I did a little catching up on Stove last night. Interesting, as the revolutionary critic Tal seems to be promoting him as (with reference on multiple topics now) he seems to be neglected by philosophers. I'm not saying Tal has trivially relied on Stove but the influence is clear as day.
Let me start with a Stove
ad hominem. I found a few critiques of Stove that I liked, but I'm going to reference this one by Bill Vallicella which I think is particularily good:
It is time to settle accounts with David Stove in what may turn out to be a series of posts. I’ll lay my cards on the table. This guy is a philistine with no understanding of philosophy whatsoever. No doubt he is clever, erudite, logically sharp, and scientifically informed. He has read plenty of philosophical texts; but knowledge of texts does not a philosopher make, any more than long beard and shabby cloak. He is a provocative writer, interesting to read. Indeed, he is worth reading in the same way that anyone who goes off the rails in a provocative way is worth reading. But he has no philosophical aptitude, no feel for a philosophical problem, no appreciation of the nature of a philosophical theory. He is a self-admitted positivist, and these incapacities are indeed just what positivism consists in. So I don’t call Stove a philosopher, but an anti-philosopher: he occupies himself with philosophy, but only to undermine it.
http://www.inblogs.net/maverickphilosop ... l#noanchorIt's said that the Greek skeptic Pyrrho ended his career by walking off a cliff and falling to his death while surrounded by onlookers who couldn't convince him of the impending danger. Pyrrho believed that no argument could be considered superior to another, hence, it's only natural that he'd be perfectly comfortable in his position that gravity ultimately had no hold on him. The account is of course, suspect. Thousands of years later, Alan Sokal, a physicist, produced a bogus paper dressed in mathematical jargon with the intent of showing that the kinds of argumentation used by all those phoney intellectuals in France would clearly support the thesis that gravity isn't real.
I think it goes without saying that philosophers can get carried away. But it also goes without saying that understanding philosophers require understanding their context and an appreciation for the difficulty of the problems at issue. Bill's summary paragraph in that link:
Philosophers, like scientists, are not in the business of denying obvious facts; they are out to understand them. The project of understanding aims at the reality behind the appearance. Stove cannot seem to wrap his mind around this simple notion.
As I said before, most people could get by with the world's business without the aid and confusion of philosophy. I'd probably be better off with other interests. And like I said before, anyone can believe in simple realism and representational knowledge. Most philosophers probably want(ed) to but couldn't figure out how to do it. Socrates believed in truth and more than anything wanted to believe in knowledge, but ended up as the only one who knew anything because he knew that he knew nothing. Hume's goals were lofty and noble by the call of Stove and Tal to believe in knowledge, but the consequences of his line of thinking led him other places. Wittgenstein orginially tried for a simple concetption of language and reality in his
Tractatus but then later came to realize how overly ambitious that project was. Popper was a great admirer of science and Kuhn was a physicist (that was my mistake earlier) and niether had in mind a project of ruining the possibility of truth and knowledge. The contradictions, inconsistancies, and lack of clarity in places to the extent they exist within these philosophers can also be read as the result of owning up to the anoying headaches that are tough philosophical problems and the continual need to revise their positions (not to mention the honesty it takes to do so).
It's easy to demand our best foot forward and commit ourselves to reality and a simple representational scheme for knowing it. And many, many philosohers began by doing just that. On these boards, we've been called to the gospel of basic evidential reasoning by a number of participants. Marg, JAK, and Bob McCue (a reformed self-styled postmodernist) come quickly to mind who never tire of telling the world how easy the truth is to know and how intellectually dishonest (and so on) major philosophical figures were. Tal it appears, adds nicely to this list although I will say in his defense that he's by far the most serious student of philosophy.
I haven't read every essay by Popper. My knowledge of him comes from a few books where he's discussed, a number of online papers by or about him, and the book "Popper Selections" which I read thoroughly a long time ago. The problems Tal and Stove have with Popper I'll honestly say I just didn't have. In fact, the main problems I had with Popper were very different, for instance, his odd conception of realism. I suppose the philosophy classes I took in college prepared or brainwashed me into a set of expectations which didn't include Popper or anyone else ultimately succeeding in solving all the problems of metaphysics or giving us the final draft of what science is. Yeah, by losing the battle it's obvious that the world collapses into some kind of philosophical skepticism. If you refuse the plea bargain and go to trial, it's kind of all or nothing. Throwing that up as a newsflash honestly makes philosophy only look stupid to those who have never had the interest to study it. So Tal can cite all these examples and give his reductios to show that if Popper was right, then X is the skeptical consequence. Well, that's par for the course and hardly interesting news to me. And I don't blame some of these brilliant minds, when losing the battle, to dare suggest that maybe the world isn't so obvious e.g., maybe there's actually something wrong with simple conceptions of representational knowledge rather than just with the arguments that fail to demonstrate it.
We can ditch philosophy, say philosophers in history were all bungling fools and commit ourselves to common sense, as it appears Stove did, and Tal's on the path to doing it seems. Pyrrho jumped off a cliff, the Stoics tendend to commit suicide, Berkely denied the hand in front of his face, Jacques Derrida can defy gravity, Popper would get taken in a casino - yeah, who'd want to associate themselves with these morons?
Fine, let's start fresh with a simple notion of representational knowledge and make common-sense assumptions about knowing more now than the Hittites did. The problem is, person A who accepts this thesis runs into person B who also accepts this thesis every bit as valiantly, they have an argument, and they end up stuck having a philosophical conversation. They can't stay on the surface forever, and once they start digging, they're going to run into all the same problems the list of fools did. And all I can say, is that to the extent that they don't, is more of a reflection that they don't understand the problems.
I, like others here, would like to see how Tal and Stove maintain the thesis that we know more now than we did 500 years ago other than by merely asserting it as obvious, which no one would deny (except maybe Wade, as Tal says). I need to see the serious philosophical thought that stands in contrast to Popper's, Hume's, Plato's, and "The Gang's" to truly appreciate what Tal's getting out of his reductios.