity." (Hilary Putnam)
Donald Davison is one of the few important American philosophers to cross the waters. He is influential in Continental philosophical circles and -- somewhat less than Richard Rorty -- has also earned a following beyond disciplinary boundaries. Davidson is an important philosopher for lawyers, who are mostly unaware of his work, since his concerns include issues of agency theory, causality, truth and interpretation relevant to jurisprudential efforts in a variety of doctrinal areas. For instance, Davidson is important to the new theory of Constitutional adjudication and suggests revolutionary definitions of causation that may be helpful in all legal thinking.
I will never forget a New Jersey judge's response to my comment (for once I allowed the mask of dullness to slip) concerning the relevance of analytical agency theory to possible doctrinal evolution in substantive criminal law by way of Davidson and Gadamer -- "Huh?," he said. That judge must be on the New Jersey Supreme Court by now. As New Jersey's very new Attorney General, Anne Milgram remarked: "That's so, like, high brow and elitist! Duh ..."
Another judge's response to my comments concerning a dramatization of George Eliot's novels was to ask: "Who's he?" I explained that "he" was a "she." A third judge liked to mangle quotations from Operas, including Carmen. (A new "error" inserted since my last review of this essay has now been corrected.) My response at the time was about what you'd expect: "You are very clever, your Honor." Scientific observations from members of the N.J. bench are beyond my ability to communicate. If you are a New Jersey lawyer or judge, this is probably not the essay that you should read.
Davidson is a paradox. Recipient of an award from Hegel scholars, often linked with Gadamer in German scholarship, Davidson is relentlessly analytical in his vocabulary and conceptual arabesques. This is fascinating because it reveals a tension in his mind between metaphysical yearnings (mistress) and chastened analytical method (wife). For the most part, Davidson behaves himself. However, towards the end of his career, there is a worrisome flirtatiousness with Continental themes and postmodernist neo-pragmatism. The poor man never realized that he was simply contemplating dual aspects of one female, Sophia. "You gotta choose one or the other!" Mediocrities always say this sort of thing. Davidson responds: "I have chosen -- both." Where does Davidson stand on foundations? What do I mean by "analytical" philosophy? This will do as a working definition:
"The philosophy of this book," Bernard Williams writes, "can no doubt be called, on some broad specification, 'analytical,' and so is much of the recent philosophy it discusses. I take this to be, indeed, a matter of style, and the limitation it introduces comes only from the fact that style must to some extent determine subject matter. ... What distinguishes analytical philosophy from other contemporary philosophy (though not from much philosophy of other times) is a certain way of going on, which involves argument, distinctions, and, so far as it remembers to try to achieve it and succeeds, moderately plain speech."
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. vi-viii.
Next is the vexed question of whether Davidson is an "empiricist on issues of foundations." Davidson claims that he is indeed an empiricist in epistemology. Most scholars agree. Nevertheless, there are dissenters -- notably in Europe -- who detect a form of Kantian transcendentalism compatible with empiricism. (An "error" was inserted in this foregoing sentence since my previous reading of it only a few hours ago.)
"Kant disparages the claims to non-empirical knowledge," Arthur W. Collins writes in Thought and Nature: Studies in Rationalist Philosophy (Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1985), p. 14. Notice that Kant is not, strictly speaking, an empiricist. Kant is a kind of idealist, offering a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism in his defense of synthetic a priori knowledge, which Kant insists, is fully compatible with the insights of the British empiricists. Philip J. Neujahr, Kant's Idealism (Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1995), pp. 33-45.
I feel like a conductor leading an orchestra through a symphony as people are beating me with sticks and destroying the score before my eyes. My goal is to protect the music. I can not explain any better what it is like to philosophize in a torture chamber. On October 15, 2007 at 9:08 A.M. I was obstructed in my eforts to post a revised version of my essay on the Jena 6 case at my MSN group, Critique. I will persist in my efforts to repost that essay. That site may no longer exist. A draft of an essay examining the ideas of Umberto Eco was damaged. I have deleted that essay from this site. I will write it elsewhere, then I will try (again) to post it here. My draft of an essay on the novels of Raymond Chandler has been altered and damaged. Eventually, I will correct and post that essay once more.
Working on material that requires exploring painful or fragile emotions and recollections, under such circumstances, may be impossible. Therapy is always impossible in a torture chamber. I will persist in my efforts to do this work because I believe that it may be suggestive to others. See James F. Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy: An Interpretation and Defense of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophical Project (New York: SUNY, 1992), pp. 13-36 and Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 471-576, then see John Russon, Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life (New York: SUNY, 2003), pp. 125-149.
All access to MSN is now denied to me because my views are deemed insufficiently democratic or not supportive of anti-Communistic "freedoms." One requires a sense of irony to rival Kafka's twisted perspective on life to describe my daily experience. I can best liken it to Boethius -- better known as Anicius Manlius Severinus (no relation to Russell Crowe in Gladiator) -- who was accused of treason in 523 A.D. While spending a year being tortured, on a daily basis, in a prison in Pavia, Boethius wrote the classic, De Consolatione Philosophiae. The dangerous side effect of torturing a philosopher is that he or she will produce a theoretical work in extremis, which will be a way of "torturing" unfortunate generations of future readers of this difficult work. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
Davidson is often described as a materialist in metaphysics. Davidson may well have described himself as a materialist. I have my doubts about Davidson's materialism in light of his non-reducibility doctrine in the philosophy of mind and "anomalous monism." (Another "error" was inserted overnight in this last sentence.) See Kirk Ludwig, "Introduction," in Donald Davidson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 6-7. ("Davidson ... relied crucially on a premise that denied even the nomic reducibility of mental to physical properties.")
I doubt the accuracy of any claim that Davidson is best thought of as a simplistic or eliminative materialist, since he is clear that the "anomalous" mental realm is not reducible to cerebral operations. This is true even if, without those cerebral operations, there can be no mental life. I classify Davidson as a pragmatist, skeptical of all discussions of foundations, with a solid grounding in empiricism and equally solid transcendental aspirations, close to Putnam, Rorty, West on the philosophical map. In other words, one of the good guys and gals. Let's not forget that Susan Haack also kicks ass:
"A theory of meaning ... is an empirical theory, and its ambition is to account for the workings of natural language ... Empirical power in such a theory depends on recovering the structure of a very sophisticated ability -- the ability to speak and understand language."
After Philosophy, p. 163.
Ricoeur and Gadamer disagree concerning the necessity or priority of empiricism, so does Chomsky's a priori and rationalistic linguistics, which is concerned with more than "observing language behavior." Now compare Hilary Putnam:
"Kant's glory, in my eyes, is to say that the very fact that we cannot separate our own conceptual contribution from what is 'objectively there' is not a disaster. It is, in fact, a certain kind of guarantee; at least as the thought is reconstructed in contemporary terms by Strawson, what is sound in Kant's argument is that the notion of a future (or of space-time) about which we are wholly mistaken is an incoherent one. If there is something we can call a future at all, it must turn out that a great many of our beliefs about it are, in fact, true. I don't wish to say that this is as great a comfort as Kant thought it was (nor does Peter Strawson wish to claim this), but it is an important point, nonetheless, that many kinds of skepticism turn out, on close examination, to be incoherent."
The Many Faces of Realism, p. 52 (arguing that radical skepticism is always incoherent).
P.F. Strawson's now famous elaboration of Kant's "compatibility thesis" establishing the unity of Critical theory and scientific empiricism makes use of Kant's original title for the Critique of Pure Reason, see The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 235-270, especially "The Structure of Experience." ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
"There will always be those," Nathan Salmon writes, "who condemn reason as somehow excessively confining. There will also be those who hold that truth is over-rated, that it is somehow subjective, or even non-existent, and that therefore it could not be the principal aim of rational inquiry. These people typically replace reason or truth with some favored practical, political, or social agenda, implicitly suggesting that the reasoned search for truth is immoral. Often they misleadingly apply the word true to any proposition that promotes or supports their substitute for genuine truth. These people are not merely mistaken; naturally understood, their stance is inconsistent. Worse, they devalue humanity's greatest intellectual achievements. Indeed they soil the noblest intellectual pursuit of which humanity is capable. [Not only philosophy, but also science.] Their stance is also dangerous."
Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. viii.
I will be devoting a future essay to Salmon's writings which have, surprisingly and against the author's expressed intentions, provided me with new arguments in defense of the rationality of belief in God. The creator of "anomalous monism" is a dual-aspect thinker, whose recent demise saddened students of philosophy. Keep in mind this idea of dual aspects. Influenced by his Harvard Professor W.V.O. Quine, Davidson rejects (as I do) Quine's behaviorism and reductivism, also simplistic and eliminative materialism. Davidson's thinking is very American. For Davidson, behaviorism can confirm but not establish meaning. Quine's notion of radical translation is supplemented with Davidson's more Kantian idea of radical interpretation. It is not enough, for example, to translate analytical discourse into phenomenological terms. It is also necessary to "interpret radically" what is translated and evaluate the ways in which we and the world(s) are different because of this discourse. David Lewis, "The Logic of What Might Have Been," in Philosophical Review, 98, 1 (January 1989), pp. 3-14; and see Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 44-45.
Continental philosophers may turn to Leszek Kolakowski's, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (Indiana: St. Augustine, 2001), p. 69 ("transcendental consciousness") and Christopher McCann's, Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 44-60 ("Cartesian Meditations"), then Gregory McCulloch's, Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to the Early Sartrean Themes (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 71-82 ("imaging"). Sartre is among my favorite of the "weird Kantians."
This Americanism is something not often appreciated about Davidson's highly technical writings as compared with Rorty's more accessible prose. Davidson is a defender of a kind of Kantian freedom. He is also an opponent of relativism and nihilism in ethics as well as skepticism in epistemology: "Error can be found only in the setting of largely true beliefs. Massive error about the world is simply unintelligible." (Davidson, quoted in After Philosophy, p. 163.)
Just as we find the external world already present in our thought processes in language, so our discovery of a moral capacity, love, and intentionality that points us towards others, through words, reveals what we might call "God" at the source and foundation of human knowing. If one theme in Davidson's writings is freedom, then another "issue" (as lawyers say) for this seemingly abstruse thinker is hope. Davidson's optimism concerning the relationship between "radical interpretation" and understanding all linguistic communications as well as meanings -- along with his holism -- is a supreme act of hope. We can understand one another, according to Davidson, and make the world better. (See my comparison of Senator Hillary Clinton's and former President Bill Clinton's as well as President Obama's respective philosophical orientations in my essay on the Jena 6 controversy.)
To the best of my knowledge, no scholar has aligned Davidson's work with the hermeneutic theory of Paul Ricoeur or the jurisprudence of John Finnis. See Finnis' Natural Law, Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 100-127, then compare: H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 120-138 with Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 14-81. There are surprising parallels among these philosophers' writings. It is a single step from Davidson to Cornel West and the politics of Barack Obama. For example, see Cornel West, "Prophetic Pragmatism and Postmodernity," in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989), pp. 235-239.
