Abstract
Thought-expressions are not simply good; instead, they become good for us when they make sense, empower action, and support health. From time to time, we may need to (re)consider the difference between thought-expression and discourse, or thought-expression that really makes sense, and the difference between discourse and discussion, or a discourse-situation that makes genuine agreement or disagreement possible for us. In this essay, I explore a problem that D. Z. Phillips and Randy Ramal have termed “logical inversion,” and I argue that wherever logical inversions have gained a foothold in our thought-expressions, they threaten to render us incapable of authentic discourse and discussion by ensuring that we misunderstand the understandings of others such that we deceive ourselves and others by picturing the knowledge and truth of our perspective against an unreal background of conceivable falsehoods which we have falsely attributed to the perspectives of others. Where this has taken place, practices of philosophical attention and conceptual clarification are needed to help us move from a situation of endless thought expression toward authentic discourse and discussion.
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Notes
In the words of D. Z. Phillips: “Conceptual clarification is an activity that is not easy to understand. It is essentially indirect. What it achieves is not the refutation of a false thesis but the unraveling of a confusion. A confused statement is not refuted, for its refutation would involve thinking of it as intelligible, but false; the trouble consists in the fact that an attempt is made to say what does not make sense. The route to the confusion has to be unfolded in such a way that the person no longer wants to utter it. The unfolding is indirect in that one has to begin from where the confused one is” (PCP, pp. 24–25).
In his article, “The Fallacy of Logical Inversion: On Avoiding Discourse in the Hermeneutics of Religion”, Ramal notes (pp. 173–176) that “Phillips believed that committing the fallacy of logical inversion entails what he calls ‘avoiding discourse,’ which is the unwitting tendency to prevent discourse from being itself or from saying what it wants to say,” or as I put the matter, preventing someone from participating in authentic discussion with this discourse, and Ramal adds that “Phillips locates the source of engaging in logical inversions in the attempts of philosophers to arrive at meaning independently of the epistemic practices in which that meaning has its place”.
Someone may look away from something precisely because she wants to ignore it and she may say more than she knows about that something precisely because she wants to say less about this something. For example, moral concern and the fulfillment of duty often bring about a certain kind of integration and happiness in our lives; however, some folks, either wanting to advocate for moral concern and citizenship or wanting to deny the existence of vigorous villains, have argued that happiness and integration are themselves the sign of a morally concerned or dutiful person, but as D. Z. Phillips has pointed out, that “a rogue may be a well-integrated person” is there for us to see in our surroundings (RFF, p. 149).
Furthermore, in his, Introducing Philosophy, D. Z. Phillips characterizes philosophy as a response to “the challenge of skepticism, and he contends: “skepticism, at its deepest, challenges the very possibility of sense (IP, p. 11). “Philosophers’ doubts” are not to be confused with practical doubt, neurotic doubt, or pseudo-doubt; instead, they are about “the possibility of knowledge and certainty” in, for example, the realm of the senses (IP, p. 14).
Note: this essay consists mainly of reflections concerning the importance of philosophical attention, or contemplation, for us. I not only seek to re-present the activity of contemplation but also (and primarily) to recommend the practice of philosophical attention in the lives of communities. I do not mean to suggest that everyone should take up contemplation. Like Plato, Wittgenstein, Rhees, and Phillips, I acknowledge that there are not many able to “show the kind of interest in philosophy that makes it possible” and that “there is a kind of indulgence in philosophy, which is worse than none at all” (PCP, p. 45).
Waiting for God, pp. 61–62.
In “the hermeneutical way of thinking”, according to Dalferth’s Radical Theology, “language is not simply the human means of speaking about all that is possible and real, but also the medium in which and through which Being itself so interprets itself that we can interpret it, speak about it, and recognize it. Language, wrote Ernst Fuchs, ‘allows Being to become “present” in time, makes it into an event’…. This is not because Being is, as it were, silently speaking to us, but because everything that exists is always disclosed to us already through language—the language spoken by actual human beings. Thus, just as one cannot think of Being without language, one cannot think of language without humans who make use of language and perceive Being as it exegetes or interprets itself linguistically” (pp. 83–84).
