Prolepsis is a figure of speech in which a future act or development is represented as if already accomplished or existing. I suppose we could usefully speak of proleptic reasons in the following Legal contexts.
This is linked to 'sedition' type laws. I have discussed this elsewhere.
2) An impossible attempt which yet has enough 'intention' to be punishable- e.g. Regina v Shipuri
This is a particularly interesting case. It is also one where a particular philosopher's views swayed the court. It illustrates the folly of ever supplying a 'proleptic reason' (i.e. explaining one's actions with respect to their expected end result). Shivpuri was innocent- he was a journalist conducting a 'sting' operation- but, as a matter of law, because of the proleptic reason he very stupidly supplied, he was as guilty as fuck. The fool was a law student at SOAS. He didn't get that you have to keep shtum when arrested.
However, there are legal contexts where proleptic reasons are usefully supplied.
Where a person is an agent or under guardianship, that person may be required to give reasons a current choice should be permitted on the basis that the likely result of its being completed would be such that a current prohibition against the action would be inequitable, injurious or against the public interest.
For example, I (assuming I was wealthy enough to become the victim of a Guardian or Conservator) may say 'I should be allowed to study twerking so as to become an accomplished Beyonce impersonator whom people will look upon with a glad eye and invite to their parties'.
The judge may rule that the expenditure involved is reasonable in proportion to my assets and though I'm an elderly black man who is as ugly as shit, still, if twerking will keep the old lunatic happy, let the fellow pay to get instruction in what is after all a healthful form of exercise. People may indeed warm to this ugly and stupid geezer because there is both pathos and humor in his delusion. Anyway, the guy might actually become a TikTok sensation.
Obviously, if I am a principal- answerable only to myself- I don't have to give any 'proleptic reason'. I have a 'Hohfeldian immunity' to spend my money as I like. You may say 'it is immoral for you to get into the top twerking program in the country, just because you are rich. Anyway, I suspect you are only doing it so as to thrust your booty and waggle it in Bill Gates's face, any time he asks you to pledge money to some good cause, not with the benevolent purpose of titillating and thrilling that estimable gentleman but with the sly purpose of letting off a silent but deadly fart. That's totes uncool, dude.'
I reply 'fuck off. You're not the boss of me. It is immoral for you to waste your time talking about shit you can't control when, the plain fact is, trillions of Neo-liberal twerkers- solely due to your refusal to condemn them- are farting in the faces of quadrillions of subaltern transgender penguins which is causing the Antarctic to melt. If you aint part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Think about it.'
What is true of the Law is also true of anything which could be the basis of a contract- incomplete or otherwise. However, without the 'buck-stopping' of the law, it is pointless to aim for precision (akreibia) in essentially economic matters of discretionary accommodation and 'bonus paterfamilias' type due diligence and uberrimae fidei type relationships.
Are there any non, at least potentially, legal, or contractual or coordination game type, contexts where it might make sense to have or require 'proleptic reasons'?
A Brouwerian choice sequence might look 'proleptic'. So might a Socratic 'palinode'. But we know that the mathematical or logical 'object' they posit changes over time. For any useful purpose, we can construct algorithms, or black boxes which generate algorithms, such that counter-intuitive but demonstrably superior results are obtained. This enables us to understand the importance of
1) ontogenesis - functors that switch on and off in a reasonably robust 'co-evolved manner'. This is capturable as a 'law-like' choice sequence, only 'at the end of time'. It can't be before that otherwise the thing could be hacked. It wouldn't be itself. It would have been farmed by a predator or taken over by a parasite.
Socrates's maieutics was the mid-wifery of the couvade. He was bringing to birth mere totems and taboos for blokes while Agnodice, who went to Egypt to study something useful, was delivering actual babies. Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the (male) youth. Agnodice escaped a similar fate. She lifted her skirt to show she didn't got no dick. She couldn't be corrupting the (female) youth of Athens. On the contrary she was helping them give birth to strong and healthy babies while quickly regaining their own strength and health.
This was her 'proleptic reason' for interesting herself in vaginas. Athenian dudes said 'fair enough. We acquit you.' Socrates' big idea was that poets and pedants should not interest themselves in the backsides of rich young dudes. They should talk well and pretend they weren't dying to cornhole the gilded and beardless youth they were smitten with.
2) Mimesis. Socrates is important coz he talked like a well-bred bloke. He was showing a 'mimesis' of the well paid Rhetoricians and Sophists of his day did not involve becoming a fucking professional ambulance chaser (paraclete) or demagogue. Plato's innovation was to set up an Academy where the legal and ratiocinative would (hopefully) be subordinated to the mathematical and (eventually) the Scientific and Logico-Deductive.
But Plato really was a gentleman whereas Socrates was just one step above Simon the Shoemaker. That's why Plato instrumentalises Socrates's seductiveness to illustrate the horrors of what might happen if you let your son and heir just gad about rather than enroll in an Academy. After all, you were already paying through the nose for his gymnastic and equestrian instruction. Add in a bit of Math and 'Philosophy'. The guy will come across as a little less of a bonehead.
Phillip of Macedon hired Aristotle to tutor Alexander and his cohort. Isocrates, who represented the 'practical' side of 'philosophia' wrote the 'Antidosis' (i.e the right to name someone to exchange estates with if a too onerous 'liturgical' (i.e. public) duty is imposed on one) to urge his stronger case for getting that valuable teaching gig. It may be that Alexander wouldn't have been such a drunken hooligan had Isocrates, not Aristotle, taught him.
My point is that the kind of rich blokes wot sent their kids to Oxbridge & Ivy League insisted that a suave and gentlemanly 'economia' was taught by pedants who knew their place. The pedants could be as black as sin- or Radhakrishnan- and they were cool with that. But those pedants mustn't get above themselves. They mustn't indulge in 'akreibia' as if they were Physicists or Law makers. A suave, 'economia', punctuated by irenic pi-jaw, was all that was required. Forget about 'no child being left behind'- as Christopher Hitchens said, the elite were content if their kids 'backsides were left alone'.
Yet, paideia is an affectionate business. I myself once taught great hulking Public School lads who were only 3 or 4 years younger than myself. I was a terrible teacher because I was ignorant and stupid. But, I was like my students- a decent enough bloke who didn't need to make somebody else feel like shit just coz own choices in life had been shitty. Maybe, the fact that I was genuinely black skinned and 'colonial'- not an equal, a competitor- made things easier. Also- like all really good 'prep school' (in England this means a very expensive primary school) teachers- I was clearly as mad as a hatter, but obsessed with 'gaming' exam results while myself existentially demonstrating their utter meaninglessness.
Plato's dialogues are a mimesis of an ideal of 'pure conversation' upheld by the elite paideia of every classical civilization. In China, where philosophy as literary culture was even more productively 'political' than Greece, this is the Qīngtán (清談 ) 'pure conversation' movement which, stupid drunkards like me, can find in our own squalidly indigenous traditions- e.g. my Bollywood 'Ghazal' playlist which endless reflects on the Barmicedal reception of the 'Symposium' whereas my Tamil 'Thiruvilaiyadal' type playlist synthesizes Sangam 'pure conversation' with the esoteric aesthetics of Kaula Kashmir.