A. A Sidebar on Hume and Game Theory.
If there is a single pathology in American legal and social thinking these days, then it must be the willing embrace of inhumanity. To recognize the importance of logical method in legal reasoning or economic policy must not blind us to our humane values and goals in using these instruments for our collective purposes. Notice in the following quote the confusion concerning reason, reasonableness and rationality, not to mention the almost autistic absence of moral sense or feeling:
"We follow the great philosopher David Hume" -- it was Hume who cautioned readers: "be a philosopher, if you must, but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man"! -- "in regarding reason as the slave of the passions. As he extravagantly remarked, there would be nothing irrational about his preferring the destruction of the entire universe to scratching his finger. However, we go even further down this road by regarding reason purely as an instrument for avoiding inconsistent behavior. Any consistent behavior counts as rational."
Ken Binmore, A Very Short Introduction to Game Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 7. (Compare "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" with "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
David Hume would be the first to point out that Mr. Binmore has failed to understand that, reason (which, for Hume, is the "slave of the passions") and rationality are instruments in the service of indispensable human ends -- like laws that are designed to serve moral goals. Hume did not suggest that we discard moral ends or purposes, nor theories of human nature. Hume merely suggested that such ends or purposes have to do with "sentiments" or feelings, very intelligent feelings to be sure, but feelings nonetheless. The great British philosopher noted that, after arrival at his skeptical conclusions, he withdrew to his parlor for a game of billiards, happily assuming the validity of items of common sense and the existence of a real world just like everybody else. Kant would explain why Hume was wise to do so. Mary Wollstonecraft was among the first theorists to see that feelings have a cognitive content.
Kant would argue that Hume's error was to overstate the scope of rationality and understate the importance of reason in balancing feelings with rationality. The Romantics erred in the opposite direction by overstating the scope of the passions and undervaluing rationality, whereas the Kantian Critical Theory restored the Enlightenment project after Hume's devastating skepticism was shown not to be so devastating, allowing for the reintroduction of faith (sublime) and art (beauty) as part of the project of human improvement.
An essay on the work of David Hume -- perhaps focusing on the fact/value controversy -- is forthcoming. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.") I hesitate to offer a long quote at this point since this essay is very long already. This aspect of my analysis of Davidson's work is important, however, so I will pause to explain Hume's psychologism and metaethics, briefly, noting that -- while I disagree with Hume -- I believe that he was the greatest of the British Enlightenment thinkers, outdone only by the Prussian Immanuel Kant, in an age filled with genius. Alasdair MacIntyre (a critic of Hume's moral epistemology) summarizes Hume's skepticism:
"Moral judgments cannot be factual, so Hume argues, on quite other grounds. They are not factual, because factual judgments cannot move us to action." [Hume would have rejected the position of the "game-theorist" quoted above not on logical grounds, but for moral reasons produced by what he called, "the moral sentiments," i.e., again, feelings.] Factual judgments are not practical, whereas this is the central function of moral judgments. Hume contrasts, at this point, reason and the passions. Reason is concerned either with relations of ideas (as in mathematics) or with matters of fact."
This sharp division of reason from passion is challenged not only by Kant in the final Critique and in his religious writings as well as most Continentalist philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (including the discoveries of psychoanalysis), but also by the revolution in quantum physics and biological mathematics or genetics as well as environmental biology. (See "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Passion or emotion is a feature of all our thinking, including scientific thinking. This does not deprive us truth or objectivity. The same Cartesian dichotomy that separates passion from reason postulates that only one of those two human attributes, reason, is "objective or universal." This separation and denigration of feeling is filled with questionable assumptions -- racist and sexist assumptions as well as others -- and is challenged, for example, by phenomenologists and hermeneutic thinkers. Feeling is a kind of thinking; reasoning is a kind of feeling. Philip Ferreira, F.H. Bradley: Feelings and the Structure of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999), pp. 15-31 (Bradley on judgments). Furthermore, this recognition restores aesthetics to a central place in American philosophy's more complex reinvention of rigor: Arthur Danto, "Art, Evolution, and the Consciousness of History," in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 188-210 and Elisabeth Shellekens, Aesthetics and Morality (New York & London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 101-110. ("Kant's account of beauty as the symbol of morality.")
Women intellectuals and artists have always been among the most steadfast adherents of this more complex point of view, notably Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil. As a matter of fact, Hume's lover was among those to suggest that the great skeptic simply needed to, as it were, "take a chill pill." See Jean Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel, 1957), p. 90. I will first omit the final sentence from this quote, then I will suggest that this final sentence is an afterthought, a kind of recoiling by Sartre from the theological territory that he entered in his analysis:
"Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus, the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born."
Suddenly, Sartre realizes where his thinking has taken him and he adds a final line:
"But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain." -- Don't be so sure, Jean Paul! -- "Man is a useless passion."
Please see my essay on "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism." Back to David Hume by way of Professor MacIntyre:
" ... We are moved to act not by this or that being the case, but by the prospect of pleasure or pain from what is or will be the case. [This simplistic explanation of human motivation is almost universally derided today, since it has led to the horrors of Soviet psychology in the service of the state and comparable cruelties of American behaviorism, as well as to crude forms of Benthamite utilitarianism and rationalizations of slavery.] And not reason, but the passions are aroused by the prospect of pleasure or pain. Hume's psychologism leads him to speak as if what he is describing are the causes of movement in human beings; he may be plausibly rewritten (and at times indeed rewrites himself) so that what he asserts is not a thesis about the causes of behavior" -- which is somewhat ludicrous in a post-Newtonian universe when persons are no longer seen as "machines"! -- "but one about the logic of practical argument." (Even as a description of the grounds for practical argument this account is simplistic.)
"Introduction," in Hume's Ethical Writings (New York: MacMillan, 1965), pp. 12-13. See also, David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover, 2004), pp. 14-60 and Ernest Campbell Mossner's introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature (London & New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 17-19. I purchased and read sections of this work along with William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (New York & London: Penguin, 1985), to reward myself on graduating from law school. Mr. Mossner's biography, for example, contains a revealing discussion of Hume's "correspondence" with his understanding French countess, Madame La Comtesse de Boufflers -- the great love of Hume's life and almost wife -- who disagreed with Hume concerning causality, facts and values. E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (London: Penguin, 1954).
Hume's understanding countess is seen in her letters to Hume as sharp, funny, worldly and a brilliant woman, who is fascinated, then amused by her "British genius" and also charmed by his ... "innocence." I recall the letters by Hume and the Comtesse de Boufflers as well as the veiled discussion of this relationship by a tactful biographer, who missed the crucial importance of those letters. Hume regarded this lady -- who did not have a university education -- as among the most perceptive and insightful critics of his work. I concur. David Appelbaum, The Vision of Hume (Mass.: Element, 1996), pp. 32-44. I recommend Mary Wollstonecraft's discussion of "rights." Wollstonecraft's borrowings from and reaction against Hume were derived by way of Hume's "common sense" critic Thomas Reid: See Wollstonecraft's classic, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York & London: Penguin, 1983), pp. 219-227. Finally, see again: "David Hume's Philosophical Romance." Western philosophy sometimes appears as a conversation in which only one side (masculine) is heard when many of the best ideas may be found on the other side (feminine). ("Master and Commander.")
Is it reasonable to be an irrationalist about morality? Is it rational to doubt the reality of morals? If Hitler is "consistent" -- I suspect that he was! -- does this make him "rational"? Or "moral"? Are "reason" and the "passions" ever fully distinguishable? A psychopathic killer may be rational. Josef Mengele was rational and scientific. Rational towards what ends? Is all rationality REASONABLE? Are there not multiple and various reasonable "ends" for human beings that determine their rationality? (See the writings of John Finnis.) Doesn't much depend on context?
Too many lawyers and social scientists have lost all appreciation of the significance of such concerns. They usually specialize in ethics issues. Consider the idea of a "fusion of horizons" developed by Davidson's contemporary and (like Ricoeur) a hermeneutic thinker, Hans Georg Gadamer, in light of the political difficulties in the world today and in terms of the therapeutic relation. Brutality and all attempts to control others precludes the possibility of understanding. Power distorts communication. As anyone who has seen an exchange between an executive and an underling knows, "bosses" tend to be told what they want to hear. Think of combining the insights of Michel Foucault with Charles Taylor in light of this idea. Jurgen Habermas also comes to mind. This distortion in communication that comes with disparities in power is something for U.S. presidents to ponder:
"Language has its true being only in conversation, in the exercise of understanding between people." (emphasis added)
Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975), p. 404. In Davidson's essay "Gadamer and Plato's Philebus," the American philosopher responds: "Gadamer has a much more basic claim, that thought itself depends on [shared] language." Truth, Language, and History, p. 274. (See my essay, if hackers have not destroyed it, "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
Communication and genuine understanding only happens between equals since these are products of respectful recognition, not conditioning, requiring far more than rationality. If there is one place where passion and reason meet, then it must be in language. In true philosophical dialogue, everyone is an equal. There are no "superiors." Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 266-294 (Frederick G. Lawrence, trans.) and Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 17-157. ("This is called dialectics.") Thomas McCarthy, "Rationality and Relativism: Habermas's 'Overcoming' of Hermeneutics," in John B. Thompson and David Held, eds., Habermas: Critical Debates (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 57-79. ("Variations on Kantian Themes.")
Think of Davidson as an astronaut sitting in a rocket, tuning every dial and engine, who cannot bring himself to lift off and soar. With the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty chose to soar, waving goodbye to professional safety and comfort. Davidson opted for ultimate professional success at the cost of staying within well-defined professional boundaries, until very late in his career. Rorty threw off the straightjacket of analytical philosophy much earlier in his academic life. Davidson dyed his straightjacket a funky color, added a cravat, pinned on a few medals from the APA, but never quite removed that analytical staightjacket until the end. James B. White spoke of legal reasoning and writing as "fencing in a straightjacket." Make of that comment what you will, psychobabblers. No artist -- especially no actor -- can hope to do his or her best work while wearing an emotional straightjacket. Genius in philosophy as well as the arts consists in a reasonable balance of rationality and passion.
Are you wearing an intellectual straightjacket? Is analytical philosophy a kind of straightjacket? Behaviorism? At their best, both science and philosophy are liberating removals of all barriers to thought. At or near the end of his life, Davidson's return to his doctoral dissertation topic (Plato's Philebus) and the puzzles of interpretation in hermeneutic theory brought his analytical thinking, as I have indicated, into a "dialogue" with the work of Hans Georg Gadamer. Davidson's trajectory is a kind of hermeneutic circle, starting again at the end of his life with a new beginning in philosophy, by returning to philosophy's beginnings -- and his own.
Philosophers intent on obtaining respect from colleagues in the sciences during Davidson's life-time failed to notice that their notions of "rigor" had been outgrown, especially in the sciences. Ms. Jacoby, this means you. This explains Davidson's progressive estrangement from anything that might be called conventional empirical materialism and increasing respect for the non-reducibility or "anomalous" nature of mental reality. I'm pretty anomalous. Aren't you? The universe is not all that normal either. Talk about weird. Contemporary science suggests that the universe should be sent to reform school or juvenile prison. Fortunately, the universe and our solar system are still young -- 100 billion years yet to go! -- so there is hope for growth and learning. Aren't we students of philosophy always in our "wonder years"?
