Philosophical Guns That Shoot Nothing But Blanks

Upgraded from an edifying exchange in the Moot with "Poor Richard" who proposes in a lengthy comment you should read for its own sake: "I've been thinking of how to rescue utility."

He says much more, to which I reply:

I guess I don't think utility really needs rescuing -- which isn't to say I think the notion needs to be bagged for disposal but that utility is plenty useful enough that it doesn't need the protection of philosophers freighting it with our rather silly idiosyncratic baggage.

As a good Jamesian pragmatist I say that "the true is the good in the way of belief... for definite, assignable reasons." That business of offering up reasons for warrantable assertions of belief according to their different modes, scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, political, commercial, legal and so on is, sensibly enough, the essence of the reasonable, properly so-called, to my way of thinking.

I do think that common or garden variety truth as beliefs we have reasons for which we are willing to state in public/ation is a perfectly sensible notion but that "truth as correspondence" is a philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks. I think that common or garden variety certainty as warranted confidence on which one is willing to stake one's life or at any rate the mortgage is a perfectly sensible notion but that "certainty as indefeasability" is a philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks. And I think that common or garden variety utilities, whether of the scientific kind that confer best-on-offer powers of prediction and control, of the moral kind that keep us from losing our scruples despite our belonging to more than one discursive community but to none of them fully, and of the prudential kinds that differently navigate legal, commercial, political tangles are all perfectly sensible notions, too, but that any "general utility function" will be yet another philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks. Needless to say, such guns are still noisy enough to leave your ears ringing when you ought to be listening more carefully to what is afoot.

True to my training in the humanities academy (BA literature, MA philosophy, PhD rhetoric, teaching cultural theory for over a decade, lions, and tigers, and bears) that is to say in the belly of the pomo beast, as no doubt the elite effete aesthete you see before you, I suppose, I do happen still think theory is better off reaching first for the tools in the historicization and contextualization drawers rather than the generalization drawer when one is trying to make sense of things. Well, fancy that: a generalization!

You see, if I speak derisively of philosophical impulses, do understand that I have had the philosophy bug most of my life and feel I know Socrates and Kant and the Founders and many Marxists and Arendt and Rorty better than most living people, I haven't shaken that bug yet -- and so acerbic comments should be viewed as wry commentaries on weaknesses to which I am prone more than finger-pointing exercises at silly benighted Others.

I do think one needs to re-think what intellectual ambition properly looks like from a pluralist-pragmatist-rhetorical perspective. I'm a teacher with a vocation for it, so this is something I think about fairly incessantly, actually. Metaphysical traditions and their many scientistic-evolutionary-cybernetic progeny in the present day seem to me to offer more discursive cul-de-sacs and pathological symptoms than uses in this work, I'm afraid. To be honest about it, I consider all such fancies that the universe has preferences about the words humans describe it with or takes sides in human squabbles over the vicissitudes of fashion and so on mostly to be vestiges of organized religiosity with priestly authoritarian politics in tow, and rather think we would all do well without them.