Method in Metaphysics

[Doug Mounce]

I collect the text from these ND Philosophical Reviews when there is a key word of interest in a context that I might want to later recover.  The recent one with a quote from Putnam looked useful, but it led me to Andrew Beards' Method in Metaphysics where he critiques Putnam and Kripke in a context that matters, so I'll just go there if needs arise. 

(Beards begins with this quote:)

"Metaphysics has survived numerous attempted assassinations. Hume's call for the burning of books has not yet been heeded except by his distant descendants the logical positivist's, whose theatrical derision of metaphysics raised a few cheap laughs. Now the show is over and serious metaphysics flourishes once more. But it has not survived unscathed. There are urgent, unanswered questions about its methods of inquiry."

Alex Oliver, 1996

The ND example:

"One difficulty in answering this question [about facts and values] is that it depends on how precisely the distinction is understood. Pulling apart the various threads is one aim of the editors' introduction. They provide a litany of notions associated with each side of the divide (1-3):

Facts: empirical verification, truth, explanation, science, natural, objectivity, descriptive, cognitive, rationality, superior.

Values: empirically unverifiable, objectively unjustifiable, ethics, subjective, relative, evaluative, prescriptive, emotion, arational, subordinate.

"There follows a history of this distinction under various guides, from the Humean injunction against deriving an 'ought' from an 'is', through variations of ethical non-cognitivism, to different types of usage in 'use' theories of meaning. Opposition to the distinction (and defence of 'fact-value entanglement') is exemplified by pragmatists such as Peirce, James and Dewey, and in particular their rejection of the so-called 'representationalist' model of knowledge, according to which 'human understanding [is] a matter of faithful mirroring [of] a reality which is brute and deaf to our requests' (13). One difficulty I had with this survey is that it privileges history over taxonomy, hence the interconnections between the various ways of making the distinction are not clearly set out, nor is there a detailed introduction to the remaining papers.

"Part I ('A Counter-History of the Dichotomy') aims to provide a history of critique of the dichotomy, focusing on the work of classical pragmatists (papers by H. Putnam and Robert Schwartz) and critical theorists (papers by Maeve Cooke and John McGuire). Putnam's own contribution explores Dewey's opposition to the flag bearers of the fact/value dichotomy of his day -- logical positivists such as Carnap, Reichenbach and Ayer. Putnam sees Dewey as targeting a fact/value distinction according to which matters of fact are subject to rational argument and evaluation, but value judgements (expressing only pseudo-propositions) are not (28). Against this, Putnam notes that pragmatists have a positive view of the role of reason in ethical inquiry, although in typically fallibilistic mode this is not as an Archimedean point prior to and outside of all existing evaluation, but a self-reflective 'careful evaluation of experience and the invention of new descriptions of experience' (39). Hence

"The right approach to our ethical problems is neither to give up the very possibility of intelligent discussion nor to seek a metaphysical foundation outside of . . . all problematic situations, but to investigate and discuss and try things out cooperatively, democratically, and above all fallibilistically. The terrible thing about the fact/value dichotomy is that by denying that there is such a thing as a responsible and rational ethical discussion, it "blocks the path of inquiry" from the very start (39)."

[Jaray...@aol.com]

Doug,

 

Beards' critique of Putnam etc is quite a "meaty" contribution (e.g. for our purposes). More on this e..g. at

 

https://books.google.de/books?id=k2VmFNLisMYC&pg=PT281&lpg=PT281&dq=andrew+beards+putnam&source=bl&ots=xAU7ThvhbL&sig=1aSZMUtKM7h4nNSHRtKqKtaIZ3g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj9j92dmYPVAhVJDsAKHdwhCvgQ6AEIPzAH#v=onepage&q=andrew%20beards%20putnam&f=false

 

where Putnam also urges a return to common sense as does of course BL.

 

Credibly founding ethics AND spirituality for our age is one of BL's feats.

 

Most "do-gooders" of our day (I'm talking about credible, responsible ones) who do not delve all too deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of spirituality travel, it seems to me, a path not unlike what a Putnam, Haldane, BL and other philosophers have done for ethics.