For Davidson and Gadamer we exist as "interpreting creatures." Davidson's work -- like Rorty's -- culminates with a move toward reconciling the schism in Western thought between analytical and Continental schools in a post-analytical and neo-pragmatist direction. Philosophers say: "Pick your poison." You can either tell us that "the cat is on the mat" and (perhaps) be very clear, or you can take the "meaning of life" question seriously, risking obscurity for insight. Can you do both? Well, most of these philosophical boys and girls try to do exactly that, while denying that this is what they are doing. Davidson finally admitted that this perhaps contradictory and impossible project -- clarity and logical precision with theoretical ambition -- was his life's goal and (I believe) partial achievement. See Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars (New York & London: Verso, 1987). (Eagleton's novel may be read as an early attempt to answer the question examined in his most recent essay.)
Herbert Von Karajan described his goal upon being appointed as Chief Conductor of the Paris Symphony as "marrying German profundity with French clarity." This metaphor may have had something to do with Karajan's "new" French wife at the time. In any case, it is the best description I know of Continental philosophy. Isn't this -- perhaps impossible goal of clarity with deep explanatory power -- one definition of all types of philosophy? Now that's what I call reasonable.
Davidson's project is to develop a non-reductive semantic theory of meaning distinct from and yet dependent upon truth, while remaining externalistic and limited to physical laws. Not bad for a kid from Springfield, Massachusetts. I think it is the idea of natural laws "determining" consequences that needs to be revised. What is meant by "determination"? To borrow from Susan Langer, Davidson's philosophy is "metaphysics in a new key." Judges are somewhat similar. "I am not creating the law. I am only interpreting it." Yeah, right. It's a little of both. Incidentally, fans of game theory are among today's idealists. Game theorists believe that mathematical modelling can determine or predict outcomes of interactions or games, events in the "real" world, at future times. (See "Where are thoughts located?" and "Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?")
II. "... we cannot be wrong in thinking there is a world outside our minds." (Donald Davidson)
Davidson's controversial claim that "we cannot be wrong in thinking there is a world outside our minds" could have been made by Kant. Given Berkeley's religious faith, it might also have been made by the good Bishop whose name adorned the school at which Davidson taught near the end of his life. Think carefully about exactly what Davidson is saying we cannot be wrong about. (See "Is it rational to believe in God?") Here is Davidson quoting Spinoza:
"All modes of thinking have God for a cause, insofar as He is a thinking thing, and not insofar as He is explained by another attribute. So what determines the Mind to thinking is a mode of thinking and not of Extension, i.e., it is not the body."
"Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects," p. 306. I have decided that 2009 is my year for studying Spinoza in depth: Compare Gilles Deleuze, "Spinoza's Letters on Evil," in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), pp. 30-44 (Robert Hurley, translation) with Lewis Samuel Lauer, "All Things Live in God: Spinoza's Panpsychism," in Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 235-239, then Christopher Isherwood, "Tota Puri," in Ramakrishna and His Disciples (California: Vedanta Press, 1965), pp. 111-127. (" ... there is the madhura bhava [The Sweet Mood] in which the devotee approaches God as a lover.")
My adversaries in New Jersey will suggest that such claims can be ignored because they are not made by a scientist. Let us pause to consider what some scientists have to say. First, David Bohm:
"More generally, then, given perception and action, our theoretical insights provide the main source of organization of our factual knowledge. Indeed, our overall experience is shaped in this way. As seems to have been first pointed out by Kant, all experience is organized according to the categories of our thought, i.e., on our ways of thinking about space, time, matter, substance, causality, contingency, necessity, universality, particularity, etc. It can be said that these categories are general forms of insight or ways of looking at everything" -- usually grounded in what is rationally necessary, even in a transcendent way -- "so that in a certain sense they are a kind of theory ..."
Again:
" ... wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man's action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. In other words, it is just because reality is whole that man, with his fragmentary approach, will inevitably be answered with a correspondingly fragmentary response." ("Is this atheism's moment?")
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 6-7. The implications of the new science and biochemistry for the philosophical problem of consciousness is only now being appreciated, after the pioneering work of Roger Penrose:
"It is the central argument of this book that we conscious human beings are the natural bridge between the everyday world and the world of quantum physics, and that a closer look at the nature and role of consciousness in the scheme of things will lead both to a deeper philosophical understanding of the everyday and to a more complete picture of quantum theory."
Dana Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: Quill, 1990), p. 10.
If you love a woman, for example, then you do not love her at one moment of her life, say, at age twenty. You love her life's journey and wish to share that journey with her, however painful this may be. If you enjoy a film, then it is not one scene or frame that you relish, but the whole movie that gives that one scene its "meaning." Mr. Hume's skepticism about the self was based on his alleged inability to find this identity at any single instant. At the end of Hume's life, however, the philosopher's passion for the pretty countess (who teased him "mercilessly" about doubting the existence of his own self) must have undermined that skepticism, since Hume's memories and passion made the journey of his lonely self cohesive as well as meaningful. See David Hume's final testament. Mark Buchanan says:
"Like Smolin and Markopoulou, Adler's scheme assumes a pre-quantum level of physical fields currently unknown to physics." (Noumenal reality? Panpsychism? God?)
"Quantum Unentanglement," in New Physics, November 3-9, 2007, at p. 39. A "Deus Principle" that contains and "explains" all? See astrophysicist Bernard Haisch's, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind it All (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006), p. 16. Paul Davies writes in "Taking Science on Faith," in The New York Times, November 24, 2007, at p. A17:
"Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith -- namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws [same thing?] maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence."
David Deutsch explains:
"Lockwood introduces the term Mind to denote the multiple entity that is having all the ('maximal') experiences that I am in reality having ...") "Comments on 'Many Minds' Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by Michael Lockwood," http://www.qubit.org/people/david/Articles/CommentOnLockwood.html
Now turn to: G.K. Chesterton, "The Permanent Philosophy," in St. Thomas Aquinas: "The Dumb Ox" (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 132-151. ("God is thought thinking itself.")
My seemingly "paradoxical" statements are often not understood because persons -- including many young philosophy students -- are no longer taught about idealism or phenomenology, rationalism or hermeneutics, never mind teleology and Aquinas, or quantum theory and process theology. Philosophical studies in America are (mostly) weak in the important history of the subject. Creative associations among doctrinal fields are discouraged. This allows Internet adversaries to describe me as a "fool" because I tend to think such concepts and traditions are important. They are important -- even to seemingly unrelated subjects, like law.
Weakness in knowledge of the history of philosophy and science is one explanation for the grievous faults in an interesting recent book by Professor John McCumber. Being classified as "retarded" or a "fool," as I have been, may explain the sabotage attempts made against these writings every day. It is not disagreement with what I say, it is my ability to express what others do not or cannot say that is unforgivable. I seem to have escaped the category allotted to me by U.S. society. This is alarming and gratifying. Everyone should escape the category to which he or she is assigned by society. (See George Clooney's performance in "Up in the Air.")
A. Biography.
Donald Davidson was born on March 6, 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts. The Davidsons moved to Staten Island in 1924. Davidson began his studies at Harvard University in 1935, on a scholarship from the Harvard Club in New York. Davidson studied, first, with Alfred North Whitehead and then, in 1939, he took his first logic course under W.V.O. Quine. Interestingly, this highly rigorous philosopher, Donald Davidson -- who is regarded as intimidating and forbidding in his fondness for abstractions and technicality -- often called the ultimate "professional" philosopher, began his academic career as an English major, first viewing many great philosophers as literary figures.
Kant and Hegel are important (if often undetected) thinkers, under the surface of Davidson's prose. There is also a mystical streak in Davidson. Kant is mentioned specifically in several of Davidson's essays, as we will see, while Hegel's ideas are often closer than one might imagine for both Davidson and Putnam, even more so in Richard Rorty's thinking:
"Seen from a broader perspective, Hegel's argument is striking because of the connection it forges between realism and intersubjectivity. Apparently paradoxically, Hegel combines realism with an emphasis on the social dimension of knowledge, an emphasis that has been all-too often [interpreted as] anti-realistic. But, for Hegel, intersubjectivity is not a replacement for realism but its very foundation. What Hegel essentially does ... is to socialize Kant's idealism, so that the 'I' of Kant's 'I think' must be part of a 'we think.' ..."
Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), p. 177.
This summary of one reading of Hegel's epistemology and metaphysics is also a concise statement of the philosophical foundations for the thinking of one of America's great and neglected philosophers. Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (New York: MacMillan, 1917), pp. 536-554 ("Post-Kantian Monistic Idealists"). From Ms. Calkins' revolutionary theory it is a natural progression to both Judith Butler and Roy Bashkar. Professor Calkins is more timely and suggestive today than she was in her day. Mary Whiton Calkins was and remains far ahead of more celebrated male philosophers who are still part of the syllabus. Calkins is mostly unknown to young philosophers in my experience. Calkins adopts a fusion approach to metaissues in 1917 that is considered revolutionary in 2009. Calkins is unconcerned about crossing philosophical boundaries to discuss philosophers in several traditions and join their insights to her own. A dialogue between Calkins and Bradley would have been fascinating. Was Calkins "intimidated" about approaching the reclusive Professor Bradley?
Harvard University refused to award Professor Calkins a doctorate, despite her completion of all requirements for the degree in the estimation of Royce, James, and Santayana, because Ms. Calkins had the effrontery to be a woman. ("Mary Warnock and Women Philosophers.") To my knowledge, no scholar in the English-speaking world is pursuing these important associations and unresolved questions. We are the losers when thinkers like Professor Calkins are subjected to insulting neglect and disdain. Why are no feminist scholars interested in this American thinker's pioneering work?
Idealism is not solipsism. There is an objective and social turn in the idealist tradition as well as a linguistic revolution in Continental thought, which is different from the "linguistic turn" in analytical philosophy. Today, the best place to find Continental linguistic thinking is in phenomenological-hermeneutics, where idealism becomes constructivism and unites with various strands of thought, from rationalism to empiricism and pragmatism. Marjorie Grene (UC Davis) is a good example of the type of philosopher I describe. John Wild (Yale) is another such philosopher. Hegel's socialized transcendental ego becomes a kind of collective "Spirit" or subject, leading to Carl Jung's collective subconscious. Notice that shared passion matters for both thinkers, Hegel and Jung, who are also deviant Kantians.
Although Alfred Tarski's semantic theory of truth and Quine's chastened empiricism are often mentioned as formative influences, few scholars note the important early influence of Davidson's tutor in 1939 at Harvard, David Prall, who was a historian of the subject and who prepared Davidson for examinations in all the traditional areas of the discipline. Davidson, p. 3.
"W.V. Quine was my teacher at a crucial stage in my life." Davidson writes, explaining his dedication to Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (1984): "He not only started me thinking about language, but he was the first to give me the idea that there was such a thing as being right, or at least wrong, in philosophy, and that it matters which." Inquiries, p. xx and Davidson, p. 33. The italics were removed from the title in this paragraph since my most recent reading of the essay. I can't wait to see what other surprises await me as I review this essay. Davidson's dedication of that work to his professor is beautiful: "For W.V.O. Quine, without whom not."
B. Point of View and Narrative Line.
Davidson's work shifts between two perspectives or points of view. These shifts between points of view are not always spelled out in the essays, which is one reason for their difficulties. I suspect that this shifting is, at least sometimes, unconscious. To my knowledge, commentators have not bothered with combining literary and philosophical techniques in seeking to understand this thinker. I suggest that such a combination of methods will be crucial to the "radical interpretive" task of understanding Davidson's dual aspect thinking. More on this later. Incidentally, Stephen Hawking's essays are a great pleasure to read and should receive the attention and criticisms of philosophers. I plan to infuriate my critics by presuming to read and comment critically on these fascinating essays. Professor Hawking is an excellent writer and thinker whose work is accessible to most people who can read the English language.
