This is just an attempt to work through some questions I had on reading Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp 143–148 and thereabouts, about "ethical knowledge" and its possibility in a fictive hypertraditional society (its salient tradition being its lack of reflection), in particular concerning the way that the "possibility[] of the insightful but not totally identified observer[] bears on an important question, whether those who properly apply ethical concepts of this kind [ie, thick ones] can be said to have ethical knowledge" (142)—how the observer is implicated in there being ethical knowledge in such a society, and how reflection is involved, and how reflection is said to destroy ethical knowledge. (When I say "work through some questions" I mean something like "express the questions somewhat combatively".) The last, in particular, now seems much stranger than I recall having found it on my first reading of the book, long ago; one might easily have thought both beforehand and, taking Williams at his word, afterward, that "reflection might destroy knowledge[] because thick ethical concepts that were used in a less reflective state might be driven from use by reflection, while the more abstract and general ethical thoughts that would probably take their place would not satisfy the conditions of propositional knowledge" (167). I say "taking Williams at his word" because he introduces that sentence with the phrase "earlier I said". But earlier he did not say that; what he said earlier was much weirder. (Or more carefully: earlier he said that, but disconnected from the context in which he says it, which requires him to have said something much weirder.)
But more on that anon; first, the argument that there's ethical knowledge in the first place in such a society (the one topic leads directly into the other, anyway). Broadly, it seems to be like this: First, those who have knowledge exhibit certain features: they believe the judgments they make, and the judgments are true, and the truth isn't happenstance but rather their practices track the truth. This is presumably meant to be a sufficient set of conditions on being knowledge(able). Second, practitioners of thick-ethical-concept discourses believe the judgments they make in using those concepts, and their use of the concepts varies as the circumstances vary. Lemma: If the judgments they make using those concepts are true, then they have, and the judgments constitute, knowledge. Third, one reason to think that the judgments are not true fails, and another reason fails if the people being talked about are sufficiently unreflective about what they're doing. Conclusion: truth and knowledge, at least in certain scenarios.
First, this is not exactly a constructive argument. That is: if you were concerned about how these practices might involve knowledge, or in what sense the practitioners can be said to know that so and so is such and such, you wouldn't really be enlightened here. (How could you be? We're talking about people whose practices you're on the outside of, and Williams talks only about "the boy is F", so he couldn't really try to get you inside.) When an argument by elimination succeeds, the result is seen to be unavoidable, but not necessarily in an illuminating way: it couldn't be these other things, so it must be this remaining thing. (That isn't necessarily a knock on it, though I personally did find it to be, as can sometimes be the case with arguments by elimination, a trifle trickily unsatisfying. Nor is it necessarily to say that a different kind of argument in this kind of case might even be possible; I'm willing to believe that in more philosophical cases than one would like to acknowledge you just sort of have to limn the thing from the outside.)
Second, if you're making an argument by elimination, you really have to make a case that you're eliminating all possibilities but those you wish to establish. Williams doesn't make such a case, and I don't think he is eliminating what's necessary. (I'm also not convinced he should get to claim the "tracks the truth" requirement; the brief argument there is simply that if any of their talk with their thick concept is true, then the fact that they vary their talk with varying circumstances, and correct each other, etc., shows that they track the truth. I suppose there's some consideration like: we only know what the content of these terms even is from the various ways they employ them, so what they do must come out to be tracking the truth, if there's truth. But it seems so easily won!.)
Williams confronts directly two possibilities for why the claims may not be truthful. One of them is this: if the observer is able to say "so and so's statement 'X is F' is true", then the observer ought to be able to just say "X is F" directly, but, Williams says, "he is not prepared to do that, since F is not one of his concepts" (143). What he seems to mean by this is that "F" is not one of his words: he explicates the disquotational principle involved with reference to slang terms for entities of a school, and the square teacher who understands but does not use the slang surely has concepts involved. To be somewhat more concrete: I, not being of the youth, or part of Twitch culture, etc., would not say that something is "based" rather than "cringe", or "poggers". But I might judge (more readily in the former than the latter case) that someone else was speaking correctly or incorrectly in using them. This discrepancy doesn't seem harmful to the possibility that things might truly be based (bzw. cringe), because what holds me back isn't their not being "my concepts" in the sense of my not knowing my way about them (though I might judge that I know my way about them to the extent of judging them correctly when used but not using them correctly myself in novel situations, as when a person has enough of a language to assess a translation but not enough to speak it fluently), but simply their not being my words to use; they belong to another population and I would feel or look silly speaking them myself. (Williams actually gives the disquotation principle as "A cannot correctly say that B speaks truly in uttering S unless A could also say something tantamount to S" (143; bold added), and that "tantamount" seems as if it actually gives one an out completely.)
