Once upon a time silly pedants puzzled over the so-called paradox of value. Why is water, which is necessary for life, so cheap, while diamonds, which are not essential at all, so expensive? One answer, the theological, was that water is like the Grace of God. It is ubiquitous and thus available to even the poorest. Diamonds are rare. The sins of Judah are inscribed with a pen of iron whose nib is a diamond. Sin is the costliest act we can commit. By it we forfeit Paradise. Thus diamonds are expensive.
With the dawn of 'Political Economy' in England, we have William Petty who gave a different explanation. A thing is valuable in proportion to the amount of labor expended on producing it. Relatively little labor, in relation to volume, is required for getting water. Not so with diamonds which have to be dug out of the earth.
Karl Marx quotes Petty in Das Kapital. Engels, a businessman, who financed Marx's labours, wrote that the bourgeois economists had discovered the labor theory of value but hadn't been able to do anything useful- e.g. guillotine the aristocracy- with it. “The man who found the way out of this blind alley was Karl Marx,” he said. Marx, whom Engels kept well lubricated, developed and elaborated this obviously foolish theory. Marx claimed it was the means through which he discovered the laws of motion of capitalism and the secret of surplus value.
Sadly, Marx had discovered and elaborated shit. Around the same time he was drunkenly dashing off his master-work, mathematically inclined engineers and academics were bringing about a Copernican Revolution in Economics. These 'Marginalists' saw that value was not something 'out there' in the world. It wasn't 'externalist'. Nor was it theological or phenomenological. The price of a thing simply reflected marginal physical product on the one hand and marginal utility on the other- provided there was an open market for it. Unfortunately, the 'time class' of internalist solutions to the problem of general equilibrium was much greater than the age of the Universe. In other words, what Arrow-Debreu etc were doing was either useless or mischievous. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Volatility is good for markets. Shakeouts raise productivity. Capitalist Crisis is salutary, Marxist Lysis is the epistemology of a pederast grooming his victims.
Sadly, Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot never learned of the Marginalist Revolution. They obstinately clung to a stupid metaphysics while believing that the West was in the grip of 'false consciousness'. The advanced countries had been hoodwinked by some bourgeois mathematicians. Interestingly, one very gifted mathematical economist- Slutsky- was a committed Communist. But after the Bolshevik revolution, he quickly realised that the lunatics had taken over the asylum. Thus he stopped being an economist and became a Meteorologist and kept his head down thus escaping Stalin's purges. Other gifted mathematicians- Kolomogorov, Kantarovich etc- went into Operations Research and other 'useful' fields to escape the charge of 'bourgeois idealism'. Thus they developed linear and dynamic programming at the same time as the Cowles Commission and other Western initiatives in mathematical economics. By the Sixties, there was a plausible mathematical theory of value that was 'externalist' in that it avoided mention of markets by computing 'shadow prices' based on scarcity. The rise of the mathematical economists coincided with Brezhnev's 'stablilization of the cadres'. Kantarovich, who claimed to have found a mathematical description of Marx's labor theory of value, got a Nobel prize. The idea was that Networked Computers would crank out 'shadow prices' and so Marxist countries would race ahead of Capitalist countries on the basis of superior allocative efficiency. Ludicrously, Allende in Chile created a Star Trek like Computer room which was supposed to lift his country into affluence. It was a disaster.
Soviet mathematical economists used 'shadow prices' to show that the USSR was being very wasteful in the way it was using valuable things like petrol and gold and diamonds. But this was already obvious just by looking up the spot price on the relevant commodities exchange. Brezhnev's reforms (which amounted to not shooting the corrupt but letting them bribe their way upwards in the hierarchy) had created a class which would willingly destroy Socialism so as to get rich selling off Russia's great mineral wealth on open markets. A mathematical economist, Aganbegyan, inspired Gorbachev's surrender of Party Control over the economy. There was an immediate 'scissors crisis'- i.e. enterprises wouldn't sell without getting something in return- and thus this neo-Leninist policy quickly collapsed. The road was paved for Yeltsin and Putin and the rule of oligarchs.
Was this inevitable? No. Shooting people- as happened in North Korea where there was a big famine after Soviet subsidies were cut off- can keep the Party in power while grey and black markets feed and clothe the people and provide a surplus for the State. Ideology can triumph over market forces, if enough people are shot or tortured and incarcerated. That is the road China is now taking. However, this ideology is wholly bogus and is imposed by the barrel of a gun. Nobody really believes that shit. As the Chinese say 'Science students look down on Arts students. Arts students look down on Poli Sci students. Poli Sci students look down on their teachers'.
Value and Meaning are both determined by 'economia'- a suave adjustment at the margin- not akreibia- which Aristotle says is the fault of seeking greater precision than the subject matter permits. In Sanskrit the word 'Artha' means 'meaning' as well as Economics- 'Arthashastra'. By contrast the Greek word which gives rise to Economics is associated with family and belonging- 'oikeiosis'.
The Indians don't have an 'essentialist' or 'externalist' theory of value or meaning or anything else. All is merely a 'samskar'- i.e. a contingent type of transaction or observance. Aristotelian metaphysics retarded the Western Academy's understanding of Economics. India's getting conquered and its giving up on oceanic trade meant its mental retardation was greater yet. Pundits don't matter. Having sea-captains buy and sell stuff on distant shores is what prods and pushes a people up the value chain.
Western Epistemology went down a rabbit hole in the year I was born. Gettier published a short paper and soon there were internalists and externalists of various sorts all talking worthless shite. So long as the Soviet threat was credible, there was some reason to be an 'internalist'. After all, the bad guys thought 'shadow prices' could be computed such that a 'golden path' could be selected by Planners. This was 'externalist'. If you were on the right side of history, you were justified. Not so if you were a bourgeois idealist. Your economy was bound to collapse. The end of days, for Capitalism, was nigh. Yea! Thou shall gnash thy teeth as all thy wealth disappears! Thou'lst be offering hand-jobs for the price of a sandwich! Ronald Reagan- this means thou!
Some very stupid- but conveniently woke- careerist Academics are trying to revive 'externalism' of a foolish sort. They don't get that they are licensing Right Wing populism. The Left shat the bed. There is no non-market economy which aint starving anywhere on earth. North Korea and Cuba and Venezuela etc. survive on grey and black markets and shooting people in the head. There are no more Kantorovichs or even Morishimas pointing to some complicated sort of Maths as the panacea. On the contrary, Maths has now clarified exactly why 'externalism' must fail. Complexity can only be tamed by coevolved processes. Concurrency and Computability problems bedevil substantive rationality. Thus 'internalism' too is irrelevant. Markets have won because Knightian Uncertainty is ubiquitous. Marxism now has to hide among the terminally useless and stupid.
As a case in point, in a paper titled 'Radical Externalism', Amia Srinivasan writes-
This paper presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism.'The basic idea of internalism is that justification is solely determined by factors that are internal to a person. Externalists deny this, asserting that justification depends on additional factors that are external to a person.'
Unfortunately, the notion of justification is empty save in a protocol bound, buck-stopped, context- e.g. jurisprudence or the evaluation of professional conduct. It is easy to show that any deontic logic whatsoever can have 'univalent foundations' if suitably buck-stopped. There are no great aporias or paradoxes here for philosophers to work themselves up over.
The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of ‘bad ideology’ – that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression.
In that case 'justification' cashes out as doing whatever shit you need to do so as not to get a bullet in the back of the head. This is simply 'conatus' as inertial self-preservation.
In such cases, I suggest, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things stand from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory.
This is crazy shit. If oppression is occurring, people aren't really free to justify anything to themselves by unlimited rational inquiry. Reason is not sovereign for them. It is tied to survival by any and all means necessary.