 

E.g, below is a link to Andrew Harvey and other popular presenters of more "private" transformationalists in the social realm by way of spiritual guidance. One can access it at 

 

 Inspiring Positive Social Change: Cutting-edge Insights from Spirituality, Neuroscience and Peacebuilding, which kicks off July 11 and 12 and then occurs every Tuesday through September 5. (To register for free, click or see http://positivesocialchangesummit.com/

 

 

In brief, yes the four chapters on Metaphysics in Insight are ground-breaking,

 

John

 

 

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[Jaray...@aol.com]

Then one may ask some relevant questions based on ongoing political discussions in Europe--all quite complex. See https://www.socialeurope.eu/2017/07/road-soft-brexit/ for more  

 

 

 

The Road To A Soft Brexit

by Jon Bloomfield on 12 July 2017 @jonbloomfield2

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Jon Bloomfield

The UK election result has been a game changer. The electorate has turned down the Theresa May/Daily Mail offer of a hard Brexit and the threat of walking away from the negotiations with the European Union. The result is a rebuff to May and all her ministers claiming that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal.’

The new parliamentary arithmetic means that the road is now clear for negotiating a soft Brexit. That means accepting the result of the June 23 referendum but recognising that for reasons of economics, geography, history and culture a close working partnership between the UK and the Continent is in the interests of both parties. Hence, the UK should seek a partnership and cooperation arrangement with the EU across a whole range of areas – the economy, security, culture, the environment, research – where it has vital shared interests with our closest neighbours.

Furthermore, events are pushing the EU as well as the UK in that direction. First, after the latest terrorist horrors in Manchester and London, who is seriously going to suggest that the UK should pull out of its intelligence sharing and security cooperation with European police and counter-terrorism services? Second, the disastrous performance of President Trump in Saudi Arabia, at NATO and the G7 has given renewed momentum to the desire amongst European leaders for greater self-reliance. The swift declaration with the Chinese government upholding their joint commitment to the Paris agreement on climate change after Trump’s announcement of US withdrawal is an early example. Third, the election of Emmanuel Macron as the new French President adds a new powerful, political figure pushing for collective action at the European level.

The main political obstacle remains migration. The May government has argued that the UK must pull out of the Single Market and the Customs Union because membership of either is incompatible with the UK controlling its own migration policy. This view is regularly echoed by EU leaders and Commission President Juncker. I have shown previously in Social Europe why this is not the case.

The Treaty of Rome is not a neoliberal free for all. Importantly, this is also the view of Jean Pisani Ferry, the author of Emmanuel Macron’s Presidential policy programme and now his chief economic adviser. Nine months ago Ferry wrote a pamphlet for the influential Bruegel think tank with four other senior EU policy makers entitled Europe After Brexit that argues that in an increasingly volatile world, neither the EU nor the UK has an interest in a divorce that diminishes their influence, especially as the balance of economic power shifts away from the North Atlantic world. The authors propose a new form of collaboration between the EU and the UK, a continental partnership which would consist of participating in the movement of goods, services and capital and allowing some additional labour mobility, as well as in a new system of inter-governmental decision-making and enforcement of common rules to protect the homogeneity of their deeply integrated economies.

On migration, the Bruegel authors suggest managed labour mobility is required for the interdependent parts of the European economies to function smoothly and to enable firms to transfer staff to other countries easily, but there is no legal necessity for unrestricted movement.

The precise form that those arrangements on a managed migration policy within the single market between the UK and the EU could take are a matter for negotiation but the starting point should be that all options including membership of the Single Market a la Norway or the Customs Union a la Turkey are on the table. These are crucial because the central economic issue is not about trade but about integrated production flows. Serious European politicians and policy-makers know that economics has leapt the boundaries of their relatively small nation states. The optimal economic area is now Continental in scale

[Jaray...@aol.com]

Hi all,

 

Below is a refrence to Andrew Harvey and here is a link to his biography

http://www.andrewharvey.net/andrew-harvey-biography/

 

