So you might reconsider your first argument. Folk have experiences that do not imply that something exists - hallucinations, dreams, illusions and so on. Your conclusion is not justified. — Banno

I don’t think Bob Ross meant that the experiences we have are necessarily veridical. Nor does this question have anything to do with our more sophisticated scientific knowledge, compared to Kant. The Enlightenment thinkers were well aware of hallucinations, etc.

Rather, when Bob Ross gives his first two premises:

1. There is experience, therefore something exists.
2. That something, or a part of it, must be producing experience. — Bob Ross

I take him to mean that the “something” which must exist and be producing experience could just as well be whatever process produces illusions. The point is that, veridical or not, something is going on.

I am asserting that all final causes are reducible in the above sense. — sime

This is very clear and helpful. I’ll let Leontiskos pursue the evolutionary biology question, but I want to raise a problem concerning the more common use of “final cause” -- that is, as a reason for doing something. Are you saying that a proper analysis of the first three causes, taken together, would also eliminate or correct a statement like “I raised the flag to show my support for our troops” as an answer to the question, “Why did you raise the flag?”?

I think we could recast the statement, "X is true, therefore you ought to believe it," with, "X is true, therefore you ought to see that it is true (and then you will believe it)." — Leontiskos

This nicely captures the problem. I agree that the recasting doesn’t ask us to create any “rational space” between understanding and believing. So my misgivings about whether such a space really exists are avoided. In the recast version, “and then you will believe it” is meant to describe a (necessary?) consequence or perhaps even a definitional identity between “see the truth” and “believe it”. We’re not left wondering whether we can still not believe!

But what is the force of the “ought,” in the recast statement? Is “You ought to see that X is true” the same thing as “You ought to believe X”? I don’t think so. I read the two statements as saying quite different things. “You ought to believe X” wants to claim that the truth of X gives us a reason to believe X, a reason that should be heeded. Whereas “You ought to see that X is true” could be saying a couple of different things. It could mean, “If you understand X, then you ought to accept its truth.” Or it could mean, “You have an obligation, under the circumstances, to understand X so as to affirm its truth.” What sort of obligation? Perhaps an important decision is at stake; perhaps time is running out on an ethical dilemma.

The point is, neither interpretation of “You ought to see that X is true” is offering a reason to believe it, in the way that “You ought to believe X” does (claim to) offer a reason for belief. The original, unrecast version is claiming that a space is available between truth and belief, and from within that space a person can be adjured to choose belief on the grounds of an allegedly compelling reason, namely that X is true. The recast version doesn’t make this claim.

I remain uneasy about whether such a space makes sense, but I don’t think we can eliminate it in the manner you were suggesting.

"This is true, therefore you ought to believe it." This is a uniform claim which is intended to apply to both sorts of cases (e.g. self-evident truths and obscure truths; necessary truths and contingent truths; etc.). — Leontiskos

Just to pick up this thread for a moment: The unease I was describing above has to do with whether it makes sense to use "ought" in this way. You've persuaded me that the claim is indeed a uniform one, not separated into "Nagel truths" (self-evident, apodictic) and more complex inferences. OK, so the idea is that, if X is a true statement, I ought to believe it. But what I now wonder is: Exactly what would the alternative be? Does the phrase "disbelieve a truth" make sense? In psychological terms, sure -- we all know how hard it can be to really take on board a difficult truth. But I don't think that's what either of us is talking about here. We want a situation in which I understand and acknowledge the truth of statement X, but also claim that I don't believe it. And if you begin to sympathize with me about how hard this can be sometimes (perhaps X is one of those "difficult" truths), I deny that this is the problem. I'm not experiencing any inner resistance of that sort, I reply; I simply do not believe X.

Is this thinkable? If you then asked, "Why not?" what could I reply? This hypothetical situation is meant to evoke a rational response. And if I've excluded any personal, subjective reasons for disbelief, then we seem to have hit bedrock. What more can I say except "I just don't"?

So, this suggests that belief follows from truth, and Nagel is right not just about self-evident logical principles like the law of non-contradiction, but about any truth that is understood as such. If so, then in such a case "you ought to believe," even though it seems to be a good English sentence, is meaningless, since I already do. Or, more accurately, its only meaning would arise in urging me to investigate and overcome whatever non-rational, psychological reasons are preventing me from believing what I acknowledge to be true. Does this make sense to you? Is this what you have in mind when you imagine saying to someone, "You ought to believe X"? If so, I can certainly go along with that.

A final, interesting point about a statement like "I acknowledge X to be true but I don't believe it": Is this self-validating in some way? Do I have direct, introspective knowledge of what I believe and don't believe? Must it be the case that, if a person says, "I don't believe X", they really don't? Or may they be mistaken? We can be mistaken about "I know," "I remember," "I see," and even "I feel," sometimes. More subtly, we can use "I wish," I desire," "I promise," in circumstances where it's reasonable for a listener to doubt our self-knowledge. Where does "I believe" fit, in this collection? J. L. Austin probably has this somewhere; perhaps I can find it.

