http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIC4VcZdR...

The link here (above) should take you to a Robert Brandom lecture on Kant in 7 parts posted on YouTube. Robert Brandom: "Kantian Lessons about Mind, Meaning, and Rationality," Parts 1-7. One caveat is that the lecture requires a certain ability to withstand an hour or so of intense, highfalutin balderdash. I gleaned some choice quotes from it for my Appendix (The Slightest Philosophy) collection, which I'll post, below. I don't know if these quotes appear in his books in quite this form, but I've tried to listen carefully and to punctuate them as they sounded. Now, how does one write a citation for a YouTube video?


Robert Brandom:

"What deeply binds together German Idealism and American Pragmatism and Neo-Pragmatism...is that we'll never understand our interaction with the world if we think in antecedent terms of what subjects are—say, in the way Descartes did—and what objects are—say, in the way contemporary natural science tells us they are—and somehow try to clamp those two together, to understand subjects as able to know about objects and act on objects so understood."

"I am what I'm recognized to be by those I recognize as having the authority to determine what I really am."

"I think Kant is, and should remain, for philosophers what the sea was for the poet Swinburne: the great, grey mother of us all."

The complete and latest version of the Appendix's quote collection can always be found here:

http://queenelson.blogspot.com/

M. H. Abrams suggested that Wittgenstein might be my ally, but I don't see how. Rorty sees himself as Wittgensteinian, and I find it hard not agree with Rorty on that. Wittgenstein sounds perfectly postmodern and relativist when he says:

“Supposing we met people who…instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?—If we call this ‘wrong,’ aren’t we using our language-game as a base from which to combat theirs?

And are we right or wrong to combat it? Of course there are all sorts of slogans which will be used to support our proceedings.

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic.”

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Reading Boghossian's anti-relativist Fear of Knowledge this morning, I thought of something else I want to say.

If a postmodernist/relativist hears me justify data-fit on the grounds that it's just true by definition that data-fit is truth conducive (because it's true by definition that the theory that fits the data is what truth means, see above), then, according to a common version of relativism, he should then argue that: "This just goes to show that your epistemology jibes with the English language, and it's just my point that our language is of course a socially-constructed tool which we have fashioned to suit our purposes and interests."

In response to this, we are entitled to be offered some other language in which there's a rival philosophy that's just as true, but is nevertheless radically incompatible. Surely, we aren't expected to worry about a rival way of thinking that appears absurd in any language. So we need some reason to think this isn't the case.

Rorty and Feyerabend, for example, have notoriously defended Cardinal Bellarmine's position against Galileo's. But surely we're not expected to believe that Bellarmine's theory is true in Latin, but false in English.

More importantly, you really don't have to be using any particular language to have in mind a theory about the world, and even to figure out whether this theory is true or false.

Think about it. Take three paper cups, a dog, and a little ball. You can play a kind of "Three Card Monty" shell game with the dog and probably fool him about which cup the ball is under. In other words, the dog can have a theory that it's under the middle cup, and he can find out later that his theory wasn't really true. You might express to another English-speaker what the dog thought by saying he thought "it's under the middle one," but that doesn't mean that the theory itself was an English-language theory. The theory was what it was, prior to the expression of it in English. It just isn't true to say the theory was dependent upon language. It wasn't.

This seems to belie the epistemology of Rorty, Putnam, Sellars, McDowell, Kuhn, and others in this post-Kantian, postmodern vein.

In other words, semantic quibbling over the meaning of some highly abstract and woefully ambiguous theoretical terms, which is a phenomena that academics are used to seeing, may seem to be pretty well described by people like Rorty. But what Rorty says doesn't apply all the way out the fringes of the web of belief. Eventually the rubber hits the road of a real world that just is what it is, no matter how we talk. Like the dog in the shell game, our beliefs can fit the facts or not fit the facts, independently of language.

I will avoid that problematic word!

John, I wish you wouldn't use the problematic word "direct" about my philosophy. Professional philosophers read this as "direct realism," which is a bad name, a straw man, and a red herring. (Sounds like a drink order: "Bartender, we'd like a Bad Name, a Straw Man, and a Red Herring, straight up.")

