Abstract
The paper proposes with Davidson that the talk of metaontology is literally meaningless, but with Wittgenstein that it is so in a way that grants a unique type of insight. More specifically, it argues both that Davidson’s arguments have a cogency that is hard to dismiss, and also that, since his own arguments are metaontological, they are self-referential, and consequently in turn undermine their own meaning as well. The paper argues further that metaontological statements cannot be avoided. Consequently, this kind of statement constitutes an unavoidable self-referential paradox that means what it also excludes as capable of meaning. The result is a reinstatement of the meaning of ontological insight and in fact, the paper argues, a deep enrichment and also a particularly cogent justification of it. In addition, the logical peculiarity of the paradox involved has further useful consequences for the outcome of this justification, including a mutually illuminating commonality with some versions of metaethics.
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Notes
See, for example, the collection of essays in Chalmers et al. (2009).
It looks as though this reinstatement cannot happen, as once meaning is lost there is simply nothing meaningful to work with any longer. It also looks as though my statement should be more precisely worded, so as not to say that the meaning of these arguments is lost, but that they turn out never to have had meaning at all. I think these objections are only partly right, however, and I shall defend this view in discussing the “resolute reading” of Wittgenstein toward the end of section 2 below.
The position Winch is responding to is one argued by Alasdair MacIntyre early in his career. He argues for the idea that, in evaluating the rationality of “primitive societies,” we cannot help but take recourse to and so come “to recognize the appropriateness of scientific criteria of judgment from our standpoint” (1970, 67; previously published in Hick 1964). We are brought to recognize that there are no other conceivable criteria for rationality, and so “our” criteria are not meaningfully described as “ours,” either: they are not culturally specific and so imposed by us; they are simply the criteria for rationality, not “ours,” not specifiable as “these” criteria rather than “those.” (A little below in the text I quote MacIntyre’s later criticism of the Davidsonian position his early argument endorsed!) Winch’s response, given more fully than in the text above, is that “his argument . . . does not in fact show that our own standards of rationality occupy a peculiarly central position. The appearance to the contrary is an optical illusion engendered by the fact that MacIntyre’s case has been advanced in the English language and in the context of twentieth Century European culture. But a formally similar argument could be advanced in any language containing concepts playing a similar role in that language to those of ‘intelligibility’ and ‘rationality’ in ours” (1964, 318).
Putnam is in fact discussing Richard Rorty’s view here, but it is a view that, as Putnam discusses (1994, 300), Rorty argues is the same as Davidson’s; and although Putnam reads Davidson differently in important respects from the way Rorty does, the problem he identifies clearly applies to the aspects of Davidson’s view that I have been discussing. The logic of the relevant issue is the same.
Dupuy (2000) offers a technical defense of the intelligibility and legitimacy of this kind of retroactive shift of truth over time, in the context of “backward induction” in rational choice theory.
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Barris, J. Davidson and a Twist of Wittgenstein: Metaontology, Self-Canceling Paradox, and Settled Insight. Philosophia 46, 255–274 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9928-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9928-7