But I am using it ["indifference"] in that same statistical sense. "They would consider [them] false as often as they considered them true." — Leontiskos

Possibly I just misunderstood; I thought you had confused two kinds of indifferent people. The first kind, Ms. Nihil, can tell the difference but doesn't care, so chooses randomly. The second kind, Mr. Ignorant, can't tell the difference and so also chooses randomly. This guy, to me, is the roulette wheel: The wheel not only makes "choices" at random, it also has no idea what the difference is between red and black. A model for Ms. Nihil might be a person who's asked to select an assortment of candies she likes, and there are only two choices. Turns out she likes both equally, so while she knows perfectly well the difference between caramel and chocolate, she decides to make random choices because she doesn't care.

The outcomes would be the same: randomness, "indifference" in either sense. But there'd be a huge moral difference if the choice was between, say, right and wrong. A person who can't (ever) tell that difference would, I suppose, be pitied, or hospitalized. But someone who knows the difference, can recognize it when they see it, and still doesn't care about choosing right over wrong -- we'd judge Ms. Nihil pretty harshly here, I think.

There's a lot of good stuff here and I probably need to reply piece by piece, as this week is starting to get the better of me. So, to begin:

I think at a very basic level we are simply considering instances of disagreement and/or persuasion, which are common." — Leontiskos

Yes, and I have no trouble making sense of the kind you go on to list. Where I'm starting have doubts concerns statements like "You ought to believe that water is H2O because it's true." Surely all the persuasion would take place at the prior claim of "Water is H2O." Once you're persuaded that this is the case, what more am I asking you to do if I say to you, "Now, believe it, because it's true"? I initially thought there was some conceptual (not psychological) space between "acknowledging truth" and "believing," but now I'm wondering if this is an illusion. If you know X is true, then you need no further reasons to believe it. (You might require some psychological assistance, of course, if it's a weird or humiliating truth.) And if you don't know, my asking you to believe it seems to be asking you to take my word for its truth. This is all very unsatisfactory somehow, and I'd welcome anyone to straighten it out.

BTW, this has obvious parallels to the question of whether the statements "X" and "It is true that X" have the same propositional content.

It seems to me that the OP is predicated on the idea that there ought to be a consensus, and that we are thus left to reckon with a conspicuous absence. When it comes down to brass tacks, this has a lot to recommend it. — Leontiskos

Yes, but. I tried to walk a fine line in the OP. I was trying to put the idea “There ought to be consensus based on rational argumentation” in brackets, so to speak, acknowledging its attractiveness but also holding it up for consideration and critique. What is the status of our concern for rational consensus, for “something to which we can appeal which will or ought to command universal assent” (Bernstein)? How should we view it? Is it the same thing as a desire for some unattainable, foundational objective truth? Or should we carefully examine other understandings of rationality? I guess I would summarize this as: Objective rational consensus may be the great unrealized dream of philosophy, or its nightmare, from which we struggle to awaken. I take the “Habermas gap” question to be a way of asking, “What would it take in order to be able to realize the consensus dream?"

So would you say that the self-reflective character of philosophical thought intrinsically resists consensus? Or intrinsically resists rational agreement? — Leontiskos

I’m not sure quite what I’m saying here. I’m trying to find a way to make the consensus question ahistorical, I think – not simply something that waxes and wanes depending on time and place – but this may not be the way to do it.

There’s no doubt that what you describe is accurate, and different eras do develop consensus relative to prior history, and then, perhaps, lose it. Could there be any progress to this dialectic? As to this possibility, Rorty puts the question well: “Even when we have justified true belief about everything we want to know, we may have no more than conformity to the norms of the day.”

I find myself wanting to say that it’s philosophy itself, understood as a particular way of thinking critically or self-reflectively, that ought to reveal why this kind of consensus is chimerical (if it is), not some historical analysis. The only reason I tried to call out self-reflection, previously, was because we’re all familiar with the queasy infinite-regress character of reflection, which seems analogous to the consensus-about-consensus question, or the how-to-reason-about-rationality question. Or, as another forum member pointed out, this may be the nature of dialectic, if dialectic indeed characterizes philosophy – no synthesis can resist becoming the next thesis, to be countered by its antithesis. But I don’t have a theory of this, or even a good insight.

@Leontiskos Thanks, that helps. You’ve raised some complex and difficult issues here. Maybe the best point of entry is the beginning of your paragraph about the “indifferent speaker” :

If someone were indifferent to truth they would say false things as often as they say true things, and they would intend to say false things as often as they intend to say true things, and they would do this even when “talking to themselves” or reasoning privately. — Leontiskos

Here, “indifferent” is being used in the sense of having no preference, overall, between truth and falsity. Aside from a certain former president, I agree that it’s difficult to imagine such a person doing this continually. But I don’t read you as describing a person who doesn’t know the difference between truth and falsity. Indeed, you speak of them as intending truth when speaking truthfully, and falsity when not. So that’s one sort of indifference: I can tell X from Y but have no preference or allegiance or “ordering to” one over the other.