To be clear, what I'm saying is that Socratic maieutics or mimesis of Sophistry is a well bred 'oikeioisis' on which a non-tribal 'Academy' can be based. But to be 'incentive compatible'- i.e solvent- this requires
3) methexis- i.e a participation mystique. This is a cheap talk pooling equilibrium which nevertheless features non-rival 'ideas' of a productive sort.
Let us now compare Magnus Mallard- a duck who says 'quack'- and Doctor Agnes Callard who is incapable of writing a single logically coherent sentence and who is entirely ignorant of shite she was previously taught.
Sometimes we engage in a pursuit before we can fully access its value.
Nothing already possessed is 'pursued'. Either you are running after something you don't have or you are just running for the sake of it. I suppose one could say 'running is one of my pursuits'. But the meaning is 'I aim to get something out of this activity which I currently lack'. You are either seeking to improve your performance as a runner or to improve the efficiency with which running is turned into some form of utility for you. A person who sometimes runs and sometimes hops without any conscious reflection is not generally considered to be pursuing running when actually running or pursuing hopping when hopping about.
When we embark upon, for example, the project of coming to appreciate classical music, we make a foray into a new domain of value.
When we appreciate classical music we are always pursuing, not attaining, something valuable. It is frequently the case that on attaining what we sought we cease 'appreciation' and commence on some other type of activity or else gain repose.
The chapter introduces a new kind of reason—a proleptic reason—to rationalize such large-scale transformative pursuits.
A proleptic reason would be a pursuit of a reason to reason which we think might be valuable. It would correspond to a 'meta-preference' and would display 'backward induction' or 'regret minimization' (depending on whether Knightian Uncertainty obtains) or some other structure of dynamic optimization. Otherwise it could scarcely be called reason. It may be a hope or a wish or an intuition of some sort, but in so far as it is termed a 'reason', it would be, as Pascal said, a 'reason of the heart of which reason knows nothing of'. But reasons of the heart are not captured by so ugly a term as prolepsis.
The proleptic reasoner is aware of the defect in her appreciation of some value, and feels the need to improve.
All reasoners are aware of defects in such systematic methods of reasoning as they have improvised or otherwise accessed. Callard may as well substitute the word 'nice' or 'reasonable' or ' supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' for proleptic. She is adding nothing new. In Hinduism, this is called 'arthavadha'. It is mere puffery.
Callard says she will show she has discovered something new. This is not the case. I may say that I have made an advance on Einstein by saying 'nice Energy' is equal to emcee squared. Einstein missed a trick when he neglected to see that naughty Energy might insist on being emcee circled. His failure to distinguish nice from naughty Energy is a serious lacuna in his work.
It is explained that the work done by proleptic reasons cannot be done by more familiar kinds of reasons. The implications of proleptic rationality for reasons-internalism are considered. Internalists hold that what I have reason to do can be arrived at by a procedurally rational extrapolation from my current desires. However, because the act of learning some new form of valuation cannot be analyzed as satisfying the values one already has, proleptic reasons are not internal.
This is nonsense. Clearly, one may value gaining another value just as one may have a meta-preference that one gains another set of preferences. It is this 'valuing of another value' which is subject to 'procedurally rational extrapolation'.
It may be argued that Einstein did not consider the possibility that naughty Energy might be hiding outside the Universe. His 'internalism' led him to falsely claim that E equals emcee squared where it is only 'nice Energy', which I invented, which has this property. Aren't I smart!
Callard writes-
The teacher of a music appreciation class is frustrated with those students
who are taking her class, as she puts it, “for the wrong reasons.”
The teacher does not appreciate music to the fullest possible extent. In particular she does not appreciate what possibilities for improving her own appreciation of music, teaching music appreciation entails. It is natural she feels frustrated. She isn't doing the thing in the way it is meant to be done.
In her view,
the class offers students access to the intrinsic value of music.
She is a fool. Access to x offers students access to the intrinsic value of x. The x she is providing is not 'the intrinsic value of x'. It is her approach to revealing that supposed intrinsic value. A charitable interpretation of what she is saying is 'I don't know how to teach students not of a particular type.' This is perfectly reasonable. Teachers often need special instruction so as to be able to reach out to differently abled students or those of a different epistemic culture or pedagogic tradition.
Students who
are taking it for “the right reason” will be taking it for this reason.
The right reason to take a particular class is because it is geared towards people like you. Thus, I am right to take a class taught by a person from a similar background to myself. I would be wrong to take a class taught by a person with a strong prejudice against people of my sort and a feeling of horror and revulsion at my mere presence in their class.
But only
those who already appreciate music appreciate musical appreciation.
Callard is wrong. The teacher she imagines may be stupid and prejudiced. But nobody can be as stupid as Callard. She does not get that people who already appreciate music won't sign up for classes in 'musical appreciation'. True, a person who appreciates the teaching of musical appreciation may do so even if they appreciate music to the max. I may attend an 'Intro to Econ' class if I've heard the teacher is really engaging and has found a way to get through even to the sort of thickos who run my pension fund.
The teacher, in this instance, may be saying 'I want the sort of students who are capable of coming to appreciate music in the manner I consider intrinsic to music. This means they have a certain type of cultural background and certain sorts of expectations regarding the instruction they will receive.'
Or, at
any rate, only they appreciate it correctly, for the reason for which (she
believes) one should appreciate it—namely, intrinsic musical value. The
problem is that if the intrinsic value of music is a reason you respond to, you
don’t need to take her class. You already appreciate music.
She wants students in the class who care about music. But she’s supposed
to be teaching them to care about music. Is she being unreasonable? The
problem does not go away once we admit of degrees or kinds of caring—it
does not help to characterize her job as that of getting people who care a
little (or who care in this way) to care more (or in that way).
Nonsense! Suppose you are hired by the College to help this teacher improve her student feedback scores. You would work with her to partition the student set according to criteria of the above mentioned sort and then devise different remedies for each group.
So long as
someone enters the class satisfied with his level or type of music appreciation,
Something irrational has happened. True, Monica Geller, in Friends, enrolled at a Cooking class so as to get praise and thus boost her flagging morale. But bitches be kray kray.
whatever that may be, the teacher will impugn his motives, whatever
they may be. The teacher is looking for students who want to care about
music more than, or in a different way than, they currently do. But, again,
she doesn’t want them to want this for some extra-musical reason.
Once again Callard has shown herself more stupid than this teacher could possibly be. Appreciation is not Music. It is extrinsic to it. It can be taught separately from Music. Ergo it contains 'extra-musical' reasons. It could be argued that the only way to learn to appreciate music is to learn music. This is certainly the case with Indian classical music which links the 'rasika's' appreciation to something explicitly soteriological. More over, the Indians had evolved a sophisticated 'field theory'. But this is not the case with Western Symphonic music. We can't appreciate Zubin Mehta's achievements by learning how to conduct some of the world's great orchestras.
