Philosophy The Worst Philosophical Argument in the World!

[The Name of Love]

I recently came across an article by James Franklin called Stove’s Discovery of the Worst Argument in the World. I think it bears a look at it because of 1) how bad it is, 2) how often it's used, both throughout the history of philosophy and in modern classrooms, and 3) how ridiculous the conclusions of the argument is.

The argument generally comes in the following form:

1. We can know things only as they are related to us, under our forms of perception and understanding, insofar as they fall under our conceptual schemes, etc.
2. So, we cannot know things as they are in themselves.

You might not know the argument in exactly this form, but this argument has been used time and again.

For example, George Berkeley, an eighteenth-century empiricist and idealist, made the argument that "the mind … is deluded to think it can and does conceive of bodies existing unthought of, or without the mind, though at the same time they are apprehended by, or exist in, itself." Essentially, Berkeley's arguing:

1. You cannot think of mind-independent things without having them in mind.
2. Therefore, you cannot think of mind-independent things.

The logical conclusion is Berkeley's subjective idealism, according to which all that we experience are, as far as we know, just creations of our own imaginations.

We also see this amazing argument played out in modern (or should I say, postmodern) philosophy. For example, this is a line of reasoning taken in postmodern literary theory (though arguably, it's an accidental strawman, as postmodern theory is extremely difficult to understand):

Based on the Saussurean principle of the sign, which is that the relationship between the signifier … and the sign … is arbitrary, the structure of language for Lacan is such that ‘language’ is already cut off from ‘reality’. What is taken as the meaning … of any word, for example, is always going to be the result of that word’s difference from all other words within a particular language. Meaning, then is a result of difference, and difference is a result of language as a system … Consequently the Saussurean-based theory of language … is radical because it erases ‘reality’ from the system: reality is never present ‘in’or ‘to’ the system of language … The gap between word and thing … is a necessary one inasmuch as language can never be identical with what it names, for example, and vice versa … From this it follows that presence (truth, reality, self-identity) is an effect of a system that is constituted by absence and separation. The very lack within language and the very gap between word and thing is what makes reality possible, making it seem present.

In other words:

1. We cannot speak about things-in-themselves except by using particular language.
2. We cannot speak about things-in-themselves.

Or take this line of reasoning, often seen within social justice warrior circles:

The cultural-relativist, for example, inveighs bitterly against our science-based, white-male cultural perspective. She says that it is not only injurious but cognitively limiting. Injurious it may be; or again it may not. But why does she believe that it is cognitively limiting? Why, for no other reason in the world, except this one: that it is ours.

In other words:

1. We cannot think about things outside of our science-based, white-male perspective.
2. We cannot think about things in themselves.

We can also take a look at American anti-realist schools of thought. Philosophers like Hilary Putnam make arguments like:

adding … a body of theory titled “causal theory of reference” is just adding more theory—and hence itself, by the theorem, could have unintended referents.

Which translates into:

1. We only talk about things using words.
2. We cannot talk about things as they are in themselves.

Or this one:

The difficulty is that whatever we observe, or, more generously, whatever we interact with, is certainly not independent of us. This is the problem of reciprocity. Moreover, whatever information we retrieve from such interaction is … information about interacted-with-things. This is the problem of contamination. How then, faced with reciprocity and contamination, can one get entities both independent and objective? Clearly, the realist has no direct access to his World.

Which translates into:

1. We only access the world through information in our minds.
2. We have no direct access to the world-in-itself.

Relativist ethics isn't immune to such "reasoning" either. Check out the respectable E. O. Wilson, who writes:

… self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional and control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions — hate, love, guilt, fear, and others — that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths.

In other words:

1. We cannot know ethical truths (if there are any) except through the urgings of our back-of-brain plumbing.
2. Therefore, we cannot know ethical truths at all.

You can also deconstruct science itself! Social constructivists like David Bloor, for instance, makes the argument that, because scientists are people affected by social conditions, we cannot trust their arguments are reasonable, as the same body of empirical evidence is compatible with multiple theories. The argument boils down to:

1. We can know things only via causal (social) processes acting on the brains of real scientists.
2. Therefore, the content of our theories is explained without remainder by the social factors causing them; that is, we cannot know things as they are in themselves.

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If you are still not convinced that this argument is ridiculous, just take a look at some of these zingers.

1. We can only see things using our eyes.
2. We cannot see things.

1. We can eat food only insofar as they are brought under the physiological and chemical conditions which are the presuppositions of the possibility of being eaten.
2. Therefore, we do not eat food-in-itself.

1. A calculator says 1+1=2.
2. 1+1=/=2.

Yup, it's that bad. It's bad because there's a hidden, unargued premise in each argument: that there can be no co-operation between reasons and causes. It is a genuine question in epistemology as to how our minds can come to know truth, but we cannot assume, based on the fact that we come to know truth using our minds that we cannot know truth-in-itself. It's a ridiculous non-sequitur. The sooner this line of reasoning is abandoned, the better it'd be for all of us.

Tell me, have you found this "worst argument" within something you've seen or read recently? Share your experience below and comment on this.

 

[ShieldWife]

This argument is particularly bad in that it’s always hypocritical in its use. People can use this argument to reject well supported arguments from their opponents and then posit baseless claims of their own. As Tim Minchin says in his Storm poem:
“So I resist the urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose-weave of a morning when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door
Or the window on her second floor.”

Because all of these post-modernists have the same criteria for determining truth that the rest of us have when it comes to sticking their hands into fire or walking off of cliffs, but suddenly there’s no such thing as truth when somebody supplies evidence to disprove one of the tenets of their leftist dogma.

It’s been a while since I have encountered on of these arguments in depth. I tend to avoid advocates of post-modernism in real life and stop reading post modernist arguments that I see on the net.

I think that the most recently that I encountered this kind of reasoning was in a debate about transgender issues on the White a wolf forums.

 

[Navarro]

This argument is particularly bad in that it’s always hypocritical in its use. People can use this argument to reject well supported arguments from their opponents and then posit baseless claims of their own. As Tim Minchin says in his Storm poem:
“So I resist the urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose-weave of a morning when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door
Or the window on her second floor.”

Because all of these post-modernists have the same criteria for determining truth that the rest of us have when it comes to sticking their hands into fire or walking off of cliffs, but suddenly there’s no such thing as truth when somebody supplies evidence to disprove one of the tenets of their leftist dogma.

As Orwell said:

Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual.