How Pragmatists Outrun Their Nonsense
Actually written MAY 15, 2003
[Note added JULY 26, 2010: But it should be noted that pragmatists don’t always outrun their nonsense, but rather embrace it, as Quee Nelson writes: “But postmodern philosophers will either deny that they disregard the truth, or else complain that if they do, then so does everybody else, and nothing can be done about it.” (The Slightest Philosophy, P. ix)]
Here I want to demonstrate the behavior of anti-realists (such as relativists and pragmatists) when they are confronted with the logical contradictions of their theories, namely, the Self-Refutation of the Primacy Of Consciousness (an instance of the self-contradiction of omnipotence).
The behavior seems to be of two major types:
1. Repeat the contradiction in a more obscure form.
or
2. Deny having made any such self-contradictory claim.
Some may employ both behaviors in the same sentence.
1. REPEATING THE CONTRADICTION
To exemplify the “repeat” behavior, I was lucky to find an on-line essay called “Default Pragmatism”, by Carlos G. Prado. This amazing essay explicitly acknowledges the contradiction, yet answers the contradiction by repeating it in a more obscure form.
I begin by showing the passages in which the contradiction is stated and acknowledged.
Here, citing the famous pragmatist Richard Rorty, is the statement in which lay the contradiction:
... though “there is such a thing as brute physical reality,” that reality is of no epistemic avail because there is “no way of transferring…nonlinguistic brutality…to the truth of sentences.”
This is self-contradictory because, if there is no way of transferring nonlinguistic brutality to the truth of sentences, then the sentences stating this very fact cannot convey any brute truth. This reduces to the sentence: "No sentence can be true." or "All sentences lie." It is the self-contradiction of the liar's paradox.
Prado goes on to acknowledge another philosopher’s revelation of the contradiction within:
... [Frank B.] Farrell thinks that Rorty’s acknowledgment of brute reality must fail to be that, because in saying what he does Rorty fails to refer to reality by his own principles.
Now, with the contradiction acknowledged (Thanks to Farrell), Prado answers by repeating the contradiction in a different, more obtuse form. Let’s analyze part by part:
The flaw in Farrell’s thinking is that he simply assumes [*] that our “symbol sequences” do achieve successful reference to brute reality,...
What Farrell does is not a flaw in thinking. He “assumes” correctly. Moreover, it is an assumption shared by Rorty and even Prado, the author of this very essay. This essay Prado writes is an instance of symbol sequences that Prado himself assumes have achieved successful reference to brute reality, namely, the brute reality of symbol sequences and people who write about them.
This is, of course, to presuppose precisely what is at issue.
Agreed. It certainly is to presuppose precisely what is at issue. Everyone makes this presupposition. This presupposition is a corollary of the axioms known collectively as the Primacy of Existence. Rejecting this presupposition in any form (such as doubting it) is always self-contradictory.
The pragmatic response must be that contrary to Farrell’s assumption [The Primacy of Existence], no symbol sequences reach out of language to brute reality in ways that enable correspondence,...
In other words, the pragmatist response is a repetition of the contradiction, as is plainly done here. Observe that the above quoted sentence describes the pragmatist response. What is that response? That response is to claim that no symbol sequences can truthfully refer to reality - and to make this claim in the form of a type-written sentence. Observe: the sentence is itself a sequence of symbols. Therefore, the sentence claims, in part, that it is unable to be true. It’s very truth means it cannot be true. That is the contradiction reappearing. And if this is so, then the pragmatist response to having their contradiction exposed is to repeat the contradiction.
It may be useful to illuminate how Prado may have expected to obscure his repetition of the contradiction. I would regard it as a bit of smoke-and-mirrors misdirection, since the essay at first glance seems to be concerned with a distinction between hard core linguistic idealism and true pragmatism. The distinction is valid in some sense, but it won’t rescue either theory from the contradiction. While Prado insists pragmatism acknowledges “brute reality” where linguistic idealism refuses such acknowledgment, neither doctrine allows their adherents to claim their theories are true, i.e. are the way things are in reality, without contradiction. Besides, the distinction is ultimately useless. Kelley reminds us that the failure of representationalism known as skepticism (in this case, linguistic skepticism) always leads to full blown idealism (in this case, linguistic idealism).