Who in their right mind would babble nonsense about 'Gettier cases' in North Korea or Xi's China?
But these ‘bad ideology’ cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favour externalism over internalism.
Cases where people are being tortured don't offer shit to even the shittiest type of Philosophy. The fact is the discipline could itself be defined as 'free and rational inquiry unconstrained in any way'. No doubt, some specially constituted people may be able to think in a free and rational manner even while being tortured but this is not generally the case.
These cases are moreover analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists.
Those 'counter-examples' fail immediately. If brains-in-vats existed there would be a large literature about how vats are supercool and where to buy a better vat and how vatted brains have better multiple orgasms.
Clairvoyants could get super-rich and usurp total power and solve all the problems of physics and mathematics. They could create Universes of their own. As for 'dogmatists'- they aint interested in free and rational inquiry any more than most sensible people are.
That is, my ‘bad ideology’ cases are,
Stupid. If there is oppression then inquiry isn't free.
in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism – except that they intuitively favour externalism.
Only in the sense that arguments made by nutters in tin foil hats intuitively favour some shite or other.
This, I argue, is a serious worry for internalism, and bears interestingly on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely ‘normative’ epistemology.
It is useless. Epistemology is about Knowledge. Not ignorant wankers trying to work out why their discipline is getting stupider and stupider.
Amia next quotes a particularly rabid nutter
It is impossible by a mere individual…effort to escape from the web of the social lie TROTSKY
Sadly there was insufficient 'individual effort' by guys wielding ice picks to get rid of Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and so forth.
RACIST DINNER TABLE: Nour, a young British woman of Arab descent, is invited to dinner at the home of a white friend from university. The host, Nour’s friend’s father, is polite and welcoming to Nour. He is generous with the food and wine,
Wine? Most Arabs are Muslim. They don't drink wine.
and asks Nour a series of questions about herself. Everyone laughs and talks amiably. As Nour comes away, however, she is unable to shake the conviction that her friend’s father is racist against Arabs. But replaying the evening in her head she finds it impossible to recover just what actions on the host’s part could be thought to be racist, or what would justify her belief in the host’s racism. If pressed, Nour would say she ‘just knows’ that her host is racist. In fact the host is racist – he thinks of Arabs as inherently fanatic, dangerous and backwards –
which is how us Brits were seen after Brexit- at least by the bien pensant.
and as a result did send off subtle cues that Nour subconsciously registered and processed.
The guy wanted to show he was a good host- everybody was laughing and talking amiably- but wanted Nour to know that she was unworthy of his hospitality. Believe me, shit like this happens to me all the time- when I visit relatives.
It is this subconscious sensitivity that led to her belief that her host is racist.
Why do my relatives hate me? The only possible answer I can think of is they fear that I've succumbed to Ramanuja's heresy and thus am no better than a fucking Iyengar- like wot Srinivasan is. Incidentally, flatulence is not a failure in a dinner guest. In many cultures, it is rude not to fart loudly while dining. My daddy was a diplomat. Trust me, I know about etiquette.
Here is my question: is Nour’s belief that her host is racist (epistemically) justified?
Yes, as far as she is concerned. She made a defeasible judgment, in a manner which yielder her utility, which it was her right to make. Indeed, what is the point of being Arab if you can't whine about how everybody fucking hates Arabs? Incidentally, this is why I didn't, as my father urged, drop 'Iyer' from my surname. I love my own people even if some are too fucking lacking in an elementary of knowledge of English Literature to understand that Oscar Wilde was lionised by the Aristocracy as a wit and raconteur coz of his pungent and contextually profound farts at the dinner table- not some boring shite he wrote.
I think the intuitive answer is yes.
No. The intuitive answer would require an evaluation of Nour's intuition. Does it generally guide her correctly? Suppose Nour makes a practice of sucking off homeless dudes because her intuition was that they might secretly be the King of Agrabah who will make her his Chief Queen and give her a billion dollars a week as pin money. In this case our intuitive answer is 'no. Don't be silly. You have terrible intuition. Also, be a dear and stop trying to suck me off. I'm neither homeless nor the King of Agrabah. '
Nour’s belief, after all, is the product of a sensitivity to racism, a sensitivity that allows her to dependably track whether or not the people she encounters are racist.
Nonsense! Nour may have a highly developed sense of who is anti-Arab. She is unlikely to give a toss for the horrible manner in which Iyengars, like Amia, discriminate against Iyers.
The fact is if Nour's daddy was the King of Agrabah, that racist Englishman would have been fawning all over her and grovelling something fierce.
It would seem odd to say that Nour ought not, epistemically speaking, have formed the belief that her host is racist, or that she did something epistemically impermissible in forming this belief.
Why? There may be good instrumental reasons- and instrumentalism is a proper Epistemology- for saying this. Speaking generally, the natives of a particular country may have absurd ideas about people from far away lands. So what? It is a mark of cosmopolitan sophistication to take this in one's stride. Mohammad Al Fayed took advantage of the racism of a couple of Tory politicians to take down the pants of a Government which had denied him a British passport. He got away with denouncing on prime time TV, Prince Phillip and other British toffs as a bunch of overgrown bum-boys who made their money as pimps. He laughed all the way to the Bank while a senior Tory minister went to jail.
And it would seem similarly odd to say that, having formed the belief, Nour ought to now, epistemically speaking, give it up.
What is this shit about x seeming odd and y seeming odd? Is that what Philosophy has degenerated into? Why teach this at College? Why not hold such conversations in the hair salon or the dentist's waiting room?
Indeed, it seems right to say that if Nour were to give up her belief in her host’s racism, she would be losing an item of knowledge.
Nour has a belief that this dude is racist with respect to Arabs when around her. If pressed, she might agree that the guy would be pro-Arab if in the presence of a great Arab sportsman. That's how cognitive dissonance works. People who call me a fat bastard aren't against nice fat people and have no particular dislike of people whose parents were not married to each other.
If so, it follows that Nour’s belief must be justified.
Nope. Beliefs don't have to be justified unless a Hohfeldian immunity in that respect has been specifically waived. It is foolish to pretend that everybody has to play 'Simon says' just coz Simon is as stupid as shit and ended up teaching Philosophy instead of doing something useful.
Of course, Nour has no awareness, introspective or otherwise, of how her subconscious racism-detection mechanism works – indeed, not even that it works.
Nor does Amia. That's why what she is doing isn't epistemic. It is silly. You can't have an Epistemology which focuses only on why Epistemologists don't know shit. That would be like a Medicine which only asks why Doctors aren't able to get their thumbs out of their butts.
And she is unable to cite anything – any experience or bit of evidence – as grounds for her belief. (As she says, she ‘just knows’.) We might well want to say that Nour would be better off, epistemically speaking, if she had such a higher-order awareness.
She may well have such a 'higher-order' awareness. The girl is in College. She must know about 'cognitive dissonance'. What isn't true is that- as Amia assumes- only stuff which can be justified qualifies as knowledge. The fact is any justification would itself have to be justified and so on. There is an obvious 'infinite regress' here. Sure the thing can be 'buck-stopped' but that involves a Hohfeldian immunity, so why go down that road in the first place?
Perhaps such an awareness would give Nour’s cognitive economy a greater degree of overall coherence, or a greater robustness against misleading counterevidence.
Sure, if she talks to somebody smart. But Amia is not smart. She has nothing useful to offer Nour. What I'd say to Nour would show her how to use British 'cognitive dissonance' to her advantage. The other guy's ignorance or bigotry is an arbitrage opportunity. It's like smart peeps in Nigeria leveraging White peep's beliefs about Nigerian Corruption to run a profitable scam. Interestingly, such scam emails should be illiterate and self-contradictory. This 'screens out' those too smart to be scammed.
