[lit-ideas] Re: Grice on Explanations and their Implicatures
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:45:05 +0000 (GMT)
Though no doubt intended as amusing, it is absolutely the case that Popper was
a self-described "tottering old metaphysician". However, this does not mean he
supported any old metaphysics, no matter how intellectually tottering.
Like Kant, and indeed very much following Kant, Popper is concerned to separate
out valuable metaphysics from valueless metaphysics - and though his account
differs from Kant's, because his account of "knowledge" and of "science" and
"metaphysics" and their interrelation differs from Kant, it is very much
Kantian.
In fact, we can characterise Popper's philosophy as reworking Kant's critical
philosophy to take into account three crucial developments after Kant:
1) In physics: the Einsteinian revolution in physics - Kant assumed Newton's
physics was not only correct but could never be overthrown (or falsified).
[This mistaken assumption, though understandable, led Kant into all sorts of
difficulties he might otherwise have avoided.]
2) In logic: the Fregean revolution in logic - Kant assumed that logic as the
Greeks had it was not only correct but could never be revised or corrected or
improved. [This mistaken assumption, though understandable, led Kant into all
sorts of difficulties he might otherwise have avoided.]
3) In evolution: the Darwinian revolution in evolution - though Kant was very
forward-thinking, Kant could not have foreseen the implications of Darwinian
thought, particularly for the 'argument from design' and cosmology. [But this
revolution also has implications for how we should understand the role of
sensory-experience and of our cognitive apparatus.]
So Popper, unlike Kant, has a Kantian philosophy that is resolutely
post-Einsteinian, post-Fregean and post-Darwinian [or neo-Darwinian] - though
it is also very careful not to treat these developments as constituting some
incorrigible final stage in the fields of knowledge to which they pertain.
Among the conclusions Popper draws from these developments, contra Kant who
could hardly have anticipated them, is that all knowledge is conjectural - for
each of these revolutions shows that what may be taken as absolutely
foundational and incorrigible in our knowledge may be shown to be mistaken, and
this fallibility of all knowledge is what lies at the root of regarding all
knowledge as conjectural.
Whereas, because Kant assumed the infallible character of Greek logic and
Newton's physics [rather than seeing both as, at best, a good approximation to
the truth], Kant set himself the task of explaining the validity of synthetic a
priori knowledge in terms where such knowledge must necessarily be correct:
whereas from Popper's POV such an explanation cannot be given because synthetic
a priori knowledge cannot have more than a conjectural or fallible character.
It is this last contention which marks Popper's philosophy as a potentially
momentous turning-point in the history of philosophy - away from the search for
certain foundations for our knowledge and towards a search for deeper,
explanatory theories of an admittedly conjectural and fallible sort.
Kant was, then, himself a metaphysician, as is Popper: but both want a critical
philosophy that is discerning as to what is valid or valuable in metaphysics
and what is not.
This helps explain why Popper is both on Kant's side in the passages quoted and
is a metaphysician: for the metaphysics Kant is attacking is that kind of
invalid or valueless metaphysical speculation that Kant's 'critical philosophy'
sought to expose by way of an explanation of the proper remit of a valid
metaphysics.
(Of course, this just skims the surface of some very important and profound
matters.)
Donal
London
________________________________
From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, 10 March 2013, 16:52
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Grice on Explanations and their Implicatures
Are you sure that Popper wasn't joking when he described himself as a
"tottering old metaphysician" ? After your recent remarks, I decided to read
The Open Society and I just came across the following passage (in the chapter
on Hegel):
But this appearance begins to change if we now turn to an analysis of Hegel’s
dialectics. For he proffers this method with an eye to Kant, who, in his attack
upon metaphysics (the violence of these attacks may be gauged from the motto to
my ‘Introduction’), had tried to show that all speculations of this kind are
untenable. Hegel never attempted to refute Kant. He bowed, and twisted Kant’s
view into its opposite. This is how Kant’s ‘dialectics’, the attack upon
metaphysics, was converted into Hegelian ‘dialectics’, the main tool of
metaphysics.
Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, asserted under the influence of Hume that
pure speculation or reason, whenever it ventures into a field in which it
cannot possibly be checked by experience, is liable to get involved in
contradictions or ‘antinomies’ and to produce what he unambiguously described
as ‘mere fancies’; ‘nonsense’; ‘illusions’; ‘a sterile dogmatism’; and ‘a
superficial pretension to the knowledge of everything’28. He tried to show that
to every metaphysical assertion or thesis,
concerning for example the beginning of the world in time, or the existence of
God, there can be contrasted a counter-assertion or antithesis...
