Philosophy Talk: The Blog

The Place of Scepticism and Sceptical Arguments

An encore post of mine on the topic of scepticism -- reissued since we are rebroadcasting that episode. --KT

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's show will be about scepticism. Our guest will be John Greco of St. Louis University. I don't really know John or his work, but I see that he has written a book called Putting Sceptics in their Place. That's sort of what I want to talk about in this warm-up to the show post.

I should start with a confession about my philosophical tastes. I tend not to find epistemology the most gripping of philosophical subjects. Roughly, epistemology has to do with the nature of knowledge. And a big part of epistemology historically has been devoted to answering the sceptic who challenges us to say whether and how we can know anything at all. Sceptical arguments, I'm sure you will see as we do the show, are pretty seductive and pretty darned hard to answer. In fact, I suspect that ultimately that sceptical arguments are not really answerable at all. At best, the sceptic can always argue the defender of knowledge to a standstill. So if the defender of knowledge is the one with the burden of proving her claims, I think she never ever succeeds in discharging that burden.

Does that mean that sceptic is right and that we really don't know anything at all?

Well, maybe. I guess that depnds what we mean by "know."

And here's precisely the thing that drives me batty about so much epistemology. So much of it is focused on analyzing and re-analyzing the concept of knowledge -- mostly in light of sceptical worries about the very possibility of knowledge. What could knowledge be such that it survives various sceptical arguments?

Don't get me wrong. Lots of really smart, creative and ambitious philosophers work on that sort of thing. And I don't doubt that they have collectively done some amazing work. But frankly, in one way I have to confess that it all seems to me so much wasted labor.

There are two reasons why I think this. First, I really do think that sceptical arguments are pretty much here to stay and are pretty much irrefutable. When we fudge around with the concept of knowledge in order to make "knowledge" seem possible even in the light of those arguments. I'm just not sure what we've accomplished, really.

Second, and more importantly, it seems to me that the real question of philosophical interest isn't what to say about the slippery concept of "knowledge" but what to say about rational inquiry and rational belief fixation. Questions about rational inquiry remain of interest, it seems to me, both before and after we give the sceptic his due. What do we reason to believe -- whether or not our beliefs count as full-blown knowledge? If knowledge is supposed to be that kind of belief, with that kind of warrant, whatever it is, that withstands sceptical arguments, then maybe we simply don't have any "knowledge." So be it. Still, we have lots of beliefs and some of those beliefs are more or less warranted by argument and/or evidence. Certainly, some of our beliefs are "warranted enough" for the multitudinious purposes of life, even if the sceptic is right that none of them deserve the honorific label "knowledge." Why shouldn't that be good enough for us?

Someone might respond that the sceptic can do the same trick on rational belief that she does on knowledge. That is, just as she can convince us that we can never know anything, she can also convince us that we never have any grounds whatsoever for believing anything. But I think as soon as the target shifts to grounds for believing and away from knowledge, the sceptic is much less compelling a figure and his arguments much less powerful. THe main reason is this: we can believe and be reasonable in believing even when we haven't ruled out certain alternative ways the world might be. Believing is, in a way, inherently more risky than knowledge purports to be. When I merely believe, even if my belief is warranted by the evidence and is backed by arguments, I don't need to rule out the very possibility that my belief could ultimately be wrong. But knowledge is supposed to be firmer than that. One can't know that p, unless p is the case.

I just looked up at the clock. I really gotta go. Too bad, because there is really a lot more to say and I'm just getting warmed up.

If I get time, I'll come back to this post after the show.

Talk to you soon.

A dialogue on Biracial Identity

posted by Ken Taylor

Tomorrow show is about biracial identity.   And I thought as a way of getting the juices flowing,  I'd write a little dialogue about some of the issues to be covered.  So here goes:

 A Black Guy (BG)  and a White Guy  (WG)  are in a bar, having drinks.  You may be tempted to think that they are John Perry and Ken Taylor -- but since I'm putting words in both people's mouths,  don't hold John responsible for any of this. 

BG:      I've been thinking a lot about biracial identities,  lately because I see that my favorite radio show,  Philosophy Talk  is about to do an episode on it.     

WG:   I wonder what they'll talk about.  I mean  thanks to Obama,  biracial is the new cool, BG.   But  I don't really see that there are  deep philosophical questions connected with the  topic of bi-racial identities raise.  Do you? 

BG:  Yeah ,  I do.   Biracial identities challenge our old understanding of race.   I think  biracial people and their struggles to constitute their identities  are beginning to push our old concepts of race to the breaking point.

WG:    This is America, dude.  Race is a reality and race isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  As a black guy, you should know that. 

BG:   Whatever do you mean by that remark?   

WG:  I mean black people experience the reality of race everyday.   White guys, like me,  tend to think of ourselves as non-racialized, as if we don't have a race.   That's a form of white privilege that you black guys don't enjoy in our racialized society.    Of course,  I'm not saying that white people are right to think of themselves as non-racialized.   It's, in fact,  part of our racial consciousness to think of ourselves as non-racialized, if that makes any sense.  

BG:  It makes lots of sense.   In America,   white is racially "unmarked."  Black is racially "marked."    if you are a member of the unmarked race, you entitle yourself to think of yourself as somehow free of race and you entitle yourself to think of  the other as the racialized other.  On other hand,  if you are part of racially marked group, you aren't so free to deny race.    And if you are one of the racially marked "others"  you are sort of confronted with your racial difference, your racial markedness at every turn.   And that gives you a distinctive form of racial consciousness.   

WG:  Er, well, something like that  -- I think.    But back to biracial people.   You said that they somehow  challenge  our old understanding of race.   But I don't see it.  Think of animal and plant species.    You can cross breed animal and plant species to produce hybrids -- sometimes stable and fertile hybrids.  But that doesn't challenge our ideas about species, does it?   In the same vein,  you  can cross breed races to produce people of biracial ancestry.   Where’s the challenge to our understanding of race in that?  I don't get it.  

BG:  But you're thinking of race as if it were analogous to biological species.   But it just isn't.   Once upon a time, people did believe that there were such things as biologically grounded racial essences.   And racial essences were supposed to distinguish people from each other in socially and morally relevant ways.  But modern biology will have none of that.

WG:  Dude,  are you really suggesting that there are no races?   Let's follow the logic of that out a little.   If there are no races, then you are not a black man, I am  not a white man, and Obama is not a man of bi-racial ancestry.  But that’s absurd isn't it?    Let me put the question to you directly.  Dude, are you now, or have you ever been,  a black man?

BG:     Of course,  I am a black man.   And you are a white man, and Barack Obama  is – well, he’s something more complicated.    Everybody thinks of him as our first black president.  But isn't he  really as much and no more a white man than he is a black man?  Why isn't he thought of as our first biracial president or even just another in a long line of white presidents?   What really makes Obama black, anyway? 

