What in the hell …

… of Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, Dread Soul and Messenger of the Other Gods, with the Three Headed Dog(ma) of Empiricism? (A bit of an experiment, not sure about its success…)

Taking my own advice, I read a bit of Quine and Davidson. I cheated really, because these were essays I’d already read. Quine identifies what he calls two dogmas of empiricism. The first is the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. The second is belief that meaningful statements consist of experiences and logical constructs. He also states “that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact” leads to a temptation “to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component.” Giving to this temptation, it’s only a short step to the view “that in some statements the factual component should be null” - these statements being the analytic ones. Quine admits an “a priori reasonableness” to the analytic/synthetic distinction, but does not hold it as established. Rather it is “an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.” (47.)

While words and (non-word) world condition the truth of statements, individual statements are not analyzable into word and world components in an productive fashion. Rather, “our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.” (49.) That is, our total set of beliefs is composed of word and world elements but component statements which make up that set are not productively assessable by trying to sort the statements’ components into these elements.

Quine’s ‘empiricism without dogmas’ is a doctrine of underdetermination. Our set of beliefs or knowledge “impinges on experience only along the edges.” New and challenging experiences require “readjustments in the interior” of the set of truths. “Reevaluation of some statements entails reevaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections - the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system.” Reevaluation is underdetermined, however, such that (or, which is to say that) “there is much latitude as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field [or set of beliefs], except indirectly through consideration of the equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.” For Quine this means that “it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement” - empirical content being a quality of systems, not statements - and that “no statement is immune to revision,” including logical laws and other statements which are ‘at the center’ of belief systems. (50.) (The condition which some statements or strings of statements have of being “relatively centrally located within the total network” of beliefs consists in having “little preferential connection with any particular sense data.” [51.] He later calls the ‘non-edge’ areas of the system “elaborate myths or fictions” which have as their “objective the simplicity of laws.” [51.])

A difficult or contrary experience can be accommodated or responded to in multiple ways. For Quine, however, there is a “natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible” such that we try to accommodate a contrary experience as ‘close to the edge’ as possible. Quine does not argue for this tendency, however, nor does he provide any evidence for its being widespread. The assertion does have, to use Quine’s phrase, a certain “a priori reasonableness,” but that does not make the assertion established. It too might be “an unempirical dogma (…) a metaphysical article of faith” such that it might be hard to make empirical and nonmetaphysical argument against someone who actually had/instantiated/practiced (as opposed to merely advocating in theory) an opposite principle of maximal systemic change in the face of contrary experience. (I am not making a claim for the possibility of such a principle, as I suspect that it would be hard to really call “system” that which maximally revised itself in the face of any contrary experience. My point is simply that were such a system to exist - call it ~Quine - the argument between Quine and ~Quine would be more like the confrontation between two who hold incompatible metaphysical articles of faith than it would be like argument between two who share a common background ‘faith’. As I will get to in a moment when I turn to Davidson, I’m not sure how coherent the former can actually be made.)

This isn’t a particularly strong objection to Quine, that he too has a faith. Quine admits as much, stating that “to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries - not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.” Quine believes in physical objects and not in Homeric gods, and would consider it an error to reverse either belief. Still, “in epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception [or, our belief systems] only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” (51.)

The naturalness of the law of minimal systemic change strikes me as an article like Homeric gods as well, though again that’s no objection. My point here is not to attack Quine so much as to speculate about what Quine implies for certain types of conversations we might imagine (Quine invites this in a way, writing that his work blurs “the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science.” [39.])

I have several questions here.

1. Could Quine object to someone who didn’t want to predict experience? I suppose the objection would be along the lines of “you would very likely die very rapidly if you didn’t predict experience, since you’re not dead, you are very likely to be already doing what I call predicting experience though you don’t call it that.”

2. What are the criteria for judging efficacity of “device[s] for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience”? Following Quine’s offhand remarks about pragmatism, prediction, and revisability I expect that these criteria are only relative and appeal to values of some sort. Part of the issue is what can and can’t be said consistently (and effectively) about these values.

3. Are the criteria of efficacity different in kind from Homeric gods, or only in degree? My impression is that for Quine there are only differences of degree here.

4. Either way, how do disagreements over differences proceed and what can Quine’s reflections add to helping understand these differences? Part of what I’m interested in is following Quine on his “shift toward pragmatism” [39] into the pragmatics[-lite] of generally Quinean conversants.

I want to talk a bit about H.P. Lovecraft, link him to Quine and Davidson (that’s the experiment I’m not sure about the success of) as his stuff’s the other (non-enervating) reading I’ve been doing just recently. Sticking with Quine’s spatial metaphor of belief systems touching experience on the edges, Lovecraft’s fiction is about, among other things, the idea of change as ‘far from the edge’ as possible - that is, change as close as possible to the center of a belief system. Lovecraft’s writing is full of people encountering things which require massive overhauls of belief systems. In some of his works, this involves phenomena which, while horrific, are relatively accomodatable at the edge.