To those outside the profession, this must seem like a semantic quibble, but I assure you it's an endemic problem historically.

I want again to emphasize this point:

A skeptic wielding the Problem of the Criterion will ask how do we know that my preferred "theory virtue," data fit, is conducive to truth?

Answer: That's what truth means. Truth is a conformity, a correspondence, a fit, to the world. A true theory means a theory which fits our experience, fits the facts, conforms to reality, corresponds to the world as it actually is.

I'm looking forward to your comparison of my epistemology with David Kelley's:

http://johnjenright.blogspot.com/2008/07...

I'm sure I will learn from it, myself! Once again, thanks.

BTW, "Members of the Audiobook Communite" should check out the fabulous "Teaching Company." I must have consumed most of what they've published in the last ten years. There's an embarrassing excess of anticapitalist dogma, of course, but, on the other hand, there's also the wonderful Alan Charles Kors. I also recommend the course called "Cycles of American Political Thought" as being not quite so anti-American as most. But their "History of the United States" is a hoot, and should be put in a time capsule. (Both the second edition and the first one, oy!)

http://www.teach12.com

Thank you for that little bit of personal intellectual history. I was at some of those original History of Philosophy lectures, by Peikoff, and remember them fondly. (I was in college.)

I had missed the pun on invidious. I like it.

My "scene-image" is a parody of one of Philosophy's misbegotten children, the "sense-datum." "Inviddy" is my own monster, inspired by the "viddy" (to see) of Clockwork Orange, and the resemblance to invidious is also something that appealed to me.

You're right that positing perceptual "forms" isn't by itself enough to banish Hume and Kant, since they'll simply insist that these forms are all that you ever see, and you can't get past them. Post-Kantians would say that's all there is. But David Kelley knows that. Kelley has other moves to make also, of course.

If I had to say off the top of my head where I might be parting ways with Kelley, I might point to my aversion to "epistemic principles" and/or "axioms," or the sort of deductive, almost Euclidean feel of his epistemology, which I fear may play into the hands of the skeptic's demand for a perfect, infallible certainty. My preference is towards a notion of certainty as a more-or-less thing which admits of relative degrees.

Or I might point to his suggestion that one side (for everybody it's always the other guy's side) has some special "burden of proof." But I may be misrepresenting him.

I must confess that I never read Atlas Shrugged, nor any of Rand's books really, except We the Living, which I didn't like. I guess I'm a fussbudget when it comes to fiction, growing up in a house full of Joyce, Proust, Nabokov, Twain and Thurber. My first major was English Lit.

What I did really enjoy tremendously was Leonard Peikoff's audiotaped lecture series on the History of Western Philosophy. But this came later.

In graduate school, in the Philosophy department, I still remember reading Hume's epistemology my first semester, and arguing, in one of my first papers, that it was bad Kool-Aid. I also wrote a paper arguing against the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Sextus Empiricus, and finally my thesis ended up being a refutation of Peter Unger's Ignorance.

Then, on graduation day, I had my first baby. So much for school. But I found I could still read books while doing my chores, as long as they were available on audiotape. Classics On Tape, now called Blackstone Audiobooks, was my salvation in those days. You could even rent Aristotle on tape, unabridged. I read Human Action, if only because it was available on tape. (Unabridged! It was like 32 cassettes long.) I loved it. I hadn't studied economics before, and that book opened up a whole new field of thought for me. Mises made me a classical liberal.

Eventually, I bought Leonard Peikoff's History of Philosophy lecture series, because it happened to be one of the only serious works in epistemology available on audio cassette. It still is. It was very entertaining, with the sound of city sirens in the background, and Peikoff's metallic cigarette lighter clicking as he takes a big drag, to get him through the ravings of the Greatest Minds in History. It's worth every penny:

http://www.peikoff.com/courses/hpo.htm

I also liked the fact that Peikoff had similar complaints about the Philosophy canon as I had expressed in school. It was so refreshing, and a relief to discover an ally. I didn't necessarily agree with his positive epistemology, and like Mises had always inclined to utilitarianism, and still do, but that didn't stop me from appreciating Peikoff's interpretation of history. It was far closer to my own view of history than any of my teachers' had been. (Maybe you could say we agree about the sickness of the patient, but offer somewhat different prescriptions as the cure?)