WG: Wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  You're going too fast for me.   I'm confused.    You seem to want to claim that races aren’t really real.   But you defiantly – or was it reluctantly    -- admitted  to being a black man.    What gives?  You can't have it both ways.  Either there are no races,  and you are not a black man.  Or there are races and you are a black man.  

BG:  I didn't say races aren't real.  I said they aren't biologically real.   The fact that races aren’t biologically real, doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the concept of race.  National identities aren’t biologically real, either.    But national identities can matter quite a lot in human affairs.

WG:    So you think that  race is a social reality, even if it isn't a biological reality.  I can buy that.    But then I don’t see how biracial identities push our concepts of race to the breaking point, as you claim.    Think about ethnic identities.  Does the fact of people of multiple ethnicities  push our old concepts of ethnicity to the breaking point? 

BG: Well,  I'm not sure.  But race and ethnicity are different in some ways and similar in others.    I think we need a distinction.   Let's  distinguish between race and racial identifications.  I'd like to  reserve concept of race for something that pretends to be  biologically grounded and  reserve racial identifications for something socially and culturally grounded. When I acknowledged  being a black man – and I was doing that proudly, by the way --  I wasn’t  making any claim about my biology.  I was making a claim about my social and cultural heritage. 

WG:    NOw it just sounds like racial identifications, as you are construing them,  are very much akin to ethnic identifications or national identifications.   You seem to think we've got two things going on without being very clear about them.  We've got a set of ethnicity like racial identifications and a set of would be biological racial categories.    Is there a problem with that? 

BG:    I think there is.  I think you're finally starting to get my point.     Go back to what I was saying earlier about biology and race.  Even though we now know that racial categories are biologically empty, we still have this deeply ingrained, cultural habit of identifying ourselves in racial terms.  But it turns out that our racial identifications are anchored in, well, nothing really.  Or at least they aren't anchored in the kind of thing we once thought they were.    And I think our struggle to make sense of biracial identities helps us to see that. 

WG:  I'm not sure  I'm following this.   But let me try something out to see if I catch your drift here.  Take Barack Obama, again.    What race does he belong to?   And why exactly does he belong to that race?  Is he black?  White?  Or is he something else entirely?  In the old days,   the one-drop rule told us the answer.   If you had one drop of “black blood,” then you were ipso facto black.   But that's clearly non-sensical,  especially if we're thinking of racial categories as biologically grounded.   But suppose we let culture and stuff like that be our guide.    Given Obama's quite distinctive upbringing,  you  wouldn't be wrong to think that from a social/cultural perspective he's much more of a white dude than a black dude.  

BG:  Of course,  neither blacks as a whole nor whites as a whole are cultural monoliths.   But if Obama's life story represent some strand of some typical American subculture, it's certainly not a paradigmatically black strand of the plethora of American subcultures.   I don't think anybody would deny that. 

WG:  SO what makes this guy a black dude?

BG:   He's decided that he's black and his decision counts as authentic,  I think, because he's got one black parent.   

WG:  That seems right, as far as it goes.  But it doesn't go far enough.  Ask yourself,  could Obama just decide that he is a white man, rather than a black man or a biracial man?

BG:    I think you're onto something important here.  It seems to me that   Obama’s got two, and only two socially acceptable options for his racial self-identification.    Like a rare but growing number of people who think of themselves as  a sort of multi-racial vanguard, he could  permissibly identify himself as a biracial person – full stop.   Or he could permissibly  do the more standard and  less culturally threatening thing and self-identify as black – full stop.  But we’re not yet at the point where Barack Obama is socially allowed to self-identify as white, rather than black.

WG:    What do you mean by "permissibly"  here?    He’s the goddamn  President of the United States.  He’s free to self- identify as whatever he chooses.  Remember George Bush I and his refusal to eat broccoli? 

BG:    You and I both know that Obama isn't free to self-identify as white and deny the black part of himself. First it would so radically change his political narrative that it  would be political suicide.   But politics aside, there's a much, much broader point here that gets us right to the heart of things.   Old fashioned  white people and old fahisoned black people  have a perhaps not fully conscious,  but deeply ingrained  cultural investment in  maintaining the racial status quo.  They, in effect,  try to  force biracial people into the  old comfortable and familiar  racial categories.    For some reason -- I'm not sure why -- we pigeon-hole biracial people into the socially “marked” race – in the case of black and white in America that's  the black race  --  rather than allow them into the socially unmarked race –  the white race (at least in America from its beginning until now).   

WG:   Now I finally see why you think the struggles of biracial people to constitute their identities -- racialized and non-racialized -- is a threat to our old ways of thinking.   They just don't fit.   And our attempts to make them fit distorts many things.   

BG:  That's one reason I referred to old-fashioned white people and black people.   I think maybe some younger people are beginning to see things differently.    They are willing to allow racial identifications to be as fluid and multiple as ethnic identifications. 

WG:  You're talking about the harbingers of a post-racial age.  I think I think that's a fantasy and isn't coming anytime soon.   But  this is tough stuff and my head is beginning to spin.   I think I need to listen to the upcoming episode of Philosophy Talk to get this all straightened out.  

The First Annual Dionysus Awards

Philosophy Talk is initiating a new movie award.   

I know;  I know.  Do we really need yet another movie award?  We've got the Oscars; the Golden Globe; the National Society of Film Critics, the People's Choice Awards ....  So what's the point of another, you ask?

Well,  it's fun to talk about movies -- at least the good ones.  But more importantly,  nobody really explicitly applauds movies for their philosophical merits -- though filmmaking can sometimes be a highly philosophical art form.   So why not an award that does just that?  Finally,  what could be cooler than winning a Dionysus Award?  Sounds much cooler than an Oscar or a Golden Globe -- at least to me. 

So on February 8th, we're going to inaugurate our Annual  Dionysus Awards for the most philosophically interesting movies of the year.    Our main guest will be noted film critic David Thomson.   But we'll also be joined briefly by some of our favorite philosopher-cinemaphile who will give their takes on the philosophically most interesting movies of the year.   

We'd love to have you join in the fun.  Submit your own  nomination for a Dionysus Award to comments@philosophhytalk.org.   Tell us which movies of 2008 you found most philosophically gripping and why.  If we find your nomination compelling,  we just may include you as a special guest  on our on-air broadcast on the 8th.

Legal Ethics

UPDATE: John Perry originally posted this when our episode on legal ethics first aired. Since, we are repeating that episode this week, we are moving this entry to the top.

Are Lawyers all that bad?
by John Perry

Our blurb for this show says,

Lawyers are often thought to be hardly better than hired guns, who, in the words of Plato, are paid to "make the weaker argument the stronger" -- like the sophists of old.  .

My father, grandfather and uncle were lawyers, in the small firm then called "Perry & Perry" in Lincoln, Nebraska, and my cousin and his son continue in that firm, now known as "Perry, Guthery, Haase & Gessford".  If the Danforth Foundation hadn't kindly offered me a fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell, I would have followed the family tradition.  It never occurred to me, as I was growing up, the law was anything but the most honorable of professions. 

