[lit-ideas] Re: Tittles--a change of title
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:23:12 -0700
I wrote
That's why I say that as far as I can tell, psychology is much better
suited to explain such things [Keegan's use of "Mommy whoop-whoop" and
John's interpretation of it] than is philosophy.
John asked
Possibly, but why? Are there serious reasons to believe that
psychologists have better explanations to offer?
I try to answer
All I can say here is that this is the kind of things psychologists
might try to explain (inductive evidence), and not the kind of thing
philosophers try to explain (intuition). That is, psychologists seem to
be interested in why people behave as they do; philosophers in what it
is they’re doing. (I’m really dissatisfied with what I just said but
can’t think of a better way to say it.) Whether or not anyone accepts
psychologists’ explanations of anything is another matter.
I think here of Chomsky’s devastating review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal
Behavior, in the journal Language. Who the scientist, who the philosopher?
Earlier I said
Yet apparently an explanation isn't wanted: what's wanted is a sorting
of philosophical accounts into those that are compatible with it and
those that aren't.
John responds
Excuse my imprecision. Let us reduce the problem to the philosophers
named: Plato, Aristotle, Berkeley, Locke, Hume, and Donald Davidson,
and, just for fun add Wittgenstein. That gives us a pretty good spread
of classical, early modern, and 20th century philosophers. Let us say,
further, that our purpose is not to distinguish those that seem
compatible [from] those that seem incompatible with a certain example of
grandfatherly experience— but instead to rank them in terms of goodness
of fit with that experience, without prejudice to how they might or
might not fit other examples. Would it be a useful exercise to explore
this problem a bit more in an effort to learn more about the thinking of
the philosophers in question?
I reply
I think Plato wouldn’t understand the question. Aristotle has a theory
of human action that appeals to how various aspects of the psyche affect
one another. I don’t see any reason why anything he says would be
incompatible with someone’s doing something and describing it as John
did—as an inference that just seems right, yet could turn out to be
mistaken. (Aristotle allows for inferences and for mistakes.) About
Berkeley, I have little to say. He himself thought that esse est percipi
was compatible with ordinary human doings, described in the ordinary way.
Locke is too tough. He has a notion of abstraction (to explain how we
can get beyond the particular thing before us and talk about kinds of
things) that I find difficult to present a case for. Reading Locke is
like eating Grapenuts. I pass.
Hume’s views on the ‘principle of connexion,’ by means of which our
ideas are related to one another would be worth looking at but I can’t
summarize them. Although Hume talks of other philosophers believing this
or that, and of their being unable to explain things as well as the
author of A Treatise of Human Nature, the distinction between philosophy
and psychology (considered as an empirical enterprise) simply didn’t
exist for him, so that anything one might say about Hume, the
philosopher, should be said with the understanding that philosophy
encompassed far more fields of study between 1711 and 1776, than it now
does. Still, Hume himself performed no experiments or observations; the
form of his explanations are fairly Kantian: given this, there must be
that, even though we experience only the ‘this.’
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#Ass
Davidson: see ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes,’ 1963. (I really don’t
expect anyone to.)
The philosopher whose investigations and burrowings deal most clearly
with the question at hand is Wittgenstein. I’d say that if one were to
rank philosophical predilictions in terms of fit, it would be
Wittgenstein first, the rest nowhere. Yet Wittgenstein himself always
claimed that he had no theory. ‘Do you think I have a theory!’
Why do I think Wittgenstein’s thought (which really can’t be
paraphrased, summarized, or assembled in outline form) has the best fit?
I’ll transcribe some passages tomorrow. The Celtics lost. My eyes are dim.
Robert Paul
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