Amia Srinivasan suggests that
What we might call ‘genealogical’ scepticism complains that the building blocks of philosophy – the judgments and concepts on which it all hangs – are contingent features of whoever it is who is doing the philosophising: her or his particular history, culture, language, education, gender, character
It is quite usual, in different schools of philosophy, to require the student to argue both for and against any particular proposition. In the same way that a stock jobber, or market-maker, quotes a 'spread' (i.e. a margin between the price at which she would buy or sell) we may identify different 'spreads' as characterizing different philosophers. In the case of the arbitrageur, this 'spread' is expressible in money terms. In the case of the philosopher, we may look at the gap between how his 'pro' and his 'anti' arguments cash out- i.e. how the 'practical applications' (as suggested by William James) differ. This gap is the 'profit' of the philosopher which may be interpretable as 'interessement' (i.e. the creation of a demand for her services) and the philosopher's rational self-interest in securing a rent from 'obligatory passage point status' (vide Michel Callon) .
This economic view of the matter encompasses 'oikeiosis'- i.e. such 'natural' circles of belonging as are inscribed by heredity, heritage and having a dick. Alternatively, we may speak of uncorrelated asymmetries as giving rise to 'bourgeois strategies'- i.e. distinctions based on 'ownership'. In either case, the proper way to proceed is on the basis of 'Gentzen calculi'- i.e. a set of conditional tautologies unique to each agent, rather than have recourse to Hilbert calculi. Alternatively, we may appeal to category theory's notion of 'adjointness' to arrive at 'universals' appropriately constrained in the set they define.
Though 'oikeioisis' or 'bourgeois strategies' sound 'genealogical, in so far as philosophy is 'scientific' or 'logico-deductive', this doesn't much matter precisely because it can use mathematical or scientific concepts of the sort mentioned above to look for canonical forms- i.e. one's which everybody would accept as the simplest way or representing things uniquely- or else proceed on the basis of pragmatic considerations or 'constructible' entities.
This does not mean that 'genealogy' is wholly irrelevant. Indeed, an Iyer- like myself- may be happy if an Iyengar, like Amia, champions my sect's version of non-Dualism. But if I discover that Emmy Noether or Terence Tao or some other person from a completely different background has an even more persuasive argument against Ramanuja- (the preceptor of the Iyengars)- I would be even more delighted.
No doubt, there are some philosophies where 'genealogy' is highly salient. I would more happily listen to Duke Yansheng explain Confucian philosophy, or the Sankaracharya of Kanchi, expound Advaita, then some random dude. Moreover, I want a guy talking Heideggerian shite to do it in a Teutonic accent whereas Anal-tickle psilosophy should be delivered in a brittle Oxbridge accent suggestive of intensive buggery at Prep School and moody, floppy haired, romances in the Lower Sixth. Genuinely bright guys- like Kripke- I don't want to listen to at all. I want Terence Tao to go through their papers and explain briefly but very lucidly where they went wrong.
Srinivasan comes from an upper class Tambram background. Dad was a banker, Mum did bharatnatyam. That's at least a thousand years of 'philosophical genealogy' right there. The only difference between Iyers like me and Iyengars like her is that we have slightly different ontologies. Hers features a 'trinity' of 'bimba, pratibimba, darpan' (image, pre-image, mirror) whereas mine is all like 'Wake up sheeple! Everything's a dream, dude'.
There is no trace of any Tambram philosophical interest (though the Tambrams define their sects in purely philosophical terms) in Amia's work. Nor is her socio-economic position reflected in any way. She has chosen to write a particular type of 'woke' nonsense and, by talking about sex and by being brown and by not having a dick, has done well by it. True, she could have gotten much richer after graduating from Yale. Still, she has a safe, well paid, job with a lot of perks and prestige though admittedly she had to move to a less developed country- England- in order to gain interessement as, at 35, the youngest Chichele Professor of Philosophy. I should mention, actual Anglicans have given up on that chair, or commode, of Socio-Political stupidity. The fact is Waldron, her predecessor, might actually have had some genuine 'Socio-Political' influence. It is safer to get in a stupid Iyengar whom everybody can tell is just pretending to be bleck and a sexually harassed woe-man.
Like Spivak, Srinivasan has no knowledge of the Indian intellectual tradition associated with her 'caste'. Back in the Fifties, people like Edward Shils were doing a lot of sociological and academic work in this regard. Indeed, India provided an ideal topos to test theories of 'tradition' and philosophical genealogy. Dr. Iqbal (his German PhD was in philosophy) the poet-prophet of Pakistan, was Nietzschean albeit with a soft spot for an irenic Akhbari conception of barzakh. Iran's Supreme Guide rates him highly- though the guy never handed back his knighthood from the Brits. Tagore did. L.E.J Brouwer and Wittlesstein rated the bearded Bengali highly. Tagore's ecumenic intuitionism- or whatever the fuck it was- appears to be perfectly acceptable to both Mamta and Shiekh Hasina- the two extraordinary women who now rule over West and East Bengal respectively.
Us Tambrams were not entirely backward intellectually. Jeddu Krishnamurti (an Iyengar like Amiya) was touted as the Universal Messiah by the Theosophists. Sadly- like a lot of Iyengars- he was good looking and so, it appears, he may have been deflowered by Whitey. Sad. But that was in Amrika. British women were less libidinous. Queen Victoria had set a good example. There was gossip that she'd gratified her ghillie (played by Billy Connolly, in the film) but none that she'd mounted her Munshi (played by the gorgeous and pouting Ali Fazal in a different and more boring film ).
Amia, her mind destroyed by shite courses at Yale and Oxford's irreversible decline, writes in a wholly deracinated manner- as if her parents cleaned toilets and spoke to each other in some subaltern tongue.
Coming to terms with the genealogical contingency of thought has been a preoccupation of the European intellectual tradition since the mid-18th century.
The Continent knew it had fallen behind Anglo-America. It played 'catch-up' and relied on 'low hanging fruit'. In some fields- e.g. pure maths- it overtook England because places like Oxford and Cambridge made English people stupider than shit. On the other hand, young Brits had far greater economic opportunities. Thus, for reasons Edward Shils analyzed, the Continent's hypertrophied 'intelligentsia' suffered from what Michael Polanyi called 'moral inversion'- i.e. hysterical wokeness of a mischievous type. The solution was not far to seek. Just create a 'mittelstand' which does well economically on the basis of 'Tiebout models' or 'Marshallian industrial districts' of a specialized type. This is perfectly 'Hegelian'. Just do some fucking work instead of talking bollocks incessantly. That's it. That's the whole story. There is no 'Archimedean point' outside a 'totalization' of the system. If you have an 'Archimedean urge' work hard at boring shite. That will soon cure you of your adolescent schwärmerei.