But then you offer this:

They would consider foundational principles like the principle of non-contradiction false as often as they considered them true. — Leontiskos

Here, I think, “indifference” is being applied in a new sense. Now the speaker doesn’t know the difference. They’re not merely indifferent as to their choice; they can’t tell them apart. Here I’m with you and Aristotle and Nagel: I can’t believe in a person who can explain the law of non-contradiction but not acknowledge its validity.

But, going back to the first sense of “indifference,” surely it’s still possible for the “indifferent speaker” to take this position: “Yes, I recognize truth and falsity quite well, but I am indifferent to them in this case.” Or, of course, they might say, “I actively prefer what is false, again in this case.”

By bringing up individual cases in this way, I think we move into another difficult aspect of the question: When we talk about things like Aristotelian ordering, are we speaking about what is the case for all humans all the time, or allowing that exceptions can be made? (Perhaps it’s a telos for the species which we haven’t yet achieved?) We might say, as an analogy, that the human species has evolved so that mothers, and by extension families, care for their young. As a general rule, this is unexceptionable. But we know it’s possible for a particular parent, in a particular situation, to fail to follow this rule. (It’s not necessitated, in your terminology.) Is “being ordered to truth” like that? Or are we saying that there is a human nature so hardwired that it’s literally impossible for anyone, anytime, not to show a preference for truth over falsity? I doubt we could maintain this. Indeed, if we could, the issue of “ought” would be moot. Every example would be covered by the “Nagel rule”: You can’t help but think/believe/say it.

Similar questions would apply to the doctor situation. It’s true that doctors assume, as a rule, that their patients desire health, but it’s not outlandish for some hedonist to say, “Sorry, I’d rather live at 100mph and die young, thanks all the same. Hold the water!” So you need a real, if unspoken, premise that says, “Follow your doctor’s advice if you want to be healthy” -- and many do not. It’s not that one might “just as well” desire to be unhealthy because one is indifferent to health, or can’t tell the difference between good health and illness. Rather, one has made a choice to value something else more.

We agree that “it’s hard to say what the exact force is” of a claim like “You ought to believe X because it’s true.” Given what I’ve written above, there are some cases where we’d say “You ought to believe X because . . . no, wait a minute, it’s a ‛Nagel truth’ so you already believe it!” Those aren’t the problematic ones (though very problematic indeed for those who don’t think Nagel truths – self-evident or analytic truths – exist). The case of concern is one where we want to say, “You ought to believe X because it’s true (though not self-evident) and because human beings are creatures with a certain ordering to truth. You should believe this particular true thing because of the sort of creature you are.” Sadly, this just puts us back into the general/individual distinction, it seems to me. The nonbeliever can always reply, “I quite agree that humans have evolved this way, and I certainly practice this most of the time. However, I am not hardwired to do so in non-apodictic truth-claim situations, and in this case, I will choose not to.” So our “ought” remains hypothetical, and our interlocutor is rejecting our hypothesis for themselves, in this case. They’re saying, “I don’t accept the translation of ‛if’ into ‛because.’ I interpret your statement as ‛You should believe this particular true thing if you want to be the sort of creature you are. Well, ‛the sort of creature I am’ is one who may be ordered to truth but can also choose not to believe some instances of it. So that’s what I’ll do.’ ”

(I want to fess up to something that has really started to puzzle me, though. I’m starting to think that the whole “you ought to believe X” thing is kind of unreal, a philosopher’s thought-experiment. What exactly would it mean to “not believe” something, if you also thought it was true? What are the actual examples of this? Are we talking about belief as a psychological experience, or as a theoretical assent to a proposition? We all know that if I’m asked, “Do you believe water is H2O?” the questioner doesn’t mean “Are you having a mental event right this moment that consists of believing X?” Beliefs can be unthought, background conditions. So which kind of “belief” have I been claiming, rather glibly, that it’s possible to refuse to true statements? I need to think a lot more about this, so it’s in parentheses.)

As you say, the “ought” question is huge and deserves its own thread/book/library. So does Kant’s view about imperatives. I appreciate the light you shed on the possible nuances between categorical and hypothetical oughts, and for what it’s worth, I find some nuances in Kant as well. I’ll watch for the next Kantian ethics discussion.

thanks for the interesting and ambitious thread. — Leontiskos

Glad you like the thread. “Ambitious” is being kind!

Your perspective here is a timely corrective. We don’t talk past each other and disagree about absolutely everything, that’s true. (And yes, I meant to raise this as a problem among philosophers, not the general public.) Perhaps there’s more consensus than I realize. Perhaps, as you point out, the sense of “grotesque wild pluralism” (as Richard J. Bernstein put it) is local to our era.

But here is why I’m skeptical. First, irreconcilable or incommensurable positions seem to have been around since 5th century BCE Athens, if Plato is to be trusted. I’m one of those who reads (most of) the Platonic dialogues as illustrations of the conflict between a certain kind of rationality, philosophia, and those who distrust it, as played out in an actual polis where political consequences are very real. And even after bad actors like Thrasymachus leave the Republic, we still never really reach a definition of justice that could persuade those who are hostile to philosophia. And your point about the Theaetetus is also telling. So . . . disagreement over argumentation and its value are nothing new, I would say.

