I've been reading Taylor Carman's Heidegger's Analytic the last while. It's a great book. While I'm only about halfway through it, I definitely consider it among my favorite Heidegger books. What is nice about Carman is how he compares and contrasts Heidegger to major figures in the more "traditional" American style of philosophy. Thus there is a lot of discussion of Searle, Putnam, Davidson and others. It's very good for situating Heidegger's thought, as well as disengaging Heidegger from some of the admittedly convoluted language that has built up around him. That's not to say everyone agrees with Carman's reading. But he offers quite clear and easy to follow arguments for his reading. What is interesting to me is that his chapter on intentionality, after engaging with Searle, turns to Mark Wrathall's reading of Heidegger.
Now many of the regular readers here know Mark Wrathall as he is a professor at BYU and a regular contributer to LDS-Phil. Not to mention one of the authors on the U2 and Philosophy book. I've discussed Heidegger with him and Jim Faulconer on LDS-Phil, but admittedly haven't read any of Wrathall's actual work on Heidegger. So this passage in Carman's book is an enjoyable surprise. (Yeah, I'm demonstrating my provincialism. But not being at one of the big schools I always enjoy reading about someone I've actually had contact with.)
I'm fairly sure that I disagree with Wrathall's reading of Heidegger and follow Carman's. Which isn't to say I'm right mind you. But I thought as I catch up on things here I might quickly sketch out the disagreement and arguments.
The basic debate is over what kinds of externalism one ought read into Heidegger. Carman (and Dreyfus) argue that Heidegger adopts a social externalism. That is the social conditions of intelligibility are external. Further they then link up this social externalism with the externalism of Putnam. (Most particular the semantic externalism of Putnam's famous water argument) They actually go somewhat farther than Putnam in arguing that all intentional content is external.
The basic arguments ends up being the content of belief. (Interestingly Brian Weatherson has been blogging on very similar topics the past few days, such as this one on the pragmatics of justification and belief.)
Following Donald Davidson's objections to Tyler Burge's arguments, Mark Wrathall argues that externalism "illicitly overgeneralize from specific cases in which it may be reasonable to defer to expert opinion in fleshing out the contents of the attitudes of individuals who are ignorant, confused, or linguistically incompetent." (Carman, 147)
The basic example Wrathall gives parallel's Putnam's famous example of our use of elm to talk about elm trees. Wrathall instead talks about gables. He points out that he used to think gables weren't the top of the walls but thought it was the peaked roof. Now when he uses the word gable, is he referring to a gable? (Carman 149) In other words Wrathall has a coherent and workable but idiosyncratic conception. Wrathall then argues that it is more reasonable to interpret him according to his own conception and not some external linguistic practice.
Carman brings up the counterpoint that Wrathall's conceptual content is still defined relative to community practices. If he thinks a gable is a peaked roof, the meaning of peaked, and roof, not to mention the opposition to wall and many other meanings are all from the community. So it is idiosyncratic but not necessarily individualistic.
Carman following Budge, brings up a more Putnamesque example.
In the actual world, I am wrong about the roofs in my neighborhood owing to my confusion about gables and gable roofs. But now imagine an other world, one in which we hold everything constant with respect to my person, but in which no one else in fact distinguishes between symmetrical and asymmetrical roofs on triangular walls, so that no one has a concept of the saltbox style as distinct from the gable. Suppose, that is, that in that counterfactual world the extension of 'gable' were wider than it is in our world so as to include what we call saltbox roofs. In that world I would be right that all the roofs in my neighborhood were gable roofs. But if I am wrong about the roofs in the first world and right in the second, without there being any difference in the roofs themselves from one world to the others, this can only be because the content of my belief is not the same in the two cases. And if the content of my belief is different in the two worlds, though everything about my person is held constant, then individualism is false.
