[lit-ideas] Univocal philosophy as the value of transcendental claims?
- From: Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 17:19:47 +0000
Walter, whose persistence in working towards mutual clarity I greatly
appreciate, writes:
"Eric asks what follows from philosophical truth. Which I take to be a query
regarding the value (i.e. benefit) of such truth. Surely I need not answer
such a question."
First, I'm not sure I asked the question Walter imputes to me, though since
apparently I'm not the one who can say whether I was making a transcendental
assertion or not, I suppose I'm also not the one to say whether I asked that
question.
What I meant to be asking was what difference it made to say that my assertion
was a transcendental claim. Maybe that is a question about the benefit of
philosophical truth, but I thought it was a question about a characterization
of my original assertion. Perhaps, though, to say my assertion is a
transcendental claim is to say that it is a candidate for philosophical truth,
in Walter's lexicon, in which case it would come to the same thing in Walter's
lexicon, even if not in mine.
But that still leaves me unsure why Walter would dismiss the question of what
the value of philosophical truth is, particularly if such truths are only those
which express necessary conditions for the possibility of some human competence
or discourse (which is what I take 'transcendental truths' to be in Walter's
lexicon).
I even think he articulated a possible answer earlier in the same post:
"T[ranscendental] analyses and arguments [presumably aimed at attaining
transcendental truths?]... constitute the only analyses and arguments that
accord with a justifiably univocal conception of philosophy as a unique
discipline of inquiry."
Which seems to say that one value or benefit of philosophical truths is that
they are the goals of a particular univocal discipline of inquiry.
Exactly why philosophy needs to be a univocal and unique discipline of inquiry
I don't entirely understand. I'm not sure that what Socrates was about, as
dramatized in Plato's writings, can be properly so characterized, for example,
but I do think it's fairly characterized as philosophy.
Moreover, the idea that transcendental analysis is valuable because it
comprises that discipline's undertaking sort of begs the question anyway.
Presumably the discipline of inquiry is worth pursuing because there is
something worthwhile that results from it -- or is it worth pursuing just
because someone might be curious about its subject matter?
So I most definitely think it worth asking: what would be the value of a
transcendental truth about, say, morality? Take, for example, the candidate
transcendental claim Walter attributed to me: In order to understand a moral
judgment one has to understand how the terms in which it was made applied to at
least potentially real human situations. If that were a transcendental truth,
as opposed, say, to a useful but not entirely reliable rule of thumb, what
would follow from that fact that would not follow from its being a rule of
thumb?
I pursue this because I think the term 'transcendental' is unnecessary, i.e.
because there are more perspicuous ways of pointing out the class of things it
is supposed to refer to, and because I think that class is empty, i.e. that
there actually are no cases of transcendental truth, in the relevant sense, to
be had in this sublunary existence or elsewhere.
Since the word also carries connotations, to my ear, that those assertions to
which it would properly apply, were there such, would be higher, more
dignified, more serious or more significant than others, cutting it down to
size seems a worthy effort towards sustaining the level playing field of
democratic discourse, as it were.
However, I might be wrong about all that. Perhaps I have a tin ear for
connotations, or perhaps I misunderstand the substance of the matter, so I
await further clarification.
Hoping everyone's new year is off to a good start,
Eric Dean
Washington DC
Other related posts:
