When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted “an epistemology,” he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear—it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn’t matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party.
Daniel Dennett
Example of professing a belief—here, belief is a fashion statement, or something fun to whip out at parties, not a thing that actually constrains anticipation.
I wonder what the story would sound like if told from the perspective of the literary theorist. Perhaps a story about how philosophers like to go on and on about truth and rationality, but when pressed by a relatively intelligent interlocutor, can’t even supply you with something as basic as a theory of knowledge?
I’m not sure why a literary theorist would expect a theory of knowledge to be particularly basic, if they did they’d probably feel equipped to come up with one themself.
Basic to the field of philosophy (it is supposed to be in their domain after all, like criticism is supposed to be the domain of literary theorists), not basic as in trivial for non-experts.
If one were to fault a philosopher for not being able to generate something basic in that sense, I’d think one would also have to fault physicists for not yet having generated a Theory of Everything. A generalized theory of knowledge would be fundamental within philosophy, but that doesn’t equate to being easy to generate, or impossible to work without (if it were, after all, nobody else ought to be able to get any work done without it either.)
I think an epistemology is something a literary theorist in particular has special need of. One thing you can do with an epistemology is recognize meaningless or unknowable claims.
I mean, I don’t know much about literary theory. But I expect my belief that literary theorists need to know epistemology is common here. I mean, one of the (older) posts uses a literature professor as an example of someone trapped by a meaningless claim (No Logical Positivist, I).
As for “an” epistemology, yes, there are a plurality of them. Of which one (or more?) is Bayesian epistemology. Imagine if Dennet taught the literary theorist that, don’t you think he’d do better literary theory? Don’t you think he’d avoid traps that other theorists fall into, of arguing the meaningless or unknowable?
You seem to miss Dennett’s point: the guy wasn’t there because he cared about having a good epistemology, an accurate theory of the world—it’s merely what everyone else is doing at the minute, and so he’s doing it too.
He was there because at the time, you needed an epistemology to be taken seriously as a literary theorist. Good. Literary theorists probably need epistemologies.
What I’m saying is maybe this fashion, as Dennett calls it, is functional. Maybe it’s popular for a very good reason. The way falsifiability is popular in science, for example.. Can’t it be a good thing that the theorist is responding to a pressure in his field?
… not really… if he’s not actually motivated by the additional rightness you can get with a theory of knowledge, then, why would he choose a good theory of knowledge instead of a cool one? I think I see what you’re saying now.
It didn’t matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish.
Also, saying that literary theorists need good epistemologies because it’s crucial to their job is… Something you should offer a fair bit of evidence for. I don’t see the relationship at all—other than the general use of believing true over false things.
… I completely missed that line when I read the quote. This is embarrassing.
And I don’t have a fair bit of evidence for it, all I have is
literary theorists are pretty smart and apparently they thought it was necessary
an epistemology is good for recognizing meaningless or unknowable claims, and from the little I’ve seen of literary theory a lot of the claims looked like that on the surface
that was enough to make me think it was possible that Daniel Dannett was just being a jerk. Because I missed the part of the quote about how the literary theorist didn’t care about getting the right epistemology. I thought he was just making fun of the literary theorist for responding to pressure within his field, because it looked to him like following a fashion. Again. Not something I still believe. It’s because I missed that part of the quote.
I don’t know whether an epistemology can be true or false.
A literature professor might ask: What happens when you see Hamlet in terms of Dennett”s epistemology as opposed to the epistemology of Aristotele?
If you want to ask that question it doesn’t matter whether the epistemologies are true. It makes sense that the professor focuses on understanding the epistemology of Daniel Dennett instead of trying to understand which epistemology is true.
An literature professor doesn’t try to understand the epistemology of God, the one true epistemology. He tries to understand the epistemology of authors. Daniel Dennett happens to be an important author and his epistemology seems worthy of analysis.
I don’t know whether an epistemology can be true or false.
That’s because “true” or “false” are aspects of maps, and epistemologies aren’t maps—they’re mapmaking tools.
You don’t judge tools based on their truth or falsehood; you judge them based on their usefulness towards a certain purpose.
In humans’ case, I think that an epistemology’s job is to act as a bridge between our naive map-making and the world—that is, an epistemology’s usefulness is measured by how well humans can use it to generate maps of their territory, and how well the maps it generates conform to their territory when read by humans. (Where “territory” can mean something as bare and ephemeral as raw qualia, barring any deeper assertion of the epistemology in question).
