Disciplinary pecking order, what defines theory, what is a philosopher, and other musings

As an outsider (applied scientist no longer in academia) I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on whether this phenomenon:

But many of my colleagues are more at home talking to psychologists and neuroscientists rather than historians…

might contribute to this one:

Even if it were the case, it remains that philosophers are singled out by panelists for their inability to explain why their research is significant socially or intellectually.

via the anti-science sentiments prevalent among a small but vocal minority of humanists and social scientists.

The excellence in nitpickery criterion, of course.

<blockquotePhilosophers respect quasi-scientific standards of rational argument…

Standards of rational argument vastly predate anything resembling modern science.

I agree that “analytical” philosophers tend to make cross-disciplinary connections outside of the humanities, usually with the natural or social sciences or with law. Relations with the humanities haven’t been so good. I’m sure we don’t do ourselves any favours by being aloof, arrogant etc, but I think part of the reason is that colleagues in the humanities want philosophy (or “theory”) for purposes for which our style of philosophy is ill-suited.

Roughly speaking, people working in history, or classics, or French studies or whatever want theory to provide them with a hook or an angle which will enable them to generate the next round of research papers. Appropriating the work of continental theorist X for this purpose (even half-understood or distorted) tends to be pretty easy (cf film studies and Zizek). Appropriating Kripke or Timothy Williamson or Davidson or Lewis for such purposes is hard to impossible.

Incidentally, I don’t think the assimilation of analytical philosophy to some kind of scientism above is on-track at all. Sure, there are scientistic philosophers in the analytical tradition, but there are plenty of anti-naturalists too. And both sides are doing recognizably the same kind of thing to one another, which differs enormously from “theory”. I’d struggle, though, to set out exactly all the respects in which it does differ. One temptation is to say that analytical philosophers tend to be anti-relativists even if they can’t agree on what truth and knowledge amount to, whereas “theorists” in the humanities tend to be relativists (often in ways that APs think are obviously self-defeating). But I’d sure that doesn’t map exactly onto the boundary between the two camps.

Appropriating Kripke or Timothy Williamson or Davidson or Lewis for such purposes is hard to impossible

so in other words, the reason why “philosophers are singled out by panelists for their inability to explain why their research is significant socially or intellectually” is that (to those panelists anyway), it isn’t?

Having said that, one wouldn’t necessarily expect everyone working in a field to have material which would be interesting to anyone outside that field, particularly given that every field is going to have a lot of people working in it who basically spend their time on reworking and improving the methodological toolkit. So for example lots of philosophers cite and talk to Amartya Sen or Ken Binmore, but that wouldn’t mean that that one would expect they’d find anything interesting or useful in the average journal article on intertemporal optimisation, even though Sen and/or Binore would. So the question’s not whether humanities types ought to be able to find anything useful in Kripke et al, but whether a) there is some sort of equivalent Sen figure who they would find useful? and b) whether it matters if there isn’t?

3: And by what criterion is that criterion to be measured etc etc? Let’s proceed empirically: give a philosopher a bit of Theory-as-bad-philosophy to play with and see what happens to it. It’s considered a rather disreputable activity, like pulling the wings off flies, (and a forlorn one – perhaps biting the pseudopods off protozoa?) but in the interests of experimental vivisection, a dispensation could be made.

4: what a lousy remark.

—

The criterion ‘problem’ may be relevant to the canvassed difficulty in explaining why their research is significant socially or intellectually (I suspect that, e.g., the purest of pure mathematicians aren’t expected to do any such thing.) To hazard a bold assertion, philosophy (not to be confused with philosophers) is unique – which is not to say ‘special’ in some morally or axiologically loaded sense – because it doesn’t have a well-demarcated subject matter or indeed really any specialised methodology (everyone – usually in academia rightly – thinks they can do logic, clarity etc. well enough for ther own purposes). [just refreshed page and seen #5 which, subject to #6, is on similar lines]

Still boldly hazarding: surely relevant – and not much discussed on either thread – is the history of what has been called ‘philosophy’: one (stylised) view might be that philosophy is what’s left of general inquiry when all the specialised disciplines for which distinctive/canonical methods or presuppositions have so far been generated have been hived off into their own departments, with any philosophical advances useful to them being handed over for their use, the philosophical work done.

