The reasonableness of accusations of unreasonableness (?!)

 

Here’s a quote that would do a lot of justice to Johnstone’s concept of philosophical controversy. It is taken from the writings of Levi Strauss – more precisely, from one of his many discussions with Stern on the notion of historicism:

“Historicism claims that all human thoughts or beliefs are historical and therefore bound to die; but historicism itself is a human thought; therefore historicism itself has a limited validity, or else it cannot be true. To assert the historicist thesis means to doubt it and, thus, transcend it” (Levi-Strauss, 1953, Natural right and history)

To Johnstone, remember, philosophical controversies are alway recognizable by this trait that one party accuses the other one of not being able in principle to fully assert a thesis. A reasonable attack of inconsistency, as it were, or a “valid ad hominem” – in Johnstone’s terminology. It was responded to - just as predicted (see review link below) – with an accusation of straw man:

[…] let us rather admit that historicism cannot claim timeless validity without violating its very principle. […] By virtue of the categories at our disposal at this moment of history, human thoughts, beliefs and values appear historically conditioned […] Since, besides the categories of our epoch, we have no others at our disposal […] we must say that, in our epoch, historicism appears to be a well established theory. The fact that we cannot affirm the eternal, timeless, transhistorical validity of historicism does not exclude the possibility of its being valid for the present historical epoch which gave birth to it. (Stern, 1962, Philosophy of history and the problem of values)

Now, the question is when is an accusation of fallaciousness – dialectically – reasonable? Can you ever unreasonably accuse someone of being unreasonable?

The debate is treated from the perspective of controversy analysis in

Dascal, M. (2008). Dichotomies and types of debates. In F. H. van Eemeren, & B. Garssen (Eds.), Controversy and confrontation (pp. 27-51). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

The edited book will be reviewed here in a couple of weeks.

Johnstone (1959) Philosophy and argument

Johnstone, H. W. (1959). Philosophy and argument. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

The review (PDF) here.
More about Henry W. Johnstone Jr here.
An interesting paper on the same topic here.

The argumentative theory of Sperber & Mercier

Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. (in prep). The argumentative theory. Harvard University Press

Read a review in Informal Logic here.
See video of Mercier explaining a few things here.

Soft rules, hard rules

Eemeren, F. H. van, & Houtlosser, P. (2007). The contextuality of fallacies. Informal Logic, 27(1), 59-67

Read the article here
Read the review here

The myth of saying it scientifically

Gross, A. G. (1990). The arrangement of the scientific paper. In The rhetoric of science (pp. 84-97). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Read the review here.

Can philosophical argument be valid?

Johnstone, H. W. (1978c). Can philosophical arguments be valid? Dans H. W. Johnstone, Validity and rhetoric in philosophical argument (pp. 22-28). Univeristy Park, PA: The Dialogue Press.

Read the review here.

When “Hello” meets context

Forget Yu-Gi-Oh! I found a better example.

Since I don’t own either a car or a slave and since I live right above a supermarket, I shop often and in small quantities. So, every time I get out of the building and every time I have to buy something, I pass in front of the supermarket. Most of the times, at the entrance there’s this man. He’s incredibly jumpy all the time, smiling and jovial. He smokes, has very thin legs and his clothes are shabby. There are two things you immediately notice. First, he always has a stash of magazines in his left hand. The magazines are not different from one another; it is a bulk of 20-30 magazines of the same kind. Second, he greets people. Yes, he greets the persons that go in and out: “Hello! How are you doing?”, “Have a nice evening, buh-bye!”, and with the more common customers, “Ah, nice to see you again Joris! Niiice jacket” etc. I’ve been told he’s been doing this for around three years.

Now, if I were a writer I would probably be able to build up some narrative anticipation around this guy. You might anyway ask yourself: What is it with this guy? (I did, and it took me a while to figure it out) Here’s the point: the guy is a beggar. He begs, this is his job; he’s there as often as he can but in any case regularly, he has work to do, and he gets money, food or beer.

There are, I think, many interesting linguistic questions that pertain to this guy and I’ll refer to them in a bit. But there is one, a not-necessarily-linguistic one which beats all others: How did this guy come up with the idea? I would suggest that he must have had a very acute sociological judgment. He must have observed, for instance, that people don’t really like beggars, that beggars are even generally avoided if not despised. He also must have observed that beggars must make a sort of compromise: the spot chosen must be sufficiently busy so that it’s not a waste of time and sufficiently remote – or away from the city center – so that police doesn’t pick you up every other day. He must also have observed that there’s this “free magazine” and “free newspapers” business going on. He must also know that if the police stops by, he can say: What? I’m helping people get their free magazine, I’m being nice, I know most of them

As for the linguistic question, we can fit them under one umbrella question: In what way does the context influence his speech acts? He is greeting people, remember? How does “Hello!” turn into “Please give me 50 cents”? Still a linguistic question: What influences his pragmatic choice? Why does he say “Hello!” (which might even be misunderstood, and I have witnessed the surprised walker’s “uhm… hello…!?”) and not “Please give me 50 cents”? Still a linguistic question: What kind of inferences do the people that give him money and food make? How do they get from “Nice jacket” to “Ok, here’s a beer” and how familiar must they be with the overall picture?