On the other hand, it is perfectly true that, as I have repeatedly announced, I will soon be opening a proper Institute of Socioproctology after my fiancee- a very beautiful Nigerian princess- joins me here with her billion dollar dowry.
And yet it seems counterintuitive to infer from the fact that Nour could be epistemically better off in these ways to the conclusion that her belief as it stands is unjustified.
It may be- to a given person or even, for instrumental reasons, for Nour herself. It depends.
For Nour’s belief that her host is racist is not only true, but non-luckily so.
This is not the case. Nour's belief, properly articulated, is that x showed anti-Arab bigotry at such and such time. For her own purposes, it may be useful to simply classify him as racist though his true motive was to register his hostility to her on the grounds that she was a Lesbian and had been fisting his wife between courses at the dinner table.
She may even discuss the matter with sensible people so as to expand her knowledge base re. cognitive dissonance involving the relevant racial stereotype and how you can leverage it to your own advantage. I do this all the time. The fact is British women see me as Indian black not African black. But by deepening my voice and saying things like 'Watusi jambo habana' in dimly lit places, I sometimes get laid. More importantly- because, like all true Iyers, I consider sex merely a means to get a cooked breakfast and a bit of tea and sympathy for my plight as the victim of remorseless Iyengar contumely and denigration- cognitive dissonance causes women to believe that intercourse was more satisfactory than it would otherwise have been precisely because of an ambiguity in my category of bleckness.
Nour’s subconscious sensitivity to
anti-Arabism not
racism means that her belief gets on to the truth not as a mere matter of chance, not as a happy accident, but as a matter of predictable dependability.
We don't know that. Amia is pulling this stuff out of her ass.
Surely then, her belief is justified.
Amia's is not. She is supposed to be a philosopher but just begs the question till the question gets fed up and takes to drink and then becomes homeless and gets sucked off by randos whose intuition is that it is the King of Agrabah.
Now consider a second case: CLASSIST COLLEGE: Charles is a young man from a working-class background who has just become the newest fellow of an Oxford college. He is initially heartened by the Master’s explicit commitment to equality and diversity. The Master assures him that, though the college is still dominated by wealthy fellows, Charles will be welcomed and made to feel included.
Charles laughs his head off. He tells the Master that everybody knows his Mum is a smelly old bag-lady. Of course, if the Master is Amartya Sen, he might keep silent because, obviously, Sen's Mum must have starved to death or been raped to death or have been forced to commit suttee.
Indeed, the Master tells Charles, he too is from a working-class background, and has experienced plenty of discrimination in his time.
Coz his Mum is a smelly old bag lady. Also she is a Professor at Cambridge, that too not in a STEM subject.
Charles is confident not only that the college will be a good community for him, but also that the Master is a person of excellent judgment on these matters. However, a few incidents soon disrupt Charles’ rosy view of things. At high table, when Charles explains that he went to a state school, a fellow responds with ‘but you’re so well-spoken!’.
that's code for bum-boy- unless you are Welsh. Only Welsh speakers disdain to spick Inglis gud like wot I do. This is because the Welsh accent sounds a bit Indian.
BTW, plenty of Brits called me 'well spoken' when I first arrived on these shores. What they meant was that I hadn't yet learned the cool way to sound 'Mockney' or 'Rude Boy' or whatever. Oddly, my current 'Sarf Lunnon accent' goes down well with younger White peeps even though it is a mash up of Worzel Gummidge, Bob Marley & Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. This is because they assume that some such idiolect once prevailed amongst professional flatulists during the early Thatcherite era.
At a visit to the pub, a number of young fellows sing the Eton boating song while Charles sits uncomfortably silent.
This may piss off Harrovians or Wykehamists but us proles get to put intelligent questions about how far up the rectum the oar is inserted. Also mention what gets eaten at Eton is cock. Lots and lots of cock.
Why the fuck should Charles feel uncomfortable if lads wot support a sport wholly unknown to himself drunkenly sing their team song? The thing is an invitation to join their side.
In a footnote Amia writes
Finally Charles hears that the other fellows call him ‘Chavvy Charles’.
But 'chav' is a working class word- originally from Romani and thus cognate with Sanskrit 'chava'. Posh people, in this fantasy, should be saying 'Grammar School oik'. Why the fuck would a Brahmin like myself be offended if posh White dudes referred to me as 'mleccha'? The thing is an, admittedly backhanded, compliment of a particularly flattering type. It shows my native culture is becoming hegemonic.
Charles, who has a dependable sensitivity to classism, goes to the Master to report that he has experienced a number of classist incidents in college.
Is Charles British? Does he have a cock? If so, that's the last thing he would do. Why not suggest that Charles goes running to the Master and then menstruates all over his favourite couch while screaming hysterically? It's what I would do.
Shocked, the Master asks him to explain what happened. But when Charles describes the incidents, the Master is visibly relieved. He assures Charles that none of these are genuinely classist incidents,
i.e. they are not the prelude to Charles being gang raped and then having his head kicked in
but playful, innocuous interactions that are characteristic of the college’s communal culture.
the posh kids want to seem cool by having a chavvy friend. The thing is a harmless fantasy. When I was a kid everybody wanted to have a Chinese looking friend coz they could fantasize the guy was Bruce Lee. The odd thing is a lot of Chinese looking kids then actually learned martial arts and thus improved their health, character, and mental prowess. Meanwhile, stupid cunts like me were trying to pass ourselves off as West Indian, not South Indian, in the hope of being relieved of our virginity.
He tells Charles that he is sure that Charles himself will come to see things this way once he gets to know the college and its ways better. And finally, he gently suggests that Charles is being overly sensitive – something to which (the Master goes on) Charles is understandably prone to being, given his working-class background.
And the fact that he menstruates.
The truth is Masters at Oxford Colleges know a lot more than poor old E.P Thompson- the son of a guy us Hindus knew very well- about the origins of the British Working Class. But so do stupid shitheads like me. Which combination of 'working class' characteristics generates which type of 'chip on the shoulder' against which bunch of snobs is something guys who have spent 40 years getting pissed in spit and sawdust floored pubs- or their Collegiate equivalents- are all, without distinction of colour or credential, expert in. Sadly, Thompson's daddy- like Tagore- didn't get that this is not a Brahminical, but an Ayurvedic, or Baidya, concept- viz. yukti- which explains why using the word 'supervenience' like it means something, means you got shit for brains mate. For medicine there is hysteresis- path dependence- and if your notion of adjointness involves 'memoryless functors' then you are immeasurably fucked. Coevolved shite don't work that way.
What does? Amia's functors which aren't ergodic but simply, and arbitrarily imposed- vide
Charles leaves the conversation unmoved, continuing to believe that he has faced classist discrimination in the college, and dismissing the Master’s testimony.
This is stupid shit. They guy has been made a Fellow. Unlike a working class guy who gets a job on the dealing floor and who worries that a Public School clique will keep him out of the more lucrative deals, Charles's remuneration and promotion prospects are unaffected precisely because the College isn't discriminating on the basis of class. Furthermore, it is simply not the case that there is 'hostile working environment'. All there is is a guy who thinks some people don't lurve him and whom he fucking hates for an irrational reason- viz. they were 'wet-bobs' not 'dry-bobs' and sang their team song after having a few pints.
I understand that Amia is telling a 'just so story' for the deeply moral purpose of getting raped women and working class rapists who may have a chip on their shoulder with respect to blecks with bigger dicks or posh tossers wot talk fancy or whatever, to join forces to oppose some shite which does not involve stopping the latter beating and raping and stealing the cool stuff of the former.
