There has been a problem with the philosophical over-use of the word ‘meaningless’, as in
‘God does not exist’ is a meaningless statement.
‘God does not exist’ has a meaning, or, at the least, it makes sense. One may of course be using the word ‘meaningless’ in a specific and precise technical sense. For example, ‘God does not exist’ or ‘God exists’ may be meaningless because it cannot be verified (in the language of certain early logical positivists), or it makes no difference to experience (as with certain pragmatists), or it has no observational consequences (in the language of early Carnap), etc. In these cases, it may be better to say that the expression ‘God does not exist’ is, at best, philosophically problematic, or, at worst, logically incorrect. Again, it is not actually meaningless if we abide by sacred ‘ordinary grammar’. Some philosophers, for example, say that ‘God exists’ is equivalent to, or means, that
Godhood is instantiated.
‘God exists’ does not mean that at all. It may be the case that the statement should mean ‘Godhood is instantiated’ if it is to be philosophically coherent and acceptable. But ‘God exists’ simply does not mean ‘Godhood is instantiated’. The statement ‘God exists’ means that God exists, in a manner of speaking. Similarly, ‘Godhood is instantiated’ isn’t even the correct ‘logical form’ of the ‘surface grammar’ either. The distinction to be made is that when a philosopher says that ‘Godhood is instantiated’ (or another ‘logically correct’ version of it) is the equivalent of - or means - that ‘God exists’ in correct logical grammar, or that it is equivalent to it, he is doing normative, or stipulative, or revisionary (or even ‘transcendental’, according to Stephen Yablo) metaphysics. That is, the philosopher who opts for ‘Godhood is instantiated’, rather than ‘God exists’, isn’t doing ‘descriptive metaphysics’ at all. These two terms, ‘descriptive’ and ‘revisionary’ metaphysics are taken from Strawson. This is what Strawson himself wrote in his book Individuals:
Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual content of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure (10).
For example, take the reference to ‘red exists’ (seemingly a reference to a universal or to a concept). We can have
Red is a colour.
parsed (or analysed) into the nominalist
Red things are coloured.
according to one ‘revisionary’ metaphysical scheme (to be argued for). Or we can also have ‘Red is a colour’ parsed (or analysed) as
Reds are colour tropes.
According to another revisionary metaphysical scheme. But the statement ‘Red is a colour’ does not mean ‘Reds are colour tropes’ and it is not equivalent to ‘Red things are coloured’ either. You can argue for the ‘Godhood is instantiated’ version of ‘God exists’, but I do not think that the latter is meaningless. Some philosophers question ‘red exists’ because it is seemingly a reference to a universal. And it is therefore meaningless because universals are deemed to be non-existent non-spatiotemporal entities.
The strange thing is that many philosophers have had a problem with the statement ‘God exists’ not because of the proper name ‘God’ (e.g., not ‘referring’), but because the predicate ‘exists’ adds nothing to the subject term ‘God’. For example, it is argued that
Tigers exist.
has the same grammatical form as
Tigers are striped.
but a different ‘logical form’. That is, according to revisionary metaphysicians (even if they don’t accept that name), ‘Tigers exist’ is logically incorrect. That may be the case, but ‘Tigers exist’ is still meaningful – it still makes sense. Just to put the cat among the pigeons, D. F. Pears not only argues that the statement ‘God exists’ makes sense, that is grammatical sense, but that it also makes logical and philosophical sense:
[To say that] the verb ‘exist’ does not add anything to the concept of the subject [e.g., ‘God’ or ‘red’]… is false: for to say that a concept has instances [or is ‘instantiated’] in reality is certainly to add something to it… [from ‘Is Existence a Predicate?’]
Just to show how reductive the belief in a correct logical form can be, let’s get back to ‘God exists’. This can be said to mean or be equivalent to ‘Godhood is instantiated’, which in turn can be said to mean or be equivalent to
There is at least one x, such that this x instantiates Godhood.
This in turn can be said to mean or be equivalent to
$x(Gx)
So now we can have a strange identity statement:
‘God exists.’ = $x (Gx)
It can even be said that ‘God exists’ and $x (Gx) have different Fregean ‘intensions’ but the same ‘reference’. That is, someone may believe the statement ‘God exists’ is true (or false) but not believe the same of $x (Gx).
