Chop, chop

So, the semester is quickly coming to a close. I have one final due on Thursday one due in two weeks, and another I can turn in anytime by the close of January.

This semester I've learned absolutely nothing in my Plato and Platonism seminar and I'll not take another class from that prof. My Philosophy of langauge seminar's focus is on the realism/anti-realism debate. In this class I've have gained a good frame of reference for meta-ethics since Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic. This is definately an area I'm interested in. I gave a class presentation on David Lewis' paper "Quasi-realism is Fictionalism" (in which I also present objections of my own and those of Simon Blackburn as found in his paper "Quasi-realism no Fictionalism"). Both Lewis and Blackburn's papers can be found in Fictionalism in Metaphysics, (ed.) Kalderon. Here is a brief summary of Lewis' paper and some problems to consider. The summary assumes you know what error-theory is in moral discourse (J. L. Mackie's view), as well as Quasi-realism and fictionalism. It also assumes you know the difference between cognitivism and non-cognitivism in meta-ethics--error theory is cognitivist, for instance--and moral realism.

In “Quasi-Realism is Fictionalism” Lewis argues for the following claim:

Quasi-realism, as a theoretical category, is synonymous with fictionalism.

Assume the quasi-realist has earned the right to echo everything the moral realist says about metaethics and moral psychology. Assume further that the moral semantics of the quasi-realist and the realist are without exception. If the semantics of the quasi-realist and those of the realist are without exception, then we cannot distinguish what the realist asserts from what the quasi-realist asserts. Thus, for any sentential expression containing a moral predicate of the form “S is P”, if the realist asserts “S is P” so does the quasi-realist. An analysis of the realist’s semantics of moral discourse, therefore, fails to yield a difference in the quasi-realist’s semantics of moral discourse.

By what light, then, is the quasi-realist not merely a (queasy) realist? Lewis invokes the notion of a linguistic disposition as the deciding factor for identifying the difference between the quasi-realist and the realist.

Lewis’ argument that quasi-realists and realists are disposed differently regarding sentential expressions of moral judgment turns on the claim that the quasi-realist recognizes moral realism to be error laden. (This error is roughly analogous to the way in which phlogiston theory or witchcraft was invoked to explain certain phenomena.) The error is the idea that there are detectable moral properties in the world. The view that morality is in error just this way is, according to Lewis, Projectivism. Quasi-realism and fictionalism are alternatives to a full blown error theory. This is what gives quasi-realism its prima facie appearance of a shared linguistic disposition with the realist—the quasi-realist wants to continue talking as the realist does.

The quasi-realist, however, does not share the same dispositions as the realist. For any given sentential expression containing a moral predicate of the form “S is P”, the expression is prefaced by a disclaiming expression that is an endorsement of projectivism. Let “*” be a disowning preface. The quasi-realist’s semantics for sentential expressions containing moral predicates of the form “S is P” is the following: “*: S is P”. The disowning preface, therefore, does not occur in the realist’s semantics. Thus, to answer the question why isn’t the quasi-realist not merely a realist, one must look for what the quasi-realist asserts that the realist does not; and what the quasi-realist asserts that the realist does not is the disowning preface.

The fictionalist also is willing to assert all that the realist asserts, and in fact does when it comes to talk of moral properties, the objectivity of moral judgments, and so forth. But the fictionalist makes only ‘quasi-assertions’, since every realist assertion the fictionalist echoes is prefaced with an “as-if” assertion; that is, the fictionalist asserts that for any sentential expression containing a moral predicate of the form “S is P”, that sentential expression is first qualified with the following kind of disowning preface: “Let’s make believe that moral realism is true, though it isn’t.” The disowning preface has the semantic function of stripping the sentence immediately following it of all assertoric force. The assertions of the quasi-realist and the fictionalist, therefore, are not assertions but rather qualified assertions that the sentence is spoken ‘as-if’ it were true.

Lewis claims that the motivations of the fictionalist—to earn the right to say just what the moral realist shares—are identical to those of the quasi-realist, since the way to earn such a right is being or make-believedly being a moral realist, and since neither the quasi-realist nor the fictionalist want to be moral realists (because they want to avoid moral realism’s errors), they both qualify their moral discourse with disowning prefaces. Since the realist, moreover, does not qualify his moral discourse with disowning prefaces, the quasi-realist is not a realist since the quasi realist asserts something the realist does not.

The motivations of the quasi-realist are identical to those of the fictionalist—both want to speak as moral realists without being committed to the error of moral realism; and the semantics of the quasi-realist are identical with those of the fictionalist—both qualify sentential expressions containing moral predicates of the form “S is P” with a disowning preface such that “S is P” no longer is an assertion.

Insofar as quasi-realism shares the motivations and semantics of fictionalism, quasi-realism is a species of fictionalism whose difference is the endorsement of projectivism.

Problems with Lewis’ account:

1. Consider the following statement: “John is a good man”. On a projectivist account, I am not attributing the property of goodness to John; instead I am expressing my reactions John, both in attitude and emotion. When I say “John is a good man”, I say this in virtue of certain facts, such as that John evokes from me just such a reaction—John strikes me as a good man. I am not asserting that goodness is a property of John; rather I am describing John as a projection of my reaction to him, where my moral judgment is understood as if my reaction to John is a property of John. My reactions, then, are not make-believe in any sort of fashion and, hence, I do not disown my moral judgment with a preface that I am make-believing as if moral realism were true. If that were the case, my reactions would be mere pretense. But the projectivist does not agree to this evaluation. The reactions one has are authentic reactions, not those generated by pretending our moral discourse is true. And these reactions, furthermore, are facts about the world.