#12: the canvassed difficulty in explaining why their research is significant socially or intellectually

As in my #13, if you closely read the sentence, it’s not a question of whether the research is intrinsically significant socially, intellectually etc, as to whether it’s sig. soc & int to a particular panel. You could put Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking together, and if they were put on a cross-disciplinary panel to explain the int.&soc.sig of their work to the field of sewage works management, they’d be out of luck (and vice versa for a sewage works engineer, who also does interesting work, explaining developments in his field to evolutionary psychologists and string theorists).

Except that there often are things in analytical philosophy that would be interesting to them (this was a point in my post). Suppose you are interested in “events”. You might find Barry Taylor’s work interesting, or some contemporary analytic work on causation (eg my soon-to-be former colleague, Carolina Sartiorio’s work, or my colleague Dan Hausman’s now not so recent book). It would be odd if you didn’t, frankly. Now, my guess is that neither of those colleagues of mine have thought much about how literary theorists think about events; and maybe it would help them to get funding if they did, though I doubt it would help them do the work that they are doing.

A lot of research proposals I have seen in the humanities do more than touch on ethics — they make normative claims about changes in human affairs within particular societies or within interpersonal relationships. Very often it is obvious to me what the flaws are in their sketchy arguments, and equally obvious that they have not consulted the work in ethics that would help them to make the arguments more rigourously (without thereby being drawn into doing analytic ethics). This is irritating, but it is also evidence (which you just have to trust me on, because I’m not going to name names) that philosophy could be more valuable to people than they perceive it to be.

All of that said, I’ll give an example where reading something that I think counts as cultural studies helped me enormously. I read Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood a few years ago (my wife read it for a class and made its central thesis sound so preposterous that I had to read it). I discovered by reading it that the claim that “X is socially constructed in some quite deep sense” is completely orthogonal to the claim that “there are no universal moral standards by which we can evaluate X”. I suppose that is obvious to most people, but because I had seen the two claims linked so often, I assumed they were related in some deeper way. Postman’s book doesn’t make any kind of argument to this effect; it shows, rather than tells. So, I learned something important (and a whole lot of other important things about the moral character of childhood) that maybe I could have learned some other way but didn’t. I guess that reading Postman changed a lot about the way that I frame some of my arguments about childhood, and certainly has made it easier for me to explain why the work matters.

The questions about Chris’s comment in #15 are whether other philosophers are as responsible as he is about this, and whether the level of responsibility varies by discipline. My guess is that the answers to both questions is no.

But the question remains – are there any other people doing (however defined) analytical philosophy whose work might be useful as a hook for film criticism or development economics, and if not, why do so many people who organise panels for a living think there ought to be?

For development economics, the work of Peter Spirtes on the statistical analysis of causation is of fairly obvious importance. For film criticism, I don’t know of any off the top of my head — in fact, it seems like the influence ought to run in the other direction, as the visual arts seem like promising ground to find interesting challenges for the linguistic turn.

If I were on a cross-disciplinary panel invited to evaluate the worthiness of a proposal on 17th-century French poetry (or whatever) for funding, and I was asked about the social or intellectual significance of the work, I just wouldn’t take the question to be about its social or intellectual significance for my own work. I’d take the question to be broader than that

But if it was an interdisciplinary panel, and a proposal came up on “Influences of early Provencal troubadours on Racine”, and it appeared to have absolutely nothing to do with philosophy at all, then wouldn’t you correctly respond something like “This isn’t an interdisciplinary paper; it might be a very good and interesting field, but it’s totally internal to C17 French literature, it doesn’t really have any signifiance outside that field”. That seems like a totally sensible reaction to me and suggests that the answer to the implict question in Michele’s work is that lots of these panels were set up on the basis of a presumed interdisciplinary interest that didn’t exist. It seems fairly trivial to me that it’s possible to create interdisciplinary panels which will never find anything interesting, so all I’m doing is advancing the suggestion that they’re actually a lot more common than people think, and this explains the observable social facts.

If I was going to prepare a case against philosophers, btw, it would be more on the grounds of their listening habits than their talking. The tiny, tiny non-economic literature on Granger causality seems to me to be a real example of Not Invented Here Syndrome having practical consequences.

