---- by JLS
-------- for the GC.
ROGER BISHOP JONES, WHO founded "Carnap Corner" -- this bloggers.com -- writes of 'epistemic retreat'. "I am not a sceptic. I know that", he added, in interview. But he is.
But, Kramer objects:
"How can he know he is NOT a sceptic" (He adds, "I tend to use 'k', but ke sera, ke sera").
"Exactly. He thinks he is NOT a sceptic. That's the most he would be willing to say I expect."
"Has he read Sextus?", Kramer goes on.
"Who is Sextus?"
"The well-known Sceptic, you know."
---------
I will have to digitalise this first essay by yours truly on this. I had to (boringly) attend this boring seminar by the late (he died so young) Ezequiel de Olaso. I was an undergraduate, i.e. below all possible grades. His idea for a YEARLY seminar was the most boring thing he could ever had conceived of:
"An account of Moliere and other French sceptics, inluding Voltaire, in the light of Sextus Empiricus."
The first meeting he brought a PILE of photocopies.
"What's that?" we asked -- there were two of us.
"Photocopies. This is D. Braun's translation -- for you -- of what Sextus Empiricus wrote."
I was disgusted. In some unis, the assumption is that students don't know ("why would we be teaching them otherwise?"). But I knew. So I said, "Bugger your Braun", and got hold of the Loeb Classical Library for Sextus, which I enjoyed. We only would deal with sections 2 to the half of section 5. "Piece of sandwich," I thought to myself (I'm not a sweet tooth) -- incidentally, is 'sandwich,' in Itaian, ambiguous? -- They don't seem to know the first thing about the wich of Sand in Kent, when they gobble them).
-----
In those sections, Sextus analyses, fastidiously, things like:
"No, it's not a cat. It seems to me as if it were a cat. But it may not be a cat".
"I BELIEVE I see a cat -- before my eyes. But my eyes, and my nose may be deceiving me. And he may NOT be a cat."
"I would not like to assert the proposition that this is a cat. It may be a hallucination, and not a cat at all, but a hallucination of a cat."
Etcetera.
This is not 'epistemic retreat', but 'doxastic retreat'.
------ I was already poisoned by Grice at that time. So I thought, "There's no way I'm going to write about Rabelais AND NOT GRICE." So I concocted this good strategy. I applied Grice's maxims to the sceptic:
1. Do not say what you lack adequate evidence for.
---- But surely Sextus, from the little I had read of that bearded philosopher, did not have evidence for diddly. I then had to conclude. It looked like a short essay, so far, and I needed an A+ (as I got). So I decided. "What?"
I suggested that Sextus could not provide 'assertoric' moves such as "My head itches" --. I suggested that he could only asked his head to be scratched. In fact I made a memento about this. Because I wrote that the 'doxastic retreat' had to be extended to the level of the PRE-supposition. And "Scratch my head!" seemed to me to implicate that he had one.
It's quite different from, "Don't bother to scratch my head".
In this case, as Grice notes, while it would be improbable, as an addressee, to be the recipient of that utterance -- if the utterer does not 'display' a head, it is yet not logically contradictory --- (vide "Do not bother to arrest the intruder!" in WOW: P & CE).
So, I suggested that while orders were a no-no, because while Sextus could have wished to keep his implicata cancelled, the idiots hearing him would NOT. Would that mean that he could 'ask' questions? No. Because questions, like orders, like not assertoric, are stupid if you are sceptic-sceptic-sceptic. They presuppose that someone is going to answer them, so why bother (there may be nobody to answer them, not even oneself).
So I had the third section citing Wittgenstein: "Of that which you cannot speak, you rather keep your mouth shut". I examined whehter this was tautologous. I submitted that it was. "To keep your mouth shut" and "not to speak" are, 'in my idiolect," I wrote, "the same thing".
My examiner was speechless.
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Very entertaining.
ReplyDeleteBut I am a sceptic, aren't I?
RBJ
Well, your problem is not to much the 'epistemic' but the retreat. As I use the expression, it's something pretty naughty.
ReplyDeleteAs per Frank Sinatra:
Could you coo?
