A Kantian Rationale for Desire-Based Reasons

September 2, 2004 4:01 PM

"Suppose you are looking for your keys. You check your pocket, then a table by the door, and you finally notice them sitting next to a pile of mail. "These are my keys," you say. Clearly the word "these" refers to your keys. but on what does this fact supervene? Which conditions are such that, necessarily, if they obtain, then your use of 'these' has the referent it does?" Philosophers' Imprint is a web site devoted to the free dissemination of philosophy scholarship. The above by Susanna Siegel, Assist. Prof. at Harvard.
posted by JohnR (43 comments total)

The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:03 PM on September 2, 2004

As Voltaire said, "A pithy saying proves nothing".

Actually, a great many of them did change it. Logicians, for example, invented the tools by which modern computing became reality. Marx was just blowing hot air.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 4:12 PM on September 2, 2004

Oooooh, SNAP!

I want humanity to enter the age of the Philosopher Kings dammit, I'm tired of waiting through all of this discovery!

Excellent link, JohnR. Needs more naked chicks but still cool.
posted by fenriq at 4:20 PM on September 2, 2004

My belief is, with the exception of Bertrand Russell, that there has not been a valuable presence in philosophy since Kant.
posted by the fire you left me at 4:53 PM on September 2, 2004

These folks have the right idea..."There is a possible future in which academic libraries no longer spend millions of dollars purchasing, binding, housing, and repairing printed journals, because they have assumed the role of publishers, cooperatively disseminating the results of academic research for free, via the Internet.'"

It seems that the obstacles to this future are social and institutional. The existing academic publishing industry certainly doesn't want to see an era of free and open publication. Also, acceptance by the canonical organs of print is institutionally recognized as the most important signifier of academic merit (and of tenure-worthiness). That's going to keep dead tree academic publishing around for a while, I think. What's needed is for more top departments to create this kind of referred site and to keep them going, slowly building momentum until electronic publishing is fully equal in status.
posted by crunchburger at 5:01 PM on September 2, 2004

Ack. Refereed. Also, behold the wonders of analytical philosophy of language! I kind of both envy and pity people who are so into worrying about fixing referential intentions, etc. The fact that the author is looking to supervene her linguistic facts on appears to be the fact that it's freaking obvious that you are talking about your keys, except restated with a powerful technical vocabulary within rigorous formal limitations.
posted by crunchburger at 5:07 PM on September 2, 2004

Mind Candy! You have my sincere thanks JohnR. Even if I don't quite get all of it, I'll still build a couple of new neural pathways. Thank you thank you.
posted by sciurus at 5:33 PM on September 2, 2004

What conditions? I'm guessing some keys on the table.
Was I right?
posted by uosuaq at 5:34 PM on September 2, 2004

What oft was never thought about because it was taken more or less for granted, but ne'er so tortuously expressed.

I'd either hate or love to see Limited Intentionism be really thoroughly developed to describe sentences containing both "these" and "those", and gestural as well as perceptual clues.

Sort of like arguing about the ontological status of fictional characters: kind of fun if nothing else.
posted by kenko at 5:38 PM on September 2, 2004

Actually, a great many of them did change it.

Yes, indeed. Sartre discovered penicillin, Plato first conceived of ABS brakes and Peter Sanger is usually credited with bringing moveable type from China.
posted by Mayor Curley at 5:42 PM on September 2, 2004

Nothing new since Kant? Boy, that's spouting the company line. What about Foucault? Quine? Singer? Santayana? Groening? Tagore?

Though I do like Russell quite a bit.
posted by Dantien at 5:53 PM on September 2, 2004

Heidegger? Davidson? Austin?
posted by kenko at 5:59 PM on September 2, 2004

Since Kant? Hegel comes to mind.
posted by uosuaq at 6:04 PM on September 2, 2004

The problem with Hegel: there seems to be no reason, outside of desiring to be a Hegelian, to believe that history is the progressive unfolding of the Absolute.
posted by crunchburger at 6:12 PM on September 2, 2004

"Which conditions are such that, necessarily, if they obtain, then your use of 'these' has the referent it does?"

