Construing perspectivism

International Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2002, Pages

  Coker, John C ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33847342493     PISSN: 02705664     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/intstudphil20023433     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy [hereafter, NTP] (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 127, 131
2. Brian Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals" [hereafter, "PNGM"], in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality [hereafter, NGM], ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994), p. 334. In note 2 on p. 352, Leiter lists alleged adherents to RV, including Kofman, Schrift, Danto, Grimm, Derrida, Magnus, de Man, Nehamas, Strong, Conway, Warnock, Davey
3. Richard Schacht, Nietzsche [hereafter, N] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 95, 112
4. Richard Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche [hereafter, MSN] (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995)
5. See NTP 128 where Clark claims that GM III:12 "is the only statement of Nietzsche's perspectivism in the works I have placed in stage 6 of his history of the 'true world' "
6. see also "PNGM" in NGM, pp. 334-57, especially page 335 where Leiter endorses Clark's privileging of GM III:12, which falls into what he dubs "Stage III" works of the "mature Nietzsche."
7. Citations from A, BGE, GM, and TI are from Walter Kaufmann's translations. Citations from D and HH are from the Hollingdale translations; and citations from WP are from the Kaufmann-Hollingdale translation
8. That Nietzsche's parenthetical remark in phase 5 may allude to D is supported both by its epigram from the Rig Veda ("there are so many days that have not yet broken") and by the following passages from book 5: 543 (intimating towards perspectivism), 548 (order of rank), 562 (the free spirit), 565 ("creation" of eyes and ears), and 575 (bird-like distance, also an allusion back to the epigram)
9. Cf. EH "Books" HH:1, where Nietzsche emphasizes the free spirit
10. E.g., Nietzsche is prepared to give up the "subject/object" distinction: see WP 522 (cf. GS 354)
11. Nietzsche's critique of the traditional philosopher's faith in opposite values, broached in BGE 2, reiterated in BGE 24, and elaborated in BGE 3, challenges the "consciousness"/"instinctive" distinction. Even if one does not place much weight on the Nachlaß, WP 589 lists a series of distinctions that it claims are interpretations, not facts, that are explicitly and implicitly critiqued in the published works: ends/means, cause/effect, subject/object, acting/suffering, thing-in-itself/appearance
12. Clark (NTP, p. 112) follows Wilcox and relies on HH 9 to claim that Nietzsche does not deny the existence of the "true" or metaphysical world, but only holds that it "has no function to play"; but in HH 10 Nietzsche continues by reflecting on how belief in the metaphysical world may become something to be explained psychologically. But Clark's admission that HH 9 supports the claim that "the true or metaphysical world has no function to play," and reading HH 9 in conjunction with HH 10, I would claim that these passages more closely fit phase 5's "idea [of the 'true world'] which has become useless and superfluous," rather than the moment 4's "The true world - unattainable? At any rate, unattained." And none of these points supports attributing positivism (in various guises) to HH: Nietzsche in HH does not subscribe to petit faits, to uninterpreted sensory 'givens,' to a grandiose vision of science as the end-all and be-all, or the like
13. NTP, p. 39
14. citing Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 1
15. Clark's interpretation has some support from Davidson, but it is later undercut by other remarks by Davidson. In Donald Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" [hereafter, "CTK"], in Reading Rorty [hereafter, RR], ed. Alan Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 122, he writes: "truth is correspondence with the way things are." But in "Afterthoughts, 1987," in RR, pp. 135-36
16. Davidson claims that "Truth is one of the clearest and most basic we have.... Any further attempt to explain, define, analyse or explicate the concept will be empty or wrong: correspondence theories, coherence theories ... [etc.], all such theories either add nothing to our understanding of truth or have obvious counter-examples." These remarks would also undercut what support Clark can get from Davidson's remark that "it is good to be rid of representations, and with them the correspondence theory of truth, for it is thinking that there are representations which engenders thoughts of relativism." See Donald Davidson, "The Myth of the Subjective," in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed., Michael Krause (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 165-66
17. Later claims by Davidson undercut Clark's construal of him: "it is futile either to reject or to accept the idea that the real and the true are 'independent of our beliefs.' The only evident positive sense we can make of this phrase, the only use that derives from the intentions of those who prize it, derives from the idea of correspondence, and that is an idea without content ..." though Davidson would hasten to add that this does not require us to reject the "platitude" that "believing something does not in general make it true
18. " See Donald Davidson, "The Structure and Content of Truth" [hereafter, "SCT"], The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXXXVII, No. 6 (June 1990): 279-328, esp. pp. 304-5, 314
19. Leiter cites and endorses Davidson's "platitude" in "PNGM," in NGM, p. 349. I would add: accepting Davidson's platitude does not a fortiori commit one to accept any correspondence theory, minimal or otherwise
20. See Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 [hereafter, TP] (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 24
21. see also Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter To Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 146-56
22. Hacking remarks (in discussing Quine, though equally applicable to Davidson) that "Good sense (or charity) inclines us to exclude any system of translation that would lead us to infer that the natives assert brief and obvious self-contradictions" (p. 152, emphasis added)
23. One might also raise, against Davidson and Clark, Hacking's objection (pp. 149-50) to "principles" like those of "charity" or "humanity": "There is nothing wrong with the principles of charity and humanity if they are just commonsense rules of thumb that might, like all common sense, sometimes offer bad advice
24. " See also Michael Forster, "On the Very Idea of Denying the Existence of Radically Different Conceptual Schemes," Inquiry 41 (June 1998): 155-56, where he points out that Aristotle's interpretation of the pre-Socratics and tragedians illustrate the "principle of charity" in its "necessity of finding, and therefore insisting on identifying, massive agreement between those texts and himself in both concepts and beliefs ... [And] precisely because he does remain faithful to his theory he gives interpretations of texts in question which are generally bad ones...."
25. rd Ed., ed. A. P. Martinich (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 415-26, esp. pp. 416, 419, 421-25
26. "SCT," note 56, pp. 312-13
27. Cf. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind [hereafter, BinM] (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 72
28. Rorty's remarks on Davidson's theory of metaphor are correct as to Davidson - a metaphorical utterance as such is like a birdsong, it is a causal stimulus to belief and meaning, but it is not itself meaningful or cognitive. See Richard Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 169. In note 27, pp. 171-72
29. Rorty remarks that "Davidson would regard ... Johnson and Lakoff's talk of a 'gestalt' as [one of the] 'dormative power' explanations of 'how metaphors work.' " I dissent from Rorty on this issue
30. For Davidson, see "WMM" in PL p. 419: "a simile tells us, in part, what a metaphor merely nudges us into noting"
31. and p. 421: "A metaphor directs attention to the same sorts of similarity, if not the same similarities, as the corresponding simile." But contra Davidson see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh [hereafter, PF] (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 126
32. PF, p. 124
33. See also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [hereafter, MWLB] (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 211-18
34. Sam Wheeler III, "True Figures," in The Interpretive Turn [hereafter, IT], ed. David Hiley, James Bohman & Richard Shusterman (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 195-217, esp. 210-14
35. See also BGE 24
36. See BinM, pp. xxi-xxvi, 190-93
37. see also MWLB, pp. 186-88, 198-209
38. MWLB, pp. 77-96
39. John Searle, "Literary Theory and its Discontents," in New Literary History, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 1994): 638-39
40. Searle cites, on p. 638, Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 123-24, 117, 126
41. BinM, pp. 188
42. BinM, p. 188, citing John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), p. 149
43. "PNGM" in PGM, p. 348: Leiter remarks that there is a tension between Wittgenstein's claim that philosophy "leaves everything as it is," and "his remarks on rule-following [which] seem to alter radically our understanding of meaning, normativity, and objectivity"
44. Leiter claims that this tension can be resolved by recognizing that the latter can be taken as "something like a 'transcendental' condition on notions like meaning.... It is only against a background of such dispositions [to use words in certain way] that it is possible to employ any intelligible idea of a [normative] constraint on meaning."