A literature professor might ask: What happens when you see Hamlet in terms of Dennett”s epistemology as opposed to the epistemology of Aristotele?
If you want to ask that question it doesn’t matter whether the epistemologies are true.
And if you want to ask the question of whether a yeti could defeat a Mongolian death worm it doesn’t matter whether they exist. What is the purpose of seeing Hamlet in terms of this or that epistemology?
A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false; you need additional criteria like a claim, “when followed exactly, this recipe will produce something most people consider to be a delicious cake.” Without a precise claim, there’s room for reasonable disagreement whether the recipe should be optimized for usability by the average individual or for perfect results from a master baker; what exactly constitutes a “delicious cake,” etc. (The Useful Idea of Truth tackles the second question only).
“when followed exactly, this recipe will produce something most people consider to be a delicious cake.”
Of course, for this particular claim to make any cake recipe in the real world true, we must understand “followed exactly” to include making a whole bunch of correct assumptions about how to do many things that are implied but not specified by the recipe (just to pick one example, when told to preheat my oven to 350 degrees, I’m expected to infer Farenheit, or at least whoever calibrated my oven’s temperature dial is expected to have done so).
Of course, many people have no difficulty in practice making cakes by following recipes, precisely because in fact we do routinely make those assumptions.
And I’m not sure how that process is any different from what I’m doing when, if asked whether a recipe is true or false, I assume an interpretive frame similar to the additional criteria you say we need. That is, faced with that question, I infer additional criteria like “following this recipe conventionally will produce a conventionally acceptable cake” whether the criteria are there or not, just like when faced with the instruction to set my oven to 350 I assume Farenheit rather than Celsius. Inferring the additional criterion is itself conventional.
So I would say that “A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false” is true denotationally but implies falsehoods; in practice, there seem to be conventional ways of casting a cake recipe to a Boolean type.
So I guess the question is, are there similarly conventional ways of casting an epistemology to a Boolean?
You seem to be suggesting otherwise, though you don’t precisely say so.
In my experience even the best cake recipes are not entirely reliable; the best you can coerce them to is an odds ratio. And since individual chefs have their own preferred recipes, it’s exceedingly hard to tell the difference between a bad recipe favoured by a good chef, and vice versa.
I agree with all of this except “exceedingly hard.” It’s not that hard to tell the difference between a recipe an average person can reliably make a tasty cake with (aka a “good recipe”) and one they can’t (aka a “bad recipe”) -- just ask a bunch of average people to follow the recipe and see what happens.
No comment on epistemologies, but (as someone who regularly bakes cakes) I must object to your views on cake.
It would be quite a stretch, I think, to say that cakes may usefully be classified as “good” and “bad”, or “tasty” and “not tasty”. Individual preferences are one reason, of course. Regional/cultural/etc. preferences are another. What threshold of “acceptability” (for any meaning of the word) you accept for your cake is yet another. How many people are “most people” is yet another.
In many of these things, there are both gradations (which do not, themselves, threaten the good/bad distinction, only force it into a continuous variable instead of a binary one) and sharper categories of ways in which a cake may or may not be acceptable (which do). For instance, a cake may be “bad” by being inedible by nearly anyone (you mistook salt for sugar); it may be bad by being a bland, sugary superstimulus, good-tasting but lacking in interesting flavor (you ruined or omitted the more delicate flavor-granting ingredients); it may be bad by being unacceptably and avoidably unhealthy (many forms of buttercream tend toward this); it may be bad by failing to satisfy the criteria of its design (you set out to make a red velvet cake, but the result was merely a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and red food coloring).
And that’s not even getting into the quality of a recipe! One may make a cake by following either of two (or more) recipes that differ from each other far more than their versions of the finished product will! Recipes may differ by difficulty of execution; by difficulty of acquiring ingredients; by sensitivity to variation in conditions of preparation; and by other factors. And what is an “average person”, anyway? Do we judge a recipe by how reliably it makes a “good” (see above) cake when followed by someone with little or no knowledge of baking? Or by an experienced, though non-professional, home baker? Does “average” refer to general intelligence and cognitive ability? Some of these criteria are less fair to the recipe than others, I think!
Fair—I meant more at the margin, it’s hard to tell the difference between a quite good chef with a very good recipe and vice versa. Likewise there are many obviously bad epistemologies, but the ones that are still in serious contention, that successful philosophers use, will all be at least pretty good.
In this context, I’d probably say a successful philosopher is one who discerns truths that weren’t previously known. (This is not unique to philosophers.)
