OK, it was a science piece in the Mail, but what the hell, I found this vaguely notable for not really implying any of the various notions of ‘intelligence’ one might find in Oakeshott’s work. The story concerns the feats of ‘Betty’, a New Caledonian Crow:
[Betty had] managed to work out how to fashion bits of wire into tools to retrieve food from a variety of hard-to-get-to places. What was really extraordinary was that the hooks made by Betty were constructed from flexible steel wire – not a material readily available in the birds’ natural habitat, a small Pacific island … Now some animals do show a capacity to learn: but Betty had no prior training, nor had she watched another crow doing this. Instead, she had created her own complex solution to a new problem.
For this writer, then, an ability to learn is a genuine marker of intelligence; nonetheless, to be truly intelligent is to have a knack for finding (maybe even creating?) function without learning. I’m not entirely sure, but I think this broadly maps onto Collingwood’s understanding of the concept of intelligence – cf. An Autobiography’s emphasis on the concept of purpose (and in particular, purpose created or at least discovered in the moment) as the crucial difference between the ‘historical’ and ‘natural’ ways of understanding phenomena.
A comment to my previous post suggests that my little typology conflated practical and theoretical thinking on Oakeshott’s scheme, since theoretical thinking (my critic claims) is on Oakeshott’s view not a matter of ‘coherence to, and imaginative development of, particularistic custom’. This is not an unreasonable criticism I think; at least, it would be a way into reconciling possible tensions between RP (and in particular, ‘Rational COnduct’ and ‘Political Education’) and Oakeshott’s other works. Nonetheless, it raises the interesting question of why, if ‘theoretical’ thinking is non-traditional (or at least can be non-traditional – for ‘traditional’ thinking, in Oakeshott’s semi-technical sense, simply is thought that exhibits ‘coherence to, and imaginative development of, particularistic custom’), why can’t – shouldn’t – practical thinking be so too?
Oakeshott was, I think, what would now be termed an ‘anti-naturalist’, persistently denying the reducibility of ‘mental’ to ‘physical descriptions’ as a Davidsonian might say. In adopting this position, I think he was more of a fundamentalist than even Collingwood — at least, one cannot find in Oakeshott’s work any of the ambiguity one finds in (for example) The Principles of Art’s use of causal language when describing ‘imaginative’ thinking, or The New Leviathan’s emphasis on ‘free will’ always being had by degree rather being something one should either just attribute or not attribute to a person or a thing.
Despite this though, I am unconvinced that the various ways Oakeshott came to characterise the mental in his work are consistent with each other. So, and if I may use the more Oakeshottian-sounding term ‘intellegence’ instead of ‘mental’, one may identify at least four different ways the notion is understood across his career:
- Experience and its Modes — ‘intelligence’ is ‘experience’ (i.e., thought or thinking) that consistency presupposes a ‘categorially distinct’ set of postulates.
- Rationalism in Politics — ‘intelligence’ is not a matter of explicit, universalistic reasoning, but coherence to, and imaginative development of, particularistic custom.
- The post-RP, pre-OHC essays collected in The Voice of Liberal Learning — ‘intelligence’ is about learning. The unintelligent — trees for example — are thus understood as such because they cannot/do not learn.
- On Human Conduct: ‘intelligent’ behaviour is ‘understood’ (meaningful) behaviour, and as such, should be theoretically reconstructed as a matter of agents adhering to procedure rather than of events being constitutive of a causal process.
Now, these charaterisations are surely different, and moreover, may even be thought prima facie incompatible. Thus, it is unclear what RP’s emphasis on ‘tradition’ has to do with EM’s claim that reason requires the presupposition of a set of consistent ‘postulates’ — indeed, the ahistorical way Oakeshott theorises the ‘modes’ (including the mode of ‘historical experience’ itself!) might be thought curiously ‘rationalistic’ by the standards of RP. Similarly, while the VLL essays’ emphasis on learning coheres with RP’s emphasis on (for example) the master-apprentice relation to an extent, the way the latter construes learning as an essentially tacit process falls away — a ‘tradition’, one might say, can no longer do its influencing over the heads of those who it influences. Move forwad to OHC‘ and its central dictum that ‘a belief is what it means to the believer’, and RP’s claim that the rationalistic politician does in fact act within tradition whether he realises it or not has completely fallen by the wayside, quite fundamentally changing Oakeshott’s working conception of ‘intelligence’ in the process, or so I would suggest.
