THESIS XII
A PHILOSOPHICAL NEWSLETTER

Volume 2 • Number 2
October 1994

INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

 • RESPONSES TO TESSMAN (Cont.)
    Matt Silliman, O. Z. Bronstein and Jeff Lawrence

 • THE LANGUAGE OF CONCEPTS:  A Debate
    David Luczynski and Stan Yake

 • WHAT ABOUT THE EXTERNAL WORLD? Response to Johnson
    Neil Feit

 • VIOLENCE AND SELF DEFENSE
    Diana Davine

 • THE CONSEQUENCES OF SKEPTICISM
    Jason McCauley

 • THE TEACHER AS LISTENER:  Rethinking Wait-Time
    Diana Davine

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I am drawn to Lisa Tessman's attempt to specify the conditions for a community to determine discursively its moral norms, though I wonder about whether it makes sense when followed through.  Clearly, in our society some people's speech and expression is "privileged" (heard, funded, profitable, influential), and other people's is not, and the criteria of distinction are arbitrary and usually unjust.  I grant, therefore, that we do not have, in such a context of domination, the conditions for truly free speech, in the sense of speech  which is unconditioned by oppressive circumstances.

In any other than a vanishingly small community, however, it is difficult to imagine creating the ideal conditions which Tessman seems to posit  as a precondition for a morally legitimate dialogue.  Not everyone can speak and be heard in precisely the same measure by everyone else; inevitably, some people's voices would be louder or more articulate, their artistic expressions more powerful and influential.  Those people's speech would thus become privileged  over the others'; even among a small group deeply committed to mutual respect and attention, such differences seem to follow from the natural fact  of human diversity (and too little diversity would hint at an oppressive  selection criterion for inclusion in the group).

If we insist on absolutely  free speech as a precondition for any of our speech to be legitimate in a civic dialogue, we condemn ourselves to illegitimacy, and our moral theory will run afoul of the dictum "ought implies can."

I do not issue this in defense of pornography; nor do I think it is pointless to envision ideality as a direction-pointer for pursuing change.  I am concerned, however, that the ideal we imagine not require conditions which are unattainable even in theory, for to do so gives us no real direction toward which to work, thus condemning us to the status quo.  To theorize freedom adequately, we must be able to distinguish (and legitimate) varying degrees of it, and imagine a process by which our dialogue grows in legitimacy while moving toward it.

Matt Silliman
NASC

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Pornography is the name many people use to define male domination in the form of sexual literature, film, or photographs.  In fact, pornography is, as defined by Webster's Dictionary, just "matter intended to arouse sexual feelings."  There is no mention of pornography  being restricted to the domination of women by men.  In fact, the fastest growing segment of pornography is that produced by women and in a manner more consistent with equality, indicating that pornography can work without being unequal in its content and free of male domination. And even though most of today's pornography is still male-structured and -dominated, pornography itself is still not oppressive -- the people who make certain types of pornography are.  In essence one rejects not the
pornography but the persons who are responsible for making pornography degrading to women.

As for Tessman's statement that "the promotion of pornography is not an exercise of free speech, but anexercise of privileged speech," I would say that speech
is free and governed only by those who believe in what is being said.  Who might these "privileged" ones be anyway?  Is it the males who have the means to communicate pornographic ideas to a large number of people through the exercise of power, money, and manipulation?  If so, are these people so privileged in their powers that they can control how we are to respect one another?  I would say that the power that has been given to pornography comes not from the "privileged" but from those who insist on suppressing the right to express oneself through pornography.

I think it is most important to remember that we are responsible for what we believe and how we choose to live.  Our environment only sets the stage; we are the actual performers.  Unfortunately, many today choose to cry foul, to play the "victim" and say they are "silenced."  Since no form of prohibition has ever been successful, and since the claim that "one is silenced" only reduces the potential for change, all change comes from within and not through censorship.  The root of all beliefs is an ideology that somehow informs us, but does not dictate to us what is right.  It follows that what is moral for one human cannot be determined, as Tessman suggests, by the collectivity.

Jeff Lawrence
       NASC

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There is, however, a significant link between marginalization and domination.  Leon Trotsky, for instance, was dominated by the Stalinist establishment in the Soviet Union through his marginalization by the mainstream dictatorship.  It is logical for domination to follow from marginalization, but I question whether the end result can be achieved without analyzing the preceding steps.

 O. Z. Bronstein

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Professor Stanley Yake recently claimed that all concepts must be communicated through written or spoken language.  In an effort to disprove that assertion, I offer the following as possible examples of non-linguistic concepts:
 (A) As a group of musicians plays a piece of music night after night, it begins to change subtly.  One musician's change on a particular night may be taken up and augmented by other musicians at other times.  Has this group of musicians not communicated concepts to each other without communicating linguistically?
 (B) Can a dog have a concept of a bone?  The dog cannot communicate through language.  Does this mean that dogs are not rational beings (i.e., that they cannot have concepts)?  Won't a dog who is offered a cardboard bone run across a room to examine it, then refuse it because it does not smell or taste like a bone?  This indicates a nonlinguistic understanding of the concept "bone" by the dog.

David Luczynski
       NASC

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Re (A):  I think the following is a better account of the musicians at work:  The musicians cue to each other's sounds, and modify their own actions based on what they hear and on what they anticipate hearing.  Does that mean they now have the same concept of the musical "piece"?  I don't think so.  They have made it through some musical piece once and a transcriber could take the recorded sound and write notation for it.  You then have a musical score that could be read and replayed.  But in what sense was any concept communicated?  On reflection, they may come up with a clear idea of what they did or of the form they were attempting to develop, but in the course of their improvisational playing they were not communicating a concept to each other.

Re (B):  Dogs are not rational creatures, if we mean by "rational" that they can think discursively.  A dog may be able to "discard" or "avoid" things we call "non-bones," but we have no reason to believe that he or she could describe the difference between a bone and a piece of meat.

Stan Yake
        NASC

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There are various kinds of objects of mental experience: concepts or ideas, sense data, and so on.  The representative realist makes an inference from the existence of such mental items -- sense data especially -- to their causes, namely persisting, external physical objects.  The constructivist complains that the inference is not legitimate, since it goes beyond what is given by the experience of the senses.

Johnson asks for responses to a particular constructivist challenge to representative realism, which goes as follows: suppose that a realist has a certain concept, for example, what the realist would say is the concept of a certain tree (it might be a visual image).  The realist cannot know which object her concept represents, the challenge goes, because in order to know this she must (1) be acquainted with the object, the concept, and the relation of representation between the concept and the object; and (2) be acquainted with the object in some way other than by means of concepts.  Since (1) and (2) cannot be satisfied, the realist cannot claim to know which object the concept represents; even if it seems to her that she is looking directly at the tree!

These are knotty philosophical problems, but I will try to make a few remarks.  I grant that a conscious experiencer may be acquainted with objects only by means of concepts, if these are broadly understood to include sense data. However, I deny that anything more than this is necessary for someone's knowing which objects her concepts represent.  This is a denial of (2) above.  One of the problems here is that the phrase "knowing which" is context-sensitive (for example, I know which person is the Republican senatorial candidate; but if I were in a room with Mitt Romney and several look-alikes, I would not know which person was the Republican senatorial candidate).  Condition (2) does not seem to me to be necessary -- if I have a visual image of a tree, most likely this alone lets me know which object the image represents: it is the tree at which I am looking (where the relation being a visual image of is the relation of representation between the concept and the object).

No doubt the constructivist will be dissatisfied; but then a reason must be given as to why this perfectly ordinary use of the phrase "know which" is unsatisfactory.  I suggest that the realist view gives the best explanation of our multifarious sense experience: the inference that persisting external objects cause our sense data is by far the best way to organize these fleeting experiences (the pen with which I now write is the very same as the one with which I began, despite the difference in my sense impressions).  We should claim to have some knowledge about the external world, and such knowledge, when it is useful, is useful because it is true; not the other way around.

Neil Feit
    NASC

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All of our knowledge is of experience and all experience is gained through perception, but what does this mean?  To answer this question we must first look at what perception is.

Given that we are part of the world, it follows directly that our sensory apparatus are also part of the world.  So what we are doing when we perceive is interacting with the rest of the world, and what we call a perception is an example of that interaction.  Further, if all of our knowledge is of experience and all of our experience is comprised solely of perceptions, then all of our knowledge is knowledge of the interactions between our senses and the rest of the world.

It follows that any judgments or valuations that we as individuals make must rest on this interaction.  I will further claim that all judgments and valuations must be made on the basis of our own individual interactions with the world, because to do otherwise would be to guess.

Furthermore, because of our individuality in the way we interact, it would follow that the judgments and valuations we make would also be individual.  I will  conclude from this that any moral system that attempts to delineate universally the right and wrong of specific actions is bankrupt.

Jason McCauley
     NASC

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At times, pedagogical reform is rooted in the simplest of concepts.  A case in point: so-called wait-time (the time we allow someone to respond to a question), if extended long enough, can help to replace the ubiquitous rhetorical questioning of teachers ("Now, when I divide here I get?") with a more genuine form of communication ("What would you do now?").

Studies suggest that actual wait-time is much shorter than teachers imagine it to be -- averaging, in fact, only about one second in duration. The common practice of punctuating lectures with brief wait-time forces students to ask general, often non-conceptual, questions ("How do you do #3?) rather than those that are of a more specific, partially worked-out, nature ("When I try to identify the premises and conclusion of this argument...").  Questions and comments of this latter variety are among our most valuable means of achieving insight into the thought processes of others.  As wait-time decreases, as we meddle with our students' responses to fit better our expectations, we answer not the students but ourselves, marking a preference for the comfortable illusion of making steady, predict-able progress.  Real listening -- hence communication -- requires extended wait-time.

Increasing wait-time serves also to complement our abilities as lecturers.  The value of telling or
showing (i.e., lecturing) is a function of our ability to gauge accurately our students' receptivity to the infor-mation we hope to convey.  Since all learning sets out from one's current store of information and under-standing , not to know the details of that situation is to teach to an imaginary student -- one probably modeled after our own under-standing of the object of study.   Lecture without wait-time threatens to be a waste of time.

David K. Johnson
     NASC

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The notion of self-defense is problematic for those intent on pursuing a philosophy of non-violence.  Can a person defend his or her life without engaging in violence?  If a basic premise of moral philosophy (including, of course, non-violent philosophies) is that each of us has the right to life, can one reasonably expect to live non-violently in a violent society?  If an adult is responsible for the welfare of a child, for example, is it an act of violence for that adult to pick up a nearby baseball bat to thwart an attack by an intruder?

Diana Davine
      NASC

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