So it
seems that what she wants is for them to respond to musical value exactly to
the extent that they’re not yet able to.
No. She wants them to follow a prespecified path up Parnassus. Callard has brutally imposed her own stupidity upon this shabby genteel lady of a certain age whom we feel a certain affection for because she is a character from Chekhov- unless she is known to be fucking the hunky, but dim, 18 year old janitor, in which case she is a character from Tennessee Williams.
This is a paradoxical way of putting an ordinary demand for the kind of
reason that is my topic.
It is not paradoxical. It is stupid. Russel's paradox does not posit barbers who think they should only shave people who are already shaved.
It is possible to have an inkling of a value that you do
not fully grasp,
It is impossible to fully grasp a value of which you have an inkling. Callard may be thinking of a cucumber which she may have a reason to value very differently from me.
to feel the defect in your valuation, and to work towards
improvement. The reason for doing that work is provided by the value in
question, but the defect in your grasp of that value also shapes the character
of the activity it motivates.
It is merely a manner of speaking to say work is done for a reason provided by a value. One may as easily say it is done by reason of a proclivity or a destiny or karmic aashrav etc.
For consider what kind of thinking motivates a
good student to force herself to listen to a symphony when she feels herself
dozing off: she reminds herself that her grade, and the teacher’s opinion of
her, depends on the essay she will write about this piece; or she promises herself a chocolate treat when she reaches the end; or she’s in a glass-walled
listening room of the library, conscious of other students’ eyes on her; or
perhaps she conjures up a romanticized image of her future, musical self,
such as that of entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening.
Someone who already valued music wouldn’t need to motivate herself in
any of these ways. She wouldn’t have to try so hard.
Callard's mistake here is to suggest that she is describing a 'good' student rather than some poor girl who has to get a credential and then some morally worthless job to pay off the debts incurred by the cost of that credential. Still, she is learning valuable skills- hypocrisy, sycophancy, conformity, cognitive disassociation- which will enable her to gain a worthless job. Indeed, the sort of Credentials Callard is paid to purvey are only useful as signaling and screening devices to employers. A girl who could fake music appreciation might be able to fake being a 'Corporate Responsibility' officer with a deep interest in inclusivity, sustainability, and the Sun shining out of the CEO's ass.
The paradox arises
there was no paradox
from a dilemma
A dilemma (Greek: δίλημμα "double proposition") is a problem offering two possibilities, neither of which is unambiguously acceptable or preferable. The possibilities are termed the horns of the dilemma. We will soon see there is no dilemma here.
concerning two kinds of reasons a potential student
of such a class could have for taking it. There is, first, the intra-musical reason, the
having of which seems to mark the class’s having come to a successful close.
Callard forgets that this is not a music class. It is a music appreciation class. It is not the case that the thing being appreciated has any infallible means, or indefeasible motive, to determine the manner in which its appreciated. Thus, the potential student could have an intra-musical reason for studying music but must lack any such thing for taking a different class.
There is,
second any extra-musical reason, the recourse to which seems to condemn someone to
subordinating the value of music to what the teacher would call “an ulterior motive.”
There can only be an extra-musical reason for taking a class which does not actually teach music.
In
the first case, the reason is not the reason of a student,
because they are not electing to study music
in the second case, it’s the reason of (what the teacher would call) a bad student.
We don't know that. All we can say, in the second case, is that if the student's 'reason' is the desire to be thought a good student of the teacher then they are likely to be disappointed. This may involve some remediable injustice but, as things stand, we would be entitled to say- your reason for taking that course is defective. That teacher gonna give you shit grades and describe you as bad news.
I will argue that this dilemma is specious,
There is no dilemma. What is specious is Callard's assertion that there was ever a paradox or a dilemma.
because there is an agent—the good student—who manages to combine extra- and intramusical reasoning.
No there isn't. No intra-musical reason can motivate being classed as a 'good student' by some shitty 'music appreciation' pedant. It may be that Callard was considered a 'good student' of Philosophy. But she is shit at Philosophy. True, there may have been other students who were shittier than her. But we have a good intra-philosophical reason to concentrate on looking for a pair of ducks- e.g. Magnus Mallard and the soon to be Mrs. Magnus Mallard- rather than any type of paradox. This is because Callard's eyesight may be adequate to the former task whereas her brain simply is not capable of performing the latter operation.
Like the music-lover she will become, she is genuinely oriented
towards the intrinsic value of music.
Lovers, in my experience, are not oriented towards the intrinsic value of what they love. This becomes clear when they leave you for reasons which, if pressed, they very volubly supply. In my case these reasons were intrinsic to me. Their point was I didn't have to be so me-like all the time. Try to behave like a fucking adult- at least when fucking. That is the gist of their gravamen.
Music is that which we assume has an intrinsic value to which we are oriented by Nature. There may be a student who can truly say- 'I've always hated every type of Music.' But this student should not take a music appreciation class. She should get some sort of medical or psychological help which could help her identify what makes her abnormal in this respect.
For instance, if offered some way of attaining good
grades, chocolate treats, etc. without coming to appreciate music, she would reject it.
Not if she understands the theory of 'reinforcement'. It may well be that some trauma caused her to hate music. Some more or less behavioristic therapeutic regime may enable to overcome this phobia. This may feature chocy treats and pats on the back from teacher.
And yet grades and chocolates are integral to the rational explanation of her action of
listening to music: she would be asleep without them.
No. Grades and chocolates are integral to Callard's story. But her story is just a story about a kid who wants good grades and gives herself little treats to stay awake in class. But that class could be in anything at all. It has nothing to do with music or anything else to which humans have a natural and gratuitous affiliation. Come to think of it, I did have a g.f who'd reward herself with a chocolate bar if she managed to stay awake during sex.
Callard is unable to understand that music is nice- people like it- whereas the shite she was taught and which she teaches is shit.
Ludicrously, she next trespasses on the realm of the economist.
The informed consumer does not go to the supermarket for
milk and come home with magazines;
Yes she does if the supermarket has run out of milk but is doing a special offer on magazines.
she buys a car for its automotive properties, and
not as a status symbol;
Yes she does. Costly signals give rise to separating equilibria. This is perfectly rational.
the informed consumer has done her research, and she is also self-informed—she must know her own needs and desires in order to gauge which objects
might serve her well.
She must also know about accessible coordination and discoordination games and their related screening and signaling mechanisms and pooling and separating equilibria and arbitrage opportunities (some of which may be Parrando games) etc, etc. She should also know why regret-minimizing strategies are preferable under Knightian Uncertainty and how things as different as shadow prices and Shapley values might reconfigure incomplete contracts. In a word, she needs 'common sense'.
All this knowledge—of herself, of the world—crystallizes in her
mind into a kind of schema that her purchase must fit, and she will not spend money until
she can be fairly certain, in advance, that she has lit upon something that satisfies this
schema.