Not for the first time, I think Oakeshott’s underlying problem here was not that he simply got everything wrong, but that he sought to grant his theories imperialistic pretentions that they could not sustain (cf. the moral of this), which in the present case led to a certain ‘flip-flopping’ through his career. More on the particular issue at hand next time…
I’ve put a couple more papers up. The first is, well, a bit duff in places, particularly early on (revising the same text over and over again always ends up making it worse…), though if you just want the main moral, check out the final third. As for the second, it basically puts into a lengthier form many of the thoughts canvassed on this blog in the past six months. Plainly, neither paper is going to set the world alight, but the usual disclaimer applies: if you wish to cite, please reference the published versions. If nothing else, I’ll probably delete this site in due course, so you’ll end up with a dangling URL.
Due to moving, I haven’t had an internet connection for a bit, and even now (as of yesterday in fact), it’s only via one of 3 Mobile’s ‘broadband’ USB dongles. Putting connection issues aside though, I’m still not sure how long this blog will continue. To an extent this is because it thoroughly failed its original purpose, though more fundamentally, I find keeping the memory of the latter alive (via the blog or anything else) a bit depressing. That said, I have a few posts lined up, so there may be a couple of weeks left at least.
The importance of practical knowledge in all its context-relative glory:
And yet, is there something fishy about Oakeshott’s vaguely Aristotelian inference that we learn to act ‘morally’ by imitating those we perceive to be moral experts?
On the other hand, maybe this points towards something Oakeshott probably rejects in Aristotle, namely the latter’s idea that the virtuousness of the phronimos ultimately stands apart from the particular tradition of moral behaviour he acts within. It makes no sense, then, to see the true moral expert as someone who would be virtuous whatever the context, from which you may further infer that the moral exemplars relevant to yourself must always be your predecessors in the particular tradition you act within, not any other…
OK, yet another post on the Callahan article, though in my defence, this was going to be part of the last one. Anyhow, consider again the example Callahan provides for how reasoning in ‘logical economics’ proceeds:
the logical school attempts to illuminate how an actor’s efforts to improve her perceived circumstances as much as she is able to do, when occurring within a social context including several property, will result in prices for economic (scarce) goods.
This is then contrasted with the sort of reasoning characteristic of neo-classical economics. Here, a mathematical model will be where any explanation begins, the explainer then attempting, Callahan claims,
to demonstrate why, under certain conditions that are taken as true by initial assumptions, a particular price will arise when some particular quantity of a good is brought to market.
From near the start of ‘The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’:
There are, for example, theories that make freedom consist in decisions taken apart from all desires, habits, and dispositions of the agent; and theories of knowledge that suggest that the mind can observe the totality of its own perceptions and ideas. In each case, the mind is divorced from the traits that constitute it; an inescapable conclusion from certain lines of reasoning, as I said, but one that should always persuade us to reject the premises.
Sounds like something that could come straight out of Rationalism in Politics, no? This partly why, I think, Stephen Turner has suggested Oakeshott wasn’t a ‘neo-Kantian’ at all (Turner is — or at least was — a Davidson fan I believe). On the other hand, it could just point towards a tension in Oakeshott’s ideas, those of Rationalism in Politics clashing with those in Experience and its Modes and On Human Conduct (this is Efraim Podoksik’s view).
[Part two of a two three part commentary on Gene Callahan (2008), ‘Economics and its Modes’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 14 (2), pp.128-57. Part one is here, part three (in so many words) here.]
In this post, I will pick up and develop two things I more briefly noted in part one: the rather eclectic nature of Callahan’s philosophical authorities beyond Oakeshott and the obscurity of his conception of ‘translation’.
If anybody’s wondering, part two of my musings on the Callahan article will appear eventually — one thing that is holding it up is my re-reading a bit of Davidson for it and remembering how ambivalent I feel about the latter. In the meantime, any passing reader might want to check out the discussion to my previous post.
‘But we acted within the rules!’ the cry goes up, as a particular form of swine fever is found to have hit a certain part of London many years ago and still be infecting the place to this day. Briefly commenting on the story, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber suggests the general public disgust hints at validating in a small way GA Cohen’s basic objection to John Rawls’ theory of justice, that ‘justice’ is a virtue properly concerning not just institutional design (as Rawls claims), but personal conduct and attitudes too. Myself, well, I immediately think of a Collingwood-Oakeshott connection (like you do!).
[Part one of a two three part commentary on Gene Callahan (2008), ‘Economics and its Modes’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 14 (2), pp.128-57; part two is here, part three (in effect) here. An article that has a title alluding to Oakeshott’s Experience and its Modes and an abstract that echoes the rhetoric of Collingwood’s early-ish article ‘Economics as a Philosophical Science’ – post bait to this blog or what?]