45. BinM, p. 188
46. on p. 167, Johnson queries: "What if, following the consensus of contemporary analytic philosophy, we deny the strict separation of the analytic from the synthetic, the a priori from the a posteriori, and the formal from the material [and, he could have added, of scheme from content]? If we regard these as poles on a continuum, then there is no need to exclude imagination from some supposed pristine realm of 'cognitive content' or 'objective structure.' "
47. See also "True Figures" in IT, pp. 204, 210-14
48. See PF, pp. 26-30
49. see also George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 31-38
50. Johnson remarks, in BinM, p. xxxvii, that "The method I employ might be called a form of descriptive or empirical phenomenology, in that I will be attempting a kind of 'geography of human experience.' Such a geography seeks to identify the chief contours (structures) and connections that our experience and understanding exhibit. It would explore the emergence of comprehensible form and organization in our experience and the means we have of making sense of it. The test of its success is comprehensiveness, coherence, and explanatory power." The term "phenomenography" is from Richard Schacht, Hegel and After (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), p. 227
51. See also PF, pp. 9-15, 74-93. Since in PF Lakoff and Johnson defend and operate with a notion of the "cognitive unconscious," their enterprise may be described as a "hermeneutic phenomenography."
52. PF, pp. 72, 128
53. TP, p. 43: Rorty is citing Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 20, 28
54. Cf. Giovanna Borradori, The American Philosopher (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 16: "Neither language nor the mind organizes perceptible reality according to fixed conceptual schemes, since they and the world are all part of an intersubjective conceptual matrix.... The entire universe, subjective and objective, is trapped in a hermeneutic mesh of signs. Reality itself is nothing other than a coagulation of language and interpretation."
55. Though the Davidsonian triangulation of subject, intersubjectivity, and world takes intersubjectivity to be the basis of knowledge, and while such assignment of priority would be justifiable as a methodological assumption of a (e.g., Davidson's) specific research program, it is not justifiable tout court, especially epistemologically or ontologically. For, as Rorty points out "A large body of Davidsonian doctrine suggests that it is hopeless to assign one apex of this triangle priority over the other two, in respect to basicness or standard-setting." See Richard Rorty, "Davidson's Mental-Physical Distinction," in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson [hereafter, PDD], The Library of Living Philosophers Vol. XXVII (Chicago & La Salle: Open Court Publishing Company, 1999), p. 587
56. "Afterthoughts, 1987," in RR, p. 135-36
57. Here I apply, but also part company, from Lakoff and Johnson, who, though remarking on the metaphoricity of many abstract philosophical concepts, appear to assume that "correspondence" is entirely literal. See MWLB pp. 179-84
58. See PF, pp. 72-73
59. Clark's Nietzsche cannot allow for the possibility that an epistemically privileged perspective could be false to any extent. But Clark's position does not follow even from Davidson's principle of charity - if charity begins or at least applies at home, and if charity requires attributing mostly true beliefs, then a charitable interpretation of one's own beliefs could involve at least tacitly acknowledging that at least some of one's own beliefs are false. See Davidson, "CTK," in RR, p. 133: "The agent has only to reflect on what a belief is to appreciate that most of his basic beliefs are true...." And if Clark would not allow for this possibility (e.g., by treating one's perspective as a conjoined set of beliefs), then her position is open to the so-called preface paradox, which, in a nutshell, would maintain, on the basis of past experience, that it is not unreasonable to believe that at least some of one's current beliefs not only may be, but are or at least are likely false
60. See Earl Conee, "Preface Paradox" (and the articles in his bibliography) in A Companion to Epistemology, ed. John Dancy & Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), pp. 357-59
61. See NTP, p. 65
62. citing TL. As if echoing Lakoff and Johnson, Schacht remarks that "A natural language, consisting of the 'flexible army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms,' that has become 'fixed, canonical and binding' for a linguistic community, fleshes out the syntactic and logical-categorial skeleton which structures our experience, articulating the world as we apprehend it" (N, p. 75; emphasis added)
63. See WP 552: "'Truth' is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered - but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather the will to overcome that has in itself no end - introducing truth, as a process in infinitum, an active determining - not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the 'will to power.'" My use of "en procès" follows that of Julia Kristeva, "The Subject in Process" [le sujet en procès], trans. Patrick ffrench, in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench & Roland-François Lack (London: Routledge, 1998)
64. Schacht, in N, cites WP 560, 556, 555 on p. 100
65. his main citations invoking justice are WP 259 on p. 102 & GS 333 on p. 103
66. he goes on to discuss GM III:12, GS 373, 374
67. and BGE 22, 23 on pp. 104-6
68. in MSN Schacht cites HH P6
69. Kofman, like Schacht, ascribes knowledge as justice in interpretation to Nietzsche, and in her main discussion she offers few pertinent citations: BGE 22, GS 301, 374 in Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (London: Althone Press, 1993), pp. 140-43
70. earlier, on p. 111 she cites HH 107, which does include the phrase "the sense for truth and justice in knowledge."
