Richard has up an interesting post about identifying your God. I'd actually blogged on this topic a few years back. The basic question is whether Christians and Muslims (or Evangelicals and Mormons) worship the same God. Roughly what we have is a tension between causal relations (i.e. the source of some spiritual phenomena or the reference of who is listening to our prayers) versus our descriptions. While this is pretty interesting in terms of religion the same issue actually pops up a lot. I think this suggests that we assume description (meaning) and reference (cause) are clearly delineated whereas in practice things get muddled very fast.
Consider science and say electrons. Are the electrons that somone in the 19th century spoke of the same as today? Depends upon whether you focus on descriptions - which were quite different - or reference/cause - which are the same. And this isn't a small matter. The whole debate about the incommesurability of theories is wrapped up in just this debate.
An other popular example of this undecidability is love. Do I love my wife because of who she is (reference) regardless of what she does? Or do I love her not because of who she is but because of what she does (description)? Clearly we don't really fit into one or the other.
I of course give a bit more significance to this element of undecidability than most. But it is an interesting issue. Semiotically what I think we have is the idea that the reference of a sign (it's object) is given only as a hint. The hint is a description but functions as an index. So we're left to guess at the index in terms of our contextual knowledge which includes both issues of reference and description. Because we have only hints we don't have a clear determinate way of resolving the original object. We're always left making a guess which implies a kind of responsibility as well as a strong fallibilism.
What if you love your wife because of what she is? Or is that equivalent to who?
I think "whatness" entails description and "whoness" entails reference, as typically used.
So let's say your wife loses her legs or gets Alzheimers. She's a completely different person. Would you still love her? Probably.
Yet lets say you love her due to her "whoness" but then she betrays you time after time. There's a good chance you'd stop loving her. So "whoness" also doesn't capture love.
So we're left in this undecidable state. Of course this isn't nearly as mysterious as it sounds. It just means our decisions are a combination of the two and can't be reduced in a straightforward fashion to either. This is exactly the same as Richard's issue of God. We're willing to acknowledge that God isn't exactly as we think. But probably there are limits to how far we're willing to go. (Say the idea that God tortures little children for fun) But exactly what these limits are isn't determinate.
Couldn't you say the same thing about gravity? Are Einstein's and Newton's gravity the same? I tend to think that they are.
I actually don't think love is an act of volition at all... sigh. You and I don't have many common points of departure, Clark.
I don't think anything I said in the above really took a stance on the issue of volition. I tend to see love as being tied to belief and I don't see beliefs as volitional. (Which is not to say I see love as being a kind of belief)
I can't see how "Do Mormons and Muslims worship the same god?" or "Why do you love your wife?" make any more sense than "How many roads must a man walk down?" or "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" -- at least, in the form they're put here. In some cases it certainly makes sense to ask why a man loves his wife; it does happen that this question is explicitly asked at times (I'm imagining a wife fishing for compliments). But in those situations it is not this question that is being asked, for it lacks the generality of the question in this post. (In the particular situation, I can imagine a variety of responses, with some of them being sensible ones, some being ludicrous ones, some crass, some clearly falsehoods. "You make me smile", "You're good in bed", "The Kremlin ordered me to love you, and I am a good comrade", "You're so humble" (said to flatter a vain woman) etc.)
If one wants to pose hypotheticals such as "Would you love your wife if she was a quadriplegic, or actually a man, or a heroin addict, or cheating on you etc. etc." then some of these scenarios strike me as reasonable spurs for discussion, but I can't see that it makes sense to assume one can answer them without the hypothetical actually playing out. (Everyone says they want to be together forever; or even if they don't, then they often are together 'til death do them part.) In any particular scenario (say a man's wife becomes a quadriplegic), I can imagine any number of plausible scenarios playing out, some of which lead to the man hating his wife, some of which lead to them growing closer together. I can imagine many of these scenarios playing out to radically different outcomes despite a shared past -- perhaps the husband comes down with a stomach flu and this leads him to being intemperate with his wife which leads to them separating, while if he had not become ill they would have managed to stay together and grown closer through the struggle etc. So then what should we say about the man's love for his wife before she became a quadriplegic? His view of her can change quite radically, and this will sometimes lead to him ceasing to love her, sometimes not. Why should there be a general rule governing all cases here, i.e., a way to divide all possibilities into those in which the object of his love is a description versus those in which the object is the referent of his "amo te", or any other way it pleases you to divy them up?