Let's see. What conditions might possibly apply to the use of the language in this way, in this context? Let me cast about a bit...

...Oh, here it is! I found exactly the condition in question!

"Suppose you are looking for your keys."

There's your condition for you.

I'm not a philosopher, nor have a widely read western philosophy. Is all of it comprised of such shoddy thinking, or just this piss-poor example?
posted by majick at 6:17 PM on September 2, 2004

...gestural as well as perceptual clues.

There are imperceptual clues?

When a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound?

When a clue is not perceived is it still a clue?
posted by five fresh fish at 6:17 PM on September 2, 2004

i have trouble enough finding my car keys, thank you
posted by pyramid termite at 6:24 PM on September 2, 2004

The problem with Hegel: there seems to be no reason, outside of desiring to be a Hegelian, to believe that history is the progressive unfolding of the Absolute.
No doubt there are plenty of problems with Hegel, as with Kant, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Plato (my top 5, in no particular order). You don't have to buy into everything a philosopher thinks for their writings to be worthwhile.
(Go check out Kant's remarks on the Jews.)
posted by uosuaq at 6:26 PM on September 2, 2004

For the most part "dead tree" publication is over. In the last 5 years of graduate school I've only accessed journals online and what isn't online is readily available through interlibrary loan in PDF format.

I really look forward to the proliferation of services such as this because the real issue is public access to scholarly work and not access to for authors to journals that will publish their work. "Online publication" will only be of value if the critical part of the academic process is still intact. Although there is a wide variance in the quality of what is available in journals, the best, and therefore most reliable, sources have still have the most stringent peer review standards. That stated, there is still a lot of bad work that gets through the peer review process even in the better journals. Search services like NIH's PubMed and Web of Science are critical in determining the reputation of authors (i.e. publication record) and how many times its been cited (i.e. how valuable others have found the work in advancing their own efforts).

I think the potential problem to look out for is the over democratizing of the peer review process. The point of peer review is to have individuals who have a comprehensive understanding of the topics discussed in a paper to provide critical feedback prior to publication in addition to giving it their stamp of approval. My concern is that open publication does not ensure this critical step and only serves to lower signal to noise ratio in most academic fields.

Apologies for the long winded post, but my hope is to get this post back on the track of discussing this potentially valuable means of disseminating academic work.
posted by Gif at 6:35 PM on September 2, 2004

My belief is, with the exception of Bertrand Russell, that there has not been a valuable presence in philosophy since Kant.

Richard. Rorty.
posted by eustacescrubb at 6:37 PM on September 2, 2004

True. I guess my gripe really has to be restated against followers or imitators of a great philosopher, not against his books. Check out Schopenhauer for the serious Hegel hating. Also, where did Kant write about the Jews?
posted by crunchburger at 6:37 PM on September 2, 2004

Wittgenstein. (I think Rorty is more an interpreter of Dewey, Heidegger, and Derrida than an original thinker, of course his influence is very great). An interesting thing about Wittgenstein is that both analytic (the guys who aren't sure that they are really talking about their keys) and Continental (for lack of a better term, or postmodern if you must) philosophers both build on his work.
posted by crunchburger at 6:45 PM on September 2, 2004

Gif, applauding your attempted re-railing: I agree with you in that the integrity of peer review is critical. I'm kind of assuming that it was maintained here (IANA Philosophy PhD) due to the good reputation of the departmant that peer reviews for it.
posted by crunchburger at 6:53 PM on September 2, 2004

FFF: "perceptual" was a bad choice of words. But I think what I meant would be clear from the context of the paper. You did read even as little of it as I did (the first four pages), right?

Where S is a speaker who uses a demonstrative expression D, and succeeds in referring, by her use of D, to an object x:
(a) S perceives x;
(b) S intends to refer to x by using D;
(c) The intention described in (b) is anchored by
S's perception of x.

Though maybe you were making a joke? "Imperceptual" not being "imperceptible"... I can't tell.

