On the issue of whether we should believe in the external world or in our ability to find author's intentions in a book, I think I've made things more complicated than they need to be.

A. Structuralists and others present us with a theory of language which make knowledge of a mind-independent reality impossible. Others present us with a theory of knowledge (Cartesian foundationalism) which also make such knowledge impossible.

B. On the other hand, we all believe that there are trees and rocks and stars and cats and eggs and that these things are the way they are independently of what we call them or think about them. When you're in the tiger's cage, it doesn't do any good to try to think of him as a pussycat or call him 'kitty'. Turning your back on him doesn't make him disappear. When he crouches in a certain way, you can tell his intention is to leap. We know a lot about what other people think and intend and feel and desire -- both from what they say and from how they act. We know it is safer to leave by a first floor door than by a 30th story window. We know there was a time before we each individually existed, and we know there was a time when no humans existed, but there were still trees and rocks and other animals.

What do you have more confidence in? The claims of the philosophical theory of language or the philosophical theory of knowledge in A or the experientially based beliefs in B? Even the person who claims to be a skeptic about our knowledge of the external world or of our ability to predict the future on the basis of past events, leaves by way of the first floor door.

If we have so much more confidence in the kind of beliefs I talked about in B, then why throw them all out for the sake of some theory of language we have no particular reason to accept? It seems better to start from those beliefs and try to develop a theory of language and a theory of knowledge that permits us to talk about and know the kinds of facts I mentioned in B. Such theories of language and of knowledge are available, so there seems to be no reason to dismiss or even suspend the beliefs in B.

Tim,
Although I do think reductionism makes understanding consciousness unnecessarily hard, and though I agree with you that the sciences do explain how they are related to each other, I'm somewhat sympathetic to AE's problems concerning consciousness. Although there seems to have been progress in understanding intentionality or representation in terms of functional states mediating inputs of sense-information and outputs of behavior, there seems not to have been much progress in accounting for consciousness if we understand it from the inside -- {i]what it is like[/i] (in Thomas Nagel's phrase) to be a bat or to be a human or to look at the color blue or be hungry.
Dennett in _Consciousness Explained_ eliminates phenomenal qualities. To some at least, this looks like dismissing the very thing that he is supposedly explaining.
I think what Dennett does is rash -- who says we have to be able to explain consciousness completely right now? Don't we have less reason to be sure we can explain it right now than to believe that there is something it's like to feel angry or hungry or see the color blue? At the same time, we have every reason to believe in physics and biology and that somehow consciousness arises out of them in some natural way (because we do not find any great gap between fully conscious humans and the rest of animate nature).
At this point I wouldn't adopt either dualism or a Dennett-like eliminativism -- I just don't think we're in a position to make the judgment. I think we should just go along accepting phenomenal qualities (which some take to be the heart of consciousness) and at the same time expect that, as we come to understand matter better, we will come to a better understanding of how the two are related.




[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 19, 2004).]

Re: Consciousness — the core issue here is whether we're engaging in a phenomenological or philological debate.

To exit the house from a second-floor door is foolish either away. I'm not aware of anyone who's evever denied the "functional reality" of a 12-foot fall-to-earth in order to bolster a semantic distinction regarding the nature of that fall.

The issue is not "Is that tiger real?"; the issue is, and always has been, "Does our perception of that tiger align with its 'reality'?"

"Reality" at this level is a "construct" of perception. Is perception "consciousness" in any meaningful sense? This brings us back, unfortunately, to Julian Jaynes. Nobody's denying that "what we perceive" is "real" to us; the argument is about the alingnment of perceived reality with "true" reality, or whether "true" reality even exists in any meaningful sense.

In a very meaningful way, poetry can be the answer to that question.

(robt)

Hi Robt,
I don't get your comment on "consciousness", but I'll respond to the other part.

The constructivist position you want to advocate (we partly create reality-- or anyway the reality we know) is based upon skepticism about the possibility of knowing a reality which we do not construct. This skepticism can be based either on a foundationalist (Cartesian) theory of knowledge or various theories of language.
My main point about the tiger was that we believe we know things about tigers, not just as they appear to us or as we conceive of them, but as they are in the world independent of our beliefs about them. Tigers and other commonsense beings seem to impinge on our experience as though they were creatures whose nature is quite independent of what we think about them. Why not accept this as our starting point rather than some radical theory of language or of knowledge which denies this?

Hume provides a skeptical argument against reasoning from past to future. Yes, leaving from the first floor door has always worked in the past, but what guarantee do we have that it will work in the future? Why should we assume that the future will conform itself to the past? Why then do we leave by the door rather than the 30th story window? The only reason on Hume's view is "habit." This is only an explanation of why we keep doing it, not in any sense a justification. So on Hume's view, it is actually NOT foolish (irrational) to leave by the 30th floor window -- because reason really has nothing to say about the matter. Next time we leave by the door, we could find ourselves falling up into outerspace, while if that time we had left by the window, we might have gently floated to earth.

Kant, in a sense, the first constructivist, was responding to Hume's problem when he suggested that we impose causality onto things in themselves thus creating the "constructed" empirical reality we all know. The trouble is, I can't see how this constructivist "solution" really helps. If we were gods and could decree the laws of nature (really literal construction of reality), then we could guarantee by force of will that the future would resemble the past. But clearly we are not in this position. If we are not almighty, then how do our concepts influence even the reality we know? If future experience suddenly decided not to resemble past experience in the radical ways Hume imagines, could we stop it by thinking very hard "principles of causality hold -- this is not happening"? (Note that this problem arises within experience itself -- it compares past and future experience rather than experience with the outside world.)
Constructivism seems to add nothing to the skeptical problems from which it derives.
We seem to live in a world in which we are not all that important, and what we think of things doesn't affect what happens (except in the special case of our own actions). And we seem to know a lot about how that world behaves. The realist explanation is that we really live in such a world and do know a lot about how this world behaves.
The constructivist explanation is that our beliefs about the world somehow constrain the laws governing our experience (they somehow make future experiences resemble past experiences, for instance). But how could our concepts affect our experience in this way? I don't think the constructivist can supply much of an answer. (The clear answer -- that our concepts affect the world causally, that we have godlike powers is obviously not intended, but in what other way can our thoughts or our concepts constrain our experience?)

In any case, the question remains, why should we accept the claim that we can't really know about cats or dogs or trees or other people as they really are in themselves? The abstract arguments for this conclusion seem infinitely less certain than our actual knowledge of (mind-independent) cats and dogs and other people. Doesn't it make more sense to develop an explanation of how we can know what we feel so certain we really know rather than start from the assumption that we don't really know about it?

I don't get what you are saying about poetry at the end, but from a poetic point of view, constructivism looks rather self-absorbed -- a hall of mirrors. Isn't the writer's challenge to reach beyond himself -- to really understand others, not just what those others mean to us?



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 26, 2004).]

There is a couple of paragraphs in the current London Review of Books which addresses the "death of the author" issue quite sensibly, I think. As follows (the author, James Wood, is differentiating "writers" from academic critics):

"Most writers I know treat an author's intentions - or their understanding of them - with severe respect. Better than anyone else, they know that a work of art means more than its creator intended it to mean, that artworks live what Montale called 'the second life of art' with their readers. But their criticism, spoken or written, tends to hug authorial intention rather closely; and writers, in my experience, are often suspicious of the way academic criticism confounds or even nullifies authorial intention in pursuit of the symptomatic. In his new book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton describes two camps, the belletristic and the theoretical. Why is it, he asks, that the former is credited with seeing what is 'really in the text'? 'To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem.' It's a caricature - theoretical Eagleton turns out to be fonder of crude binarisms than the crustiest old clubman - but a writer would be very wary of a criticism that only wanted to read The Waste Land symptomatically. Not to attend to a plausible reconstruction of the author's aesthetic intentions is not to attend to the made-ness, the constructedness, of the artwork; and writers, sensibly enough, have a great deal invested in such matters.

Value follows intention. There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good? - is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question."

Note how Wood correlates interest in "intention" (what the author was trying to do) with interest in "value" (how skillfully he did it). Postmodernist academic ideology discredits both interests; the "death of the author" evidently entails or is entailed by the death of aesthetic value judgements. Hence its irrelevance to practicing writers struggling to improve their craft.

The whole article, an unfavorable review of "The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England?" by Randall Stevenson, is here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n10/wood02_.html


[This message has been edited by AE (edited May 30, 2004).]

I find AE's comments here very useful, as they explain, from a theoretical perspective, why so many post-modern critics are not interested in aesthetics, or even craft.

I would add only, in my usual manner, imploring people that one should nonetheless take postmodern theory seriously, that the suspicion of intention and value is simply one element of the complex of theories that have lead various critics for various reasons to speak of the death of the author. We explored some of the others in the other "death of the author" thread.

Whenever I read comments like AE's, I am utterly persuaded by them, and yet I continue to be persuaded that I cannot, as a rigorous critic, give too much weight to an author's intentions. Such irreconcilable conflicts are typical of the post-modern condition.

epigone

Value follows intention - one way to assess value is to state what you think an author is trying to do then assess how well the author does it. If the author's trying to write a sad piece but produces a successful comedy, the piece is a success but the author has in some way failed. That failure may matter to the author (e.g. William McGonnigal) but I don't know why the readers should care. Such cases aren't that common though one sometimes hears of books written for children that succeed better with adults. Sometimes these are marketing mistakes rather than mistakes by the author.

[i]The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good?</> - what? authors have big egos and are always seeing how they measure up compared to the competition. Surely not.