There's no answer to "Why does so-and-so love his wife?", in general, despite it being a reasonable thing to ask in some settings. Asking "why" needs friction if it is to get a grip on the facts, so to speak. I think it is the same with "Do Mormons and Bahai'ists worship the same God or no?" -- Not clear what "same" means here. Though one can imagine scenarios in which the question is one which comes up (I have in mind the recognition of Mormon baptisms, which the RCC does not recognize as valid, owing to the depth of disagreement over the nature of God). But I can imagine multiple scenarios in which the question becomes sensible to ask leading to what appear to be different answers ("Yes" and "No" in different settings), without there being anything contradictory in this. (Suppose the SBC recognizes Mormon baptisms as well as RCC ones as "It's the same God" behind both instances of the sacrament, while the RCC recognizes SBC baptisms on the same grounds, but rejects Mormon baptisms on the grounds that Mormons are not monotheists, and so "God" does not play a role in the religion at all, despite the shared reverence for Jesus and much of the Biblical tradition etc. I do not see that it makes any sense to view this situation as a disagreement over the meaning of "God" in a Mormon's mouth and "God" in the Pope's mouth, or in the mouth of a Baptist preacher. "The meaning of a word" is the wrong place to look for understanding what is agreed or disagreed on here.)
In short: I don't think the answers to these sorts of questions are undecidable; I think that they're not real questions. They are not the sort of thing to have answers.
Daniel the issue is less hypotheticals like "would you love your wife if X happened" than the question of what we love, the person or the attributes. This is an old issue that goes back, as I recall, to Pascal. I'm just suggesting that the question about God is of the same sort.
To say that these aren't real questions though seems to me an odd tact to take. It seems that whether they are real questions they do raise an important issue regarding identity.
Just to clarify. Put the question this way. What essentially identifies the entity I love qua their being loved? So this is different from just identifying them qua the person they are. Rather it is what identifies them essentially in a certain kind of relationship.
As I said I don't see this as quite as profound as some do. I think it simply a common feature of relationships of various sorts. I could name many kinds of relationships outside of worship, love, or so forth that have the same features.
I'm inclined to say the same of the cleaned-up question as I did of the earlier ones: I don't think "What essentially identifies the entity I love qua their being loved?" is a real question (in fact, it strikes me as nonsense on its face). (Either it's just a flowery version of "Why do I love my wife?" or it's so much gassing.) Like I said above, in various situations various responses become appropriate or inappropriate, but there is no such thing as an answer to the question outside of all such circumstances -- a response which needs pay no regard to its surroundings.
(One could respond "They are the one you love", but this is clearly just restating the question as an assertion, which isn't the way one answers a proper question.)
If "What essentially identifies so-and-so as such-and-such etc." is to be treated as a genuine question, then the answer can only be: Nothing does. But this would never be treated as a satisfactory response, because we do recognize those whom we love as the ones we love, at various points and in sundry scenarios. And so it seems like the answer can't be "Nothing" because this appears to be a denial that there is any way in which we recognize a loved one in any circumstance, when all that is being denied is that there is a way in which we recognize said person in all circumstances. When there are really many ways to recognize someone, to identify them, to pick them out etc. without there needing to be more than a sort of family resemblance among them all. (There are many cases where "Why do you love me?" becomes sensible to ask and certain responses become sensible to answer with, but this doesn't entail that there is any response that holds good for all instances of the question, and thus would hold good for the question asked in abstraction.)
(I mean all of the above in a Wittgensteinian spirit, though I suppose that probably comes out clearly enough without me typing this sentence.)