I asked Mark about this and he hadn't read Carman's book yet. I guess he'd read some early versions but it sounds like it had changed significantly from then. He kindly agreed to allow me to put up a few of his comments. I'll put up an other post later tonight on some of the other issues. (Mainly concerning Heidegger's meaning for idle talk) However some of Mark's comments clarify his own position over how one might understand him from Carman's engagement. I'm sure anyone who had read the original paper wouldn't have any trouble. But that's always the danger in reading any text that largely is engaging an other text. Sometime without both texts one can misread things.
I think the disagreement between Taylor and I is a little more nuanced than one can gather from your blog. I actually agree that Heidegger is a social externalist of sorts. In the article Taylor is reacting to (in Philosophical Topics 27), however, I criticized Taylor (and Bert Dreyfus) for attributing to Heidegger a very strong version of social externalism -- one according to which the meaning of our terms is fixed by the lowest common denominator, that is, the meaning that anybody in the linguistic community could understand. This is, as I argued in the Phil Topics article, also contrary to the Putnam/Burge line of social externalism, because they allow experts to fix the meaning of some terms. I argued that this Putnam/Burge view makes sense, and that nothing in Heidegger contradicts it. Heidegger's view is compatible (indeed, I think it presupposes) the view that experts can determine the meaning and reference of a term independently of what the anyone (das Man) thinks. Heidegger's own practice as a philosopher demonstrates this -- no one would plausible interpret Heidegger as intending his philosophy to mean only whatever everybody in the broader linguistic community could understand it to mean (indeed, Heidegger had an annoying tendency to insist that nobody had yet understood him). I think Taylor, as a result of my article, now sees the error of his ways.
Clearly this is more subtle than I was taking Carman to assert. Which is undoubtedly partially my fault and not necessarily Carman's. However Carman does confuse things somewhat when he starts this section on social externalism on page 146. He opens saying,
Mark Wrathall has recently leveled a powerful attack both on social externalism and on the social externalist reading of Being and Time that others, including myself have favored. Wrathall argues that those, like Drefus and myself, who would assimilate Heidegger's account of the social conditions of intelligibility to the semantic and psychological claims of Hilary Putnam or Tyler Burge are in part reading implausible theories back into Being and Time and moreover rendering those theories even more implausible by fixing discursive content not tot he practice of knowledgeable experts but to the one (das Man) - which is to say anyone and everyone. (146)
Beyond some confusion over what exactly everyone's position is, my sense is that is this "lowest common denominator" that is the issue. What do we mean by that? I want to touch on that as it is the place where I feel Heidegger parallels both Derrida and Peirce in aspects I've discussed here over the past few months. I'll get to that later, as I mentioned.
It looks like, in the book, he's trying to salvage some last remnant of his original extreme social externalism. From the passage you quote and the argument you describe, Taylor seems to be arguing that the linguistic community is determining the background norms of usage against which a particular idiosyncratic usage gets the meaning it has. But I've never denied that.
The place where Taylor and I might actually disagree is the status to give to background norms and conventions. I suspect we both think they are indispensable. But I agree with Davidson that they are not essential in the sense that, in any given instance, they can be dispensed with. We could, just between the two of us, invent a new term that owes nothing to the norms of our linguistic community and we could, between the two of us, use that term meaningfully.
In any event, this argument is far removed from Heidegger's version of social externalism. Heidegger's main interest is in the way the style of being and the particular (not necessarily linguistic) practices are fixed by the community. That has implications for linguistic and conceptual content, but the consequences are perhaps not as direct, I think, as Taylor believes that they are.
I mentioned my theory about vagueness and Carman's relating these background linguistic features. I also mentioned my post on Peirce and common sensism. So I'm still more sympathetic to Carman rather than Wrathall at this point, I think. Mark, in response to my brief comments on this matter, suggest that he really needs to read Carman before saying too much. He did add a bit though.
I'm not sure what to think about the relationship between common sense, idle talk, and vagueness. It seems to me that these name different (although perhaps often overlapping) things. Idle talk, for instance, can sometimes be quite specific. What makes idle talk "idle" is that we lack a conversance with the matter -- that is, the skills and practices that give us the right disposition to really grasp something. I suppose you could say that makes our understanding of what is said vague (in a particular way), even if the talk is not at all vague. . .