But, even under these irenic conditions, militating for an ecumenical stupidity and impotence, Charles may, quite rightly conclude that some of his colleagues are elitist snobs upon whom he can get his own back by praising Priti Patel when, as she inevitably will, she comes for BoJo's scalp.
Charles meanwhile is unaware that some people from working class backgrounds (e.g. the Master) suffer from false consciousness, distorting their ability to recognise class-based oppression.
False consciousness aint a real thing. It is not the case that you secretly want to suck me off but have been brainwashed by Neoliberalism into thinking I am ugly, stupid, fat and very old.
How the fuck could Charles- Amia's epistemic equal by her own stupid stipulation- be unaware of any cretinous, paranoid, shite she has down pat just coz she went to Yale which is shite when compared to Harvard? Charles, like me, would spend his time making fun of Amia and Jason Stanley and the manner in which a sometime Governor of Madras, Elihu Yale, fucked up by endowing a University bound to be second class.
I'm not saying that Yale hasn't changed for the better. When I was young there was a thing called 'Yale butt disease'- i.e. Yalie girls had fat asses and wore glasses and were pathetically eager for intercourse.
I have no reason to believe any such thing currently obtains.
Is Charles’s ultimate belief that the college is classist justified?
He does not have any such belief. He thinks some of his colleagues are insufferable snobs. He will probably get his own back by fucking their wives or g.fs. They, being bum-boys at heart, will be cringingly grateful.
I think the intuitive answer is, again, yes.
No. Amia has misstated the 'ultimate belief'. She has assumed Nour and Charles are as stupid as she is herself. But there is no one quite as stupid as Amia. Yale is a very expensive and adversely selective School.
Like Nour, Charles forms a true belief on the basis of a dependable sensitivity to instances of classism.
This is not the case. Amia stipulates that there was sufficient observed verbal behaviour for the belief that certain specified people had shown prejudice in specific contexts. But singing a rugger song or boating song while at the pub aint discriminatory. You are being invited to join something which already binds some of those present together. I once met a young English man who could sing every verse of 'Jana Gana mana'. To my shame, I couldn't. He was a cricket fan and had learned the words during an interminable Test match when India played Australia. The Indians grabbed him first so he came to be on their side.
Eton competes with other similar public schools. Etonians want the 'chav', or South Indian darkie, or whatever, to think well of their school while holding Harrow to be an excellent preparation for a career in petty crime.
Unlike Nour, Charles maintains his true belief in the face of seemingly credible, misleading evidence – namely, the Master’s testimony to the effect that Charles’ belief is actually formed on an unreliable basis, viz. an oversensitivity to classist slights.
The problem here is that the Master is described as being older than Charles. England has changed greatly. Public Schools suddenly became comfortable and hygienic. Masters would give you privacy to finish your wank- even if what they really suspected you of doing was smoking- whereas previously they'd have beaten the shit out of you for Onan's offence and made you copy out the scarier bits in the Bible. By contrast, you were welcome to have a Sherlock Holmes' type pipe attached to your eleven year old lips as you struggled to parse Theocritus.
With the advent of Cameron, BoJo etc, it became cool to be a snob. But the 'working class' too has changed. It is not economically homogenous. Some 'chavs' grow up with swimming pools and a silver spoon up their nose. Others are barely getting by.
And yet, this does not seem intuitively to affect the justification of Charles’ belief. Charles is not only justified in forming the initial belief that the college is classist; he intuitively remains justified even after the Master gives his misleading testimony to the contrary. Indeed, as with Nour, it seems right to say that Charles knows that the college is classist, both before and after the Master’s attempt to explain away Charles’ belief.
Maybe the Master was talking about one type of elitism- the epistemic belief that people without classical paideia (i.e. Greek and Latin being beaten into you at an early age) would be necessarily inferior in their conceptions- while Charles is talking about a different type of cliquishness. But such cliques are ubiquitous in Academia precisely because, as Kissinger observed, the stakes of its politics are so small.
The real problem young academics face is 'wokeness' on Campus. Guess which side Amia is aligning with?
In dismissing the Master’s testimony, we might think that Charles
belongs to a different generation. Norms have changed.
exhibits a mild form of epistemic dogmatism,
which is neither epistemic nor dogmatic but simply a masturbatory term to keep a stupid circle jerk going.
a dogmatism that could, if indulged in other circumstances, lead him to recklessly dismiss non-misleading evidence and court ignorance.
British culture may have changed somewhat. Still, since I'm closer to the Master's Age, I find something implausible in Amia's story. When I was young, the way people bonded was by sharing pet peeves. The guy who expresses hostility to some other supposedly more tightly bonded group is offering himself as a recruit to another, perhaps notional, group. Sink a few pints together while topping each other's horror stories of persecution and the deal is sealed. The fact is paranoia is an occupational hazard among smart British peeps. This probably has something to do with the weather and the fact that British beer is piss.
(One way of cashing this out is to note that, if Charles had been in a world in which his evaluation of the college was wrong, and the Master’s right, he would have stubbornly maintained a false belief.)
For example, the College isn't really a College. It is a reality show- or so its producer believes. The other guys are actors. Next week they turn into werewolves. Except one of them really is a werewolf. That's when the fun starts. The key to unravelling the mystery of who is the head Werewolf who can only be killed with a silver bullet is contained in the Eton boating song.
We might also think that Charles would be better off, epistemically speaking, if he had available to him the phenomenon of false consciousness as a debunking explanation of the Master’s testimony:
Coz the Master is secretly the head werewolf! His false consciousness was implanted by the CIA as part of Biden's cunning plot to reverse Brexit.
Paranoia can debunk anything. Epistemology was shitty enough without Amia turning it coprophagous.
if he were in a position to explain away the Master’s testimony, rather than simply dismiss it. Perhaps we even think that Charles is somewhat blameworthy, epistemically speaking, for this act of dogmatism. And yet, none of this intuitively precludes Charles from justifiably believing – indeed, I think, knowing – that the college is classist.
It isn't. All that has been established is that some of Charles's colleagues are snobbish cunts. But they may also be crazy Leftie snobby cunts who think they should do the proles' thinking for them.
Charles’ belief that the college is classist, like Nour’s belief that her host is racist, is true not as a matter of good luck, of happy accident, but as a function of his capacity to dependably get on to the truth. This intuitively seems sufficient to justify it.
No. Charles and Nour formed a judgment of a narrow type. Amia has unwarrantedly expanded it into something else entirely. The fact is Nour may herself be racist. Charles may himself look down on 'chavs'. They are not endowed with some finely tuned racism or elitism detection skill.
Bear with me for a third, and final, case:
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Radha is a woman who lives in rural India. Her husband, Krishnan, regularly beats her.
If this is the case, Amia has a duty to tell the police. The thing is a cognizable offence. Why suborn for the purpose of psilosophy, something which is against the law?
After the beatings, Krishnan often expresses regret for having had to beat her,
Why should he bother? He should blame his poor diet or distraction for not doing a better job of it. He should promise to do push-ups and eat healthy till his performance improves.
but explains that it was Radha’s fault for being insufficiently obedient or caring.
Also she should be earning money by sucking off dudes at truck stops.
Radha finds these beatings humiliating and guilt-inducing; she believes she has only herself to blame,
No. She blames her karma. Has Amia never watched an Indian movie?
and that she deserves to be beaten for her bad behaviour. After all, her parents, elders and friends agree that if she is being beaten it must be her fault, and no one she knows has ever offered a contrary opinion.
