[lit-ideas] An Orrery of Griceiana
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2013 08:28:08 -0500 (EST)
It's a long long way to Orrery
but my heart's right there!
McCreery:
>Agreed [with McEvoy there, in "Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction", re
'good reason', &c].
Hey, the philosophical game should not be as easy as THAT. :).
In a message dated 12/16/2013 8:05:31 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx writes:
has left the JTB conception behind, as it has left behind the conception
of "substances" and many other things that philosophers debate in ancient
terms, as if the pre-scientific world was yesterday or the scientific world
has no impact on them.
-- which brings us, oddly enough, back to Peter Michael Stephan Hacker (and
why, not, since he agrees on this), Herbert Paul Grice. In "Orrery of
Intentionality" (McEvoy should be familiar with that charm of a word, 'orrery'
-- I prefer to capitalise, "Orrery"):
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hacker
"Philosophical inquiry is therefore very different from scientific inquiry,
and Hacker maintains accordingly that there is a sharp dividing line
between the two.
"Philosophy is not a contribution to human knowledge, but to human
understanding"
-- quoted from Hacker, "An Orrery of Intentionality".
Specifically, Hacker goes on to argue, along Wittgensteinian (but why not
Griceian -- Grice's views in this field were more influential on Hubert
Dreyfus and J. C. Haugeland, though), that so-called 'neuro-science' can only
_mislead_ when it comes to that _understanding_. (A fuller quote in ps).
It's a nice point of depth grammar that McEvoy sticks with the present
tense:
"that philosophers DEBATE in ancient terms"
cfr.
"that philosophers debated in ancient times".
The case in point is indeed Plato's Theaetetus, cited by Ayer and most
notably by Gettier -- what McEvoy, who likes an abbreviation, calls JTB
('knowledge as justified true belief').
And if we started with Hacker we may well end with Baker. Hacker was PPE,
like initially Baker. But Baker's obituary interestingly reads.
Remember that he was of 'upper middle-class' Eastener stock. The obituary
reads:
"A Marshall scholarship took him to Queen's College,Oxford, in 1960 to read
philosophy, politics and economics. Dissatisfied with the course, he
mastered enough Greek in a few months to transfer to Greats."
Grice never had a choice. His 'upper middle-class Midlands background (he
came from the affluent district of Harborne, in Staffordshire/Warwickshire)
was well versed in Homer and Greek generally since his Clifton days. And so
nothing smaller than 'greats' would have been good enough for him.
(Hacker, interestingly, holds, as I say, a PPE).
Baker's obituary goes on: "He began a doctorate in 1963 which he completed
only in 1970, teaching meanwhile ... as a fellow of St John's College,
Oxford" -- Grice's college.
"It was there that he began the collaboration with [co-fellow of St.
John's] P. M. S. Hacker made famous by their exegetical volumes on the work of
Wittgenstein."
And 'science' was never in THEIR picture -- or Grice's.
Grice loved the greats, however dead: We should treat the dead and great
(like Plato) as if they were dead and alive. And if we disagree with "JTB",
that may be because we have failed to 'introject' into the great
philosopher's shoes (or sandals, as I prefer, when talking Grecian). Note that
neither
'justified', 'true', or 'belief', are Greek words, even if we are
criticising an 'ancient', 'pre-scientific' account of stuff. Or not.
Cheers,
Speranza
ps. Also from Wikipedia -- the fuller quote under Hacker's entry:
"This [view as expressed and formulated in Orrery] has led Hacker into
direct disagreement with "neuro-philosophers": neuroscientists or philosophers
such as Antonio Damasio and Daniel Dennett who think that neuroscience can
shed light on philosophical questions such as the nature of consciousness
or the mind-body problem. Hacker maintains that these, like all
philosophical problems, are not real problems at all, but mirages arising from
conceptual confusion. It follows that scientific inquiry (learning more facts
about humans or the world) does not help to resolve them. His 2003 book
"Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience", co-authored with neuroscientist M.
Bennett, contains an exposition of these views, and critiques of the ideas of
many contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers, including Francis
Crick, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and others. Hacker in
general finds many received components of current philosophy of mind to be
incoherent. He rejects mind-brain identity theories, as well as functionalism,
eliminativism and other forms of reductionism. He advocates methodological
pluralism, denying that standard explanations of human conduct are causal,
and insisting on the irreducibility of explanation in terms of reasons and
goals. He denies that psychological attributes can be intelligibly ascribed
to the brain, insisting that they are ascribable only to the human being as
a whole. He has endeavoured to show that the puzzles and 'mysteries' of
consciousness dissolve under careful analysis of the various forms of
intransitive and transitive consciousness, and that so-called qualia are no
more
than a philosopher's fiction."
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