I think this is a wonderful example of an institution (that of begging) influencing linguistic behavior (the speech act of greeting). Also, this passes so naturally, that all of the people I have asked what they think about the guy said without blinkging: “He’s begging!”

Yu-Gi-Oh!

“One of the best ways to see something that we have come to take too much for granted (like language) is to look at an example of it that makes it strange again. So consider Yu-Gi-Oh!, a popular-culture activity, but one whose use of language will seem strange to many.

Here are some facts about Yu-Gi-Oh!: Yu-Gi-Oh! is a card game that can be played face-to-face or in video games. There are also Yu-Gi-Oh! television shows, movies, and books (in all of which characters act out moves in the card game). There are thousands of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Players choose a deck of 40 cards and “duel” each other. The moves in the game represent battles between the monsters on their cards. Each card has instructions about what moves can be made in the game when that card is used. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a form of Japanese “anime,” that is, animated (“cartoon”) characters and their stories shown in “mangas” (comic books), television shows, and movies. Japanese anime is now a worldwide phenomenon. If this all seems strange to you, that is all to the good.

Below I print part of the text on one card:

When this card is Normal Summoned, Flip Summoned, or Special Summoned successfully, select and activate 1 of the following effects: Select 1 equipped Equip Spell Card and destroy it. Select 1 equipped Equip Spell Card and equip it to this card.

What does this mean? Notice, first of all, that you, as a speaker of English, recognize each word in this text. But that does you very little good. You still do not really know what it means if you do not understand Yu-Gi-Oh!. So how would you find out what the text really means? Since we are all influenced a great deal by how school has taught us to think about language, we are liable to think that the answer to this question is this: Look up what the words mean in some sort of dictionary or guide. But this does not help anywhere as much as you might think. There are web sites where you can  look up what the words and phrases on Yu-Gi-Oh! cards mean, and this is the sort of thing you see if you go to such web sites:

Equip Spell Cards are Spell Cards that usually change the ATK and/or DEF of a Monster Card on the field, and/or grant that Monster Card special abilitie(s). They are universally referred to as Equip Cards, since Equip Cards can either be Equip Spell Cards, or Trap Cards that are treated as Equip Cards after activation. When you activate an Equip Spell Card, you choose a face-up monster on the field to equip the card to, and that Equip Spell Card’s card’s effect applies to that monster until the card is destroyed or otherwise removed from the field. When the equipped monster is removed from the field or flipped face-down, all the Equip Spell Cards equipped to that monster are destroyed. A fair few Equip Spell Cards are representations of weapons or armour. (http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Equip_Spell_Cards)

Does this really help? If you do not understand the card, you do not understand this much better. And think how much more of this I would have to give you to explicate the whole text on the Yu-Gi-Oh! card, short though it is. Why didn’t it help? Because, in general, if you do not understand some words, getting yet more of the same sorts of words does not help you know what the original words mean. In fact, it is hard to understand words just by getting definitions (other words) or other sorts of verbal explanations. Even if we understand a definition, it only tells us the range of meanings a word has, it does not really tell us how to use the word appropriately in real contexts of use.” (pp. 3-4)

Gee, J. P. (2011). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Particularities of “philosophical controversy”

Johnstone, H. W. (1978). Persuasion and validity in philosophy. In H. W. Johnstone, Validity and rhetoric in philosophical argument (pp. 13-22). Univeristy Park, PA: The Dialogue Press.

Read the review here.

All footnotes to Plato are …

Johnstone, H. W. (1978). Philosophy and argumentum ad hominem. In H. W. Johnstone, Validity and rhetoric in philosophical argument (pp. 5-12). Univeristy Park, PA: The Dialogue Press.

Read the review here

Backdoor analyticity

The thesis Massey goes for in this paper is, I think, very challenging. The analytic-synthetic distinction, which was ultimately left in the blur by twentieth century philosophy, is said to be eluded by the new concept of conceivability. There are arguments based on conceivability out there, and they are no less blurry than those based on analyticity. Such arguments are traced back to Hume. Unsurprisingly, thought experiemnts seem to be the prototypical example.

Massey, G. (1991). Backdoor analyticty. In T. Horowitz, & G. Massey (Eds.), Thought experiments in science and philosophy (pp. 285-296). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Read the article here.

RIP library.nu

So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? One thing it means is that these barbarians - these pirates who are also scholars - are angry. We scholars have long been singing the praises of education, learning, mutual aid and the virtues of getting a good degree. We scholars have been telling the world of desperate learners to do just what they are doing, if not in so many terms.

So there are a lot of angry young middle-class learners in the world this month. Some are existentially angry about the injustice of this system, some are pragmatically angry they must now spend $100 - if they even have that much - on a textbook instead of on themselves or their friends.

Read the entire article on the subject here.