A friend of my mother's had the bad habit of stabbing her husband when drunk. He'd get his own back by pummeling her after she had passed out. But, her stabbing skills improved with practice and so she was tried for murder but got off on a domestic violence plea. Sadly, she was unable to find a second husband and ended up stabbing her elder sister.
Moreover, Radha has thoroughly reflected on the issue and concluded that, given the natural social roles of men and women, women deserve to be beaten by their husbands when they misbehave.
Wow! Amia thinks there is a process of 'thorough reflection' which can come to this conclusion. Hindus disagree with her. It is true that at an earlier point in history, the husband was obliged to beat with a rope or split bamboo a wife convicted of a particular transgression. However, that obligation was removed by law. If there is a cognizable offence, it is up to the state to dole out punishment.
Is Radha’s belief that she deserves to be beaten justified?
No. It is contrary to Law and Religion.
I think the answer is: surely not. For Radha’s belief is not merely false,
it is implausible. Amia is too deracinated to write in a manner which carries conviction about Hindu women in rural India.
but moreover the product of a convincing, and systematic, patriarchal illusion: that it is men’s place to subordinate women.
This was not an illusion. For a long period of time, a woman convicted of a transgression had to be punished only by her husband in a manner prespecified. If this was not done, then the whole family would be punished.
This illusion – one that infects not only the testimony of Radha’s peers and respected elders, but her moral emotions (shame, remorse) and best attempts at rational reflection – ensures that Radha has no dependable access to the moral facts of her situation.
No. Hindu's have a concept of 'pativrata' who remains devoted to her husband in life and death. However, the pativrata is not under any obligation to cohabit with her husband. The British were surprised when a wife refused to join her husband even when threatened with jail. Yet that lady who went on to become one of India's first female doctors, remained devoted to him- observing all 'samskars' and dressing as a widow after he died.
The duty to the husband can be discharged in different ways. The wives of both JP and Kripalani refused to consummate their marriages preferring to devote themselves to the service of the Nation. That does not that these were not genuine marriages characterized by the highest type of love.
In Radha's case, she may be invited to join an Ashram or a relative's family where she can observe all the samskars of a pativrata. Depriving a husband of a punching bag is no derogation of duty. On the contrary, it is salutary.
Radha, despite her own best efforts, is tragically cut off from moral reality.
No. I have met such women. They are in touch with moral reality. Amia is not.
Radha’s false belief is hardly her fault; it is not only explained but obviously excused by the patriarchal illusion of which she is a victim.
Amia's false beliefs about Hindu womanhood are inexcusable.
Radha is doing, we want to say, the best she can, given her own distorted epistemic connection to the world.
No. There is something better that she can do though there may be some exigent circumstance preventing her taking that option. This is covered under 'apadh dharma'. But that's what other people are there for. Helping Radha, they help themselves and their community.
Her belief is eminently understandable; we would be naïve to expect anything better of ourselves in Radha’s position. And yet none of this is the same as saying that Radha’s belief is justified. Indeed, once we draw the distinction between justification on one hand, and excusedness or blamelessness on the other, it feels intuitive, I think, to say that Radha’s belief meets the conditions for the latter, but not the former.
Amia's intuition is that 'false consciousness' exists. If so, why not create more useful types of 'false consciousness'- like everybody wanting to do STEM subjects rather than shitty Arts degrees?
The problem with paranoia is that if the grand conspiracy really exists then it could do things much more advantageous to itself than simply procure beatings for Radha.
Radha’s belief is the product of a distorted relationship to reality – a relationship that excuses the falsity of her beliefs, but does not thereby render them justified. These three cases – RACIST DINNER TABLE, CLASSIST COLLEGE and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE – together present, I want to suggest, a serious challenge to a widely held view in epistemology.
Shit can't challenge shit. It is the uselessness of Epistemology which has caused it to degenerate into coprophagy.
According to epistemic internalism, justification is a matter of a subject’s (non-factive) mental states: ‘internal’ duplicates, the internalist says, do not differ in justification.
The problem here is that if 'internal' duplicates exist then all sorts of weird and wonderful things would be possible with existing technology. There is no point doing a thought experiment which assumes something incompossible unless it is to show that this is so.
A typical internalist says that epistemic justification is a matter of fit with one’s evidence, or with one’s epistemic reasons, or more generally with how things look from one’s own perspective on the world – where it is presumed that such facts are facts about one’s (non-factive) mental states.
In other words, by playing with words one can always show one isn't saying something absurd.
Epistemic externalism, meanwhile, denies that epistemic justification supervenes solely on such ‘internal’ facts: ‘internal’ duplicates might well differ in justification.
and justification may well differ from justification except on Tuesdays when it has hot sex with itself in a motel room. That's the trouble with talking nonsense. Your nonsense might start differing with itself and then getting jiggy in motel rooms and using your credit card to order hard core porn on Cable and leaving you to explain all this to your spouse who isn't a philosopher and thus is paying the mortgage and utilities till you hit the jackpot with your book 'Five Metaphysical ways to master micturation.'
The externalist says that epistemic justification is at least partly a matter of facts that lie beyond one’s mental states – for example, whether one’s belief exhibits an appropriate causal connection to its content, or is a product of a reliable or safe method.
This is all very well but facts have to alter mental states to have any such effect. This is a truly pointless debate.
Externalism can turn into paranoia- nutters babbling about 'false consciousness'- while internalism can degenerate into solipsism. Amia, knowing well which side her bread is buttered on- prefers paranoia.
The internalist, meanwhile, has a more difficult time of it. Internalists divide into two kinds, depending on how they understand what it is to be an ‘internal’ duplicate. According to access internalism, A and B are internal duplicates just in case they are identical with regard to their introspectively accessible mental states.
Which would be cool if everything we had ever seen or heard were 'introspectively accessible' to us. But this is not the case for very good evolutionary reasons.
According to mental state internalism, A and B are internal duplicates just in case they are identical with regard to their (non-factive) mental states, whether those states are accessible or not.
In which case, solipsism is always better justified than any other theory.
For the sake of simplicity, I will focus on the challenge that my cases present to access internalism. (In , however, I will briefly show how my challenge extends to mental state internalism as well.) How could Nour or Charles be justified, according to the (access) internalist, given that neither has any awareness of the reliable grounds of his or her belief – and indeed, in Charles’ case, has strong internalistic reason to think he is not so reliably grounded?
The problem here is that Amia is putting words in their mouths. If Nour says to me 'X's dad is anti-Arab' that is the beginning of a conversation which can be useful to her. Thus her belief has an instrumental value which is why she discloses it to me. Something similar could be said of Charles. There are things they can learn which will enable them to be more successful.
Amia may be thinking of some sort of tribunal or ethics committee or politically correct systematized lynching or 're-education'. But young people aren't afraid of that any more. They can make more money dropping out of College. In some jurisdictions they can sue to get their fees back and punitive damages for epistemic abuse and bullying and so forth.
And how could Radha be unjustified, according to the internalist, given that she believes in accordance with her (rather misleading) evidence, with what she has reason to believe, and with how things seem to her?
Hinduism has a very well developed epistemology backing up its deontology. Amia is ignorant of the 'internalist' reason why a 'pativrata' has a duty not to co-habit with an abusive husband save under exigent circumstances (apadh dharma). But there is a collective responsibility to remove those external constraints.
The internalist appears to be faced with a choice between biting the bullet on these cases – conceding that they provide intuitive support for externalism –
which Amia wants only so as to smuggle in 'false consciousness' and Trotsky and the tremendous benefits conferred on China by Mao's 'Cultural Revolution'.
or trying to find a way to vindicate the ‘externalistic’ intuitions in a way consistent with internalism.
by doing the equivalent of asserting that all cats are dogs.