A more subtle misdirection is the attack on realism via the diaphanous model of consciousness which makes realism seem like an attempt to ignore the fact that our minds (and language) contribute to the way existence appears to we observers. The attack is rarely answered except by objectivists like Ayn Rand and David Kelley, to whom I refer the reader.
At any rate, I include Prado’s entire essay below for more reference.
[No. I’m not allowed to do that. But, at the time of this book’s publication, Prado’s essay is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20030817052640/http://www.filosofia.pro.br/carlo_prado.htm ]
2. DENIAL BEHAVIOR
Now I turn to demonstrating the denial behavior.
Journalist Keith Windschuttle has documented an extraordinarily open and public instance of denial behavior, complete with repetition of that which has been denied. Here Mr. Windschuttle relates his interaction with linguistic idealist, Greame Turner, regarding what they both call “Cultural Studies”.
When I [Keith Windschuttle] said that cultural studies believes that “the world should be conceived as a ‘text’” [Linguistic Idealism] and that “individual human beings are unimportant in shaping the world” [Windschuttle 1998a: 13], [Greame] Turner replied that “nobody believes anything as crude and stupid as this” [Turner 1998]. Well, unfortunately, this is not true. Apart from the leading figures of the French structuralist and poststructuralist movement, French historians such as Fernand Braudel and the entire Annales school, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University Quentin Skinner, the German hermeneutic theorist Hans-George Gadamer, not to mention the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and all the post-war French Heideggerians including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, there are at least two people giving papers here today whose recent writings quite clearly endorse one or other of them.
...
The second person whose writings support one of these “crude and stupid” beliefs is Graeme Turner himself. If you write, as he does in his textbook The Media in Australia, that “language does not describe reality, it actually constitutes it” [Turner 1993: 219; Turner 1997: 311, his italics], or as he wrote in another work “what language does is to construct, not label, reality for us” [Turner 1988: 43], you commit yourself to certain logical conclusions that you cannot avoid. One of these is the ontology known as idealism, the view that things exist only as objects of perception, or, in the cultural studies version, as objects of conceptual and linguistic lenses of our own making. Within this linguistic idealism, the proposition that “the world should be conceived as a ‘text’” logically follows, whether Turner wants it to or not. The only way he can avoid being committed to it is to drop the claim that language constitutes reality. So far, he appears most reluctant to do this. The original statement appeared in his book in 1993 and was repeated verbatim in the second edition, as recently as 1997. If he really believes it is crude and stupid to say that the world should be conceived as a text, why does he keep repeating its essential premise, that language constitutes reality? Until he renounces this proposition, no one should take his denials seriously.
The Sydney Line, Journalism versus Cultural Studies Keith Windschuttle [http://www.sydneyline.com/Journalism%20versus%20Cultural%20Studies.htm] Keynote address to Media Wars: Media Studies and Journalism Education Seminar, Queensland University of Technology, 27 November 1998. Published as “Cultural Studies versus Journalism,” Quadrant, March 1999, also published as “Journalism versus Cultural Studies”, Australian Studies in Journalism, No 7, 1998
* Notice that the anti-realist (pragmatist) attack on realism is to accuse realism of circularly "assuming" the validity of realism. I think this is just another expression of the fact that realism cannot be proven from any prior premises, that it must be accepted on "faith".
We are here but a few turns of argument shy of the Great Epistemic Quagmire, wherein the realist and anti-realist are both caught in an infinite regress of mutually undercutting one another. (I describe the Great Epistemic Quagmire here and here.) Here we are at the realist exposing anti-realism's logical self-contradiction, countered by anti-realism's exposing realism's faith-laden logical circularity. But the anti-realist can ultimately cut to the chase and claim that logic itself does not track truth. Indeed I think this is implicit in the notion that sentences cannot track truth. If all logic must be expressed in sentences, and sentences do not track truth, then the logic expressed by sentences cannot track truth. Likewise, logical phenomena, such as self-contradiction and circularity, have no connection to truth. And now we have truly arrived at the Great Epistemic Quagmire.
Comments
Post a Comment