Nope. A Hannan consistent strategy is going to feature 'discovery' and 'ontologically dysphoric' hedges and 'negative probabilities' and other weird shit. Crystallized schemas is what keeps peeps poor. It also permits Sen-tentious shitheads gassing on about 'reasons to value' and pretending they can decide what we should all want. (Spoiler alert- it is yet more Sen-ile 'public reasoning'). I was amused to read that Colin Clark, who discovered that Gandhi favored free market solutions to the problem of hunger (Indians are idle. Raise the price of food, so they get off their backsides!), and who had plenty of experience of Mahalanobis type shitheads, was convinced that Mao must have listened to an Indian economist before starving 40 million of his people to death.
The schema may be more or less detailed, more or less schematic. The
important point is that what is sought is an outcome that matches the schema in all the
relevant valuational details. She knows the value of what she is getting before she gets it.
On an informed consumer model of rational agency, rationality means knowing in
advance what good you expect from your action. If all goes well you experience
satisfaction, a kind of match or fit between what you thought you were going to get and
what you in fact ended up getting. I don’t think it’s wrong to associate rationality with
the kind of self-command modeled by the informed consumer.
It is wrong to associate rationality, in a world with Knightian Uncertainty, to an Arrow-Debreu model. True, we can, speaking individually, do some hedging on Arrow-Debreu security markets but we would be foolish to bet the farm on them. Was Callard asleep during the financial crisis? Why is she so ignorant?
But informed-consumer
rationality presupposes
perfect information and costless futures markets for everything. If this obtains, there can be no 'ethical knowledge' whatsoever. All there is is 'revealed preference'. Thus a Sen type 'meta-preference' would simply be expressed as a sequence of instantaneous trades on future markets. True, the outcomes are stochastic- this is an expected utility model- but they are not uncertain. This means there is a one off expression of an 'ethos'. Since no dynamics obtain with respect to that 'ethos', the 'ethical' realm is merely a partition on a set. There is a 'zero knowledge' proof for 'type'. That's why the thing is mathematically tractable. As with the God of the theologians all affects are effects. Nothing is ethical save what is computed as economic.
a lot of ethical knowledge on the part of the agent
As I have explained, this is not the case. If 'knowledge on the part of the agent' is important then Brouwerian choice sequences- not 'representative agents' or 'ideal types'- must be the basis of analysis. But such sequences may only be known as 'law-like' at the end of time. In other words, we don't know the reason of their reason till reason ends.
—both selfknowledge,
which I have
that is, knowledge of what kinds of things she herself enjoys
which changes all the time plus there's new stuff I find I really like
and finds
meaningful,
there was a time when I'd have found Sen-tentious shite or Callard's crap meaningful. I'm older and wiser and, anyway, the maths has moved so much further on.
and knowledge of the world, that is, knowledge of what kind of value is out
there on offer.
i.e. knowledge about what you don't know. Why stop there? Why not stipulate for eating what you haven't eaten and having had babies with everybody with whom one hasn't had sex.
And all that knowledge is practical knowledge.
It is nonsense.
So how do you get it?
Doing practical stuff in a smart manner gives you practical knowledge.
I
am interested in the species of practical rationality that governs the acquisition of some of
that knowledge.
In that case, quit philosophy. Get a proper job.
The kind of rationality I want to discuss does not involve accurate foreknowledge of the
good your rational action will bring you.
So Callard is interested in rational search & sampling in a manner which yields stopping rules for matching problems or permits welfare comparisons of a complex sort. This is a well studied and lucrative field.
You can be rational even if
you are a figment of Callard's imagination
your antecedent
conception of the good for the sake of which you act is not quite on target—and you
know that.
This is false. If you miss target then the fault of 'hamartia' arises. You were aiming for the rapist but ended ups shooting your hubby. Now the police are saying you wanted to kill your husband coz he was a big fat homo. Fuck having a conception of the good. Have a conception of being rich and successful.
You do not demand that the end result of your agency match a preconceived
schema, for you hope, eventually, to get more out of what you are doing than you can yet
conceive of.
What good would demanding this sort of shite do? Who indulges in it? Only somebody Callard has invented.
In practice, we make decisions under uncertainty and 'satisfice' or 'minimize regret'.
I’ll call this kind of rationality, “proleptic.”
But it isn't rational. Demanding or not demanding some stupid shit simply is not a feature of the lives of rational beings.
When we make plans for the future, what is the one thing we must do if we are rational? The answer is we must make provision for adverse contingencies. Reason is prudent. It seeks to secure its own continued existence- what Descartes called
conatus se movendi,
The word ‘proleptic’ refers,
usually in a grammatical context, to something taken in advance of its rightful place. I
appropriate it for moral psychology on the model of Margaret Little’s phrase ‘proleptic
engagement,’ (p.342) by which she refers to an interaction with a child in which we treat
her as though she were the adult we want her to become.
Callard overstates Little's stupidity. It is enough to speak of law students being treated as though they already were lawyers. The problem here is that whereas it makes sense to treat a student or trainee in this way, it does not make sense to treat oneself thus. This is not to say we can't use 'backward induction'- i.e. work back from the target state to determine a sequence of feasible steps to it. Suppose you want to be Batman. You can't pretend you are Alfred and treat yourself like young Master Wayne. Nor can you treat yourself as Ra'as al Ghul or Commissioner Gordon would. As for child-abusing yourself- that's so not what happened to Robin.
Proleptic reasons are provisional
in a way that reflects the provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development:
A law professor can provide a mimetic target for his students. His use of prolepsis reinforces that target because it forces the students to adopt it immediately, to the best of their ability. They have to spit out their gum and learn to talk in complete sentences. Soon they are wearing bow ties and sipping claret and competing to get a clerkship with a High Court Judge. There is nothing 'provisional' about this.
Backward induction can indicate that you should go to Law School and learn to tie a bow tie and sip claret. But it can't create a Law School for you.
Callard is talking bollocks.
her inchoate, anticipatory and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better.
and knowing better because she is trying. There is nothing 'provisional' about a girl attending Law School. At first there's a lot of stuff she doesn't get. She bursts into tears in moot court. Then the gruff old professor- played by Susan Sarandon- lends her a strap-on. She rapes some co-eds and Trump immediately appoints her to the Supreme Court.
Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t
exactly the right ones.
I know my reasons for doubting that the earth goes round the sun aren't exactly the right ones but it is rational for me to spend all my savings publishing my research. My son might think I've lost competency. Fortunately, Dr. Callard will tell the judge that I have 'proleptic reasons' and thus am perfectly sane. Sadly, she will then try to bite her own head off.
I will show, by generalizing the paradox described above, that it is not only the rarified
context of music education that calls for a proleptic analysis.
The teacher of music appreciation was not a musician. There could be no 'prolepsis' there with respect to music education. Callard's 'analysis' was shit.
I argue that we must
acknowledge the reality of proleptic reasons, else we be forced to classify as irrational a
large swath of human agency—agency that is purposive, self-conscious, intelligent, truthsensitive, and constitutes a kind of building block of or prelude to everything else that we
do.