It's an reasonable question, I think, why Williams is confident that the observer would be willing to quote the term in question. Most actually existing people do not observe the analytic philosopher's niceties regarding use and mention of terms quite as rigorously as the philosophers do, especially around fraught terms. If F is not the observer's concept in a strong way, then his ability to judge about its use in another's statement is called into question; if it's not his term in a strong sense, then he might reasonably be skittish in uttering it even within a quotation. But this is more to the point with regard to the possibility I think Williams is leaving unaddressed. Another interesting question is why Williams subsequently characterizes the issue here as one in which "their notions [are] so different from the observer's that he could not assert what they asserted" (145), which really does seem to put this in territory different from the slang example and raise the question of how the observer is judging the truth of the quoted statements afresh.
The second argument that claims involving the terms in question are not true that Williams considers is false, "not because they can be mistaken in ways that the locals themselves could recognize, but because an entire segment of the local discourse may be seen from outside as involving a mistake" (145). One thinks, perhaps, witch discourse, or of "magic" more generally, of which Williams says:
"magic, at least, is a causal conception, with implications that overlap with scientific conceptions of causality. To the extent this is so, magical conceptions can be seen from the outside as false, and then no one will have known to be true any statement claiming magical influence … the problem is that their statements [] imply notions similar enough to some of [the observer's] for him to deny what they assert. (145)
That is, the system of scientific concepts the observer can find in magic-talk overlap sufficiently with the scientific concepts with which the observer is familiar that the observer can relate the two and condemn the former as at root mistaken.
In the ethical as opposed to theoretical context, Williams puts it thus:
the locals' statements imply something that can be put in the observer's terms and is rejected by him: that it is right, or all right, to do things he thinks it is not right, or all right, to do. Prescriptivism sees things in this way. The local statements entail, together with their descriptive content, an all-purpose ought. We have rejected the descriptive half of that analysis—is there any reason to accept the other half? (145–6)
It is in answering that question that the issue of zermalmende Reflexion arises, but before we get there—isn't there something odd about this? If the observer finds the claim to be false, must it be because of such a prescriptivist split? Compare this example from the next chapter:
[M]embers of a culture that does not admit human sacrifice encounter members of another that does. They conceptualize differently the ritual killings, but this does not mean that the first group, if horrified, are laboring under an anthropological misunderstanding. It is, as they might put it, a deliberate killing of a captive, which is enough for their ethically hostile sentiments to extend to it. (158)
Indeed, they might be laboring under a crystalline anthropological understanding (mightn't they?) in which they very well understand what the other folks are getting at when they talk about the sacrifices but think it's all just erroneous. Or—and one really must wonder whence comes the temptation to set all these encounters in imagined ethnographic encounters with or between "primitive" peoples—consider something like the following. (And here I confess that it's not with the greatest comfort that I'll use (or even mention) the term that follows, but am doing so because I think it's more useful to have a concrete example than to talk of a "headman" saying "F", and because I don't think that endless circumlocutions would really have helped.) I believe that I am, and that most people I know are, capable of judging the aptness, in use, by the standards of those who use it full-throatedly, of terms such as "slut". I wouldn't use it myself, and I wouldn't even be thrilled to quote its use and assess the quotation, but I think I know what people are about when they do use it, and I would and do reject its application in general, as involving a whole complex of patriarchal nonsense which I also wish to reject. It certainly seems as if this rejection involves my deeming any particular application of it wrong, not because it's misapplied but because I think it can't be correctly applied. I don't believe that in adopting such an attitude I must adopt the prescriptivist analysis; certainly, since the basis of the rejection is another set of "thick" values set against patriarchy, it doesn't seem that it boils down to a description plus a thin "universal moral notion" (146). (One can also ask how it is that I come to be able to judge regarding uses of the term without inhabiting the system of values of which it is a native. But since I do do so—or allege that I do—if the only account thereof is the prescriptivist one, well, so much the worse for Williams.) But Williams only considers that one might call the application of the rejected thick terms systematically wrong from a thin, rather than a competing thick, position. So it isn't clear to me that the argument by elimination covers the needed ground.
My first thought about the observer unwilling to say in his own person "X is F" was that it would be this kind of case—unwilling to say it because to use of F is to take part in an odious-to-the-observer scheme. But it can't be that—the rest of the discussion wouldn't add up, and anyway, the observer would be unlikely to mention it in such a blasé fashion or to judge the sentence using it true. But I don't see how this kind of rejection of the thick concept maps on to the division into a pure description plus a thin "right" or "wrong".
It's about this that Williams does bring in the role of reflection:
The basic question is how we are to understand the relations between practice and reflection … in relation to this society, the question now is: Does the practice of the society, in particular the judgments that members of the society make, imply answers to reflective questions about that practice, questions they have never raised? … There are two different ways in which we can see the activities of the hypertraditional society. … One of them may be called an "objectivist" model. According ot this, we shall see [them] as trying … to find out the truth about values … We shall then see their judgments as having these general implications [as we see claims about magic as having implications about cause more generally]. On the other model we shall see their judgments as part of their way of living, a cultural artifact they have come to inhabit … we shall take a different view of the relations between that practice and critical reflection. We shall not be disposed to see the level of reflection as implicitly already there. (147)
Note that the judgmental observer of just a minute ago doesn't need to care about this; that observer can seemingly say "well yes they aren't trying to get at abstract truths about patriarchy (or whatever) but their practices evince patriarchy and they are incorrect in their ground-floor statements because of that".
Why is this relevant? Well, consider the practitioners of magic; they seem, or have seemed to many ethnologists, to be engaging in causal reasoning, but with faulty premises, but because they share a topic with what we know, we are in a position to deny what they assert (as Williams had said, p 145). (Must the practitioners of magic be reflective about it, or is it enough that we read off causal implications? It seems as if it must be the former, given the distinction between the objectivist and non-objectivist readings of practices, but, in this domain at least, why?) They're up to something similar enough to what the observer knows for the observer to get his conceptual-schematic hooks in, is, it seems, a very crude way to take it. In the ethical case: "if we take the nonobjectivist view … various members of the society will have knowledge … But on the objectivist view they do not have knowledge, or at least it is most unlikely that they do, since their judgments have extensive implications" (148) which, one expects Williams to continue, impinge on a domain of the observer's knowledge, which enable the observer to deny what they assert (or, as one could more simply put it, which are false). This would parallel the discussion at the introduction of this possibility for denying knowledge: "magical conceptions can be seen from the outside as false … the local criteria do not reach to everything that is involved in such claims" (145), and so on. But that isn't how Williams goes on; he goes on to say "… which they have never considered, at a reflective level, and we have every reason to believe that, when those implications are considered, the traditional use of ethical concepts will be seriously affected" (148). Why do we have every reason to believe this? What are the implications (Williams of course can't tell us, because the only term he's given is the schematic "F")? We don't say that the practitioners of magic have got it wrong because, if they continue their investigations into causality, the practice of magic will be unsustainable (if we did say that their practice would collapse with continued investigation, we'd say that it would happen because they've got it wrong), nor, of course, did Williams suggest that we do. It is an open question in any given case whether mere reflection on the use of a thick ethical concept will, because of whatever further implications it has, tend to undermine it, or anyway, shouldn't that be what someone skeptical of ethical convergence ought to think? (There seems, too, to be something odd about the claim "you don't have knowledge now because, in the future, you (or your descendants!) will find this practice foreign". By the end of this section Williams is saying what he will later say he said: if "reflection characteristically disturbs, unseats, or replaces those traditional concepts [then] reflection can destroy knowledge" (148), but right here he is saying that reflection proleptically already has destroyed knowledge even before any disturbance, unseating, or replacement has happened.) In actual courses of reflective thought sometimes the wildest nonsense ends up being confirmed and the distressing implications just remain unconsidered or are explained away, and often, also, the reflection that destroys must be carried out at a rather high level of sophistication (we don't all have Williams's skill). At the same time, it seems that Williams can't quite say here, as he does in the case of magic, that the observer, because he can see the that the observees are engaged in a practice of trying to get it right that connects with his like practice, can bring his greater knowledge to bear and say that they're wrong on that account, because the observer, who one presumes is also reflective, shouldn't on Williams's account have that greater knowledge. But it's only something like that, as far as I can tell, that justifies his denying them knowledge now, merely because of the kind of life they have, before the corrosion typical of reflection has set in.
Recent Comments