Lawyers, it seemed to me, had the very honorable calling of helping ordinary citizens cope with the law, with contracts, with lawsuits, when they were accused of crimes, when they wanted to petition the government for redress of grievances, and so forth.  And, I must say, lawyers have helped me in most of those ways, and the lawyers who have helped me have all seemed like honorable, hard-working  people, who earned the fees they charged.  We are proud to live in a nation of laws rather than men, and how could we do that without lawyers?  So when and why did lawyers get the bad reputation reflected in our quote, and expressed every day in lawyer jokes?

And, come to think of it, if lawyers are such jerks, how come the law school has a higher pay scale than the philosophy department ---- but I digress.

There are presumably many reasons that lawyers have acquired, in the eyes of many of the non-lawyers in our society, a bad reputation.  For every television show that represents them in a positive light, like Perry Mason or Matlock, there must be a dozen that cast them in a less favorable light, like one of my current favorites, Boston Legal.  And a lot of lawyers work for big corporations, helping them to avoid taxes, avoid just punishment for peddling defective products, and the like.

But one reason, and the one we are most likely to explore on the program, is that lawyers are often obliged, or seen to be obliged, because of legal ethics, the code of conduct to which lawyers subscribe, to do things that  conflict with  the more common sense dictates of morality. O.J. Simpson is widely, perhaps unfairly, seen to have gotten away with murder because his zealous lawyers flim-flammed the jury.  And Robert Blake.  Not to mention Michael Jackson, who wasn't accused of murdering anyone, but whose luck in the courtroom seemed also to exemplify the principle that people with enough money to hire lawyers who are good at making the true appear the false and the false appear the true  can get away with anything.  Especially in Southern California.

Lawyers have an obligation to pursue the interests of  their clients, whether they defending  tobacco companies that have conspired to keep the truth about the danger of their product from the public, or rapists or other depraved individuals who will commit more crimes if released, or helping stupid people who spill hot coffee on themselves with frivolous lawsuits that mean that the rest of us get tepid coffee from the local drive-in, or conniving so that big companies don't have to pay taxes and can continue to spoil the environment. 

Not to mention prosecutors, who, if my sources of information, mostly television shows, are to be believed, regularly browbeat people into copping pleas for crimes they didn't commit.

But our system is an adversarial system.  Justice is served by vigorous prosecution and defense.  Does this imply that lawyers are obliged to behave in ways that don't always serve justice, and don't always benefit society, and aren't always very fair to everyone involved --- particularly to the people who don't have enough money to hire the top guns?  Does the nature of our legal system put lawyers in a moral dilemma, where the obligations of their profession require them to act in ways that can have terrible consequences?  Is there a better way to do all of this?

Well, these are some of the issues we will explore with noted  philosopher of law David Luban, of Georgetown University, We had a great program with him once before, on war crimes, and this should be a good one too.  Join us as we discuss the  ethical obligations of lawyers to their clients, to the court, and to society at large. 

Political Correctness and the Speech Fashion War

posted by Ken Taylor

It's been awhile since I've done this -- awakened at a god-awful hour on Sunday morning, to write a blog about an upcoming show. I hope I'm lucid.

Today's show is about the political correctness. Our guest is Leonard Steinhorn, author of a rousing defense of the baby boom generation, to which I proudly belong, called The Greater Generation. According to Steinhorn, we baby boomers were the leading edge of a great sea change for the better in America. Our age cohort almost single-handedly ended racism, sexism, and homophobia. We brought down corrupt and mendacious presidents. We ended a pointless and forlorn war. By elevating the sanctity and fragility of the environment to national consciousness, we brought to heel a kind of anything goes capitalism that saw our lakes and streams and air as just more commodities to be used up and discarded. We took the university by storm, first as students and then as faculty, helping to make them more than perpetuators of narrow privilege. We took the conformist, hierarchical and oppressive America bequeathed to us by our so-called greatest-generation forebears and shook it up root and branch and in the process gradually remade it into a more caring, progressive, egalitarian society.

Assuming that we boomers really do deserve all this praise, it's still fair to wonder what any of this has to do with political correctness. Well, I think it actually has a fair bit to do with at least the fate of the term 'politically correct' especially with the claiming, reclaiming and disclaiming of that somewhat odd phrase.

I say that the phrase 'politically correct' is an odd one because I don't think I've ever heard anyone use that phrase in a straight-forward and sincere manner. In my experience, people on the left tend to use the phrase mostly in a sort of self-mocking, tongue and cheek way, while people on the right tend to utter the phrase only in a sort of defiantly dismissive tone.

That's not to say that there aren't serious issues behind all this. One of them has to do with the both the decreasing prevalence of things like overt racism, sexism and homophobia. I'm not at all sure, to say the least, that sexism, racism and homophobia have really been decisively defeated in America. Steinhorn takes pains, though, to remind us just how sexist, racist and homophobic post WW II America really was. He is surely right that the world we live in today is nothing like that America. Thank god.

Still, though there are still people who hold views that those on the left might want to characterizes as racist, sexist, or homophobic a striking thing started happening sometimes in the mid-sixties. At some point it became highly unfashionable, at least in the circles in which I travel, to publicly express views that could be considered even mildly racist, sexist, or homophobic. And I don't think that's just a reflection of the narrowness of the circles in which I travel. What I find striking about this is that I believe that the pace of change in the fashionably expressible vastly outstripped the pace of substantive social change on the ground. The result was that many people probably found that they could not fashionably say what they actually thought, for fear of being labeled racist, sexist, or homophobic.

Let's distinguish two things here: (a) being racist, sexist, or homophobic; (b) being labeled racist, sexist, or homophobic. I take it that you can be labeled racist either correctly or incorrectly. But I also take it that you can fail to be labeled racist even though you are one.

Now if it's unfashionable to express certain views and if the cost of expressing such views is that you get labeled a racist, then if people care enough about what they are labeled, several things can happen. First, many racists may retain their racist views, but fail to express them, because they disvalue being labeled racists, even though they value being racists (and may even value expressing their views, but not enough to incur the cost of being labeled racist.) Second, some non-racists may fail to express their views because of the disvalue of being wrongly labeled racists. Third, some people who believe themselves not to be racists and who value the expressing their views, will pay the cost of being labeled racists, but will resent those who do the labeling.

If the left thought that victory in what we might call the speech fashion war really meant a substantive victory on the ground, then the left may have made a significant miscalculation. Making it unfashionable to say certain things -- which, for awhile at least, the left really did seem to have done -- doesn't ipso facto make it unfashionable to believe those things. I take that to be a pretty obvious point. But the thought may have been that by driving certain views, as it were, underground, you make it impossible to for the views to be publicly defended. And one might think that views that can't be publicly defended will ultimately wither away.

