Human reason and a common world: Why Wittgenstein and Rawls are both wrong

Review of Metaphysics

Volumn 60, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 359-384

  Kaplan, Morton A ^a,b  

^a University of Chicago ^*  (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 33846379271     PISSN: 00346632     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. See the masterful dissection of rigid designation in Leonard Linsky, Names and Descriptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 66 and following.
2. See also Morton A. Kaplan, Science, Language, and the Human Condition, rev. ed. (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1989), 61-71.
3. 2O, was shot down in turn.
4. Kaplan, Science, Lanquage, and the Human Condition, 51-61.
5. Series of email exchanges with a member of a group of neo-Aristotelian philosophers who proposed the example of the end of a line. My learned and helpful interlocutor, Peter Redpath, has corrected mistakes in my understanding of Aristotle. Although we continue to disagree, I have learned much from him that was useful in writing this article. I agree that stable designations have a kind of unity and permanence. However, "kind or is not the same as actual. I, thus, disagree with Aristotle's position that if a definition of a unit is true it is necessarily true. No formal definition can be true of the world in such a sense. I see permanence and change, unity and plurality, and necessity and chance as correlatives and things as transitionally segregated bundles of potentialities (See n. 7).
6. The classical Greek philosophers had no knowledge of how the neural system operates in the formation and employment of concepts. However, we now know that this process is inconsistent with an identity, even in the limited Aristotelian sense, between a sign and a concept. When an object or quality is recognized, signals fire from different parts of the brain. Although it would be a mistake, as Neils Bohr noted, to reduce brain to mind or mind to brain (complementarity applies, as it does in the wave/particle case: see Max Born, Physics and Politics [New York: Basic Books, 1962]), this indicates that concepts have a complex neurological context. They do not exist in a discrete form as do signs that mediate between the mind and referents. Thus, they evolve as the content of mind evolves. Furthermore, recent research shows that different parts of the brain are involved in top down (general perspective) and bottom up characterizations of the objective world.
7. "I do deplore, like yourself, the nonhermeneutical, noncontextual assumptions that underlie the way scientists, such as Wheeler, misunderstand the meaning and role of theory. But this is not just a fault of scientists, but also of many philosophers who mistake symbols for the signified (what is meant) and theoretical equations for universal world structure, independently of observers, research communities, the laboratory horizons of experiments, and the practical horizons of technical design." Communication from Patrick Heelan, William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University. The next section of this article and Heelan's comments express a similar position.
8. Kaplan, Science, Language, and the Human Condition, 79-122. These pages provide both a critique of individual proposals for unique protocols of confirmation or falsification and a discussion of how the metaphor of fit is used to deal with judgments in a variety of fields.
9. This is an infinite process. It is interesting to note the position Georg Cantor took when he claimed that some infinite sets are larger than others. It is true, for instance, that for the interval of 1 to 100 the set of integers is twice as large as the set of even integers. However, an infinite set is not something that exists but a process that is characterized by an algorithm. One infinite set may be "sort of larger than another but it does not have actual existence as a set (According to the Tristram Shandy paradox, if Tristram lived forever and if it took him two days to write up each day's events, then the older he got the farther behind he would be until eventually he would be infinitely far behind). This does not mean that the concept of truth is meaningless but only that every claim of truth is limited. Within their intensional and extensional limitations things do have a kind of unity and a kind of permanence. The world is such that some types of interpretations, within their extensional and intensional limitations, function with enough reliability to permit understanding and communication.
10. See Kaplan, Science, Language, and the Human Condition, 142-71.
11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscomb (Oxford: Basil Blackwell and Mott, 1958), 116e.
12. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 80e.
13. In 1917 three children claimed the Virgin Mary appeared, offered predictions, and stated she would reappear on several occasions. When a multitude gathered for a particular appearance, they claimed to see the Virgin, a vision of hell, and the dancing of the sun. Although some who were not in the local area claimed to have seen the dancing of the sun, most people did not. One prediction was that a particular two of the children would die soon and that did occur.
14. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 224e.
15. An analysis of John Rawls's major book A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971)
16. is presented in Morton A. Kaplan, Justice, Human Nature, and Political Obligation (New York: The Free Press, 1976), 107-81.
17. These pages offer a critique of the particulars of Rawls's argument and of the reasons for their adoption. They also analyze special devices such as the reflective equilibrium, which depends upon unspecified and, if one accepts the philosophical position stated earlier, nonexistent universal generalizations of social science. A critique of utilitarianism is also contained in these pages. A systematic discussion of the various types of choice theory and of problems in their application to complex real-world events is presented in Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957), 167-250.
18. The only game for which this appeared to be true was the two-person zero-sum game, although, even so, it would hardly be an adequate foundation for a general theory. Then L. J. Savage pointed out the minimax regret criterion. The prisoners' dilemma seemed to pose an absolutely dominant solution until one examined the relationship between raw outcomes and utiles. The prisoners' dilemma is a dilemma only if one specifies that the prisoners value jail sentences inversely with length and that they are indifferent to the fate of their colleagues. If the prisoners know they care about each other, tacit coordination turns it into a cooperative game. The numbers employed for dollars in various games are determined by the von Neumann utility axioms, which invoke an exhaustive set of comparisons. (This is why it may be rational for some people to buy one, or even more than one, ticket for a Big Lotto even if the expected dollar value is less than the purchase price.) Such comparisons depend on dense analysis. The test in principle also invokes a dense form of analysis.
19. The asymmetric bargaining game - and all bargaining games in principle are asymmetric - replicates the problem introduced into game theory by minimax regret. There is no single solution and, hence, no rule that is uniquely fair in Rawls's sense. However, in this case, it is not attitude toward risk but conceptualization of bargaining strength that is at issue.
20. Kaplan, Justice, Human Nature, and Political Obligation, 47-104, presents a step-by-step critique of Toulmin's denial of the objectivity of the good.
21. Stephen Toulmin, Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).
22. For discussions of the test in principle, see Kaplan, Macropolitics: Selected Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Politics (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), 36-45;
23. Kaplan, Justice, Human Nature, and Political Obligation, 174-81;
24. and Kaplan, Science, Language, and the Human Condition, 250-79.