Can We Live With Contradiction?
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/op...ction.html
EXCERPT: The philosopher Peter Singer was once attacked for contradicting himself. [...] So, how bad is contradicting yourself? In philosophy, since Socrates (a troll before there ever was an internet), the answer has been “very bad.” If you find you believe two inconsistent propositions you need to do something about it. You owe a theory.But theories themselves tend to be confusing, unsatisfactory or both.
[...] I think, though, that we can do better, and one step toward doing that is cutting ourselves — individually and as a culture — some slack for being inconsistent. When we look at other cultures we can see that they are attempts to square the circle of conflicting worldviews. The ancient Chinese were heirs to both a Taoist and a Confucian heritage. So sometimes an ancient Chinese literatus was inclined to let it all hang like a Taoist, and sometimes he wanted to impose a harmonious social system on unruly human impulses like a Confucian.
We don’t blame the ancient Chinese literatus for being inconsistent, so why not try to be at least as forgiving to ourselves? Not just because life will be less stressful or because people who are harsh and unforgiving to themselves end up being harsh and unforgiving to others, as the journalists were with Singer (although both things, I believe, are true) but because if we have two sets of practices that work, we will lose something by giving up on either one of them. It helps us make it as a civilization to view people as sources of meaning and it also helps us to view them as causally determined. Until we have something better we risk impoverishing our skill set by getting rid of either one of them in a foolish quest for consistency, the hobgoblin (or is it the bugbear?) of little minds.
But what do we do about mother and the chicken? Do we have any resources better than the bourbon for dealing with the times when our lives get paradoxical? I think we have at least three: ritual, horror, and comedy....
How playing Wittgensteinian language-games can set us free
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-playing-wittge...et-us-free
EXCERPT: We live out our lives amid a world of language, in which we use words to do things. Ordinarily we don’t notice this; we just get on with it. But the way we use language affects how we live and who we can be. We are as if bewitched by the practices of saying that constitute our ways of going on in the world. If we want to change how things are, then we need to change the way we use words. But can language-games set us free?
It was the maverick philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who coined the term ‘language-game’. He contended that words acquire meaning by their use, and wanted to see how their use was tied up with the social practices of which they are a part. So he used ‘language-game’ to draw attention not only to language itself, but to the actions into which it is woven. Consider the exclamations ‘Help!’ ‘Fire!’ ‘No!’ These do something with words: soliciting, warning, forbidding. But Wittgenstein wanted to expose how ‘words are deeds’, that we do something every time we use a word. Moreover, what we do, we do in a world with others.
This was not facile word-nerdery. Wittgenstein was intent on bringing out how ‘the “speaking” of language is part of an activity, or form of life’....
What do we know?
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/op...-know.html
EXCERPT: [...] As we look back on our season of surprises — from Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize to Donald Trump’s election — what we’re being reminded of, surely, is how very little we know. On Nov. 7, thanks to more data than had ever been collected before, updated every second for 16 months or more, we all knew what was coming. By midnight the following day, we realized that all the data in the world doesn’t add up to real life.
Remember in “Othello” how the seasoned warrior is coaxed away from the realm of knowledge and into the adjacent territories of inference and rumor, by his old friend Iago? The minute he is severed from real life, on the “rack” of his own thoughts, declaring “Iago is most honest” after Iago has confided to us, “I am not what I am,” the noble Moor can’t be sure of a thing. Our pollsters, our pundits, our sources of “news” — our know-it-all selves — work much the same ground, though perhaps with less malicious intent, to persuade us that hearsay + opinion + guesswork = truth.
I recently got a crash course in this reality — don’t we all nowadays, on dates or job interviews, on simple social occasions? — when I visited a campus. I was told that Professor X was going to host me for dinner, so of course I decided to check him out online, not least because I was fairly sure Professor X would do the same with me. I needed to show him I had thought about him beforehand; more than that, I had to be armed for two hours of small talk.
As soon as I googled him, RateMyTeachers.com came up, and I learned that my host-to-be was arrogant, ignorant, cruel and even sadistic. Each entry was more vicious than the last. Only later did I wonder whether this character assassination was a conspiracy among the few students to whom he’d given a “C.” I didn’t stop to think that I wouldn’t necessarily trust these 19-year-olds in any other domain, least of all when their futures were at stake. I didn’t bother to consider that it’s usually those who are most vehemently pursuing an agenda who take the time and trouble to post reviews online.
I went into my host’s house on guard — and hardly knew what to do with the kindly, courteous and really fun man who stood in front of me. He no doubt wondered why I was being so standoffish and reserved. Or maybe he’d come across reviews of me online and knew already that I’m arrogant, ignorant and cruel....