There was a brief Scottish Enlightenment, though some have claimed England too had some such noxious thing, which, by the end of the eighteenth century, had a big influence on the 'camera liberals' of Germany, but Scotland went back to common sense while the English groped their way through a pea-soup fog of Evangelical and Utilitarian obfuscation towards a slightly less horrible class system.
German historicists like Herder and Humboldt taught Europeans to think historically about thought itself, to see historical inquiry as a historically circumscribed endeavour rather than an unencumbered encounter with the hard facts of the past.
This is nonsense. Herder was a clergyman. He knew History was but a 'carmen solutum'- i.e. a fitting subject for reconstitution by a poetry as yet retarded or rustic. The Hebrews had prophet/poets who created a Nation and a Faith. The prosperous and secure English had Shakespeare. Apparently the Indians had Kalidasa which is how come you could get rich by going there. Herder's interaction with Goethe is considered important. But, no 'historicism' was involved. On the contrary, Germany faced 'Tardean mimetic targets' in the same way that 'caste' India did during the course of the Nineteenth Century. Dr. Ambedkar explicitly mentions this- but it had been an 'unthought known' for Tambrams for hundreds of years. That is why we have the very concept of a 'Niyogi'- e.g. Radhakrishnan, the philosopher who became India's President. What it means is you don't cease to be yourself by imitating someone completely different. Oikeiosis permits reassignment- if the thing pays.
Hegel applied this historicist lesson to philosophy: as “each child is in any case a child of his time…thus, philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts” (1820/1991, 21).
This is not historicism. Hegel wasn't saying that an Englishman couldn't follow his system just because England was more advanced. He is saying the 'spirit' of England may be more advanced but the way to understand why this was so- and how to make the thing even more advanced- lay in following his Logic which was also a Metaphysics as well as a practical manner of changing the 'Becoming' of your own bunch of guys.
It is quite foolish to say that Hegel learned a 'historicist lesson' and then applied it to some other field. White peeps may not want to call Amia on this coz she is brown and don't got a dick and her parents are probably abjectly cleaning toilets, but I iz bleck. Also, Iyers are stupider than Iyengars. Furthermore, my dick so small it don't even class as a clit. Did I mention that I have an IQ of 80 and my parents starved to death after getting fired from their jobs cleaning toilets? I'm like transgender- except the Lezzas won't have me coz I iz clitorally challenged- and even Yale- which was set up with money from one Elihu who was the Governor of Madras and thus, provably, sucked all the jizz out of my ancestors through flagrant acts of fellatio and, anyway, that's why I iz shit. Gimme tenure already or if that is asking for too much, then endow a chair, or commode, in Socioproctology at Ivy League. You know you want to. Just do it already.
In turn, German historicism lay
that should be 'laid'. Academic standards have declined greatly since I were a lad. Back when I did my A levels, my teacher would not have let me get away with ignorant claims of this sort. It's no good saying, 'I'm speaking impressionistically'. German historiography, precisely because of its fragmented market and reliance on archival material, was not impressionistic at all.
the groundwork for Nietzsche,
Nietzsche's philology was, it is true, peculiar. He ought not to have been given a Professorship. But the guy went mad. Syphilis was his groundwork.
from whom we have the term ‘genealogy’ in the sense in which I’ve been using it – as applying not to people but to beliefs, values and concepts – as well as the most famous example of a sceptical genealogy: the genealogy of bourgeois, Christian morality we find in On the Genealogy of Morals.
Nietzsche contracted syphilis, went mad, and died a horrible death. Meanwhile bourgeois Christians made out like bandits. Fuck skepticism. Empiricism tells us which side won and which side stayed home shitting itself till it malodourously died.
Here Nietzsche tells us that our system of morality has its true origins not in human goodness or divine providence, but in an interplay of more lowly forces: the ressentiment of slaves against their masters, the debtor-creditor relation, and the desire of the priestly caste to dominate.
Amia comes from a priestly caste. Does it want to dominate? No. It wants to run the fuck away from shitholes which have priestly castes.
Lots of descendants of slaves, or colonized subjects, decided to emigrate to the UK. This had nothing to do with ressentiment. It had to do with seeing their daughters turn into Priti Patel not Amia type shitheads teaching worthless shite.
In Nietzsche we see
a syphilitic cretin from a country which fucked itself over twice in the last century out of sheer stupidity.
the fulfilment of what Robert Brandom calls the “revenge of Enlightenment naturalism on Enlightenment rationalism”
There was no Enlightenment. There was anti-clericalism and then anti-anti-clericalism and then there was the Beatles. Meanwhile the STEM subjects burgeoned while the Humanities turned into sub-humanities on the path to becoming Grievance Studies pure and simple. Why do Sciencey dudes get to be smart when stupidity is compulsory elsewhere?
That is, Nietzsche’s genealogy showed how the kind of scientific, naturalised explanation that was the hallmark of the Enlightenment could be used to undermine the great idol of the Enlightenment, man’s capacity for rational thought.
What undermined the great idol of the Enlightenment was that enlightened despots fucked up whereas petit bourgeois Theists made out like bandits.
Amia says-
much of the intellectual history of the 20th century might be told in terms of a war between those committed to historicist or naturalistic genealogical excavation and those, like Karl Popper and Leo Strauss,
who were refugees from a Continent which had shat itself. Thankfully, the American army and Coca-Cola and the Disney Corp. stepped in to render morally inverted intellectuals less mischievous to the commonweal.
who thought such excavation not just alethically irrelevant but ethically pernicious. Indeed one might think — or at least I think — that the ‘two cultures’ of the modern intellectual world are no longer, as C.P. Snow once suggested, the humanities and the sciences, but rather the culture of those on one hand who think that everything must be genealogised, and on the other, those who think that there is nothing to be learned from genealogy.
The humanities lost. So did this genealogy shit. There is only Grievance Studies on the one side and getting rich on the other. Philosophy is now regarded as a sort of therapeutic finger painting for victims of horrific epistemic self-abuse.
With unconscious irony, Amia asks-
What should we make of such genealogical scepticism about philosophical judgment? No doubt many find it intuitively compelling. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols predict that encountering the results of experimental philosophy will cause in philosophers a . . . 'crisis akin to that of the [Christian] child confronted with religious diversity . . . For the discovery of religious diversity can prompt the thought that it’s in some sense accidental that one happens to be raised in a Christian household rather than a Hindu household. This kind of arbitrariness can make the child wonder whether there’s any reason to think that his religious beliefs are more likely to be right than those of the Hindu child' . . .
Amia is from a Hindu family. Yet, in quoting two White dudes, she does not point this out. The fact is, 'religious diversity' does not matter. What matters is whether there is a hegemonic majority. If there is, you get a Bible thumping Bobby Jindal and a janeodhari Rahul Baba. Where is the 'diversity' in her own oeuvre? What's with her Eurocentricism? She must know that a lot of the Continental cretins she rates were influenced by Indian and Chinese thought.