71. See Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Comany, 1978), p. 18
72. See also Catherine Z. Elgin, Considered Judgment [hereafter, CJ], (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996), p. 123: '"Objects in a vacuum fall toward the Earth at a rate of 32 ft/sec' is not strictly true since it neglects the gravitational attraction of everything except the Earth."
73. "PNGM" in NGM, p. 351: Leiter is citing, and endorsing, (see note 39, p. 357)
74. Ken Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 49
75. Wittgenstein, as Leiter (not atypically) interprets him, leaves matters ambiguous whether the "transcendental conditions" on meaning truth and knowledge are non-cognitive common dispositions or normative or both, and this would also apply, by analogy, to Leiter's Nietzsche. See "PNGM" in PGM, pp. 348-50, esp. p. 348. Contrast "True Figures" in IT, p. 199
76. Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), p. 45
77. See John McDowell, "Scheme-Content Dualism and Empricism," in PDD, pp. 87-88
78. McDowell cites Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A51/B75. See also note 24
79. N, p. 62
80. NTP, pp. 128, 135
81. "PNGM" in NGM, p. 351
82. See Nancy Fraser, "Solidarity or Singularity?," in RR, pp. 302-11 for a helpful survey and critique of Rorty's views as they developed on this issue
83. See, e.g., GS 333. The current conceptions of reflective equilibrium in analytical philosophy originate with Goodman in some remarks on logic, and then get highly developed by Rawls, Daniels and Dworkin in ethical and legal theory, and then by Elgin in her "constructionalist" reconception of epistemology. For Goodman, see Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955), pp. 65-68
84. for Rorty, see Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth, p. 137, cf. also pp. 66-67, 98-103
85. for both Daniels' own views and Ravvl's, see Norman Daniels, Justice and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996)
86. for Dworkin's views (in contrast to Rawls's), see Taking Rights Seriously, esp. Chapter 6
87. for Elgin, see CJ, 101-45
88. By offering "equilibrium" in place of "Zusammenklang, " I am not simply abandoning the latter notion, for equilibrium theorists in a variety of fields often invoke the notions of "accord," "consonance," and "harmony" (all of which are standard translations of Zusammenklang): see, e.g., Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), APPENDIX 2, Section 3, "Note on Facts and Valuations," p. 1055, where he discusses "harmony" and "equilibirum."
89. Elgin in CJ writes the following (my emphasis added): "Clearly such [additional] judgments should be consonant with the ones we already hold. But what makes for consonance?" (p. 103)
90. "we might compromise, modifying a variety of commitments to bring them into accord" (p. 132)
91. "Revisions reverberate" (p. 132)
92. Moreover, Stich, in effect, challenges the very notion of "reflective equilibrium" as being an "uncashable and useless metaphor"
93. see Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 75-89
94. While I think Stich's challenge can be met, I also take his challenge to evince that the philosophical employment of the notion of equilibrium is an employment of a conceptual metaphor - "equilibrium" operates as a rigorous exact mathematical model in thermodynamics, in chemistry, and in biology, but it is not at all clear it so operates in the analytical philosophical notion of "reflective equilibrium" or in my "adjudicative equilibrium." That, however, does not make it "uncashable and useless": its usefulness and "cashability" must be proven out in whether it enhances our knowledge or understanding, and whether it allows more justice in adjudication to be done