The Philosophy of Philosophy
Holism, Context and the A-Historical in Philosophy
It can be said that many students of philosophy can make sense of, say, Plato and Aristotle’s ideas without necessarily putting them ‘in their historical context’. Doing so may help us to understand them, but it is not necessary for our understanding. For example, Aristotle made the metaphysical claim that every effect or event must have a cause. Does that philosophical idea need an ‘historical context’ to be made sense of? There may well have been many contingent reasons as to why Aristotle was interested in the first place in cause and effect, but that doesn’t make them relative to ancient Greece alone. Plato believed that the best kings or leaders would be the ones who had been philosophically trained. This view may be wrong, and it may have ancient Greek historical nuances, but do we need to know these connections? Would a philosophical training have helped Prime Minister Tony Blair to be a better leader? Yes or no? We do not need to know the aetiology of this particular view of Plato’s to understand it or take a position on it. Of course sometimes if we take some views out of context they may seem silly. Some views or ideas seem silly in all contexts. This is true, also, of non-philosophical views, such as those of science, religion and politics.
Can’t some philosophical ideas or views be on par with the a-historical truth that 2 + 2 = 4? For example, views about how we must necessarily experience the world. Views about space and time (their experiential aspects). Perhaps even ideas or views about the wrongness of torturing young children for fun are a-historical.
There is a problem with over-contextualising. Where do we draw the boundaries of our contexts? Are they indefinite? For example, a Muslim may only take a criticism of a particular passage in the Koran if the critic has read the entire book (the ‘context’). A sentence can be understood out of context. This Derrida taking context to what some may think extremes:
Since these concepts [of ‘Western metaphysics’] are not elements or atoms, and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics (‘Structure, Sign and Play’).
And this is Donald Davidson with a similar, less extreme, position:
If sentences depend for their meaning on their structure, and we understand the meaning of each item in the structure only as an abstraction from the totality of sentences in which it features, then we can give the meaning of any sentence (or word) only by giving the meaning of every sentence (or word) in the language (From ‘Truth and Meaning’, 1984).
However, if we mean by ‘context’ that the meaning of the words in the sentence is related to other words, beliefs, truths, etc., then of course the context is relevant. Take the sentence: ‘Pass that red ball.’ This can only be understood within the context of a red ball or another person being near to the red ball, etc. But the sentence can still be understood even if there were no ball in the environment. It could be understood even if the subjects were sitting in a church without any ball or whatever. Or do we mean that the sentence can only have a meaning if the person who hears it must cognitively contextualise the ball with balls in general, the general nature of movement with passing, the relation of the colour red to other colours, etc. If such dramatic contextualisation were needed every time and in every circumstance, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.
It may be the case that certain aspects of psychology or mind are a-historical. The Chomskian language faculty is seen as largely a-historical by Chomsky and Chomskians. According to them, it belongs to all peoples at all times. Of course there must have been a time in our evolutionary history when the language faculty wasn’t fully developed. The same is true of Kant’s transcendental a priori categories and concepts (if one accepts them) that determine everyone’s experience at all times and have done so since the beginning of man. Again, though, the beginning of man, as with Chomsky, is indeed a historical event or a set of events, even if indeterminate in nature.
Perhaps the debate about the historical and the a-historical is being argued within the larger context (yes, ‘context’!) of the over-historicising tendencies of much Continental philosophy. And the opposite tendency of much Anglo-American analytic philosophy. This a-historical bent of much analytic philosophy is a sense very Kantian in nature (or at least it was so). Kant more or less thought that all his philosophical ideas and positions were essentially founded on a-historical truths and realities (in ethics, metaphysics and even in aesthetics and political philosophy). Indeed he would have said that if one’s philosophical position or idea is not a-historical, then what’s the (philosophical) point of it? Since Hegel (perhaps before Hegel) everything in (Continental) philosophy was effectively historicised. Hegel did not, however, completely historicise his own philosophy although he did see it as the culmination of the ‘world spirit’, etc. And then came Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, et al. Basically, to some (or all) of these men, much (or all) of philosophy became the genealogy of philosophical and non-philosophical ideas. Philosophy, therefore, became partly inter-disciplinary. Even logic and mathematics were historicised.