'And just as some Christian children come to think that there’s no rational basis for preferring Christian to Hindu beliefs,
there are two reasons
1) uncorrelated asymmetries promote eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'
2) 'Beliefs' solve coordination problems. Christian values remain Schelling focal in Christian countries.
'we too might come to think that there’s no rational basis for preferring Western philosophical notions to Eastern ones (2008, 11)'.
Getting paid to teach shite is the only rational basis for preference falsification, or stupidity, in this regard.
As a descriptive, psychological matter, Knobe and Nichols might well be right. (Indeed we need not imagine some hypothetical encounter with experimental philosophy. Anyone who has taught a first-year undergraduate philosophy course will likely be familiar with this sort of sceptical response.)
Anyone who has taken a first-year undergraduate philosophy course will be familiar with the stupidity and ignorance of those who teach the thing.
But the tacit normative claim here — that philosophers ought to experience such a crisis of faith — is far more vexed. Not every crisis is rational. And not every revelation of genealogical contingency undermines judgment.
A judgement isn't a belief or a member of an information set.
My judgment that Paris is the capital of France
does not exist because you are not actually being asked to decide the matter for any given purpose. My judgment, as head of the International Socioproctological Institute, is that London is the capital of France (on the basis that De Gaulle's 'Free France' was a de jure Republic and that all successor states whose capital is Paris are illegitimate)
is contingent on the fact that I exist, that I possess the concepts Paris and France, and that I have been taught that the capital of France is Paris.
There is no judgment here. This is merely an element in an information set which Amia may share with a little girl in her ancestral village. It is not contingent on Amia having any particular concept. She simply doesn't matter very much.
And yet none of these revelations of genealogical contingency
One may speak of Kripke 'rigid designation' but that isn't 'genealogical'
seem to undermine my claim to know that Paris is the capital of France.
Because the way to undermine that claim is to show her 'background knowledge' is defective. Thus, I may well doubt my belief if someone says to me with a superior smile that I'm wrong to think Paris is the capital of France because De Gaulle, in 1968, transferred the de jure Capital to Orly. This was never reversed for strategic reasons to do with 'Permissive Action Links' within France's nuclear doctrine.
If they do, we have entered a realm of wholesale scepticism, in which none of my judgments are secure.
Judgments are defeasible. Scepticism is defeated by evidence, not by a priori reasoning.
Such wholesale scepticism is presumably not to the taste of most genealogical sceptics. After all, their scepticism appears to be based on facts that they take themselves to know — namely, that our philosophical judgments have the particular genealogies (in evolutionary history, or culture, or education) they do (cf. Bealer 1992; Foley 1998; Sosa 1998, 2005; Tidman 1996; Yablo 1993). Such sceptics must do more than merely reveal that our philosophical judgments are genealogically contingent. They must show us why the kind of genealogical contingency exhibited by (some or all) philosophical judgments should cause a crisis of faith, without thereby debunking all claims to knowledge, especially their own.
A discipline which thinks people must do stupid shit for some stupid reason is a stupid discipline.
Any argument is contestable and defeasible. There are no 'first-order epistemological premises' because a premise is itself the product of an argument.
Amia is writing nonsense when she asserts-
any plausible argument for genealogical scepticism rests on contested first-order epistemological premises — premises that some philosophers find intuitively attractive while others do not.
Why not simply admit that armchair philosophy is 'anything goes'?
This is despite the claim, made by some genealogical sceptics, to take an Archimedean view of philosophy, one that inhabits the philosophically neutral perspectives of sociology, history, science or commonsense.
An Archimedean view would identify a fulcrum outside the discipline. Instrumentalism is one such view of philosophy. Only that counts as philosophy which more than pays for itself through the utile changes it brings about in other disciplines. Thus, if mathematicians were picking up philosophical ideas to make breakthroughs, then we might say the subject hadn't degenerated into finger painting for drooling affirmative action victims of epistemic self abuse.
Unfortunately no such Archimedean stance is available.
Nonsense! There are plenty. Some would say Philosophy is only important because it creates a bunch of cretins who really have nothing to lose by trying to overthrow Capitalism, thus slitting their own throats.
To argue against philosophy on the grounds of genealogical contingency requires taking a stance within epistemology, and thus within philosophy itself.
This assumes that 'genealogical contingency' is a philosophic question- i.e. it has not been 'closed' by the natural sciences. But philosophy is under no obligation to argue that every question is open. It is welcome to redraw its boundaries such that closed questions cease to trouble it.
And, as genealogical sceptics themselves are keen to point out, which stances people take within philosophy (including epistemology) is in part a matter of genealogical contingency.
These are uncorrelated asymmetries- e.g. gender, class, which school you attended etc.
One’s judgments about the epistemological premises required by any plausible argument for genealogical scepticism
Don't exist. This is because to say an uncorrelated asymmetry exists is not to assert any type of epistemological premise whatsoever. Otherwise there would be a way to remove that asymmetry which, because it is informational, is also epistemological.
— judgments about explanation, evidence, justification, defeat, methods, bootstrapping and so on — are presumably as shaped by background factors (one’s culture, or the nature of extent of one’s philosophical training) as the philosophical judgments that genealogical sceptics wish to impugn. If so, then genealogical scepticism faces the spectre of self-defeat.
No. They face the spectre of non-falsifiability or 'modal collapse'- i.e. everything and anything confirming their view or else there being only one possible world.
The genealogical sceptic cannot, by his own lights, have reason to accept his argument’s conclusion — and nor can he offer us any reason for accepting it, either.
This isn't the case. One can, by one's own lights, judge everything or nothing to confirm any crazy shit you like- e.g. everything is controlled by the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat. Nor could it be otherwise. It would be absurd to suggest that pussy would countenance a Guatemalan horcrux.
Amia gives 5 specious arguments she thinks a 'genealogical sceptic' might put forward.
Argument from Insensitivity (AI) (1) Your philosophical judgments are insensitive to the truth (2) Sensitivity is a condition on knowledge (3) Therefore, your philosophical judgments don’t constitute knowledge
All judgments are 'buck stopped' and robust. They may have a protocol bound manner of providing 'equitable remedies' where the facts of the case are acknowledged to have changed. However, the point about a judgment or a decision is that to be useful it must have a different structure from an argument or a proposition.
Knowledge is either robust or it isn't knowledge. That is why we identify it with a Structural Causal Model which changes what it explains in a manner which more than pays for itself.
A bunch of Judgments may represent knowledge within a particular field- e.g. Tax Law or Socioproctology- but only for a specific purpose. Thus London's black cabbies do 'the Knowledge'- i.e. learn 320 'runs', and their associated 'points' of interest, which have been judged to constitute the knowledge necessary to be a black cabbie- but this has nothing to do with their own 'judgments' about London or various types of Londoners.
