[lit-ideas] The Times They Are A-Changing Back
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 15:36:14 +0000 (GMT)
http://www.mojo4music.com/11045/bob-dylans-times-changin-50/
'Below, Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman looks back on an album that, half a
century later, still speaks volumes.
<snip>
"Listening back to it recently, it struck me that The Lonely Death Of
Hattie Carroll could not happen in America now, but the Ballad Of Hollis Brown
happens every day. It’s about somebody who can’t keep it together for his
family and who kills the wife and the children before taking to the gun to
himself. That happens everyday in America. That poverty is
still there."'
Donal
On Thursday, 16 January 2014, 21:13, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The physical availability of a written document is not a completely trivial
matter. Dreyfus was, I believe, convicted on the basis of a letter which was
claimed to exist but was not presented as physical evidence in court.
Generally though, we can hardly speak of historical claims as being empirically
testable. However, they can be verified or falsified in other ways, although
with perhaps less conclusiveness. For example, it used to be thought that Emily
Bronte died of TBC, but new evidence emerged suggesting that she died of water
poisoning.
I am not sure if historical explanations as to why something happened, whether
in intentionalist or non-intentionalist terms, would be considered 'knowledge'
in the hard sense. Here Popper's critique of historicism comes into play; such
explanatory frameworks seem to be capable of interpreting almost any emerging
evidence so as to fit the theory, and it is difficult to see how they could
ever be tested or conclusively disproven. Some theories prove to be more
convincing and/or influential than others , but it is hardly a matter of
testability in any strict sense.
Well, my two cents for today.
O.K.
On Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:58 PM, "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx"
<Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
In a message dated 1/16/2014 2:42:52 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
The p.s. to JL's last post contains a wealth of
important philosophising.
It does, however, only skim the surface of our epistemic position.
---
Thanks for that.
The commentary that followed was pretty elucidatory. I re-read the ps, and
would like to re-focus on Grice's example about a pupil -- in "oral
examination" -- KNOWING the date of the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815, as
it
happens).
McEvoy is right in distinguishing 'theoretical knowledge' and 'scientific
knowledge'.
I was particularly fascinated by Popper, in the ps referred to above, to
HUME -- the source of this all:
Popper writes:
"David Hume’s view of historical
knowledge [cfr. Grice on 'historical
knowledge' about the date of the Battle of Waterloo, in "Logic and
Conversation", III] was different."
Popper goes on to quote direct from The Treatise on Human Understanding
(Book I, Part III -- Section IV, in Selby-Bigge's edition).
Hume writes:
"We believe that Caesar was killed in
the senate house on the ides of March because
this fact is
established on the unanimous testimony
of historians, who
agree to assign this precise time and place
to that event."
------ So here we have Grice, in 1967, lecturing, in Harvard, about the use
of 'know' as applied (correctly, in his view) to a pupil who in oral
examination states that the Battle of Waterloo took place in 1815
---- And Hume, some years, later, to a different audience -- relying on
Graeco-Roman Ancient History (or Ancient Graeco-Roman history, rather -- why
not mere "Roman" history):
i. Caesar was killed in the Senate house on the
ides of March, that is,
March 15, 44 BC.
----
Grice wants to say that the pupil, on oral examination, would hardly be
required to display 'conclusive evidence' about "p" -- the target of Gettier's
criticism.
Hume starts NOT with the 'true' bit of this alleged knowledge, but the
'belief' bit -- he is after all, into the generation of 'ideas' (and
impressions) and 'understanding' -- following Locke of course, who was Hume
[Home's]
hometown, metaphorically.
Hume:
"We [or rather Hume should say, "I" -- but he is using the majestic plural,
as Queen Victoria did, when she says they were not amused] believe that
Julius
Caesar was killed in the Roman senate house on March 15 44 BC"
and the reason (hardly conclusive evidence, but more 'for this or that', as
Grice would say)
"because this [alleged] fact is established on the
unanimous testimony
of historians, who agree to assign this precise time and place to that
event."
Hume continues:
"Here are certain characters and letters present either to our memory or
senses."
-- which, as McEvoy's commentary emphasises, Popper may want to minimise --
but cfr. McEvoy's and Popper's emphasis on testing. For how are we to test
that Caesar was NOT killed on that date and in tha place, or that the
Battle of Waterloo was fought on a date OTHER than July 18, 1815? And the
question is not rhetorical.
Hume continues:
"... which characters we likewise remember to have been us’d as the signs
of certain
ideas"
Here he is just following Aristotle's Categoriae as mediated by Locke:
words ---- stand for ideas ('phantasmata' in Aristotle) -- which stand for
THINGS
----
Hume
continues:
"and these ideas were either in the minds of such as were immediately
present at that action, and received the ideas directly from its
existence"
Not Brutus, because he KILLED Caesar and would hardly report the event.