Majick: That's not really true, now, is it? Merely the fact that I'm looking for my keys doesn't vouchsafe that the "these" in the statment "these are my keys" refers to them. It would be nice if there were keys present, right? And since I take it (this was my impression from the article, and I don't see why anyone would be writing about conditions of knowledge pertaining to referents this is wrong) that the author's concern is with how other people would be able to tell what the referent is, it would be nice if I did something like, say, look at the keys, or pick them up, or both. Say there were multiple sets of keys on a table. I walk over to it, survey it, and announce, looking, as far as you can tell, at no one set in particular, "these are my keys". Which was I referring to?

I'm not a frequent MeFi commenter, and I haven't read your particular comments assiduously. Tell me, are they all based on ignorance of the links being discussed, or is this a particularly shoddy example? It's one thing to think that the questions people are trying to answer are utterly silly, pointless, and basically uninteresting logic-chopping, but the practitioners are, for whatever reason, trying to find deeper answers than "well, duh!"

Crunchburger: was just talking to a friend who asked why no one had mentioned ol' LLWW yet. Same is true of Kant and (lesser extent, I'm mostly thinking of Sellars, I guess, and to be honest I'm not that up on current [or any other] kind of philosophy) Hegel, nicht wahr?
posted by kenko at 6:55 PM on September 2, 2004

hear, hear, eustacescrubb! Rorty has saved me from despair in many, many ways at different stages of my life.
posted by stonerose at 6:59 PM on September 2, 2004

One potential downside to all-electronic publishing is that other journals need not do as Philosopher's Imprint has done and make their contents freely accessible (even though there is absolutely no reason not to and plenty of reason to do so). I understand that some journals that have online equivalents (I don't know how many are solely online) are pretty restrictive; while anyone who has access to a library with hard copy journals can read one—and I'm pretty sure that basically anyone can use a state school's library, since it is a public institution—access to electronic journals can be restricted to those who have accounts on a school's network. JSTOR does that, and it's annoying: in a few months my account with my college will expire!

I don't see why the medium in which an article is published need have anything to do with the quality of the peer review. I know there are print journals that have lax standards.

Either Brian Weatherson or Brian Leiter, discussing Philosopher's Imprint at some point, mentioned that since they don't need to have a certain page length to make publishing worthwhile, they can publish exactly as many or as few articles as they think are worthy. I used to work for the managing editor of two economics journals, and the backlog was terrific: a paper wouldn't get published until years after it had been accepted (and it would only get accepted a year or a year and a half after being submitted). Much easeir for an online journal to publish more when they get more quality work, and just wait out the dry spells.
posted by kenko at 7:03 PM on September 2, 2004

I have to apologize...Kant's remarks on the Jews are not in any of the books I have on my shelf...they appear in minor works, lectures or newspaper articles or the like. I thought they would be famous enough to be easily findable on the web, but a quick search (although it did turn up some quotes) didn't give me any really good sources.
posted by uosuaq at 7:07 PM on September 2, 2004

kenko: Do you think that my suspicions about there being a prejudice about the quality of work in web-only journals are off the mark?

on preview: I would expect Kant's views here to be pretty typical of any borgeouis person in his society in 1800, which is not very appealing.
posted by crunchburger at 7:11 PM on September 2, 2004

crunchburger, I was responding to this statement by Gif: "I think the potential problem to look out for is the over democratizing of the peer review process. The point of peer review is to have individuals who have a comprehensive understanding of the topics discussed in a paper to provide critical feedback prior to publication in addition to giving it their stamp of approval."

I don't see why web journals should be susceptible to this any more than print journals. I don't doubt that there is prejudice against web-only journals, however unmerited, though (Philosopher's Imprint does appear to be well-regarded).
posted by kenko at 7:19 PM on September 2, 2004

Though maybe you were making a joke? "Imperceptual" not being "imperceptible"... I can't tell.

Indeed. A very poor one, at that.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:22 PM on September 2, 2004

kenko, I love you.
posted by Dantien at 7:50 PM on September 2, 2004

Wittgenstein. (I think Rorty is more an interpreter of Dewey, Heidegger, and Derrida than an original thinker, of course his influence is very great). An interesting thing about Wittgenstein is that both analytic (the guys who aren't sure that they are really talking about their keys) and Continental (for lack of a better term, or postmodern if you must) philosophers both build on his work.