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/op...ction.html
EXCERPT: The philosopher Peter Singer was once attacked for contradicting himself. [...] So, how bad is contradicting yourself? In philosophy, since Socrates (a troll before there ever was an internet), the answer has been “very bad.” If you find you believe two inconsistent propositions you need to do something about it. You owe a theory.But theories themselves tend to be confusing, unsatisfactory or both.
[...] I think, though, that we can do better, and one step toward doing that is cutting ourselves — individually and as a culture — some slack for being inconsistent. When we look at other cultures we can see that they are attempts to square the circle of conflicting worldviews. The ancient Chinese were heirs to both a Taoist and a Confucian heritage. So sometimes an ancient Chinese literatus was inclined to let it all hang like a Taoist, and sometimes he wanted to impose a harmonious social system on unruly human impulses like a Confucian.
We don’t blame the ancient Chinese literatus for being inconsistent, so why not try to be at least as forgiving to ourselves? Not just because life will be less stressful or because people who are harsh and unforgiving to themselves end up being harsh and unforgiving to others, as the journalists were with Singer (although both things, I believe, are true) but because if we have two sets of practices that work, we will lose something by giving up on either one of them. It helps us make it as a civilization to view people as sources of meaning and it also helps us to view them as causally determined. Until we have something better we risk impoverishing our skill set by getting rid of either one of them in a foolish quest for consistency, the hobgoblin (or is it the bugbear?) of little minds.
But what do we do about mother and the chicken? Do we have any resources better than the bourbon for dealing with the times when our lives get paradoxical? I think we have at least three: ritual, horror, and comedy....
How playing Wittgensteinian language-games can set us free
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-playing-wittge...et-us-free
EXCERPT: We live out our lives amid a world of language, in which we use words to do things. Ordinarily we don’t notice this; we just get on with it. But the way we use language affects how we live and who we can be. We are as if bewitched by the practices of saying that constitute our ways of going on in the world. If we want to change how things are, then we need to change the way we use words. But can language-games set us free?
It was the maverick philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who coined the term ‘language-game’. He contended that words acquire meaning by their use, and wanted to see how their use was tied up with the social practices of which they are a part. So he used ‘language-game’ to draw attention not only to language itself, but to the actions into which it is woven. Consider the exclamations ‘Help!’ ‘Fire!’ ‘No!’ These do something with words: soliciting, warning, forbidding. But Wittgenstein wanted to expose how ‘words are deeds’, that we do something every time we use a word. Moreover, what we do, we do in a world with others.
This was not facile word-nerdery. Wittgenstein was intent on bringing out how ‘the “speaking” of language is part of an activity, or form of life’....
What do we know?
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/op...-know.html
EXCERPT: [...] As we look back on our season of surprises — from Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize to Donald Trump’s election — what we’re being reminded of, surely, is how very little we know. On Nov. 7, thanks to more data than had ever been collected before, updated every second for 16 months or more, we all knew what was coming. By midnight the following day, we realized that all the data in the world doesn’t add up to real life.
Remember in “Othello” how the seasoned warrior is coaxed away from the realm of knowledge and into the adjacent territories of inference and rumor, by his old friend Iago? The minute he is severed from real life, on the “rack” of his own thoughts, declaring “Iago is most honest” after Iago has confided to us, “I am not what I am,” the noble Moor can’t be sure of a thing. Our pollsters, our pundits, our sources of “news” — our know-it-all selves — work much the same ground, though perhaps with less malicious intent, to persuade us that hearsay + opinion + guesswork = truth.
I recently got a crash course in this reality — don’t we all nowadays, on dates or job interviews, on simple social occasions? — when I visited a campus. I was told that Professor X was going to host me for dinner, so of course I decided to check him out online, not least because I was fairly sure Professor X would do the same with me. I needed to show him I had thought about him beforehand; more than that, I had to be armed for two hours of small talk.
As soon as I googled him, RateMyTeachers.com came up, and I learned that my host-to-be was arrogant, ignorant, cruel and even sadistic. Each entry was more vicious than the last. Only later did I wonder whether this character assassination was a conspiracy among the few students to whom he’d given a “C.” I didn’t stop to think that I wouldn’t necessarily trust these 19-year-olds in any other domain, least of all when their futures were at stake. I didn’t bother to consider that it’s usually those who are most vehemently pursuing an agenda who take the time and trouble to post reviews online.
I went into my host’s house on guard — and hardly knew what to do with the kindly, courteous and really fun man who stood in front of me. He no doubt wondered why I was being so standoffish and reserved. Or maybe he’d come across reviews of me online and knew already that I’m arrogant, ignorant and cruel....