In any case, I am surely very, very grateful for the incredibly warm and enthusiastic welcome my book has received from the fans of Ayn Rand.

As for Thomas Reid, he was right to reject Hume, but I'm not sure he completed the job of refuting him. But Reid called it, which is more than most.

(Note: HTML on this post is a little buggy.)

Well, if I want to change brands, what would you say are some points of superiority in yours? I see the nine9s youtube review also makes the comparison. Alternatively, what are some standout incompatibilities? Do I have to carefully note them for myself?

I went back to see how Kelley handled the case of the circular flat object that "looks like an ellipse" from most angles. (This way I avoid the distraction of color.) He does say that we see it as a circle, then he says there is a a way of looking which he calls reductive, which allows us to see it as an ellipse. (Which is related to the way an artist trained in perspective renders it.)

Then he introduces an idea of "perceptual form," which comes from Rand. (Although it does not derive from anything she published herself. The one cite to her is from a Q&A published posthumously, if I recall correctly.)

This idea of perceptual form lets him say: I perceive the circular shape in the form of an ellipse.

You don't go this route. You make up a funny name for what Kelley calls reductive seeing("inviddying scene-images"), and you don't give it much credence as a mode that deserves special treatment.

Anyway, much as I learned from David's book, I think your approach is more direct and more fruitful.

I sense your approach is closer to Reid. Objectivists don't read Reid! I worry that this whole "the forms in which we perceive things" phrasing invites representationalism in the back door. It sounds so Kantian.

My book has a new home on the web:

http://queenelson.blogspot.com/

When it comes to color, I might just interpret Kelley as offering one way he hopes that we can talk about it without getting into trouble. For my part, I don't take much interest in the problem of color, simply because it seems to me that any solution offered to the riddles of color (such as the Inverted Spectrum riddle, and the riddle of Black and White Mary) is only going to be a plausible solution if it does not entail absurd or draconian conclusions such as radical skepticism. In other words, I'm not worried that the "right" analysis of color might lead to absurdity, because if it leads to absurdity, then obviously the logical conclusion is that it probably isn't the right analysis.

Ha. I won't hesitate to challenge, but on my first read of your book I was just blown away, so I really need to read it again. There was very little I definitely disagreed with, just a good number of things I wanted to think through more. Ayn Rand did shape my outlook profoundly, but her own account of perception was fairly sketchy (as she admitted) and has some potential vulnerabilities, including her many references to a problematic view of sensation which has not held up well scientifically. David Kelley's book, Evidence of the Senses, (as you know), extended her approach by using an approach where color, for example, is the "form" in which we perceive an object's reflectance properties. But I worry that might be an unnecessary circumlocution, and your approach, like Thomas Reid's, was appealing in its directness. I also thought your approach to foundationalism and skepticism was intriguing. Your engagement with Hume I found admirable.

Thanks, John. You've been very kind. But don't hesitate to challenge my epistemology too! I'd like to steal your account away from Ayn Rand. Have I talked you into switching products yet? ;-)

Quee, I want to offer a big thank you for your mini-essay on Occam's Razor, expanding on some of what you wrote in your book, and pointing me to other things to read. Somehow this subtopic strikes me as fascinating.

Also, M.H. Abrams and Frederick Crews? Wow. Great! I'm a big fan of those 2 Pooh books on lit crit by Crews, and Abrams is simply a giant. (I suppose my BA in English is showing.)

If you’d like to read more on the subject of “abduction,” or appeal to the best explanation, I’d recommend starting with a very good book for anybody interested in epistemology in general. Here it is:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79654...

Two essays in this book, Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, display Jonathan Vogel attempting to wield the argument to the best explanation against skepticism, and Richard Fumerton trying to shoot him down. One way to describe my book would be to call it an extended rejoinder to Fumerton. A handy nickname for Fumerton is Humerton, since he's very Humean. He does a good job as attorney for Hume.