Went away for a bit, but wanted to respond to comments on my earlier #5.

My favorite approaches to defining “scientific inquiry” are books along the lines of “Uncommon Sense” and “The Unnatural Nature of Science,” both of which emphasize that science is a cooperative intellectual activity conducted in the context of *moderate* skepticism about the reliability of human intellectual abilities.

Rational inquiry of predated modern science. The picture is that philosophers are still, to some extent, engaged in old-style “pure” rational inquiry, while the scientific community started paying more and more attention to actual experiments. The issue becomes really pressing when experiments start undermining intuitions (particles have definite locations, animate/inanimate is a fundamental distinction) that are the basis for philosophical arguments.

Responding to Bertram’s #8, I also would emphasize the distinction between philosophy and genuine science. Nevertheless, philosophical anti-naturalists often arrive at their conclusions by way of rational argumentation — the idea is, if you think hard enough, you are forced to conclude .

#20 Well no, not really. I think there are 2 distinct reasons why you might set up an interdisciplinary panel:

(1) Because you think there’s an interdisciplinary interest in the sense you’ve just identified.

(2) Because you want an range of great and good outsiders to ensure fair play, commensurability of standards etc. (In the same way that academic appointment and promotion panels often have multiple disiplines represented).

My responses above assume (2). So there I am, and I’ve read the referees reports by disciplinary specialists and they tell me that X is very important and there are no obvious warning signs etc. The person has done a good job of explaining to me (and extradisciplinary person) why X matters from an intradisciplinary perspective. I think I’m bound to give it a thumbs up. Ranking the stuff compared to other proposals from other disciplines is tough and a bit arbitrary, but unless you are going to ring-fence little micro-disciplinary pools of money forever, it has to happen.

#25 Well it may be a combination of all three. In fact I suspect that non-philosophers are frustrated because philosophers don’t do the things that they would find useful. It isn’t exactly that they are looking for stuff to lift, but rather that they have extradisciplinary expectations and beliefs about what philosophy is and how it relates to their work that most actual philosophy doesn’t match up to (but “theory” does). Philosophers, on our side of things, are often too impatient to explain things properly to people whom (they regard as) dumb enough to take “theory” seriously.

A lot of panels are not there for interdisciplinarity, but to fund good work within the disciplines which might, or might not, be interdisciplinary. As Chris says, unless each discipline is ring-fenced with its own pot of money, it is inevitable that people will be making decisions on disciplines that are not their own. Chris is right, too, that they ought to exercise judgment in a way that is not biased by their own interests and disciplines. My experience with division level tenure committees has been good (we are, sensibly, ejected from the room when our own departmental colleagues are being judged).

So I think three things are going on.

1) There is, indeed, a valid criticism of philosophers for not communicating what they know to the rest of the humanities (and not knowing what they need to know in order to communicate that).

2) Philosophers are losing market share (Leiter complains about this from time to time and I think it is a consequence in part of 1).

3) Others in the humanities are impatient with philosophers, and more impatient with them than they are with each other, because i) philosophers don’t communicate well, ii) non-philosophers have uncorrected predispositions about what philosophers are doing and why they should be doing something else and iii) philosophy is, indeed, more distant from the rest of the humanities intellectually than they are from each other, so it is just harder for them to see the significance of the work, even if it is reasonably well stated in its own terms.

I think that practitioners of most reasonably confident academic disciplines are pretty arrogant about their disciplines, and that philosophers aren’t really that much worse than others. They might seem much worse, but that might be because they share fewer assumptions and methods with other humanities disciplines than are shared within the rest of the humanities, so that someone in English, say, is more likely to have a point of contact with someone in History, and someone else in French, and someone in Spanish, than with someone in Philosophy. Even Linguistics, which is also an outlier, probably benefits from the distribution of linguists across many departments.

One last thing. In the calls for most of these competitions for grants/awards there is a clear statement that the panel will contain people from many disciplines, and that you may well not be assessed by someone familiar with your discipline, so you have to explain things in clear and accessible language. Not trying to do so is either lazy or arrogant, and is both stupid and rude, regardless of whether arrogance or laziness is the underlying trait. (That’s trying, I’m talking about, not succeeding — I think philosophers try and fail, because it is difficult, and there’s nothing wrong with that). My suspicion is that others in the humanities try harder, but also get away with not trying more readily than philosophers because of what I said in the previous paragraph.

