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4 responses to “Review of Williamson’s Tetralogue”

1. 

   Patrick S. O’Donnell

   January 23, 2015

   It would be quite interesting to see a book like this examined in light of contemporary work in political philosophy and theory, in particular, on the Liberal (or Rawlsian) attempt to achieve an “overlapping consensus” among worldviews that are prima facie irreconcilable, as well as the various conceptions of “deliberative democracy,” in short, to various possible loci of “public reason.” Putative “irreconcilability,” however, may be irrelevant if it’s the case that we cannot assess the truth of any philosophical or religious worldview qua worldview. As Hilary Putnam has said, “’Is our own way of life right or wrong?’ is a silly question, although it isn’t silly to ask if this or that particular feature of our way of life is right or wrong, and ‘Is our view of the world right or wrong?’ is a silly question, although it isn’t silly to ask if this or that particular belief is right or wrong.” Moreover, “consensus” is an unrealistic goal, as Gerald Gaus has argued, and thus we must content ourselves with the fairest manner of adjudicating our deep disagreements in a democratic society in the form of a “conclusively justified umpiring mechanism” (indeed, ‘democracy is required just because even rough consensus is not a plausible political ideal’). In any case, an examination of a philosopher’s “tetralogue” alongside notions of public reason(ing) in Liberal political philosophy seems to me worth pursuing (although perhaps not in the context of a review).
   I’m also curious as to whether or not or to what extent the interlocutors in such a dialogue entertain worldviews that are similar to those found “on the ground,” in the real world. You note that “the characters are rather like caricatures of each of the positions, with no ambition to psychological complexity. This might sound like an unreasonable requirement given the stated goals of the book; but the truth is that anyone writing a philosophical dialogue will be confronted with the exceedingly high standards set by the founder of the genre, Plato.” That would seem to be a considerable shortcoming of this endeavor. It’s important to bear in mind that most of us don’t have, in the end, “systematic” worldviews (one reason for Putnam’s comment above). As Ninian Smart said, “We have an amalgam of beliefs [and values, commitments, inklings, and so forth] which we may publicly characterize in a certain way. I may say that I am an Episcopalian, but how much of my real worldview corresponds to the more or less official view of the Episcopal Church? How much is in any case left out by an ‘official worldview’ which tells me nothing directly about cricket, being Scottish, having a certain skepticism about nationalism, thinking there is life on other worlds, shelving the problem of evil, or other matters. Our values and beliefs are more like a collage than a Canaletto. They do not even have consistency of perspective.” Inasmuch as our worldviews may be marked by indeterminacy, inconclusiveness, and inconsistency of perspective, as well as sundry passions and interests (and thus may be fairly described as somewhat ‘messy’ yet coherently identifiable as worldviews), how we in fact engage others in conversation, discussion or more formal kinds of dialogue would seem to elude the methods of philosophy, however valuable the paradigmatic Socratic dialogue remains for other reasons. Dialogues in the real world may be — and perhaps still in keeping with Williamson’s motivations for constructing this particular tetralogue (as far as I can ascertain) — better captured on the stage or in a screenplay, by the novelist or short-story writer (albeit one with a philosophical temperament!).
   We often hear of the need for empirically-informed philosophy, so it’s worth pointing out that there’s been considerable research on various forms, actual and experimental (e.g., mini-publics), of several conceptions of deliberative democracy, revealing both the strengths and limits, the virtues and vices, of such participatory fora in a would-be democratic society: see, for example, Robert E. Goodin’s Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (2008). Goodin and Simon J. Niemeyer (and after Aristotle and Hobbes), ask us to accord more attention to the point at which deliberation actually begins. As they persuasively argue, much of what we term deliberation (at least the ‘consideration’ part) precedes interpersonal “organized talking:” “An internal process of weighing reasons necessarily precedes any participation in a public discursive interchange.” What we bring to the table, in other words, may be a neglected component of what it means to engage in democratic deliberation, and Goodin’s earlier book, Reflective Democracy (2003), in part addresses how we might enhance these internal mental processes so as to render our preferences more “reflective” in the sense of more “empathetic,” “considered,” and “far-reaching.”
   And again along the lines of arguing in the real world, I suspect it would prove illuminating to compare Williamson’s project to Elster’s research on the role of both “arguing” and ”bargaining” in the process of constitution-making at the Federal Convention in Philadelphia and at the Assemblee Constituante in Paris from 1789 to 1791 (Elster, Jon. 2000. ‘Arguing and Bargaining in Two Constituent Assemblies,’ University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 2: 345-421). There are other (and less grand or politically-charged) settings where arguing and bargaining are part of the same process of talking together, does Williamson speak to this “impure” form of dialogue?
   Finally, I would hope this tetralogue conveys for us an appreciation of the following propositions about truth from Michael P. Lynch (unlike many if not all of this blog’s philosophers and many of its readers, I’m not well-versed on Williamson’s views on truth):
   “The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.”
   “[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.” Or: “[T]he conditions under which a proposition is true are partly determined by the conceptual scheme in which the proposition is expressed. But what makes a proposition true is not its relation to a scheme but whether or not the conditions in question obtain. For a claim to be true (or false), the conditions must be relative to a scheme. Yet the reason that the claim is true is not because it is relative to a scheme (as the truth relativist must hold); it is true because it is the case. [….] A fact, in the human sense, is simply what is the case.”
   “Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.”
   “All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.” Or: “Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.”
   “A theory of truth should make sense of the following metaphysical principle: Truth is One: There is a single property named by ‘truth’ that all and only true propositions share.” The theory should also be “able to make sense of the intuition that drives pluralism about truth, namely, Truth is Many: there is more than one way to be true.”
   ‘[T]ruth is a single higher-level property whose instantiations across kinds of propositions are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties. [….] Truth is many because different properties may manifest truth in distinct domains of inquiry. In those domains they have the truish features. Truth is one because there is a single property so manifested, and ‘truth’ rigidly names that property.” Or: “Truth is an immanent functional property that is variably manifested.”