I dig Wittgenstein, but I think you underestimate Rorty. That his work is readable and understandable by people of ordinary intelligence who are not schooled in the discourse of philosophy is something the admire.

And I think you should add Davidson and Kuhn to the list of people he "interprets". He draws on them much more than Derrida, IMHO.
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:17 PM on September 2, 2004

I don't see why web journals should be susceptible to this any more than print journals. I don't doubt that there is prejudice against web-only journals, however unmerited, though.

I agree with you Kenko. The intention of my previous statement was to make the point that the ultimate value of this medium of academic publishing will be determined by the quality of work it attracts and whether it is received as a reliable resource. As crunchburger noted access to scholarly work is either unavailable or highly inconvenient to access for individuals outside the academic loop. It really shouldn't be this way given the public support (i.e. research grants, scholarships) that is provided to the pursuit of academic work. The potential value of this medium in addressing this issue and eliminating the limitation on the volume of work that can be published should ensure the success of this medium. My concern is that it is done right so that it does attract high-quality work. I think resources like Philosophers' Imprint are ensuring the integrity of this medium through critical step of peer review.

At the very least, this medium could provide a much more direct means of disseminating valuable work. I cringe most times when I read or watch the minimally informative rehashes of the most recent article published in Science or the "hype and noise" about the latest blip noted by the SETI program in the mainstream media. I think in this sphere academics have really dropped the ball and that making the original sources of the stories easily available to the public could serve as a check against the generally poor job the mainstream media does as a conduit of information.
posted by Gif at 8:30 PM on September 2, 2004

Yeah, I'll cop to my take on Rorty being a bit glib. I really liked the essay I just read on his site, about the analytic/non-analytic schism.
posted by crunchburger at 8:35 PM on September 2, 2004

kenko, thanks for writing the reply to majick that I wish I had come up with. That comment made my blood pressure jump (me being a grad student studying semantics and all.)
posted by advil at 8:37 PM on September 2, 2004

And me with nothing more than a BA to my name!
posted by kenko at 9:56 PM on September 2, 2004

"Merely the fact that I'm looking for my keys doesn't vouchsafe that the "these" in the statment "these are my keys" refers to them."

If you go hunting for ambiguity in subject-object grammar, you will find it. That's shooting fish in a barrel. Language, particularly the language we're using at the moment, is imprecise. That ambiguities can be partially -- often sufficiently -- resolved by context really doesn't point at some kind of Deeper Meaning, even if you've been dosed with a mild hallucinogen.

"...the author's concern is with how other people would be able to tell what the referent is..."

Information theory is pretty clear on this one: If you wish to convey high precision information, you don't strip away the precision before transmitting it. Reducing something with high information content, such as the identity of a ring of keys, to a term like "these" without context is a big swollen red lossy transformation. If you pawn something like that off on a person without sufficient contextual information, I guess the answer to "how other people would be able to tell" is that they don't. Let's not act surprised.

Clearly, parlor tricks like this are meant to be mere handwaving, a gentle prodding at the place where cognition meets linguistics, an exercise in "woah, dude"; there's no shame in calling it what it is.

Listen, I'm all in favor of big thinkers thinking big thoughts, that's a great idea, I back it completely even in cases where I don't personally agree with the result. But please, let's go ahead and call wanking wanking and thinking thinking.
posted by majick at 10:36 PM on September 2, 2004

That Rorty stuff is great. Thanks.
posted by Tlogmer at 1:56 AM on September 3, 2004

(me being a grad student studying semantics and all.)

How can other people tell what the referent is in "You want fries with that?"

just kidding, sort of
posted by bashos_frog at 2:43 AM on September 3, 2004

My second grade teacher asked me know whether someone using the word bangs means an explosion or short hair? I think I said it was how and when they used it. The context.

Me smart back then.
posted by xammerboy at 7:39 AM on September 3, 2004

This is silly.

Indefinites are not, necessarily, ambiguous. The sentence is parsed by english speakers as:

"These (keys) are my keys".