Callard is talking ignorant bollocks. There is not a single aspect of 'human agency' which we don't classify as rational from an economic or biological or sociological point of view. Even this shit of Callard's is 'rational' in the sense that it advances her career. Some of her peers are bleating about proleptic this or that so there's an availability cascade here which can trundle on in an Academic Department which is engaged in a limbo dance of continually lowering standards till everybody with recovered memories of epistemic self-abuse can get a PhD in that shite.
I end by exploring one of the interesting implications of the existence of proleptic
reasons for a theory of rationality: the traditional dichotomy, inaugurated by Bernard
Williams, between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ reasons is thereby rendered non-exhaustive.
That dichotomy was meaningless. Vide-
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Why all internal reasons are actually external prejudicesBernard Williams' doctrine that all reasons for a person doing something must be internal to that person- i.e. involve a motivation within himself rather than arise out of some Social Convention- appears easy to dispose off- at least on the assumption that human beings evolved by Natural Selection. This is because, assuming it is costly to have motivations which are subject to some calculus such that they inhibit or permit an action; it follows that for any given action, the Evolutionary Stable Strategy will militate for some proportion of actors not possessing an 'internal reason' but proceeding by mimicry, including lagged mimetic effects- i.e. for an external reason- to complete the same action. Indeed,
Amotz Zahavi's work on warning calls and predator 'mobbing' shows how 'external reasons' can improve predator-prey outcomes and hence are trans-species Eusocial.
The same point would be true for artificial agents- e;g. those used in a simulation- provided it is costly to acquire information and apply reason to it and there is heterogeneity in terms of either information access or processing capacity amongst agents.
True, one could simply change the way one defines 'internal reasons' or 'motivations' such that we now speak of a desire to mimic or a desire to be lead or a desire to roll the dice and so forth. However, since these desires or motivations are encoded in Language, then- by Wittgenstein's argument against Private Languages- clearly these are 'external reasons' merely. The one doing the action may not even be aware of it, let alone have an internal reason for doing it. Certainly, it would also be a case of quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis.
However, since Public Language has different granularity than either 'Mind stuff' or whatever Cognitive process determines action, and furthermore, since we know in advance that any given set of terms available to Public Language for use as explanans is either incomplete or misleading or both- it follows that no external reasons exist save by way of prejudice.
The literature on this subject, in so far as it relates to counter-factuals, misses the point that for agents who have evolved by Natural Selection, Uncertainty always exists as to which World we live in- this one or a counter-factual. Indeed, the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy- assuming it is costly to find out the answer- is to always remain in a state of 'buzzing blooming' confusion in this regard, at least for some proportion of the population. Philosophy has no Archimedian point here. On the contrary, opening its jaws to digest Game Theory it becomes merely the Ouroburos of the latter's shed skin.
No doubt, those familiar with the literature may think I'm missing the point.
Perhaps, Williams is referring to ideal agents with infinite and instantaneous computing power? The problem here is such agents would have a type of Theory of Mind which would disintermediate Language and the essentially linguistic distinction between 'internal' and 'external'. Indeed, it is far from clear that the word 'reason' would retain any utility.
Alternatively, we may posit some special barrier to perfect Theory of Mind. But, in that case, Language would be entirely strategic because arising wholly from that barrier and the reason for it. Here again the distinction Williams makes becomes wholly hypocritical and empty of Philosophic content.
What about William's criticism of 'external reasons?'
The answer, of course, is that the agent believes he's hit on a 'cheap talk' ploy in a particular sort of game. To turn it into a 'costly signal' he may pretend to be undergoing some terrible inward struggle productive of the costive truth in question. Indeed, there's a Kavka's toxin type twist to this such that he has an incentive to convince himself that this is what is genuinely happening.
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I. Large Scale Transformative Pursuits
Consider the class of what I’ll call large-scale transformative pursuits: attending college,
moving to a foreign country, adopting a child, becoming a painter or a philosopher or a
police officer, achieving distinction in athletics or chess or music, becoming a sports fan,
an opera lover or a gourmet, befriending or marrying or mentoring someone, etc. The
two features uniting this class of pursuits are that
1) The alternative is known to suck ass big time.
2) Sticking with the new thing is bound to be better than going back to the same old
one cannot know beforehand all that
one is to get out of them,
but one does know that one's previous life sucked ass
and that they require years of sustained effort,
so what? Sustained effort is required to make a success of life, no matter what you do.
both in the form
of preparation and in the form of the work attending the completed state. They are both
transformative and large in scale.
Like deciding to be a woman not a man. The evidence is that people don't feel right if they aren't in the type of body they feel they are meant to be or if they are not doing the kind of job they feel they are meant to be doing or if they are not married to the person they feel they are meant to be married to or they are not living in the country they feel they were meant to live in.
There have been many studies into why people make these types of 'transformative' decisions- more particularly where they are irreversible. None has suggested that Callard's 'proleptic reasons' figure in it save in terms of the first step- the first choice of subject or job or partner. The danger is that this is 'false consciousness'. The woman who feels she has to get married and be a home-maker may at a later point become a male photographer with a nomadic existence. Biology may throw some light on why this is so. Callard can not.
Some ends are transformative but not large in scale: riding a roller coaster for the first
time or trying a new flavor of ice cream.
So Callard means trivial when she says 'transformative'.
In these cases, I don’t know quite what I’m
getting myself into.
Yes you do. You place utility on trying the roller coaster or the ice cream flavor. There may be a mimetic aspect to this.
I ask the world to, as we say, ‘surprise me.’
Callard is easily surprised. She gets on a roller coaster and endures a roller coaster journey. What a shocker!
When we seek to be
surprised in this way, we are engaging in the transformative project of revising our tastes
on the basis of new experiences.
No we are not. We are doing 'discovery' with fixed tastes.
As a rule, we only understand the value of these experiences after the fact and not while we pursue them.
No. We remember them after they are over. We experience them while they are occurring. However, we can understand them even if they never happened to anybody. It was only after I defeated Dr. No and had sex with Arsulla Undress that I understood that the other kids were jealous of me. That's why they called me a big fat liar. Anyway, that's why I quit teaching.
It is because the set of actions
we do ‘for the thrill of it’ or ‘to see what that is like’ do not require years of intensive
preparatory or consequential effort that our reason for engaging them can simply be to try
something new.
Callard is not aware that 'years of intensive prep' tend to be related to earnings or status or some other source of utility. She thinks they are about changing your preferences. This is not the case. Tastes are constant unless what one consumes changes them- e.g. drugs.
The value of novelty or surprise suffices to motivate and rationalize only
small scale transformative pursuits.
Everything is rationalized by utility and disutility. Disutility in an existing occupation can motivate changing that occupation. Investing time and money in getting into a different profession is exactly as rational as an entrepreneur quitting a sunset industry and getting into a sunrise industry.
Becoming a police officer,
is a way to earn money. Peeps need green.
or adopting a child,
is a way to gain joy. Peeps need love and to love.
is also
‘something new,’ but we would not view that as a sufficient reason to adopt such an end.