I'm not so sure. What can't be fashionably defended because it can't fashionably be said, can still be believed, and believed with great conviction and confidence. Rendering such views costly to express does not ipso facto render them costly to hold. Moreover, when a view held by many can't be fashionably expressed, one can't, I would think, really know whether the arguments on public offer that purport to refute the unexpressed views are actually being taken up and acknowledged by those who hold the underground beliefs. That is to say, the fashionable arguments on offer that parade as victorious may be enjoying an illusion of victory rather than the real thing.

I suspect that for at least some period in recent history, many people believed things that they thought couldn't fashionably be said. And I think some, especially on the left, may have once mistaken victory in, as it were, the speech fashion war for substantive victory on the ground. I think it no longer possible to make this mistake. Partly because the views that once looked to have been driven underground are now refusing to stay underground. That's part of an anti-political correctness backlash. But that, I think, is all to the good. What arguably lay behind the strategy of trying to eliminate certain attitudes by rendering the expression of those attitudes unfashionable was a quasi-whorfian hypothesis that that what can't be said can't be believed. But the whorfian hypothesis is false. And the strategy based on it only appeared to win the day.

There is much more to say. And certainly it could be said more clearly. But my juices are flowing at least. And I'm sure that after I'm exposed to John Perry and Leonard Steinhorn's arguments, I'll have completely changed my perspective.

Flirting as a two-step dance

posted by Ken Taylor

Ah the glories of summer. Though lots has been happening behind the scenes at Philosophy Talk -- much of which you will hear about very soon -- not a lot has been happening on this blog of late. But now that our summer more or less hiatus draws to a close, we will be in the studio more often, producing more live shows. That should mean more blogging too.

I can't honestly say that today's show is about an age-old philosophical question. In fact, as a philosophical topic, flrting is, like, so last second. As far as I can tell, it was put on the map by today's guest, Carrie Jenkins, and her mate Daniel Nolan in a pair of dualing articles. You can download Carrie's by clicking here and Daniel's by clicking here. Also, be sure to check out Carrie's blog Long Words Bother Me, where she mostly doesn't flirt, but does serious philosophy.

I don't profess to have a well worked-out theory of flirting. In my youth, before I settled down, I was nothing like a master flirt, though I tried hard. So I don't even speak from rich experience. But I'll offer a few quick takes just to get the juices going before this morning's show. I'm sure Carrie's thinking will be much more sophisticated than my own feeble attempts.

I start out thinking that flirting probably has a sort of "Gricean" structure. By that I mean a couple of things. First, it seems to me that you flirt with someone by intending to flirt with them. It's one thing to cause sexual arousal in another person by a look or a walk or a word or your tone of voice or the tilt of your head. But unless you intend to cause arousal by that means, it doesn't seem right to my ear to say that you are flirting with them.

But it also doesn't seem right that merely intending to cause arousal by a certain bit of behavior -- verbal or non-verbal -- suffices for flirting. First of all there's the point that you might intend to cause arousal but be so clueless as to how to go about it that you utterly fail. A clueless and crude teenage boy who thinks that mooning girls is a cool way to flirt, isn't really a flirt (though maybe he's an attempted flirt, according to Daniel Nolan). He's just crude and obnoxious.

More interesting -- to me at least -- than cases of attempted flirtation that fail to arouse or intimate sex or romance because they are so inept are cases in which you do succeed in causing arousal by a behavior that's intended to cause arousal, but in which you, nonetheless, don't flirt. Psychologists have long known that sexaul attraction is facilitated during states of strong antecedent emotional arousal -- whatever the antecedent emotional state. There's a famous and widely cited study that compared guys crossing a scary bridge in a beautiful setting who were approached by a woman claiming to be doing research on beautiful places with guys on a secure bridge in a similar setting approached by the same woman. The woman asked a few questions, gave them a questionnaire, and gave them her number in case they had follow up questions. The guys on the scary bridge rated the woman more attractive and were more likely to call her afterwards than the guys on the secure bridge. Clearly the guys on the scary bridge were more emotionally aroused than the guys on the secure bridge, but they (mistakenly?) attributed their arousal to the presence of the woman.

Well what's that got to do with flrting, you ask? Well now that you know about this study, if you didn't already, here's a way to arouse a potential partner and cause that person to be interested in you. Take your target on a roller coaster ride on your first date. He or she will find you more attractive and be more interested in you than he or she otherwise might have been. Suppose you do this intentionally. Though you are manipulating your partner's level of sexual arousal by behavior intended to do just that, it doesn't seem right to say that you are flirting with with your target just by inviting her or him on the roller coaster ride. (Although, once you get the person on the ride your flirtations may be more successful.)

This brings me to the quasi-Gricean part. I think you flirt only when: (a) you behave in ways intended to intimate the possibility of sex or romance and (b) you intend to make that intention manifest to the other.

I'm not sure this is enough to constitute flirting. But it seems to me that if you don't intend to make it manifest that you intend to be intimating romance or sex then probably you are not flirting. You may be doing something else sexually charged. But you're not flirting.

Here's another quick thought about the "speech-acty" character of flirting. It seems to me that flirting is sort of like two speech acts in one. On the one hand, there's a kind of self-presentation involved in flirting. I present myself as potentially available to you. But in that self-presentation, I thereby invite you to present yourself to me as available to me. if you don't take up the invitation, I have flirted with you, but you haven't flirted with me. If you do take up the invitation, we're flirting with each other. Suppose that after you have openly declined my invitation, I continue to flirt with you -- that is, continue to present myself as available and thereby invite you to so present yourself to me. My flirtation turns into something else, it seems, though I'm not sure exactly what. An unwanted advance? Rudeness?

Suppose on the other hand, you accept my invitation to present yourself to me as available. But suppose that I decide I don't like you so much after all. I give you the buzz off sign. What then? Are you being similarly rude or obtuse or overly aggressive if you don't get the message? Was I being a mere tease? Once I begin a flirtation and you take me up on my invitation, am I or am I not entitled to take my invitation back without sanction? Or is it taking it back like refusing to let you in the door when you show up with your invitation to the dance?

Of course, there must be some limit, some off-ramp. To begin to flirt isn't to commit to carrying all the way through to romance or sex. To flirt is only to initmate a possibility. As the flirtation develops, we each get to decide at some point or other that the merely possible will not, in this case, be actualized. Or so it seems. But how exactly we manage that in a mutually agreeable way, now that's a tricky question.

[added after show.] I also think it's the fact that a flirtation intimates a mere possibility -- a possibility whose non-actualization is also presupposed as a possibility -- that lends flirtation an air of what we might call intrinsic playfulness. It's partly because it's made mutually manifest that this may or may not go any further that flirting sort of is bound to have a playful air. If flirtation were always intended to get you all the way to romance or sex, there would be a kind of intrinsic seriousness to it that flirtation lacks. Of course, at some point when there's mutual and continuing uptake, things can get serious indeed. And surely we want that out of some our flirtations.

What's on you Summer Reading list?

posted by Ken Taylor

On today's show, we'll be talking about books. The sun is out, the surf is up, and it's time to take to the beach, with a few good philosophical books in hand. We did a similar episode last year and it was fun. So we thought as the summer of 2007 approaches, we'd try it again.

