Funny, I thought that "ann coulter is the maureen dowd of the right" was a way of insulting ann coulter.
This shows that foundationalism is bankrupt; here we have agreement not in opinions, but in forms of life. Just kidding.
I just went on too long in the IA comment wing, but take it up here if anything there is interesting. I lost heart at "kick the kids out; buy self a jaguar."
Yes, I'm still trying to decide whether it's worth replying to that particular argument over there.
Oh hell, I am going to respond, feel free to vent here though!
Yeah, ok, the jaguar comment was disheartening. although, to be honest, I would not pay $25k or 25 cents, to have my child taught by an English prof roiled by deep metaphysical doubts about whether to assign Blake of Buffy the Vampire slayer.
And fontana, I am with you 110% about putting too high a metaphysical requirement on everyday life. (although I may think, contra Hume or Rorty, that such these metaphysical requirements can be met).
There are a number of good comments now, which potentially lead in several different directions. I don't know where to start in terms of making a reply. So perhaps I'll just sit in on ogged's spin-off thread :)
The spin off was meant to keep your thread from becoming a foundationalism debate. If you sit in here, I'm going to charge you rent.
Now I'm headed back to your site to answer Mr. Schwartz.
More on foundationalism here anon.
There *are* a ton of issues here. The humanities (along with other areas) has done a terrible job justifying its existence, even when the opportunity presents itself. So I can understand skepticism from the outside (or the inside, for that matter).
At the same time, it's not ok to think that (a) the market problem is caused by people fleeing from the humanities or from universities generally because of the vacuity of their content; (b) Nietzsche is to blame for the Third Reich; (c) your kid will ever have her own retirement account without going to college.
The philosophical parallel to dehumanization isn't so much the overthrow of every possible sacred cow as much as the rise of the timid research project. I've heard several people remark that this last generation or two has been missing the forest for the trees, but it's hard to know if there's anything to this, or, assuming there is, if it's got a partly economic explanation.
Um... what is foundationalism?
- Magik "Uneducated, Intrepid" Johnson
The term "anti-foundationalism" has been used to refer to a grab-bag of philosophical positions. One quite influential 'anti-foundationalist' figure is Richard Rorty. A decent summary of his thouht can be found here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/
My vulgar Rorty summary: truth just means whatever as a matter of practice gets people to stop arguing and move on.
Never having read Rorty (am I supposed to admit that?), my definition is a bit different. If you check the thread this post links to, you can see a few definitions of anti-foundationalism and go from there.
Cool. I need to think about that one, but I'm not in much today...see you in the evening!
Geez, I really meant evening. Now I'm bleary. Nevertheless, part of my busy day included a detour to a bookstore that had the Dworkin book so I read the passage you quote from.
Dworkin sets up a very rigorous notion of objectivity that he uses to contrast with his own. As I recall, he says that the thoroughgoing skeptic thinks that believing in objective moral claims means that one either believes they can be established like laws of physics or on the basis of "moral quaverings," which is his clever (I hate clever) way of saying intuition. He sets up his notion of "objectivity" in distinction to that quite rigorous one. According to Dworkin, we don't need to make metaphysical claims; when we say objective, we just mean that the issue is somehow decidable, a matter of argument and not, like matters of taste, beyond adjudication. So, you see, he says, to say our claims are objective in that sense is just to emphasize the fact that they are susceptible to argument, not, as the skeptic mistakenly believes, that they aren't.
But the power of the recent critiques of "objectivity" (particularly moral objectivity) is precisely that they aren't "metaphysical" theories of skepticism, they're damn near plain old empirical observations. For Nietzsche and Heidegger, history reveals the coming to be and passing away of regimes of truth, which makes unavoidable the thought that each regime is contingent and transitory. We can see the rejection of even Dworkian objectivity in someone much nearer Dworkin in time, place and sensibility. Rawls was moved to write Political Liberalism, which is, in effect, an addendum to Theory of Justice, in order to account the difficulty of "reasonable pluralism," which is his term for the fact of incommensurable world-views.
I don't know, did you read the Dworkin very differently?
Hey, I'm trying to answer your comments over at IA's at the moment! And my rather lengthy reply there just disappeared as I clicked here. Aargh!
Not to worry. Your IA post (38-ish) strikes me as indicating that the argument above (here) is at least in the right neighborhood.
If you haven't seen this, there's an interesting discussion of a related issue in the first chapter of G. A. Cohen's if you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich? The issue he's after is the counterfactual how can you believe that p given that you admit, if various contingencies had turned out differently, you would not believe that p? e.g., you wouldn't be a Socialist, Jew, etc. had you been born to a family with different traditions and ideologies.
Look! I've used italics to disambiguate! Yet it's not IN the text!
Can a guy get away with not spelling out his anti-objectivity argument anymore? Guess not.
Very short version:
The way in which the world is disclosed to me is affected by who/what I am. Who/what I am is affected by the world that is disclosed to me. These are always happening at the same time. Neither I nor the world ever have a fixed meaning. All statements are incomplete and approximate. (Finitude, fallibilism, original sin.)
This disclosure, the interplay of person/world, has a history. I can see that the way I disclose and approximate is similar to some past practices and differs from others. I become aware that my own way is not just limited in itself, but merely one of many possible practices. I could be otherwise. (Historicity, perspectivilism, perhaps relativism.)
The upshot is that I come to see meaning as something made and contingent. Note that that contingency need not apply equally to all matters and my power of making need not be everywhere the same.
Now, as to the matter at hand, I don't think we can credibly say there are moral facts (and I think I can argue with someone about that—on pain of irrationality, as you say). I don't think our morality is simply given us by our culture or society nor do I think we retreat inside ourselves to intuit moral beliefs. There is a complicated interaction in which culture and our biological selves talk back to one another. From out of that, we make moral meaning. But I remain stumped about the purchase that moral meaning has in public discourse.
As for the Cohen, I think you can see by now that, given the space I'm willing to make for culture, I'm not very concerned about an argument that attempts to use the influence of culture to undermine the "objectivity" of beliefs.
As time goes on, I get more confused. I'm not sure what disclosing involves (does "the world discloses itself to me" mean just that I form beliefs?) or about what it would be for you or the world to have a fixed meaning, since you're not the sort of things that *have* meaning, in the relevant sense. If I understand this even a bit, it seems that, according to what you've said, intersubjective *sameness* of meaning isn't possible, and that's a reductio of the view, on the surface at least. And what's the *special* problem with moral facts, as opposed to, say, medium-sized dry goods facts, or green-patch-here-now facts? It looks like
"I become aware that my own way is not just limited in itself, but merely one of many possible practices. I could be otherwise. (Historicity, perspectivilism, perhaps relativism.)"
is a point that applies to everything else, too. (If so, that seems like a reductio, too.) And if there *were* a problem with moral facts, how would that affect the normative claims implicit in, say, the rest of the blog? If you think it's wrong to mislead the public, don't you therefore think that it's a fact that it's wrong, and that the sentence "it's wrong to..." is true?
I once overhead someone at a convention say "well, that depends on what you think a FACT is." That's a sign that it's time to get the hell out of there.
I'm sorry Fontana, I tried to do a plain English extremely abbreviated Heideggerian account of interpretation and failed miserably. Green-patch-here-now is closest to what I meant by "disclose," and I think moral facts are tougher because there's no clear referent as there is with a green patch. The real source of opacity is that I'm not sure what I think about precisely the issues you raise, namely intersubjectivity and morality. I'd like to give a Heideggerian account of both but I'm not there yet.
For the record, I think it is possible to give a coherent account of both intersubjectivity and morality, but I can't explain myself to even my own satisfaction.