It would be 'something new' for us to adopt any view on this matter. The police screen applicants as do adoption agencies. We have no sufficient reason to start wagging our fingers about any of this.
It would often be irresponsible to take up even a hobby, if one’s only grounds for doing
so were the whim of a new experience.
Callard drones on about this new hobby-horse of hers. Sadly she does not understand that 'rationality' has nothing to do with morality. Equally a moral course of action may be wholly irrational in conception. A command, not a reason, may motivate it.
When it comes to the kind of reasons that might
rationalize a transformative pursuit, scale matters.
Scale only matter is there are non-convexities (things like economies of scale) or barriers to entry or exit.
Not many pursuits are large in scale without being transformative,
drugs are small scale- just as is sniffing glue. Also punching a policeman can be pretty damn transformative.
but some may be.
Under some circumstances, making a lot of money might qualify, especially if the motive
were, e.g., to secure the financial future of one’s descendants.
Winning the lottery might not be 'transformative'. Who knew?
Craft-hobby activities such
as assembling a huge puzzle or adding pieces to one’s handbuilt model railroad will also
often qualify.
I suspect that some of the appeal of the repetitiveness of such activities—
restoring another classic car—is that they are virtually guaranteed to be nontransformative.
Yet they make take over your life. You might quit a well paid job to earn a pittance running a hobbyists' website.
... The problem posed by large-scale transformative pursuits is this: they require us to act on
reasons that reflect a grasp of the value we are working so hard and so long to come into
contact with, but we can know that value only once we have come into contact with it.
This is false. We know the value of love, of devotion to God, of saving lives etc. before we marry or devote ourselves to a monastic order or train to become Doctors. Indeed, we may feel we knew that value more strongly, or were more passionately gripped by it, when we entered that 'transformative pursuit' than when half way through it. It may well be that journey's end will find us, as is said to have happened to Mother Theresa, stuck in a 'dark night of the soul'.
How do economists and psychologists explain 'leaps in the dark'- i.e. big life changing decisions made with very little information? The answer has to do with either escaping disutility or depression on the one hand and negative risk aversion or time preference on the other. A value is placed on leaping because what is behind is burning up. The darkness veils the perils on the other side. If people will take dangerous mind altering drugs or knowingly risk a horrible death- as some do in adolescence or during other periods of psychic stress or anomie- then it is scarcely surprising that they might leap in the dark away towards long term transformative projects- joining the Marines, or a Monastery- without much concern for the 'values' such choices embody.
And yet the cost of granting that such ends are pursued for no reason, or bad reasons,
would be to very greatly restrict the scope of practical rationality.
Callard is speaking of a type of practical rationality which might endorse slavery but forbid masturbation. It has always been considered foolish by rational people. Only some third rate pedants teaching worthless shite are obliged to pay lip service to that crap.
For most, if not all, of
the experiences, forms of knowledge, ethical and intellectual traits, activities,
achievements, and relationships that we value are such that the pursuit of them is both
large in scale and transformative.
Because those transformations- e.g. moving from childhood into adolescence or adolescence into adulthood or adulthood into senescence- are biologically preordained. Life is large in scale and transformative. The alternative view point is that it's just shit you do day after day till death shits on you.
It is true that even if we were forced to characterize the
choices by which we move ourselves towards all of those ends as irrational, we could still
rationalize engagement with the ends once achieved. But if this is all there is to practical
rationality, we should be disappointed.
The world was disappointed with 'practical reason'. It was stupid shit. Economics and Psychology can pay for themselves. Callard's shite is merely a Credentialist academic cascade. It is predicated on the notion that there is a golden path of incremental enlightenment which, if you reach its end, is the promised land. This is the premise of every Pyramid scheme or paranoid cult.
...Large scale transformational pursuits are characteristically aspirational:
when the agent gets where she’s going, she realizes that she has what she was after all
along.
There are people who claim that by following the golden path they have attained perfect felicity. This may include claiming the power to levitate or live for ever. What Callard thinks aspirational, everybody else thinks asinine.
II. Vagueness, Testimony, Competition, Pretense, Approximation, SelfManagement
We ought to demand a rational account of how someone can work her way to the
valuation characteristic of the various end-states to which we aspire.
Why? An examined life is one thing. It may teach us something. An examined lie is merely a lie.
Satisfying this
demand, I claim, means introducing a set of reasons—I’ve called them “proleptic
reasons”—tailor-made to rationalize exactly these sorts of pursuits.
Tailor made explanations have no explanatory power. A genuine Structural Causal model invokes one size fits all explanans. Thus, if we see that the fire has burned everything except this box, the tailor made explanation is that the fire had a reason to avoid the box. The genuine explanation is that the box was made of asbestos.
By way of argument
for this claim, let us survey alternate contenders, reviewing the kinds of factors we
typically cite
'we' being peeps with wee little brains
in explaining such behavior: a vague grasp of the value in question,
coz values aint vague at all, they are like hamburgers which you can firmly grasp.
a
precise grasp of a value in close proximity to the value in question,
coz if you have a precise grasp of the fries, the burger must be in close proximity- right?
reliance on the ethical
testimony of a mentor or advisor figure,
So, the 'values' these nutters are babbling about are exactly the same things that nutty cults invoke so as to prey upon the weak minded.
What is the fucking point of a notion of rationality which fits with Scientology but not 'Science as a vocation'?
imaginative engagement in a pretense of being as
one aspires to be,
I have super-powers. I just can't show them to you coz you are not a high level enough initiate. Will you be paying by check or card?
casting success at some activity as a locus of social competition,
I've become a level 5 initiate. The Arch-Mage is going to show me his super-powers tomorrow. He suggested I bring plenty of lube. All the other girls are so jelly!
recourse to self-management techniques of (dis)incentivization.
Lying to yourself.
I’ll argue, case by case,
that vague reasons, approximating reasons, testimonial reasons, reasons of pretense,
competitive reasons, and reasons of self-management rationalize in the right way only
insofar as we help ourselves to a dedicated subset of each genus of reasons.
In other words, you can take a stupid lie from each bunch of stupid lies peddled by every other cult, or bogus philosophy, and get your own stupid cult, or bogus philosophy.
It turns out
that in order to rationalize aspirational agency, we must invoke not vague reasons but
proleptically vague reasons, not testimonial reasons but proleptically testimonial reasons,
etc.
It turns out that for me to be accepted as a great scientist we must invoke not E equals emcee squared but nice E equals emcee squared. Also Darwin was wrong. We must invoke nice nice Evolution. As for Quantum Theory, it must be replaced by nice to be nice Quantum Theory.
Trying to avoid proleptic rationality, we end up ushering it in piecemeal, through the
backdoor.
Speak for yourself. Nothing's get in through my back door.
Someone who has a ‘vague reason’ for -ing -es with only a vague idea of the value of
-ing.
That's Callard sho nuff.
It is certainly true that I have a vague idea of the value of all sorts of pursuits in
which I am not currently engaged. For instance, I think there are many valuable careers I
did not choose, many valuable hobbies I don’t pursue, many valuable books I’m not
reading.