For any given purpose, what is defined as Knowledge has nothing to do with Philosophy. This is also true of philosophical knowledge as defined by teaching or examining bodies. If the thing can be taught to an acceptable standard to anybody then 'genealogy' is irrelevant.
Amia's next argument concerns something that has nothing to do with either genealogy or scepticism.
A second form of genealogical scepticism focuses on the supposed explanatory inertness of the (putative) truth of our philosophical judgments.
Truth is not an explanation. An explanation may be true or false but the Truth does not explain anything at all. Something has to be added or subtracted from the truth to get to an explanation.
Any argument which does not accept this fact is bound to be self-defeating. Amia is not attacking a strawman- she is attacking a strawman which set fire to itself and which has blown away as ashes.
According to this line of argument, our philosophical judgments are entirely explained by genealogies that make no mention of their truth;
in which case, this argument considers itself not to be an argument but some sort of biological reflex with no higher standing than a burp or a fart.
this in turn implies that we have no reason to believe that our philosophical judgments are correct.
For the same reason that a burp or a fart is not a philosophical judgment.
Take again our simplified case, in which you and your fellow Westerners share some philosophical judgment p while Easterners share the judgment not-p.
An example of such a p is 'Westerners live west of such and such longitude'.
We might think that the complete explanation of why you believe p rather than not-p is that you were born a Westerner rather than an Easterner.
But then again we might not.
Contrast the complete explanation of why I believe there is a computer in front of me.
How? W don't have the relevant information.
Presumably that explanation will involve the fact that there is a computer in front of me, causing me to have certain visual sensations that in turn lead to the formation of my computer-belief.
How is that an explanation? It is a theory. The fact is, I believe there is a computer in front of me because I am using it just now as a computer just as I did yesterday and the day before. I am not looking at the computer- which is tastefully hidden under the monitor. But I know it must be in front of me because my monitor could not be tracking my typing of this sentence if it were not connected up to my computer.
So unlike the explanation of your judgment that p, the explanation of my computer-judgment mentions the truth of that judgment.
It was not an explanation. Suppose I had stolen Amia's computer from her office and substituted a box which looked similar. I am arrested for theft. I deny the charge and call Amia to the witness stand. I know she is very stupid and will say 'I still have my computer. It isn't stolen. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be working very well, coz when I type on the keyboard, nothing comes up on the screen'. Suppose this is what actually happens. I turn to the Judge and say 'acquit me. I can't have stolen something which the victim claims to still possess.'
The prosecutor will then try to explain to Amia that she had a false belief regarding her computer. I can only pray that she will start saying 'no. I have made a philosophical judgment. I am a Professor of Philosophy and studied at Yale. Fuck off you stupid oik. '
Here is a generalisation of the argument: Argument from Explanatory Inertness (AEI) Your philosophical judgments can be explained without mention of their putative truth (8) When a judgment can be explained without mention of its (putative) truth, then that judgment is unjustified (9) Therefore, your philosophical judgments are unjustified
This is foolish. What justifies your 'philosophical judgments' is that they are actually your judgments and you are a philosopher in some recognized sense with the right to make those judgments. Thus, if I were a Professor of Philosophy and an acknowledged authority on Kant, then my philosophical judgments are justified by virtue of being such as a person in my position would quite properly make.
It is perfectly fair to say that Philosophy can't do 'explanations' and that every use of the word by different types of Philosophers, acting in a professional capacity, merely illustrates the stupidity and self-defeating nature of the discipline. Perhaps that is what Amia is getting at. But then again, perhaps not. Why say Philosophy is shit when you can just take a great big dump upon the upturned faces of students of that shite?
Philosophy can ponder the concept of causality. It can posit causal chains within itself such that it can have a 'sparser' description. But if it is shit, shit it will remain.
Consider
Argument from Coincidence (AC)
(10) There is no plausible explanation of how our philosophical judgments reliably track the truth
Yes there is, if that is what is actually happening. Consider arguments about Absolute Space and Time or 'incongruent counterparts'. Philosophical judgments which 'track the truth' as represented by experimental evidence can plausibly be explained as having been made by really smart people who were keeping abreast of developments in mathematical logic, category theory etc.
Of course, there may be some ancient Sage- or his modern disciple- who also says something similar in which case the 'plausible explanation' may wax mystical and discuss the manner in which esoteric meditation techniques access to the fourteenth dimension etc.
(11) If there is no plausible explanation of how judgments in a domain track the truth in that domain, then those judgments are unjustified
There is no plausible explanation for why this must hold and no plausible explanation for that plausible explanation etc, etc.
Only someone who endorsed a non-causal view of the relevant domain of philosophical judgment would be likely to say this.
Causal and non-causal are not well defined for philosophy. Thus only in a manner of speaking could a 'non-causal view' be linked to what a particular philosopher be likely to say.
For someone with a causal view will presumably claim both that individual judgments are best explained with reference to their truth and that the reliability of judgments in the domain as a whole can be explained causally.
An intuition or an observation may be causally linked to truth, A judgment involves judging- evaluating arguments and careful thought. A judgment may be invalid by reason of inherent vice or lack of competence- e.g. being mad or drunk- even if it hits at the truth.
Consider the following-
Suppose that the movement of a certain commodities market in the Netherlands is isomorphic to the daily rainfall in the Amazon basin. What might explain the coordination?
The activities of Arbitragers with 'Muth Rational' Expectations.
One possible explanation is causal: the exchange of the commodity affects the rainfall in the Amazon, or the Amazonian rainfall affects the exchange of the commodity, or there exists some third factor that causally influences both.
This is the problem with Amia. She is as stupid as shit. Everybody who ever watched Eddy Murphy and Dan Ackroyd in 'Changing places', knows that arbitragers react to crop forecasts or rainfall figures or whatever best correlates with outcomes.
Here is an alternative explanation, one that doesn’t posit a causal connection underlying the correlation: both Amazonian rainfall and the Dutch commodity market are characterised by the same underlying mathematical structure.
Neither can have an 'underlying mathematical structure' because they are not mathematical objects. Commodities markets may, due to the activities of arbitragers, have a link to whatever variable it is 'Muth Rational' to base Expectations on. There can be an underlying 'Structural Causal Model'- but it has no mathematical structure. Rather, for a specific purpose, a mathematical structure may be imposed for computational reasons.
Thus their movements evince a striking isomorphism.
But only because arbitragers have made it so.
Now consider a similar argument for the reliability of humanity’s moral judgments: the moral truths are generally oriented around the principle of achieving social harmony, and evolution selected for creatures who had moral beliefs that were conducive to social harmony.
But every American is taught at school that 'moral beliefs' caused the Puritans to get on the Mayflower and that the absence of 'social harmony' caused various yet more Puritanical sects to split off from each other and head off into the heart of a 'Wilderness Zion'.
