Traitor (Tarot)

Tarot – Traitor [Club Teatria 24.3.2007]

Hundred lashes!
-The battles are fought outside.
Count your blessings!
-The war is in the head.
Hundred lashes!
-Try to suffer less than learn.
Count your blessings!
-I try to be fair with both.

Hundred lashes!
-Walk proud to the pole.
Count your blessings!
-The seconds are really short.
Hundred lashes!
-Don’t forget how to breathe.
Count your blessings!
-They’ll carry you away.

I won’t stand your cowering.
Your selfpity disgusts me.
And here you’re just wallowing in you feces.
You’re a traitor…to your species.

I want my secrets kept.

The hand’s hard for the curious.
Iron grip, the whip flies furious!

I won’t stand…
You’re a traitor…to your species.

I want my secrets kept.
You kneel, I accept.

M. Hietala

Prospective and retrospective explanations

To talk of something in retrospect is to explain why something happened. Although we can talk of the future in terms of the inverse species of explanation, prediction, we often consider the world of the future in modal terms, of what is possible to happen. It seems that we can think of the past in a causal, explanatory sense, and the future as modal, possibilities (as well as causal); but do the events of the past tell us that what actually happened was necessarily the case? if it was necessarily the case, then, it must be necessarily the case prospectively; further, if that were true, our modal talk could not instantiate anything about how things genuinely could be otherwise, but would be an expression of either our wishes, our dispositions, our contemplations, or, that modality talk was elliptical of a false discourse.

S*

Analysis and desire: methodological considerations

Let us consider the analysis of desire; moreover, the issue of how one is to understand what motivates action. Let us ask two questions.

Is such and such an action properly explained?

Is such and such an action rational?

These are two distinct approaches to the issue. As such, our analysis points out two different foci. An account of action can succeed either in terms of how far one can cash out an explanation, or, an account succeeds in terms of how answering whether something is rational or not.

Williams gives an example that helps us here; imagine I see a glass before me, and I want to drink it, I believe that it is gin, so I mix it with tonic, and drink it, where it is, in fact, petrol. I perform this action because I believe this thing before me is gin, and I desire that I want a gin and tonic. We have a motivation to perform the act, but the normative aspect is that we probably shouldn’t drink petrol.

What is rational to do? This seems like a different question; an issue of what norm one is to follow; or what counts for one to be rational. How is it rational to act, to behave, how should behave. Its interesting to note that in his analysis of motivation; Williams refuses to address the issue of ‘normative reasons’ . His treatment of the issue is good on its own; but it has led to a confusing literature of multiple distinctions to cut the same thing. So, as such; we have

i. Internalism vs. Externalism

ii. Motivation vs. Normative reasons

iii. Motivation internalism vs. Reasons internalism

iv. Motivational externalism vs. Reasons externalism

S*

Secularism: “Have the courage to use your own understanding”

I’ve been trawling through a few articles, also discussing with Sinistre and Antisophie, about secularism, and Taylor’s recent work. Antisophie is trying to get her head around the narrative of what characterises our age, Sinistre says that such a view is missing the point. I shall take Antisophie’s historical concern into a bit of thought at the moment.

Kant’s 1884(?) essay on the enlightenment makes the explicit suggestion that in public affairs; we use a common language; namely, reason. This is contrasted mainly, to our cultural prejudices, like religion, or local dispositions, etc. Fair enough.

Secularism, in some crude way, may be seen as, if not putting forward a covert agenda (as some argue it does; e.g. integration of minorities, anti-Islam, pro-hegemony). the promotion of a universal mode of communication to deliberate on socio-political affairs. If we use the same concepts (like justice, fairness, utility, etc.); we may find some common resovle and approach to tackling issues.

So, where’s the problem? (Since this view is so obviously disjunct from our real state of affairs?)

i. The underlying ideology of secularist proponents (ad hominem, in the non-syllogistical sense)

ii. Economic factors

iii. The inconcievability of a universal notion of public reason

iv. Anything else??

Sinistre*

Confused Questions

1. Does it make sense to construe norms into the discourse of epistemology?
2. What are the status of the theoretical norms?
3. What theoretical norms are there?