In his focus on language and truth Davidson adopts what he calls "the point of view of the recipient of language" or linguistic communication. This is an externalist perspective. It is Davidson's anti-Cartesian move, where Davidson's thinking is closest to Quine. Umberto Eco's work on a recipient theory of communications and his semiotics is very useful to appreciating Davidson. Davidson is also near to one side of Husserl and the phenomenological tradition, i.e., the existentialists.
Most Continental philosophy, on the other hand, is "subject-centered." Most Anglo-American philosophy is a search for the "God's eye point of view." Anglo-American philosophy often seeks an escape from "subjectivity." For us Euro-American philos, there ain't no such escape. However, we've still got truth and objectivity. Davidson walks a high wire between these perspectives. We all must do the same in this postmodernist setting. Alasdair McIntyre's comments on the works of Hans Georg Gadamer may be useful to the project of reconciliation of analytical and Continental thought, also to the fusion of scientific and humanistic cultures currently underway.
What we need now is a multiple-aspect approach that incorporates the insights -- as opposed to the mistakes -- in rival traditions. David Deutsch's thinking is helpful: I will write soon about a highly recommended work in which ideas simply explode (unfortunately, so do a number of serious errors that undermine the author's project), see John McCumber, Reshaping Reason: Towards a New Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 1-56. (The book appeared in hard cover in 2005, but I am only a poor student -- who purchased the less expensive paperback in 2007.) Professor McCumber tells us: "... our utterances have degrees of truth, ... but ... we cannot tell with any precision, what those degrees are. I call this a hermeneutic view of sentential truth. It holds that true and false ... are no more rigorously ascertainable, in a given case, than 'large' and 'small.' ..." (p. 46.)
Alas, I must "demur." Professor McCumber has stepped on a land mine by failing to distinguish epistemological difficulties from ontological ones -- "ascertaining" truth is distinct from truth's "existence," as evidenced by the inability to ascertain the truth in this debate itself, even as we pronounce true statements all the time -- and by failing to attend to the extensive discussions of indexicals in analytical philosophy, along with the sharp cleavage between epistemological and ontological inquiries. McCumber's analysis falters and grinds to a halt. Whether we know truth (and how much we know) may be a matter of degree, truth itself is not and can not be a "sort-of" kind of a thing. Thus, we encounter the following astonishing claim by McCumber that would have caused a stroke if it were heard by Davidson or Putnam, "... there is no number which is the number of pine trees in the Rocky Mountains." (p. 46.) Furthermore, "not even God" can know this number. McCumber concludes that we must stop trying to say "absolutely true things" and settle for what we say to be "as true as we can make it." (pp. 46-47.)
There certainly is such a thing as the number of pine trees in the Rocky Mountains. John Searle says so. Furthermore, even without God, we can (for once!) "just go and look" since this is an empirical question that merely requires sufficient resources, time, and effort. Where are those scientists when we need them? God, being all-powerful and all-knowing, by definition, would not break a sweat figuring this out for us. True, we have to define our terms first: What is a Pine Tree? At what point do we call something a "tree" and so on? Here's my dictionary. It won't take long. As for "absolute," first Terry Eagleton, then John Searle:
"That truth is absolute simply means that if something is established as true -- a taxing, messy business, often enough, and one which is always open to revision -- then there are no two ways about it. It does not mean that truth can only be discovered from some disinterested viewpoint. In fact, it says nothing about how we arrive at truth. [It is also irrelevant to how well we know the truth or whether our knowledge is subject to revision.] It simply says something about the nature of truth itself."
After Theory (New York: Perseus, 2003), pp. 105-106.
That was the left jab. Here comes the right cross that demonstrates the self-referential and contradictory problems that cannot be eliminated from McCumber's position to the extent that it can even be articulated coherently:
"Any attempt to find out about the real world at all" -- or to say how things are or what is the case -- "presupposes that there is a way that things are. That is why it is wrong to represent external realism as the view that there are material objects in space and time, or that mountains and molecules, and so on exist. Suppose there were no mountains or molecules, and no material objects in space and time. Then those would be facts about how the world is and thus would presuppose external realism. That is, the negation of this or that claim about the real world presupposes that there is a way things are, independently of our claims."
Mind, Language and Society (New York: Perseus, 1998), pp. 30-31.
This is not to suggest that we will ever fully know how things are and it has nothing to do with the obvious point that we need minds to know things. Professor McCumber's position collapses into self-contraditory assumptions, especially when it comes to McCumber's (I regret to say this) hopelessly muddled discussion of time, atemporality, eternity and utterance. Inserting "errors" in my essay will not help McCumber's thinking. I expect to devote a brief essay-review to McCumber's book, which is fun reading. At this point in "time," I invite you to read carefully -- Professor McCumber does not -- the discussion of "simultaneity" as requiring "a particular perspective" (p. 17), then notice the failure to consider point of view in alleging that "a sentence does have to be contemporaneous, though not simultaneous, with whatever makes us accept it for true." (p. 18.) Contradiction? From whose perspective or point of view is the sentence "contemporaneous"? Guess what Professor McCumber is arguing for, much to his surprise and chagrin -- God. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
"Contemporaneous" with what and for whom (or when) is not all that clear, as indeed it could not be clear. No detailed theoretical definitions of "simultaneous" or "contemporaneous" are offered, although these are contested terms. Furthermore, McCumber seems to assume both a correspondence theory of truth and truth-criteria of "verification" (what's that?), despite the unexamined and devastating criticisms against both doctrines. This assumption is made without any argument when each doctrine requires a book-length defense. (pp. 15-20.)
More "errors" inserted and corrected. December 10, 2007 at 9:27 A.M. distracting phone calls from 402-727-2510. I guess somebody who doesn't like me is -- or was -- a John McCumber fan. Too bad. Try Simon Blackburn. See, for example, Simon Blackburn, "Review of Davidson's Truth and Predication," http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Davidson.htm "... there is nothing lawlike about the mental and the physical ... mental description imports a vocabulary for describing them which is unsuited for occurrence in physical laws (hence, anomalous)."
Thus, mental and cerebral are "nothing but" a single entity's dual way of being in the world. In determining meaning, under the inspiration of Tarski, the social and objective features of the world "mirrored" in language will require an application of Davidson's "Principle of Charity," which is the rigorous effort to make sense of what is said by a speaker so as to fulfill the mission of radical interpretation/communication. This entails an imaginative ability to "inhabit" a rival point of view.
Judges and lawyers should take note of this doctrine because it is the essence of jurisprudential genius. Example: look at the way Ronald Dworkin or Lon Fuller summarize rival jurisprudential positions in a paragraph or with an abstract character ("Hercules" for Dworkin, "Rex" for Fuller). See, e.g., Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 81-131 ("Hercules") and The Morality of Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 33-94 ("Rex"). Despite being out of fashion, Lon Fuller is one of the most imaginative and insightful legal philosophers of the twentieth century who should be read by students, lawyers, and judges today. See Lon L. Fuller, Legal Fictions (California: Stanford University Press, 1967), pp. 49-139.
George Santayana would point out that "Hermes, the interpreter" must "run" from the anomalous realm of mental explanations to the only slightly less anomalous realm of actions and causes "explaining" empirical events. "Explanation" is a troublesome concept for Santayana and Davidson, also for Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 8-11. Davidson's epistemological move will imply an entire metaphysics of language, a new transcendental argument, assigning speakers to a location in space and time. A useful comparison may be drawn between Eco's idea of a "force" and Davidson/Nozick on "explanation" as compared with "cause." Davidson achieves a theological significance in his writings with this Americanized transcendental argument:
"If this transcendental argument works, it follows that there is a correspondence between general aspects of our language and general aspects of reality. These aspects can be identified through formal semantic analysis, thus yielding a 'metaphysics of logical grammar,' the appropriate contemporary form of Kant's 'metaphysics of experience.' ..." (Why would there be such a correspondence found in language? Guess?)
After Philosophy, p. 163. A good comparison is found in Leszek Kolakowski, Religion: If There is No God ... (Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2001) and in the Hebrew tradition of reflection, see Paul Weiss, Modes of Being (Illinois: Southern Illinois Univesity Press, 1958), pp. 257-357 ("God"). Perhaps Professor McCumber would profit from reflecting on this paragraph:
"It is sound, I still think, to hold that philosophy is a circle, that every item in thought and in being is incomplete, and that what a good philosophic account presupposes is not beyond its capacity to encompass conceptually. ... each thing necessarily points to all the others, as the object of its needs, what it must take account of in order to be complete." (Weiss, p. 9.)
Concerning point of view:
"If explicit appeal must be made to speakers and their circumstances in giving a theory of truth, then on the assumption that the general features of language reflect objective features of the world, we must conclude that an intelligible metaphysics will assign a central place to the idea of people (=speakers) with a location in public space and time."
After Philosophy, p. 182.
This is Davidson's answer to McTaggart on the mystery of time and it is helpful in coming to terms with McCumber. What is John McCumber doing in California? The power of crystals? The influence of David Hume and Davidson's regular shifts to an internalist perspective is seen in Davidson's remarks on agency and causality, which are also linked to his "anomalous monism" as well as Davidson's engagement with Baruch Spinoza's "dual aspect" theory on mind/body issues.
Hume is one of my favorite philosophers, whose essays should be read by all students of philosophy, history, literature, law, or just good writing. Hume is the last philosopher who should be quoted in support of brutality, coercion, or censorship. Davidson suggests that "actions [are] events whose causal histories begin with the beliefs, thoughts, desires and intentions of an agent" (Kant) whereas "perceptions and emotions are caused by events in the world outside the body." (Hume) "Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects," at p. 293. Hume on sense data and Berkely are important again. If Paul Ricoeur is best thought of as a "Hegelian-Kantian," then Davidson may be seen as a "Humean-Kantian."
"... the problem is what can the connection between the mental and the physical be if it is to satisfy these conditions? Spinoza's answer, as we know, is that the mental and the physical are two ways of viewing one and the same world." (Dual aspects?)
"Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects," at p. 300.
Here's Davidson's definition of anomalous monism:
"I do not feel ashamed to admit that the reading I find plausible of Spinoza's ontological monism coupled with a dualistic (or multiple) explanatory apparatus is close to my own view of the relation between the mental and the physical. I call this position anomalous monism, and I have from the start recognized its kinship with Spinoza's views."
"Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects," p. 308.
Davidson is called an "identity theorist" on mind/body questions. (A new "error" was inserted in this foregoing sentence since last night.) Identity theory means that mind and brain are seen as "identical." What Davidson means by this is a non-reductive and non-eliminatively materialistic monism, strikingly similar to Spinoza's dual aspect monism, with some minor qualifications, which turns out to be a "dual-description" or "-aspect" theory, similar to the dominant view among phenomenologists like Mary Midgley.
Remember the physicial world is not so physical these days. What has an identity, in my view, is a person, not a brain or mind. A person has a brain which makes his or her mind possible. Nonetheless, mind is not reducible to the brain, since the mind is essentially a social and linguistic entity. Monistic idealists may well agree with this conclusion even as they express it in a different vocabulary.
