On the possibility of thought and talk.

I wanted briefly to bring up an issue that I've been thinking about that relates to my own research. This has come up in previous posts regarding the memory objection, so you might want to take a look at those (if you have a lot of time on your hands). At any rate, one common line that you hear from Gangadean and his people is that they are seeking to figure out transcendentals---which constitute something like preconditions for the possibility of thought and talk. They take this line from Kant, who thought that our minds could not help but project onto the world particular beliefs (or perhaps frameworks like time, space and causality). So Gangadeanians argue that for instance, the laws of thought are requisite for the possibility of thought and talk. The idea is that we have some insight into the very nature of thought and talk, and also that we can figure out a priori, what the requisite conditions would have to be for thought and talk to exist or be instantiated.

To me this smells like intuition mongering. I mean how could we come to be certain of what counts as thinking vs. non thinking (and what the appropriate preconditions for thinking would be) if not by way of intuition (i.e., something like an immediate awareness or sense)? I doubt that any analysis of a thought is forthcoming (try to come up with the necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a thought). Nor can you investigate the nature of thought empirically or anything, so you must be able to investigate thought by, well, thinking--- but how sure can we be about our conclusions here? To reiterate a recurrent theme of this blog,  I think philosophy doesn't get off the ground without intuitions, so such a view isn't so problematic for me as it is for Gangadean (who seems to equate believing at least some things on intuitions with fideism). The trick for him then is to provide a theory of the difference between situations where intuitions are acceptable and those where it isn't. Of course we should expect his theory to not be ad hoc or ultimately itself grounded in intuitions (on pain of circularity). But I want to mention something else, namely, that believing something (e.g., the laws of thought) on grounds that thinking would not be possible if we didn't, is a strange kind of reason to accept something. What it looks like is pragmatism about reasons for belief.

When we consider whether we should believe some proposition, (e.g., the law of non contradiction) we want evidence (or some truth conducive reason) for why it is true. Broadly speaking, there are some propositions (or sets of propositions) which in some general sense make it the case that another proposition is either guaranteed to be true (as in the case of logical entailments), or else provides some reason to think the latter is true. Here you have a relation between propositions that is epistemic. When you ask whether or not it you ought to believe that p, you are asking whether p is true and what reasons you have that indicate the truth of p.

On the other hand you might answer the question of whether or not you should believe p, from practical considerations alone. For instance, maybe believing in an afterlife will make you really happy and so you conclude that you ought to believe in an afterlife. This marks a different kind of reason to believe p, a pragmatic one which doesn't say anything about whether the proposition in question (in this case, the afterlife being real) is true or not. (Note it could make a person very happy to believe something, even if the belief isn't true).

Now returning to belief in the laws of thought, the argument given by Gangadean actually turns out to be a pragmatic one, rather than an epistemic one. The thinking seems to be that you must or ought to believe in the law of non contradiction (for example) because if you don't, then you
cannot think or talk consistently. So the justification for the belief is pragmatic rather than epistemic. It's about what is or will be possible in terms of what you can do, and doesn't tell directly about whether the proposition is actually true. So now it's starting to smell like Pascal's wager (which ironically, Gangadeanians are happy to argue against by pointing out that it confuses the pragmatic with the epistemic!).

*Now one might think that I've misunderstood the argument. Here is a way to make it not a pragmatic one: We assume that we can have certainty about things. Once that is given, then we think about what must obtain (the preconditions) for this possibility. Since giving a theory that explains how something that is taken as true (i.e., the belief that we can/do have certainty) is some indication that the theory is true, this would give an epistemic reason for believing in the laws of thought for instance via something like abductive reasoning (i.e., the fact that a theory plausibly explains an accepted phenomena is evidence that the theory is true).

Not only is this not a deductive argument (and so we're no longer after certainty), the main problem is that it isn't common ground in the first place that we can and/or do have certainty about anything (including this very statement). Indeed the way Gangadean usually wields this argument is in a context where he is trying to show that we can be certain (i.e., that some basic things are clear to reason). So the only way to make his conclusion rest on epistemic reasons is going to be by begging the question in the current context. That is to say, assume certainty is possible to argue that certainty is possible (and actual).

So Gangadean's argument is either a pragmatic one which is troubling in its own right because it says we ought to believe something for non evidential, non truth conducive reasons, or else it is question begging. If there is any interest, I will present an argument for why pragmatism of this sort is a terrible idea in a future post.