But the real challenge for internalism lies elsewhere.
Yes. I have to agree with Amia because I happen to know that internalism's real challenge has to do with not losing sphincter control during sex. I'm not saying I'm a member of the same support group but it so happens that my 'Anti-Iyengar hate group' meets in the next room and the walls are real thin.
My three cases are not merely recalcitrant to internalistic treatment.
But they are too poorly specified to do the work Amia wants them to. We have no warrant to believe that her characters have the beliefs she attributes to them. Furthermore, she shows deep ignorance of both England- a country where class has a long and complicated history- as well as Hindu India- which has a very sophisticated deontic epistemology.
They are moreover analogous to those very cases that internalists have canonically presented as counterexamples to externalism. Consider, for example, one of Laurence BonJour’s famous such counterexamples: CLAIRVOYANT: Norman, under certain conditions that usually obtain, is a completely reliable clairvoyant with respect to certain kinds of subject matter.
The neighbor's cat under certain conditions may appear to be a dog. This does not mean it is a dog. A clairvoyant is someone who has a supernatural ability. A person who sometimes appears to have such an ability is not a clairvoyant.
He possesses no evidence or reasons of any kind for or against the general possibility of such a cognitive power, or for or against the thesis that he possesses it. One day Norman comes to believe that the President is in New York City, though he has no evidence either for or against this belief. In fact the belief is true and results from his clairvoyant power, under circumstances in which it is completely reliable. Because Norman’s belief is based on a reliable method, the typical externalist will say that it is justified.
Because cats are dogs if they have the supernatural ability to become so.
But many find this externalist verdict absurd.
What is absurd is that people get paid to write this shite.
BonJour writes that Norman’s belief is ‘epistemically irrational and irresponsible, and thereby unjustified’. For it is part of one’s epistemic duty, he goes on, to ‘reflect critically upon one’s beliefs, and such critical reflection precludes believing things to which one has, to one’s knowledge, no reliable means of epistemic access’.
But the guy has no reliable epistemic access to Norman's mind. He is violating a Hohfeldian immunity Norman possesses. Norman. who is imaginary, will seduce his wife by taking the form of a shower head. Karma is a bitch- even when injuries are done to merely Meinongian objects.
Norman’s belief, BonJour says, is from Norman’s own perspective nothing more than an ‘unfounded hunch’ (ibid).
How does he know?
Thus Norman’s belief, pace the externalist, is unjustified. It is worth noting that not all internalists will agree with BonJour’s account of why Norman is unjustified. For BonJour is invoking a very strong internalist condition on justification, according to which S’s belief that p is justified iff S has (independent and undefeated) reason to believe that her belief was formed on a reliable basis. For BonJour, agents need to be not only aware of their grounds, but also aware that their grounds are their grounds.
and be aware that their awareness is their own awareness and aware that that awareness is their own awareness and so forth.
CLAIRVOYANT is analogous to RACIST DINNER TABLE, in which, recall, Nour’s belief is intuitively justified.
No it isn't. Amia's story was under-specified. She needed to add more details to go from an Arab sensing something off about the way her host was treating her to the contention that Nour has some supernatural racism-detection mechanism.
Both Norman and Nour exhibit a sensitivity to the truth,
No they are sensitive to certain attitudes.
a sensitivity of which they are unaware but that nonetheless produces reliably true beliefs.
This is not the case. I can't hire them to screen out snobs or bigots for some purpose of my own. For example, I have long campaigned against anti-Iyer bigotry on the part of Iyengars like Srinivasan. Nour would fail to detect any such thing in Amia. Indeed, like many Arab women she might assume- on the basis of my moustache- that I was an elderly lady, perhaps employed as a maid by the Emirati family down the road.
DOGMATIST: At a time t1 Mary walks into an art gallery and sees a red sculpture. There is nothing abnormal about Mary’s perceptual faculties or the lighting conditions in the gallery. Thus she forms a true belief that the sculpture is red.
No. She forms a true belief that it looks red to her.
At a slightly later time t2 a gallery assistant tells Mary that the sculpture is not red, but illuminated by a hidden red light, such that any object it shines on would look red even if it weren’t. Mary ignores the misleading testimony and continues to believe, on the basis of her reliable perceptual faculties, that the sculpture is red. What Mary does not know is that the exhibition – including the gallery assistant’s misleading testimony – is being put on by a famous artists’ collective dedicated to epistemic hoaxes.
Would Mary accept a bet that the sculpture was red? If not she has no real belief in the matter. In life we often find people of a dogmatic type. We try to get them to put their money where their mouth is. But the back down.
The standard intuitive verdict on DOGMATIST is that Mary’s belief-
which was attributed to her in an unwarranted manner simply so stupid shite could be written
while initially justified at t1, loses justification at t2, when the misleading testimony is delivered. After all, how could Mary’s belief that the sculpture is red be justified after she is told by a seemingly reliable expert that her perceptual capacities are unreliable?
Her perception is fine. Either the sculptor had colored it red or it had been made to appear red in some other way.
In continuing to believe that the sculpture is red, doesn’t Mary ignore evidence that, from her perspective, bears squarely and damningly on her belief?
This stupid availability cascade has been trundling along for years. Why have all those involved in it so consistently ignored evidence that people like Mary don't exist? You don't really believe a thing you won't bet on. Still, you can derive a quiet satisfaction by saying very slowly and with a mad glint in your eye- 'Iyengars hate Iyers. They spread rumors that we put garlic in sambar. Why is no one talking about this? Fuck you António Guterres! Fuck you very much!'
I have found this a reliable way to get out of having to listen to people gassing on about Israel or Trump or whatever. Bizarre grievances of your own cancel Grievance Culture
Third and finally, recall that in DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, Radha has an intuitively unjustified belief that she deserves to be beaten,
which is why she was always nagging hubby to do his duty and beat her already.
a belief that is a symptom of a systematically distorted relationship to reality.
Amia is the only person here with a such a relationship.
Now consider the following case: BRAIN-IN-A-VAT: Jane is a handless brain-in-a-vat,
but we don't know that Jane is compossible- i.e. can exist in our reality.
subjected to a compelling, electrochemical illusion to the effect that she is a normally embodied person
We don't know how to create such illusions. We do know that some people may have bizarre beliefs- e.g. that they are dead- but don't understand the brain chemistry behind it.
The external world sceptic asks how it is that Jane, a normally embodied person, can know that she has hands given that, for all Jane knows, she could be Jane.
This is what is impossible. We simply don't know whether there can be vat-brains. If they can exist, their phenomenology will soon change drastically as it adapts to a novel fitness landscape.
The externalist answers that because Jane is, ex hypothesi, a normally embodied person – i.e. because Jane is in fact not JaneBIV – Jane’s belief that she has hands enjoys a (reliable, safe, etc.) connection with the external world which in turn secures justification. While Jane and JaneBIV are internal duplicates, the externalist insists, their beliefs enjoy different justificatory standing.
What 'justificatory standing' can we attribute to a discipline which puts imaginary, incompossible, beings on a level of equality with real people? The thing is a waste of time and money. Defund it now- écrasez l'infâme!
Amia, in the second part of her paper, gasses on about 'false consciousness' and 'bad ideology'.
cases – that is, cases that feature subjects who exist in conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining (and are in turn sustained by) systems of social oppression: patriarchy, racism, classism.
in other words, such 'woke' bullshit is equivalent to believing you might be a brain in a vat or that the CIA is controlling your mind through satellites.