The idea of a person implies a being-in-relation (Heidegger, Sartre, Ricoeur), which in turn implies shared grounds of relation or Being. This is to move from philosophy to theology, as a natural progression. It is also to bump into a bunch of scientists covering the same territory. You may begin to see the relevance of John Finnis and Neo-Thomism. Ludwig Heyde, The Weight of Finitude: On the Philosophical Question of God (New York: SUNY, 1999), pp. 44-56 and Jean Paul Sartre's Le diable et le bon Dieu (Paris: 1951). I promise the latter is highly relevant, especially to Heyde's discussion of Auschwitz and Davidson's final move toward a "meeting" with hermeneutics. There is no individual or autonomy without community. Now think again about the American Constitution's connection between liberty and equality, values which are protected first and foremost from government. Please keep this thought in mind when I discuss Magritte's ceci n'est pas une pipe below while "reflecting" on the same painter's less well-known masterpiece of 1936: Les Liasons dangereuses.
http://www.ankiewicz.com/writing/thesis/fig2.jpg (My image feature is damaged by hackers.)
Who are the lovers in this Magritte work? Please refer to "Judith Butler and Gender Theory." Is this painting a work of theology? The moment when identity becomes plural, when you realize that your very self could not exist without others, you are (necessarily) on your way to the concept of God. God ("love" if you prefer) is the connective tissue between being and essence.
"The ideal of a comprehensive vocabulary," Davidson writes, "in which complete explanations could in theory be given of any event does not in theory rule out the possibility of another, irreducibly different, vocabulary in which alternative explanations of the very same events could be produced." ("Dual- or Multiple-Description Theory.")
"Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects," at p. 302.
Any one of these descriptions will imply the others. This "entanglement" will necessitate a totality making each explanation meaningful. This Absolute or totality has a familiar name in global thought. Notice that the God-idea makes meaningful the Absolute implied by the existence of necessary relations which does not mean that God is found in all objects. God necessitates or grounds all MEANINGS of objects in relations as well as networks of relations. God is the "spinning top" that is the universe. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
What word would you use to describe the ultimate and absolute description that contains itself? Hint: It's a short word. There are a number of contexts in McCumber's book where his difficulties may be resolved by substituting the word "God" for his use of the word "truth." The vanishing of these difficulties thanks to the "God-concept" would have the effect of making McCumber's discussion much more profound and complex. See Reshaping Reason, pp. 27-28 (What does it mean to say that Heidegger's "truth" is "time [that] discloses itself"?) and Quentin Lauer, S.J., A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 2nd ed., 1993), pp. 293-297 ("... self-consciousness and God-consciousness are identified in absolute knowing.") Finally, see James W. Felt, Coming to Be: Towards a Thomistic-Whitehedian Metaphysics of Becoming (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), which I have just started, delighting in the author's unapologetic defense of metaphysics. Professor Felt describes metaphysics as: "Shooting at the moon ..."
Philosophers are shooting at the moon with a sling shot. No wonder New Jersey hackers are paid to disrupt and destroy these dangerous writings, bribed to suppress and censor my unsettling philosophical writings between bouts of thievery from the public treasury. Notice -- as McCumber doesn't -- that there is nothing "atemporal" about Hegelian absolute knowing -- which is always available here and now -- such knowing is merely "eternal." O.K., now think again about what or Who it is that "reveals itself," eternally. (See my essay-review "Is this atheism's moment?")
Does McCumber fail to appreciate that eternity is available in time? Shakespeare is happy to instruct him and all of us on this issue: "... That in black ink my love may still shine bright." (Sonnet 65.) Ekstasis? The possession of my time "all at once and as meaning" is a notion that goes back to the ancient Greeks. See Albert Camus's The Plague. (Yes, you can write an apostrophe and "s" after a word ending in "s.")
Both or multiple sets of explanations may be true. They may be contained within a larger truth. (See my essays on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley and soon, my examination of Mary Whiton Calkins' critical-dialectical-realist theory.) Davidson's "anomalous monism" suggests that a being with a single "identity" has a non-reductive mental life made possible by a physical body, a mental life whose explanation and understanding are not reducible to statements about that body and never will be. Explanations of mental phenomena can not be reduced to physical explanations -- except in theory, maybe -- since they constitute a different "explanatory discourse" for the one subject. However, each explanation may be necessary to the others.
This metaphysical stance is crucial to appreciating Davidson's views on reasons for action, causality and intentionality. These ideas concerning agency are in turn, potentially, vital for lawyers and judges. This following statement is not made by a theologian. It is the conclusion of one of the foremost mathematicians and physicists in the world:
"But even if we accept that consciousness itself has such a curious relation to time -- and that it represents, in some sense, contact between the external physical world and SOMETHING TIMELESS -- how can this fit in with a physically determined and time ordered action of the material brain? ... I am arguing for some kind of active role for consciousness, and indeed a powerful one" -- a new idealism-phenomenology in quantum physics -- "with a strong selective advantage."
Roger Penrose, "Where lies the physics of mind?," in The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 446. Please see Jane Fonda's performance in 33 Variations, by Moises Kaufman, Eugene O'Neill Theater, 230 Broadway, W. 39th Street, New York, N.Y. (Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Fonda have understood everything that you will find in this essay.)
Davidson's views may be seen as a postmodernist pluralistic epistemology leading to a language-based metaphysics for the fractal subject found in our carnival culture. Davidson has left us with a new "kinder and gentler" pragmatism. User-friendly Americanism in philosophy. Excellent, way excellent.
Putnam says: "Meaning ain't in the head." Davidson might respond: "Maybe not, but meaning can begin in the head." Davidson insists: "Only in the context of communication can one have objective truth." The idea of communication, however, may include cells "speaking" to one another, as my daughter and budding immunologist in biology informed me. Metaphors are inescapable in science. Thus, there is a new interest in a scientific hermeneutics transcending the boundaries of both philosophy and classical science. Subjects and environments "communicate." This suggests, again, the importance of interpretation in science as well as philosophy. Perhaps they also fall in love. In a Kantian moment, cosmologist Stephen Hawking underlines the importance of the a priori conditions for the possibility of life in an orderly universe:
"Indeed, such an imbalance between particles and antiparticles is yet another a priori condition for our existence ..."
"Inaugural Lecture at the Royal Society of Science," in John Boslough, Stephen Hawking's Universe (New York: Avon, 1989), p. 130. (See "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.") John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, "Entropy and the Paradox of Life," in Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985), p. 176:
"David Bohm argued that the appearance of life wasn't a chance conjunction of molecules but unfolded inevitably from [an instantiation] of the multi-dimensional order of the universe. He insists that the usual scientific distinctions between life and non-life are only abstractions, possessing limited value. In fact, life and non-life are implicitly woven into each other. [Dialectics, entanglement.] Travelling along on his far-from-equilibrium expedition, Ilya Prigogine encountered a similar discovery. Life and non-life both appear in non-equilibrium situations -- and such situations are everywhere. Nineteenth century thermodynamics" -- which is still taught to people in societies unfairly denied access to much of this scholarship, like Cuba -- "had portrayed a universe in which entropy increases and structures inevitably break down. Prigogine discovered a thermodynamics which describes how in far-from-equilibrium situations" -- like madness? -- "structures will inevitably form. [Prigogine] called the dynamics of such structures 'ORDER-THROUGH-FLUCTUATION.' ..." (emphasis added)
Interpretations? Perturbation theories? Probabilities? Collapse and reintegration. Metanoia. Apply this insight to brain science. Please see again Magritte's two paintings in this essay. Consider Paul Ricoeur's remark that language implies the Other. Gadamer's teaching that understanding is community. Taylor on the dialogical nature of identity. Do you begin to see what they are saying? Guess what we are doing now, as you read this essay? No, not that. We are creating a community in this text because one freedom (me) is inviting another freedom (you) to interpret. Creation is a more complex idea than many scientists realize. Creation is an invitation to participate, to "finish" what is created, including yourself. Think of what the word "Constitution" means. O.K., now try the Scriptures. Any thoughts? Think of that moment of true encounter in or "as" communication as "eternal." You can be eternal any "time" or place. All you have to do is "be."
It has been said that the best philosophers provide not simply new answers to classic philosophical controversies, but entirely new questions that lead us to reinterpret everything we thought we knew. Recent science is forcing us to do exactly that "reinterpreting."
Close your eyes and picture Jung's mandala, a crucifix, a Star of David, Buddha under the tree, Mecca, the Hindu trinity, or just the Milky Way, you'll get it. Do you prefer the double helix? Now open your eyes and look in your mirror -- whoever he or she may be. Where are you "now"? Does the figure reflected in the mirror ask you to "finish" yourself and the world? Does the universe "ask" scientists to interpret its processes? Is that "finishing" what he makes possible for her, through interpretations? What would you call this realization of the self with others or absolute "finishing" of creation? Communication? Understanding? Being? Love? What are the conditions for the possibility of communication and scientific knowledge? Think carefully. ("Brian Greene and the Science of Memory" and "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art," then "'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review" and "'Star Trek': A Movie Review" finally, "'The Fountain': A Movie Review.")
If you prefer, think of a microscope. You approach the microscope and observe what appears to be a tiny new year's eve bash. The phenomena that you discover under your microscope invites your interpretations as you sense that this enormous party among the tiniest entities is going on all the time and we're missing it. Think of how much fun it is to understand what's going on. Consider all the free food we're missing. Where are the tiny doughnuts? One way or kind of understanding of what's going on under your microscope is called "science." One way of deciding on the meaning of what is going on is "philosophy." Determining the place of both science and philosophy is "religion." William Johnston, The Mirror Mind: The Zen-Christian Dialogue (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), pp. 1-25 (Ichiro Okumura draws on Chinese philosophy and Christian theology for a scientifically-aware hermeneutics.) Please read a philosopher recommended by a friend in New Jersey, Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Los Angeles: University of California, 1980), pp. 1-46 ("What is Religion?")
"Although I am given to myself primordially as an animate body I am, Husserl thinks, still capable of observing the physical form assumed by that body in which I 'rule and govern directly,' for example, by looking at myself in a mirror." (McCann, p. 48.)
Unfortunately, our psyches are made up not of one dictator in control of all things, but of a messy Parliament of discordant voices. Now Kolakowski:
"There is no relation of precedence in God: neither in a temporal sense, as there is no time in God, nor logically, as logical precedence cannot be properly applied to the unspeakable unity." (Kolakowski, pp. 23-24.) (God as Quantum Mind?)
What would you call that necessary a priori unity making all knowing and communication possible? See Professor E.J. Lowe's claim that "metaphysics can indeed be about reality, and can avoid collapse into empirical scientific theory, provided we can learn to be content with the fact that, as far as actuality is concerned, metaphysics cannot provide us with certainties." The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press-Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 27. Notice that this does not dispute certainty in the metaphysics of logic. More on these issues later. Joseph Margolis, The Unraveling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca & London: Cornel University Press, 2003), pp. 42-77 ("Incommensurability.")