You can’t appropriate, say, Davidson to talk about film? Really? Surely some of the stuff about interpretation could be put to use in film criticism?

Becker’s article is from 1953, not 1963

To be fair, that is partly a function of the way the post is framed, and also the way you have framed your questions to the philosophers. Only partly, perhaps.

Philosophers do listen, quite a bit, to economists and scientists, and much less to other social scientists and to humanists. But it is worth remembering that a couple of years ago Chris himself nominated a book by an ethnographer as the only contemporary book that he could think of that all political philosophers have to read. I’d nominate Postman as one of the books that any political or moral philosopher thinking about children or the family has to read. In fact, I will, in a subsequent post.

(I think I’m going to have to do a whole post about Granger Causality and the very, very limited engagement with it by philosophers, which is also topical because Sir Clive recently died).

Especially odd because other non-economics disciplines- notably neuroscience and bioinformatics- certainly have noticed it and made pretty extensive use of it. So it’s not as though it’s not fairly widely known outside economics.

Daniel- I’d never heard of Granger (it’s not my area so I don’t feel bad about this) but looked it up to see what I could find. You’re right that he’s not mentioned in some books where you might think he would be. But in Nancy Cartwright’s book _Hunting Causes and Using Them_ it’s listed in the index as “Granger causality or Suppes causality”, where the “Suppes” is the philosopher Patrick Suppes. Suppes worked on probabilistic notions of causation from the 70’s, at least, on. At least one book on Suppes discusses Granger a fair amount. (I just looked in the indexes and searched inside a bit- I’m not competent to know whether the discussion is any good.) My guess is that if the two had similar accounts (and I don’t know at all), and a philosopher wanted to talk about probabilistic notions of causation, she’d look first at Suppes, if for no other reason that that since Suppes was a philosopher he was more likely to put the problem in familiar terms and to relate it to similar problems. But it may well be that there are important differences between the accounts and that philosophers should look at Granger more than they do.

Matt @ 37,

As an aside, I should note that Suppes is still alive and active in philosophy today. He has a remarkable body of work, which is well summarized by his book Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures (free PDF of RaIoSS).

It’s bloody amazing that people refer to Davidson at all in the context of art, art history, or history of any kind. The fixation of synchrony and the opposition to subtext is pathological. It’s like listening to a legal philosopher who’s never tried a case argue against rhetorical language.
“What Metaphors Mean” I looked it up.
“metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation mean, and nothing more”

Le Jaseroque
Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave,
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux,
Et le mômerade horsgrave.
Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils!
La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend!
Garde-toi de l’oiseau Jube, évite
Le frumieux Band-à-prend.

Son glaive vorpal en mail il va-
T-à la recherche du fauve manscant;
Puis arriveé à l’arbre Té-Té,
Il y reste, réfléchissant.

Tell me what and more importantly HOW that means.
This discussion isn’t bizarre, it’s obscene

‘Granger causality’ looks potentially interesting (on a cursory internet search), but I’m not quite clear (on that same cursory search) why philosophers are supposed to be especially interested in it qua philosophers. It doesn’t look as though it constitutes a theory or conception of causation, or a special kind of causality – rather, a statistical method for discovering a certain kind of diachronic correlation. That may well be relevant to a given probabilistic account of causation, but not necessarily beyond that – and I’m afraid to say, perhaps more on the listening end than the talking. (Though those who need to get actual results tend I think to be a bit impatient with philosophical input, which I suspect is rarely straightforwardly helpful, and may often be rather bad news…)

I needn’t really bother pointing out that I could be quite wrong about some or all of this.

On listening in general: there is a ‘philosophy of..’ for most other disciplines (potentially all) – which involves philosophers doing a great deal of listening/reading. I like dsquared am still a bit unclear what the actual issue/problem is supposed to be – but then I should read the book I suppose!

Granger-causation (which Granger always credited to Norbert Wiener – “Granger causation” is a folk term because people kept wanting to say that it wasn’t “proper” causation) is defined as: A Granger-causes B iff:

A is temporarily prior to B, and
A provides information about B which is not available from any other source.