OUr guest will be Danielle Marshall from Powell's City of Books in Portland Oregon. You may or may not have noticed that Powell's is now an official sponsor of Philosophy Talk. We're really pleased about this and are looking forward to along and fruitful partnership with Powells.

By the way, if you are in the Portland area, come and check us out week after next. We're going to be doing two events of there. On Wednesday evening, June 20th at 7:30, we'll being doing a live taping of the show at Powell's downtown store. Our guest will be the poet and philosopher Troy Jollimore, whose first book of poetry, Tom Thompson in Purgatory just won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. More details about that event are here.

The following evening, we'll be doing our show LIVE from the studios of Oregon Public Broadcasting, Thursday evening at 8pm. This will give our Oregon area listeners a chance to interact with us live, rather than getting their usual re-broadcast version of the show. Our two guests for that epsiode will be Tom Cohart and Daniel Klein, authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Humor. Be sure to tune in and call-up, Oregon!

I have to admit to have slightly subversive intentions with regard to OPB. I very much want them to move us to Sunday's at 10am, so we can be live all over Oregon. They aren't likely to do it, but maybe by coming up and doing the show live just once, that can create a bottom-up groundswell of demand for more live episodes of Philosophy Talk.

In any case, do come and check us out at Powell's on Wednesday the 20th and tune in and call up to our live OPB broadcast on Thursday the 21st.

But back to our summer reading list.

Now I have to admit that most of my own summer reading, will not be reading for pure philosophcal pleasure. That's because I really MUST finish a book I've been working on for several years now that is WAY past due and get started on the next one, about which I have been thinking, speaking and teaching but not writing for the past several years. So most of my reading wil be directly related to those two tasks.

Still, I have thoughts both about what I would like to read myself this summer, if I were to be able to for pure philosophical pleasure and about what I might recommend to others to read who were looking for interesting philosophical reads.

Here are few things that I find intriguing. In some cases, I've actually begun the books. In other cases, I merely hope to some day relatively soon.

Two important philosophers, well worth reading, both of whom sometimes wrote for a wider audience, died recently. Richard Rorty and Robert Solomon. Rorty died just Friday morning. Solomon died a few months ago.

Solomon was a guest on Philosophy Talk awhile back talking about happines. We tried to get him on again, to talk about love or the emotions or existentialism. But schedules never clicked. Bob was a lucid and passionate writer. You should read something by him. He wrote many fine books, but one I like a lot is his book, About Love: Reinventing Romance for our Time.

Many regard Rorty as one the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Though not many analtyic philosophers regard him that way, many non-philosophers do. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Rorty was probably over-appreciated by non-philosophers and underappreciated by many philosophers. If you haven't read Rorty or haven't read him recently, you should pick up one of has many books or collections of essays. I just picked up two of them the other day. A collection he published back in 1999 called Philosophy and Social Hope which is, I think, his first collection of essays aimed at a "popular" audience and a more recent collection called Philosophy as Cultural Politics. This last one was published just this year, and is represented as the 4th volume of his philosophical papers. Perhaps the final thing that Rorty wrote, or really co-wrote , is What's the use of Truth? This very short book, which I haven't looked at yet, seems to be an exchange between the French analytic philosopher Pascal Engel and Rorty.

If you want to read a reasonably accessible book by an outstandingly good philosopher attacking Rorty's views on truth, see Paul Boghossian's book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism

I've just looked up at the clock. Unfortunately, I really need to run. I've got to get to the studio. I've got lots more suggestions. I'll just type a few quickly without providing a lot of links. I'm about three chapters into The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's an intriquing idea, and there's lots of insight there. But the style of the book is a little frustrating. Seems like a book that will be much talked about for awhile.

I'm a good way into Barack Obama's Tale's of my Father -- a really fascinating read about the constituting of a self, espeically a racial self. Obama is a very fine writer and a much more thoughtful than your average politician lets himself appear to be. You could read this book and then read Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity and/or Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and you would have had a great exploration of the dynamics of identity constitution from many different angles in many different voices.

Another a-typical politician that has something deeply philosophical to say is Al Gore. I've just picked up his book The Assault on Reason. I'm not that far into it yet. I've just skimmed a couple of chapters. But it seems to be written with passion and courage and clarity at first glance. I read a column of David Brooks criticizing Al Gore as some weird alien creature. But seems to me, we need more people like him in American poltics.

I also started Doug Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop. This looks like a typical Hofstadter book -- well written and witty, full of insight, but also not likely to satisfy the professional philosopher in me. Of course, that's not quite what he's trying to do with this book about the nature of the self. (Although he does say that he views this book as a "return" to philosophy on his part and he wants it to be convincing to professional philosophers of mind like me. We'll see. I'm only a few chapters into it and I'm reserving judgment.

If you want to read a more philosophically demanding book about the self, read The Situated Self by Jenann Ismael. Brilliant stuff -- it will be harder going than Hofstadter, admittedly, but it will be well worth the effort.

Anyway, I gotta go. Talk to you soon. Between you, Danielle, John and me, I'm sure we can come up with a dynamite summer reading list for the philosophically inclined.

Journalistic Ethics?

posted by Ken Taylor

The topic for today's show is Journalistic Ethics. Our guest will be Dale Jacquette, of Penn State University, who has recently published a book about the topic called, Journalistic Ethics: Moral Responsibility in the Media. I'm sure you can get a copy of the book at Powell's Books -- which is now an official sponsor of Philosophy Talk.

This will be a short post just to get my juices flowing before the show begins today.

The preamble to the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists states that "public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues."

These are certainly admirable sentiments. But it would be pretty hard case to make a case that in our times journalism, at large, lives up to the high ideals articulated in that preamble. Take, for example, propagandistic early coverage of the war in Iraq. That coverage provided precious little enlightenment and was, in my opinion, a complete disservice to our democracy. How has it come to this?

I have to admit to being pretty down on journalists as a class - especially the Washington Press Corp.

When I was very much younger, I thought of journalists as caped crusaders, daring truth seekers, who stood apart from the system and were willing to challenge it, and were even wililng to help facilitate its radical transformation. I thought of journalists as people whose job it was to shed the light of truth on the secrets cracks and crevices of government and society. I even toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist, for awhile, just because it seemed to me like one of the most noble of professions.

That, I think, was because my first stirrings of poltiical and social self-consciousness occurred at the height of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. And even as the war waned, there quickly follwed the whole Watergate thing. Journalism was instrumental to ending a disasterous war, to helping bring about a more just social order, and hastening the downfall of an arrogant and corrupt president. What profession could be more noble and more consequential? I think I was not entirely self-deluded in seeing the journalism of that day as powerful counterweight to entrenched and otherwise barely accountable poltiical power.