Second, what I’m calling the “Habermas gap” really is like playing Whack-A-Mole. Consider Anscombe on consequentialism. You rightly use terms like “from this perspective” and “considered in this way.” But doesn’t this merely reinforce the point that there are many equally talented philosophers out there who don’t share her perspective and don’t consider the matter in this way? Are we narrowly aligned around a consensus re consequentialism? Maybe. Darn it, there’s not even a consensus around whether there’s a consensus! . . . or so it seems to me.

I wonder if the consensus about the idea that there ought to be a consensus is perhaps our own historical peculiarity, and is driven by the West’s secularism and its belief in “The End of History.” — Leontiskos

One last point, very speculative. I think the question about rational justification as a consensus-building technique may be internal to philosophy and not a historical phenomenon at all. I suggest that it’s part of the essential self-reflective character of philosophical thought – which may also account for its apparent intractability. I find this speculation of yours about the West enticing, but I don’t think that historicizing the problem can really answer it. For (and I know this is repetitive by now) the position that “There’s a consensus around the idea that there ought to be consensus,” aka “We now know that consensus is a good thing,” can be and has been disputed, by thoughtful philosophers.

@Gnomon I agree with most all of this, especially the humility part. I would only clarify that "being in possession of all truth," as Franklin put it, isn’t really the goal here. Philosophers like Habermas and Rehg (and me) who worry about this question are worried about why even the most basic issues in philosophy don’t seem to have agreed-upon stopping places or plateaus of consensus.

'Does the idea of a philosophical system detract from the argumentative weight of a premise?' — kudos

I think I understand this, but hope you'll say more. Tell me if this is close: One possible premise for a philosophical argument is "Philosophical arguments need to have premises that can be rationally argued for." So, in trying to evaluate that premise, we're immediately thrust into a self-reflexive loop that is also highly abstract. (I would have said "form without content," though you characterize it the opposite way.) I'm not sure whether, or why, this detracts from the argumentative weight of any one particular premise, or whether the "system" aspect is important here. I do see that it highlights a foundational problem about argumentation, and if that's mainly what you mean, it's a good point. But I may be missing something . . . please go on!

Is this really characteristic of it being reasonable, or only of it being a claim? — kudos

Again, I may be at fault here for not explaining precisely what the problem situation is. No one – not me, not Habermas, not Rehg – believes that any and all claims are automatically reasonable, that just because it’s possible to counter a claim in some fashion, this creates a plausible or reasonable position. Rather, the issue raised is meant to address a very familiar problem situation in philosophy, where excellent philosophers find themselves differing about very basic questions in metaphysics, morals, etc. H and R, if I’m reading them correctly, are asking into how this comes about – how it could come about, if all concerned are intelligent and rational and have been exposed to the same pro-and-con arguments on the question.

The idea is that, if the form of the argument is agreed to be valid (and of course there may be disagreement about that as well), then the problem must lie in disagreement about the premises which have not been argued for. Clearly, some premises have no initial plausibility (“We know there’s a hell because God needs to punish us deservedly”) and most philosophers wouldn’t waste time on them. So perhaps we should say that a reasonable claim might be one with a long, intricate history of back-and-forth among great philosophers, always being countered by other, equally reasonable claims. As I said, I think that is a very common thing to find in the history of Western phil.

But this emphasis on arguing for the premises seems merely to push the question back, or up, one level. For any argument in favor of the premises must itself start from premises, and so on. . . there’s the problem. H and R want to know if there is a way out of the potentially infinite regress, and if so, whether it is rational in the sense that it can argued and justified to others who dispute the original claim. And as we’ve seen in this discussion, it may well be that an approach emphasizing rhetoric, persuasion on ethical grounds, or some form of hermeneutic analysis is required – in other words, a new understanding of “rationality” would have to be brought into play.

The role of psychology is yet a different matter.

Different from what? — kudos

I meant “different from the question of whether there’s a rational move that can be made in this situation.” We can give as much weight to psychology as we care to – we can imagine all our interlocutors are burdened by heavy baggage of personal biases -- but the question doesn’t go away: Could they do something about it, in terms of argumentation, other than assert their idiosyncratic (Kant would say “heteronomous”) points of view? And would whatever they did be rationally convincing?

none of those concerned are interested in looking for a truth that they are not already in possession of — kudos

I’ve met many such people, interested only in confirming what they’re already sure of. Socrates met a lot of them too! I hope it doesn’t characterize more than a fraction of good philosophers, though.