If a professional philosopher, an expert jaded in all the latest in epistemology, asked me to point out to him a few pages to read in The Slightest Philosophy where he might find something to chew on, I’d point him to pp.196-218. But if all I could point to was one sentence, it would be this one, on p. 200:

"The whole point of the contest is that it obviates the need to wring our hands over infallible pedigrees."

I have issues with Occam's Razor, as you may have gleaned from the book. This is for several reasons.

Firstly, there's a lot of disagreement over what exactly it is that makes one theory/explanation/story "simpler" than another. Number of moving parts? Number of entities? (How many entities exist in your refrigerator? Go count them for us, and the guy with the fewest wins. How many entities per lasagna casserole? One? Fifty thousand?)

More deeply, I don't like to think and talk in terms of these too-popular creatures called epistemic principles. I prefer to have as little to do with them as possible.

But most importantly for me, there's no fundamental connection between simplicity and truth. Occam's Razor, as my student argues in the book, is, I feel, basically just a sort of understandable prejudice one adopts after having a lot of experience with humans, and it tends to point in the right direction a lot of the time, but perhaps not always. There are complicated truths and simple lies, I suppose, depending on how you define simplicity.

I admit that it seems pretty intuitively attractive to say that heliocentrism beats geocentrism on simplicity, and that this makes heliocentrism seem a lot more plausible. But if somebody feels that the Razor makes the Brain in the Vat beat common sense, then he's faced with a choice of deciding that paranoid schizophrenia is the conclusion to which right reason leads, or else that the Razor isn't always everything it's cracked up to be. Notice that heliocentrism also wins on data fit. (In fact, I heard somebody say that, as first proposed, heliocentrism did not beat geocentrism on data fit, and that's why it wasn't believed. Until, later, when, with fundamental modifications like elliptical orbits, the theory finally did beat geocentrism on data fit.)

On the other hand, if one construes the Razor in a way that makes it equivalent to something like Richard Fumerton's "deductive argument for simplicity" (The Slightest Philosophy, pp. 180, 218-219), then I am going to be a fan of that Razor. Let's call it Fumerton's Razor.

At least since Kuhn, people have had this idea that we might decide between competing theories by applying a short list of "Virtues" (predictive power, fruitfulness, data fit, simplicity, etc.) and preferring the theory that displays more of these.

I won't go over all the reasons people have given to feel uncomfortable with this approach, since you may able to imagine them. (Can one add or subtract from this list of virtues just because one feels like it? If not, what makes these so special that they're the canon of saintly virtues?)

One way to describe my approach would be to say that I allow only one virtue, data fit, and demote any virtues, like simplicity, that can't be construed as a version of data fit. Example: predictive power is fit to data, future data. (It's so impressive because it's a lot harder to make your theory do that. As any chart-happy stock picker soon learns, making your theory fit past data is far easier than making it conform to future data!)

Here's the nice part:

The skeptic will break out one of his best weapons: The Problem of the Criterion, and ask why we should think data fit is conducive to truth. He will demand to know what makes data fit so special?

Easy. That's what truth means. Truth is a conformity, a correspondence, a fit, to the world. A true theory means a theory which fits the facts, conforms to reality, corresponds to the world as it actually is.

Kantians and post-Kantians like Rorty deny this, but of course it mires them in absurdity, and the only reason they espouse their bizarre rejection of truth is because they think they have to, in order to beat the skeptic. They just don't realize that a) there's a much better way, and b) Kant's way is no way at all.

I didn't realize the appendix was so popular! What I've been thinking I should read up on is abduction. Someone or other asked me what the Student gained by preferring abduction to Occam's razor, and I wasn't completely sure. Is it Lipton I should read? -John

Speaking of quotations, here's one of my new favorites:

"True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics." --Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of We

Of course, I still can't get a publisher. It's an interesting catch 22. Most commercial publishers won't read or even accept delivery of "unsolicited manuscripts." They only read stuff from literary agents. But a literary agent understandably won't look at an epistemology manuscript, because nobody buys epistemology books. That's why only a subsidized, non-profit academic press will publish an epistemology book. But only if the author holds an academic position, of course. Otherwise, one must go through a commercial publisher. (Go back to top of paragraph and repeat).