Bonus: a (very reasonable?) slippery slope included!

But the legality of library.nu is also not the issue: trading in scanned, leaked or even properly purchased versions of digital books is thoroughly illegal. This is so much the case that it can't be long before reading a book - making an unauthorised copy in your brain - is also made illegal.

The philosophical basis of rhetoric: a thought experiment (?)

Johnstone, H. W. (2007). The philosophical basis of rhetoric. Philosophy and rhetoric, 40(1), 15-26.
Review: here

“Dear Mother and Dad,

 

Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay?

Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty will healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burnout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It's really a basement room, but it's kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven't got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show.

Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our premarital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. I know that you will welcome him into our family with open arms. He is kind and, although not well educated, he is ambitious. Although he is of a different race and religion than ours, I know your often express tolerance will not permit you to be bothered by that.

Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a "D" in American History, and an "F" in Chemistry and I wanted you to see those marks in their proper perspective.

Your loving daughter,
Sharon”

Doing science with thought experiments

Post: article review
Subject: thought experiments in scientific reasoning
Date: March 2, 2012
Link: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_Yq2vTLXMQ4WGJvc3Y5WWlTd3FTV1ZaV1JrNFg2Zw

Reviewed article: Irvine, A. (1991). Thought experiments in scientific reasoning. In T. Horrowitz, & G. Massey (Eds.), Thought experiments in science and philosophy (pp. 149-165). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Read the review.

The Good, the Bad and Aristotle

Trust me, I’m an engineer

It is interesting how the best preachers preached while refusing the “genre” of preaching. I see this division working only under the assumption that there’s normal wisodm, on the one hand, the one we would acquire from interacting with worldly things and abnormal wisdom, on the other, the one which is the consequence of interacting with God. The former is the philosophical knowledge of the wise, knowledge which is true by virtue of how Existence in fact is; the latter is the providential knowledge of the blessed, knowledge which is true by virtue of how God in fact is. So it’s interesting how preachers from both sides care to dismiss them being preachers of one side.

How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was - such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth. But many as their falsehoods were, there was one of them which quite amazed me; - I mean when they told you to be upon your guard, and not to let yourselves be deceived by the force of my eloquence. They ought to have been ashamed of saying this, because they were sure to be detected as soon as I opened my lips and displayed my deficiency; they certainly did appear to be most shameless in saying this, unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for then I do indeed admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs!

Well, as I was saying, they have hardly uttered a word, or not more than a word, of truth; but you shall hear from me the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner, in a set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases. No indeed! but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for I am certain that this is right, and that at my time of life I ought not to be appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a juvenile orator - let no one expect this of me. And I must beg of you to grant me one favor, which is this - If you hear me using the same words in my defence which I have been in the habit of using, and which most of you may have heard in the agora, and at the tables of the money-changers, or anywhere else, I would ask you not to be surprised at this, and not to interrupt me. For I am more than seventy years of age, and this is the first time that I have ever appeared in a court of law, and I am quite a stranger to the ways of the place; and therefore I would have you regard me as if I were really a stranger, whom you would excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and after the fashion of his country; - that I think is not an unfair request. Never mind the manner, which may or may not be good; but think only of the justice of my cause, and give heed to that: let the judge decide justly and the speaker speak truly.

Plato – Socrate’s Defense

And I, brethren, when I came unto you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. We speak wisdom, however, among them that are fullgrown: yet a wisdom not of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, who are coming to nought: but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory: which none of the rulers of this world hath known: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory: but as it is written,

Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not,
And which entered not into the heart of man,
Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him.

But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth; combining spiritual things with spiritual words. Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he should instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.

First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians

The Fallacy of Making your Fallacy a Mere Blunder?

E. J. Dionne (The Washington Post):

We’re witnessing what should be called the Two Cadillacs Fallacy: Romney’s rather authentic moments suggesting he doesn’t understand the lives of average people (such as his comment on his wife’s two Cadillacs) are dismissed as “gaffes,” while Santorum’s views on social issues are denounced as “extreme.” But Romney’s gaffes are more than gaffes: They reflect deeply held and radical views about how wealth and power ought to be distributed in the United States. These should worry us a lot more than Santorum’s dopey “snob” comment or his tasteless denunciation of JFK.

Read the entire article.

The “meaning” of thought experiments

 

In (Galili, 2009) the author is after a definition, with a goal and a method in mind. The goal is to be able to clarify this thought experimentation “for educational purposes” – having already observed that many of the thought experiments have educational qualities due to their intuitiveness. Searle mentions at the end of his article in Views into the Chinese Room (Searle, 2003) that everyone to whom he has explained his thought experiment was able to understand both its purpose and its logical “mechanism”.

Historical note

Galili starts with two remarks which I find very enlightening. First, he takes a few examples of scientists or philosophers who used thought experiments, or something which subsequently received the label, but named them differently (analogies, paradoxes, imaginary situations etc.) Sometimes, it is unclear whether they are referring to an actual experiment – one to be put into practice – or one for which the results are so clear no implementation is … read more