D. Z. Phillips, reflecting on “the possibility of discourse,” has put the point this way: “As in a conversation, the unity of a language is not formal, and what one emphasizes is not the differences between things but how one thing leads to another. But if one asks how one leads to another, the answer will not be, Because they must, but rather, Because they do. What will count as ‘sayable’ will depend on how people actually talk to one another. Or, better, that people talk to one another in the ways they do, that they make the connections they do, will show what is and what is not ‘sayable’” (PCP, p. 51).
The Postmodern Explained, p. 24f.
Power/Knowledge, p. 131.
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 3f.
In Philosophy’s Cool Place, Phillips approvingly quotes Wittgenstein as saying, “our aim is to bring back words from their metaphysical to their ordinary use,” and goes on to clarify that “by ‘ordinary’ use he means the natural contexts in which our concepts have their meaning.” (p. 161).
MacIntyre is always moving toward a telos, or “terminus.” In After Virtue, MacIntyre (1981) begins with the observation that “the most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on—although they do—but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.” After Virtue, p. 6.
Waiting for God, pp. 61–62.
According to Ramal, “the source of engaging in logical inversions [resides] in the attempts of philosophers to arrive at meaning independently of the epistemic practices in which that meaning has its place.” “The Fallacy of Logical Inversions,” pp. 173–202.
As Dalferth (2016) has rightly noted: “Perceiving and understanding are two paradigmatic ways of our relating to the world or, rather, of the world relating to us. They give rise to different problems, which provide the occasion for epistemological and hermeneutical reflection. As our perceiving is guided by the key distinction between existence (being) and nonexistence (nonbeing) and oriented through the modality of actuality (we can only perceive what is actual; otherwise we call it an illusion), so is our understanding guided by the key distinction between meaning and existence and oriented through the modality of possibility (we can only understand what is meaningful and, as such, possible). Perception locates us in a specific, concrete situation (we are where we perceive); understanding opens the horizon for us of how we can act within this situation (we are what we can be). Both belong together, and both can go wrong. Not everything that we think we perceive is actually the case—we may be mistaken. And not everything that we think we understand have we understood correctly—we can be deceived.” Radical Theology, p. 25.
The analysis of Plato’s Gorgias that I present to the reader in this section is something that I owe mainly to Randy Ramal and his willingness to share his insights with me in the course of our many conversations concerning the fallacy of logical inversion.
It is interesting to note that Plato does have the character Callicles point this out to Socrates and Gorgias, when he exclaims: “O Socrates, you are a regular declaimer, and seem to be running riot in the argument. And now you are declaiming in this way because Polus has fallen into the same error of himself of which he accused Gorgias:—for he said that when Gorgias was asked by you, whether, if some on came to him who wanted to learn rhetoric, and did not know justice, he would teach him justice, Gorgias in his modesty replied that he would, because he thought that mankind in general would be displeased if he answered ‘No’; and then in consequence of this admission, Gorgias was compelled to contradict himself, that being just the sort of thing in which you delight. Whereupon Polus laughed at you deservedly, as I think; but now he has himself fallen into the same trap.” Gorgias, p. 43. With this in view, the reader should remember that I am speaking about Socrates’ participation in deception, not Plato’s.
Gorgias, (2015, pp. 28–30).
Cf. Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion, pp. 44–45.
For similar reasons, Farley (1990) objects that radical suffering is not correctly understood as merely an effect of sin because the ordinariness and often involuntary nature of radical suffering, in her view, disallows such a reading of our situation. Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion, pp. 12, 40–65.
Exclusion and Embrace, p. 109.
Exclusion and Embrace, p. 254.
With respect to the difficulties of doing philosophy, i.e. difficulties in giving problems the kind of attention the kind of attention philosophy asks of us, Phillips quotes Wittgenstein as saying: “You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are”; “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself”; “If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself… he will remain superficial in his writing”; and “working in philosophy is really more like working on oneself” (PCP, pp. 45–46).
For similar reasons, Randy Ramal has criticized the majority of religion’s interpreters for seeking to “explain [the relation between ordinary practices and the world] through causal means,” and like Phillips, Ramal “rejects the causal emphasis entirely and describes it as a misguided historical or pseudo-philosophical attempt to do what cannot be done.” “The Fallacy of Logical Inversions”, pp. 173–202.
James (2002).