When you look into a microscope, are you not glancing in a mirror? I will now refer to a work that seems to bear no relation to these ideas. I suggest that it does. Angela Davis, "Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights," in Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 202-223. (How would you summarize Davis' understanding of what is a woman?) Why is it generally argued that we are moving from a masculine symbol of divinity and the universe, to a feminine symbol of both? Is the hostility to my writings a result of saying these things? How is it possible for feminist women to be manipulated into cooperating with "silencing" others? How is the spacing of paragraphs in this essay?
Getting these points accross to so-called "educated" adversaries in debates in contemporary America is very difficult. This is partly because of an outdated scientific picture of reality to which the American popular mind is clinging long after this "picture" or metaphor has lost all cognitive utility. It has nothing to do with how intelligent people happen to be. The universe is not a mechanical clock with rigid laws governing all causal relations. Simplistic or eliminative materialism is or should be dead as a doornail. The ground of Being, as Continentalists say, is also the ground of truth. Guess Who that might be? (See again: "Is it rational to believe in God?") My essay on the epistemology of belief has been defaced many times and may no longer exist as I wrote it. My computer is still under attack.
What are you seeing under that microscope again? What seems like chaos, turns out to fit into an incredibly beautiful order. Scientists say: "Yes, but there is no God creating that order." My response is: "How do you distinguish the dancer from the dance?" What do you call that order? What is that beauty? Take your time. Are you not a part of what you are seeing under the microscope? Are you not part of that beauty? If so, is that beauty not part of you, "now"? In the construction of gender identities in which we must share by virtue of being human, what are you doing by designating one gender as "inferior" to another? Notice that such identities only make sense as part of a system in which all are implicated.
Suppose a twenty year-old genius in his own mind (like the guy I used to be) says: "Can God stop time?" The answer to this little chestnut is easy. Whose time? Your time stops when you stop. The same is true for every empirical rational agent. If you ask whether time per say can be stopped by God, then you are postulating a knowing agent capable of conceiving of time in the absence of all humans, objectively or absolutely, which is to fashion an argument for and not against the existence of God. There can be no such thing as time per se without an absolute measurer of time. If you then ask whether such a God is limited to the passing of time, then the answer is even easier: Where and at what point would time be "stopped" from "passing" for an entity that is everywhere and everywhen? Which time? According to some scientists, for example, time runs backwards in a black hole or stops, but God is everywhere. God is in that black hole where time "stops," even as "He/She" is elsewhere where time "runs" normally, whatever that means. This question of whether "God can stop time," to the extent that it is meaningful, is an argument "for" God. God is the ultimate and eternal "multiple description" entity. In fact, just between us, you can argue that God is found in your ability to construct that argument and in the argument itself -- no matter who makes use of it or for what purpose. Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning, at pp. vii-viii.
You can accept this thinking and still be an atheist, by the way. Multiplicity theories offer many suggestive insights both to theologians and physicists. Do you see implications for those who deride femininity? Is "masculine" meaningful or real apart from "feminine"? In Davidson's words:
"Successful communication proves the existence of a shared, and largely true, view of the world. [God?] But what led us to demand the common view was the recognition that sentences held true -- the linguistic representatives of belief -- determine the meanings of the words they contain. Thus the common view shapes the shared language. [Gender is a language, a costume, a network of relations.] This is why it is plausible to hold that by studying the most general aspects of language we will be studying the most general aspects of reality."
"The Method of Truth in Metaphysics," in After Philosophy, p. 168. For a brilliant step in the direction suggested in this essay for metaphysical speculation taken by Christopher Norris, who could not have been aware of my writings, please see:
"What this comparison [of Derrida and others] with Chomskian linguistics helps to bring out is the connection -- at any rate the close analogy -- between issues concerning the scope, limits and precise nature of human creativity in language and issues concerning moral autonomy or the freedom to criticize and re-envisage our socio-political conditions of life."
Christopher Norris, "Free-Will, Creativity and Structural Constraint," in Fiction, Philosophy, and Literary Theory: Will the Real Saul Kripke Please Stand Up? (London: Continuum, 2007), at p. 217 (emphasis added).
Where's my copy of Chomsky's book? Take another look at your microscope and imagine that words are placed under that microscope. I wonder what we will find at the bottom of our languages? Consider, first, a comparison with literary hermeneutics in George Steiner, The Grammar of Creation (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001), at p. 20:
"The intuition -- is it something deeper than even that? -- the conjecture, so strangely resistant to falsification, that there is 'otherness' out of reach gives to our elemental existence its pulse of unfulfilment. We are the creatures of a great thirst. Bent on coming home to a place we have never known. ... Thus in philosophy, no less than in theology or poetics, the beginning of the story is also the story of the beginning."
Compare my quotation from Paul Weiss above with this scholar's comment on Davidson's philosophy and his search for a homecoming:
"One theme that emerges as new -- or at least as newly salient -- is a transcendental argument designed to show that it is only in the context of communication that one can have the concept of objective truth and have determinate thought about things in one's environment, because only in the context of communication does the concept of error have scope for application, and only in triangulating with another speaker on an object of common discourse can we secure an objectively determinate object of thought."
Triangulating is the right word. There can be no science without metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions, no scientific truth without faith. Davidson, p. 11. See George Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1923 and 1955), pp. vi-vii: "Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things ..." Connect Santayana with Calkins. Let us compare atheist Jean Paul Sartre's views:
"Each of our perceptions is accompanied by the consciousness that human reality is a 'revealer,' that is, it is through human reality that 'there is' being, or, to put it differently, that man is the means by which things are manifested. It is our presence in the world" -- mirrored in language -- "which multiplies relations. It is we who set up a relation between this tree and that bit of sky. Thanks to us, that star which has been dead for millennia, that quarter moon, and that dark river are disclosed in the unity of a landscape."
Now put humans in the picture and ask yourself what holds objectivity, this unity -- including the human realm -- in place? Why and how is scientific truth possible? Take your "time."
"Why Write?," in What is Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 40.
Davidson's semantic theory of meaning is now clear in light of his understanding of truth. Davidson employs a truth theory, "... in the sense of a finite axiomatic theory characterizing a truth predicate for a language, in the style of Tarski, to do the work of a compositional meaning theory for a language. The insight that this relies upon is that axiomatic truth definition that meets Tarski's Convention T enables one to read off from the canonical theorems of the theory what sentences of the language mean. ..." Davidson, p. 13.
Think of the etymology and definition of the word "canonical." What is the etymology of the word "radical"? The jurisprudential implications of this work in Davidson's celebrated philosophy of action, multiple description theory and radical translation from the "anomalous" realm of intentions and reasons to the public world of actions and liabilities are neglected both by philosophers and legal scholars. New Jersey lawyers and judges respond by asking: "Who had the stop sign?"
III. "The Law is without blemish or flaw and I, my Lords, embody the Law." (Gilbert & Sullivan)
What is the relation between an agent and those events that are his or her actions? In "Agency" (1980) Davidson contends that "actions are bodily movements that can be picked out under different descriptions -- under some of which an action is intentional and under others of which an action is unintentional -- and that an action may be described in terms of its effects -- so that a killing, for example, is nothing more than a bodily movement that causes a death, and so occurs before the death does." Davidson, p. 15. (Avoid, like the plague, S.L. Hurley's confusions on this issue.)
Perhaps it requires some experience with the worst kinds of emotional turmoil and suffering to perceive associations in knowledge and derive key insights that are not obvious to others. David Hume's mental crisis and breakdown comes to mind. Why do our thoughts "belong" to us? Why do they not float away in the night? Or do they? What is consciousness? Can I meet my consciousness for coffee later? Such questions and the insights to which they lead result from the sense -- almost always obvious among the greatest philosophers -- including some who have experienced torture, of being strangers in the world of "normality." (See the film "Starman" and Ben-Ami Scharfstein's 1980 study, The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought.)
Are these thoughts so dangerous or am I so "weird" that it is necessary to destroy or deface these writings on a regular basis? Does intelligence frighten you? I am revising this essay against an onslaught of computer attacks. Images I have used in my writings are found so disturbing that I am precluded, at this "time," from regaining access to MSN which is alleged to have "closed." My writings are censored, suppressed, then plagiarized. ("Master and Commander.")
"... there is the I, which, as certainly as it is subjective, aspires to rise above mere subjectivity. This is the I that we know and do not know, depending on the notion of 'knowing' that we adopt, on our degree of understanding of ourselves, and on our closeness to or estrangement from ourselves. This is the omnipresent human I in which everything we feel, think, and do is joined, and which, if we are able and lucky enough, externalizes itself into a somehow detachable, I-transcending form." (Scharfstein, p. 1.)
Think of my comment about putting humans in the picture. Now put the picture in humans. Let us be very careful at this point, unpacking all that is going on in Davidson's definition and pursuing the implications of the theory. Recall that Davidson has told us that anomalous monism makes the mental realm and its explanations identical with (but not reducible to) physical explanations; furthermore, Davidson has provided us with concepts of "radical interpretation" and "radical translation"; then he has suggested what amounts to a "multiplicity theory" which says: events may have various and "deviant causal chains." It follows from this reasoning that a single event may be "seen" 1) in terms of physical interactions; and 2) also mental explanations derived from intentions and reasons (intentions mediate reasons and the actions they "cause").
The task of the radical interpreter and translator -- like Hermes, the messenger of the gods -- is to travel between explanatory realms, translating by inferring, explanatory "patterns" yielding meanings and connections between "reasons" and "actions," "beliefs" and "intentions" as well as events or consequences and motives. Scientists? Philosophers? Actors? All are INTERPRETERS. This is to outline a hermeneutics of freedom.
A great actor brings Shakespeare's text to you as something new and living. This is the best description I have read of judicial reasoning as another "hermeneutics of freedom." (See my essay Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004), if it still exists. I am obstructed from seeing my books at Lulu.) The U.S. Constitution is today's law. However, within that law is an entire history, a history which stretches back to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. The Constitution's indestructible power is based on that rootedness in civilization through or within language. A great judge or legal scholar is like Muhammad Ali. He or she "floats like a butterfly, but stings like a bee." The legal mind is flexible, adept, quick and subtle. An example, in my opinion, is found in the decisions of New York's Judge Learned Hand. This is not to say that one agrees with every decision by such a judge, but that one admires the thinking that leads to those decisions and judgments by such a person.
A justice I admired -- whether or not I agreed with his decisions -- when he was on the New Jersey Supreme Court, whose work was philosophically adept, is Allan B. Handler. (How he got to the Trenton court is a mystery.) These days Handler is into the whole money thing. In Latin American jurisprudence there is a fascinating literature of "axiology" in interpretations of juridical principles, as I recall, especially in Argentina.
A new "error" has appeared and been corrected since my previous review of this essay. December 18, 2007 at 3:27 P.M. phone calls from 208-842-0107, more hackers being blocked, new scans. February 12, 2008 at 9:23 A.M. calls from 206-629-8606. More computer attacks. August 5, 2010 at 4:38 P.M. I am unable to close out a scan of my computer. I have spent several days correcting "errors" inserted in numerous writings. The foregoing sentence has been altered in the same way several times.
Philosophy of law in Argentina is very rich and developed in relation to the Italian, French and Spanish legal traditions. By the way, there is no required course in American law schools in comparative or international law. American lawyers are usually abysmally ignorant of other legal traditions, often this ignorance is balanced by a great lack of knowledge of their own tradition. The great Spanish commentators on the Code sections and juridical doxa are mostly unknown in America, as are the Spanish priests who pretty much invented international law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Suarez is the most celebrated of these jurists.