In this article, Callahan seeks to apply Oakeshott’s concept of ‘modes’ and ‘idioms’ to the problem of methodological diversity within economics, arguing for methodological pluralism to the extent of denying there to be one true economic methodology, but methodological monism to the extent that each methodology is considered to be appropriate to its own particular way of looking at economic phenomena. In the present post I will offer a summary and (at times) constructive interpretation of Callahan’s argument; in the sequel, I will investigate it more critically.
Hopefully I’ll have something more substantive to post in due course, but, urgh, everyone’s favourite ‘Christian’ philosopher-blogger is at it again – who would have guessed, but he’s pro-torture! (Well, pro-torture when a partisan Republican crew are in charge at least…) I’m not sure what I find more depressing – the mini article itself or the comments, including those to the ‘heads up’ post on Feser’s personal blog. True to form, Feser comes to denounce a patient interlocutor as a ‘nasty piece of work’; an apology is quickly forthcoming – from said interlocutor to Feser! – which Feser then ignores for a long time before finally replying to it with scorn, a scorn that only encourages the pro-Feser commentators in their attempts to bully the interlocutor.
Anyhow, a passage from Adorno’s lectures on Kant’s moral philosophy comes to mind:
If we were to attempt to explain why on earth it would be wrong to torture people, we would encounter all sorts of difficulties … In all such moral questions, the moment you confront them with reason you find yourself plunged into a terrible dialectic. And when faced by this dialectic the ability to say, ‘Stop!’ and ‘You ought not even to contemplate such things!’ has its advantages.
According to Adorno then, morality should be considered ‘permeated by reason’ (ethical living requires critical reflection upon living, in short); but notwithstanding this, ‘reason is not the sum total of morality’. Adorno goes on:
This aspect is expressed in the commandments of religion, as contrasted with philosophy … however problematic their moral norms may be, there is something valid in the religions, and the injunction ‘Go, and do thou likewise’ contains something that, formally at least, is no less essential a part of moral theory than the rationality that requires me to be able to explain why I should go and do likewise.
[From Problems of Moral Philosophy (Livingston trans.), p.97.]
Update (7/5/09): looks like it’s now all sweetness and light between Feser and Mark Shea (the ‘interlocutor’ mentioned above), albeit without the former explicitly taking back any of the hateful things he had said and allowed to be said. Obviously, petty squabbles about the morality of torture are ultimately nothing when the disputants are on the same side of the ‘tenth crusade’, comrades in arms in the struggle for ‘Christendom’ and ‘civilisation’ against ‘jihad’ and ‘liberalism’. (Oh, and in the unlikely event Shea himself comes across this — don’t worry, my original post did not have the intent of applauding you as such…)
Bernard Bosanquet’s ghost appears to have spooked Edward Feser. Apparently, while it’s very bad for ‘contemporary secularist and liberal philosophers’ to dismiss the views of certain dead theologians without referring all the time to original texts, it’s perfectly fine to dismiss the views of certain dead secular and liberal philosophers (and some not-so-’secularist’ and ‘liberal’ ones too) on the basis of a single line from a private letter. Maybe I’m missing something though? Thus -
[Being an Idealist, Bosanquet would] have had a tough row to hoe, no? I mean, trying to show… that naturalism is false – surely a very daunting task in any age, but especially so in the era of Maxwell, Lyell, Darwin, et al.!
B-b-but – they may have been wrong to think so, but the typical Idealist attitude towards Darwin was to try to assimilate the concept of biological evolution to their own metaphysics. Reading on though, Feser reveals himself to have been sarcastic, so maybe he realises that -
Seriously, though, how could Bosanquet, or any philosopher, get away with such breathtaking dogmatism? Quite easily, for idealism really did seem quite obviously to be true to generations of post-Kantian and post-Hegelian philosophers, and not without good reason. Given certain subjectivist epistemological-cum-metaphysical assumptions having their origins in Descartes and the early empiricists, the idealistic consequences drawn from them by Kant, Hegel, and succeeding generations of German and British philosophers were, if not quite inevitable, at least extremely natural.
So, Bosanquet and like-minded Idealists were dualists were they? Er, nope. Moving on -
[naturalism] simply could not stand up to scrutiny given what so many philosophers thought they knew about how we know the world (and “therefore”) what we know about it. If all we ever know or can know is experience, we cannot so much as form a concept of that which is other than experience.
Simplistic, but that might be plausible reading I suppose (cf. how Oakeshott identifies reality with ‘experience’ in Experience and its Modes). On the other hand, left at that and one might well end up attributing to Bosanquet what he called ’subjective idealism’, be it in the form of a sceptical denial that external reality is knowable in itself or the positive doctrine that metaphysical reality is to be identified with the individual’s consciousness – and that would be rather silly, or at least, in need of an argument for why when Bosanquet himself polemicised against it, he was really arguing for it…