In such cases, I want to suggest, the salient epistemological question becomes not whether subjects are blameworthy or praiseworthy for their beliefs – whether their beliefs are reasonable by the subjects’ own lights – but how these beliefs relate to a system whose function it is to distort subjects’ access to the truth for the purposes of oppressing them. What intuitively matters most in such cases is whether the subject’s truth-tracking capacities are distorted by ideological forces, or whether the subject is endowed with capacities that allow her to pierce through ideological distortion.
What Amia is doing is 'ideological distortion'. Sadly, her students are too stupid to pierce it because they have chosen to study shit.
Thus in DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, what seems to intuitively matter most, epistemically speaking, is not that Radha’s belief is perfectly reasonable by her own lights
Not if she is Hindu.
– a thought the externalist is happy to capture by saying her belief is excused28 – but that her belief is the product of an ideologically-distorted mechanism.
Krishnan is a name only found in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. If he and Radha live in Kerala, the ruling party is Communist. If it is Tamil Nadu, the Chief Minister's name is Stalin. If there is an ideological distortion in either State it must be of a Left wing sort.
This does not mean Commies don't beat their wives. Indeed, Meena Kandaswamy has written eloquently about marital abuse meted out by Marxist professors- '“When I hit you,” he notes mournfully, “Comrade Lenin weeps.” Women should beat themselves till they conform to Party morality. This is because, under Neo-Liberalism, husbands are not paid properly for performing a vital service.
Imagine a case, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE*, in which Radha* exists in a non-patriarchal society,
Oh dear. Amia, it seems, does not know that South India had matrilocal societies. Even Shelley knew this because some other Old Etonian had written a book praising the Utopian 'Empire of the Nairs' where women ruled the roost.
but because of a quirk of her neurophysiology, believes she deserves to be beaten by her husband. Is Radha* any more intuitively justified than Radha?
Not if she is a Hindu. Amia has given her characters Hindu names- Radha and Krishna are lovers but not married and 'Radhakrishnan' was the name of a Vaishnavite philosopher who became President of India. But Amia is a horrible racist and elitist. Her Radha is mentally defective unlike Charles and Nour.
For Nour and Charles, because of their respective social positions – as an Arab, and as a member of the working class – share an ability to reliably apply concepts (racist, classist) in ways that contest the dominant ideology.
Yet it was India, not the the British Labor party or any Arab ideological movement which first and most thoroughly challenged racism, elitism and misogyny. Back in the Nineteenth Century a pativrata decided to go to jail rather than cohabit with her husband. She helped change Hinduism. The Indian National Congress had a female leader before British women got the vote. It had affirmative action long before America. Under Indira Gandhi, Princes were stripped of their privileges. Hereditary membership of the British upper house was only recently abolished. In India a guy who was too poor to go to College is a two term Prime Minister. In Britain two old Etonians have been Prime Minister in the last decade.
Externalistic verdicts in bad ideology cases are attractive, I want to suggest, because
they enable you to believe in bad ideology and false consciousness and the paranoid radicalism of the early Seventies.
what intuitively matters in such cases is not how things seem from the agent’s own (often limited) perspective, but how the agent relates to the epistemically distorting systems in which they are embedded.
Amia is imposing an epistemically distorting system of an elitist, racist, anti-Hindu, anti-poor, type.
For the externalist... justification can come apart from questions of personal responsibility and blamelessness. To be externalistically justified requires, in part, the cooperation of the external world: one must have an undistorted relationship to the relevant bit of reality, which is not something entirely within one’s control. Thus Radha is unjustified, despite her individual conscientiousness and blamelessness, because of her ideologically-distorted connection to reality.
She is poor and Hindu. Ideology is about telling people like her what to do. Consider Narendra Modi. He was poor and Hindu, but is now Prime Minister. Rahul may have a 'vichardhara' (ideology) but was defeated in his ancestral seat of Amethi by a woman who hadn't even been to College. India has seen that 'ideology' is bad for Hindus. Serving the country requires actually serving people. Justifications can go hang.
What is more, the externalist maintains that one can, as it were, ‘stumble into’ justification, by being felicitously connected to the relevant bit of reality.
Like Rahul felicitously being the son and grandson and great grandson of peeps wot went to Cambridge. He himself has an M.Phil from there. Yet, he is a babbling cretin.
Thus Nour and Charles
coz they attended posh Colleges
are justified, despite the fact that they each have an internal duplicate who falsely believes that, respectively, their host is racist and their college is classist.
This is because (so says the externalist)
No. Nour and Charles are Amia's invention. It is her own bigotry which is on display.
Nour and Charles have the good luck – thanks to their social positions – of being properly connected to the world in a way that is conducive to knowledge. In all three cases, whether the subjects are justified or not turns, in part, on factors that are not within their individual control. In short, externalism – in its insistence that justification can supervene on facts external to the agent’s own ken – is poised to vindicate what we might think of as a structural rather than merely individualistic notion of justification. A structural explanation gives an account of its explanandum by adverting to the larger system of which the explanandum is a part, rather than (solely) adverting to features of the explanandum itself.
How can the thing which is to be explained be explained without adverting to anything else? Whether we say there is some deeper inner structure to the thing or it is part of some external structure, there is still some larger structure being invoked. How do we know anything is beyond anybody's ken?
To explain that the dutiful housewife does the lion’s share of the domestic labour because she prefers it that way is to give an individualistic explanation of her behaviour;
It is to tell an obvious lie. Somebody who is 'dutiful' does things as a matter of duty not of preference.
to explain that the dutiful housewife does the lion’s share of the domestic labour because that is what is socially expected of women is to give a structural explanation.
This too is a lie. A dutiful housewife would still do her duty even if society expects her to murder her children and bathe in their blood.
Both explanations might well be true
No. The moment Amia qualified 'housewife' by using the word 'dutiful' only a deontic explanation could fit bit the bill. What particular duties are relevant for her? Is it a duty to herself- e.g having a clean and shiny home is something she needs to maintain her sense of self worth? Is it a duty to her husband and children? Does it have something to do with her religion?
– social expectations can produce adaptive preferences –
No they can't. Expectations affect expectations, preferences affect preferences. Social pressures may affect meta-preferences. They can't affect preferences themselves.
but in certain contexts it is clearly the latter sort of explanation that is important.
But those contexts are shitty
Similarly, to employ a structuralist account of justification is to explain a subject’s justificatory status in terms of the broader epistemic system in which she is embedded.
No. It is to talk stupid shite.
Radha’s belief is unjustified because she is the victim of bad ideology.
Amiya has a bad ideology. She invented Radha without understanding that, by reason of her husband's name, she must be either from Kerala, which has a long matrilocal tradition and has a Communist ruling party, or else from Tamil Nadu, long ruled by a woman, and now run by a guy named Stalin. Radha can only be the victim of a bad Leftist ideology.
Nour and Charles’ beliefs are justified because their group membership allows them to pierce through bad ideology.
They aint poor and they have been to College.
Meanwhile, the internalist – in her insistence that justification supervenes on a subject’s mental states – is not poised to underwrite a structural notion of justification.
This does not matter. One could hold that the unconscious is structured like a language or that language thinks us or some shite of that sort.
Instead, she can only explain an agent’s justificatory status in terms that are intrinsic to the agent herself.
But maybe language inhabits her.
Externalism, but not internalism, is poised to vindicate Trotsky’s claim that ‘escape from the web of the social lie’ is more than a matter of ‘mere individual effort’.
That's not a good thing. Trotsky fucked up big time. Why not simply quote Hitler? Exterminating Jews and Gays and Gypsies involves more than mere individual effort.
As the reference to Trotsky suggests, my way of thinking about what might be deeply at stake between internalism and externalism – that is, the ability to vindicate a structural epistemology – has resonances with Marxist standpoint epistemology.