Hi! Nice to see someone is reading my book. Just a few quick thoughts, partly to clarify my disagreement with Mark.
I think it's a mistake to suppose that Heidegger's "das Man" refers to the "lowest common demoniator." I certainly never meant to suggest such a reading. Heidegger defines das Man in terms of the average, the normal, the typical. I take that to be (roughly) midway between the meanest shred of intelligibility common to anyone who has a given understanding or concept at all and (so called) "experts." Moreover, I think there are many matters of daily life about which it makes little sense to suppose that there are "experts." Expert pedestrians? Expert Diet Coke drinkers? Expert tooth brushers? Instead, in many such things, there are roughly differentiated groups of those who (more or less) know what they're doing what they're talking about and those who don't. So, I take semantic authority to be much like the authority of informed common sense: it's not full-blown expertise, but neither is it the bottom of the barrel; it's what people know who (more or less) know what they're doing and what they're talking about.
I think Mark and I differ with regard to the relative priority of common usage and the principle of charity. Of course two people can arbitrarily settle on a new local convention that departs from common practice, but this is rare and moreover parasitic on the public language. Mark seems to agree with this, but I think it prevents the principle of charity from playing the decisive role it does in Davidson's semantics.
For instance, on any given occasion I can, if I must, resort to interpreting Mark to mean gable roof when he says "gable," but only as an exceptional case. The standard case is the one in which, if he insists that all the roofs in his neighborhood are gable roofs when in fact many of them are saltbox style, since he thinks saltbox roofs are gable roofs, then we say he's wrong, not that he's right because he's entitled to his own idiosyncractic concepts. And notice, what's decisive is common, not expert, opinion. If the experts draw fine distinctions that most of us ignore, then we can forget about the experts in settling on what we mean. If the distinction between gable and saltbox roofs is an esoteric subtlety, and most informed folks actually call them all "gable" (I have no idea), then we would say Mark was right after all: they're all gables; forget the experts.
If Mark sees a whale and says he saw a huge fish, I think we'd say he was wrong, even if he then insists that by "fish" he means any animal swimming around in the water. We wouldn't say, "Why then, you're right!" We'd say, "You're wrong about what you saw, and the reason you're wrong is that you don't know what a fish is." Just about everyone, I think, knows that whales are not fish, and we require people's utterances to rise at least to that level of common understanding. If, on the other hand, Mark sees a koala and says he saw a bear, or better yet a "koala bear," then we might say he was right, since most people refer to koalas as "koala bears," even though they're not bears at all. Same with "sabre tooth tigers," which weren't tigers. These are borderline cases. Is heavy water "water"? Well, it's D2O, not H2O. Here expert opinion may be irrelevant, if it insists on drawing a distinction. I think heavy water is often referred to as "water," but of course it's not quite the same. But notice: when we disregard expert opinion, what we ordinarily favor in its stead is not individual idiosyncracy, but shared common sense and standard usage. We don't allow people to mean water when they say "milk" or "catfish" or "helicopter." We just don't.
In short, I'm not opposed to charity in special cases, but I think it is necessarily a secondary and stopgap hermeneutic measure. The principle of charity, it seems to me, is a dogma in Davidson, and one inconsistent with our actual practice of making sense of each other and ourselves. In real life, we're not so forgiving. And I think Heidegger knew this.
Taylor
Just back from vacation and I was pleasantly surprised to see Dr. Carman responding here. Let me say that your appeal to the issue of charity of interpretation is quite interesting to me as this is, I think, one place where Derrida differs significantly from other Heideggarians. (Whether one ought read Derrida as a Heideggarian is, of course, an open issue - but I do read him that way) The debate over charity of interpretation in the (in)famous Gadamer-Derrida debate is one example of this.
As I said I've been on vacation so I've only just had a chance for one read of the key chapter on realism. So I've still not made it that far through the book yet. I confess one reason the book held my interest was precisely because of the engagement of Searle and Heidegger. I'm curious to see how it corresponds to the way I read the Derrida - Searle debate.
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