Davidson is unaware of the doctrine in criminal law of inchoate crimes and mistakes of fact or law. This makes some of his writings uncanny for lawyers. To my knowledge, this Davidsonian discussion has not taken place in law reviews. I do not have access to a law library. There may be a few scholars tracing connections between, say, physicist F. David Peat's "synchronicities," the work of David Deutsch regarding the "multiplicity of universes" providing a key to achieving a new world view synthesizing the theories of evolution, computation, and knowledge with quantum physics and anomalous monism. Deus principle? Professor McCumber should read David Deutsch's writings. (A quotation mark was removed from this paragraph since my previous review.) I doubt such multidisciplinary theory or scholarship exists today. Roberto Unger's analysis of what he used to call "Superliberalism" and later "Plasticity into Power" is analogous to these developments in quantum and explanatory theory. Is it time to examine "proximate cause" in Tort law in light of these developments in physics?
"... scientific knowledge consists," Oxford physicist David Deutsch writes, "of explanations, and the structure of scientific explanation does not reflect the reductionist hierarchy. There are explanations at every level of the hierarchy. Many of them are autonomous, referring only to concepts at that particular level (for instance, 'the bear ate the honey because it was hungry'). Many involve deductions in the opposite direction to that of reductive explanation. ..."
The Fabric of Reality (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 21. ("Unity?")
Professor Deutsch's ideas have fascinating and unexplored implications for literary and aesthetic theory as well as philosophy of law. The ingredients now exist for a "quantum jurisprudential theory" of law and adjudication for our new century. If I can escape my torturers long enough on this computer, I hope to provide only a few suggestions for how such an analysis may proceed. For a slightly tongue-in-cheek journey through the epistemological mine field surrounding paradox theory, I recommend George Boolos, "To Be is to Be the Value of a Variable (or To Be Some Values of Some Variables)," Journal of Philosophy, 81 (1984), discussion at Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning, at p. 240. Consider this important passage from Davidson's unknowing development of a theory of adjudication:
"An intentional action is one performed for a reason: the agent has an answer, however absurd or trivial it may be, to the question 'Why did you do that?' Reasons rationalize an action in the following sense: in the light of those reasons, the action is intelligible to others. [Notice the shifting point of view from 'subjectivity' to what lawyers call 'objectivity.'] The reasons reveal what the agent saw in the action, his end or purpose. Reasons fall into two main categories: cognitive and conative. The latter are the values, aims or goals of the agent -- the ends, distant or immediate, that made the action seem to the agent [point of view shifts again to what lawyers call 'subjectivity'] worth performing; the former are the beliefs that prompted the agent to transfer the value he put on the end to the means, ultimately the action, which he thought [notice the shift in point of view to the collective mental realm] would achieve the end."
Lawyers may wish to think of shifting burdens of proof. Davidson is collapsing traditional dialectical boundaries in this text by developing a multi-dimensional model of agency. (See "S.L. Hurley on Beliefs, Reasons, Actions.") This next passage is crucial. Be alert to the appearance of the word "explain":
"We cannot, however, simply define acting on a particular reason as acting in a way that is rationalized by one's beliefs and values, for one may act in way that is rational in view of certain of one's beliefs and values, but do it for quite other reasons. Thus I might want to help an old man and believe that I could help him by paying him to mend my umbrella -- I might have simply wanted my umbrella fixed. Clearly we must insure that the reasons that a person has for performing an action are the reasons that explain his performing the action." ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
None of this applies to animals not capable of explanations. Think of the "umbrella cases" in theft law. A man leaves his umbrella in a basket as he enters a restaurant. A woman leaving the restaurant takes his umbrella "believing" it is her own. Has she stolen the man's umbrella? Davidson would ask: "What beliefs or intentions, based on all circumstances -- projecting yourself into the mind of the agent -- best 'explain' her actions from a logical point of view?" How would an actor approaching such a scene "interpret" the conduct? How about a director? Can you bring together the actor's and director's perspectives? That fusion of perspectives is called "judicial reasoning."
A group of actors could play that scene with the umbrella in several different ways: First, as though the woman intends to steal the umbrella; second, as though she takes the umbrella accidentally; third, in a way to leave the event "unexplained," ambiguous both as to motive and as to what has taken place. The viewer is forced to interpret. Being human is living in a world of possible meanings where we are forced to interpret by "finishing" the texts that we encounter. Narrative options. Perhaps we are required to finish the universe of meanings and realities by interpreting it as well as ourselves. Actors are the teachers of mankind with regard to these mysteries of freedom as interpretations that we live. Scientists may certainly be called "interpreters." This includes, necessarily, the legal setting where judges must be rigorous and logical, but also must develop an inescapable aesthetic component in their thinking. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Sartre is right -- "We are forced to be free." Worse, we are even free to decide whether we are free to decide things "freely." Is this also true of the universe? God? In a universe that instantiates the principle of freedom, what does it mean to say that a cause "determines" an effect? Choices within constraints? Explanations? O.K., now read Hamlet. Actors and other performing artists are called professional "interpreters" in several languages. J.M.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), on dialectics that yield shared explanations.
Why are no two "interpretations" of Hamlet exactly the same? Why are no two performances by any single actor of the same play identical? This approach gives judges greater aesthetic freedom or discretion, within legal constraints, in interpreting a fact pattern, allowing for the use of common sense and intuition, imagination and sensitivity. My feeling is that judges have to rely on such skills anyway, but may be restricted by laws seeking an impossible objectivity from acknowledging this or being as creative as they can be. Legislatures should remember that sometimes "less is more." Davidson shifts into high gear:
"One suggestion, which I believe is right as far as it goes, is to say that a person's reasons explain his acting only if they cause the action. Yet this is still not sufficient, since causality can work in devious ways; the reasons must cause the action in just the right way if they are to be the reasons the agent had in acting. I do not know how to make the conditions immune to counter-example, nor do I think it can be done. The problem, which relates the mental and the physical through causality is the mirror image of the problem of perception."
"Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects," pp. 296-297.
Perhaps a one word solution is possible, as per David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood -- Mind, or God? Get rid of the idea of causality or rigid and deterministic laws and stay with the idea of explanation, also freedom based on a mix of standards and rules, all of which are discourse-based. Deciding on causality is about choice as well as constraint. Deterministic causality leads us in a backward direction toward Newton's mechanical universe, whereas explanation leads in a forward direction towards a quantum space of multiple dimensions, forces and accounts of phenomena, along with conflicting motives connecting agency with consequences. "To be or not to be ..." Hamlet is a dramatization of quantum mysteries. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Causality is static, unless it becomes multiple; explanation is fluid, more dynamic. Sigmund Freud explained to a puzzled colleague unable to choose between rival diagnoses: "Remember, a dog can have both lice and fleas." (Diana?) Perhaps the universe also has both lice and fleas. Hegel and dialectics becomes important again. Here is Roy Bashkar's two cents' worth. This passage is difficult, but worth the effort:
"I am going to give a real definition of dialectic as the absenting of absences, [Negative Dialectics] via a retroductive-explanatory argument from the genealogy of the concept. ... dialectical critical realism attempts to explicate the essence of the concept, it has no wish to be proprietorial about it. Some other candidates to my preferred real definition are (seeing) the negative in the positive (which inverts Hegel), the concrete in the abstract, the complex in the simple, the totality in its aspects (and vice versa), the coincidence of distinctions and connections (cf. when we have to think the co-incidence of identity and change or of identity and difference), the co-existence of positive contraries and negative sub-contraries, the presence of past and/exterior in the moment of becoming." (Feminine in masculine, white in black, poverty in wealth.)
Plato, Etc., The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (New York & London: Verso, 1994), pp. 133-134 (multiplicity, dialectics). (Suggestion: Bring together David Deutsch and Umberto Eco, David Bohm and Roy Bashkar, Mary Whiton Calkins and Umberto Eco, Paul Ricoeur and Marjorie Grene.)
Paul Ricoeur's fusion of humanistic studies and theology with philosophy is one side of the coin for which Marjorie Grene's fusion of biology and physics with philosophy constitutes the other side. Both philosophers are phenomenologists-hermenuticists. I am suggesting that the most interesting philosophers in decades to come will be fusion-thinkers. For example, Roberto Unger's approach to legal and political-theoretical work.
Davidson's suggestive analysis provides useful pointers for judicial decision-making in this difficult area of discerning intent and assigning responsibility. Davidson should be required reading for intelligence agents. The drawback to such a highly creative and intelligent approach is that it asks a lot of judges -- creativity, interpretive acumen, subtle and cautious parsing of texts and descriptions of events, psychological skills, philosophical adeptness and imagination, in addition to legal scholarship may be impossible for any group of human beings to achieve. Perhaps Davidson's work may be seen as aspirational or ideal. If I were writing a law review article, I would "move on" to an application of these ideas -- perhaps in necessity cases -- and draw some conclusions. I leave such work to others. My disgust with American law prevents me from taking the analysis further. (Efforts to destroy these writings continue on a daily basis.)
IV. Davidson's Analytical-Continental Approach and Gadamer's Hermeneutics.
Davidson's lecture accepting the Hegel prize from the city of Stuttgart is an important and wise attempt at overcoming the divide between Continental and analytical philosophical schools. Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C. should be taking notes. Interestingly, our intuitions concerning Hegel's influence on Davidson find support:
"So there is a long history to our shared interest in Plato, the dialectical method, and problems of interpretation. It is natural that Hegel should provide another bridging element." (Davidson is referring to the work of Hans Georg Gadamer.)
"Dialectic and Dialogue," p. 252. The necessary sources are Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, ed., The Hermeneutics Reader (New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 1-54 (Best introduction to this field of scholarship.) I suggest, especially for those in search of shortcuts: Hans Georg Gadamer, "The Historicity of Understanding," in The Hermeneutics Reader, pp. 256-292 and then one of the great essays in recent philosophy, Hans Georg Gadamer, "On the Contributions of Poetry to the Search for Truth," in Robert Bernasconi, ed., The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays by Hans Georg-Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 105-116.
A new criteria of truth in physics and mathematics theory is "beauty." Arthur Danto, "Language, Art, Culture, Text," in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, at pp. 69-81. Brian Greene's work is relevant to this discussion, especially The Elegant Universe.
The idea of a dialectic is compatible with many of Davidson's deepest insights. Davidson came to dialectics late, in terms of method in his work. So is the idea of a conversation between "shifting points of view," latent in Davidson's early work, but developed only towards the end of his life. On this point concerning "variability of perspectives," the novels of Gore Vidal will be just as helpful as anything by the philosophers, especially Julian and Burr. (Again: "Master and Commander" and "The Allegory of the Cave.") Commenting on Socratic dialectic, Davidson says:
"... there are two vital aspects of Socratic dialectic which transcend the mere attempt to convict a pretender to knowledge of inconsistency. One is that both participants can hope to profit; the other is that unlike a written treatise it represents a process that engenders change." (p. 254.) ("Out of the Past.")