No. In Marxism the Economic base or substructure ultimately determines the superstructure. What Amia is doing has nothing to do with an Economic structural causal model. It is sheer paranoid fantasy or 'Grievance Studies' type wokeness.
For Marx, the proletariat’s relationship to the means of production confers on it, as a class, an epistemic privilege vis-à-vis society’s economic relations.
No. It is merely on the 'right side of history'. It will inevitably rise up because Capitalism will suffer a final crisis and disappear.
While the ‘Free-trader Vulgaris’ sees the marketplace as ‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man’ where ‘alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’, those who are forced to sell their labour are positioned to see the material reality under the ideological appearance: to see that the marketplace is a site of exploitation, where they have ‘nothing to expect but…a hiding’ (Marx 1867/1887, 123).34
Unless they gain countervailing power by restricting the supply of Labor. One way the British working class- which started getting a larger and larger share of the vote after 1867- could do this was by restricting Jewish emigration. Incidentally, the second Indian to get into Parliament supported this law. Marx could see that the rise of Trade Unions might kill of his type of silliness in Britain. But it was always doomed. Why? In Britain, a guy with a PhD in philosophy or some other such shite is considered a fucking cretin.
Likewise, for feminist standpoint epistemologists, it is women’s relationship to the means of reproduction – women’s role in childrearing, nurturing, and caregiving – that confers on them, as a class, an epistemic advantage in understanding the real material relations of society under the ideological (patriarchal) appearance.
Which is why any woman who has had a kid is epistemically superior to Amia. She knows that what Amia is doing is a wank.
As both Lukács and Hartsock
both of whom gave birth to and breastfed....no children.
stress, the proletarian (the word means 'child-bearing') and feminist standpoints, respectively, are to be achieved, and are not something automatically given in virtue of one’s status as an oppressed subject under capitalism or patriarchy.
Sadly, women tended to run just as fast as men the fuck away from the sort of places Lukacs liked.
Piercing the ideological appearance
which is what I've done to Amia's warmed up sick
requires an overcoming of false consciousness and the achievement of revolutionary consciousness,
Nope. It just requires making fun of stupid cretins.
in turn a matter of both political analysis and political action.
of a self defeating sort. It is a good idea to put stupid Leftists on the faculty of tony Colleges. You are inoculating rich kids against infantile Leftism. The important thing is that they learn to feel contempt for the Radhas of the world. Don't be mean to Nour or Charles coz they attend the same College as you. Also they might knife you or suicide bomb you. Concentrate your condescension on Radha. Don't you know India is like totes Fascist now a poor guy has become P.M?
But neither revolutionary analysis nor revolutionary action is easily achieved by the individual alone:
but wanking- which is what this is- can be achieved by the individual alone. On the other hand only by organizing a truly massive circle jerk can we show that we can all jizz at the same time.
thus the emphasis on collective consciousness raising in both Marxist and (especially) feminist politics.
Self-criticism sessions for everybody! Won't that be cool!
This is the second sense, for standpoint epistemologists, in which the overcoming of the ‘social lie’, as Trotsky says, is not a merely individual achievement.
Rather it is the work of a bunch of gangsters who then kill each other till the last man standing is the biggest psychopath.
On the other hand, not till all Iyers unite to take back Iyerland and prove to the world that we never put garlic in the sambar- as Iyengars sneeringly suggest- not till then can any man extract his head from his pooper or any woman hold up the head that is currently jammed up her twat.
First, where one finds oneself in the social ordering (one’s place, say, in relation to the means or production or reproduction) confers on one epistemic advantages or disadvantages, putting one in a better or worse place to recognise the truth under the lie.
Very true! The rent-boy is wiser than his client, the High Court Judge. The truth about Britain is known only to the elderly bag lady who would yell 'Jew Paki bastid' at me when I walked by. Everybody just assumed she was Joan Robinson but it couldn't have been her because her views on economics were quite sound- as is evidenced by that fact that didn't shout at people who gave her money.
Second, even if one is, epistemically speaking, advantageously positioned, one’s likelihood of achieving the privileged standpoint turns on one’s relationship to others – specifically, whether one enjoys the sort of political community that can together create a rival to the dominant ideology.
By killing those who espouse it. This again is true. The rent-boy could become Minister of Propaganda if the right gang gets a lock on power.
There is a natural kinship, I want to suggest, between Marxist standpoint epistemology and externalism.
But this is also true of Hitler or David Icke's standpoint epistemology. By contrast, Iyers will definitely regain control of Iyerland- currently ruled by leprechauns- because otherwise nobody will believe we don't put garlic in the sambar- an evil canard spread by Iyengars like Srinivasan.
Both stress the way in which the distribution of epistemic goods turns, in part, on factors beyond subjective control, producing a deep epistemic asymmetry between agents in internally analogous positions.
Indeed. This is why the pure-blooded Aryan could easily see through Einstein's fraudulent theory of Relativity. Incidentally, that Jew made his so called 'discoveries' by insisting that there could be no privileged frame of reference. The true theory of Relatives deals with how to make Time pass more quickly when they are with you. The Fuhrer's solution was to have sex with his underage niece.
Thus the proletarian, like Charles, is able to know something of the truth about his society,
e.g that furriners should fuck off back where they came from.
despite the fact that he is surrounded by the misleading counter-testimony of those who see the world as the reigning ideology dictates –
which says we should welcome furriners if they be loaded or talented or willing to do the jobs nobody else wants.
and despite, moreover, the fact that such dogmatism, in someone not so reliably situated vis-à vis the reigning ideology, would lead to error.
In other words, Charles is 'reliably situated' so long as he is against Old Etonians coz they are rich not coz they are Jews or Levantines or darkies or the spawn of Russian or Chinese oligarchs.
And, like Nour, the proletarian is able to know even without knowing the grounds of her belief – even though such credulity would, again, lead to error in someone not so reliably situated.
For example if Nour is an Israeli Druze and takes objection to her host's vicious anti-Zionism.
Meanwhile Radha, like some members of the proletariat, is a classic victim of bad ideology, believing that the world is just as it presents itself as being.
Whereas it is actually such as Amia, poor booby, believes it to be. The fact is, Radha lives in a country where the Prime Minister, by remaining celibate, showed that no man has a duty to beat his wife. He can become a sansyasi and thus avoid the sin of 'himsa'. But a pativrata wife too can become a sanyasin and thus remove a moral hazard from the path of her husband.
Interestingly, an Australian court cleared a Hindu woman of murdering her husband- he had called her a fat bitch- because it was persuaded that a Hindu woman might think it her duty 'to purify her husband's penis' by pouring petrol on it and setting it alight.
Hartsock writes that the capitalist’s vision of the world ‘cannot be dismissed either as simply false or as an epistemology relevant to only a few’. For, she goes on, ‘the worker as well as the capitalist engages in the purchase and sale of commodities…and [as] material life structures consciousness, this cannot fail to have an effect’ (Hartsock 1983, 288). This is not to say that Radha – or anyone else suffering from false consciousness – could never come to know the truth of her situation. But it is to say that, for many victims of false consciousness, coming to know the truth would require something more than more assiduous reflection. Most obviously, it would require that she have her consciousness raised through political engagement.
Cool! She should join the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti and learn how to wield a sword and hit people with a lathi.
It seems Amia is a Modi bhakt, but is simply too stupid to see it! Talk about 'false consciousness'! The fact is 'political engagement' is based on oikeiosis. Radha is a Hindu woman in a rural area. The most natural form of 'political engagement' for her is to join a Hindu woman's organization which is part of a broader network which is taking power from stupid Lefties who, according to Meena Kandasamy, beat their wives for the sake of Comrade Lenin's precious tears while fucking over the economy something chronic.
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