But it now seems to me that those were pretty singular times in the history of journalism. At any rate, things have certainly changed since then. Now, I look on the journalistic class as a whole with extremely jaundiced eyes -- though there are still a good number of nationally prominent journalists -- especially of the print variety -- for whom I have great admiration. The problem, I suspect, lies in the increasing "corporatization" of the mass media. A great deal of the media is controlled by a few huge and powerful corporations. And I suspect that huge media conglomerates have no more interest in challenging and shaking up entrenched power structures than GM or Exxon or any other corporate giant does.

Moreover, I hate to say this but I fear that many if not most journalist within these huge media conglomerates are more inclined to pursue the path of a corporate careerist than they are to pursue the path of a rabble rousing, truth seeking outsider.

The other day I heard Cokie Roberts make what superficially is a pretty benign statement about what her job, as a journalist, is. She said that her job as a journalist (covering Washington politics) is to explain politics and the political class to the American people. This was in the context of a question about whether she had ever thought about following her father's footsteps and running for political office herself. She answered that she didn't need to run for office to feel like a part of the system, since her job as a journalist was to explain the political class and their doings to the American people at large. That made her feel like she was an important part of the system, without having to take on the burdens of public office.

One can see some point to Roberts description of her job and the jobs of journalists generally. But there's also a trap there. Because ask yourself "In what terms" should the journalist explain the workings of the political class to the people at large. In terms that the politicians themselves would offer? In terms that are maximally revealing of the real dynamics of political life? Some politician is pushing some bill. He or she mounts a bunch of arguments about the good the bill would do. But the politician is also in the thrall of some lobby. Perhaps his or her real agenda is to serve the interest of said lobby. What's the journalist job here? To explain the arguments pro and con, taking at face value the things that politicians explicity say? Or to dig deeper, to ask who the real winner and losers will be if the bill is passed or not passed? Mostly, we get the former out of Washington reporters and hardly any of the latter.

Why? Because reporters these days seem to want, at all cost, to maintain access to the corridors of power. This is partly connected with their culture of corporate careerism. They seem always to be on the look out for that one leak, that one tidbit of information from some anonymous insider, that will lead to a blockbuster possibly career-making story. But if you play ball with insiders, then you have to play by rules that will serve the interest of those insiders. You have to frame issues in ways that will serve their agendas. Otherwise, they won't keep giving you access.

To be sure, inisders do compete with one another. And you never know who's going to be up one day and down the next. So you have to pick and choose your insiders well. Or you have to learn to play both sides of the street, as it were. But that just leads to what you might call more "He said. She said." reporting. Get a Democrat to say one thing, find a Republican who willl say something at odds with what the democrats says. And now you think you've been fair and balanced and objective.

But have you done anything, really, to ferret out the truth? Have you done in independent truth-seeking, fact checking, assessment of the strengths and weakness of arguments?

But perhaps that isn't the journalist's job. Perhaps the journalist's job is merely to let the elites speak and challenge one another. The media provides a platform upon which elites can compete for control of public debate and discourse, not any kind of independent check on the reliability of claims made, etc.

I once heard a journalist who was the Pentagon Correspondent for some major media outlet say in response to the question "Why don't you challenge Rumsfeld more?" that it wasn't her job to challenege Rumsfeld. Her job was to ask him questions and take down his answers. She also had the job, she conceded, of reporting what, say, the Democrats say in response to Rumsfeld's assertions. FInally, she said that she takes what Rumsfeld says and what others say in response and presents it all to her readers adn lets them decide what to make of it.

This is journalism? Seems to me little better than stenography. What if, for example, Rumsfeld is propagandizing, to put it mildly, through his teeth? And what if the Democrats are too cowardly and craven to challenge Rumsfeld's propoganda? What does our intrepid journalist cum stenographer do now? More he said, she said? But who does she turn to?

Perhaps it wouldn't be so troubling if more voices from off the center stage were given more play. I mean the folks shouting from the bleachers "It's a lie! It won't work! The Republicans are deluded! The Democrats are craven and cowardly!" Who are such voices? Often scholars, activists of one sort or another, foreign intellectuals and politicians, etc. But part of the culture of access journalism is precisely that you don't bring the folks sitting in the bleachers onto center stage very often. They are the outs. The outs don't deserve to be listened to in the same way, especially when they challenge, rather than confirm what more entrenched insiders have to say. Even if they have the force of the better reason, argument, and evidence on their side -- heaven forbid. Because, of course, journalists aren't really much in the business anymore of making independent assessments of the arguments offered up by competing elites.

They call this neutrality. But how does such neturality really serve the goal of enlightening the public by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues? I don't really think it does, at least not very much.

As you can see, I've grown pretty cynical and disgusted in my late middle age. Perhaps I over-react. Do I? I'm sure John and Dale will enlighten me if I do.

I gotta go make radio.

Why I am not a Wittgensteinian

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode is about Wittgenstein. Our guest will be Juliet Floyd.

Many regard Wittgenstein as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I don't share that view. But there's no denying that, for a man who published only one book during his lifetime -- a book that he later basically repudiated -- he really did have a tremendous impact on 20th century analytic philosophy. Indeed, Wittgenstein has to be regarded as one of the great founding fathers of 20th century analytic philosophy, especially of the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy.

Now I don't profess at all to be an expert on Wittgenstein. I did read a fair amount of Wittgenstein as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where a number of my teachers had an enduring fascination with his work. I don't doubt that Wittgenstein was a deep, ingenious, and highly impactful philosophy. Nonetheless, I find myself resistant to much of his philosophy -- especially his later philosophy. In the rest of this post, I'll try to say a bit about why.

When I say that I find myself resistant to much of Wittgenstein's philosophy, it's not so much this or that particular claim of his that I resist. There's lots of things that Wittgenstein says in his great work the Philosophical Investigations, for example, that I find intriguing, deep, challenging, and well worth thinking about even today. I presume we'll talk about some of his more intriquing philosophical claims today -- his picture theory of meaning, his claim that the limits of my language are the limits of my world, his later (and highly influential) view that meaning is use, his argument against the very possibility of a private language. All this is rich and provocative stuff. And though I probably ultimately reject a lot of it, it isn't these things that I find so hard to swallow from Wittgenstein. It's really his "metaphilosophical" outlook that I find myself constantly recoiling from. That is, it's his views about how to do philosophy and what you can and cannot achieve by doing philosophy that I most firmly reject.

Let me explain. Wittgenstein, especially the later Wittgenstein, viewed philosophy as it had been practiced more or less up his own arrival as mostly a budget of confusions. Philosophical problems and "theories" one and all arise, he says at one point in the Philosophical Investigations, from language gone on a holiday. The rough idea is that a whole lot of philosophy gets going by taking terms like say "knowledge" or "mind" or "idea" or -- take your pick -- and raising questions that have nothing to do with our sort of everyday use of such terms in the context of the "language games" in which they are at home.

