Abstract
In this essay I shall argue for the primacy of practice over reason. In doing this, I shall lend support to one of Feyerabend’s most controversial claims, namely, that epistemological anarchism applies to logic. The primacy of practice, however, has the consequence of providing an external and objective standard of rationality, and this, I shall show, refutes the Protagorean relativism Feyerabend advocates.
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Notes
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, (London: NLB, 1975).
Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society, (London: NLB, 1978).
G. Ryle, Collected Papers, (London: Hutchinson, 1971), Vol I, 252. Ryle is describing Wittgenstein’s views in the Tractatus.
The best account of these difficulties is to be found in S. Haack’s Deviant Logic and Philosophy of Logics, (Cambridge: University Press, 1974 and 1978).
See for instance J.S. Mill’s A System of Logic, (New York: Longmans, 1898), Introduction: “Logic, then, is the science of the operations of the understanding which are subservient to the estimation of evidence: both the process itself of advancing known truths to unknown, and all the other intellectual operations in so far as auxiliary to this”.
See W. V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized”, in Ontological Relativity, (New York: Columbia, 1969); J. Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology. (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1972); S. Haack, “The Relevance of Psychology to Epistemology”, Metaphilosophy, 6(1975), 161–176.
“The origin of all error must be sought solely in the unobserved influence of the sensibility on the understanding. … It is owing to this influence that in our judgments we mistake merely subjective reasons for objective, and consequently confound mere semblance of truth with truth itself”. I. Kant, Introduction to Logic, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1963), 44, tr. T. Abbott.
This view is defended by M. Black, “Necessary Statements and Rules”, Models and Metaphors, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
N. Chomsky, Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), and Language and Mind, (New York: Harcourt, 1970).
The argument I present here is largely G. J. Massey’s in “Are There Any Good Arguments That Bad Arguments Are Bad?” Philosophy in Context, 4 (1975), 61–77.
W. V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970, 1970), 100.
K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, (New York: Harper, 1968), 207–208.
A. J. Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 203.
J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Frazer, (New York: Dover, 1959), Vol II, 391.
N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1953), 63–64.
G. Ryle, Collected Papers, Vol II, 233.
G. J. Warnock, “The Primacy of Practical Reason”, Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action, ed. P. F. Strawson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 224.
The literature on problem-solving is meagre. J. Dewey in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry attributes central importance to problem-solving, but his discussion is imprecise, verbose, and insufficiently argued. R. G. Collingwood’s logic of questions and answers does not discuss problem-solving under that label, but his questions bear more than a superficial resemblance to what I mean by problems, cf. his An Essay on Metaphysics and An Autobiography. K. R. Popper and his followers explicitly talk about the importance of problem-solving to scientific inquiry. But they do not regard problem-solving as a standard of justification; cf. essays 1, 2, 3, and 10 in Conjectures and Refutations. See also J. Agassi, “The Nature of Scientific Problems and Their Roots in Metaphysics”, in The Critical Approach, ed. M. Bunge, (New York: Macmillan, 1964) and I. Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I Lakatos and A. Musgrave, (Cambridge: University Press, 1970). My objections to their approach are in “Fallibilism and Rationality”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 9(1972), 301–309. N. Rescher’s Methodological Pragmatism, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) is very close in its orientation to the view I here favor. There are two recent books devoted to problem-solving. L. Laudan’s Progress and Its Problems, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) is doing exactly what I think ought to be done in epistemology. The other is my own: A Justification of Rationality, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1976). In “A New Defence of Common Sense”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 16(1979), 115–122, and in “The Centrality of Problem-Solving”. Inquiry, 22(1979), I say more about the topics I now proceed to discuss.
The relation between problems of life, theories, and problems of reflection is in some ways very much like Popper’s frequently used schema of beginning with problems, proceeding to a tentative solution, eliminating error, and encountering new problems which emerged from this procedure. My main disagreement is that I believe that problems of life are not theory-generated, whereas Popper would deny, I think, that there are any such problems. See his Objective Knowledge, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 119.
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Kekes, J. (1991). Reason and Practice. In: Munévar, G. (eds) Beyond Reason. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 132. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3188-9_6
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