Daniel Dennett
Example of professing a belief—here, belief is a fashion statement, or something fun to whip out at parties, not a thing that actually constrains anticipation.
I wonder what the story would sound like if told from the perspective of the literary theorist. Perhaps a story about how philosophers like to go on and on about truth and rationality, but when pressed by a relatively intelligent interlocutor, can’t even supply you with something as basic as a theory of knowledge?
I’m not sure why a literary theorist would expect a theory of knowledge to be particularly basic, if they did they’d probably feel equipped to come up with one themself.
Basic to the field of philosophy (it is supposed to be in their domain after all, like criticism is supposed to be the domain of literary theorists), not basic as in trivial for non-experts.
If one were to fault a philosopher for not being able to generate something basic in that sense, I’d think one would also have to fault physicists for not yet having generated a Theory of Everything. A generalized theory of knowledge would be fundamental within philosophy, but that doesn’t equate to being easy to generate, or impossible to work without (if it were, after all, nobody else ought to be able to get any work done without it either.)
“So what’s it all about then, Bertie?”
I think an epistemology is something a literary theorist in particular has special need of. One thing you can do with an epistemology is recognize meaningless or unknowable claims.
I mean, I don’t know much about literary theory. But I expect my belief that literary theorists need to know epistemology is common here. I mean, one of the (older) posts uses a literature professor as an example of someone trapped by a meaningless claim (No Logical Positivist, I).
As for “an” epistemology, yes, there are a plurality of them. Of which one (or more?) is Bayesian epistemology. Imagine if Dennet taught the literary theorist that, don’t you think he’d do better literary theory? Don’t you think he’d avoid traps that other theorists fall into, of arguing the meaningless or unknowable?
You seem to miss Dennett’s point: the guy wasn’t there because he cared about having a good epistemology, an accurate theory of the world—it’s merely what everyone else is doing at the minute, and so he’s doing it too.
He was there because at the time, you needed an epistemology to be taken seriously as a literary theorist. Good. Literary theorists probably need epistemologies.
What I’m saying is maybe this fashion, as Dennett calls it, is functional. Maybe it’s popular for a very good reason. The way falsifiability is popular in science, for example.. Can’t it be a good thing that the theorist is responding to a pressure in his field?
… not really… if he’s not actually motivated by the additional rightness you can get with a theory of knowledge, then, why would he choose a good theory of knowledge instead of a cool one? I think I see what you’re saying now.
Yes, that’s what this line is about:
Also, saying that literary theorists need good epistemologies because it’s crucial to their job is… Something you should offer a fair bit of evidence for. I don’t see the relationship at all—other than the general use of believing true over false things.
… I completely missed that line when I read the quote. This is embarrassing.
And I don’t have a fair bit of evidence for it, all I have is
literary theorists are pretty smart and apparently they thought it was necessary
an epistemology is good for recognizing meaningless or unknowable claims, and from the little I’ve seen of literary theory a lot of the claims looked like that on the surface
that was enough to make me think it was possible that Daniel Dannett was just being a jerk. Because I missed the part of the quote about how the literary theorist didn’t care about getting the right epistemology. I thought he was just making fun of the literary theorist for responding to pressure within his field, because it looked to him like following a fashion. Again. Not something I still believe. It’s because I missed that part of the quote.
I don’t know whether an epistemology can be true or false.
A literature professor might ask: What happens when you see Hamlet in terms of Dennett”s epistemology as opposed to the epistemology of Aristotele?
If you want to ask that question it doesn’t matter whether the epistemologies are true. It makes sense that the professor focuses on understanding the epistemology of Daniel Dennett instead of trying to understand which epistemology is true.
An literature professor doesn’t try to understand the epistemology of God, the one true epistemology. He tries to understand the epistemology of authors. Daniel Dennett happens to be an important author and his epistemology seems worthy of analysis.
That’s because “true” or “false” are aspects of maps, and epistemologies aren’t maps—they’re mapmaking tools.
You don’t judge tools based on their truth or falsehood; you judge them based on their usefulness towards a certain purpose.
In humans’ case, I think that an epistemology’s job is to act as a bridge between our naive map-making and the world—that is, an epistemology’s usefulness is measured by how well humans can use it to generate maps of their territory, and how well the maps it generates conform to their territory when read by humans. (Where “territory” can mean something as bare and ephemeral as raw qualia, barring any deeper assertion of the epistemology in question).
Yes.
To the extend that’s your paradigm Dennett’s truth centered paradigm is misguided.
And if you want to ask the question of whether a yeti could defeat a Mongolian death worm it doesn’t matter whether they exist. What is the purpose of seeing Hamlet in terms of this or that epistemology?
The same purpose as reading Hamlet in the first place; aesthetic enjoyment & intellectual exercise.
Sounds like you’ve got a funny epistemology… Try reading The Useful Idea of Truth.
A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false; you need additional criteria like a claim, “when followed exactly, this recipe will produce something most people consider to be a delicious cake.” Without a precise claim, there’s room for reasonable disagreement whether the recipe should be optimized for usability by the average individual or for perfect results from a master baker; what exactly constitutes a “delicious cake,” etc. (The Useful Idea of Truth tackles the second question only).
Of course, for this particular claim to make any cake recipe in the real world true, we must understand “followed exactly” to include making a whole bunch of correct assumptions about how to do many things that are implied but not specified by the recipe (just to pick one example, when told to preheat my oven to 350 degrees, I’m expected to infer Farenheit, or at least whoever calibrated my oven’s temperature dial is expected to have done so).
Of course, many people have no difficulty in practice making cakes by following recipes, precisely because in fact we do routinely make those assumptions.
And I’m not sure how that process is any different from what I’m doing when, if asked whether a recipe is true or false, I assume an interpretive frame similar to the additional criteria you say we need. That is, faced with that question, I infer additional criteria like “following this recipe conventionally will produce a conventionally acceptable cake” whether the criteria are there or not, just like when faced with the instruction to set my oven to 350 I assume Farenheit rather than Celsius. Inferring the additional criterion is itself conventional.
So I would say that “A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false” is true denotationally but implies falsehoods; in practice, there seem to be conventional ways of casting a cake recipe to a Boolean type.
So I guess the question is, are there similarly conventional ways of casting an epistemology to a Boolean?
You seem to be suggesting otherwise, though you don’t precisely say so.
In my experience even the best cake recipes are not entirely reliable; the best you can coerce them to is an odds ratio. And since individual chefs have their own preferred recipes, it’s exceedingly hard to tell the difference between a bad recipe favoured by a good chef, and vice versa.
I would suspect the same of epistemologies.
I agree with all of this except “exceedingly hard.” It’s not that hard to tell the difference between a recipe an average person can reliably make a tasty cake with (aka a “good recipe”) and one they can’t (aka a “bad recipe”) -- just ask a bunch of average people to follow the recipe and see what happens.
No comment on epistemologies, but (as someone who regularly bakes cakes) I must object to your views on cake.
It would be quite a stretch, I think, to say that cakes may usefully be classified as “good” and “bad”, or “tasty” and “not tasty”. Individual preferences are one reason, of course. Regional/cultural/etc. preferences are another. What threshold of “acceptability” (for any meaning of the word) you accept for your cake is yet another. How many people are “most people” is yet another.
In many of these things, there are both gradations (which do not, themselves, threaten the good/bad distinction, only force it into a continuous variable instead of a binary one) and sharper categories of ways in which a cake may or may not be acceptable (which do). For instance, a cake may be “bad” by being inedible by nearly anyone (you mistook salt for sugar); it may be bad by being a bland, sugary superstimulus, good-tasting but lacking in interesting flavor (you ruined or omitted the more delicate flavor-granting ingredients); it may be bad by being unacceptably and avoidably unhealthy (many forms of buttercream tend toward this); it may be bad by failing to satisfy the criteria of its design (you set out to make a red velvet cake, but the result was merely a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and red food coloring).
And that’s not even getting into the quality of a recipe! One may make a cake by following either of two (or more) recipes that differ from each other far more than their versions of the finished product will! Recipes may differ by difficulty of execution; by difficulty of acquiring ingredients; by sensitivity to variation in conditions of preparation; and by other factors. And what is an “average person”, anyway? Do we judge a recipe by how reliably it makes a “good” (see above) cake when followed by someone with little or no knowledge of baking? Or by an experienced, though non-professional, home baker? Does “average” refer to general intelligence and cognitive ability? Some of these criteria are less fair to the recipe than others, I think!
Yes, I agree with all of this.
Fair—I meant more at the margin, it’s hard to tell the difference between a quite good chef with a very good recipe and vice versa. Likewise there are many obviously bad epistemologies, but the ones that are still in serious contention, that successful philosophers use, will all be at least pretty good.
Mm. How do we recognize a successful philosopher?
Good question! How would you go about answering that?
In this context, I’d probably say a successful philosopher is one who discerns truths that weren’t previously known. (This is not unique to philosophers.)