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2. 

   Tim

   January 23, 2015

   You cite only Lakatos’ book as a contemporary example of “prominent philosophical work written in dialogical form”. What do you think about Perry’s, Rosenberg’s and Smith/Oaklander’s dialogues? Or the dialogue parts of Mulgan’s Ethics for a Broken World? Sure, they are meant to educate, not to present and defend new philosophical thoughts, but maybe they are closer to Williamson’s use of the dialogue form than Lakatos’.

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3. 

   Catarina Dutilh Novaes

   January 24, 2015

   Fair enough 🙂 I’ll weaken this claim in the final version: “Indeed, in recent decades very few philosophical works written in explicit dialogical form have appeared, the most remarkable of them being perhaps Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations (1976).”

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4. 

   Vivek Iyer

   March 4, 2015

   Suppose Williamson is a genuine philosopher- not a Careerist hack- in that case this ad captum vulgi work reflects on his unconscious or chthonic belief in the unworkability of his own Sorites solution.
   Tetralogue gains salience along with 4 cornered Logic which need not be dialethic, if there is some intensional criteria (rather than a conditional) such that two corners have a pragmatics
   (i.e. an interpretation or uniformly presentable ideal of a certain sort) which can be shown to be empty or asymptotically approach emptiness.
   However, because Set theory uses extensional definitions, and thus can’t distinguish between the recursive and the recursively enumerable, it is condemned to glutty or gappy pragmatics.
   To my knowledge, there is no Domain unrestricted workaround for this or something like this.
   Plato’s genius was in showing why any particular dialogue was the solution to a co-ordination game. As Leo Strauss pointed out, in the Laws, the Spartan is shown to be a proxenos of Athens and
   the Cretan a descendant of a prophet who had helped Athens. Thus Idionomia or Antagonomia are removed from the Domain.
   Williamson thinks it would be a truly remarkable result if modal logic, howsoever refined, declared its own modality ontologically dysphoric or not at home in the World. Yet, Philosophy is received
   in precisely this register and to precisely this end by all but Professorial pit ponies blinkered to its mine.
   You highlight Williamson’s use of the ‘dialogue’ form and mention Lakatos. Why? There is no connection between the two. Lakatos’s Research Programs are Co-ordination problems for ‘paradigm busting’- i.e. Muth Rational migration from a Discursive saddle point- involving (he hopes canonical) ‘monster barring’ etc.
   Williamson’s Tetralogue is not a prolegemon to a Teratology. It is a salutary monstrance of the manner in which Philosophy’s sleep of Reason, or divorce from Mathematics, is productive of nothing but monsters.

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