The Deep Ones, for instance, don’t necessarily require change at the center of belief systems. The Deep Ones are amphibious humanoids capable of breeding with humans. While the acts which some of the Deep Ones and their human(ish) relatives carry out are shocking, these acts are often no more shocking that acts carried out by humans in wars and other lamentable situations. The Deep Ones in one sense no more require changes in the center of belief systems than the discovery of any other unknown complex species, like giant squids etc. In another sense, the Deep Ones do require some changes closer to the center, in that the Deep Ones are sentient. This too isn’t totally unheard of, though - beliefs about nonhuman sentience are not unheard of in the past and are suggested by some contemporary research into and much fiction about animal consciousness and artificial intelligence. That the Deep Ones and humans can breed does entail some changes in the center of belief systems, for those who have “humans and nonhumans can not interbreed” as well.

None of these changes are as system-central as “theoretical statements of physics or logic,” Quine’s examples for center beliefs. (51.) These changes may be unpleasant, and usually are in Lovecraft’s work. One way to characterize much of Lovecraft’s work is that it dramatizes the stressful nature of massive belief-systemic changes, and of changes in beliefs which are not system-central but which are highly cherished. (Lovecraft does not deal with this, but one might think of banal examples of the latter, such as the belief “I am a good father” held by an absentee alcoholic man, loss of which would prove highly unpleasant even if salutary.)

In Lovecraft’s fiction the Deep Ones do appear in connection with elements which are more of a challenge to system-central beliefs. Those humans who have children with the Deep Ones are often practicitioners of magic and have powers which are not easily accommodatable (in the sense of being accommodatable at or near the edge of a belief system). They are also often worshipers of beings - gods and/or aliens - the existence and/or abilities of which do require more central changes than the Deep Ones, including changes in truths of physics and logic. Lovecraft’s work abounds with attempts to narrate these changes, confrontation with beings/forces which cause such changes, and the experiences of humans dealing with both.

Lovecraft handles these experiences in three ways. One is to resort to terms which are both vague and intense in these instances - nameless, chaotic, unreckoned, not-to-be-described, not-to-be-named, insane, shapeless, inconceivable, mindless, etc. A second is to employ to his fictional other languages like the occasional cries of “ia! ia!” in a number of his works or Nyarlathotep’s shout of “Aa-shanta ‘nygh!” (The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, p403 in the Arkham House edition of At The Mountains of Madness.) The third is through fragmentary speech, like Warren’s speech via the radio to Carter in “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” such as “Curse these hellish things - legions - My God!” (304), or the breakdown of the narrator in the end of “The Rats in the Walls” (p96 in Tales, a Lovecraft collection edited by Peter Straub and published by The Library of America.)

In his “Notes On Writing Weird Fiction” http://www.geocities.com/soho/cafe/1131/14notesen.htm, via k-punk) Lovecraft writes

“One cannot, except in immature pulp charlatan-fiction, present an account of impossible, improbable, or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace narrative of objective acts and conventional emotions. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to over come, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and deliberately - with a careful emotional “build-up” - else it will seem flat and unconvincing. Being the principal thing in the story, its mere existence should overshadow the characters and events. But the characters and events must be consistent and natural except where they touch the single marvel. In relation to the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life. Never have a wonder taken for granted. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.”

The point as I take it, and phrased in the idiom I’ve been using here, is to give the experience of (or/and which induces) massive belief-systemic change as sharp a contrast with the ordinary is possible. The realist aspects provide a background against which to foreground the experiences in question.

Lovecraft’s narrators rarely survive the massive belief-systemic change intact (it’s not clear if that’s possible, since at least one definition of ‘intact’ would be ‘not having endured a massive belief-systemic change’), or they are rendered incomprehensible to the reader. This is necessary. After all, if Lovecraft’s works actually did induce massive belief-systemic change in readers, as Lovecraft’s fictional codex The Necronomicon inflicts upon its readers within Lovecraft’s worlds, then his work would likely be controlled just as is the Necronomicon in Lovecraft’s work. If Lovecraft’s work did inflict such changes on readers it would not at all be clear that Lovecraft’s work would be recommendable, just as one would hesitate to recommend a work to someone if that work typically resulted in viewers killing themselves or family members.

In a sense, Lovecraft invites readers to contemplate this change as part of contemplating the ungroundedness of belief systems - to consider that physical objects are myths like Homeric gods, following Quine - but does not necessarily endorse changing these systems as a result. (Indeed, it’s not clear where the normative force would come from - what its ground would be - for claiming a normative content to claims about groundlessness. Quine’s naturalist or pragmatist “it’s more effective” is one attempt at normative content related to this, I think.)

Lovecraft’s phrase “a wonder story” is a good phrase for this quality of his (and other) works, especially Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath with its wonder in the face of beautiful and terrible otherworldly cities and with its ultimate engine of the wonder of Lovecraft’s New England which conveyed to him “vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy.” Part of belief-systemic change involves seeing the (previously taken for) commonplace in a new light - hardly a novel observation on the aesthetic.