"Andrew Harvey is Founder Director of the  Institute of Sacred Activism, an international organization focused on inviting concerned people to take up the challenge of our contemporary global crises by becoming inspired, effective, and practical agents of institutional and systemic change, in order to create peace and sustainability. Sacred Activism is a transforming force of compassion-in-action that is born of a fusion of deep spiritual knowledge, courage, love, and passion, with wise radical action in the world. The large-scale practice of Sacred Activism can become an essential force for preserving and healing the planet and its inhabitants.  ....."  One may ask how does this all "fit in with Lonergan"? If Lonergan were writing MiT today he might at least footnote him.  Let us remember that MiT builds on Insight. and its "ethical-spiritual metaphysics" (John) 

 

 

 

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[Jaray...@aol.com]

Hi all,

 

"Metaphysics has survived numerous attempted assassinations...." we read below in Doug's posting. We might say that with such "leaders" as Putin, Erdogan, Trump it'll take some HUGE efforts to help democracy survive in the ongoing attempted assassinations of "rule of the people" based on justice and, from our point of view on this site, ALSO underpinned by a sound metaphysics and a living faith. How about the complex following analysis?

 

John

 

In his eight years as president, Barack Obama oversaw a civil rights renaissance, laid the groundwork for combating climate change, and shepherded the nation through its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

But his failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for causing the collapse of the housing market ushered in an era of populist rage that cleared the path for a demagogic reality-TV star to take the Oval Office, according to Jesse Eisinger’s new book, The Chickenshit Club, which hit shelves on Tuesday.

“If they had, the history of the country would be different,” Eisinger, a veteran financial reporter at ProPublica whose investigation on shady crisis-era Wall Street practices won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011, told HuffPost by phone. “We would think of the financial crisis differently, think of the Obama administration differently; there would be a sense that the government was legitimate. There would be a sense of accountability after the crisis, the reforms would be tougher.”

He added: “I don’t think we would have Donald Trump as president.”

The book traces Department of Justice impotence on corporate crime back two decades. In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst, and the sudden deflation of highly valued early internet firms increased scrutiny over companies’ books across industries. At Arthur Andersen, the Chicago-based accounting giant that for nearly nine decades had been one of the nation’s top auditing firms, troubles began to mount. In 2001, the firm settledwith the Securities and Exchange Commission for making false and misleading statements about Waste Management Inc. In 2002, the company found itself in the middle of telecom giant WorldCom’s $3.8 billion fraud scandal.

That year, President George W. Bush, eager to steady a quivering economy, signed anexecutive order establishing the Justice Department’s Corporate Fraud Task Force. The team of prosecutors would ultimately bring down Enron in what became the world’s most infamous accounting-fraud scandal. But before toppling the energy-services company and sending its top executives to prison, DOJ investigators would snag another big fish, catching Arthur Andersen shredding its audits of Enron. In June 2002, the world’s fifth-biggest accounting firm effectively shut down after a conviction for obstructing justice.

The conviction rippled through the corporate world as Arthur Andersen laid off thousands of employees. The shock wave inspired a fierce backlash from corporate lobbyists and defense attorneys. They launched a PR campaign that painted prosecutors as overly aggressive cowboys willing to put people out of work and destabilize markets. Groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce funded appeals of the conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 2005, the high court unanimously ruled against the Justice Department.

The court found that prosecutors failed to properly convey to the jury the laws Arthur Andersen broke ― essentially letting the firm off on a technicality, Eisinger argues. “Today, prosecutors remain reluctant to indict large corporations for fear of driving them out of business,” Eisinger concludes early in his book. “Andersen had to die so that all other big corporations might live, free of prosecution.”

ALEX WONG VIA GETTY IMAGES

President Barack Obama signs the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act into law as congressional leaders look on during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House May 20, 2009. 

Changes to the way the Justice Department treated white collar crime came into sharp relief after the 2007 financial crisis. The Corporate Fraud Task Force of 2002 boasted nearly 1,300 fraud convictions by the time Obama replaced it in 2009 with the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. The new entity combined the efforts of the Justice Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department, in what then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner promised would “act aggressively and proactively in a coordinated effort to combat financial fraud.” But, lacking the focus or prosecutorial muscle of its predecessor, the task force turned out to be what critics called “a clearinghouse of information and resources to facilitate enforcement by other government agencies.” One former Justice Department official derided it to Eisinger as “the turtle.”  

