[lit-ideas] Re: Popper and Peacocke on representation
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 14:56:33 -0230
Here at the Rose and Crown on North Parade Street, Oxford, Arkansas, consensus
amongst philosophers and the philosophically-inclined has it that Davidson
never maintained that a sentence (statement) must be believed (or not) to be
what it is. As well, all concur - save for a student of a student of Dick Hare
- that to know that P is true (or not) is to believe that P is true (or not)
and that Davidson would agree. Yes, I choose my drinking companions carefully.
Walter O
conferencing away at New College
Quoting Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx:
> Omar K. was wondering about a reference to Davidson:
>
> "Well, if Davidson really thought "that you cannot have a 'sentence' ("The
> cat sat on the mat") without the BELIEF (or opinion) to the effect that
> the cat sat on the mat." he must have been stark mad. I am thinking that
> this is probably a misunderstanding. [...] Okay, we might say that lying, if
>
> successful, requires at least one person to believe it, but if there is no
> way of accounting for jokes, fictions, second/language teaching examples,
> examples on Lit/ideas etc., without presupposing 'belief' in the
> proposition, this is basically ridiculous."
>
> A bit of context may be in order.
>
> The reference to Davidson came from P. Enns, who was quoting Davidson as,
> as it were, a way to illuminate the prose of Heidegger (specifically
> Heidgger's writings on the nature of language -- the early and the later
> Heidegger, in conjunction). Let us have that first-hand quote again.
>
> Perhaps after that, we can immerse onto the question of the priority or
> alleged priority (as per Davidson) of opinions over utterances that Omar K.
>
> is, in my reading, addressing:
>
> P. Enns had written:
>
> "Alongside the importance of Heidegger's essay, 'The question concerning
> technology', which discusses instrumental reason and the role of technique
> [...,] I would also add Heidegger's work on language in *Being
> and Time* as well as his later essays, such as 'The way to language'. In
> these writings, Heidegger explores the ways in which language is
> constitutive of understanding and the intelligibility of the world, not as
> a tool or lens with which we encounter the world, as though language were
> something through which we picture, represent or refer to the world, but
> rather as being human. Whether it is in his discussion of how language is a
>
> necessary condition for human life in the world, or the way in which
> language precedes our understanding of the world, Heidegger tries to show us
> that
> language is much more than a means of communication. While the later
> Heidegger does occasionally indulge in a mystification of language,
> in both the early and later writings, his aim, to borrow a phrase from
> Davidson, is to re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects
> whose
> antics make our sentences and opinions true or false."
>
> To re-word:
>
> To re-establish unmediated (i.e. _sans_ representation?)
>
> touch with the familiar objects
>
> (such as cats and mats)
>
> whose antics (notably the cat) make our sentencs AND OPINIONS
> [my emphasis -- Speranza] true [...]."
>
> We now corroborate, thanks to P. Enns, that the quote comes from
> Davidson's sort of famous 'conceptual scheme' essay.
>
> In trying to elaborate on the Davidson quote, I ended up emphasising the
> role of 'representation' (not a word Davidson uses admittedly).
>
> And I thought of bringing in Peacocke (who's written extensively on this,
> and, in my view, brilliantly).
>
> And, I thought of ALSO bringing, 'into the bargain', as it were, Popper --
> since McEvoy has a serious interest in this philosopher and it looked as if
> Popper's Kantianism may contradict some of Davidson's points -- and _a
> fortiori_, Heidegger: that there is such a thing as an unmediated touch with
>
> stuff. (I hope my phrasing is clear!)
>
> Omar notes:
>
> "Well, if Davidson really thought "that you cannot have a 'sentence' ("The
> cat sat on the mat") without the BELIEF (or opinion) to the effect that
> the cat sat on the mat." he must have been stark mad. I am thinking that
> this is probably a misunderstanding. ... Okay, we might say that lying, if
> successful, requires at least one person to believe it, but if there is no
> way of accounting for jokes, fictions, second/language teaching examples,
> examples on Lit/ideas etc., without presupposing 'belief' in the
> proposition,
> this is basically ridiculous."
>
> Yes.
>
> It may be interesting to emphasise that Davidson is speaking of 'sentences
> and opinions' in the quoted passage
>
> -- where 'opinion' must stand for belief (or some such 'cognitive'
> psychological attitude -- versus a conative one such as 'desire', which are
>
> fulfilled or not, rather than true or false).
>
> But this should perhaps trigger, if we are in the right philosophical
> mood, a broader question.
>
> It is easy enough, after all, alla Davidson, to ascribe truth to sentences
> -- rather than to opinions.
>
> This is the Tarski schema. Yet, in some conceptions of knowledge (notably
> the one one and again contradicted by McEvoy) it is _beliefs_ that are
> primarily true, not sentences -- Plato's Theaetetus, the earliest source
> possibly, as cited by Gettier.
>
>
> Davidson has gone on record as a symmetricalist: he cannot have an opinion
> without a sentence and vice versa -- this is for him both an
> epistemological AND an ontological point. (I was inspired into this
> interpretation of
> Davidson's philosophy by Anita Avramides DPhil dissertation at Oxford,
> advised
> by Strawson).
>
> On the other hand, for those philosophers who have explored the idea of
> content (as Peacocke has -- as in his book, "Content", Blackwell, but also
> in
> his inaugural lecture as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford),
> the role of representation becomes crucial.
>
> In Peacocke's case, it is perceptual content that counts, which may brings
> a dose of scepticism to Davidson's realist (if that's what it is, even
> scientific-realist) idea that there is or should be or could be an unmediated
>
> touch with familiar things and their antics -- I would NOT use 'object'
> which presupposes a full epistemology alla Kant).
>
> Alston (in his classic "Philosophy of Language") famously (or is it
> infamously cites Grice (a favourite philosopher of mine) as an 'ideationist',
>
> alla Locke. For Locke, indeed, there is 'mediate' signification, and
> 'immediate' signfiication. And this may relate to Davidson's use of
> 'unmediated' in
> the quote provided by Enns.
>
> Locke, Alston says, holds that words SIGNIFY, immediately, the IDEAS in the
> mind of he or she who uses them -- but they signify, or aim at signifying,
> mediately, the THINGS for which these ideas stand -- hence (I think) what
> Popper, elsewhere, refers to as the new 'way of ideas' (which becomes,
> eventually, the title of Grice's posthumous book).
>
> Perhaps talk of representation as keyword here sounds pretentious. It
> shouldn't, I hope!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Speranza
>
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