I may not have been to Yale but a Yalie once puked on me and, the next day, rather flatteringly suggested that she only did so because I struck her as a Harvard alumni- a reflex of a salutary type which I myself share. Anyway, my point is that everybody knows how Jebediah Springfield led a band of wagons from Maryland and headed westward with his partner Shelbyville Manhattan on a quest to find "New Sodom" after misinterpreting a passage of the Bible. They later parted over political differences; Manhattan wanted to found a town where people could marry their own cousins, while Springfield wanted a town devoted to chastity, abstinence, and a flavorless mush he called "root-marm". Manhattan went on to found the rival town of Shelbyville.
Or one for the reliability of our epistemological judgments: the epistemological truths are generally oriented around truth-conduciveness, and evolution selected for creatures who are good at pursuing truth. Or one for the reliability of our mathematical and metaphysical judgments: the mathematical and metaphysical truths structure the way the world is, and evolution selected for creatures who were good at learning about the way the world is.
This is simply silly. Everybody knows that Kant was wrong about 'synthetic a priori truths'. Why is Amia bothering with this warmed up sick?
Perhaps I have been unfair. Amia has kept the best- or least shite- for last.
I have saved what I take to be the most epistemologically promising argument for genealogical scepticism for last. The argument deploys the widely-accepted safety condition on knowledge, according to which S knows p only if S could not have easily falsely believed p using a sufficiently similar method to the one she actually uses to form her belief that p (Sosa 1999).
This can't be safely known as a safety condition on itself because one could easily falsely believe that it aint shit simply on the basis that some Professors, not known to us personally to be shit, might not be shit. Indeed, it is only after one reads a little academic Philosophy that the scales fall from one's eyes and one realizes that though Professors of shite subjects might look smart, they aren't at all.
More simply, one’s belief must be based on a reliable method, one that does not produce nearby false beliefs.
Nonsense! One's beliefs should be based on what it is useful for us to believe. Nearby false beliefs don't matter if they don't alter behavior or outcomes.
Unlike the sensitivity condition, the safety condition does not swiftly generate the result that we know nothing at all. My belief that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat is insensitive: if I were a brain-in-a-vat, I would still believe that I wasn’t.
Nonsense! Nobody really believes they are a brain in a vat. To entertain such a belief, we'd have to live in a world where we were constantly opening the Managing Partner's door and seeing a brain in a vat or going to a Rolling Stones concert and seeing brains in vats manipulating musical instruments through robotic arms. But, if such were the case, there'd be lots of self-published books about how vat brain existence is super-cool and helped the author overcome her fear of having multiple orgasms with Republicans or enabled her to see the truth of Scientology or whatever.
But my belief that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat is – on the assumption that I’m in fact embodied, and that there’s no nearby threat of being envatted – safe.
No. It is silly. A belief is safe if it actually makes you safe. There is a Newcombe type problem here. You should work hard to acquire beliefs that will save your head from the chopping block.
So safety has the benefit of capturing the intuitive importance of reliable truth-tracking for knowledge
Knowledge? There is no 'knowledge' here. Useless shite is just shite. Only when it gets published in an Academic Journal could it be considered a citation worthy turd emitted by sufficiently credentialised careerist asshole.
but, because that demand is confined to an agent’s modal neighbourhood, does not generate sceptical worries.
This is foolish. The 'modal neighborhood' may feature strange attractors or topological holes or all sorts of other weird shit. The absence of 'sceptical worries' suggests modal collapse- i.e. all truths are necessary truths.
Very few philosophers and no member of the general public would agree that-
Safety is generally considered an externalist condition on justification.
The reference here is to the literature on 'Gettier cases'. The problem is that there have been developments in all sorts of other fields which have greatly altered the scope of discussions re. 'justified true belief'. Still, as far as a narrow and obsolete academic availability cascade is concerned, it is not true to say that externalists require justification. There can be no condition on something which is gratuitous. Furthermore, if justification has some external component then it can also have no internal component in at least one case. In this case justification can't have a 'safety' condition though safety can be a consideration. Thus 'unsafe' convictions in the law are examples where safety is a consideration of any asymmetric and context dependent type. However, where it arises, neither questions of law or of admissible fact are relevant.
According to epistemic internalism, justification supervenes entirely on states that are suitably ‘internal’ to agents.
Whatever it is that supervenes, it can't be whatever coordination problem it is that the word 'justification' solves. Why? Social interaction happens not through telepathy but embodied interaction mediated by speech and other signaling behavior.
How this notion of ‘internal’ is unpacked generates two varieties of internalism.
It can be unpacked in a trillion different ways and of internalism or externalism or nonsensism or anything else, varieties are more multitudinous than the mind can boggle at.
According to ‘access’ internalism, justification supervenes solely on states to which agents have privileged first-personal access, i.e. some subset of the conscious mental states (Chisholm 1977; BonJour 1985).
Nothing which supervenes supervenes 'solely'. If it does, then the relationship isn't one of supervenience. Rather the relationship is as between this key, and no other, and this particular lock, not any other lock. The problem with using smart sounding words is that you have to use them smartly. You can't just stick them any old how into any old sentence. Amia babbles nonsense in what follows before introducing this characteristically foolish and self-defeating example.
Suppose Charlotte sees a red book on the laboratory table and forms the true belief that there is a red book on the table.
Why should she do so? She may have had the thought 'there's a red book on that table'. Alternatively she may, at some later time, say 'I thought at such and such time that I'd seen a red book of that table.' But a thought is not a belief. Something more is required for a thought to qualify as a belief- viz credence. It would be safe for Charlotte to believe she thought she saw a red book. Why should she believe she saw a book that was definitely red, not any other color?'
Then her chemistry teacher – whom Charlotte has every reason to believe is trustworthy and reliable – informs her that there is a red light shining on the table, a light that makes nonred objects appear red.
This is the job of the physics, not the chemistry, teacher. The red light would have made the table look red. Charlotte should distrust this teacher who is clearly in the meth business- a la Breaking Bad- and is getting high on her own supply.
This constitutes evidence that Charlotte’s belief is unsafe;
Only because Charlotte is a stupider version of Amia
Charlotte now has reason to believe that her visual inspection of the book on the table could have easily led her to have a false belief. Internalists will want to say that, so long as Charlotte has no reason to mistrust her teacher, and has no reasons independent of her visual inspection for believing that there is a red book on the table, her belief is rendered unjustified by the new evidence she has acquired.
This is not the case. Charlotte could only have had a belief about what she thought she saw or remembered seeing. She could not have had a belief about the haecceity of an object to which she was otherwise unconnected.
So while internalists won’t endorse a safety condition on knowledge, they will most likely endorse what we might call an internalist safety condition, according to which strong evidence of unsafety defeats justification.
All that is happening here is that the 'internalist' is trying to make an illicit deduction- viz. that some guy thinking a book is red means the book is red. Why not simply say 'fairies are real coz my Aunty saw one when she was a little girl' ?