'Competing reason' is an oxymoron. — kudos

I probably didn’t do justice to the distinction Habermas and Rehg want to make between “rational argument” and “reasonable claim.” Rational argument based on logical form (validity, if you like), with the premises put on hold as to their veracity, is indeed as objective as “objective” gets – that is, it’s transparent and publicly checkable. But H & R’s idea is that, when you also claim veracity for the premises, you’ve moved from rational argument to reasonable claim, to making a plausible case that could be countered by an equally plausible alternative. And the “gap” question concerns whether there’s a rational procedure for deciding between such competing reasonable claims.

The role of psychology is yet a different matter. In an earlier post, we have:

The participants each come to the argument with their own education, experiences, prejudices, interests, temperament, and so on. — Fooloso4

This seems to be a similar idea to yours. But the “gap” question remains: You can grant that most of what we think is idiosyncratic to our psychology, and still ask whether there is a rational procedure that can mitigate this -- and also, as many have responded here, whether you would want to.

Your final quote about religion as a lodestar is @Wayfarer, not me, so I'll leave it to them to respond.

You said you did not want to pursue the use of rhetoric and emotion — Fooloso4

By all means, please share your thoughts on how rhetoric might enter the story here. In the OP I tried to sharpen the question about rationality in order to make it manageable and specific, but Rehg and Habermas both write about the importance of rhetoric and a hermeneutical investigation of rationality. In the same paper I quoted from ("Reason and Rhetoric in Habermas's Theory of Argumentation," in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, Jost & Hyde, eds., 1997), Rehg devotes a number of pages to laying out his ideas of how "rhetorical devices might constitute an essential aspect of rational motivation."

@Janus I think this is what Rehg is getting at when he talks about the difference between “cogent argumentation” and “logical deduction,” in the quoted passage. He wants to know whether the premises for a logically valid deduction can also be rationally justified in a way that would compel agreement. So your answer is no, fair enough. From your position, I wonder whether you think there might be something sufficiently intersubjective – not to say objective – in “creative imaginative thinking” that could take the place of rational argument and inspire consensus? Or might we need to supplement imagination with rhetoric in order to persuade?

we are left with an acknowledgement of the irreconcilability of viewpoints. The question then is, how best to live together given that there are differences that cannot be reconciled. — Fooloso4

One of the responses to this problem that I like best is the line that stretches from Dewey through Rawls and describes a broadly liberal-democratic, pluralistic vision of justice and the state. For let's not kid ourselves, when viewpoints become irreconcilable, philosophy must become praxis. The way we disagree has ethical and political dimensions.

But then, in the spirit of "two reasonable views of (most) everything," Rawls, T. Nagel et al. have been the subject of some withering, well-observed dissents from Critical/neo-Frankfurt School philosophers and also from more friendly voices such as Martha Nussbaum.

I don't want to derail the topic but the Socratic tradition does not promise Truth. — Fooloso4

I agree. — Arne

And so do I. I was doing my impersonation of a disappointed post-modernist, trying to give voice to a common critique of Western phil. My own view is that Plato was the subtlest of philosophers, constantly engaging with the meta-philosophical questions I find so compelling. However . . . there is a way of understanding "the Socratic tradition" to mean "everyone in the West who came after Plato," and if you adopt this somewhat crude and Hellenistic conception, then yes, there's a strong streak of "Let's find the ultimate truth about everything" in that tradition.

Even posing the issue raises issues. — Arne

I thought about pointing out that the very problem I was raising was, of course, subject to the problem! But I decided it would be better to let that come out in the discussion. I agree completely. There are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of the "Is rational agreement possible" question.

I question the framing of the problem in terms of rational motivation. The participants each come to the argument with their own education, experiences, prejudices, interests, temperament, and so on. — Fooloso4

Yes, and the question Habermas and Rehg want to press is: Is that all we can say? Is that the end of the story? Is rational consensus impossible? Are we left with the dreaded "incommensurability" of viewpoints?

What do those today within the Socratic tradition have to wake-up from, if anything? — Fooloso4

I'm not a post-modernist, and perhaps should leave that question to someone with more sympathy for the "wake-up call" position. Presumably, the Socratic tradition would be seen as a chimera, something that promises Truth and doesn't deliver, because capital-T Truth just isn't on offer.

So, why do you see disagreement as a problem? Why should philosophers agree about something? — Angelo Cannata

These are good questions, and need to be taken separately. Philosophical disagreement can be a "problem" in two senses. First, it can puzzle and distress individual philosophers, especially those who have held out high hopes for something like a scientific philosophical method, one that obviously converges on truths within given paradigms. Should it distress them? It’s hard to know quite what to say here. It seems more a psychological than a philosophical question.

But philosophical disagreement can also be a problem in a more abstract sense – a thought problem, a phenomenon that needs explaining. Taken in this sense, disagreement may or may not cause personal distress, but it ought to raise a question about what we’re doing as philosophers. What can we discover in the history and practice of philosophy that might account for such widespread inability to converge on a consensus? One may or may not think that’s unfortunate, but the intellectual problem remains. It’s more in that spirit that I wanted to raise the question. (Personally, I find that when I’m operating in a rational mode, I do think it’s unfortunate, and when I’m in a more aesthetic/mystical place, I don’t!)

