From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo Wed Feb  5 11:57:01 EST 1992
Article 3481 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: Searle and the Curse of the Mediocre Philosop
Message-ID: <1992Feb4.214157.8592@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Feb2.165723.184@lrc.edu> <BVskFB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1992 21:41:57 GMT

In article <BVskFB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:
>lehman_ds@lrc.edu writes:
>
>As to the substance of the charge -- posting a lot of material on
>the Chinese Room without having read Searle, the fact is that I
>didn't post much at all.  I read the material in the articles and
>didn't post anything until I had some idea of what was going on.
>(But if someone says, "Hey, this guy posted voluminous ramblings
>about the Chinese Room," most people will remember you as having
>posted voluminous ramblings whether you did or not. That's a fact
>of human psychology.)
>
>Then there's the general issue of the genre of philosophical texts
>lurking in the background of this discussion. Ideally philosophy
>is not thought of as textual or "literary" at all.  The "essence"
>of the argument is presumably expressible in completely other
>words (i.e., has full "translatability" and "synonymy").

If you really believe this, read some Quine and call me in the morning.
More to the point, the onus is not always on the claimant to explain
to everyone what he means.  If it were, we'd never get anywhere. Philosophy,
like any other discipline, has a canon of work that people are expected
to be able to draw on.  If one doesn't have the background, one can ask
where to find it, but to expect (mercifully) short postings to run every
argument to which they refer is...well, unreasonable.

> Indeed if
>the argument itself depends on a particular concatenation of
>particular words, the suspicion is that it is a species of
>rhetoric rather than philosophy.  (It was Nietzsche who first
>pointed out that philosophical texts are indeed texts, with
>metaphors and other figures of speech, and they use rhetorical
>tricks and devices to convince and slide over weaknesses in their
>arguments.  But, while I think there is a lot to his point, I
>think he overstates it.  For example I think Nietzsche's own
>theories could be more clearly expressed in the plainstyle than in
>his own flowery, literary style.)

Funny, I thought it ws Plato who first distinguished rhetorical from
dialectic. Nietzsche was just another "footnote", to use Whitehead's
metaphor.

>I think the logical skeleton of
>Searle's thought was clear enough by the time I said anything at
>all.  In fact if someone argues that it should be necessary to
>read the original (rather than a summary in a secondary source)
>sh/e should ask h/erself just what that says about the underlying
>logical and conceptual skeleton under the rhetorical flesh of the
>author's "own" words.
>
If someone argues that a secondary source is adequate evidence of anything,
they should go back and do the last two years of undergrad over again.
Secondary source get it wrong all the time. Even if they get it right,
they put their own gloss on another's words, highlighting and hiding
parts of the original intended meaning. Read the original always, lest
you be embarassed by someone retorting, "Yes, we've all seen so-n-so's
woefully inadequate critique of such-n-such. Surely you don't mean to
say that that was implicit in the original argument."


-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
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