If the person is staring at a basket of grapes while they say it, that is a failing of the person's perceptive ability, not a failing of the language or the indefinite descriptor nor, as it turns out, the speaker's descriptive ability. The speaker is merely incorrect.

Also, most people would simply say "Here are my keys" which removes any ambiguity about whether the person is addressing keys or not, with the possibility of introducing another absurd (non)ambiguity about what "here" means.

Again, indefinites do not necessarily imply ambiguity. If there is sufficient context, indefinites allow conservation of language, so that the speaker is not required to say "Eureka! The keys lying on the table 1.5 meters from where I currently stand are indeed my keys, the subject of my previous search."

That this passes for rigorous academic publication is absurd. Yes, I read about as much as I could stomach of the link. And that is with some college philosophy classes behind me, including a perfect-scored logic class.

A graduate program in semantics? Truly these are the end times.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:40 AM on September 3, 2004

The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.

Surely it is reasonable to think that one can effect more intelligent change to something if one has some understanding of it.
posted by rushmc at 7:50 AM on September 3, 2004

well, this thread is dead, it it's probably better that way. But...

Majick: very few people would argue that "these" is ambiguous - it is vague (roughly, its meaning is underspecified and determined by linguistic context). Ambiguity is when it has multiple discrete interpretations, due to something like a word having multiple meanings. But that aside, the question here is not where ambiguity or vagueness is, or that it exists, or whether it can be resolved, but how it is resolved by a context.

Very few contexts are sufficiently uninformative that there is much question about what "these" is, especially if you speak English, so it is not surprising that most people find the answer trivial. The question is to explain how you know what the answer is in the first place, and what it is about the contexts that makes them informative, preferably explaining both of these things in some kind of formal way. The questions that are being asked do nothing like assume that there isn't enough information in the context to determine the referent of "these". When you give a person a normal amount of information in the context, they do know what "these" refers to, and we want to know how.

These are not easy or trivial questions. It is especially not easy if one wants to give an answer that applies for any use of "these" in any context. When someone says it is trivial, what they mean is that it is trivial to anyone who speaks English (or some human language with demonstratives, which is probably all of them), because speaking English gives you the ability to know what the sentence means.

These concerns are not trivial if the larger question is what speaking English (or any language) actually involves, because any answer of the kind that many people in this thread have been giving (of the it's trivial stripe) devolves into "speaking English involves speaking English", or "using 'these' involves knowing what 'these' means". Well of course that's true, but the question is what does "these" mean? If you try to explain in terms of your competence as a speaker, you have begged that question.

For those of you (all 0 reading this thread 7 days later) wondering why any of this would be useful, and thinking to yourself, "how can someone possibly be employed at this?", consider the following problem. I want to talk to my computer. I want to say, "these are my notes on such and such, file them under category x", or some such thing. "This is my new dog, don't trigger the alarm when it walks around. I want to be able to point or nod in the right direction or whatever, and have the computer know what I mean by "these" or "that". The computer has to be able to do whatever humans do when we here "these". And you can't say to a computer, by way of instruction, "well its friggin obvious that these are my notes", because that won't tell it how to figure out what you're talking about. You have to say in a clear, precise, and formal way, how the computer should understand what you mean by "these" or "that", and the answer should work for any conditions under which you might use those words. And that is why papers like these (and how do you know what I meant by that (and that), huh?) could someday be useful.

ynoxas: I'm not very clear on what you mean. But I'm obliged to point out that there is no indefinite anywhere in any sentence under discussion, as far as I can see. An indefinite is something like "a key" or "some key" or "one key". "These" might be considered an indexical. Perhaps you mean that? It is, in fact, usually considered to be definite, not indefinite.

And there have been graduate programs in linguistics which have allowed specialization in semantics since the 60s or 70s. There have probably been graduate programs in philosophy of language which allow doing something like what a semanticist might call semantics for quite a bit longer then that. Of course, I don't know of any programs that are specifically in semantics, so maybe it really isn't the end times quite yet. Of course, perhaps semantics doesn't mean what you think it means?
posted by advil at 8:01 PM on September 10, 2004