Unless there is a significance to the "nothing" which is the Heideggarian spirit...
So perhaps we're just repeating the Carnap/Heidegger debate over nothing as it relates to meaningfulness?
I don't have a dog in the Carnap/Heidegger fight. Carnap thinks language has a single purpose, and it only does just that one thing; Heidegger seems to think language isn't up to the task demanded of it in any event (the whole "forgetfullness of Being" thing).
One could replace the "Nothing" in my above post with "There ain't no such animal what does what you think needs doing. (But it don't matter none, since what you think needs doing don't need done.)" Which has the virtue of sounding unlike Carnap and Heidegger.
Yes, but I think Heidegger's view of the Nothing is really what is going on here. Which is why this is a big deal for Derrida. That is the question is the identity of these things. We might recognize that we love and therefore there is some identity to our lover qua lover. We might simultaneously recognize that in a certain way the question of identity is unanswerable (or, to use your original words, meaningless). Yet identity is "there."
Heidegger would say, I think, we have a kind of pre-cogntive access to this. Indeed the mere fact we can identi-fy our lover entails a recognition of being even if it isn't (and perhaps can't) be brought out fully into our awareness.
I further think that he'd say that the denial of the meaningfulness of this kind of question is due to the demands of presence in our discourse. That is a question is meaningful only if it can be answered in terms of something present. So when, in your second formulation, you say "there ain't no such animal" this is exactly the approach Heidegger criticizes. "Animal" is of course a metaphor. The part that is interesting is "there ain't no such thing." That is, there isn't existence.
This can easily be interpreted in light of Heidegger's critique of the Greeks as privileging actuality above possibility and the demanding of presence of a certain kind as being truth.
Once you reject that kind of discourse as necessary for understanding identity (identity as presence) then a lot follows.
If you reject Heidegger's approach (as most do) then you're left with the question being meaningless. If it is meaningless though, then what grounds identity? Nothing does. So we're left with a kind of nominalism where all that groups such things together is the act of naming. So the identity of our lover qua lover is merely a name.
Ditto for the identity of God.
To add, I think the above demonstrates why I think reading both Heidegger and Derrida as scholastic realists makes sense. Even though the universals they treat as real are not treated so in a kind of presence. That is it is scholastic realism minus any hint of Platonism.
If the question of "identity" as such is meaningless, then we are not left with a nominalist answer, but no answer, as there is no question for it to be an answer to. The question isn't "unanswerable" any more than "Iffle biffly poof" is "unanswerable." (Nor does nominalism give us any answer to "Iffle biffly pook?" when nothing else does; neither is it the fault of the Greeks that "Iffle biffly pook?" isn't something to which one can give an answer.)
There is of course a perfectly decent use of "identity" -- it is useful to be able to point out that "the author of 'Lolita'" and "Nabokov" aren't two different people; perhaps someone thought "Lolita" really was written by a Mr. Humbert Humbert, and speaking of the identity of Nabokov and the author of "Lolita" seems as fair a way as any to clear up the matter: "The two are identical." But there is no sense to asking if Nabokov is identical with Nabokov or not, nor why this is or is not the case.)
If one doesn't know, or at least one is not sure, that "Lolita" was not actually written by Humbert Humbert, then one might sensibly ask if the author of "Lolita" is Nabokov. But if one has no doubts about this, then it is nonsense to ask if the author of "Lolita" is Nabokov. That question one already knows the answer to, and so there is no sense in asking it. (Except as a joke, feigning ignorance etc. But here one is not doing what one does in an inquiry. I can make an inquiry only where I comport myself as one seeking an answer, and not as one having one. And to feign acting as if I seek an answer is not to be seeking an answer.)
But in questions like "Is the author of 'Lolita' the author of 'Lolita'?" one always already knows the answer. And so there is no sense to the question, as it never is the sort of thing one can ask as a question. "A thing is identical to itself" is a piece of nonsense. (I can explain to someone that this is the same as that, picking out each as I please -- perhaps via an ostensive gesture, pointing, a rough description -- but if I were to claim that this is the same as this, picking out the same object both times, then I have done nothing that is not accomplished by simply picking out the first object. "The same as" does no work in the second case. And neither would talk of the "identity" of this, or even of this qua this. Identity-talk takes two to tango, though of course they dance as one.)