Ramal (2010) has expressed similar criticisms, claiming: “Although in his other writings [James] emphasizes the pragmatic attitude that gives primacy to practice over theory, I think that in the Varieties he adopts an epistemically empiricist model for understanding religious experience. According to this model, religious experience is the upshot of external, divine influences and it is similar in its procedural grounds to empirical experience. The only difference between the two types of experience for him is that the objects of religious experience are not empirical in nature.” “The Fallacy of Logical Inversions,” pp. 173–202.
D. Z. Phillips notes that Wittgenstein launched similar criticisms at James Frazer. Criticisms suggesting that “an age’s conception of what an intellectual problem is can be shoddy and that shoddiness consists precisely in the inability to see a problem in terms other than seeking answers to it, seeking solutions, getting things done” and that “Frazer could see [primitive] rituals only instrumentally, as ways of getting things done, just as, in a wider context, he thought of the science of culture as essentially a reformer’s science” (PCP, pp. 46–47).
When James affirms that “there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves to it,” it seems he has come close, if he has not temporarily crossed over, to the view that we must look for the meaning of religious experience somewhere ‘behind’ religious discourse (VRE, p. 53). However, it should be noted that James then turns his audience’s attention away from objects like the ‘soul,’ ‘God,’ and ‘immortality,’ toward feelings of objective presence and declares that unreasoned immediate assurances are “the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition (VRE, p. 74).” In this way, James fights the good fight against the Siren call of metaphysics, yet he could not resist the urge to conclude these lectures on “The Topic and the Unseen” by arguing that felt encounters with transcendence tend to awaken “both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of [one’s] being,” in proportion to their personal dispositions and, in this way, confining the sense of religious discourse to the logical space available to religious experience within his Ego theory (VRE, p. 75). Not wanting to get carried away with exegesis, I only mention here, that the remaining lectures seem to constitute a positive effort to cultivate a sense of possibility for Ego-enhancement inherent within religious experiences through attention to effects that religious “moods of expansion” and “moods of contraction” have had on persons of various temperaments.
In his lectures on “Healthy Mindedness,” having indicated his preference for self-expansion, he notes that some persons contend the “chief concern” of human living is happiness, or well-being (VRE, p. 79), and that some individuals, as a matter of fact, are predisposed toward joviality and healthy-mindedness (VRE, p. 119). In these individuals, James argues that healthy-mindedness performs both a self-protective function, blinding persons to the immanence of evil and preventing injury at the hands of self-destructive moods (VRE, pp. 88–89), and a kind of regenerative function, alleviating our fears (p. 98) and relaxing our psychic inhibitions (VRE, p. 111). Of course, some persons evidently achieve healthy-mindedness involuntarily, while others work to systematically develop some form of optimism (VRE, p. 88), and James admits that he is primarily interested in the possibility of “the deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind.” (VRE, p. 89). Throughout his lectures, James recognizes numerous possible objections to the idea that pursuing feelings of happiness is a truly religious objective – for example, concerns that religions of healthy-mindedness render persons unable to properly “feel evil” (VRE, p. 84), discourage moral progress (VRE, p. 80), and tempt persons to revert to primitive forms of human consciousness (VRE, pp. 118–119). Nonetheless, James is convinced that some folks are undeniably benefited by such practiced and that such religious practices should be studied, but not discouraged, by scientists and philosophers interested in how persons “carry on their intercourse with reality” (VRE, pp. 119–123).
The rest of the lectures mainly aim to cultivate a sense of the possibility for the transformation of the sick soul and to clarify prospects for self-feeling enhancing expansions into “the MORE.”.
For example, he acknowledges that discourse characterized by “moods of contraction” makes religious sense, but he only explores how “moods of contraction” function within projects ultimately aimed at self-expansion, at facilitating breakthroughs that lead to shifts in our knowledge of “the transmarginal or subliminal region [of human consciousness]” and habitual energy with which we live our lives (VRE, p. 483).
Phillips also quotes Peter Winch, with affirmation, as saying: “Reality is not what gives language sense. What is real and what is unreal shows itself in the sense that language has” (RHC, p. 306).
Waiting for God, p. 57.
Ibid, p. 100.
Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 203.
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Yarbrough, B. The threat of logical inversion and our need for philosophical attention: from thought-expression to discourse and discussion. Int J Philos Relig 83, 21–39 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9595-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9595-9