What will an externalist want to say about this sort of case? Suppose the teacher’s testimony is truthful: there really is a red light shining on the table. Then it is the case that Charlotte’s belief is unsafe, and according to the externalist, unjustified.
This is nonsense. Charlotte believes she saw a red book. We may not believe that the book she saw was red, but that is a different matter.
It appears that Amia has devoted her time to a discipline which doesn't grasp this simple distinction.
Suppose you and your best friend Hussein always go to lunch and split the bill. You have equally reliable track records when it comes to doing the mental math required to figure out how much you each owe. On this occasion, you believe that you each owe x dollars and Hussein believes that you each owe x+1 dollars. Many think that, in such a case, you ought to abandon your belief that you each owe x dollars, and only re-instate it after you have double-checked or achieved some independent confirmation that you were right.
This is foolish. Clearly Hussein has different ideas as to how much to tip. Suggest, in a veiled manner, that this is because he wishes to perform fellatio on the waiter. That's what proper Chartered Accountants do.
In any case, what you or Hussein believe is wholly irrelevant. The fact is, you can't leave the restaurant without paying the restaurant for your lunch. You may pay x while stipulating that you thought the service was lousy while Hussein pays x+1 or x+2 or whatever amount he thinks appropriate.
As a matter of fact, both you and Hussein may be wrong about how much you have to pay. What you can't be wrong about, given you are equally good at Arithmetic, is how much half the bill as presented comes to.
Amia babbles nonsense about safety and justification and god knows what else.
31 (AU) gives us a promising way of vindicating this thought. For we might think that the fact that Hussein disagrees with you constitutes strong undefeated evidence that your judgment (that you each owe x dollars) is unreliable.
Quite false. It is evidence that Hussein has different ideas as to the gratuity. By reason of the uncorrelated asymmetry by which you can only be certain you yourself are not acting strategically, Hussein's disagreement is immediately defeated. Suppose this were not the case. Then any time a homeless dude suggests that you want to suck him off coz u r into swallowing jizz big time, you have to perform some complex mental operation before telling the fucker to fuck fucking off.
For Hussein’s disagreement suggests that you could have easily, using the method of mental math, arrived at the belief that you each owe not-x.
In the same manner that you probably are totally gagging for homeless jizz just coz I just told you so.
My suspicion is that what people find intuitively compelling about genealogical scepticism doesn’t have much to do with considerations of safety.
By 'people' Amia means stupid people stuck in a worthless discipline. Every type of professional has to worry about the 'safety' of their professional judgments. But philosophers of Amia's stripe aren't practicing a profession. They are running a Credentialist Ponzi Scheme.
Instead I suspect that when considering evolutionary or experimental debunking arguments, people are struck by the (putative) revelation that what is ‘really doing the work’ behind our beliefs are forces orthogonal to the truth of those beliefs – forces of evolution, culture and so on.
This is a point of view our beliefs about our beliefs easily accommodate simply by reducing the level of credence we place on them. Thus, when I see a Swami producing 'vibhuti' out of thin air, I believe I have witnessed a fraud- pious or otherwise- not a miracle of the Lord Shiva. But, in a Court of Law, I can say 'I saw such and such Swami give vibhuti to such and such devotee who now claims the rougue swindled him out of his ancestral wealth.'. The prosecutor might clarify 'did you witness a miracle or was there some fraud in the production of vibhuti?' and I might shrug my shoulders and reply 'I have no means of knowing. What I saw was the defendant give vibhuti to the complainant.'
This then sends one into sceptical free-fall: If our beliefs have nothing to do with the truth, how can we trust them?
This is foolish. Belief is itself a matter of credence not truth. Thus what Amia is really saying is 'if our beliefs are only our beliefs, how can they be our beliefs?' The answer is- 'they can be nothing else'. Our left hand is our left hand even though it is only our left hand and not our right hand.' Getting hot and bothered about this involves a free fall of stupidity not skepticism.
This thought can be cashed out in various ways: in terms of explanatory inertness, or coincidence, or probabilities.
No. Credence means Belief which means Trust. It is a fact that we place Credence on some things and sometimes withdraw that Credence on the basis of new information or because of a change in the incentive structure.
But one dialectical weakness these arguments share, as I have tried to bring out, is the presupposition that there is no causal connection between our philosophical judgments and the philosophical truths – an assumption denied by some philosophers for many domains of philosophical judgment.
There is a causal connection between what a guy gets paid to say and what he does say. For Philosophy, this pertains to worthless shite, not Truth.
Amia now puts forward some stupidity of her own-
By contrast, (AU) doesn’t suppose that no causal connection exists between our philosophical judgments and the philosophical truths. Rather, it suggests, more weakly, that even if there is some sort of causal connection between the philosophical truths and our philosophical judgments, that connection is insufficiently reliable to produce knowledge.
In which case, it can't suggest any such thing. It is too weak and too unreliable. Indeed, it is meaningless. Even if there is some causal connection between false truths and false judgments that connection can't do shit. Philosophy exists only so as to continually underline this point by means of worthless papers like this.
In a sense it’s a less thrilling point to make; it doesn’t inspire the same sort of sceptical vertigo as the earlier arguments.
But proceeds ad nauseam nevertheless.
But this, I submit, is a feature rather than a bug. Defending our philosophical judgments against (AU) is a subtler and more interesting business. I’ll now turn to how that might be done
By telling stupid lies.
Recall our branching taxonomy of epistemologists.
Which only arises if 'Gettier cases' pose a serious problem for Knowledge as opposed to a branch of Philosophy which claims to be about Knowledge. Since no such problem arises in any field save that of post-Gettier epistemology the parsimonious conclusion is that this sort of shite 'epistemology' is not a branch of Epistemology any more than scoring Mathematicians on the basis of their sexiness is part of Mathematics.
First we have the distinction between internalists and externalists.
But both are stupid, useless and wrong. The problem is that internalists must be externalist in some respect and vice versa. This raises the question of whether either can have a concrete model. If they can't, then they lie outside the scope of any Epistemology of a pre-specifiable type. This follows because without a 'universal' able to make such a determination, there can't be adjoint functors. But without adjointness there is no taxonomy because there is no branching. The thing is inchoate.
The same argument applies to every other such similar iteration,
defeatists and anti-defeatists.
dogmatic and akrastic
and so on and so forth.
Take the putative variation in Gettier judgments with extent of philosophical training.
Good philosophical training would involve high level category theory.
To simplify matters, suppose that those with philosophical training share the judgment that Jones doesn’t know, and that those without philosophical training judge that Jones does know.
