On 5/30/06, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I just finished Taylor's second chapter. I see no reason at this point to see his "framework" as different from R. G. Collingwood's "Constellation of absolute presuppositions"
My initial response was to say, "Of course." Taylor is very much in the line that goes back to Plato and flourishes in Kant, who argue dialectically that all statements require givens, i.e., some set of assumptions that is taken for granted, the ground where logic's spade strikes an immovable rock. Collingwood is a party to the same conversation.
Still, I thought, there might be an important difference, signaled by the choice of language. A framework can be a temporary structure, extended where extension is useful, torn down when its usefulness ends. An "absolute presupposition" sounds like something that won't change or go away.
Googling "R.G. Collingwood 'Constellation of absolute presuppositions' brought me to David Pierce's Wikipedia page on Collingwood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Pierce/An_Essay_on_Metaphysics_(R._G._Collingwood)
where I find the following elaborate set of distinctions.
There are statements, questions, and suppositions. That which is
stated is something that can be true or false; following a convention that he does not like, Collingwood will call this a proposition, and stating it is propounding it. (It is not clear that Collingwood makes an important distinction between a statement and a proposition; neither does he say explicitly that they are the same thing.)
Every statement is the answer to a question. This question is always
logically prior to the statement; in scientific thinking, the question is also temporally prior, although it persists while it is being answered. For example, an everyday observation like "That is a clothes-line" is preceded logically, but perhaps not in time, by a question like "What is that line for?"
Every question has a presupposition, which is logically prior to the
question. The question "What is that line for?" has the presupposition that the line is for something. When a question has an unmade presupposition, it is said that the question does not arise. For example, the question "When did you stop beating your spouse?" usually does not arise.
That a supposition causes a question to arise is the logical
efficacy of the supposition. The supposition need not be a proposition in order to have logical efficacy. For example, in commerce, the supposition that people are dishonest causes receipts to be requested; but a request for a receipt is not an accusation that somebody is in fact dishonest.
Assumptions are suppositions made by choice. Not all suppositions
are assumptions. It can be rude to accuse people of making wrong assumptions when they are only making suppositions.
Presuppositions that are themselves answers to questions are
relative presuppositions. There are also absolute presuppositions, which are not answers to any questions; they are not propositions; they are neither true or false. For example, the pathologist works with the absolute presupposition that every disease has a cause. This is not something that can be discovered or verified, like the existence of microbes; it is taken for granted.
The metaphysician's job is not to propound this or that absolute
presupposition, because it cannot be done; the metaphysician's job is to propound the proposition that this or that supposition is an absolute presupposition."
What strikes me here and brings me back to Taylor is the specificity with which absolute presuppositions are described. The pathologist assumes that every disease has a cause, an assumption he shares with Freud's account of slips of the tongue or, according to Evans-Pritchard, the Azande diviner invoking witchcraft to explain why the granary collapsed on this particular person's leg. Mentioning the pathologist reminds us that absolute presuppositions need not be universal. They can be like the bits of number theory my college calculus textbook assumes when it sets out to derive the basic principles of integration and differentiation, sufficient unto the day and the project. It also reminds us that while the pathologist, Freud and the Azande diviner share the presupposition of a cause, their accounts of how causation works can still be wildly different.
What has this to do with Taylor? He is trying to come to grips with the modern predicament in which we may all agree that some assumptions are necessary but must do so in a context from which competing assumptions cannot be excluded. We may, like the signers of the Declaration of Independence "hold these truths to be self-evident" but cannot avoid the fact that others may disagree. What, then, is a philosopher to do, once the possibility of achieving certainty, so clearly assumed by Descartes, Spinoza or Kant, is stripped away?
Here, I believe that would agree with Collingwood as described by Pierce.
Metaphysical questions are historical questions. For example, the
following are possible presuppositions in physics:
Some events have causes. (The remainder follow laws.) All events have causes. No events have causes (They all follow laws.)
Which of these is true? This is a pseudo-metaphysical question,
which cannot be answered. The physicist simply presupposes one of these presuppositions. Its logical efficacy does not depend on its being thought true or its being true. The metaphysician discovers that
Newtonian physicists presuppose 1; "Kantian" physicists presuppose 2; "Einsteinian" physicists presuppose 3.
Thus the metaphysician propounds propositions (which can be true or
false) featuring the metaphysical rubric, namely
In such and such a phase of scientific thought, it is (or was)
absolutely presupposed that…
The rubric may be omitted only when the reader can supply it for himself.
Excepting the presupposition that metaphysical questions are historical questions, Taylor sets out to discover how the assumptions in terms of which people understand themselves (his "frameworks"; Collingwood's "absolute presuppositions") have changed over time in the Western tradition. It is how he addresses this problem, his three axes, and the way in which, if Taylor is right, their relations have changed over time, that is most interesting to me.
This post is, however, already too long. Here I will pause to hear what others have to say.
-- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
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