(Put another way: If the identity of our lover qua lover, or of God qua God, is just a name, then this just goes to show that "identity" isn't anything important. Metaphysics doesn't make a man more or less loving, less or more likely to confuse one face with another, less or more likely to turn to apostasy.)
I have no problems buying Derrida and Heidegger as realists. Which is why I was curious if Derrida ever discussed Sellars; I know he dealt with Austin a bit, so he's looking at English-language philosophy from the right time to run into Sellars. It seems to me (as a slogan), worries about the forgetfulness of Being is just more hand-wringing about the Given.
The reason I believe this is nominalism is because we call things identical even though we can't give reasons for them. Thus the identity is merely one of name. Now one can of course go off on the ethical debate about whether this is important. I'm not sure that's necessarily that useful. (I'm not sure most philosophy is ultimately that useful -- we'd probably all be better off studying science or business)
So I think you're merely conceding my point (which by the end of your post you seem to be acknowledging) Can I convince you that this question of identity isn't meaningless? That it's better to be a realist than a nominalist? I'm not sure. I doubt I'm skillful enough to convince most of much in philosophy. I see my aims as much more modest - inquiring for my own benefit.
Although perhaps I ought turn back to Peirce, for whom this nominalism issue was a big issue.
As to Sellars and Derrida. I know folks have attempted to make "virtual" engagements but as far as I know Derrida himself never addressed Sellars. One big flaw among many Continental figures, including Derrida, was limited familiarity with Analytic philosophy beyond a certain point. Which always struck me as odd. There's a story that someone gave Derrida a copy of Kripke and he had a hard time following it even though he could follow Deleuze, Foucalt and others. While in some ways the divide is greater than other in other ways folks are engaging the two sides in fruitful ways.
To me it's all just philosophy. I tend to think more in analytical terms but find a lot of value in Continental work.
BTW - isn't Sellars often considered to have anticipated many of the debates about externalism the past couple of decades and made defenses of internalism and nominalism? Were you interested in Derrida precisely because Derrida (following Heidegger) is an externalist and realist? Or more due to the debate over the myth of the Given? (Which Derrida engages in various places although arguably most interestingly in The Gift of Death)
Certainly we can give reasons for why Nabokov is identical with the author of Lolita -- namely, that he wrote the book, that Humbert Humbert is merely narrating, etc. But there is no single reason that is useful for explaining this identity in all cases, no matter why the confusion has come about. And so identity is neither a matter of names nor of some "property of identity".
Why do you think one must be a realist or a nominalist? (cf. Philosophical Investigations ss383. ss402 is also nice, here.)
Pity to hear that Derrida never looked at Sellars. "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is certainly an easier go than Kripke, though. (People who are Seriously Confused generally are hard to read, since they end up tying strange knots with their odd notions. Where reading someone who gets it all right, even if their writing is dense, is always a bit like seeing the sun emerge from behind a cloud.)
I'm interested in Derrida because he's widely-read, and so he gets brought up in discussions of folk I'm interested in for their own sake (Davidson, Wittgenstein, Hegel, to a lesser extent Heidegger). Externalism/internalism and realism/antirealism have always stuck me as rather muddled topics, probably because I first saw them by seeing Davidson and Wittgenstein(ians) attack both sides (along with, often, the dichotomy itself). I suspect there's been some terminological problems with "the myth of the Given" -- does Derrida attach some special meaning to this phrase? I've only ever associated it with Sellars' "attack on the entire framework of givenness." But it seems that Derrida can't mean it in a Sellarsian sense, if he shows no signs of having read the guy.
I think Derrida's topic is more "the given" in general although especially in empiricism. But his ultimate target is less modern analytic use than its use in a more general sense. When he does attack someone it's unfortunately the common Continental failing of attacking the boogeyman of positivism.
