This Is Not News

Every once in a while I read a book I desperately wish I had written. The Philosopher at the End of the Universe by Mark Rowlands is one of those books. I’ll write a fuller review in the near future, but I wanted to give it a mention now. Rowlands is a philosophy prof in the UK and a big fan of science fiction stories. He argues that the high concepts of a lot of blockbuster movies are actually explorations of thorny philosophyical issues like personal identity and the reliability of knowledge. Since Star Wars is probably one of the things that got me thinking about ways of understanding the universe as a kid, I’m not one to argue. In fact, I just showed an episode of Babylon 5 to one of my classes to kick start a conversation about identity and the mind. And of course everyone has heard about the connection between philosophy and The Matrix.

What I like about Rowlands’ approach is that while he’s not dismissive of the movies, he also knows that a good exploration of the issues they raise requires more depth than you can get in a two-hour movie. So he expands the conversation to include key texts and arguments from a number of philosophers. He has a sense of humor, but he uses it in the service of a serious discussion. It’s a really nice piece of work.

The challenge of a Deweyan reformer is to somehow form a functioning community out of a vast society – to create close enough links between geographically disparate people such that one will consider the effect of his actions on the other even if they never become acquainted in person, or indeed ever become specifically aware of the other’s existence. It is a difficult task, even if the reformer successfully exploits the technological and media tools available to her. It may be tempting, therefore, for the reformer to focus her efforts on the national scale – writing essays for national magazines, staging events designed to be covered by the large news networks, etc. Dewey, however, was quite cognizant of the role of local communities in the eventual establishment of the Great Community, and the democratic reformer ignores this role at her own peril.

Vibrant local communities are vital to Dewey’s vision of a flourishing democracy. Many social challenges will need to be addressed at a local level, and the experience of working together to address said problems will give citizens the skills and mindset to tackle larger issues in a similar fashion. The impetus for change often begins at the local level as well, as a grass-roots response to a particular local problem calls attention to a larger issue and galvanizes feeling about it. If a national reform movement is to be a true model for the desired democratic society, it too must function as a network of thriving, coordinated local reform movements.
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Many, although not all, of the essays I’ve written for this section of the site can be considered part of an overall narrative, starting with the historical tradition of Western philosophy and its roots in Plato and Descartes, moving to John Dewey and other American pragmatists’ effort to rethink the fundamental premises of that tradition, and then using that response as a catalyst for a new theory of individual development and civic organization. It is worth noting, however, that American pragmatism is not the only critical response to the Platonic/Cartesian tradition. A number of thinkers, mostly in France and Germany, have developed a number of positions loosely referred to as “continental philosophy,� which often take the critique in very different directions.

It’s worth noting that just as there are a number of pragmatists, many of whom disagree with each other often on significant details, continental philosophy is no monolith. Any generalization one tries to offer would have exceptions. For the most part, however, it is safe to say that continental philosophy embraces relativism and is skeptical of arguments that try to logically prove a universal truth. (Many continentals do believe in some kind of eternal absolute, but that such eternity is unknowable to human minds.) Continental thinkers often appear to heavily blend philosophy with other disciplines, which sometimes have the effect of making their prose more forbidding to those trying to pull out a straightforward set of premises and conclusions. Jacques Derrida, for example, has a very heavy element of literary criticism in his work; language structures and shapes thinking, and can thus become a filter that hides the truth from us, so one should try as much as possible to take apart the language and get past the structures it imposes on us.
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Education was a paramount concern for John Dewey during his career, as can be seen from some of his book titles: The Child and the Curriculum, The School and Society, Democracy and Education, and Experience and Education all concerned themselves chiefly with the topic. At the University of Chicago, he taught not only in the Philosophy department, but in Pedagogy as well. With his wife, he ran a model school at the university in which he could implement and test his theories; it was the removal of his wife from her position that led Dewey to leave Chicago for Columbia. Today, Dewey’s theories are still debated in professional academic literature, discussed in education programs, and even occasionally remarked on outside purely academic circles. Unfortunately, both in Dewey’s time and now, those positions are frequently mischaracterized and set up as straw men.

Dewey’s education theory was not merely focused on technical questions of curriculum and formal schooling. In Democracy and Education, he uses education in its broadest sense, as the fundamental activity of individual and social life. To understand this, it is necessary to explore the manner in which Dewey defines life. That which is living engages in an active effort to sustain and perpetuate itself, making use of its surroundings in a continuing attempt to achieve this goal. Nonliving objects are passive – they do not respond to changes in their environment with an expenditure of energies designed for self-preservation. If a force is bearing down on a rock, and the force is great enough to break the rock, the rock simply breaks; it does not attempt to shift or redirect the force so that its continued coherence is no longer at risk. Plants will send out roots to seek for water and move their leaves toward light sources; animals will seek out and even store food. Dewey describes growth as the restructuring of experience and the use of available resources in a process of self-perpetuation and self-renewal. Life strives to grow; it changes itself to overcome obstacles and take advantage of available opportunities. When growth stops completely, life ends. For human beings, growth is not merely a question of physical survival, but of intellectual and emotional flourishing – we grow in our ability to understand our surroundings, in our capability to act on and alter our environment; in doing so we develop and fulfill new potential not just for ourselves, but for the community to which we belong. For the individual, preparing for and experiencing these opportunities for growth is education.
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“We’ll wrap this whole conversation up next time with some further discussion of inductive logic and the fallacies sometimes associated with it, and exactly how we should treat these rules of logic.�

OK, I have no idea what I was smoking when I wrote that last time. I could probably stretch the topics in that sentence into another three essays. Well, that just gives us fodder for the discussion, I suppose.

As I mentioned in the first article in this series, inductive reasoning differs from the deductive logic we’ve been focusing by being less formal and less absolute. Deductive logic is like a math problem. You take your inputs, you follow the procedure dictated by the operations, you get your output. Inductive reasoning is more like writing an interpretative essay for English or history class. You try and pull all your evidence together to support your conclusion, but you have to deal with the fact that no matter how much support you have, it’s always possible that the truth lies elsewhere.

That said, there are good and bad ways to go about making an inductive argument. So let’s look at some of the fallacies one might slip into. (These and a host of other common reasoning problems are discussed in a book called Critical Thinking and Communication: The Use of Reason in Argument. It’s a little dry, but not too technical, and can be a useful resource.)
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Picking up on our discussion of deductive logic, the five basic operations we discussed last time have certain properties that make one statement identical to another – there are multiple ways to express the same basic idea. This is important because one way of phrasing a statement might suggest or make clear a way of developing the argument that a perfectly equivalent phrasing might not. Some of these are very basic, such as the property of commutation – ‘p v q’ is the same thing as ‘q v p.’ Others are obvious, like the rule of double negation: ‘~~p’ is the same thing as ‘p.’ But others are slightly more complicated.
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Much of this site’s content centers around the attempt to put together reasonable arguments in support of one position or another. We haven’t really spent much time exploring what ‘reasonable argument’ are, however, and one of the quickest ways to end a potentially constructive conversation is to let basic terms go unexamined. It might seem like an understanding of logic and reasoning should be common sense, but within the philosophical arena, there are fundamental differences about the very nature of logic and reasoning that aren’t just academic hand-wringing. Those differences often spill out into people’s everyday discourse – as do the errors that drive logic professors crazy. So what I’d like to do is start a sort of primer to basic structures of logic, and touch on some of the related issues.

What I’m discussing here is very basic, formal deductive logic. It’s formal not in the sense that it wears a three-piece suit, but in that it’s concerned with the form, or structure, that an argument takes – how its parts fit together, and what does and does not follow from given pieces of information. A logician will often work with symbols rather than actual arguments to keep this emphasis clear. It’s deductive because it works from given information to determine what other facts absolutely must be true – there are no shades of gray or degrees of probability. Of course, not every argument that one encounters will fit neatly into a particular formal structure or be amenable to a strict yes-or-no evaluation. Much of the reasoning we do in everyday life is of the inductive variety, which factors degrees of probability into the mix. But many of the underlying principles are the same, which makes the study of formal deductive logic worthwhile.
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Even though I tend to disagree with just about every major point in it, Plato’s Republic holds a warm spot in my heart. For one, it’s a well-thought-out and ambitious attempt to bring metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and other topics together into one comprehensive treatment. This is no easy task, as I’ve discovered while poring through dozens of books by John Dewey to try and connect the pieces of his thinking together. For another, it’s the first book we really delved into in the first philosophy course I took at Fordham University, and without that course I doubt I’d have majored in philosophy, pursued graduate studies, or started this site.

Hmm. Maybe it’s time to rethink that warm spot.

At any rate, there’s far too much in Republic for me to synopsize in a single article, but there are a few of Plato’s arguments and examples that have become commonplace even in non-philosophical discourse that I’d like to use to start some discussion. These instances should also help illustrate how Plato helped to set the terms of philosophical debate for literally thousands of years afterward.
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Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam has argued that while Dewey’s pragmatism is a strong foundation for social ethics, it falls short as a means for individuals to answer questions about how they should act in a particular situation, or what they should believe – the questions through which we discover and become who we are. These are questions about what is the right thing to do at a given moment, and it is often the case that multiple options seem viable – it is not possible to eliminate, through some process of investigation or deduction, all but one option on the grounds that the others are obviously wrong or unsupportable, or that one response has no flaws while all others do. Putnam cites the case of Pierre, who must choose between leaving home to join the Resistance during World War II, or staying home to take care of his elderly and ailing mother. To a disinterested observer, both options seem viable, and there does not appear to be a rule or formula to settle the matter and provide an answer that would be universally agreed upon. “Neither of the alternatives he is considering is in any way stupid. Yet he cannot just flip a coin.”(1)
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Continuing our discussion of the theoretical questions a democratic reformer in the Deweyan tradition would need to answer:

A properly-functioning reform organization is itself a community within the larger society; its members should feel a bond with each other and be aware of the effect their actions have on the group as a whole and their individual colleagues. This community is itself a smaller public, looking to discover itself and organize itself appropriately. Since its members presumably share an awareness of this need and are actively engaged in the process, one would expect the reform organization to be further along in organizing itself than the larger society. It is vital, then, that reformers organize themselves as much as possible along democratic lines.

While it is relatively unlikely that charges of hypocrisy would be a non-democratic reform organization’s major challenge, it makes sense to avoid the problem if at all possible. More significantly, it is almost certain that at least some reformers would be aware of the conflict between the organization’s goals and the methods it used to achieve them. This will in turn almost certainly damage morale and reduce the reformer’s effectiveness. It is useful to raise a person’s awareness of conflict between important beliefs if you want to slow that person’s actions and make him think about those beliefs, but counterproductive when you are trying to motivate direct action. The commitment to democracy, once made after careful reasoning, must be carried through.
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