Granger’s specific and unique contribution was to show that subject to fairly general conditions, if a linear combination of two stochastic processes is stationary, then it must be the case that one of them Granger-causes the other.

Granger’s challenge to philosophers was to say what there was over and above “mere” Granger-causation in “real” causation. I know from second and third hand anecdotal accounts that in later life he became rather frustrated that none of them seemed to be interested in taking this question seriously.

there is no reason why a bright student shouldn’t use stuff he learned from reading Quine for the interpretation of literary works

Hilarity!

#45: Criticism might not be on grounds that G-causation is not always sufficient for causation. It might instead not always be necessary. Off the top of my head, and going on your presumably simplified rendering: assume A causes B, and A has a side-effect C which does not cause B, but is just as predictive of it (because correlated with A in a suitable way). Then A causes B but does not G-cause B (because C can provide the ‘same’ information). So if the envisaged scenario is possible, G-causation is not always necessary for causation. (But this, unless I have made some blunder, must have been observed before.)

#47: Shun the complete collection of properly-connected and jointly-frumious Bandersnatch parts!

Dsquared, perhaps Granger causation wasn’t taken up by philosophers because they were more concerned with asking what is real causation over and above Humean causation? Since Humean causation is weaker than Granger causation, any answer to the first question would entail an answer to the second.

assume A causes B, and A has a side-effect C which does not cause B, but is just as predictive of it ((because correlated with A in a suitable way).

For this to work “a suitable way” would have to mean “always”. In which case every A is also a C and there are big problems in saying either that A and C are separate events, or that A causes B but C doesn’t. ( I think that the problem here is that you’re using “just as predictive” to mean “C alone can be used to predict B with just as much accuracy as A alone”, whereas the marginal information criterion would be “A alone or C alone can be used to predict B with just as much accuracy as A and C”)

Ignorance of fact and paucity of argumentative standards. I know whereof I speak: I was one of them

this is presumably intended as rhetoric, but the implied syllogism (I was an X; I was Y; All X are Y) is quite obviously invalid. So by the criteria of a literary theorist it might (might) be considered a good argument but by the criteria of a philosopher it isn’t. So we both recognise there’s a problem here.

perhaps Granger causation wasn’t taken up by philosophers because they were more concerned with asking what is real causation over and above Humean causation? Since Humean causation is weaker than Granger causation, any answer to the first question would entail an answer to the second

? Surely the point here is that Granger’s answer to the first question was “Granger causation” and his answer to the second was “nothing”. In which case your statement is trivially true but misses the point.

Not wishing to compare myself to the greats, but my limited experience in trying to interest philosophers (or at least philosophy journals) in ideas of causality derived from (an economists version of) decision theory had the same reception as Granger got. There are quite subtle differences in the approved disciplinary ways of thinking about problems that create big barriers to communication.

We saw this also in the Cohen seminar – even though philosophers, economists and others are concerned about broadly similar problems regarding justice and inequality, we couldn’t seem to agree about what constitutes a proper question, let alone what would constitute a satisfactory answer.

I’ve never seen a really satisfactory discussion of this. CT seems like a great place to have it, and it seems as if Michéle might have some very useful insights to get us started.

response about development economics and analytic philosophy: perhaps the most obvious recent example of the interaction between philosophers and development economists is nancy cartwright’s hunting causes book which was written partly while she visited Princeton’s Center for Health and Wellbeing (run by economists) and mentions discussions with angus deaton (a development economist) many times. more generally, any work on causality will have some audience in applied empirical economic work (cartwright is one contributor. but there are others). second, and this is obviously old hat, a lot of public finance and tax policy economists adopt utilitarian positions but other theories of welfare and justice often make an appearance.

Last two paras got flipped. Herbert did not write about Granger causality (though he did have an economics degree), he wrote about Cathars and stuff. Where’s Emerson?

dsquared,

I read assume A causes B, and A has a side-effect C which does not cause B, but is just as predictive of it ((because correlated with A in a suitable way) as saying that A causes both B and C (C by way of side-effect, but that’s the law of unintended consequences for you), and that C provides the information for evaluating G-causality since both B and C correlate with A. I see where you get the “always correlates” part, but “always correlates” does not automatically lead to “every A is also a C”.