It's interesting since in a certain way Derrida could be seen as a modified empiricist himself. So I think the Sellars parallels are interesting. Although I'm hardly a nuanced reader of Sellars.
Trying to avoid the false dichotomy of realism/nominalism or internalism/externalism is always interesting if those are taken in a single way. One could argue that this was very much what the pragmatists attempted. Indeed Dewey was constantly being attacked by both realists and idealists while trying to chart a third way. Even Peirce, for whom nominalism was his favorite whipping boy, arguably adopted a kind of realism quite different from what his "scholastic mentors" would have accepted. Primarily due to taking evolution as an ontological feature of existence. Arguably in this he parallels Heidegger and Heidegger's focus on temporality as it relates to ontology.
Getting back to the topic, I don't think I'm arguing for a single reason. Indeed I think I'm arguing quite the opposite. I'm arguing that there is something real that structures our relationships but that this reality isn't reducible to something simple. It's "unspeakable" in a certain way. Whether that ends up just meaning it's not finitely describable is probably a complex topic on its own.
I think the linked post in interesting. A variation of the posited thought experiment would be suppose a committed monotheist, such as say a Muslim, with no knowledge of classical mythology were to die and for whatever reason be transported to Mount Olympus and view the pantheon of assorted deities. Obviously, this person would not believe that these divinities were his or her God, but a more interesting reaction would be that even if it were communicated to this person that his or her God did not exist that person would probably still not be particularly impressed with these deities.
As for the stated examples, the electron example does not seem relevant because most people believe in the existence of electrons with certain basic properties and so there is an underlying cause with various descriptions that may be similar or dissimilar. Given that no such consensus exists with regard to te existence of deity or divine characteristics, we are left with descriptions, which it would appear should be evaluated in terms of their similarity by their similarity and dissimilarity. A strict monotheist, for example, would not consider Zeus or Jupiter or the Mormon notion of a deified human to be similar to their deity. The opinions of Mormons with regard to common notions of a trinitarian Christian deity have ranged from bemusement to understanding to mockery, thus demonstrating a range of opinions with regard to dissimilarity.
As for the example of the spouse, I also fail to see the relevance here. Most people, it would see, love a person because of some somewhat permanent traits that we might call character or personality or beauty. Most people would find someone to be shallow if they immediately insisted on a divorce from a spouse who had lost a limb and most spouses would feel a desire to take care of a partner with a degenerative condition, although they perhaps would not consider forming a relationship with a person already in this state. On the other hand, many people would probably end unions with a spouse who suffered a permanent and sudden change in personality, particularly if they were to become less pleasant in nature.
Sellars' main target is Ayer, so it actually wouldn't be that off-target if Derrida was attacking positivists. (Assuming he's dealing with actual positivists, and not the posited "Positivists say X" you see in so many lame discussions of logical positivism. Which I expect Derrida would, what with his great love for close-reading texts in odd ways.) I'll have to keep an eye out for "The Gift of Death"; Dallas libraries don't have a copy. (It actually looks like they have hardly any Derrid at all. Always crazy what public libraries end up with in these areas; they have most of the Cambridge translations of Kant's stuff.)
(Actually, I may need to poke around a bit more. For some reason Harris's "Toward the Sunlight: Hegel's Intellectual Development" doesn't show up under any title searches, but I found it with his name. The perils of a search engine from 1993.)
I think we've hit the meat of the issue with the notion of a "something" that is "unspeakable" (I suppose also "non-cognitive"/"non-conceptual" if not "unthinkable"; perhaps "impossible"?). The McDowell articles I mentioned a while back (still available upon request -- dmlindquist@gmail.com ) are very, very relevant here. As is the whole "Myth of the Given" in general; this "unspeakable" isn't pulling its weight, I think, any more than sense-data were.