Alternatively, this is the only career where having shit for brains is no disqualification.
One problem with such ideas is that they are often not very motivating. I don’t
plan to read most of those books. Consider a bad student of music appreciation, one
intent on merely going through the motions necessary for fulfilling a distribution
requirement. He might happily grant that music-appreciation is “good and valuable end.”
But he actually thinks getting a beejay from a hottie to be a much better way of getting his end off.
He has a vague idea that music-appreciation is good. But that’s not enough to get him to
do the homework, show up to class on time, study for the exam etc.
Just give him an 'A' pour encourager les altres. Definitely do so if he's on the football team.
A vague idea does
not entail willingness to put in effort.
Some people like putting in effort. Others are lazy. This has nothing to do with whether their ideas are vague or precise.
So let us suppose that the vague idea is not so
vague—in fact, let us posit that it suffices for motivation.
Ideas don't 'suffice' for motivation. That's why you have to pay people to fix the toilet or dispose of your garbage.
It is not implausible that in
many situations I can say I have only a vague idea of the value I am motivated to get.
It is implausible that Callard has any sensible ideas.
I
buy tickets to an opera I know I love, not knowing exactly what I will love about it this
time.
Actually, Callard is onto something here. I frequently buy tickets to see avant garde movies at the mutliplex. I never know what it is I will love about them- coz I end up watching a movie about super-heroes. Thus, what I loved about 'last year in Marienbad' was Danny De Vito's performance as the penguin.
Such an activity is not aspirational, because I’m satisfied with my vague idea.
This is unlikely. You are likely to welcome new information- e.g that the set-designer won an award or the lead soprano once had a fling with the oboe- much to the disgust of the oboist.
I
don’t feel now, the need to work to make up the difference between the vague idea I have
now and the sharp one I will have later; I don’t experience that difference as a defect in
my current state. I need only wait for the world and my interests to line up in such a way
as to make it possible for me to do the enjoying or appreciating that I’m already fully
capable of.
Not really. If you have the time, you might do more research so as to have a better, more informed appreciation of it. Also you want to say something really smart while waiting at the bar during interval so everybody thinks you is like a con-o-sewer.
The aspirant’s idea of the goodness of her end is a characterized by a distinctive kind of
vagueness, one she experiences as defective and in need of remedy.
So what? If she has the time and resources she will be researching the thing. Somebody who really cares about having got into such and such college or having got a job with such and such firm, stands out because they have done this research. It is likely they will get more out of the experience because they have a 'prepared mind'.
She is not satisfied
with her own conception of the end, and does not feel that arriving at the correct
conception is simply a matter of time. She understands her aspirational activity as work
she is doing towards grasping this end. So, while vague conceptions of value do help
explain how aspiration is possible, it is equally true that the phenomenon of aspiration
helps us understand a distinctive form of vagueness—a kind of ever-sharpening
vagueness. Large scale transformation pursuits are done for those vague reasons that are
proleptically vague.
Vagueness has to do with the sorites problem- how many hairs do you have to have on your head to defeat the charge of being bald? Callard is merely talking about the expansion of a given information set. There is no vagueness or prolepsis here.
Self-Management Reasons
My music student plans to reward herself with chocolate for getting through
the symphony.
There is no 'music student'. Just some kid trying to get a grade in 'music appreciation' coz she is too retarded to study anything more intellectually taxing.
I might make plans with a buddy to go running in the
morning, so that she can “hold me accountable” for my plan. Reasons of
self-management show up whenever I am trying to get myself to do
something that I think I should do but may feel insufficiently motivated
to do.
Reasons of self-management show up wherever there is a self which needs to manage itself. .
Some forms of self-management can be very mild, such as simply
resolving to (not) do something. In all these cases, I find some way to add motivational backing to a given course of action. Notice, however, that such
self-manipulation comes in two forms.
We will notice nothing of the sort because it isn't true.
Suppose that Sue worries that she’ll be tempted to buy expensive holiday
presents for her friends, despite her lack of funds. So she adopts one or
more of such self-managing tactics as: choosing a thrifty friend as a shopping
partner, leaving her credit card at home, resolving not to enter a certain
expensive store. In the case I’m imagining, Sue does not see her temperamental generosity as problematic. She doesn’t have a systemic problem, she
just happens to be very short of funds at the moment. Reasons of self-management are, in this kind of case, directed only at behavior on a given
occasion, or even a series of occasions.
Management is only about what happens on certain occasions. Self-management does not permit delegation (to the thrifty friend in this case). Avoiding something is not the same thing as 'managing' oneself.
A different kind of holiday shopper might, by contrast, be engaged in a
long-term struggle to curb her chronic overspending by learning to think
less commercially about how to make herself and those around her happy.
In that kind of case, self-management is directed primarily at changing how
the agent thinks, values, and feels.
This is self-improvement which may require some 'managerial' decision making. The previous case wasn't. You are not 'managing' yourself if you get somebody to lock you up or even if you lock yourself up.
The music student described above
would presumably see it as quite problematic if, years hence, she were still
motivating herself to listen with chocolate.
Why? The thing is a habit. Nothing wrong with having these little rituals.
Or consider the case of moving
to a new country. I may, at first, have to “force” myself into social situations.
My hope is thereby to come to inhabit the new culture, language, etc. in
such a way as to become disposed to engage eagerly in such socializing.
I aspire to make this new place my home.
This is not self-management. It is a 'learning curve'. Once one has mastered the language and social codes of the new country, you don't need to turn into a gregarious butterfly. At least in England, you become as reticent as the natives and share their horror of talking about anything other than the weather.
This second kind of selfmanagement
This is learning, not management.
often goes along with a characteristically aspirational form of
practice.
Nonsense! We may have to learn a new language so as to get ahead. We don't aspire to becoming one of those disgusting furriners wot eat snails or whatever.
In some cases, doing something over and over again changes the
way I do it.
Doing stuff aint management. Talking stupid shit to people who are actually doing stuff is the hall-mark of the manager.
And so by doing it, I hope to change my attitude towards it.
Sometimes I manage myself precisely with the aim of managing myself less
and less.
Masturbation aint management- though managers are tossers. Anyway, that was why I was booted off the management training program at the public toilet where I used to work.
And that is just to say: reasons of self-management, too, come in a
proleptic variety.
There is no 'self-management' here. There is either avoidance or learning. But neither are 'proleptic'. They are wholly 'presentist' precisely because action has to be taken here and now. Prolepsis is another word for procrastination.
There are some types of self-management- e.g. yoga or mindfulness- which feature 'backward induction' from the goal of detachment and tranquility. They generally feature step by step instruction and paint the final state as having some ineffable blessedness. There is a testimonial aspect to this. Does the fact that we rely on 'authority' compromise our sense of free-will? The workaround is to have a 'palinode' such that you volitionally invoke your own 'autochthony'. Thus Ireland and India declared their constitutions autochthonous- sprung from their own soil- rather than a gift of the English. The problem with having a dogma of free will is that free will can tell dogma to get knotted.