A physical example of this is entanglement. The properties of the unmeasured particle are correlated to the properties of the measured particle, not because you took measurements of the properties of C. Rather, the two particles have correlated properties because you entangled them beforehand. “A” is not a “C”, yet the correlation gives access to information about “B”. How would you posit that the entanglement is the measurement, and would the quantum information/encryption people agree with you?

Unless I am missing something (and I am quite shaky on quantum probability), the cases where A and C provide exactly the same information about B because of entanglement are exactly those cases where people are very reluctant indeed to talk about causation.

John Quiggin @56: that sounds very promising for making some serious progress – can you give more detail?

[BTW A post of mine’s just been selected for (random?) stop-and-moderate. For when it does show up, the first sentence should read: ‘Well yes, but…’ and thus starts the long dialectic (this example, or one like it, presumably rehearsed elsewhere).]

Notsneaky in 59- for what it’s worth, Hoover is now joint-appointed in the philosophy department at Duke, and was (perhaps still is, I’m not sure) co-editor of the well-respected (though pretty specialized) journal _Economics and Philosophy_, so he’s reasonably well-known and is well-respected among philosophers. (For some time he was deeply involved in an interdisciplinary group at UC Davis that included John Roemer and Jean Hampton, among others, but that at least became less prominent when Hampton and Roemer left Davis.)

The problem with people doing philosophy outside philosophy departments is that they’re not trained in philosophy. (…) Since they have a sufficient mass, they are able to exercise power and anoint particular people as stars from amongst themselves, but this ranking exercise is indifferent to actual quality.

Maybe it’s because I studied both philosophy and comparative literature, but I’ve met quite a few profs and also some students who were really good at both. Of course if somebody has been focused on reading Hegel, Quine or whatever from day one, he will be better at that than somebody who took a more comprehensive approach. And the students of comparative literature could generally be divided into those who read more philosophy/theory and those who focused on reading literary works, because doing both takes a lot of time. But you will have similar divisions within philosophy departments and I see no good reason why bright people should not be able to do both or why there should be a strict division between philosophy and the rest of the humanities.

sleepy — I thought you were done. I also thought you were male, but that just shows how much I know.

Magistra’s comment at 69 is interesting to me in part because I’ve been reading Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, which is also anthropology, and which I picked up mostly out of an interest in “theory”–I think Mary Douglas’s books are usually classed as “theory.” I can see two ways of interpreting Goody, either as critiquing various strands in anthropology or as laying out a sampling of ways scholars in all fields might think about culture. These might correspond to two different approaches to philosophy per se. But though the book might count as theory, Goody is an anthropologist and does not fit the definition “philosopher”, and furthermore whether one or another of those two readings is available would seem to depend on whether anthropologists’ scholarly writings are assumed to be legible to non-anthropologists.

Philosophy is not a formal science.
Analytical philosophers are another branch of the the Chicago school that argues that facts are irrelevant.

Roger @ 35: Could you give a positive characterization of what folks in literature are doing and the role of Theory in it (or some examples if it is too diverse to characterize a general method)? If they’re not applying Theory X to Text Y, what are they doing?

I’ve tried to engage you and failed.
I asked questions. They received no answer. And I’m as qualified to ask them as anyone on this page. The relation of literature to philosophy is akin to the relation of the activity in a courtroom to legal philosophy. This discussion seems to ignore that distinction.
And by the way: can one translate Mallarme or not? It’s a simple yes or no question.
And its on point I think. If it’s not then please tell me why.

Well, they do all sorts of funky stuff which is indeed impossible to summarize, but you might want to take a look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_Literature

The notion that they steal theory from philosophers or that they simply apply theory x to text y is totally laughable.

oops, the above was in response to Matt’s post

Quine: No statement is immune to revision..
Rousseau: Commençons donc par écarter tous les faits, car ils ne touchent point à la question. Il ne faut pas prendre les recherches, dans lesquelles on peut entrer sur ce sujet…

“Mistakes were made.”
It makes sense that a logician wouldn’t be aware of the history of the passive voice and it think it meaningless.
Do I have to explain it to you too?

When you’re willing to revise any of your own statements let me know.

“The answer to the question is no. you cannot translate Mallarme without losing information.”

That isn’t obvious to me, but then, I’m not sure what you mean by “information” and “loss” here.