WestBerkeleyFlats: I can't say I share those intuitions about what people would do if their wives suddenly (lost all their limbs, went crazy, became an incurable shrew, began channeling Josef Stalin). I can see a wide range of reactions in these cases, and I can see a wide variety of judgements being passed on each of these reactions. (I'm inclined to deal more harshly with the man who won't live with a horribly unpleasant wife (who had previously been a pleasant, sweet wife) than the man who won't live with a legless wife. Though I'd prefer to see neither lead to a divorce. Which at least ranks the scenarios differently than you have them.)
I think there's nothing deeper to this line of thought than truisms: "A man keeps loving his wife, unless something major comes up." (Where "major" is up for debate.)
The bit with the Muslim and the Athenian pantheon is an interesting scenario. I think it's the same case Kant brought up in "The Conflict of the Faculties", with Abraham and Isaac. Kant claims that the right thing to do in Abraham's situation is to not murder Isaac, since whatever it was Abraham heard/saw, it couldn't have been God, because God could not command Abraham to do something wrong, and murder is wrong. (Which is all fairly straightforward, I think. At least on Kantian lines, which I'm partial to in moral matters.) Green argued in "The Hidden Debt" that Kierkegaard was likely responding to this strain of thought in much of his grappling with Mt. Moriah; I think he's likely right. (Though of course Kierky is grappling with many things in "Fear and Trembling", and everywhere else.) Kierkegaard's point (at least, one of many) then becomes that Kant is right in as far as it goes (one shouldn't listen to strange voices that say to slaughter your children), but this has nothing at all to do with the story of Mt. Moriah. To think that it does is just to miss the point of Moriah, and even to trivialize it. (Kierkegaard says that if the account is preached well then there is no risk at all that anyone might want to imitate Abraham, here.)
I think something analogous applies to your picture of the Muslim and the Athenians: Just looking at the issue as one of monotheism/polytheism (or even of one monotheistic picture of God versus another) doesn't really get us very far.
Note that Gift of Death is probably as much about Kierkegaard and the Kierkegaardean element in Heidegger along with a critique of religion as it is about "the given" in a normal fashion. Of course these all end up being related due to the way The Event is taken in Heidegger.
Really briefly, since I'm just so overwhelmingly busy this week...
The issue of the Muslim wisked to Mt. Olympus doesn't seem that different from the example I gave of a devoted Catholic encountering Mormon beliefs I'd brought up. A tad more extreme, of course. But not different philosophically. I think the fundamental issue is causality vs. essential properties. The mythological Zeus has radically different essential properties from the Islamic view of God. (As opposed to say the Stoic or Platonic Zeus) However if the person had prayers answers and was in some sort of "causal" relationship with God then there is that connection. The issue then becomes which is more important? Causality or descriptions? And I just don't think there's a way to make a decision. Rather it will be a somewhat subjective decision.
To imply that it is just about descriptions is, I think, incorrect.
As I tried to show, I think this a philosophical issue since there's a definite tendency in philosophy (especially since Descartes) to privilege descriptions (representations) above everything else. So I think this question ends up just manifesting this much lower level debate in philosophy. It might not seem like much of a debate simply because many are so committed to one answer to this fundamental question.
One other quick comment.
The opinions of Mormons with regard to common notions of a trinitarian Christian deity have ranged from bemusement to understanding to mockery, thus demonstrating a range of opinions with regard to dissimilarity.
The main reason for this is because nearly all Mormons confuse the Trinity with Modalism. So typically their criticisms are attacks on Modalism and not the Trinity proper. While Mormons tend to have a strong skepticism of too metaphysically motivated theology (perhaps for good reason) I think the main issues Mormons have with "traditional" theology is creation ex nihlo and the Father's embodiment. Add in whether there is an essential unbridgeable ontological separation between man and God and you have the main critiques. The Trinity proper (at least as found in the main creedal presentations) really don't pose a formal problem for Mormons, despite the occasional sniping at the Nicene Creed one finds among Mormons. (I think that sniping is more due to being unfamiliar with the philosophical backdrop and its thus being "unintelligible" to most people)
BTW, for those interested my discussion of the ontological difference from a few years back clarifies why this is all an issue for the Heideggarians.
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