Which leads to your second question about why philosophers should agree about something. As a skeptical observation, I think it’s unanswerable. There is no good reason, provided you’re willing to operate outside rational argumentation and/or "argue" for such a move. And indeed, we see this strategy (I don’t mean that derogatorily) often employed by Derrida, Feyerabend, Rorty, and others. They are, or appear to be, indifferent to whether other philosophers agree with them, unless it’s in the name of “solidarity,” like Rorty.

It looks like you identify philosophy with rationality, but they are not the same thing. — Angelo Cannata

Well, I don't really identify philosophy with rationality, since many of the post-modern critics I have in mind are extremely dubious about such an equation, and I don't hesitate to call them philosophers. For me, the rationality question is a problem within philosophy, but not necessarily solvable by rational means alone. A philosopher is free to recommend other approaches.

The intuitive opinion follows Aquinas in claiming that the human being is intrinsically ordered to truth — Leontiskos

There are many interesting and insightful things in your post that I'd like to respond to, but I have to confess my almost complete ignorance of Thomism. So first, could you expand on what Aquinas means by "intrinsically ordered to truth"? I'm guessing it has something to do with an essential nature of human beings, possibly involving an Aristotelian telos? But I'd welcome some help here.

@Pantagruel. I see, thanks. I thought you meant there was a specific connection between Nagel's position on logical truth (to understand is to believe) and the instrumentality of reason. But I think you're saying that all reasoning works this way, not just apodictic stuff like modus ponens.

This seems to entail the instrumentality of reason. — Pantagruel

That's interesting. Could you say more about it?

Which of the two responses do you prefer? — Leontiskos

This was a question about how to view a statement like "You ought to believe a sound argument" -- what sort of "ought" do we have in mind here? The two responses I suggested were:

1) The statement is shorthand for “You ought to believe this sound argument if you care about such things as holding beliefs that are based in reason/soundness/fact etc.” 2) There is actually no choice in the matter at all, since to understand the soundness of an argument is to believe it.

Concerning the second, I reread what Thomas Nagel has to say about it (in The Last Word, 77). He writes, "We cannot conceive of a being capable of understanding [logical arguments] who did not also find them self-evidently valid: Nothing would permit us to attribute to anyone a disbelief in modus ponens, or in the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4." Nagel clearly doesn't think you can withhold belief, in the psychological sense, from something you accept as true rationally. I'm not so sanguine about it, but if Nagel is right, there's no issue about "ought" since the believer would have no choice in the matter.

For my part, I think the first response is the better one. As far as I can understand the concept of "ought" in philosophy and ordinary discourse, it is always conditional or hypothetical. Even the bluntest and most heartfelt uses of "ought" ("You ought to do the right thing, just because it's the right thing", "You ought to believe X because it's true") still seem to me to refer back to an unspoken conditional of some sort. Not everyone cares about right things or truth or being rational. Those who do should certainly invoke the "ought" in these examples. But I don't know what force the "ought" could have for those who don't. Robert Nozick, more or less kidding, wrote about an imaginary ultimate philosophical argument so powerful that “if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies”! Short of such a miraculous and cruel syllogism, I really don't know what more could be done to give some firepower to "ought". Which is not at all to say that the concept is dispensable or incoherent. It's just not categorical, not self-justifying.

If I present you with a sound argument, then you ought to assent to the conclusion. — Leontiskos

I also admire T. Nagel, and recommend his The View from Nowhere and The Last Word as superb, challenging presentations of some of these themes.

Leontiskos raises an interesting point about the force of “ought” in a statement like “This is a sound argument, therefore you ought to believe it.” Much as I would like to derive a genuine, non-hypothetical “ought” from “is” here, I don’t think we can. It seems like two responses are possible. 1) The statement is shorthand for “You ought to believe this sound argument if you care about such things as holding beliefs that are based in reason/soundness/fact etc.” 2) There is actually no choice in the matter at all, since to understand the soundness of an argument is to believe it. This is Nagel’s position, by the way, in regard to logical truth.

Of course this leads to larger perplexities about the force of “ought” in any statement. Could there really be a non-hypothetical, categorical, absolute requirement (capital-O “Ought”, as it were) to believe or do anything? I suppose Kant came closest to making a good argument for this, in the Groundwork, where he tried to show that not accepting the categorical imperative was contradictory to human freedom, a kind of self-cancellation. But even here, I don’t know that it’s incoherent to simply reply, like Whitman, Very well, then I contradict myself.

That said, I do believe that religious experience can generate an “ought” of an entirely different kind, but that’s for another OP.

it is important to get clear about the difference between the subject, or that which is experiencing, and the content of experience. — petrichor

I think we have to add a "3rd self," namely the unconscious self. As the distinction between subject-experience and content-experience makes clear, there is nothing contradictory about a self that is not (at the moment) available to conscious awareness. Paul Ricoeur pointed out (somewhere; I can't find the reference at the moment) that "knowing that I exist" doesn't tell me what I am. The cogito is uninformative about depth psychology.