The book takes its name from an address then-U.S. Attorney James Comey gave in 2002 to a fresh-faced crop of elite Justice Department recruits. Before becoming the best-known FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover, Comey oversaw the Southern District of New York, a federal jurisdiction with domain over Wall Street. The district has long served as the premiere assignment for prosecuting corporate wrongdoing, with a magnetic attraction to some of the country’s most ambitious young legal minds. In the speech, Comey warned against joining the “chickenshit club” ― his shorthand for prosecutors who only pursue cases they’re almost certain to win. Justice, he argued, came of taking on violators for whom the system seems rigged, not picking off easy targets.

One of the book’s best examples of Comey’s unheeded advice comes in the form of another figure famous today for his public disputes with the new administration: Preet Bharara, who served as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan from 2009 until Trump abruptly fired him in 2017. Bharara earned a reputation as the “sheriff of Wall Street” for prosecuting crooked hedge fund managers and insider trading cases. But as Eisinger describes it, the nickname was overblown. Compared with financial giants’ reckless mortgage security trading, insider trading amounted to a “two-bit, low-level crime that has nothing to do with the systemic corruption on Wall Street,” he said.

“In the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, right in Preet’s backyard, when banks that he and his office were supposed to police made egregious mistakes and acted recklessly and, I think, committed crimes up and down, the fact that they didn’t prosecute is a scandal,” Eisinger said. “The argument that they looked and didn’t find anything isn’t persuasive. They either didn’t look very hard, or they didn’t dedicate enough resources.”

It’s easy to feel cynical about the broader legal system outlined in The Chickenshit Club.And at a time when the Justice Department faces a shrinking budget, the idea of a well-funded task force sniffing around potential dead ends for corporate crime is difficult to imagine. The first stages of a corporate criminal probe are typically carried out by a law firm hired by the company under investigation. For example, in 2008 ― two years after its CEO became the first top executive on Wall Street to own a company stake worth $1 billion ― Bear Stearns hired a law firm to probe the collapse of its mortgage-related hedge funds. Later that year, company, on the brink of bankruptcy, was sold to JPMorgan Chase at a fire-sale price.

The Democrats have very few differences from the Republicans now.Jesse Eisinger

“The great secret to corporate criminal prosecution is that we have privatized and outsourced it to the companies themselves,” Eisinger said. “In doing so, they’re taking cues from the client of the company, and the client of the company is going to be studiously incurious about following investigative threads that might lead to the CEO or board rooms. Instead, they point the finger at a middle manager or someone expendable, and that’s the person who gets indicted by the general government.”

It’s a revolving-door system. Those same law firms poach Justice Department prosecutors, with offers of far higher salaries than the government can afford. That makes the Justice Department just a middling step in the pipeline between elite law schools and big firms, which is true regardless of politics these days. Firms like WilmerHale and Covington & Burling lean Democratic, while Jones Day leans Republican.

“The Democrats have very few differences from the Republicans now,” Eisinger said. “They’re both drawing from the same elite legal culture, they’re all essentially clerking from the same judges or the same courts. … They’re all drawing from the same well with just little gradations in difference on ideology, mainly around social issues.”

There are steps that would help. Salaries for Justice Department prosecutors top out around $150,000. That makes offers nearing seven figures from private firms hard to resist for someone in a costly city like New York or Washington. Eisinger recommended raising salaries for such public servants to $400,000.

“The reality is you have a couple kids in New York City, and you do have great needs if you want to live an affluent life,” he said. “We should not say that you should live a life lacking in status or material wealth if you want to serve the government. That’s not the way to get the best service.”

To its credit, The Chickenshit Club presents a stable of heroes, too. There’s Kathy Ruemmler, the former deputy director of the Enron Task Force who delivered the government’s closing arguments in the trial that convicted former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and later went on to become Obama’s White House counsel. And there’s U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who argues to this day that government enforcers lack a backbone when it comes to indicting corporations. And Benjamin Lawsky, New York state’s former head of the Department of Financial Services, who, absent indictments, fined big banks hundreds of millions of dollars and forced dozens of employees to resign.