Meaning and rights are protean concepts, variable and moving all the time in our postmodernist settings, since we live within languages and symbol-systems, kinds of explanations. Our dual natures as earth-bound, embodied creatures housing transcendental aspirations and yearnings for freedom must coexist somehow with our bounded physical natures. We must share empirical reality and aesthetic as well as moral space with our fellow creatures. This is only possible through understanding (humane wisdom, religion). Knowledge (science) alone is insufficient. This insufficiency of knowing, I insist, includes scientific knowledge in the human social context. Empathy and imagination are vital in all efforts at successful communication and understanding of ourselves and of a universe that is eternally in transition and division.
This idea of understanding includes you, as my dialectical partner. I am changing you; you are changing me, if this is a true dialogue. The opposite applies in a torture chamber, where torturer and victim inhabit different "No Exit" realities as one seeks to annihilate the other:
"So I confess that I do not see how even the most complete understanding of human psychology [law?] can avoid essential reference to the material forces that impinge on us. Nor do I see how psychology, as long as it deals with such concepts as those of action, intention, belief, and desire, can either be reduced to the natural sciences, or made as exact and self-contained as physics."
How exact is physics these days when the physical world is not so physical, after all, but only a matter of probablities in the arrangement of particles? Does even empirical reality illustrate the principle of freedom? I wonder why that might be? Should we be learning something?
April 30, 2010 at 11:29 A.M. Sadly, once again, there was a defacement of this text. I believe that I have made the necessary correction, yet again.
"... although what is actual must for that very reason be possible, experience alone cannot tell us what is actual, [objectively,] in the absence of a metaphysical delimitation of the possible." (Lowe, p. 9 and "Is it rational to believe in God?")
December 10, 2007 at 10:40 A.M. new phone calls from 352-357-4151. I am blocking:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90x (NJ)
As I suggested, we may even take Spinoza as having shown why such a [behaviorist] psychology is impossible; the nomological irreducibility of the mental to the physical can be taken to point in this direction." See "Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects," p. 312 (emphasis added).
What was McCumber saying about truth and verification? What kind of verification? Why not Popper's falsification? Coherence? Meaning? How do we "verify" verification? I began by suggesting that Davidson offers a very American defense of freedom. If we are most human as radical interpreters, freely creating and created by, or receiving meaning, choosing among perspectives in very different settings and with quite various options, then language-use and communication becomes the most prominent expression of the freedom that we are -- together, equally -- and not only in legal reasoning. Hamlet again. Quantum mechanics provides the analogy to this constructivist theory of meaning and reality.
Think of love expressed in a man's gentle touch of a woman's face as a communicative act in which meaning is freely created by both persons for one another and themselves, as they perceive all that is revealed in many dimensions, multiple "nows," with or by that single gesture. E.M. Forster says: "Only connect." See Michael Tanner, "Metaphysics and Music," in A. Phillips Griffiths, ed., The Impulse to Philosophize (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 192-200 (selbst dann bin ich die welt).
An old chestnut in philosophy concerns Leibnitz and the identity of indiscernibles. Example: "... for any individuals x and y, if for any property f" -- say, f = Goodness or Love -- "x has f, if and only if y has f, then x is identical with y. ... Consider an exactly matching pair of gloves, suppose the entire universe consists of the left glove facing the right glove. There are two distinct gloves. But what is the difference between the two?" Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 391. Love is undifferentiated.
Suppose one glove is masculine and the other is feminine, one is black and the other white, any ideas? Where is the "relation" between the two gloves "located"? Are there two gloves? Or only one set of gloves? What would you call that unity that contains everything in a meaning-conferring relationship? Take your time again. Yes, I know about Russell's paradox and what Russell might have stumbled upon. Guess:
http://www.bookofjoe.com/images/magritte1929.jpg (ceci n'est pas une pipe.)
Russell's paradox points to the limitations of the British philosopher's early thought. Russell's and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica echoed, deliberately, Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). Ironically, almost exactly one hundred years later, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781, then 1786) appeared making Albert Einstein's thinking possible. F.H. Bradley was more forward-looking than Russell -- both in terms of Bradley's logic and metaphysics -- anticipating developments in the physics and mathematical theory of the twentieth century. Discussions of the full range of issues surrounding Russell's paradox requires extensive separate analysis. However, enough may be said here to clarify my point concerning Magritte's masterpiece (the painting refutes or undermines Russell's paradox in the human world of meanings), thus supporting my analysis in this essay.
"To be conscious of facts at all is to judge; and to judge is to engage in an ideal elaboration of the given. ... Even though this context-existence rift is everywhere before us, we must not forget that the sliding away of content from existence is a condition that, although an essential feature of all cogntitive perception, is not wholly acceptable. It creates, if you will, a tension in experience -- a problem to be overcome. ... And it is through our effort to ideally create a larger context for the orphaned content that we provide it with solace. ..."
Bradley's Theory of Knowledge, p. 30 and "F.H. Bradley's Concrete Universal." Deus caritas est?
A professor of art history once suggested that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." I believe that this is true not only of artworks, but of our knowledge and reality. The Absolute is not a collection of frozen particulars abstracted from one another and their relations, along with the symbols or the languages in which they are contained, or the intellect of the Kantian observer establishing all of the infinite possible relations among particulars at any given time or times in terms of all future possible observers. Russell has bumped into Kant's antinomies, Bradley's logic of judgments and metaphysics of relations, and (more to our purpose, the suspicions of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida). Bradley's philosophy and much of the best work in Continental theory being done today is a powerful response to skepticism by seeking a reconciliation between abstract thought and concrete reality:
" ... Bradley himself regards it as the only effective response to radical skepticism. Bradley, I shall argue, remains thoroughly convinced that only by declaring all knowledge to be inherently relative to the the greater whole" -- where all relativity disappears -- "within which knowledge, will, and feeling coexist in an interdependent manner, can the various philosophical puzzles regarding the subject-object relation and the development of inference be found. Only by sacrificing its claim to complete knowledge [as distinct from truth] of anything, can philosophy avoid an account of the world wherein a self-refuting skepticism is the result."
Bradley's Theory of Knowledge, p. 12. (This knowledge claim says nothing concerning existence of truth, even absolute truth, which Bradley suggests is not only real but NECESSARY.)
I am currently alternating chapters of two books that are helpful to this discussion: 1) Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (New York: Walker & Co., 1997), pp. 48-69. ("During the twentieth century mathematicians have extended the idea further and have searched for so-called 'sociable numbers,' three or more numbers that form a closed loop.") 2) Also, Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 39-76. ("General relativity provides the choreography for an entwined cosmic dance of space, time, matter and energy.") Please compare with these two books Timothy Bahti's translation of Hans Robert Jauss' Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1982), pp. 139-189. (Are the "hermeneutics of experience" and the "hermeneutics of reading" compatible or are they identical?)
Let us pause to consider Russell's paradox:
"Some classes have themselves as members: the class of all abstract objects, for example, is itself an abstract object. Others do not; the class of donkeys is not itself a donkey."
Simon Blackburn, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 336.
Russell is led to his paradox by a failure to notice the constraints of his own discourse. All sets are members of themselves in the sense that they exist and are formulated only as symbols, within a language or discourse with a history, interacting with an interpreter, who also has a history. R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), pp. 231-273 and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 318-321.
In speaking of "the class of all classes that are not members of themselves," Russell comes to the limits of his concepts and logic, not to the limits of truth or reality. All "classes" (given the definition of the word) are part of a common "set " of signs that are time-dependent and dynamic, leading to an ever-greater level of generality of expression, pointing to conceptual structures that are interrelated and that only become meaningful, even in negation -- you guessed it -- in terms of an Absolute that contains them. The paradox arises only within the languages of set theory, geometry, mathematics which must become part of "... a harmonious system of ideal contents united by relations, and reflecting itself in self-conscious harmony [with] ... nothing outside of it." Appearance and Reality, p. 150. (The Absolute.)
Russell has picked up only one of the two gloves and has chosen to ignore the other. Russell's confusion argues for -- not against -- Bradley's Absolute:
"To judge that this is a flower is to use a universal. [The same is true when we refer to "sets."] But the universal when you attend to it, burgeons. It is necessarily connected through genus and species with a hierarchy above it. Its appearance at this spot and moment is connected spacially, temporally, and causally with every other event in the universe. And these relations if we saw clearly enough, would turn out to be necessary also. ... The business of philosophy [and science] is to understand; to understand is to explain; and to explain is to place things in a context that reveals them as necessary. Such explanation is genuine discovery; the necessities thought discerns in things are not made by us" -- but by an all-inclusive discourse or logic, like God? -- "and neither are such values as beauty, or the goodness of justice or happiness. What from our point of view is increasing understanding of the world is thus from another point of view an increasing self-revelation of the Absolute in finite minds." (Only one "error" inserted since yesterday?)
Brand Blanshard, "The Philosophy of Analysis," in H.D. Lewis, ed., Clarity is Not Enough (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), pp. 76-77 and J.N. Findlay, "Bradley's Contribution to Absolute Theory," in Anthony Manser & Guy Stock, eds., The Philosophy of F.H. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 269-284.
Think again of Magritte's painting ceci n'est pas une pipe. The subject of this painting is not a pipe, but the history of art as representation, the expectations and interactions of observers encountering works of art. The painting is not a pipe. The plays of Beckett and Pinter may be invoked at this point. All of cinema is involved in these paradoxes. These relations between interpretations and works of art, in hermeneutic terms, become infinite, gesturing at a totality containing and transcending them: "To see the world in a grain of sand/and the universe in a wild flower ..." (William Blake)
This is also to find ourselves at the edge of mathematical theory. For this reason, no two performances of Hamlet can be exactly the same. It is up to you, the audience member, to "finish" Hamlet each time that you attend a performance -- until the next performance. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "'The Fountain': A Movie Review.")
Mirrors are "set" facing each other. Language and the world. Self and Other. The word "donkey" is not itself a donkey. Nevertheless, we can speak objectively and meaningfully of donkeys and of the word "donkey," of the history of the names of animals and mathematical concepts. Stat rosa pristina nomina nomina nuda tenemus. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.")
"As Gregory Vlastos splendidly says, someone who like Socrates practices the dialectical method accepts 'the burden of freedom inherent in all significant communication.'" ("Dialectic and Dialogue," p. 259.)
F.H. Bradley's tragic understanding of life, his need to reach out in indescribable pain from his spacial as well as other limitations to a felt absence resulted in philosophical insight at the level of genius, bringing Bradley into the company of today's finest scientists as he sees and feels the multiplicity of a beautifully fragmented and protean reality or infinite number of worlds, spaces, times. Bradley was the one glove that felt the absence of the other:
"Every man's world, the whole world, I mean, in which his self also is included, is one, and it comes into his mind as one universe. It necessarily does so even when he maintains that it truly is but plural. But this unity is perhaps for most men no more than an underlying felt whole. There is, we may say, an implicit sense rather than an explicit object, but none the less the unity is experienced as real. On the other hand above this felt totality there is for the average man an indefinite number of worlds, worlds all more or less real but all, so far as appears, more or less independent. There are the facts perceived by the outer senses, and there is the inner realm of ideas and intimate feelings and passing moods. And these regions more or less may correspond, but they do not correspond wholly. Then there is my present actual world, and the ambiguous existence of what has been and is about to be. ..."
F.H. Bradley, "On Floating Ideas and the Imaginary," in James W. Allard & Guy Stock, eds., Writings on Logic and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 229-247, the final quote is found on page 233.
I hope that you will be.
