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.