What then is Bernstein’s alternative to metaphysical foundationalism? Does he attempt to go the way of a coherentism that could resist the “will to self-assertion”? Does he attempt to avoid metaphysics altogether? — Leontiskos

Yes, important questions. Bernstein’s magnum opus, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, addresses them in full, though it was an “inquiry in progress” and didn’t necessarily provide firm answers. I don’t know if I can do it justice, but here are a few points.

RJB’s response to “anti-foundationalism” is subtle. He is constantly drawing a distinction between a critique of foundational metaphysical starting points for inquiry – which he thinks is a legitimate and significant concern – and a critique that amounts to “a polemical attack on the very idea of philosophy” -- which he disputes vigorously, along with Habermas (probably his closest philosophical ally).

Another way to make this distinction might be to say that, for RJB, the adoption of rational inquiry, or “communicative action” a la Habermas, or a quest for genuine phronesis, is not “foundationalist” in some naive or dogmatic way. You ask whether RJB gives up metaphysics entirely. I think the right answer is, If you include rationality and all its cognates (including a transparent process that can result in genuine phronesis), then no, RJB very much sticks up for this. But I suspect he’d be more likely to draw a distinction between this kind of practice and “metaphysics” understood as an a priori search for certainty about ontology and epistemology, which he does abandon. One of his trademark terms is “Cartesian anxiety,” by which he means the desire of philosophers for a clear and distinct starting place for inquiry.

How then does philosophy get off the ground? Here RJB’s approach is generally that of Peirce, I would say. He endorses (with some reservations) Peirce’s idea that a community of inquirers will in time converge on philosophical truths – or at least that this has to be our goal. Peirce believed this process had to start without foundations, on the open sea, as it were. If any foundational metaphysics are on offer, we could only find them after the journey, not as a place from which to set sail. Or this is how I read Peirce, anyway. RJB talks approvingly of Habermas’ idea of “a project of reconstruction and critique that points to the telos that should guide our praxis.” In short, we have no choice but to begin, philosophically, where we are, using the tools that best recommend themselves to this style of inquiry – which is an ethical as well as a rational style, since it insists on an equal community of inquirers who share, if only hazily, a kind of endpoint or telos for philosophy and for humankind.

The big problem I see as largely unresolved in Bernstein, and that he continued to wrestle with all his life, concerns the proper understanding of “objective” and “subjective.” RJB was sure that hermeneutics could forge a synthesis between these two concepts, which he regarded as a false either/or. He was suspicious of any approach in which “the subjective becomes virtually synonymous with the private, idiosyncratic, and arbitrary” and “the very idea of phronesis seems like a confused concept.” This misguided approach also has the effect of seducing us into believing that “knowledge must be objective – or else it is only pseudo-knowledge.”

I haven’t read everything Bernstein wrote, but if he ever found a completely satisfying resolution here, I don’t know of it. Nor am I entirely satisfied myself with treating rationality as involving no pre-commitments to a metaphysical position – but I may not be reading RJB accurately here.

Well, perhaps more than you wanted, but these meta-philosophical questions are deeply engaging for me.

As to what the word 'knowledge' can be applied to, I think that is a matter of stipulation, not fact. — Janus

Indeed it is, but I think we need to be careful not to stipulate a usage that goes too far afield from ordinary discourse. (Otherwise, why not coin a new, technical term?). "Knowledge" is hazy and debatable, for sure, in terms of who might qualify to have it, but if an alien race made contact with us, I doubt if our first "ordinary language" position, so to speak, would be, "Well, they can't know anything, they aren't human." Again, I just want to be careful to preserve a use of "knowledge" that isn't tied to a human perspective.

Besides, my cat would be mad at me!

it seems that it is a pragmatic matter — Leontiskos

Thanks for the link to the final video. Yes, the videographer (I believe his name is Nathan Hohipuha?) argues that we need to understand "object" as a pragmatic choice. But then he goes on to say (around 8:00) that Harman doesn't see it this way -- that he regards it as basic ontology, something that could be shown to be right or wrong, not just a useful idea. So I'm still unsure how Harman would argue for this. Also, not to throw shade on Hohipuha, but I can't help wondering whether a philosopher of Harman's evident caliber would really be saying things like "This is true, period." Anyway, I'll watch Part 2, where perhaps we get some detail, and see what I can learn.

A bit like the child who wants to use a different color, but whose crayons are all shades of grey. — Leontiskos

Nice!

The notion of knowledge being contaminated or distorted by human subjects seems absurd given that we are speaking about human knowledge. — Janus

I think your caveat -- "apart from animal knowledge" -- illustrates the problem of identifying knowledge per se with human knowledge. There would also, traditionally, be the question of God's knowledge. To this day, physicists like to talk about "God's PoV" or "the mind of God" as a shorthand for describing an ideal knowledge of how things are. Why would there be some sort of guarantee that human knowledge must coincide with this? And if you discount a God hypothesis, there are still the non-human animals. What they know is surely very different from our human knowledge.