Could you care?
For a cunning cottage
we could share?
Your mush
I never shall shush
--- I.e. 're-treat' is possibly ambiguous but I have some inconvenience in thinking of it as anything "but" that cottage. In any way, there is problem a Sextus-type problem with your 'epistemic'. For the Greeks, indeed, episteme this and episteme that. They were BOUND to use 'episteme' because they lacked English. In English, I grant, you have one concept too many of 'knowledge'.
So the 'epistemic retreat' is -- like a retreat -- to where you go. You don't say "I know" but you go one step down. "Bring down a peg, or two" as I think Grice says, somewhere.
So, yes, I would think you are a Sceptic. And then you say you are Carneadean, which is posh.
Cicero stayed in Rome. He couldn't stand a Greek. But HIS son, he sent as a boarder to study with The Greeks. At the time, the Academy (or "Academia" as Cicero called it) was not what it had been -- they charged obscenely. Cicero recalls with affectionate the letters his son -- "Junior", he called it, literally -- about his learnings from Carneades ("The man will not believe you are not paying the fees, dad"). Etc.
Roger. I expect you understand I'm teasing! Of course you are free to use 'retreat' and 'epistemic' like that. They make for two grand words, and a grand combo in combination.
ReplyDeleteI do think you are possibly a sceptic. (or 'skeptic' as Kramer may prefer).
As I see it, or you, rather, you rightly oppose 'sceptic' with 'dogmatic', and since Quine thought he was clever (or a 'smartass,' as Prof. Turner prefers (*--don't ask you Prof. Turner is, he doesn't exist. I use him to air some strong opinions of mine) when he wrote "Two dogmas of empiricism", you know that.
Quine thought he was being clever: how can empiricism have dogmas? Of course empiricism doesn't HAVE dogmas. It doesn't mean Empiricism is scepticism.
Similarly, when Grice/Strawson replied, "In defense of a dogma" they were being VERY jocular (although not as jocular as Quine). For how can a 'dogma' be DEFENDED? Once it is DEFENDED it is no longer a dogma.
So, when Sextus opposes the dogmatics with the sceptics he is right. And there are so many types of empiricism: Phyrronian or absolute or Carneadean or probabilistic, that you never, literally, know.
----- Plus, since Gettier, we are never sure any more what we mean by "know" (episteme -- in Plato). In the Timmaeus, he writes, "knowledge" is 'justified true belief', but that's hardly enough unless we BIND the 'justified' with the 'true' bit, etc. -- and even then we seem to need a 'causal' link (Grice, WoW: section on 'knowledge' in WoW:iii).
---- Etc.
And don't feel the burden to have to "explain" your terms. "Never explain, never apologise" someone said. Your post on "forms of judgement" was VERY informative as to your current projects, etc, and I think that is going to be some good book, on Rationality and Evolution.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you received the "Intro to Semantics", too. I hope you read this thing I posted here on the "On some concepts of pragmatics" by Carnap, where he does seem to think that 'belief' and 'assertion' and 'utterance' are what define (extensionally) pragmatics. Grice never cared for the label 'pragmatic' much -- and would agree with Carnap on those terms possibly being pragmatic (although Grice would take a more serious view, and think of belief as the topic of philosophical psychology -- and he himself explicitly sees 'the theory of meaning' as an offshoot of 'rational psychology', as he calls it -- all this is scholastic terminology that Grice is jocularly using apres Kant. Etc.
I do like your take on "retreat" irrelevant (and irreverent?) though it is.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between me and the pyrrhoneans is that we have a different conception of what counts as a dogma. I prefer something close to ordinary usage, while the pyrrhoneans take the merest trace of an opinon as dogma.
Thanks for the permission to abstain from explanation, but that is really the whole problem.
After a certain amount of thinking one can acquire a head full of ideas, which resist communication.
Then new ideas have merit primarily if they make possible the exposure of the old ones.
On Carnap on pragmatism, I'm still trying to locate the grounds of your interpretation, I havn't yet been able to make anything of your last (mainly because of distractions).
RBJ
That should have been "pragmatics".