We could have:

i. Ontological unity (naturalism – strong)
ii. Methodological unity (naturalism – weak)
iii. Conceptual unity (Transcendental)
iv. Systematicity (Transcendental)
v. A set of peacemeal norms, induction, parsimony etc.

4. Question-begging, how is induction set into a norm? This relates to the following question

5. If we assume inductive behaviour is inevitable (which, it kind of is), then there is a fact of the matter about the fact that we do use it; further, there is an inevitability about our use of it. Given its inevitability, is there an ought implies can consideration to be made? I see contrary tendencies as to the question of the rationality of questioning the epistemic practice that we deem inevitable (Cf. Stern 2000)

6. We may have epistemic norms of differing graces: strong norms like induction, or systematicity is stronger still, but we may have rules of thumb like parsimony; it may seem that the image is far from systematic, but Quinean-web-like

Destre (and Michael)

Better than poetry?

If computation and neurophysiology take away our folk concepts of psychological ascriptions and our talk of psychological states; does that mean we will have to revise our pretheoretic discourse about those entities?
I don’t know about you, but I will stick to my beautiful and inconsistent language; but it won’t come to that decision, though.

Antisophie

Accidie

The eternal nightmare; going through life purposelessly.

To know the highest joy, the most beautiful love, and to know you cannot have her.

To live in constant hiding in a body, waiting to emerge, but in principle, you may never find a chance to emerge.

To know the most perfect comfort, the most joyous and wonderful person, and yet to lose her.

What is left? The whole world, but such a world seems so much more bleak without her.

What is left in a life without hope?

Obedience

Sinistre

Superhero fetishism

I was going to write a post on this; here’s an interesting precursor for it

M

What is the transcendent?

The transcendent is that which we cannot otherwise but believe, yet cannot prove; the a priori principles which, so fundamental, we may not prove, yet we must presuppose to legitimate all else of reality.

What makes something transcendental, if there is anything to be transcendental at all?

A Transcendental Deduction must be found; whereby we prove that an enthymeme is in place in our everyday epistemic practices and metaphysical construals, however; we must not, as a contingent matter, not have proved this relata in any other way.

What kind of things are transcendent? Belief in the external world, possibly induction and the place of other epistemic norms, or other metaphysical beliefs like the endurance of particulars, which, even in the face of rational doubt, we must otherwise assume.

Destre, Michael

The theory of theories

What lies at the heart of any given theory? Or rather, what is it, when we are presented with a plurality of accounts for a particular phenomenon, that we use to distinguish one from another; as sociologists, why are we Marxists rather than Postmoderns, as philosophers, why are we Endurantists compared to Purdurantists? It is a language of theoretical norms that we must appeal to.

In the assessment of a theory we must ask questions of what constitutes a good theory; and insofar as we are to ask a question pertaining to the preference of a theory, we are asking a normative theory. As such, I maintain that at the core of all theories, and at the core of all judgments of propositions from mere ‘p’s to truth-statements, or rather, best appropriations of such truth. What a fundamentally bold suggestion, to say that at the heart of all theories (upon which, we derive ‘facts’), is a norm!

What norms can we have? Norms of which their status derives no truth themself; but rather, constitute not only the conditions of possibility, but the conditions of proper epistemic conduct. These norms are desideratum; statements of what is desirable about a theory.

Consider Bennett’s paper on Analytic Transcendental Arguments; where there is a short discussion on theories. Bennett poses the question: what is it about theory T that we must jettison to replace with T*?

A given T* may explain more than T; so we ditch T for T*

ENTHYMEME: It is desirable for an account to explain more

A given T* may have less commitments than T, but explain the same, or more than T; so we ditch T for T*

ENTHYMEME: It is desireable to be economical in our explananda, to get more explanation out of less commitment

Perhaps a strong, and perhaps seemingly non-sequitur suggestion is taht truth is comprised of the compound of all these metatheoretic norms; and we may deflate truth (or complicate, if you see it that way), into a whole gamut of desideata which form our current constitutient norms of what is likely to be accepted, given wider standards. For instance, our standards of rigour may vary context-dependent, but contingent to now; our construal of what is true may be contingent upon the syntax upon which we use in the business of provability and argumentation.

Destre