In that case, philosophical training is faulty. The philosophers are wrong. Jones is a non-philosopher. Knowledge predicated of a philosopher is not Knowledge predicated of a non-philosopher, by stipulation, in this case. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry. This means that there are two types of agents. Non philosophers can own the type of knowledge attributed to Jones. Philosophers can't. There is a bourgeois strategy by which it is eusocial for both sides to admit that Jones's knowledge is of a type which non-philosophers are in the right about. If this is not done then Philosophy will be stuck with maintaining absurd positions- e.g. the average American speaks Chinese better than the average Chinese person because when people hear some one say 'Shi hai kung fu chop suey' they go- 'that's Chinese' whereas when a Chinese bloke talks, for all we know he may be jabbering away in Japanese.
The proponent of (AU) thinks that this constitutes evidence that our (that is, we philosophers’) Gettier judgments are unsafen. But this is only true if the methods used by philosophers and non-philosophers to arrive at their respective Gettier judgments are indeed ‘sufficiently similar’.
This is utterly mad. Where there is an uncorrelated asymmetry, agents who argue similarly will still be doing opposite things. Thus owners of property behave one way- they defend what they own- while those who don't own that property behave in a different manner. This is the 'bourgeois strategy'. We may say that the agents have similar Gentzen calculi, but one side has a conditional tautology featuring ownership. The other doesn't.
One might think instead that two quite dissimilar methods are in play here – the expert method employed by philosophers, say, and the lay method used by the philosophically untrained (Bealer 1998; Devitt 2006, 2011; Kauppinen 2007; Sosa 2007; Williamson 2007, 191-2; Liao 2008; Pinillos et al. 2011). 33
The problem here is that philosophers are stupid and ignorant. The profession has been adversely selective for many decades.
Similar things could be said in response to other instances of (AU). For example, one might think that the method we humans use to arrive at our moral judgments is rather dissimilar from the method that would be used by creatures who developed a radically different morality thanks to a different evolutionary history.
Nope. John Maynard Smith came up with the uncorrelated asymmetry argument. It applies to any type of coevolved behavior.
The fact is we are able to tell what belongs to us- including what judgments we ourselves made. Our 'Gentzen sequent calculi' are independent of each others in this respect.
There are many things of which we are uncertain- but we are uncertain about such things together, not privately, save by way of pyschological trauma or mental aberration.
Consider the following-
SURPRISE HOMOPHOBE: You have known your friend Robert for a few years now, and you believe his judgment to be as good as yours. For you agree on most things, and when you occasionally don’t, one is always able to change the mind of the other through reasoned conversation. One day you’re shocked to discover that Robert thinks that homosexuality is immoral. You discuss this for some time and realise your disagreement is bedrock. Robert simply has the strong, intuitive judgment that homosexuality is immoral. But on all other issues you continue to agree. What should your response be?
Get a policeman to suck his cock. Seriously. Policemen are always delighted to be asked to afford this service to members of the public. It isn't true that the guy will arrest you and then his mates will kick your head in once you are in the back of a paddy wagon.
Should you conclude that your judgment about homosexuality is unreliable, and therefore that you should abandon it?
Definitely not. By stipulation, you only know that, up till now, Robert was like you, not superior, with respect to judgments of a certain sort. You now have evidence that his judgment is inferior in one case. This is because you know more about your own judgment- and are in any case more attached to it precisely because it is yours- whereas you know less about Robert.
Of course, if you have started to believe Robert is superior to you then 'cognitive dissonance' might cause you to revise your views. But, by previous stipulation, this possibility has been
Plausibly not. Plausibly, you should conclude that Robert’s judgment on this question is impaired,
That isn't plausible at all. People who say 'homosexuality is immoral' rather than 'I hate fags' are probably not homophobic at all. They are pretending because they belong to some particular Religious organization or Cultural formation. As a matter of fact, a lot of people who claim to hate fags do make exceptions for those they happen to be sucking off at the time.
We speak of judgment as being impaired by drugs, alcohol, rage, brain trauma etc, etc. We don't say that some guy who says 'x is immoral' has impaired judgment if there is some benefit he gets from making that claim.
Suppose I discover that Biden said 'homosexuality is immoral' back in 1971 to a bunch of Catholic Mums. I won't hold this against him. He did what he needed to do to launch his political career. On the other hand, if he said 'have lots of gay sex youse guys!' to a bunch of Bishops, then- unless he was drunk- I would definitely think there was something wrong with his judgment. I wouldn't want him to have his finger on the nuclear button.
perhaps because he has grown up in a bigoted home or is suffering from repression and self-hatred. Crucially, the only reason you have for concluding that Robert’s judgment is impaired – and thus that the disagreement is misleading evidence of your own unreliability – is the fact that homosexuality is not immoral. If bootstrapping is acceptable in some cases, we should ask to know why it is not acceptable in others. The (AU)-sceptic cannot simply assume the illegitimacy of bootstrapping, or the falsity of dogmatic anti-defeatism – or at least, as I will argue shortly, not without risking self-defeat.
This is simply false. A politician who says 'homosexuality is immoral' may be showing very good judgment- in the eyes of people who are passionate for Gay Rights- because, in context, it may be important that the thing can't be criminal for the same reason that equally yucky stuff heteros get up to mustn't be criminalized coz half the population would be in jail while the other half would be trying to get into jail so people won't think they are sad losers who couldn't get anybody to punch their V card.
All philosophical arguments which fail to distinguish Gentzen calculi from Hilbert calculi and which fail to take account of situations where uncorrelated asymmetries or 'adjointness' obtains are self-defeating in a trivial manner.
Consider the following
'Ethically, Religious Exclusivism has the morally repugnant result of making those who have privileged knowledge, or who are intellectually astute, a religious elite, while penalizing those who happen to have no access to the putatively correct religious view, or who are incapable of advanced understanding…(Runzo 1988, 197- 343)'
An assertion that x is morally repugnant backed by some particular claim to expertise is itself morally repugnant. There is one exception. This has to do with expertise arising from an uncorrelated asymmetry. Why? It is 'common knowledge' that epistemic standing differs.
In the case of an organized Religion with a well established ecclesiastic hierarchy, there may be a supreme authority who has to pronounce on issues of morality. This is a terrible burden. We would not want to be the Judge in a case whose outcome might involve capital punishment. For a similar reason, we don't envy the Cross those whose authority arises by voluntary adherence to a Spiritual creed must bear.
. …except at the cost of insensitivity or delinquency, it is morally not possible actually to go out into the world and say to devout, intelligent fellow human beings we believe that we know God and we are right; you believe that you know God, and you are totally wrong (Smith 1976, 14).
So Christ and all the prophets and Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Theresa and so were all morally impossible. No insensitivity or delinquency is involved in telling people what they expect to hear from you provided you are not holding them down and inflicting your views on them against their will. But it would be equally immoral for Smith to inflict this view upon people who would have preferred him to confess that he ate dog turds.
Skepticism can extend to its own claims. It could be claimed that this would lead to paralysis but one could be skeptical of that claim.
Amia concludes thus-
Sextus famously advised that we suspend judgment about all things, including the sceptic’s argument.
