Vol. 19 No. 21 · 30 October 1997
pages 16-17 | 2564 words
Cat’s Whiskers
Jerry Fodor
- Points of View by A.W. Moore
Oxford, 313 pp, £35.00, June 1997, ISBN 0 19 823692 1
Proust’s Swann is obsessed by what he doesn’t know about Odette. His anguish has no remedy; finding out more only adds to what he does know about her. Since Kant, lots of philosophers have suffered from a generalised and aggravated form of the same complaint. They want to know what the world is like when they aren’t thinking about it; what things are like, not from one or other point of view, but ‘in themselves’. Or they think that maybe that’s what science aims to know, and wonder whether it’s a project that makes any sense. They are thus worried about ‘the possibility of objectivity’.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 22 · 13 November 1997
From Alan Malachowski
Jerry Fodor’s cat (LRB, 30 October) has ‘long whiskers tout court’ – not ‘ “from a perspective” or “relative to a conceptual system” or “immanently” ’. Hence: ‘objectivity is easy.’ But if a former inhabitant of cat-infested Moggieland (where most cats have whiskers well over one metre in length) were to come across Fodor’s cat she might truthfully claim that it has short whiskers. Can Fodor produce the ‘long whiskers’ component of his ‘exiguous ontological apparatus’ to underwrite the ‘objectivity’ of his original ‘tout court’ verdict, or has he unwittingly let the cat out of the bag regarding the ubiquity of relativist presuppositions?
Alan Malachowski
University of East Anglia
Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997
From A.W. Moore
I found it hard at times to recognise my book Points of View in Jerry Fodor’s review (LRB, 30 October). The fact that three of the first six paragraphs were devoted largely to urging on me a distinction between the perspectival and the subjective which I am myself at pains to draw did not augur well. But I want to focus on Fodor’s claim that I have an account of representation from which it follows that my own philosophical views are nonsense. It appears that Fodor himself thinks this and that he thinks I think it. I do not. I had better not. For since my account of representation is itself an integral part of my philosophical views, I can only think it if I am prepared to accept that my philosophical views entail their own nonsensicality. But if they do, then they cannot be nonsense; for nonsense cannot entail anything. So they must be false. And I am certainly not prepared to accept that.
The problem is that Fodor thinks I endorse transcendental idealism (which I do regard as nonsense). So let me set the record straight. I do not endorse transcendental idealism. I talk a good deal about it, about its allure, and about why it is nonsense. I also talk a good deal about the ineffable, to which I think it is related. Attempts to talk about the ineffable are often castigated as attempts to have one’s cake and eat it. Hence Ramsey’s oft-quoted quip, which Fodor himself finds irresistible: ‘What can’t be said can’t be said and it can’t be whistled either.’ But if one were to trade quips for quips, one could ask why the opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is not a counter-example to Ramsey’s dictum. This question is not as flippant as it sounds. Anyone who wants to talk seriously about the ineffable, or to engage seriously with such talk, must be clear about what the domain of discourse is. I argue in the book that it is states of knowledge. There is nothing to preclude talk about ineffable states of knowledge. What is impossible is to put them into words. The connection I see with transcendental idealism is this: transcendental idealism is the nonsense that results when one attempts (unsuccessfully, of course) to put certain ineffable states of knowledge into words. At one point in the book, having made this connection, I add: ‘I cannot overemphasise that this does not constitute any kind of defence of transcendental idealism.’ One is always wary of saying that one cannot overemphasise something. Really not? Perhaps saying even as much as that is already to overemphasise the point. But after reading Fodor’s review, I am somewhat reassured on this score.
A.W. Moore
St Hugh’s College, Oxford