Take the so-called problem of other minds. How does this problem get started? Well, Descartes convinced many philosophers that we have immediate and incorrigible access to the contents of our own minds, as if the mind were somehow completely open to itself. It's clear we don't in the same way know the contents of the minds of others. Starting with that observation, it really wouldn't take much argument to get yourself into the frame of thinking that one can reasonably and intelligibly wonder whether we have anyway of knowing about the minds of others. And once you got yourself into that state of wonder, it wouldn't take a whole lot of further argument to convince yourself to be an utter sceptic about our knowledge of other minds. Of course, at least some other philosophers will be unmoved by your scepticism. They may take themselves to be the guardians of common sense. But as soon as they admit that your arguments at least deserve answering, that there really is a problem about our knowledge of other minds, then we're off and running on a race to see which set of philosophical arguments will carry the day. Sceptical arguments will war with anti-sceptical arguments. the debate will go on -- probably interminably, with no real resolution ever being achieved.

We philosophers tend to think of our problems as "enduring." But the Wittgensteinian thought is that that may just be another way of saying intractable, however. And Wittgenstein can be seen as offering us an explanation of why we find the problems so intractable. That's the point of his saying that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. This is not for him a sign that the problems of philosophy are deep. It is rather a sign that they are grounded in utter confusion and abuse of language.

Now I won't try to reconstruct the arguments that might lead one down the primrose path of worrying about our knowledge of other minds. I'll leave that as exercise to the reader for now. What Wittgenstein wants to do for philosophy is to give us a way of avoiding taking even the very first step down such paths in the first place. The secret, he thinks, is simply to look at how we actually use such terms as 'knowledge' 'self' 'others' etc in the real life language games and "forms of life" in which those terms are at home. Philosophy should simply stick to describing use. It should abandon the grand hope of building philosophical theories of things like mind, knowledge and self. It has no particular resources for enabling it to construct such theories in the first place. And all of its past attempts to do so have led to intractable confusion.

Once we abandon the urge to build grand philosophical theories designed to get at, as it were, hidden philosophical essences, and simply look at how language is actually used, it's not so much that we thereby solve the traditional philosophical problems, It's rather that we dissolve them. If we simply look at our actual practices, we will see that the idea that we know the contents of our own minds in some immediate, incorrigible fashion that is different from the way in which we we know the minds of others cannot be sustained. The very problem that gets the whole intractable debate about our knowledge of self vs. our knowledge of other minds is based again on "language gone on a holiday." And once you see this, the problem immediately dissolves itself.

There's something profound about Wittgenstein's approach. Not without reason did generations of later philosophers find it a potent rallying cry. It's certainly true that we want to pay attention to how our language is actually used and we don't want, through mere inattention to the facts of use, to generate pseudo problems. But I have to say that I think it is a serious mistake to think that all the so-called traditional problems of philosophy are mere pseudo-problems borne of insufficient attention to how we actually use certain quite ordinary terms, that, in their everyday use, are completely unproblematic.

Since I'm going to have to leave for the studio pretty soon, I'm not sure I can spell this all out before airtime. Probably I'll come back to it after the show and provide an update. But here's a couple of quick takes on why I don't share Wittgenstein's assessment of the "enduring" philosophical problems and his assessment of what to do about them. First, I think it's wrong to say that if we just look at how the language is actually used the problem about other minds would simply go away. One needn't doubt that we do know the minds of others. One can simply wonder both how possibly we could know the minds of others and how actually we do, in fact, do so. Both of these strike me as important and interesting questions. The former is the kind of question that you'll find a philosopher more likely to be asking. And the second -- the how actually question -- is one you'll find a psychologist/cognitive scientist more likely to be asking.

I could say a lot about the nature of how possibly questions. Think of what you're doing when you ask and try to answer a how possibly question like this. You've got an initial budget of concepts -- maybe concepts of mind, knowledge, self, others. And reflecting on these concepts you find yourself puzzled as to how these concepts "coordinate" with one another. You can see how possibly a thinking being can know itself, but your puzzled about how a thinking being can know the contents of the mind of another thinking being. You start to imagine the possibilities. In so doing, you are, as it were, taking an imaginative walk through a range of alternative possible worlds, trying to see if there are any in which one mind knows the contents of another mind. If you find one, and if it's not too far away from the actual world, you conclude that yes one mind can know the contents of another mind. If you don't find one, or if the ones you find are very very far from the actual world, you become a sceptic or conclude that one can only know the contents of one's own mind.

You can read Wittgenstein as arguing that we don't really have any discplined way to walk through the range of possibilities in any way likely to produce stable conviction. Instead of trying to take unconstrained and undisciplined walks through a range of imagined, but un-ordered possibilities, we should just look. Look at how we actually talk about mind, self, knowledge and other in the actual language games we play when we do so in the context of the lived forms of life that give those games point.

I think there is something to this advice. But not everything that Wittgenstein seems to think.

Consider the practicing cognitive scientist. What we do when we walk through a range of alternative worlds in the imagination can feel a lot different from what we do when we do science. Take your practicing cognitive scientist who wants to know how minds actually cognize one another. How does she go about constructing a theory of how people actually manage to know the minds of others. Well one thing she doesn't do is to simply look at how words like "knowledge" "mind" "self" "others" etc are used in ordinary language games. She might take such use as data points. But she's perfectly prepared to find out that people don't actually have much of a clue as to how we actually go about figuring out what other people think and believe. So what does she do? She deploys more or less tried and true methods of hypothesis generation and testing. She does experiments, she builds models, etc. That is, she draws on all the ways and means of empirical inquiry to try to figure out exactly how, in fact, we so regularly, reliably and systematically figure out what other people feel, believe, and desire. [She also notices that we are not so good at figuring out our own thoughts and feelings.

But what about the poor philosopher? The psychologist cum cognitive scientist in her attempt ot answer the how actually question about our knowledge of other minds is armed to the teeth. She has all the ways and means of empirical inquiry to draw upon. But what do we poor philosophers have to draw on in trying to answer our how possibly question? One worry might be the one we discussed above. We philosophers really don't have much to draw on except our own unconstrained philosophical imaginations. But philosophical imagination unmoored to the everyday forms of life that give our language games point, is a paltry thing, a thing more likely to mislead than illuminate. So perhaps what Wittgenstein is trying to do by suggesting that we look at how language actually works is simply to give us a way to constrain the imagination in ways that prevent it from just running rampant.

I applaud that instict, if that was the instinct. But take it a step further. Why restrict ourselves to just in tact "language games" in which the problematic terms and concepts supposedly have their homes? You wouldn't recommend that procedure to the practicing psychologist cum cognitive scientist would you? You wouldn't say look only at what people say. Don't do clever experiments designed to ferret out the hidden inner mechanisms or regularities not immediately evident in our everyday practices and our everyday descriptions of those practices.

WHy should the evidential base for our philosophy be more restricted than the evidential base for the construction of psychological and other theories.

Because philosophy is, well, different, and sui generis? I don't think so. Philosophy, on my view, is very much continuous with science. I don't mean to say that philosophy is just one science among others. It isn't. For one thing philosophy really is much more concerned, often, with "how possibly, if at all" sorts of questions than the sciences typically are and less concerned with the "how actually" than the sciences typically are. But how possibly questions should really be thought of as "how possibly, given what we know" questions. And as science increases our knowledge of the actual, we get greater and greater resources for constraining our answers to the how possibly questions that are our stock and trade.

