I've been sporadically following the recent discussion of politics/ontology and how they relate with some interest. I'm not sure exactly where I'd fall in a debate, but I did think this list by Nick at Speculative Heresy hit on some interesting "fault line" type points.
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One thing I've noticed consistently about the sort of discourse that's prevalent in academic philosophy is that it tends to privilege the "political" (or, alternately, the "social") as a field over and against all other fields, as if forces like physical laws, bio-chemical processes, etc., are simply "mediating" forces that eventually find themselves shoehorned into the King of all Domains, the political. This King of Domains ends up being the field that unifies all others and makes them cohere. I can sympathize with anyone who suggests that this way of looking at the world is anti-realist and even pretty profoundly "correlationist"—mostly, though, I see it as a form of what Daniel Dennett and others have called greedy reductionism.
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The greedy reductionist tends to write off all other possible explanations of how a world/situation works or what constitutes a given phenomenon— excluding, of course, the one that comes out of their own professional discourse— and in the process also tends to see their own discursive bias as the only one capable of subsuming all others under its umbrella. Anyone in the sciences is very accustomed to this sort of scholastic guild mentality: physics is the king of all sciences, no, but math is the formal bedrock, no, biology is how this world actually works, etc.
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The truth of the matter is that the world (if physics has taught us anything) need not be explained solely with reference to one unified field. It's entirely possible that the world is a product of a bunch of forces that work independently of one another and, therefore, that these may never be tidily folded into a discursive whole. So the physicist, the biologist, the politician, the social scientist, etc., are all equally right in describing the world according to their own specific set of reductionist criteria. Problems arise only when one reductionist gets greedy and wants all the powers of explanation for themself. When this happens, Dennett says reductionists slip into "explaining away" competing theories as mere "mediating forces" within their discursive field, rather than giving a positive, constructive explanation of the world according to the strengths and limitations of their discipline.
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I have no problem with people making all kinds of divergent political and social theories about how the world works; just don't try to tell me that these are more important or more politically and socially relevant than scientific ones. Case in point, from this week's world news: P. Leonardo Mascheroni. If this story about an American physicist who boldly sold hydrogen-flourine laser information to Venezuala doesn't fly in the face of every cliche about how science is The Man while theory isn't, or how scientists are too blinded by a naive belief in their own "objectivity" to get involved in politics, while grad students in the humanities are somehow perfect exemplars of what it means to be politically engaged in the world, I don't know what would.
36 comments:
AL: "It's entirely possible that the world is a product of a bunch of forces that work independently of one another and, therefore, that these may never be tidily folded into a discursive whole. So the physicist, the biologist, the politician, the social scientist, etc., are all equally right in describing the world according to their own specific set of reductionist criteria. Problems arise only when one reductionist gets greedy and wants all the powers of explanation for themself."
Kvond: The problem is that this sounds quite Latourian, or at least sociological, again, another "greedy reduction". Everything requires translation, all the objects of a certain discourse are real objects to that discourse, etc., etc. A pluralism of discourses is also a "world view" in its own right.
kvondique stop critiquing my lovely fiance, she's on to something, i think the objectologists' claim that they posses a mastery of the pluralism of discourses, while the other ''outdated'' human-centered views are hanging on to their greedy reductionism, is an instance of meta-greedy reductionism, but then, frankly, I always loved psychoanalysis more than philosophy.
I always used to make the same complaint about the Bakhtinians: sure, they talked a lot about polyvocality, but in the end the Bakhtinian is the one with the master theory of how voices and discourses get woven together in time.
Hi everyone
@anodinelite: I liked very much the post ;-) ..i also think that Nick´s propositions fall into a greedy reductionism, which is one of the vices of the scholastic view that is reproduced 'practically' in many fields of knowledge.
@kvond Kevin I don´t think it sounds latourian at all: she is not talking about actors or actants neither about networks, she is talking about fields of knowledge and their strategic relations and tendencies, which is more like bourdieusian. I don´t think all the sociological leads to a greedy reductionism, at least not Bourdieu´s relationism. In fact, i think the problem is that Nick is somehow applying the very infamous early-latourian laboratory operation -or something near that-, so to embrace his standpoints: the 6 propositions are the proof of it.
Well, I didn't mean to criticize anyone in particular here, I know it's difficult not to see everything through the lens of whatever particular field you decide to study. As far as ANT/OOO goes...well, I'm not even sure what the Latourian stance would be on this. I do think some people overreact to the suggestion that Capitalism doesn't exist or that humans aren't the only actors in the world. They clearly aren't, to anybody whose spent any amount of time studying non-humans.
Kvond: I'm not interested in "polyvocality" so much as probably letting a bunch of experts to their themselves, which I think Bourdieu might criticize. I like the idea that there are experts in all sorts of fields and that these compare notes and see what they come up with. What interests me is the fact that completely disparate fields sometimes overlap in productive ways. I'm entirely uninterested in folding everything back together and (as you've said before) closing it up. Not that I'm a philosopher, anyway. But...
who's
Oh and I probably should say that I don't believe in "worldviews". I hate that word.
Dejan: This is why I prefer analysis to philosophy, too...
Which isn't to say you don't have your greedy psychoanalyst reductionists, but the tendency is different in general from what I've seen. Philosophy tends toward closure, that's what so many radical new philosophical systems seem to do, find a new way to wrap everything up in a nice neat little package. There are good points to this, it's an interesting way to see where a culture is going, I suppose. But psychoanalysis says, no, nothing's getting wrapped up here! Don't even think about it.
My love, when the Egyptian Temptress says
''I’ve found that people have a hard time distinguishing the fact that I cannot exist without certain prior relations among my bodily organs from the fact that, once I exist, I do exist in independence from everything else. Lack of oxygen can kill me, but what it then kills is me, not my relation with oxygen.''
It is only psychoanalysis that can give us the insight that her libidinal investment is in the idea that - as Cher used to sing - ''sooner or later, we all sleep alone''.
Very German existentialist.
I disagree with him, obviously.
I completely agree here, but I also note that it's an easy academic game to play 'Find the Hidden God' with the way values, commitments and premises focus other people's interests and attention. It's not like anyone is immune to this critical operation. As Weber said, phenomena do not have objective interest. They only emerge into intelligibility through the cognitive and affective orientation of our attention.
Agreed again, though, that it's irritating when 'educated' people don't get this about their own practice.
Carlo congratulations on your partnership with Spoonerized Assliterations!
"Agreed again, though, that it's irritating when 'educated' people don't get this about their own practice."
Yes, I realize I do it myself all the time, but it puzzles me when I see other people who can't admit that they do it to at times, or at least admit that it's built into discourse at some base level. I think that's why I find scientists so affable and even ultimately quite benign and non-threatening, because 9 out of 10 of them will sit down with you and lay their biases out on the table one by one. Of course, afterward they'll argue till they're blue in the face that their hypotheses are the best ones...but still, they'll gladly offer up an itemized list of their assumptions and blindspots without hesitating should you ask for one.
I can forgive anyone almost anything if they can admit to themselves what's really going on, what they're doing, and why they're doing it... I've always thought the unforgiveable sin must be the lack of self-awareness rather than heresy or blasphemy.
I think this is really good, though I do have one issue with it. It strikes me that the claim that the world 'can't be tidily folded into a discursive whole', and the claim that there is no master discourse (or domain), such as physics, to which all else can be reduced, aren't entirely the same. True, the latter would entail the former, but not vice versa.
It seems to me that science does aim at a genuinely unitary picture of the world, and that aiming to describe the world as a whole isn't necessarily a matter of reducing it to a single domain, but rather of pursuing the study of each domain separately AND trying to understand how they connect up to form a single world. I think you've touched on this already in your response to Kvond, where you say that it if often the overlapping of disparate fields which is productive. The point I would make is that this overlapping is not merely incidental, but is part of what science aims at.
The interesting philosophical question is what does this overlapping consist in (or how should we relate different sciences to one another) if not reduction?
Argh. Pardon my entailment.
I meant to say if it was true that there were a domain to which all else could be reduced, this would entail that the world could be folded into a neat discursive whole, but that we can't affirm the antecedent here, i.e., that the world can be folded into a neat discursive whole is does not imply that there is a fundamental domain or master discourse.
Anodyne, yes indeedie. It helps good scientists that they understand themselves to be producing 'robust findings' rather than 'the truth'.
Thanks, Dejan! What could be better than a moderate and tempered 50's Americanan? TWO moderate and tempered 50's Americanans, of course!
Deontologistics, I'm still struggling to grasp your point. I see what you mean about a division of investigative labor tending toward a comprehensive unitary picture of the world. If it's all supposed to boil down to physics, or chemistry, or economics or voodoo I see how this would be reductive. But if it stays a crosslinked manifold of investigative lines at various scales, not so much?
AL: "Oh and I probably should say that I don't believe in "worldviews". I hate that word."
Kvond: It can be countered that those people who don't believe in world views are those who have world views they do not acknowledge, are not aware of (or don't want criticized). Any description of the their "worldview" as wordview is simply something that is PUT on them.
Under such a logic of course a lot of bad things have gone on. Part of philosophy is making the "world views" (the internal coherence of beliefs) that are implicit, explicit. Some my feel that this is unfair, or even a bunch of hocus pocus, some might feel that this is essential towards moving to a more just world.
I personally don't feel that I have a "worldview" but I also suspect that valuable things could be achieved by trying to summarize what that worldview would be, IF I had one (or several).
Relatedly scientists don't feel that they have a "metaphyiscs" at all. Metaphysics is just the silly stuff of philosophers, and not even most comtemporary philosophers at that. But...it can be pointed out, most scientists in most fields have simply ADOPTED a default metaphysics of scientific materialism, an implicit metaphysics upon which most of their descriptions fit. Now, as one philo prone, I find it interesting to critique the "non" status of the metaphysics of most scientific description. Something of the same seems to go for "world views" as well.
I should have written,
"I personally don't feel that I have a "worldview" but I also suspect that valuable things could be achieved by trying to summarize what that worldview would be, AS IF I had one (or several)."
Deontologistics: I'm with Carl, I'm not quite sure what you mean. I do agree with you when you say "that the world can be folded into a neat discursive whole is does not imply that there is a fundamental domain or master discourse", because I think it's possible to come up with all sorts of reductionist criteria that work well to limited ends, though.
Kvond: It's not that I dislike the word "worldview" because I don't personally think I have one. If anything, I think I have a more coherent one than a lot of people. But if we want to get highly technical, "worldviews" are not how cognition works; information about the world does not get processed into some sort of highly codified coherent whole in the way that the world "worldview" implies in academic usage. Of course, there was the original use in philosophy (Weltanschaaung, was it? Wittgenstein?) that may have been a little tighter, but it seems to have become one of those words that gets thrown around so much, like a catch-all for what we can't explain yet, and means so many different things to different people, that it becomes lazy, it keeps people from thinking rather than helping them think about what they think. For this reason it seems like another folk psychological term that I'd rather see reevaluated than taken for granted in the way that it is now.
I do agree that it makes sense to talk about what worldviews might be, though, you're right.
I've become acquainted with a lot of scientists. In general, they don't worry much about metaphysics, you're right--but there aren't too many of them who would outright deny that they come from somewhere, that they have biases, as I've mentioned. It seems that you're trying to keep the frame philosophical, as philosophers do. I don't think scientists are under any obligation to "ground" everything they do in philosophy. I don't think everybody's/anybody's beholden to "metaphysics", even though I think there are good and interesting lessons to be learned from studying that kind of philosophy. Most scientists I know would agree with that statement, too. They respect philosophical discussions, and see where there's plenty of overlap, especially when it comes to biomedical issues. They're just too busy to spend a lot of time mastering other disciplines, most of them.
Weltanschauung.
You know, it'd be nice to have an edit feature on this...for some reason I make a ton of typos and grammar mistakes in comments boxes...
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. The point I was trying to get at is just that the goal of unification in the sciences, and the idea of a complete reductionism (say as espoused by physicalism) are distinct, and that our denial of the latter should not be taken to undermine the former.
The reason I put this forward is because I think that part of the role of ontology is to work out the structure of the unitary whole to which all of the different scientific domains belong, and thus how we should understand the relations between them. This doesn't mean that ontology tells us what the specific relation between the objects of neuroscience and sociology are, that's up to scientists, but rather what would constitute a legitimate relation between them, or the general way in which they need to be situated in relation to one another.
I don't think this is a matter of deducing the structure of the world a priori, but in fact it is something that must be sensitive to science. I won't go into this in further detail as I've written about it elsewhere, the point is simply that neither science nor ontology need involve the kind of greedy reductionism you so rightly criticize.
Ahh, I see...yes, I agree. I think that's what a vital and relevant and even politically pertinent philosophy/ontology would do-- it would exist in the role you've described.
AL: "It's not that I dislike the word "worldview" because I don't personally think I have one. If anything, I think I have a more coherent one than a lot of people. But if we want to get highly technical, "worldviews" are not how cognition works; information about the world does not get processed into some sort of highly codified coherent whole in the way that the world "worldview" implies in academic usage."
Kvond: When you say "cognition" you seem to be talking about a single person, and their perceptions of the world. This is a subtle assumption of much of our thinking, that if we can figure out how the brain "processes" "the world" we get at what is really important. Worldview, might be a cognitive feature of the brain, but it IS a feature of how social cognition works, or, at least, examining the coherence of fundamental beliefs that join together a multitude of "cognitions" I believe proves fruitful. There is no "worldview" lobe in the brain, sure, but when all those brains get linked together through their bodies into societies, into fields, worldviews and their criticism I believe do come into play.
I should have said, "worldview might NOT be a cognitive feature of the brain, but it IS a feature of how social cognition works..."
Kvondique OF COURSE you don't have a worldview when your view encompasses THE BEYOND of the world!!!
No, I'm not talking about a single person. I'm talking about how the brain works in general in all people.
"Belief" is another folk psychological term whose continuing value many neurologists would contest. It seems that we have this word 'belief' that describes something people experience. Most people think that beliefs add up to actions on some fundamental level, where the brain is shoved in the middle of these two things, acting like an intermediary, but never a really central processing unit. There are very good (but technical) arguments about why "belief" may have nothing to do with human behavior whatsoever. I tend to think, myself, that it plays a much more minor role than many people assume it does.
I certainly don't think that when groups get together ghosts start flying around between their heads making special types of cognitions possible that aren't otherwise, anyway.
AL: ""Belief" is another folk psychological term whose continuing value many neurologists would contest. It seems that we have this word 'belief' that describes something people experience. Most people think that beliefs add up to actions on some fundamental level, where the brain is shoved in the middle of these two things, acting like an intermediary, but never a really central processing unit. There are very good (but technical) arguments about why "belief" may have nothing to do with human behavior whatsoever. I tend to think, myself, that it plays a much more minor role than many people assume it does."
Kvond: Then perhaps you would also say something like this:
AL [hypothetical]: "Oh and I probably should say that I don't believe in "beliefs". I hate that word".
of course the sentence would be a contradictin in terms, humorously enough.
It seems are are on a neurology kick these days, and imagine that however neurologists describe the world is the PREFERABLE way of engaging with it. (This of course is in contrast with your plurality of fields position of the thread, but we are all entitled to our self-contradictions...appealing to neuroscience to dispell the objects of another field.)I don't begrudge you that, but criticizing and esteeming peoples "beliefs" is the primary way towards social good. Whether the jurors "believe" you are guilty, or whites "believe" black people are lazy, or men "believe" women are more emotional, or Americans "believe" Al Quaeda is going to attack or the economy is going to rebound (and the justification for those beliefs) are of paramount importances. Calling these beliefs "folk psychology" (a phrase that I seriously disagree with the use of because of its rhetorical trick of turning primary factors for judging the world into something of a myth about gods and magic), is a big of a Scientific materialism trick, attempting to own the discourse.
Or, to be more precise about it, heading towards "greedly reductionism":
AL: "Belief" is another folk psychological term whose continuing value many neurologists would contest...There are very good (but technical) arguments about why "belief" may have nothing to do with human behavior whatsoever. I tend to think, myself, that it plays a much more minor role than many people assume it does."
Kvond: Just how "minor" a role is this? Are you not heading towards your "greedy reducdtionism"? And why does a "technical argument" not amount to greedy reducdtionism? Does not the power of a description lie it its ability to make us more active in the world, more self-determining (and not in some ultimate underlying truth)? For the good, "technical" arguments of neuroscience to reduce and remove the value of descriptions of belief, they would have to also remove the empowerments that arise from descriptions of belief, they would have to dispell the power of the description "He killed his wife because he believed he was cheating on him'" which is pretty much ridiculous.
Kvond, I think you're making a poor argument. There might be good reasons for understanding ourselves and others in terms of folk-psychological concepts such as belief and desire, independent of the explanatory effectiveness of such notions. If this is the case, then demonstrating that these notions are inadequate to the real subject matter, i.e., the explanation of these causal systems called humans and their social groups, need do nothing to undermine these reasons.
I understand that you're a davidsonian to some extent, and so you should appreciate the idea that understanding people in terms of belief and desire is a matter of taking them to be rational agents, and that this whole process of interpreting one another as rational agents is a necessary part of the structure of communication as such. In order to have a debate for instance, we have to treat each other as rational interlocutors, and we have to understand what the each other mean by what we say by situating it within a broader interpretative context of beliefs (that we understand by retrojecting from behaviour that we assume to be rational given a broader interpretative context of desire).
It's perfectly consistent to think that we must think of each other in these terms (or similar terms) insofar as we aim to communicate with one another, AND to think that these terms nonetheless don't pick out anything that plays any proper role in the causal story of what is really going on. There are two different obligations at play here, one to treat ourselves and others as rational agents, and the other to describe the world as it is in itself, they need not conflict.
DE, honestly, and I do not mean this as a disparagement but, I find discussion with you usually fairly useless, pretty much because you simply repeat well-rehearsed, although hard-worked arguments (usually the mark of a grad school student working on a thesis); but you seldom give me the impression that you are actually THINKING on the subject matter, anew. Its like playing a fellow who keeps opening up with the same Sicilian Defense opening well into the middle game in chess, and then works for a draw. There is not a lot of benefit or pleasure in the talk, there is little chace of change or even agreement. Perhaps you feel the same way, but Anodyne Lite ALWAYS seems to ber thinking through, trying thoughts on, working her way to a point of view she may not have had BEFORE having a talk, and we do tend to agree on many issues. Because we agree on much there is always the chance we will come to new agreement here. Discussion is not simply an opportunity for her to simply PRESENT her ideas.
You begin your thoughts here with the idea that I am making a poor argument, and then present your own vision. Unfortunately my "argument" is in context of the ideas that AL present, it is a discussion between us, with a specific history. But I will try to expand the discussion.
Let's take me being a Davidsonian, I am not convinced in our discussions in the past that you actually have a grasp of Davidson at all. My position here is exactly Davidsonian, in particular grown from his Anomalous Monism: that our mental predicate attributions like "believe" and "desire" etc, do indeed ACT as both causes and reasons for our behavior, and that the causal relationships between beliefs CANNOT be reduced to the causal relationships between physical phenomena - and yes, these mental predicate attributions ARE cashed out in real pragmatic consequences.
I have no idea what you mean by "plays a proper role in the causal story of what is REALLY going one". If you understood Davidson you would never have written such a critical sentence I believe. There are two descriptions in Davidson, mental predicate descriptions and physical ones, and the latter are not "what is REALLY going on". He has no role for this "really" that you use. Davidson does not play games with ontology because he does not believe in metaphysics. As such he refrains from your "really". I find it very odd that you bring him up.
Further, Davidson's work is precisely the kind that helps us do away with the RHETORICAL force of a phrase like "folk psychology" when directed towards beliefs, which contains the implicit notion that we can talk mythologically (like provicial illiterates) about beliefs and desires, but when we talk in the proper "educated" sense, we do away with so much folklore. Davidson's work, especially as it was influenced by Spinoza, goes a long way towards upending the notion of "folk psychology" here. (cont.)
(cont.)
When AL wants to give priority to a neurologist's description (I suppose as the "real" one) she is, at least in my mind, abstracting the description out from its REAL WORLD circumstances. There are reasons why we make that kind of description, rather than another, and primary among them is that in using it we can orient ourselves to the RELEVANT causal forces that have helped determine the behavior. Insofar as we turn to the physical causal chain, ie., the reason why he killed his wife is because his brain was in state "x", is because THOSE causes become germane us in helping us act more powerfully in the world. But when we refer to beliefs and desires, ie, the reason why he murdered his wife is because he believed she was adulterous, or because he was enraged, help pick out OTHER causal factors in the world. Saying that the "brain state" description is the REAL one (has the causal factors that are most important to us), is simply to not understand the processes towards social good and justice in the world.
Just because YOU are a materialist, and YOU want there to be only ONE description of what is REALLY going on, does not mean that the real world circumstances that actually determine and drive which descriptions we fine germane do not have to be cashed out. Your position is something akin to that of a theist who decides in advance, any argument that ends up saying that God exists is by defintion a good one. You simply assume the opposite, any argument that ends up resulting in materialism is a good one. I rather fall between. I am interested in the real circumstances that govern our question in the first place, why one description is better than another in THIS case (I'm not trying to join the materialism club). Indeed there might be arguments why treating others as rational agents is a good, in fact logically necessary, thing (Davidson offers many of them), but even if there were NOT such arguments, it STILL would be the case that the reason why accepting the description "He murdered his wife because he believed she had cheated on him" rather than "He killed his wife because his brain was in state x." is because such a description is simply more valuable, it, in most causes, passes our eyes beyond the conditions of the local event towards our shared values and mutualities, picking out what is significant for US, as a people, and in helping us determine through those choices, what kind of world, and among which kind of people, we want to live. They are cashed out in their use. If this means that we cannot be materialists, that's okay. No great loss.
The plurality of field descriptions Anodyne Lite advocates in this post (and I have not read your comments to them), for me is a plurality of use. Ultimately there is a value to letting people speak and study in diversity, and this value is that each discourse brings out salient features of the world (and ourselves). This is exactly what allows discussion (and criticism) of beliefs or of worldviews to be found valuable, and this value is not then to be reduced to whether or not it allows one to be a materialist or not.
Yes, I'm on a neurology kick, it's probably what I'll be doing for the rest of my life. So you have to understand that I'm talking about this from the perspective of someone who is interested in pushing a specific field into exciting new territory--not (at least, at this specific moment, and in this specific context) in folding my own thoughts back into discussions of the social/political good.
I often think that this normative emphasis on social and political good can become like a card people who are interested in humanities selectively play (not you, but others)--they themselves can indulge in all kinds of discourse about aesthetic stuff that has a tangential relationship to questions of political praxis and very little political immediacy beyond academic blogging (I'm thinking of certain people and their obsession with Dubstep, for instance, or Michael Jackson) and be in the clear. But any talk on the part of others that strays from same old party line about the "social good", as this has already been conceived by them is immediately met with a backlash of reactionary proportions.
Apparently, even speculating based on the current lay of the evidenciary land about how cognitive and neuroscience may change the way we look at social behaviors forever is blasphemous if it doesn't begin from the premise that the social constructionists are already correct. The problem with your objections, although I understand where you're coming from, is that in the end they're largely semantic. "Belief" is ultimately just a word. I continue to use the word in reference to myself because our language has few others to convey what I mean, and that's a real shame. But for the first time in history, cognitive and neuroscientists are in a position to test hypotheses regarding "belief" and its role in human behavior. So far, the results have been quite interesting. What people say they believe, what people claim as their "worldview", often does not synch up very well at all with their actual behaviors. A great example that springs to mind is "abstinence only" education, abstinence pledges, and sexual behavior in teens. It turns out that human biology tends to trump even our best efforts to "believe" it away.
I'm not interested, of course, in abandoning the notion that a murderer has motives for killing. That would be absurd, of course, and dangerous. But does the murderer's conscious "belief" system, do the things he says he "believes", have anything to do with his violent behavior? That's the interesting question. And that's one, that hopefully, if I make it all the way and become a neuropsychiatrist, I will be able to help answer. The results of our experiments may not be what people expect.