(”Notes On Writing Weird Fiction”
http://www.geocities.com/soho/cafe/1131/14notesen.htm) Lovecraft wrote that “one of [his] strongest and most persistent wishes [was] to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.” He also wrote of “a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real.” It’s important to note that the suspension/escape is both momentary and illusory. It’s not clear to me that we could comprehend it to be otherwise, or that we can actually comprehend even this. I say this in regard to Davidson’s essay on the third dogma of empiricism.

In “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” Davidson reviews and affirms Quine’s account of the two dogmas of empiricism and proposes a third: the division between scheme and content. By this, Davidson means the idea that different conceptual schemes - roughly, Quine’s belief systems - organize the world differently. This idea seems obvious - we might say with Quine that it has a certain a priori reasonableness - but that doesn’t mean it bears scrutiny. Davidson thinks the idea of “organizing system(s) and something waiting to be organized” - that is, the scheme/content distinction - ” cannot be made intelligible and defensible” and so should be abandoned. (189 in Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation.)

The scheme/content distinction generally appears in “images and metaphors [which] fall into two main groups: conceptual schemes either organize something, or they fit it.” (191.) The ’something’, the content, generally is either the world/reality or experience/sense-data. In all of these, the ’something’ either waits for organization - is temporally prior to the organizing scheme - or is logically independent of organization. In both cases, the ’something’ qua itself - the content-in-itself, so to speak - is unorganized such that different schemes organize it differently. Davidson holds that this notion of uninterpreted reality doesn’t hold. He also holds that the idea of different conceptual schemes doesn’t make sense. For two schemes to be demonstrable different would require inability to transition (to translate) between them. This inability is not simple failure - as would likely happen at least in part were I to encounter someone who spoke only Hungarian - but is impossibility, untranslatability. Davidson holds that any failures must be only local failures. The “background of generally successful translation provides what is needed to make the failures intelligible” and indentifiable as failures in translation. (192.)

The point Davidson wants to make, I think, is that “nothing (…) could count as evidence that some form of activity could not be interpreted in our language that was not at the same time evidence that that form of activity was not speech behavior.” (185.) He doesn’t prove the point and doesn’t attempt to, however, saying merely that to be convincing it would require a supporting argument from which it was concluded. He also holds that in communication we must assign “to sentences of a speaker conditions that actually obtain (in our own opinion).” This “is not designed to eliminate disagreement, nor can it; its purpose is to make meaningful disagreement possible, and this depends entirely on a foundation - some foundation - in agreement.” Conversational “[c]harity is force on us, where we like it or not, if we want to understand others” and talk to them, and in many respects to talk meaningfully about them. (196-7.)

Davidson end his essay saying that he has not “shown how communication is possible between people who have different [conceptual] schemes, a way that works without need of what there cannot be, namely a neutral ground, or a common co-ordinate system. For we have found not intelligible basis on which it can be said that schemes are different.” At the same time, “if we cannot intelligibly say that schemes are different, neither can we intelligibly say that they are one.” (198. This reminds me of Ayer on religion and atheism. Ayer - rightly, to my mind - states that propositions about the existence of god etc are nonsense. This at first appears good news to the atheist - the believer’s beliefs are nonsense, the atheist cries! - but the nonsensicalness cuts both ways: “God exists” is nonsense no more and no less than “God does not exist.” Similarly I think, though perhaps with smaller stakes, with “conceptual schemes are different” and “conceptual schemes are not different.” With both, the point seems to be to leave the question, along with its affirmative and negative answers, to the dustbin of history.)

Part of what goes away with Davidson is Quine’s spatial metaphor. Belief systems have no edges which touch experience and centers which are further from experience or reality. Experience and reality and belief systems are no more differentiable than are the word and world contribution to the truths of statements (that was the sorting which helped underwrite the analytic/synthetic distinction which Quine attacked). The other thing that seems to go away with Davidson is the idea of massive belief-systemic change. The possibility can’t be eliminated, I think, but it can’t be secured either. Lovecraft’s illusory suspension can only be illusory because we don’t know how to think about something which could be completely other than or different from us. At a minimum, if we can think about something then that something shares at least one predicate with anything else we can think about, namely the predicate of being something we can think about. Lovecraft’s suspension, then, is not the contemplation of Something Else (Something Very Much Else) which his narrators are supposed to encounter, but rather precisely a suspension, a sort of not-thinking/believing, a suspension of our belief systems. This is, I think, the significance of the fictional languages and the sentence fragments. It may be rather like what happens when one tries to think about things (or should I say “things”? - “things which can not be”?) like objects which are all black and all white in the all same places at all the same times, or round squares. The closest one gets is a sort of seizing up of thought. In this sense, massive belief-systemic change isn’t conceivable - because conceivability implies continuity with belief-systems to at least some degree - or isn’t differentiable from simple failure of one who holds a belief system as in cases of insanity, intoxication, etc.