On the other side of the fence, the analytic philosophy side, putting ideas within their historical context was seen rather like committing the sin of ad hominem arguments against a philosopher rather than against his ideas. In the latter case, context and individual psychology were - and still are - deemed to be irrelevant to whether or not the ideas themselves stood or fell.
Metaphysics
Is Rorty an Anti-Realist?
Rorty claims to be some kind of anti-realist (Scott Shalkowski, 2000).
Rorty never classed himself as an ‘anti-realist’. Why? To have done so he would have committed himself to the validity of that classification. More specifically, he would have committed himself to what Derrida calls a ‘binary opposition’ between realism and anti-realism. This was a problem Derrida noted in the tradition of Western metaphysics and his own Continental traditions. In his ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ Derrida claimed that Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger
worked within the inherited concepts of metaphysics.
This meant, to Derrida, that since no concept is an ‘atom’ (it is borrowed from the ‘syntax and system’ of Western metaphysics), then every
borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics.
So by using the term ‘realist’, or even the texts of T. Nagel, Wright, Dummett, etc., Rorty would have simply entangled himself within analytic philosophy’s ‘intertextual’ web. For example, we might have had such titles as ‘Evans on Strawson on Wittgenstein on Frege’ rather than, say, Evans writing on ‘Sense and Reference’ - even though that very title, ‘Sense and Reference’, would also be defined and circumscribed intertextually anyway. There is nothing mysterious or ‘fuzzy’ about the term ‘intertextual’. How many contemporary philosophical questions are simply re-expressions of the givens of Western philosophy? Derrida calls such rewritings in philosophy ‘sign substitutions’. When we talk about ‘reality’, or the nature of objects’ or ‘goodness’, aren’t we really talking about, say, the ‘texts’ or books of Nagel, Plato, G. E. Moore, etc?
All this may be deemed to be an elaborate ruse to ‘deny’ analytic philosophers the ‘tools they need to mount an attack’ on Rorty or post-modernism. But who is denying whom the tools? Prima facie, it could work both ways. The analytics deny the Continentals their own particulars tools too in all inter-tradition discourse.
What about Rorty on truth? The point isn’t that Rorty believes that it is a good thing that truth if often ‘what you can get away with’. I don’t even think that Rorty believes that this is in fact what truth is. It is a sociological and epistemological point on his part, not a metaphysical or semantic one. That is, this is in fact what happens in many – if not all – situations. The problem is that Rorty does indeed indulge in what analytics call ‘rhetorical flourish’. But only to get his point across. In addition, Rorty is just as much a ‘man of letters’ as he is a philosopher. In modern speak, he is a post-modernist in style and, like Derrida, disavows the literature/philosophy chasm.
More technically on Rorty’s part. He believes that truth and warrant are inextricably linked. If it is not ‘one’s colleagues’ letting you ‘get away with’ truth-claims, then it is one’s friends in a philosophy department, or at a scientific convention, or even in a pub. Perhaps we can make the late Wittgenstein point that it would require only two people on a desert island to make sense of ‘going right or going wrong’ – that is, for one to tell the other this and vice versa.
Back to antirealism. What would it mean for a man on an otherwise uninhabited planet to be warranted in saying that
XYZ makes up 45% of the atmosphere here. (?)
How could that sentence be deemed to be true (or false)? As Dummett argues in his Truth andOther Enigmas, the questions we must ask about these kinds of statements should not be about ‘problematic entities’, but about ‘problematic statements’. However, whereas Dummett speaks of certain statements being absolutely ‘evidence-transcendent’, I would express the former by saying that the XYZ statement is an example of a truth-claim being evidence-transcendent to any other mind (though not perhaps in principle).
Nagel on Rorty and Putnam’s Relativism and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
There are essentially two approaches to science that Nagel positions himself against in the ‘Science’ chapter of his book The Last Word. The first is what may be called ‘Kuhnian’ or ‘relativistic’ philosophy of science. The second is Kantian ‘transcendental idealism’. What the metaphysical realist requires in order to distance himself from these two positions is, as Nagel puts it,
an objective reality [which is] independent of particular observations and observers (83).
