Belief, Truth, Interpretation

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYsTJt8vxg 다음 강의를 정리한 것이다. 

BELOW Is my note. 

 

 

 

Critique prevailing observation – philosophical assumptions and historical practices

Misconception on Intellectual history

-       Identifying and explaining belief?

Mark Bevir, <The Logic of the history of ideas > “whenever people make an utterance, they express ideas or beliefs. And it is these beliefs that constitute objects studied by intellectual historians”

 

Keith Thomas <Religion and the decline of Magic> “systems of belief, many beliefs widely accepted in the past may now strike us as obviously false. The fact remains in earlier times intelligent persons held them to be true. The historians to ask Why that should be so?”  witchcraft

-       Not should be an intellectual historian’s focus

Why not?

To suppose any belief are being affirmed?  Literary texts, often identify authors with expressed belief of their fictional characters  <- new historicism to recover authorial belief of renaissance or early modern writers from the evidence of their texts

 

Ex) guessing Shakespeare’s mind while writing “mercy than justice” in merchants of Venice.

 

But then what about philosophical or political treatise, not literary works?

“surely we basically need to approach philosophical texts as statements of belief?”

-       Nope, also misleading and impoverish hermeneutics. But more controversial.

 

Machiavelli. Ch 18 <Principae> “political leaders who aspire to fame and glory must learn to imitate the lion and the fox ”

“the success in politics depends on realistically recognizing the unavoidability of false and fraud” unpacks the metaphor and states the belief?

How adequately you can hope to interpret that passage if you approach it with that in that basic question in mind. Extension of advice book for rulers, glory the proper goal of prince. means to acquire glory cultivate – (manly) virtu. (defining quality of successful leader)

Machiavelli, cultivate beastly quality, questioning humanistic qualities. Launching critiques, Cicero “two ways injustice done, by force(lion) or by fraud(fox)” reminding his readers, reminding and repudiating Cicero.

 

Machiavelli is not merely stating an apparent belief, also citing cicero reminding, repudiating and satirizing his readers of Cicero’s claim.

In approaching and interpreting the text, I have not treated it as an expression of belief. Rather I have treated it as quite complex intervention in a specific political debate and moral argument of the time. Once you identify the character of the intervention you may feel you imply number of belief.

 

Not asking what Machiavelli is affirming here. Asking “what is he doing” “what is he up to?”

 

Vocabulary the most appropriate to textual interpretation is the one that we use to speak about actions. Not beliefs. Activities of interpretation less on affirm. Recapture underlying purposes of those affirmation. Thereby trying to elucidate what kind of contribution they saw themselves are making to preexisting conversation of debate.

 

Texts like symphony and building…

 

Leviathan like a speech in parlement. Character of the book. A polemical intervention in the debate of the English revolution immediate aftermath the ablation of the institution of monarchy into the question. The political obligation due to a part. What is he doing. Trying to produce an ironic work in condition of revolution.

 

 

Plato’s republic.  Politics of Athene.   Much less prospect about understanding these text if you treat them as a form of a linguistic action, instead of affirmation of a belief. 

 

Specific intervention that he is making in political genre, handbooks for princes.
satire. Ridicule. Object of ridicule.

 

Postmodern critique – “are you seriously telling us you succeeded in recovering Machiavelli’s intentions?”

Recovery of intentionality is only contentious if you believe Intentions are simple mental events? (philosophical error)

Intentions, in intellectual history, are publicly inscribed.

 

Linguistic acts are the names of acts that Machiavelli intentionally performed.

 

No attempt to get into Machiavelli’s head.

Public context of the utterance – force of the utterance -> intertextuality (intentionality)

 

 

Postmodern critique (objection)– this preoccupation forgets the power of language itself in its play/jeu  (Derrida) write itself over any intention to communicate. You can’t get rid of ambiguity due to the polyésmie. Equating  the meaning of the text with the intended meaning is just an obvious mistake.

 

Misses the point: true Derrida and traditional hermeneuticists

“One should be interested recovering the meaning”

Nope. Speech act- “what people meant by what they said” not about linguistic meaning.

 

You can’t understand an action without invoking the intentionality that is embodied in it. Because in the explanation of actions, we identify the action as being an action of certain kind. This is how we individuate our actions in virtue of the intentionality embedded in them.

 

1.     If there is always an intervention in any text, however abstract, no categorical distinction between political treatise and literature. Attune yourself to understand underlying meaning. Read enough, know enough

2.      Treat the text as social action

3.     Not Koselleck’s Explanation. Not solving puzzle.

Motif with which you act is the cause of the action that you perform. The cause is having certain motivational set.

 

 

How should that enterprise should be taken? How should that be done?

 

Widespread view: anglophone history writing. True or false? Standard approach analytical social – Charles Taylor. False belief failure of reasoning.

 

 

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

Witchcraft – peasants witchcraft belief in Languedoc

“it is possible to cause harm by casting spells” – This the product of deep and distracting form of psychological pressure that the historians need to identify.

 To understand why witchcraft belief gained such wide acceptance in the France during the reformation period what you need to identify is that “what could have caused such a breakdown in the normal processes of reasoning”

 

The effect of reformation esp breakdown of local consensus – breakdown of trust btw neighbors and a tendency entertain new suspicions and new fears of your neighbors -> heightened promptness to accept the possibility that could indeed be done

 

What the philosophers ask  - how that false belief came to be held

 

---- don’t ever write history like that.

 

Why not?

To ask the question, as philosophers precede is to assume

 

 

37 30 That is to assume when historians encounters the beliefs that he or she judges to be false the explanatory task is that of looking for the cause of the lapse of reasoning that is to equate that holding of rational beliefs with the holding of the beliefs that historians judges to be true.  And that excludes the possibility that even in the case of the belief nowadays strike us obviously false may have been in good ground in earlier historical period for holding that false belief to be a true belief.

 

 

To equate the holding of the belief that seems to us false with a lapse for rationality is to foreclose on a whole type of explanations

 

So he excluded in advance the possibility the belief in the witches do you harm might be the product of perfectly acceptable chain of reasoning. But that means as a result, the explanation that he puts forward, the delusion, maybe completely false

 

Don’t forget to distinguish epistemic and practical rationality

 

I should adopt my beliefs only in the light of certain attitude toward the process of belief formation itself. I can hardly be said to hold a belief rationally unless I’m interested in a sort of evidence that gives me grounds for concluding my statements of beliefs could be justified and not liable to be overturned.

 

Inner acceptability of the structure of the beliefs then you cannot fail to count as rational beliefs that coheres within the system that you uncovers.

 

Whether our forbearers had sufficient ground for holding to be truth what they believed to be the truth

 

Conceptual relativism in relation to practice of intellectual history.

Richard Rorty – Galileo vs Bellarmine.  Bellarmine’s rejection of heliocentrism WAS no less objective than Galileo’s affirmation of it. Endorse of Rhetoric of modern science.