For all the failures of the Obama administration, the Trump White House threatens to be “an order of magnitude worse,” Eisinger said. Already, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made street crime and drug enforcement higher priorities than corporate misdeeds. White House officials indicated that antitrust approval of AT&T’s merger with CNN-owner Time Warner may hinge on personnel changes at the network, whose aggressive reporting has drawn Trump’s ire. Plus, Trump refused to sell his personal business, raising concerns that the Justice Department could become a tool to reward or punish the president’s partners and rivals.

“We’re going to have a kleptocratic administration that looks the other way at corporate crime and hands the federal government over to corporates for all sorts of malfeasance,” Eisinger said. “I anticipate the worst Department of Justice in our lifetimes.”

 

In a message dated 7/11/2017 5:55:51 PM Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit, doug....@gmail.com writes:

I collect the text from these ND Philosophical Reviews when there is a key word of interest in a context that I might want to later recover.  The recent one with a quote from Putnam looked useful, but it led me to Andrew Beards' Method in Metaphysics where he critiques Putnam and Kripke in a context that matters, so I'll just go there if needs arise. 

(Beards begins with this quote:)

"Metaphysics has survived numerous attempted assassinations. Hume's call for the burning of books has not yet been heeded except by his distant descendants the logical positivist's, whose theatrical derision of metaphysics raised a few cheap laughs. Now the show is over and serious metaphysics flourishes once more. But it has not survived unscathed. There are urgent, unanswered questions about its methods of inquiry."

Alex Oliver, 1996

The ND example:

"One difficulty in answering this question [about facts and values] is that it depends on how precisely the distinction is understood. Pulling apart the various threads is one aim of the editors' introduction. They provide a litany of notions associated with each side of the divide (1-3):

Facts: empirical verification, truth, explanation, science, natural, objectivity, descriptive, cognitive, rationality, superior.

Values: empirically unverifiable, objectively unjustifiable, ethics, subjective, relative, evaluative, prescriptive, emotion, arational, subordinate.

"There follows a history of this distinction under various guides, from the Humean injunction against deriving an 'ought' from an 'is', through variations of ethical non-cognitivism, to different types of usage in 'use' theories of meaning. Opposition to the distinction (and defence of 'fact-value entanglement') is exemplified by pragmatists such as Peirce, James and Dewey, and in particular their rejection of the so-called 'representationalist' model of knowledge, according to which 'human understanding [is] a matter of faithful mirroring [of] a reality which is brute and deaf to our requests' (13). One difficulty I had with this survey is that it privileges history over taxonomy, hence the interconnections between the various ways of making the distinction are not clearly set out, nor is there a detailed introduction to the remaining papers.

"Part I ('A Counter-History of the Dichotomy') aims to provide a history of critique of the dichotomy, focusing on the work of classical pragmatists (papers by H. Putnam and Robert Schwartz) and critical theorists (papers by Maeve Cooke and John McGuire). Putnam's own contribution explores Dewey's opposition to the flag bearers of the fact/value dichotomy of his day -- logical positivists such as Carnap, Reichenbach and Ayer. Putnam sees Dewey as targeting a fact/value distinction according to which matters of fact are subject to rational argument and evaluation, but value judgements (expressing only pseudo-propositions) are not (28). Against this, Putnam notes that pragmatists have a positive view of the role of reason in ethical inquiry, although in typically fallibilistic mode this is not as an Archimedean point prior to and outside of all existing evaluation, but a self-reflective 'careful evaluation of experience and the invention of new descriptions of experience' (39). Hence

"The right approach to our ethical problems is neither to give up the very possibility of intelligent discussion nor to seek a metaphysical foundation outside of . . . all problematic situations, but to investigate and discuss and try things out cooperatively, democratically, and above all fallibilistically. The terrible thing about the fact/value dichotomy is that by denying that there is such a thing as a responsible and rational ethical discussion, it "blocks the path of inquiry" from the very start (39)."

--