2. Lewis does not demonstrate that fictionalism depends upon a distinction between an agent’s belief and attitudes when engaged in moral discourse, as quasi-realism does in its endorsement of projectivism.

3. There are a number of theses that bear the name of fictionalism, some of which may be closer in spirit to quasi-realism than others. Lewis does not address this as a possibility.

4. Quasi-realism brings out the deficiencies of fictionalism in the following ways:
a. Fictionalism hinges on make-believing in lieu of moral error recognition. Doing so, however, carries the drawback of flying in the face of our everyday moral practice, since fictionalism would require the moral agent to pretend the appropriate attitudes for any given moral context (See 1 above). If fictionalism is simply the doctrine that we talk ‘as-if’ something were true when in fact it is not, this implies that pretending is invoked to explain our moral judgments just in case the error of our moral judgments is recognized. But the quasi-realist denies that the recognition of error in our moral discourse is a prior requirement for explaining quasi-realism.

5. The disowning preface presupposes that there is such a thing as the moral fiction to which the preface is disowning—one must have a fixed content for what we pretend to be true. Knowing what it is that we are pretending requires us to know the difference between worlds allegedly unlike ours and worlds including ours in which there are no fictions. Suppose the fiction in question to be colors. Is it true in the color fiction that canaries are yellow? To answer this we need to know how it is our world fails to contain yellow canaries while only containing pseudo-yellow canaries. (The yellow canary example is J. L. Austin's, I think from Sense and Sensibilia).

I also have a history of Christian thought class. In this class it's not so much that I've learned much, but that I've just been able to go into more depth at positions I already was familiar with. Essentialy this course is an examination of the philosophical theology, and doctrinal views, of the early church fathers--the Apostalic Fathers. We are reading Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Ireaneus, Justin the Martyr, Arius, Eusebius, Athanasius, Tertullian, Origen, and the like. What's great about this course is that you get to see the historical development of Christian doctrine unfold, particularly as it relates to the doctrines of the Trinity (it is Tertullian that was the first to give the language to Trinity talk that is now the unconcious parlance of practically all fundamentalists and orthodox, be they Protestant or Catholic), the Hypostatic union, and the nature of the relations between the Word, the Son and the Father. Also covered particulaly well are the developments formations of various doctrines regarding baptism, salvation, and scriptural interpretation (they gave arguments about how and why the scriptues should be interpreted in particulary ways), and tradition. Many of these doctrines and notions were formulated and discussed at great peril to those in the debates. It took centuries of philosophical argument and scriptural exegesis to formulate a number of standardly held doctrines that are juist taken for granted by your everyday Christian (of course, no Christian thinks they are the everyday Christian, but they usually are). And these formulations cost some proponents their very lives--and they willfully lost them lest they break God's will by holding fast to what they thought were falsehoods. The history of Christian thought is underappreciated today by Christians. Most Christians are entirely ignorent of why they even hold the doctrines that they do--they think their pastor is the one who has articulated what they believe and has exegeted it from the scripture (or, if we are lucky, they will cite a theologian from the 1800's as the basis fo what they take to be accurate doctrine). Wrong! The Apostalic Fathers, while not correct in all things (woe to you if you think whom you study from is correct in all his views), were brilliant thinkers, pious and fully trying to serve God according to His will. They were not a bunch of Catholic cronies , they were Christians trying to understand the Bible; Christians who put their impressive intellects into formulating what all preceding generations of Christians draw upon. Many of them new the apostles, some of them were handed down churches by the apostles themselves. All of them contributed, sometimes at the cost of death, torture, exile, and ostracism, significanty to the ongoing attempts to precisely and accurately give an account of Christian beliefs. Their arguments are sophisticated, their lives full of the desire to serve God, and their legacy is one worthy of serious study.

At the beginning of this semester, while I was walking to my car after class (it was about 945pm), I was just off campus and three guys pulled up in a car next to me, yelling also sorts things to me as if I were gay, then pull out a guy (one guy pulled a gun) and attempted to acost me. They didn't get shit from you. Not too long after that I got the flu and was wiped out for a while--that stuff just lingered on for weeks and weeks. Then, right when I felt as though I was getting better, I got Broncitus, and again was wiped out. I spent the majority of this semester sick. It sucked.

I was able to, nonetheless, read a couple more books since that last bok list posted. I read The Case For Ghosts: An objective look at the paranormal, by Danelek. It's not the most rigorously argued book I've ever read, nor was it particularly groundbreaking. But it is the spirit of the book I appreciate and it is a step in the right investigative direction. I also have read Pascal's Wager: the man who played dice with God, by James A. Connor. This is primarily a biography, but does go into a number of Pascal's mathematical, geometrical, theological and philosophical contributions, as well as some of his work in physics. Let's put it this way: Pascal is one of the towering geniuses and child prodigies of Western Civilization. this book will also inform you about much concerning French history from the late 1500's up to the beginnings of the Enlightenment. The information regarding climate and food avaliability was particulaly interesting, as such factors contribute greatly to the movement of history.

I like the smell of roses.