Since I'm writing at sort of break-neck pace because I want to get this up before I leave for the studio, I'm not sure if I'm being clear. So let me try a quick statement of a kind of anti-Wittgensteinian bottom line, that concedes something but far from everything to Wittgenstein. Just starting out bare, with a bare "how possibly question" isn't likely to get you very far. All you have to go on, from square one, is one's own philosophical imagination. But an imagination unconstrained is probably not a reliable guide to anything very deep. Looking at actual language in practice can be one source of constraints. There is a way we actually do talk about the minds of others. There is the actual evidence that we do use to support our actual conclusions about the contents of others minds. And its wise advice that we start out by looking at such things. But we should also be prepared to look eslewhwere -- at, for example, the deliverances of cognitive science -- and constrain our imaginations by those deliverances as well. And we should also be prepared to find that our everyday practices are sometimes infected with all sorts of illusory material, founded on all sorts of historical mistakes and misdiagnosis that achieve through the mechanisms of cultural transmission the status of received wisdom. That is, we should be prepared to find that common sense and ordinary usage may themselves stand in need of thoroughgoing reformation.

But once we see that we can constrain our imaginations in lots of different ways, from lots of different sources, in its walk through a space of possibilities, why believe that we are prevented from even beginning the walk? Why despair that we will only end in confusion and chaos and intractable fruitless debate? Maybe we will, but we are not bound to.

Of course, another worry is that if we make more and more progress on the how actually questions, the how possibly questions will eventually cease to grip us. And at least that part of philosophy will come to an end. Maybe. But we are often gripped by how possibly questions when we cannot even begin to get a grip on how the thing actually works. I don't know what mechanisms are actually in there, but let's see what mechanism might be in there. And once we consider which ones might be there, let's see if we can eliminate some of the possible ones and hone in on the actual ones. Is the elimination of possibilites a scientific or a merely philosophical undertaking? I think the answer must be really both and. And as long as there are domains ripe for conceptual reconfiguration, there will always be room for philosophy. Philosophy will end only when conceptual puzzlement itself comes to an end.

With that, I really gotta go, as Ian Shoales is found of saying.

Democracy and the Judiciary

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode is about the Judiciary and Democracy.  Our guest will be Larry Kramer,  Dean of the Stanford Law School.   We're really looking forward to having Larry as our guest.   Larry has been an agent of change since coming to Stanford.   It used to be that the law school barely cooperated with the rest of the University.  But under Larry's able leadership many good partnerships are being formed between Law and other arms of the university.  For example,  there are  now joint PhD-JD programs in a number of areas in the university,  including a joint Phd-JD in philosophy.   So all you inspiring Philosopher-Lawyer Kings out there put Stanford on your list of possible places to pursue your dreams.

Anyway,  on to the subject of today's show.   In one way,  it seems obvious that the  court system -- especially   judicial review of the acts of the legislative and executive branches of government -- is, in one way,   a bulwark of our constitutional democracy.   That was a point made clearly and forcefully by a past Dean of the Stanford Law School,  Kathleen Sullivan,  who was our guest on Capitol Hill when we did a show on Separation of Powers.   The court protects  certain minority rights from being trampled by the majority, protects the basic liberty and participatory rights of all,  and checks the excesses of the other branches of government.   That's all well and good and crucial for democratic self-grovernance.

So what's the issue about the courts at all?   Well, surely one issue is that the main means by which we the people can hold our government accountable is through the electoral process.  But judges, by and large,  do not serve at the pleasure of the people  I am not advocating that they should.  Indeed,  I despise judicial elections.   Here in California we have judicial elections for certain judges.  They are usually low key.   You hardly ever see the judges out actively campaigning for office.  Instead on our massive electoral guide,  you get their written statements.   And unless they've somehow been in the news for some other reason,  that's about all you learn about them. Still,  I almost always find their candidate statements repulsive, simple minded things,  designed to pander rather than to inform.    Elected judges become  pandering politician,  even if on a smaller scale.    So I prefer to see judges appointed rather than elected. Unelected is more likely to mean independent, especially where appointments are a joint responsibility and come with lifetime tenure.   

So what's the real problem?  Well, the  decisions of the Courts, especially the Supreme Court, have  had far reaching and often wrenching social consequence in recent and not so recent years.  Over the course of the last fifty years or so,  the Supreme Court has played a major role in the transformation of our social life.   With the stroke of a pen,  it struck down segregation in the schools,  placed severe limits on the regulation of abortion,  greatly altered the way police do their business, severely constrained  the extent to which affirmative action could be used to bring about a more inclusive society -- and on, and on, and on.   Whether you think these decisions were well-decided, from a legal constitutional perspective or not,  you have to admit that they were enormously consequential.  And the consequences were not all good.   

Indeed,  I submit that the courts are to some large measure responsible for the fractious and divided nature of our politics over the last 50 years.     That's because many on the losing side of some of the court's decisions  felt as though their opponents had won through the court system what they had no chance of winning through the political system.   And the losers organized themselves to try to seize the political process to gain back what they thought that had illegitimately loss.

Now I'm not saying  that the court was therefore always wrong to decide as it did or that the losers are right  to try to use the political process to undo what the court did by judicial fiat.   I'm just saying that when the court  is believed by many to have "usurped" the political process on behalf of a set of sectarian interests,   social and political turmoil is all but inevitable.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing.  As I say in this piece,  stability in the service of reaction   is no virtue,  instability in the service of progress  is no vice.   

Still,  I think there is something to the thought  that what the political process CAN decide, it really SHOULD  be left to decide, at least ceteris paribus.   Take the abortion issue.   It seems to me that if the question of abortion had been left entirely to the political process, we would by now have had a long settled and  reasonable compromise.   There would be some restrictions on abortion; these would vary from state to state, but it seems hardly likely that abortion would be flat-out illegal in all circumstances anywhere.    The compromise might not represent an equilibrium point.  We would probably find a certain ebb and flow in the restrictions that states place on abortion as social attitudes and mores evolve.   But what would be missing,  I think, is the current level of intensity and anger that certain parties currently bring to this issue. 

Again,  I'm not suggesting that the  threat of instability is always sufficient reason for the court to forbear deciding an issue.   Sometimes the court needs to, as it were, shake the society up and to serve as the leading edge of social progress.     But I don't think it can be denied that when it does so,  it may have massively destabilizing effects on the political system.   And those destabilizing effects may severely threaten the social progress the court aims to bring about.   No other institution has such a unique combination of powers  to, on the one hand,  effect, for good or ill, the political  process, but, on the other hand, to stand outside the political process, almost entirely unaccountable to the people at large.

Perhaps I'm wrog, but this strikes me as something of a paradox.    What do you think?  Have I missed something?