In other words, we are seeking the ‘invariants’ of nature. And it is these invariants which all adept observers should, at least in principle, be able to ‘arrive at’.
The world can be approached in two ways. Nagel cites the example of objects and their mutual attraction. One approach essentially tells us about the world as it is regardless of one’s position and conceptual scheme. The other tells us that the scientific world is nothing more than the invention of a ‘language-game’.
I mentioned Kuhn earlier, but it is Putnam’s ‘internal realism’ that is tackled in greatest detail by Nagel. According to Nagel’s Putnam, the world is nothing more than the ‘creative product of our language’. The truths and beliefs about the world are simply those which have survived. They have won out in the Justification Game. Nagel has a big problem with what he thinks are purely epistemic notions of truth. The points he makes in the ‘Science’ chapter are no different to the ones he makes about truth in the preceding chapters. He is now using the same arguments he used against Rorty – in the ‘Thought from the Outside’ chapter – against Putnam. His position is quite simple and, at a prima facie level, very plausible. All this talk about ‘rational acceptability’ is fine. No problem. But there must be something by virtue of which a statement or position is rationally acceptable or justified. There must be, as Putnam says against Rorty, a ‘fact of the matter’ which makes something rationally acceptable. Rational acceptability cannot be free-standing. If we make the identity-statement
Truth is rational acceptability.
Then we are leaving something out of the overall picture. Nagel may well accept that rational acceptability is necessary for truth (a criterion of truth), but it is in no way sufficient. In fact Nagel and Rorty do have one thing in common in this respect. They simply do not understand Putnam’s position.Perhaps this is because Putnam’s position is simply too much of an affected compromise between Nagel’s metaphysical realism and Rorty’s ‘relativism’. Putnam, as a mitigated pragmatist, may not like such extremes.
Despite Nagel’s citation of Putnam’s supposedly epistemic attitude to truth, he does quote a very interesting passage from Putnam which distances the latter from ‘Rortian relativism’, at least that is what Nagel thinks. The passage makes a simple point. The very fact that we can claim that the truth of p is manufactured, as it were, by language-game1, shows us that truth must be something over and above language-games or this specific language-game. In other words, taking a meta-position about truth-in-language-games, or simply a God’s-eye view on truth, shows us that the concept or reality of truth is in fact being tacitly employed by the language-game theorist. By virtue of what can we know that p is manufactured? How can we make sense of p being true for language-game1 but not for language-game2? Surely it must be the ‘facts of the matter’ that do not happily square with either language-game1’s position or the position of other - or all - language-games (if that is possible). I think, then, that Nagel cites this passage from Putnam to demonstrate that it is truth – metaphysical truth – that is divorced from language-games which is allowing the relativist, or even Rorty himself, to make sense of these assertions of truth which do not square with others. Put simply. By virtue of which facts do the language-game theorist, or Rorty himself, know that p and the denial of p are about the same thing? Surely it can only be the ‘objective world’ which would allow him to make these meta-statements on the different attitudes to p offered by different language-games. In other words, he is implicitly recognising that these manufacturings of truth may not match the actual truth or the facts of the matter.
Nagel on Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
In the second half of the ‘Science’ chapter Nagel takes on Kant. Perhaps it is in relation to scientific claims that one realises how radical the Kantian position is. This position on scientific knowledge goes against both common sense notions of science and certainly against the notions of many scientists, especially the philosophically illiterate ones. The history of German philosophy and science in the early part of the 20th century shows us how deeply Kantianism impinged on the minds of not only philosophers of science but scientists themselves. Nagel himself cites the clear example of Einstein.
It is fairly well known that Einstein rejected Mach’s phenomenalism in favour of Planck’s realism, at least in his early days. This is not to say that phenomenalism and transcendental idealism are one and the same thing, but both positions clearly emphasise the phenomenal rather than the ‘actual’ world. Nagel puts this baldly. He writes that Kant argued that
ordinary scientific reasoning applies only to the phenomenal world.