"Saying that the "brain state" description is the REAL one (has the causal factors that are most important to us), is simply to not understand the processes towards social good and justice in the world."
Saying half the things you've said in the adjoining post is simply to not understand systems biology in the slightest.
"It seems are are on a neurology kick these days, and imagine that however neurologists describe the world is the PREFERABLE way of engaging with it. (This of course is in contrast with your plurality of fields position of the thread, but we are all entitled to our self-contradictions...appealing to neuroscience to dispell the objects of another field.)"
It seems you must have misunderstood what I said up there. Neurology is not "preferable" because I am choosing to limit my focus in this way, and I never said it was, or even implied that it was. It's simply what I'm interested in at this particular time. I'm making a case for certain hypotheses or theories based on what I'm studying. I'm sharing them because I think they're interesting.
I don't understand why this would be offensive. Is philosophy the only kosher intellectual interest?
I apologise if I got in the way of your and Anodyne's discussion, or if you find my approach monotonous. Though I would point out that I've not used the word 'materialism' at any point here.
Here's my argument boiled down as much as I can.
1. There is reason to talk in terms of belief and desire (or something similar) independent of its explanatory value. This is the necessity of treating ourselves and others as rational agents for the possibility of communication.
2. This isn't to say that talking in terms of belief an desire can't ever be useful or explanatory in some sense. There are instrumental reasons to talk in terms of belief and desire.
Newton's theory of gravity can still be used to provide explanations of gravitational phenomena where it's simply unnecessary or overly complicated to use Einstein's. Rationalistic explanations of individuals' behaviour in terms of intentional states (I'll refrain from using the term folk-psychology here), is often perfectly fit for purpose, especially in those cases in which individuals are taken to be performing some kind of explicit practical reasoning.
3. Neither fitness for purpose nor their necessity in communication is enough to support giving some metaphysical status to the terms that kind of description deploys. However, neither does denying this status (be it from a materialist or other perspective) undermine these reasons for using intentionalistic language.
So, we've got two different reasons to use intentionalistic forms of explanation independent of the adequacy of such forms of explanation: lets call them the communicative reason and the instrumental reason. You seem to want to add a third which falls somewhere in between here:-
"because such a description is simply more valuable, it, in most causes, passes our eyes beyond the conditions of the local event towards our shared values and mutualities, picking out what is significant for US, as a people, and in helping us determine through those choices, what kind of world, and among which kind of people, we want to live."
I think this need thinking through a bit more, but I'm not hostile to it. However, I still don't see it as incompatible with maintaining that there aren't such things as beliefs and desires, and that adequate explanations of us as causal systems need to be able to develop independent of that kind of intentionalistic terminology.
It seems to me that there isn't any problem with not believing in belief, as long as this is understood in the proper terms.
DE: "I think this need thinking through a bit more, but I'm not hostile to it. However, I still don't see it as incompatible with maintaining that there aren't such things as beliefs and desires, and that adequate explanations of us as causal systems need to be able to develop independent of that kind of intentionalistic terminology."
Kvond: To say that the above "third" is not incommpatible with your metaphysical world of demanding a materialism is a far cry from saying that it is in support of such a move as well. Davidson, whose position I outline, makes no such move, sees no gain it it. Talking about what is a "really, really real" (when efficacy of description and what it pays off in, actually has traction in our world) can simply be a matter of "worldview" or I would like the world to be. I want it to be a materialist thing, so I am going to bend all of my descriptions such that they are not "incompatible" with materialism.
I do think that Davidson's lack of a metaphysics provides a certain shallowness to his linguistic turn interpretation, in that his conceptual dualism, if you follow it through must be about, or in regards to "something". There is though no reason to collapse that something into one set of those descriptions: physical causation, rather than the other set: mental predicate attribution. I prefer simply to make the Spinozist move, and say that that which is referred to in these two non-reducible chains of cause, is Substance, which expresses itself in both of them.
But I am equally happy to let simply the pragmatic and the rational coherences of each of them operate on their own, as parallel descriptions which gain their footing through what they reveal, which features of the world they bring forth, and the valued determinations we make for the kind of world we want to live in, without the metaphysical substrate.
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