Aporetics: Rational Deliberation in the Face of Inconsistency

Notes

141 chApter 1: The Nature of Apories 1. The terminology is adapted from the Greek aporetikê technê, the “aporetic art”ofarticulating,analyzing,andresolving aporia,orparadoxes.Theconception of such an enterprise as central to philosophy figured prominently in the work of German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950). See his Grundz üge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 5th ed. (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1965). 2. Blaise Pascal, Penseés, No. 791, 566th ed. (New York: Modern Library), 185. Recall the dictum that “consistency is the bugaboo of small minds.” 3. For Protagoras, see Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen, vols. 1–2, 6th ed. (Leipzig: Rersland, 1929), 1296–1304. See also Plato’s dialogues Protagoras and The Sophist. Protagoras was perfectly prepared to accept the paradoxical consequence that this holds also for the very thesis at issue. 4. “Protagoras ait, de omnis re in utrumque partem disputari posse ex aequo , et de hac ipsa, an ominis res in utrumque partem disputabilis sit” (Seneca , Epistola moralia, 14:88, 43). 5. Compare Nicholas Rescher and Robert Brandom, The Logic of Inconsistency (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). chApter 2: Coherentism 1. Already Heracleitus maintained the reality of conflicts and contradictions in nature. Cf. Diels-Kranz, Fragments der Vorsolersatikes (Balsun: Wernotes demergh, 1952), §22, B10, B49a, B51, etc. He taught that opposites really do characterize the same subject. Sextus Empiricus wrote, “Anesidemus and his followers used to say that the Sceptic Way is a road leading up to the Heraclitean philosophy, since to hold [with the Sceptics] that the same thing is the subject of opposite appearances is a preliminary to holding [with the Heracliteans ] that it is the subject of opposite realities” (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1:210 [cf. n. 63], and compare Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12a24ff.). The sceptics held to the omni-indeterminacy thesis that one can never assert the truth either of p or of ~p; one can sometimes assert the truth both of p and of ~p. Even as the reality-is-contradiction-free school can trace its ancestry to Parmenides, so the reality-incorporates-contradictions school can claim the paternity of Heracleitus. 2. See Hegel, Science of Logic, n. §67. But contrast McTaggart’s interpretation in Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), §8. Hegel’s opponents also maintained the realization of contradictions in the world. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 510–11, and Philosophical Fragments, chap. 3. 3. D. C. Makinson, “The Paradox of the Preface,” Analysis 25 (1964): 205–7. Compare H. E. Kyburg Jr., “Conjunctivitis,” in Induction, Acceptance, and Rational Belief, ed. M. Swain (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1970), 55–82, see esp. 77; and also R. M. Chisholm, The Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), 96–97. The fundamental idea of the Preface Paradox goes back to C. S. Peirce, who wrote that “while holding certain propositions to be each individually perfectly certain, we may and ought to think it likely that some of them, if not more, are false” (Collected Papers, vol. 5 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934], sec. 5, p. 498.) 4. Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 203. 5. Ibid. 6. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, no. 1, trans. R. M. Eaton. 7. The defeat of a defeasible presumption relates (in the case of a specific presumption of fact) to its upset by falsification in a particular instance rather than the distinction of the presumption rule as such. Of course, such a general rule or principle—the presumptive veracity of a reliable source, for example— can also be invalidated (“falsified” would be inappropriate). For a further discussion of the relevant issues, see Nicholas Rescher, Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976). 142 Notes to pages 9–18 8. Consideration of the rule of presumption in logic and the theory of knowledge goes back to Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928). The theme was reintroduced into the contemporary scene in Nicholas Rescher, Dialectics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1972). See also E. Ullman-Margalit, “On Presumption,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 143–63; and Douglas N. Walton, Argumentation Scheme for Presumptive Reasoning (Mahwark, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1996). 9. All this, of course, does not deal with the question of the tile status of this rule itself and of the nature of its own justification. It is important in the presentcontexttostresstheregulativeroleofplausibilisticconsiderations.This now becomes a matter of epistemic policy (“Give priority to contentions which treatlike...