Perhaps, instead of using words like "contaminated" or "distorted," we could simply speak of "perspectival" knowledge. That way, we avoid the idea -- which I assume you don't advocate -- that the word "knowledge" can only be applied to what humans know.

What are some of Bernstein's thoughts on the topic? — Leontiskos

One of Bernstein’s concerns that interests me on this topic: What happens to liberal-democratic values (including the value of political discussion among equals) when certain post-modern challenges to rationality are either misconstrued or taken too far? Bernstein was sympathetic to post-modern philosophers, but he saw this danger coming from both the left and the right, and perhaps most distressingly from philosophers (such as Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida) whose politics were resolutely humane and progressive, but who didn’t seem to realize what the disparagement of rationality can do in the wrong political hands. Bernstein wrote mostly in the last decades of the 20th century, but he lived to see many of his warnings come true, in our current U.S. culture where “truthiness” is good enough for so many people, and there is less and less faith in a “common practice” or tradition that includes appeals to fact and reason.

His several essays on Richard Rorty give a good flavor of RJB’s concerns. Two of them are collected in The New Constellation. RJB discusses Rorty’s pragmatist appeal to “we” citizens of a democracy to stop trying to justify liberal-democratic values and simply get on with “making them look good” so others will want to adopt them. But without rational justification – without a fallibilistic, self-correcting, consensus-building approach to political argument -- “Rorty seems to be insensitive to the dark side of appealing to ‛we’ when it is used as an exclusionary tactic – as the ‛rationalization’ for fostering intolerance.” He goes on, “[On this sort of view], tradition, including the tradition of liberal democracy, does not seem to have any determinate content other than the ways in which we (I) interpret it. And our interpretations, our self-creations, seem to be little more than an expression of our idiosyncratic will to power, our will to self-assertion.” In other words, RJB sees the Nietzschean danger that, if rational argument among equals is abandoned, all that’s left is persuasion – making a position “look attractive,” in Rorty’s words – or else a literal use of coercive power.

Hope this gives you a sense of Bernstein’s interests in this area. He was a modernist philosopher in the Kantian, Frankfurt-School, Habermas tradition, and strove throughout his writings to defend and justify a rationalism that is not a metaphysical foundationalism, and that also does not produce Weberian “rationalization” and oppression. He and Rorty were lifelong friends, I believe; both called themselves pragmatists; but Bernstein was very reluctant to accept Rorty’s claim to the title.

This video might help as a good jumping off point for a Harman's view of objects. Perhaps we can have a discussion on it? As I do think it more than indirectly deals with essences, by way of defining objects and their ontology. — schopenhauer1

I haven’t read Harman, though I’m interested to do so now. The video was perhaps not as enlightening as it might have been, so take what I’m going to say as referring to the videographer’s explication and the ensuing forum discussion; I don’t know how accurate any of it is to Harman’s thought.

Briefly: As with so much ontology, the big challenge is to explain how the questions being raised are not merely verbal disputes. Take the question (apparently key to Harman), “What is an object?” Exactly what sort of question is this? Is it akin to a scientific or experimental question, which could be explored and perhaps answered by an investigation of the world? Is it more like a traditional metaphysical question, which might be answered a priori using some kind of transcendental argument a la Kant, or an appeal to logical principles? Or is the question really a pragmatic one – perhaps when we ask “What is an object?” we’re really asking what, out of the many possible uses of the word “object,” is the most useful or helpful one in philosophy – and of course we’d have to specify the uses we have in mind.

I take the pragmatic answer to be, more or less, the one that replies, “It’s a verbal dispute. You can’t go out and hunt some Essence called an ‛object’ in Nature and give it a description, nor can you stay at home and produce a critique that will tell you what an ‛object’ would have to be, metaphysically.” I think this kind of response is a robust challenge to ontology at this very basic level, though not an unanswerable one. But for our purposes here, if Harman is indeed claiming to have an answer to the question “What is an object?” and if it’s pretty much along the lines the videographer has given, I’d be curious to know what you all think Harman takes himself to be doing. What kind of question is he answering? How might he reply to the charge, “This is purely verbal”?

(This is my first post – thanks for welcoming me to the forum!)

Reading this thread, I was reminded of an insight from Richard J. Bernstein in his essay, “The Rage Against Reason” (collected in The New Constellation, 1992). Bernstein notes some similarities between modernist philosopher Jurgen Habermas and the American pragmatists. He writes, “Both [Habermas and the pragmatists] share an understanding of rationality as instrinsically dialogical and communicative. And both pursue the ethical and political consequences of this form of rationality and rationalization. It was Peirce who first developed the logical backbone of this thought in his idea of the fundamental character of a self-corrective critical community of inquirers [my itals] without any absolute beginning points or finalities. . .”

Bernstein has a lot more that’s interesting to say about the connection of rational inquiry with democratic values. But for our purposes, I think what he’s describing is quite close to this concept of transparency and philosophical humility. What is often challenging, of course, is to take seriously the idea that such inquiry might truly be “without any absolute beginning points or finalities.” But that’s another subject.