As all the readers of The Last Word will know, Nagel doesn’t like what he calls ‘subjectivism’ in philosophy and, indeed, in science. What has that got to do with Kant? Well, he calls Kant’s transcendental idealism
the most famous form of subjectivism about reason in the history of philosophy.
It therefore becomes clear that Nagel’s philosophical enemies stretch much wider than the Derridas and Rortys of this world.
Is Rorty a Relativist?
Rorty divides relativists into three groups. Or I should say, he says that there are three types of philosophers called ‘relativists’ by other philosophers:
i)The most frequent sense of the term. Those people who believe that
every belief is as good as every other (ORT, 23).
ii)Those who believe that the term ‘truth’ is so ‘equivocal’ that it may be dispensed with.
iii)The third group believes
that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society – ours – uses in one or another area of inquiry (23).
Rory calls the latter view ‘ethnocentric’.
Because Rorty doesn’t belong to group ii) above he has no problem with the word ‘truth’ or ‘true’, but he does have his own slant on it. He happily accepts that it is indeed equivocal. However, this isn’t a big problem for him. He argues that ‘true’ may ‘mean the same in all cultures’ even though there may be ‘diversity of reference’ for the term. This appears to be a pluralist account of truth. Not only may truth have diversity of reference but also ‘diversity of procedures for assigning terms’. What, then, gives Rorty the right to use the term ‘truth’ at all? Well, to Rorty, it is simply a ‘term of commendation’: it is ‘an expression of commendation’ (23).
There is another slant on ‘pragmatist relativism’. It is that pragmatism doesn’t actually offer us a theory of truth in the first place (something William James said way before Rorty). What pragmatists deny is that ‘truth has an intrinsic nature’. It follows from this that any theory of truth, or any actual truth, would be acceptable as long as it were justified or it has ‘paid its way’. I suppose that now it can be said that this is just another theory of truth: truth as justification. In a sense this conclusion is correct. But it is still not a commitment to truth’s ‘intrinsic nature’ because all sorts of theories of truth can be justified in specific circumstances. It turns out, therefore, that justification is an extremely broad and flexible term. Actually, in this work Rorty does not always mention justification. He puts it this way:
… the pragmatist says that there is nothing to be said about truth save that each of us will commend as true those beliefs which she or he finds good to believe (24).
Rorty says that this is not ‘one more theory about the nature of truth’. Again, how does Rorty extricate himself from this problem? He simply does so by saying that it isn’t a
theory of truth, much less a relativistic one (24).
More precisely, it isn’t a metaphysical theory of truth. What it is, in a sense, is an ethical theory of truth (just as Heidegger’s ‘ontology’ is ethical). But a theory that can’t specify anything much in advance. It can’t go all technical and say that ‘Truth is…’ Instead it all hinges around Rorty’s commitment to solidarity. What this means, again, is that truth must be allowed to flow out of ‘cooperative human inquiry’. We should not proscribe what truth is beforehand. It should always be ‘what is good in the way of belief’. Rorty goes into greater detail on this. He writes that
‘knowledge’ is like ‘truth’, simply a compliment paid to be beliefs which we think so well justified that, for the moment, further justification is not needed (24, ORT).
Rorty has no truck with relativism. Indeed, when he is called a ‘relativist’ by realists and other philosophers he simply accuses them of trying to make him play their own peculiar and particular game. Rorty says that no one can
detach oneself from any particular community and look down at it from a universal standpoint (30).
So, if this is indeed the case, everyone is a relativist, including the realists and objectivists who think otherwise. In fact the God’s eye view, Nagel’s ‘view from Nowhere’, is the only way to make sense of certain strands of metaphysical realism and objectivism. Objectivists cannot quite stomach it when the pragmatist says that this is impossible and therefore calls him a ‘relativist’ or a philosophical ‘deflationary philosophy’ or even a ‘cynic’ or ‘nihilist’. It is ok calling all sorts of people ‘relativists’, but how can one explain the view from Nowhere? There must be a happy medium between Nagel’s impossible position from Nowhere, and the ‘anything-goes’ strands of certain types of relativism. Rorty’s ethnocentrism is seen as being a middle way between the extremes just commented upon.