Should we draw a firm line between translation and exegesis and interpretation?

Is a densely annotated translation of Mallarme’s L’apres-midi … (along with some audio clips of Debussy, say) a violation of the spirit of Davidson’s argument about translatability? After all, the annotations are an ongoing effort to convey the richness of meanings from one setting to another, and that seems to be consonant with much of what Davidson says about translation and conceptual schemes.

I think Ian Hacking is on to something in distinguishing between the sorts of statements “that may be made in any language … and statements whose sense depends upon a style of reasoning” that lets us recognize an utterance or proposition as a candidate for truth or falsehood. This isn’t unrelated to LaBonne’s distinction between a sort of straightforward (but often-clumsy) mapping of meanings with utterances, T1, and a deeper conveyance of imagery, metaphor, pungent symbols, etc, T2. Along these lines George Lakoff spent a fair bit of time in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, laying out several plausible senses in which utterances might and might not be translateable. Or here, a better illustration of T1 translatability but a radical (but not permanent) failure of T2.

More pointedly, it is possible to argue with Davidson without dismissive and insulting assertions about the stupidity of analytic philosophers and the inscrutability of poets who had a clever way with sounds.

Uzani, his army at Lashmir.

Loren, there’s a way to find out what gets lost in translation, namely trying to translate a literary or philosophical text from one language to another. It’s damn hard and every translator would concede that he had to make choices which change the meaning of the text, sometimes only slightly, sometimes quite significantly.

novakant, I’m certainly not disputing that. It just doesn’t persuade me that Davidson and other analytic sorts are morons simply because it’s a difficult, time-consuming, and inevitably incomplete process, explaining art and poetry across languages and cultures. And yet we still labour mightily to do so. I see that as partly a vindication of Davidson, not a refutation.

I think in the last two I said just about all I ever wanted to say on this site.
I described what I’ve always assumed to be obvious, in a way that I think made that obviousness quite clear.
Thank you Engels for lobbing me that softball pitch that allowed me my coda.

[aeiou]Don’t tempt me, asshole.

loren, Davidson is certainly not a moron, but I think his claim, that there are no conceptual schemes, or rather that there is only one conceptual scheme common to all of us, is too strong or maybe just too general. The problem with his approach is that he seems to jump straight from a refutation of incommensurability to the claim of universal translatability.

This is far too neat to be accurate and we need to examine the gray areas where translation is only partially successful and we are left with both a shift in meaning and elements that remain incommensurable. Literature as the highest form of human expression in language can serve as an extreme example, of what is actually very commonplace in ordinary communication. Whenever a poet tries to translate his feelings, experiences and thoughts into written language, a reader tries to translate a text into a something that he can connect with or a translator tries to translate a text from one language to another, something gets lost in the process and there are shifts in meaning.

These gray areas of only partially successful translation are pervasive, the norm rather than the exception, and they cannot be explained away by the notion of an imagined omniscient interpreter. And while hilzoy points out that “translation” in these debates has a wider meaning than that of our ordinary language use of the word, I would still hold that the act of translating a text from one language to another is the closest we can get to actually experiencing and really understanding how shifts in meaning occur and what incommensurability means.

I think Davidson needs to posit at least in theory some sort of ueber-scheme to end all schemes, even if he wants to throw out the whole concept of scheme vs. world and doesn’t want to call it a scheme. Here he’s just conceding that we’re not quite there yet. In the next paragraph he talks about not giving up the notion of “objective truth”, if only “relative to language”, but within the realm of language there are, at least potentially, no incommensurable blind spots. I think that such blind spots exist, both on an individual and a cultural level and that we can only try to approximate, but never fully capture, their reality through language. That said, I’m certainly not denying that Davidson’s claim isn’t of interest to the humanities, it’s interesting and provocative.

Re. novakant@100, as I understand it the “standard” interpretation of “we need to examine the gray areas” is something like “consilience”: although every science has its own information structure, and we are at present divided by the incommensurability between our various partial knowledges, we can and should work to merge sciences into an eventual whole–not philosophy, but one big science (including the social sciences and human sciences, usually). I’m not sure whether Davidson agrees (I’ve only read two articles of his).

Can’t resist:

“What’s a philosopher?” said Brutha.
“Someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,” said a voice in his head.

— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods