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Philosophy
THESIS XII
A PHILOSOPHICAL NEWSLETTER
© 1994 (September)
Volume 2, No. 1
Inside this Issue:
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
DAVID K. JOHNSON
FREE SPEECH & DOMINATION:
RESPONSE TO SILLIMAN
LISA TESSMAN
AND...
WILLIAM MCBRIDE
A SEPARATE REALITY: RESPONSE TO
VON GLASERSFELD
MATT SILLIMAN
IF A TREE FALLS...
DAVID K. JOHNSON
THE SILENCE OF THE MIDDLE
TERRY COYNE
PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE?
STAN YAKE
Though we begin this academic year with a slightly
modified name (a reaction to the discovery of another, established publication
sharing our enthusiasm for Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach), our charge
remains to provide an open and respectful forum for the discussion
of all matters philosophical. This issue brings to print several
new and continuing discussions on a variety of topics, including: the relations
of Ernst von Glasersfeld's "radical constructivism" to reality (or "reality"),
of free speech to pornography, and of public to private life. As
always, I warmly invite friends of the discipline everywhere, from every
perspective and from every corner of our academic community, to participate
in and enjoy these reflexes of the philosophical spirit.
DAVID K. JOHNSON, EDITOR
NASC
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FREE SPEECH & DOMINATION:
RESPONSE TO SILLIMAN
Matt Silliman asks for comments on Ronald Dworkin's claim that, regarding
pornography, the individual right to free speech and women's collective
right to equality "are not really in competition with one another, because
restricting speech and expression undermines a political community's ability
to determine collectively its moral norms." I am also concerned with
creating the conditions in which a political community can engage in collective
ethical thinking. But what are these conditions?
Roberto Mangabeira Unger writes in Knowledge and Politics that "because
of the fact of domination, moral agreement is often little more than a
testimonial to the allocation of power in the group. Shared values
carry weight only in the measure to which they are not simply products
of dominance" (p. 243). I would argue that, as a tool of domination,
pornography interferes with a community's ability to engage in ethical
thinking which would be truly collective or truly representative of the
whole community. We do not have, in the context of domination, the
conditions for free speech; and, as Mangabeira Unger points out, this is
the only condition under which moral agreement would be meaningful.
Dworkin recognizes that restricting free speech undermines collective
moral thinking, but what he does not seem to recognize is that "free speech"
is restricted under conditions of domination, not through laws which directly
prohibit it but by ideological and material conditions which serve both
to coerce thinking and to reserve the means of public expression for the
privileged. That is, where dominant ideology informs our beliefs,
our desires, our "preferences" (e.g. for pornography), etc., our speech
is not "free" but rather is formed in part by this domination; and which
forms of expression (e.g., pornography) become public depend on who has
the resources to back them. Thus the promotion of pornography is
not an exercise of "free" speech, but an exercise of privileged speech.
Dworkin seems to be concerned with safeguarding this privileged speech
but not with enabling the free speech of those who are exploited, threatened,
disrespected and silenced through the practice of pornography. Those
who are interested in creating the possibility of truly free speech must
work to end all forms of dominance and subordination, for it is these conditions
which are opposed to freedom and therefore to the possibility of a community's
moral agreement being meaningful.
LISA TESSMAN
NASC
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AND...
On the issue of MacKinnon's championing of anti-pornography legislation
over free speech, I can only say that her views have for some years seemed
deeply disturbing to me in a way that those of few other thinkers ever
have, and of course now there is a pretty clear pendulum swing against
her, though with the sort of ambivalence and deep regret, on the part of
some of her critics, that you [Silliman] express.
The exchange in Ms. some months back concerning her treatment of some
Croatian women who had written, before the war, occasional pieces for a
sort of Playboy-like magazine in former Yugoslavia, and her accompanying
claim that the war is in part a product of the pornography that was supposedly
rampant in former Yugoslavia, gave me abundant grounds for feeling better
about rejecting her views, because in this matter she had been clearly
guilty both of the grossest misstatements of fact and misunderstandings
of the situation, as my own familiarity with Yugoslavia allowed me to know,
and -- even worse -- of attacking viciously the same group of women who
were being vilified by the Zagreb press for being insufficiently nationalistic
for the new Croatia, to the point of running one headline that said "Croatian
Feminists Rape Croatia": these were the very people MacKinnon was dumping
on.
So I feel better, because obviously she can be ignorant and vicious,
but that is not of course sufficient reason to reject her entire position.
I don't regard the right of free speech as absolute. But I am also
not convinced that pornography is quite the prelude to rape and murder
on a society-wide scale that she makes it out to be; so much depends on
the context in which a particular bit of pornography is (a) presented and
(b) received.
Can MacKinnon be seen as a major contributor to poisoning male-female
relations in present US society, or should she rather be seen as a clear-sighted
identifier of what was there all along in the social structure, but that
no one before had dared to name? I am not sure which of these two
(it's not an either-or anyway) is more accurate.
WILLIAM MCBRIDE
PURDUE UNIVERSITY
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A SEPARATE REALITY:
RESPONSE TO VON GLASERSFELD
In his comments to Meltz
Green, von Glasersfeld says (1) "...the elements out of which we build
up our knowledge do not originate outside us in an independent 'reality'..."
and (2) "But subjects cannot construct as they might like. Their
actions and the viability of their mental constructs are always constrained
by the reality they experience." In trying to reconcile these two
evidently contradictory statements, I conclude that von Glasersfeld must
mean something different by the term "reality" in the two sentences (which
no doubt explains its appearing in scare quotes in the first). Perhaps
the first "reality" is the term as we ordinarily use it, referring to an
actually existing world independent of our experience and which our experience
is about (granting that our experience may often be inaccurate, though
allowing that it is in principle improvable). The second, unquoted,
"reality" must mean something akin to Kant's reconstruction of the term,
roughly: "available as an object of public experience, but bearing no relationship
to any "thing" as it would be if it were not experienced."
This interpretation fits well with von Glasersfeld's comments, in the
same paragraph, about his qualified kinship with Kant. It also raises
a problem. If the world of my experience is "real" only in the sense
that I have made it so by experiencing it, whence comes the "constraint"
on that experience which he chides idealists for ignoring? It cannot,
ex hypothesi, be an external "reality" unconstructed by me, since the theory
brooks none; it cannot be a "reality" constructed by other experiencers,
since, if there were any such, I would have had to construct them myself.
At the end of his note, von Glasersfeld suggests that the source of this
constraint is simply "conclusions drawn from experience which, for one
reason or another, one does not intend to question for the time being."
Suppose, however, that I do intend to question them, and they refuse to
yield to my most insistent and strenuous efforts. I have been trying
for years to get rid of an old chicken coop which I continually and irritatingly
experience in my backyard, where I wish to construct a garden. This
and many other unpleasant facts (eg., violence, suffering) persistently
resist all my efforts to question or "deconstructivize" them (to coin a
rather ugly term). Perhaps it is time to take the more prosaic approach
of simply tearing the thing down (I refute von Glasersfeld thus!).
von Glasersfeld's only recourse, it seems to me, is not in a philosophical
but a psychological theory, which explains my perverse and systematic undermining
of my own constructive intentions by reference to a labyrinthine self riddled
with confusion and self-hatred (and, of course, constructed by ...me).
This amounts to positing universal insanity. He is entitled to hold
such a view, I suppose, but as a theory it would be damnably difficult
to provide evidence for (all the data would have literally to be manufactured).
There is, however, yet another possible sense which von Glasersfeld
might be giving "reality," again close to the usage of Kant. Perhaps
he holds that there may be an external reality somehow relating to our
experience, but that there can in principle be no way to know what (or
even whether) it is. Call him an ontological agnostic. If it
were the case, however, that external "reality" were in principle unknowable,
this itself would be a substantive fact about external reality (and about
us), and how could von Glasersfeld know such a fact? Ex hypothesi,
if it were true he could not know it, and if he could know it it would
not be true. All things considered, is it not more plausible that
"reality" means roughly what we ordinarily take it to mean?
MATT SILLIMAN
NASC
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IF A TREE FALLS...
Perhaps the discussion requires focus. I suppose that the basic
structure of the constructivist (and skeptical) challenge to representative
realism is as follows. First, if we are to know what object a given
idea or concept C1 represents, we must be able to compare C1 with that
object. But in order to determine whether O1 stands in some representational
relation, say, R, to C1, we must (1) be acquainted with C1, R, and O1;
and (2) know O1 other than by means of the concepts C1, C2 ... Cn.
Of course, the constructivist assumes that C1 and R, qua "conceptual constructions,"
are immediately available to the subject (see, for example, von Glasersfeld
(1989), "Knowing Without Metaphysics," p. 6). However, on the further
assumption that "we have no access to the world except through further
experience," there can be no non–conceptual access to O1(see, for example,
von Glasersfeld (1989), "Facts and the Self from a Constructivist Point
of View," p. 436). It follows that we can neither know which objects
correspond to which concepts nor, in particular, what there is in the way
of an "external" world. (See also Grossmann (1990). The Fourth Way.
p. 5.) I am forever looking for novel ways to respond to this challenge.
Any suggestions?
DAVID K. JOHNSON
NASC
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THE SILENCE OF THE MIDDLE
About a year ago the North Adams Transcript began carrying a column
by the Rev. George Fowler entitled "Monk at Large." Fowler's views
on Christianity offended [many Christians]. The editor responded
by offering members of the Christian community a column of their own called
"Clergy Corner." The religious right has availed itself of this column
and responded directly to Fowler's ideas, but the liberal Christian middle,
as represented by the majority of local pastors, has yet to take a stand.
Fowler's present position is similar to that of most non-secular biblical
scholars. Roughly, his position is that Christian scripture contains
some valuable moral ideas but that the tales of miracles should be dismissed
as understandable exaggerations.... The religious right have simply
called Fowler's views blasphemous. They offer [miraculous] accounts
of the suspension of natural law as proof of the epistemological verity
of Christian doctrine.
Between these two clear-cut positions the silence of the middle is deafening.
Presumably, the majority of local Christian leadership is a step away from
fundamentalism, but their lack of a credo places them on vague ground.
The local clergy need to respond to Fowler with specific belief requirements
and the rationale on which they are based.
TERRY COYNE
NASC
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PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE?
We try to distinguish between our public life and our private life,
but it seems to me that this distinction is less easy to make today than
it might have been in earlier periods of history. The distinction
between governmental and non-governmental domains is harder to make today,
and all manner of high speed electronic communications now intrude into
every part of our everyday lives. What are the implications for publicly
motivated censorship of "private" electronic communication?
STAN YAKE
NASC
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