Besides, the academic presses charge so much for books that nobody but academic libraries can afford to buy them. Certainly not penniless Philosophy students. On Amazon, you're a big epistemology seller if you sell 300 copies a year. Feh. The commercial publishers are right; they know their business. To make a profit, on a serious epistemology book, forget it. It's a tiny market.

But, God bless America, nobody really needs a publisher anymore, so I had no problem doing everything myself. I even did the ink drawing on the cover, and one of my kids pasted the drawing into the WORD file.

When, around 2004, Antony Flew first read a draft, he called it "total devastation," but warned me that the establishment would "ignore it," relying on the fact that I'm a nobody. He said the only way I could breach the citadel, "would be if somehow you could get it disseminated among the students. Then their teachers would be forced to respond."

The only way I thought of so far to do that, was by using Facebook. So that's what I've been doing. People seemed to think using Facebook rather scandalous at first, but now I get fan mail from students who are crazy about the book. Even from some who were once fans of postmodernism. Not bad for a self-published epistemology book on the shelf of no bookstore.

My latest coup is that Meyer H. Abrams, a literary giant, and, among other things, the founding editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, (dude!) read it and liked it. It was sent to him by Frederick Crews, who edited the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Crews happened to read my book, tracked me down, and wrote me a terrific blurb:

"The Slightest Philosophy is an amazing, liberating book that deserves a wide audience. Quee Nelson is a realist in both senses of the term. With verve and wit that cannot be found within Philosophy departments, and with sound learning as well, she has made stone kicking both intellectually respectable and fun."—Frederick C. Crews, editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, author of Postmodern Pooh, Follies of the Wise, and The Pooh Perplex

Privately, Abrams wrote to Crews:

“I agree about The Slightest Philosophy—it makes you smile, or even laugh aloud, while remaining, remarkably, a serious and comprehensive demolition....It merits a wide and appreciative readership.” (M. H. Abrams)

(Crews kindly passed the compliment on to me, and Abrams gave me permission to quote it.)

You may remember Crews as the guy who helped to bring down Sigmund Freud, with two sensational articles in The New York Review of Books in the 1990s. His send-up of postmodern literary criticism, Postmodern Pooh, is hysterical. Here's a delightful interview with him:

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/...

Here are the latest additions:

Friedrich Schlegel

"Idealism considers nature as a work of art, as a poem."

Soren Kierkegaard

“What our age lacks…is not reflection but passion.”

“The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.”

“It was intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed. Presumably that is why I, who have had the job, was armed with an immense intelligence.”


Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb standing with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if everything is to be given its due, then twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”


J. S. Mill

“Matter, then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. If I am asked, whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I do not.”


Friedrich Nietzsche

“No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself.’”

“It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule.”

“That a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth, one knows from the fact that, e.g., we have to believe in time, space, and motion, without feeling compelled to grant them absolute reality.”

“That there is no truth, that there is no absolute nature of things nor a ‘thing-in-itself,’—This, too, is merely nihilism—even the most extreme nihilism.”


William James

“An idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.”

“In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think and talk about the same world because we believe our percepts are possessed by us in common.”

“Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is criticized by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another—we willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.”

“The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”


Jean Paul Sartre

“Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or slack as to let them do so. If so Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us.”


Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

“609. Supposing we met people who…instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?—If we call this ‘wrong,’ aren’t we using our language-game as a base from which to combat theirs?
610. And are we right or wrong to combat it? Of course there are all sorts of slogans which will be used to support our proceedings.
611. Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic.”

“If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’.”


A. J. Ayer

“From our resources of sense-data, we ‘construct’ the world of material things.”


Jacques Lacan

“There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie.”

Thanks, John! I've expanded the nefarious quotes collection in the Appendix a bit, especially since it's so popular with readers. I'll post a new section from it for you below, but sorry I don't know how to make the footnote citations appear...

I'm glad to hear you are planning on a second edition. Not because there was anything wrong with the first, but because I found the first edition fascinating and I'll be interested in seeing what you modify or add.

This is a place I hope to get questions, comments, reviews, and feedback to improve the second edition of my new epistemology book, The Slightest Philosophy. For those who don't happen to have a copy, a lot of it can be read for free through a Google Books link posted on the left here:

http://queenelson.blogspot.com/