Rather, it was the followers of Julius Caesar -- FEW OF WHICH were present --
who reported the idea.
I'm less sure about Waterloo -- but apparently, we owe it all to Lord Hill:
The 80 guns of Napoleon's grande batterie drew up in the centre. These
opened fire at 11:50, according to Lord Hill (commander of the Anglo-allied II
Corps), while other sources put the time between noon and 13:30.
I'm not surprised pupils,
in oral examination, may not be asked to display
KNOWLEDGE of the HOUR of the date when the Battle of Waterloo was fought.
("Sometime as per the late morning to the following couple of
hours,
according to contemporary reports").
Hume goes on:
"[O]r [in the case of Caesar] they were derived from
the testimony of others, and that again from another
testimony till we arrive at those who were EYE-WITNESSES
and spectators of the event."
Not from the assassins, as we believe. They left the scene and the corpse
of Julius Caesar was found later. So we should distinguish between an
eye-witness to the finding of the corpse of Julius Caesar under that infamous
statue AND an eye-witness to the 'assassination' itself.
Similarly, what Lord Hill did was HEARD the guns. He was an ear-witness --.
If not an 'spectator', an 'audience'
(Theatrical critics like Geary
sometimes dismiss this point: "Strictly, an attendee to a concert is a member
of
an audience, but the attendee to an OPERA is a spectator, since she is
supposed
to SEE, too, and not just LISTEN").
Popper comments on Hume:
"It seems to me that this view must lead to the infinite regress described
above."
And Grice WOULD agree. Because his points against the 'conclusive evidence'
are of the same type. He finds that they involve 'problems' of a
'regressive' nature:
--- must the knower KNOW that the evidence is conclusive?
(never mind whether he must know that the allegedly conclusive evidence is
TRUE).
Note that if we GRANT, as we shouldn't, that the knower MUST KNOW that his
evidence is conclusive, there is a bit of a vicious circle involved, for
"K"
(knowledge) would be defined in terms of some further sort of "knowledge".
Grice suggests the problem is not final, in that 'knowledge' may be
'self-referential' in nature.
----
Popper goes on:
"For the problem
is, of course, whether ‘the unanimous testimony
of historians’ [referred to by Hume in the case of Caesar] is to be
accepted, or whether it is, perhaps, to be
rejected as the result of their reliance on a common yet spurious source."
THERE _are_ indeed controversies as to the spatio-temporal coordinates of
the assassination of Julius Caesar, and I'm not surprised if modern history
is today more concerned with _social_ aspects alla School of the Annals.
----
Popper goes on:
"The appeal to ‘letters present to our memory or our senses’ cannot have
any
bearing on this or on any other relevant problem of historiography."
-------- Which perhaps oversimplifies. I love Loeb and I think Loeb is all
we need. And we have to recall that the first 'letters' were in Latin:
Caesar was first described as having been
assassinated in letters in a foreign
language to Hume (as it were). The 'locus classicus' as it were, and the
'scholium', as it were: Livio, Tacito, and the rest of them.
In the case of Waterloo (that interests Grice) some of these 'letters' were
probably in French, and I should NOT be surprised if the answers to the
question as to the spatio-temporal coordinates of Waterloo diverge in an
English and a French pupil. Or not.
Grice seems to have concluded that, since,
"The battle of Waterloo was fought on June 18 1815"
is _synthetic_, it's best to restrict 'know' to the grasping of tautologies
and mathematical truths. Plato was right that the perfect circle is only
an ideal
limit, and that we call 'circles' are HARDLY circles in this
Platonic 'sense'. Mutatis mutandis, with 'know' -- and indeed with "mean"
(Grice's focus, in "Meaning Revisited",
as in "Fido" means Fido). "Know" ends up
being a value-oriented notion that is ascribed upon 'deeming' conditions:
the pupil is "deemed" to know that the battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815,
as, as Grice recalls, once in Oxford, a cat was deemed to be a dog
(because a particular college would not allow cats on campus, and the dean's
pet
happened to be a 'cat' (later deemed a dog by the college's Governing Body).
I'm not surprised that M. A. E. Dummett also found historical knowledge
(so-called) a fascinating way to prove INTUITIONISM right (or 'wrong' to his
critics).
Note that Grice is simplifying the picture. If we ask today what historians
KNOW we hardly expect them to drop dates and places. We expect,
alla von
Wright, to provide EXPLANATIONS, mostly in intentional terms, as to why
Caesar was killed (whenever and wherever that was) and why
Waterloo was, again,
whenever, _won_ -- or 'lost' as the *other* sources have it.
Or not.
Cheers,
Speranza
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