Abstract
I would like to begin by thanking Michael Tissaw for his critical commentary (Tissaw, 2013) and this journal for publishing my original article (Arponen, 2013), for printing a critical response to it, and for giving me this opportunity to respond. I shall endeavour to make it worth the time and space devoted to the issue.
Tissaw’s critical response focuses upon one relatively small part of my original article, namely, my treatment of Peter Hacker. Tissaw accuses me of distorting Hacker in various ways. For example, I cast Hacker as talking of concept possession as knowledge of criteria even though, in the passages that I quote, Hacker does not even use the word ‘knowledge’. The more serious underlying issue is, Tissaw argues, that I cast Hacker as arguing that this knowledge is the mental source of human action even though Hacker explicitly denies this.
In defence of my treatment of Hacker, in my original article I was, I believe, particularly clear that I was going to be associating Peter Hacker with views that he has explicitly denied. I sought, as I put it in the article, ‘to inspect more closely whether there might be internal tensions in Hacker’s views’, which had to do with his explicit rejection of cognitivism and the simultaneous latent compatibility of his views with it. I approached this by acknowledging that there is an ‘undeniable non-cognitivist thrust to Hacker’s views’ before going on to show why some of Hacker’s views might nonetheless be seen as latently cognitivist (Arponen, 2013: 9).
From the very beginning, then, it was clear that I was going to reach beyond Hacker’s own words in trying to tease out the latent cognitivism that I had identified in his views. After all, I was in the business of exposing something latent. I, therefore, do not feel like I need to blush as Tissaw produces passages from (Baker and) Hacker that explicitly deny cognitivism. These are not hard to find and include such passages cited by Tissaw as ‘the criteria of understanding are not criteria for the presence of an inner state’ (Baker and Hacker, 2009: 68) and many others, some of which I also cite in my original article. It is also noteworthy that Tissaw criticizes me for putting the word ‘knowledge’ in Hacker’s mouth, yet he also admits that Hacker would probably ‘not deny that persons exhibit behavior expressing “knowledge” of criteria’ (Tissaw, 2013: 23). Consequently, what was so wrong about putting that word into Hacker’s mouth? I cannot help but feel that Tissaw’s commentary accuses me of things that I already admitted in the original article and/or that are not so controversial after all.
On the other hand, Tissaw might be read as saying that I have not done enough, that is, that the ball is still very much in the court of those who see latent cognitivism in Hacker. Hence, the title of Tissaw’s piece, as well as his claim that ‘there is nothing here that must be taken as the equivalent of Hacker’s saying that the criteria of understanding – or, if we want to take it a step further, understanding as a kind of ‘knowledge’ – are a mental source of human action’ (Tissaw, 2013: 23). In this response, then, I would like to try one more time to shed light on the reasons for my attribution of latent cognitivism to Hacker.
This time I approach the issue by asking what kind of terms does Hacker give us for conceptualizing human action and sociality? And consequently, in Wittgensteinian terms, what kind of a picture of human sociality do these terms give rise to? The key phrases and terms surely are those of criteria for correct concept application, mastery and those of rule, ability and exhibition in use. Now, as I argue in my original article, these terms and phrases suggest to me what I termed a first-person perspective to human sociality. That is, with them, we come to think of human sociality in terms of the rules, criteria and abilities that a person knows, possesses, or has mastered, that she or he puts in use or exhibits in her or his actions and that other competent social beings make use of when they understand the activities of the person. Also Lars Hertzberg detected such a picture in Hacker. Hertzberg described and objected to this picture saying that ‘to relate to someone as a speaker is not a matter of noting that she lives up to some standard or conforms to some pattern’ (Hertzberg, 2010: 123; this passage was also quoted in my original article).
Moreover, the picture emerging from Hacker is arguably a latent cognitivist one of social actors putting in use and recognizing in others the presence of what can be variously called mastery, ability and that could be called knowledge (of norms, values, concepts, etc.) but also disposition and, again, mutual recognition and acceptance. Notably, Searle, and other ‘causal ontologists’ (see Arponen, forthcoming), openly cast these possessions of social agents in causal ontological, cognitivist, terms. Do not indeed both, the cognitivists and the putative non-cognitivists, make use of these possessions of social actors as the source, 1 the engine, of their activities and their understanding of others’ activities? True, many would not write about these possessions as features of the human ontological make-up or modes of human cognition, nor view them as functioning in a mechanical manner. Yet, this is how they seem to function, namely, as something that social actors are in possession of and that drive their activities. In my view, then, Wittgensteinians have not sufficiently radically distanced themselves from cognitivism.
There is, in my view, a larger issue looming in the background of the foregoing discussion that was discussed in my original article and that is worth attending to also in this response. Where the Cartesian cognitivist heritage is arguably individualistic in its focus upon the human subject in the effective privacy of her or his own mental life, Wittgenstein has been massively influential in inspiring collectivist and social constructivist thought in the 20th and the 21st centuries (Lock and Strong, 2010: 11 and ibid.: ch. 8). Important differences notwithstanding, arguably central to many collectivist or constructivist positions is the idea of socially or culturally defined standards, abilities, concepts and the like specific to each group or culture that are disseminated by the processes of socialization, training and correction within those groups. Many Wittgensteinian terms – rule, mastery, ability, display of competence, and indeed standards – fit well in that picture.
Yet, first of all, this picture threatens to be a latent cognitivist one in that, as Theodore Schatzki put it, ‘[m]any alleged ontological nonindividualisms turn out to be ontological individualisms … their “opposition” to individualism … being a stand against too narrow a construal of the stratum of the individual’ involving no substantial denial of the cognitivist core of individualism (Schatzki, 2002: 127). This is to say, in collectivism the individual remains a thinking being who acts on the basis of his or her ideas, beliefs and knowledge, only, these are construed as collectively shared and subject to social training and checks. Secondly, another deficiency of such a collectivist view is that it sidesteps variety and inequality of human actors’ positions and epistemic equipment therewith epistemically or intellectually homogenizing what arguably is a heterogeneous, differently placed and dispersed mass. While collectivism is good at working out cultural differences, it cannot recognize intra-cultural differences. At the root of this inability is the cognitivist idea of beliefs and knowledge as the engine of human action and its collectivist extension: the idea of collectively shared ideas as the source of collective action. It is perspectives like these that ultimately inform my critique of Hacker and that, I hope, get debated in future reactions to my original article.