...In other words, when leaving the field of experience, our speculation can
have no scientific status, since to every argument there must be an equally
valid counter-argument. Kant’s intention was to stop once and forever the
‘accursed fertility’ of the scribblers on metaphysics. But unfortunately, the
effect was very different.
*It seems pretty clear to me that Popper is siding with Kant against the
accursed metaphysics, or is there another reading to it ?
O.K.
________________________________
From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, March 10, 2013 12:38 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Grice on Explanations and their Implicatures
________________________________
From: "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
>Well, then it seems,
Grice applies 'reductive' or 'reductionist' to ONTOLOGICAL questions.
Whereas for Popper, 'reduction' is OF EXPLANATIONS, only.>
No. And it seems even Grice, via his 'Ontological Marxism', might say 'No' or
at least equivocate: for the fact a concept has a workable application, for
example in an explanation, may ground an argument that the concept denotes
something that exists [e.g. 'belief']. I.e. Even if we are sceptical that our
ordinary language way of talking about 'belief' and 'belief-states' - as in
'John thought that', 'Rose felt it is was unlikely that' - is that accurate as
a description of the underlying facts to be explained [we may suspect our way
of talking is a massive simplification of what is going on at a physical and
mental level],we may take it that concepts that refer to 'mental states' or
'mental events', in workable explanations that cannot be replaced by
explanations purely in terms of physics, denote the entities that exist beyond
what exists purely in terms of physics.
So the explanatory and the 'ontological' may be inextricably linked because
what we need in explanatory terms may be a guide to what exists to be explained.
A fuller treatment of how Popper approaches these issues - including the
'mind-body' problem, though this is widened out by Popper into the problem of
the interaction of World 1, 2 and 3 - may be found in his The Self And Its
Brain [co-authored with John Eccles, a Nobel laureate in science].
Popper's Worlds123 is clearly an ontology of sorts: it is not merely that he
defends this schema as useful in explanatory terms [though he argues it is] but
that he would argue these different 'Worlds' exist. Why does Popper then say,
in The Self And Its Brain, that he is not offering what is sometimes called an
'ontology'? Perhaps because he doesn't want his position assimilated to some
kind of traditional 'ontology', particularly any sort that asserts we have
'existences' that are more than conjectural, or an 'ontology' based on the idea
of 'essences' or 'substances'. *
*[In this regard, JLS' characterisation of Popper's view on the mind-body
problem as substance-dualism is wholly wrong, for Popper explains why science
has overthrown the ancient idea of physical 'substances' and why mind-body
'dualism' does not require any idea of a mental 'substance' (which idea, in
Descartes, leads to an untenable form of dualism).]
>If we take 'why' as a demand for an explanation, we may play at Popper's
VERY RESTRICTED view of 'reduction' (NOT TO APPLY to what matters to
philosophers, 'metaphysics' -- a swearword in Popper's vocabulary -- but to
answers which more or less in a straight mode relate to a question.>
We have been here before many times and JLS should know better than to suggest
metaphysics is "a swearword in Popper's vocabulary", for Popper not only
described himself as a "tottering old metaphysician" but it is clear his major
publications are metaphysical works as opposed to scientific work. The theory
of Worlds123 is a metaphysical theory, for example [btw the denial of this
theory is also metaphysical].
Now if we could explain John ringing for an ambulancepurely in terms of physics
- because the merely physical noise and sight of a car crash did something to
his neuro-physiological system that physically impelled him to lift the phone
and make certain physical noises that physically impelled the person who heard
them to set in train a physical chain of events that led to an ambulance being
sent - then we might say that talk of John's "beliefs" and of John's "mental
events" is simply idle talk: we might show, by way of such an explanation, that
John's beliefs [e.g. that his phone works, that there is an ambulance service,
that the car crash was such that calling an ambulance was the correct thing to
do] are entirely superfluous and dispensable. And we might even conclude his
beliefs, being irrelevant to a workable explanation, do not exist. But we are
nowhere near such an explanation scientifically, and the difficulties in ever
getting there may be
insuperable - and this insuperability may be explained in terms of metaphyics,
because explanation purely in terms of physicsisinadequate. And this inadequacy
may be brought out by reflecting on the different levels - Worlds123 - that are
involved in explaining the act of calling for an ambulance.
Donal
Who may need an ambulance himself soon as a result of JLS' posts
London
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