Get Your Hate On II: Against Simplicity, Research Time, 04/01/2018

I can understand why Gilles Deleuze would have been especially bitter about what pure Analytic Philosophy™ became. It started as a punk rebellion against pretentious Cambridge Hegelianism.

When I was studying the history of early Analytic Philosophy at McMaster University under Nick Griffin, he told me an amazing story about how that field came to be. G. E. Moore was a graduate student at Cambridge, talking with one of his senior professors, J. M. E. MacTaggart. During this casual lunchtime conversation, MacTaggart offhandedly remarks, “Well, of course, time isn’t real.”

Moore's reaction – “What the fresh fuck?!?!” Or the paragraph-long, overly-polite equivalent appropriate to 1890s England.

Of course, as soon as I thought of this example to update the Waverley
case, I had to throw on this album. More than a decade later, it's still
so good!

That punk spirit – the urge to overthrow an oppressive, beyond-the-world, pretentious Hegelian near-mysticism – animated the forge of Analytic Philosophy. But the school’s leaders focussed that spirit on reducing anything that could suggest the metaphysical away from philosophical thought.

What does that Waverley problem amount to today? Here’s an example better suited to the 2010s.

You remember when Untrue came out and no one knew who Burial was? So before 2008, when you talked about “Burial,” the reference of the name was mysterious, unknown. You could point to the album, listen to the music, but you couldn’t say what the real meaning of the name “Burial” was before William Bevan was outed.

It’s a mind-twisting problem to consider on its own terms. People still write essays returning to Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” to this day, more than a century later. But Deleuze’s critique still stands – Who the fuck cares? What does it matter?

In the specific context of mathematical logic, it makes perfect sense. But the extreme reductivism of Analytic Philosophy™ reduces philosophical thinking to these problems of word meaning and reference. Everything of wide or visceral relevance is abstracted from philosophy.

So here’s Deleuze’s argument for why Analytic Philosophy™ is to destructive to genuinely creative thinking.

Reason one. When you apply a problem of reference whose proper context is mathematical logic to all philosophical thinking, you end up reducing all of philosophy to logic. The doctrinaire rationalism of the American Analytics – I’m thinking in particular of Willard Quine and the many other thinkers he influenced – raises science to the ideal of thought.

I've come to think of Richard Rorty as having combined the most
profound errors of American Pragmatist™ thinking with those of
doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™, delivered with all the smugness
of a lifelong Ivy League academician's style.
But that's another post.

But this reductive image of science isn’t even how science actually works. It’s that bizarre science of totalizing unification – the one true form of knowledge. This is why the sub-disciplines of philosophy of science that haven’t yet overcome the influence of Quine and Donald Davidson have become so moribund – their practitioners believe in a unified science that doesn’t exist.

Reason two. Philosophy turns into discourse alone. You exchange logical propositions and proofs – whether as symbolic logic or as propositions with the same simple framework – and evaluate them. Are the inferences valid? According to which system of logic?* A vibrant, creative tradition reduced to tiresome nitpicking.

* Even here, merely admitting that there can be more than one valid system of logic, all mutually incommensurable or irreducible, is more than the presumptions of doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™ can bear.

Reason three. Philosophical conversation becomes mere debates over opinions. Is this a good argument? Are all your inferences valid? What are the facts and states of affairs that justify what you say?

Deleuze calls it Richard Rorty’s dinner table. Casual arguments over minutiae, tossed off with all the commitment of those who are never at risk from anything. As if conflicts over values, ethics, and ways of living have never killed anyone.

They never killed anyone as comfortable as Rorty, or most of the folks who think such arguments are philosophy’s central subject matter.

The Content of a True Contradiction, Research Time, 29/01/2014

Having finished Graham Priest’s Beyond the Limits of Thought, you might wonder what one of these true contradictions might be. I discussed the basic logical foundation of it a few posts ago, and one of the conversations I had with friends who read it revolved around what contradictions would actually be true. Because when you open the possibility of true contradictions, you also open yourself to straw man arguments from your enemies to make you look ridiculous.

After all, just because there can be true contradictions doesn’t mean that every contradictory sentence is true. There can be true propositions of regular sorts. That doesn’t mean that every proposition is true. The sentence “I am Adam Riggio and a root vegetable” is contradictory, but it isn’t true because I’m just Adam Riggio, no matter what dreams and aspirations I may have to become a turnip. The sentence “Adam Riggio was born in Jakarta” is a sentence with a non-contradictory form, but its form doesn’t make it true, because it’s empirically false. I don’t even think I want to go to Jakarta. The climate would kill me in the face.

The whole book is an exploration of one type of true contradictions, the contradictions which indicate a limit of thought. We reach a point in our conceptual exploration beyond which our powers to think don’t work. The tricky part of this idea, where contradictions appear, is that in order to identify a limit of thought, we have to transcend the limit. That’s why Priest identifies this contradiction in terms of transcendence and closure. A limit concept of thought generalizes over the totality of what can be thought or expressed or iterated, closing the set. But in order to generalize over that totality, we must refer to what can’t be generalized, transcending the set we just closed. In referring to what can’t be encompassed in the totality of what can be thought, we think it. So we both can think it and are unable to think it. 

Bertrand Russell's most fertile period in philosophy was
spent working to overcome what he held to be intolerable
contradictions in logic. Personally, he also reminds me of
an interesting take on Doctor Who.

In the history of philosophy, this was often conceived as the thought of the infinite. Finite creatures can’t conceive of the infinite, so goes the idea. Especially since in some periods of philosophy’s history, the infinite was conceived as the uncountable, and mathematical conception only included very simple counting methods. When set theory was developed, we now had a system of rules that could count infinite quantities, or at least quantify over them. Being able to do this helped clarify a confusion, or rather identify that our previous thought had been less transparent than we believed. Set theory was a new standard to think about infinity.

Priest’s book looked through the history of philosophy to find the common thread in all these limit concepts of thought: totalizing self-reference. The perfect example in logic is the set of all sets. Being itself a set, it would have to include itself in its own set. But that would make it subject to the classic Russell paradox, that a set being a member of itself implies that it is not a member of itself. Russell’s generation of logicians spent years obsessed with overcoming this contradiction because they took as an unquestionable premise that consistency was a necessary condition of the true, that a contradiction could never be true because reality was consistent. It’s been an obvious and clear truth since Aristotle declared it to be so in his writing.

Aristotle was also a teleological evolutionist and believed in a geocentric cosmology. Aristotle is no authority.

Self-reference is one species of true contradiction. There are probably others, but I don’t want to talk about them today. Except perhaps for one little moment of jamming, a speculation that I’ve wondered about for years, ever since I started studying the nature of human thought and mind. 

The limit of our thought lies in the contradictions of self-reference, reflexive and reflective thought, self-consciousness. We wouldn’t have the personalities we do without self-consciousness, the ability to think beyond immediate needs and immediate perceptions. Self-consciousness is the ability to imagine the future and the past, planning for uncertainties and conceiving of priorities and desires. Self-consciousness is the ability to critique and change ourselves and our behaviour. To do so, we must refer to ourselves, include ourselves in our statements about the world, even as referring to the world implies that we are somehow separate from the world. Sartre, for example, described human consciousness as beyond the world, but embedded in it. Self-conscious creatures like humans may very well be another species of true contradictions walking around all over this planet.