ReplyDeleteRBJ
Thanks. In "Meaning and Necessity", there is apparently (I must have, alas, only photocopies of it somewhere -- in the more damped areas of the Swimming-Pool Library) an appendix, "On some concepts of pragmatics" where he seems to define pragmatics extensionally as the empirical study of "assertion, belief, and utterance" -- specific collocation in that essay, I think. I hope he does trade on his earlier "Intro to Semantics".
ReplyDeleteLoved your account of the phyrroneans. You seem quite on spot as to the Greek for 'dogma'. I believe it just meant, originally, something like a thing being 'pointed'. I'm pretty sure the '-ma' is a neutral ending. (Kramer will agree that 'dog' is polysemous here, but I think that is NOT the 'dog' we need, at this point -- but cfr. Grice as been counted to 'rally to the defense of the UNDERdogMA anyday -- Grice's mischiveous friend Grandy, cited in Grice WoW: "Meaning Revisited"). I think 'dog-', in Greek, may be cognate with "dic-', i.e. to say in Latin. As when we do say, "Master dixit", the master showed it to us -- as when we say, apodeictic to mean 'demonstrative'. So what is apodeictic is OSTENSIONAL, as a 'dogma' as it were. The plural is indeed DOGMA-TA, which I do love. If I had been Quine, I would have titled the thing, "Dual Dogmata" and leave the "of Empiricism" as otiose and uncalled for (The 'analytic-synthetic' distinction was possibly Leibniz's invention!).
----
Do explain!
Etc.
OK, JL.
ReplyDeleteI have the book, but never paid any attention to those two pages.
I don't think they say what you are suggesting.
He begins:
"In an earlier paper I discussed the pragmatical concept of intension..."
and he responds to some criticisms of Chisholm.
But in doing so he does not make any statement about the scope of pragmatics.
He does say that we need a conceptual framework for theoretical pragmatics, so he is thinking fairly generally about pragmatics, and he discusses some ideas about what you might find there.
But I don't see that he says anything which is inconsistent with his earlier general statement about the scope of pragmatics.
If he claimed that his speculations about what there should be in this theoretical framework were sufficient for all pragmatics, then you might be not so far off.
But he doesn't, and he is only really considering a theory which is adequate for "intension".
Even if he did make that claim, one should not take this as a change of heart about the scope of pragmatics.
Its would probably be a mistake about what kind of theoretical language would suffice, which one might point out by observing that according to his definition "allegation" belongs to pragmatics as much as belief and cannot be accounted for in the framework he has so far outlined.
RBJ
On Quine's dogmas. surely the problem is with "dogmas" not with empiricism.
ReplyDeleteHis target was Carnap, and I don't think its correct to describe his position, not even on analyticity, as dogmatic (though Quine will find it hard to budge him, just as he would if he tried to persuade him that black is white).
On the other hand, I do myself think that Quine's rejection is dogmatic, he is not just incorrectly claiming that the distinction was not then adequately defined, but that it could not possibly be (and on poor grounds).
Though I suppose you are right that this isn't an exclusively empiricist doctrine.
My own account of the distinction goes back to Plato, who anticipates Hume's fork.
Leibniz has the word, but the distinction in Leibniz is thoroughly muddled, its much clearer in Plato and Hume.
RBJ
Sure. I thought exactly of you and your historical researchers one semi-sec AFTER hitting the button 'publish'. It is an old distinction, and I'm PARTICULARLY enamoured of the account you provide of Locke's 'trifles' -- MY idea of analyticity.
ReplyDelete--- Thanks for views on dogma and for summarising the Carnap "two-page" thing in "Meaning and Necessity". Your point about 'allegation' is so true it hurts.
Actually, my first ever published paper had a short title, "On the way of conversation" or something and such a long subtitle that it offended my neighbours: it inclued "allegedly minor problem". You see Grice says that ther are grand major problems with meaning and at least one 'minor' problem -- (WoW: Meaning Revisited): how to define the meaning of an expression! --- So I provide a way out to that 'allegedly' minor problem. I wouldn't think Grice THOUGHT it was a minor problem, only said it!