[lit-ideas] Re: Moral Judgment and Perceptual Metaphor -- Good to Think?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 17:57:48 EDT
From Haidt's quotes:
"Morality is so rich and complex."
As opposed to 'poor and simple'. In general, 'rich' is overused.
"It’s so multifaceted and contradictory. But many authors reduce it to a
single principle, which is usually some variant of welfare maximization. So
that would be the sugar. Or sometimes, it’s justice and related notions of
fairness and rights. And that would be the chemist down the street. So
basically, there’s two restaurants to choose from. There’s the utilitarian
grille, and there’s the deontological diner. That’s pretty much it."
I think he has it right. Grice who disliked a choice, would say, "Kantotle"
(or Ariskant), or how to make a deontological diner in the utilitarian
(teleological, I prefer) grille.
"We need metaphors and analogies to think about difficult topics, such as
morality."
We don't. Morality boils down to conation. And there's nothing metaphoric
as "She wanted to kill him". A propositional attitude, like "... wants ..."
is build upon a "THEORETICAL" concept ('want' now, part of psychological
theory).
Vide, Grice: Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the
bizarre: now repr. in one of the best morality books published in the 90s: The
Conception of Value (ed. by J. Baker out of Grice's notes for the Carus
Lectures -- Grice died in 1988).
"An analogy that Marc Hauser and John Mikhail have developed in recent
years is that morality is like language. And I think it’s a very, very good
metaphor. It illuminates many aspects of morality."
R. M. Hare said it much better, "The language of morals", but bored Grice
so!
"It’s particularly good, I think, for sequences of actions that occur in
time with varying aspects of intentionality. But, once we expand the moral
domain beyond harm, I find that metaphors drawn from perception become more
illuminating, more useful."
Well, no need to GO metaphorical. Both 'see' and 'want' usually take (or
should ALWAYS) take 'that'-clause. He saw the sun. He wanted Mary. But in
fact, it's "he saw that the sun was rising", or "He wanted to make love to
Mary", i.e. "he wanted that he would make love to Mary". Nothing metaphorical
there.
"I’m not trying to say that the language analogy is wrong or deficient. I’
m just saying, let’s think of another analogy, a perceptual analogy."
McCreery adds: "To an anthropologist entranced for more than four decades by
Levi-Strauss’ call to consider the “logic in tangible qualities”"
---- pretty vague. All qualities are MORE than 'tangible'. Seeing is not
really 'tangible'. It's like saying, with Saint Exupery, 'what is essential
is invisible to the eyes'. Pretty nonsensical. There are 'perceptual qualia'
to use the philosopher's lexicon (singular, 'quale'). A quale is a very
difficult thing to conceptualise, and we don't need 'tangible', misused,
attached to it.
---- vide Peacocke, a disciple of Grice, "Sense and content". Oxford:
Clarendon Press. In general, the moral theorists who believe that there are
"real" moral qualia out there oppose Peacocke and adopt an approach more like
Blackburn's quasi-realism concerning attitudes. All wrong!
"and a student of Victor Turner, who envisions dominant symbols as bipolar–
one pole a cluster of concepts the other, the sensory pole, a cluster of
tangible qualities that evoke powerful emotions, Haidt’s thinking is highly
appealing. What say others here?"
I like the bipolar thing, but refudiate it. No need to go Dualists, and
Cartesian Dualists at something pretty simple.
Take,
"The cat is on the mat"
--- that's a concept, or it involves the concepts -- Fregean senses --
'cat', 'mat', 'to be on'. Surely there are perceptual attachments to each
concepts.
If you say, with Palin,
"Chortles refudiate frumiously", unless you provide a perceptual correlate
to the alleged concepts (e.g. 'refudiate') we don't know what we are
meaning. And it's ALL, pace Grice, about meaning.
J. L. Speranza
The Swimming-Pool Library
Villa Speranza, Bordighera
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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