Anything that can be done by Hilbert calculi can be done by Gentzen calculi using conditional tautologies. We now know a lot more than did Sextus. Why mention this obsolete fustian? The answer is that Amia has decided to devote herself to useless shite. Since she is stupid- this is probably a good thing.
Might the philosopher do the same in response to the genealogical sceptic – that is, simply suspend judgment on whether any of her philosophical judgments constitute knowledge, given their genealogies? But how, we might wonder, could such a philosopher possibly continue to philosophise? This worry is a version of what is known as the Apraxia Charge against Pyrrhonian scepticism. According to that charge, the sceptic who suspends judgment about everything is incapable of action, for action presupposes belief.
Except it does not at all. Zeno may have believed his paradoxes against motion. But when he could walk- solvitur ambulando!- just as well as anyone else. We very frequently do things which we don't believe we can do- example pull somebody out of our league or fart into the upturned face of our boss etc.
Is it really possible for the philosopher to continue to perform philosophical actions – to entertain thought experiments, make arguments, deliberate and debate – all the while suspending judgment about all philosophical questions?
Sure. But some would stop doing so if people made fun of them or they didn't get paid.
It depends of course what ‘suspending judgment’ really amounts to. According to Michael Frede (1979, 1984), the sceptics’ answer to the Apraxia Charge lies in §1.13 of Outlines of Pyrrhonism, in which Sextus seems to distinguish between two kinds of assent, only one of which he takes to be problematic in its dogmatism.
For the Skeptic, dogma means things not evident. Acatalepsy is the notion that that the things one thinks with have not been fully 'seized' or comprehended. But, since Skeptics have no problem with accepting they are seized of appearances and feelings, this merely means that one is skeptical of things where there is no uncorrelated asymmetry such that some appearances and feelings and thoughts are known to be ours and others are not.
Dogmatic assent, Frede claims, involves an outright belief and assertion of how things really are, while non-dogmatic assent does not. This is how we are to understand the sceptic’s claim, in acting, to being merely guided by appearances (§1.21-24) and, in speaking, to be merely reporting how things seem to him (§1.21-24).45 Thus Frede writes that “having a view involves one kind of assent, whereas taking a position, or making a claim, involves another kind of assent, namely the kind of assent the sceptic will withhold” (1984, 128), and “[t]o be left with the impression or thought that p…does not involve the further thought that it is true that p” (ibid., §133). If Frede’s reading is correct, then perhaps the philosopher might be able to act on – indeed philosophise on – her genealogically contingent judgments, without thereby being dogmatically committed to premises that undermine that very commitment.
The height of uselessness has been attained when useless people argue over whether they have bound themselves to be useless by reason of their uselessness or whether their uselessness arises out of the fact that they are utterly useless. Uselessness may be necessarily predicated of philosophy but this does not prevent it also being contingently predicated of them for any given reason x as well as for the reason not x.
Indeed, in his discussion of how thought is possible for the sceptic, Sextus explains that we acquire our conceptual structure not through dogmatically assenting to various propositions, but rather through cultural transmission and education; acting in accordance with this conceptual structure then does not constitute dogmatism (§1.23 – 4).
In other words, Acatalepsy was as Greek as its opposite- a useful thing to argue in that time and place. The thing wasn't some Indian fad or other such barbarian malady.
I’m not in a position to comment on whether Frede’s interpretation of Sextus is correct. But I do think its application to the question of what stance one might take on one’s own philosophical judgments is interesting. It is true that cannot treat oneself as a purely psychological phenomenon; one must take up at least some of one’s views from the internal perspective to be able to think and act at all.
Why? It is only because there is an uncorrelated asymmetry. Imagine a philosopher who takes a lot of speed. He has written countless papers. He may find it difficult to tell a paper written by himself some time ago from a paper written by some colleague with a similar education. In this case, absent a signature of some sort, the philosopher might treat himself as a 'purely psychological phenomenon' so as to try to guess which paper was actually his. Thus he might say 'this paper was written by a pessimist with a bleak outlook on life. I recall I was depressed at the time when I tackled this topic. Thus I must have written this. It couldn't have been my colleague- whom I recall circulating something at the same time- because he'd just got married and was as happy as a clam.
However, in this case, we would be inclined to believe that the 'philosophical judgments' made in the paper weren't consequential to the author. If he didn't give a toss about it, why should we?
This is what is certainly right in the Apraxia Charge.
Nonsense! One could write reams and reams about all sorts of shite without caring a damn for the subject matter. One isn't really 'acting'. One is simply going through the motions.
But according to Frede’s Sextus, there is a belief-like attitude that is somewhere in between outright belief and total psychologisation, between a wholehearted assent to p and the detached observation that one is inclined to judge that p. If there is indeed such a space,
There certainly is, if the thing doesn't matter a damn.
it might provide a home for the philosopher who finds her own epistemological commitments undermining themselves.
Philosophy is now so useless, it is seeking a twilight home for itself.
There are other similar ways of rethinking what sort of attitudes we do or could take towards our philosophical commitments, such that those commitments are or would be robust against genealogical debunking. One might for example think that philosophers don’t (or shouldn’t) believe their views outright, but merely ‘accept’ them – where acceptance either amounts to some practical commitment to act as if they we believed them, or some other belief, for example the belief that the philosophical view in question has various theoretical virtues, or even practical ones.
I recall an episode of 'the Good Wife' where Alicia tries to show that a philosopher who believes in materialism shouldn't get custody of his kid coz... he believes everything is just atoms right? Such an argument may work in a court of law but they can't prevail in Academia. Nobody got fired for faking their thought experiments or not deconstructing themselves or just being a big fat hypocrite.
Bullshitting prevailed in Amia's branch of Philosophy because Philosophy's concern was Philosophy's own Grievances against Philosophy and the fact that these were pure bullshit unconcerned with truth or utility or beauty or justice. Amia's anointment signals Philosophy's getting 'woke' to the manner in which Philosophy is sexually harassing itself in a totally racist manner so that Philosophy might burgeon.
To take refuge from genealogical scepticism by adopting such a metaphilosophical view would involve
admitting that Philosophy is now a sort of shelter for battered women who have been subjected to horrific sexual abuse by themselves because they married themselves before realizing that they were racist, fascist, and likely to vote for Trump or Brexit or whatever.
not merely reconceptualising what it is we are doing when we do philosophy, but perhaps changing our philosophical practice.
Enough with the epistemic self-abuse! You will go blind or else your fist will get stuck up your twat or something of that sort.
For those (like me) who already take their relationship to many of their philosophical commitments not to be one of outright belief, this might be an attractive possibility. For others, such a change would simply mean that the sceptics have won.
Bullshit won while the Maths moved on. Sad. Why speak of skepticism when what we have is a stinky pile of shit produced by bleck wimmin victims of epistemic self-abuse?
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