Testimonial Reasons
We often invoke testimony to explain how someone’s rationally held beliefs
can outstrip the cognitive resources that can strictly be called his own.
But we can reframe this in Bayesian terms and thus get rid of 'testimony'. There is just an information source like any other which generates 'priors'.
There
is some controversy over whether such testimony is possible in a moral
context, but it certainly seems possible to heed the practical advice of your
elders and betters—even against your own instincts and inclinations. It is
also true that advisors or mentors often, even typically, figure in large-scale
transformative pursuits. But the mentor’s role in the life of the aspirant is not an unproblematic one.
Unless you are a Bayesian rather than a pedant in a worthless University department.
Unlike in other testimonial contexts, the aspirant’s goal is nothing other than coming to see the value for herself. The fact
that your role-model knows so much more than you that you are inclined to
defer to her advice
for the same Bayesian reason that you think your watch more accurately records the passage of time than you feelings in this regard. I often think I've been running for hours. My watch says I couldn't last 5 minutes.
means that contact with her is a constant reminder of
what you don’t have.
And what she doesn't have- viz. youth.
You don’t aspire to do what she does; you aspire to do
what she does in just the way she does it—namely, independently.
Not if you are doing something useful. In that case you want to do better than her- and so does she.
What would the music appreciation teacher think of a student who takes
her class on the advice of his music-loving mentor?
That depends of whether she likes the mentor. If she hates him, she will be prejudiced against the student. This is 'cognitive dissonance'
I think the teacher would
be satisfied with this reason to the extent that she felt the student wasn’t.
Only if the teacher had gotten it into her head that she is Robin Williams in Dead Poets society or Jean Brodies or something equally silly.
I’m
happy to take someone else’s word on the truth of many of my historical or
scientific beliefs. I’m not, similarly, happy with my reliance on my mentor.
Because you want to outstrip your mentor. Also if the guy asks you to strip- don't do it. That's sexual harassment unless the guy is just a homeless dude who wandered in looking for a toilet. What? Shit like that goes down all the time! Anyway, I didn't say it happened to me.
The species of testimonial reasons that figure in aspiration are special in just
the way that the vagueness of an aspirant’s conception of her end is special.
In other words, they aren't special at all. We are merely speaking of Bayesian updating of an information set.
The testimonial element in aspiration is of a distinctively degenerative kind:
the present legitimacy and authority of the mentor’s voice is conditioned
on—indeed, anticipates—its gradual evanescence.
No it doesn't. In useful subjects, some students won't outstrip their 'mentor'. That's cool. They may do useful 'applied' stuff.
And in characterizing
this curious species of testimony, we have, once again, helped ourselves to
a dedicated, aspirational species of the genus in question.
No we haven't. There is no genus called 'proleptic reason'. There is only reason and information.
Reasons of Competition
Many large-scale transformative pursuits are, at some point or other, fueled by
a desire to position oneself at the top of some group of people engaged in a
similar pursuit.
Not for the majority of those involved.
Wanting to be better than others at something is a very
powerful motive.
Only if you have good reason to believe you possess certain traits in a higher degree.
The mathematician G. H. Hardy writes that he initially
“thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted
to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most
decisively”
This was the defect of the 'Wrangler' system and the reason England fell behind Germany and France. Kosambi's boss at Fergusson was a Senior Wrangler. He never touched maths after returning from Cambridge. Keynes too was a Wrangler.
We frequently encounter such competitiveness
in athletic, musical, intellectual, and artistic pursuits. People even get competitive about their hobbies. But there are—again—two kinds of competitiveness.
In one kind of case, I compete in order to display my excellence or submit
it for assessment. So: I would like my excellence to be praised, celebrated,
renowned to others. Or I would like to know how good I am, perhaps to be
reassured that I really am as good as people say I am. Competition can be a
way of gauging one’s excellence, by measuring it against the excellence of
others, or flaunting it, by demonstrating its superiority to the excellence of
others. Such flaunting can itself spring from a variety of motives—for
instance, I might want to flaunt my excellence as a physicist in order to
inspire other young women to become physicists. Whatever the ultimate
motive, competition of this kind is characterized by a desire to make known
to others or to myself a virtue that I already have.
Nonsense! Only a guy who does no training or other preparation and who turns up for the exam or the race completely unprepared could be able to say that he already possessed the required virtue.
In another kind of case, the point of competition is to allow me to strive
for excellence in an open-ended way.
In which case, competition is irrelevant. We might say you are competing against yourself. We might also say that people who watch porn are self-competing.
The thought of being better than the
people around me is a powerful motivator for making something of myself
when I don’t know exactly what it is I want to make of myself. Hardy
recounts:
I found at once, when I came to Cambridge, that a Fellowship implied ‘original
work’, but it was a long time before I formed any definite idea of research. I had of
course found at school, as every future mathematician does, that I could often do
things much better than my teachers; and even at Cambridge, I found, though
naturally much less frequently, that I could sometimes do things better than the
College lecturers. But I was really quite ignorant, even when I took the Tripos, of the
subjects on which I have spent the rest of my life; and I still thought of mathematics
as essentially a ‘competitive’ subject.
Hardy was aware that the Germans and the French and so forth had adopted a very different method to motivate mathematical talent while the English were stuck with mere calculators.
If the motivations driving Hardy to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians were competitive in nature,
They weren't. Hardy had great talent and his reading of Continental mathematics showed him a new way forward. He favored getting rid of the Tripos system and emulating the French and Germans.
this competitiveness must have been of a singularly hungry kind. In this kind of case,
competitiveness is a way of holding open a door for the person I’m trying
to become.
No it isn't. Hardy's point was that lots of Wranglers did nothing once they had won that prize. Competition wasn't doing what it was supposed to be doing. The philistinism of the English had made them fall much below Germany.
I’m competing in order to become excellent,
in which case competition is irrelevant. Hardy was actively looking out across the channel to where the best work was being done.
rather than in order
to show that I already am. When the prize arrives it turns out to be not what
I really wanted; I am already preparing for the next competition. The value
for the sake of which I compete is not one on which I have a good grip.
Values aint hamburgers. You can't grip them.
I compete for the sake of a future or anticipated value that I, as of now, only
incompletely understand. This form of competitiveness is proleptic
competitiveness.
It is not competitiveness at all. We may speak of it in this manner metaphorically. But we could equally describe it in terms of mountaineering or defecation or anything that comes into our head. I suppose one could speak of 'proleptic breathing' if the purpose of breathing is to continue breathing even a day from now. But what would be the point of doing anything so foolish? Every stupid pedant could invent new terms e.g. catachrestic constipation which means using a word incorrectly instead of shitting copiously as you would like to do. To speak of 'proleptic reasons' is to indulge in catachrestic constipation- which may be preferable to your shitting copiously into your cupped hands and flinging your feces about. On the other hand, the thing would make a good You Tube video. It may be that Callard's writing this shite represents a stage in her evolving into what she really aspires to be- viz. a You Tube sensation who can shit on demand into her cupped hands and fling her feces with great accuracy into the dropped jaws of her students.
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