2. Also, that Russell’s prohibition need not be honored everywhere—for I have shown (apart from the liar’s paradox, which no longer is one) that self-reference is impossible to deny and turns out, in the final analysis, to be a potential condition for the resolution of the problem of reference. Here again it is the concepts of science and knowledge, of reference and self-reference, of validity and truth that make it possible to clearly define the difference between a discipline that thinks of itself as technical—logic—and another that claims to exist as knowledge as a whole—philosophy.
But if self-reference as a principle of reflexivity (congruence between a statement and its utterance) is now not only entirely elucidated but moreover justified, the question again arises as to what such a principle engenders. Is it an isolated principle, a simple criterion to apply to external propositions, a negative principle in the sense that it indicates only falsity? Or is this principle the source for a way to link together and produce propositions? Can we define the distinctive laws of reasoning from this first principle? Does the law of self-referentiality permit the construction of a “logic” or a method of argumentation that is then likely to unfurl a network of interdependent truths? Moreover, does this principle enable the capture of authentic content? I must now address this crucial question of the fecundity of the reflexive principle.
7
The Model’s Fecundity
The question of the fecundity of the principle of congruence between a statement and its utterance can be addressed in two parts: an elucidation of the mode of reasoning that gives rise to this principle of self-referentiality, on the one hand, and of its possible modalities of application on the other. The first is probably the most important in that it determines the mode of reasoning that advances philosophy to the rank of a knowledge that aspires to truth by taking self-referentiality as a law, model, and guide.
A New Definition of Transcendental Argument
The model of reflexivity as I have just presented it allows me to propose a revitalized definition of transcendental argument. Before making this renewal explicit, let’s first recall the canonical definition of transcendental argument as well as the dispute that gave rise to it.
We owe the introduction1 of the term “transcendental argument” to P. F. Strawson, who showed2 how Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, used two types of argumentative systems to establish his theses: On the one hand, and most often, Kant devotes himself to a description of the way that our faculties, in harmony with one another, produce experience. On the other hand, and much less frequently, Kant has recourse to a type of argumentation that aims to show that if we do not accept a given concept, then we can neither think nor act as we understand ourselves to do. Thus, Kant justifies reliance on the concept of cause by showing that this concept is the necessary condition for our experience of succession. To show how certain concepts or series of concepts are necessarily implied in cognitive operations that we actually carry out is, in Strawson’s eyes, the nuclear structure of “transcendental argument.” Strawson uses this argumentative system in his own philosophical analyses, detaching this argument from its initial context in order to consider it as a type of valid reasoning, and thus reusable beyond the single context of transcendental philosophy. Thus, he means to show that we cannot differentiate the objects that we perceive if we are not able to understand ourselves and the objects as two entities coexisting in space. Following him, and again considering a general type of commonly executed cognitive operations (like, for example, perception of objects, reference to something, or even predication), Gareth Evans tried to bring out their necessarily implied presuppositions. In the same way, we have seen how Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel use this type of reasoning when they try to bring to light the necessary conditions underlying our most common communicative experiences. Transcendental argument thus consists in bringing out the necessary presuppositions of an experience of thought or speech. Having recalled the argument’s definition, in light of the context of its birth (namely, Strawson’s revival of the Critique of Pure Reason’s reasoning), it seems permissible to formally analyze the argument in the following way:
p
It would not be possible that p if we did not think that q.
We must think that q.
It is true or it is necessary that q.3
In order that a transcendental argument be considered as such, the premise (p) must be a cognitive operation, like, for example, perceiving an object, establishing a link between cause and effect, or making any prediction.4 These are the cognitive operations that we perform daily. These operations thus refer to propositions of the type, to take up the examples cited by Strawson, “I perceive objects,” “I get my bearings in space,” “I communicate with others” and not to assertions about reality like “The earth rotates” or “Gold is a metal.” The initial fact or factum cannot be any old fact about the world but must be a cognitive factum. In contrast to ontological arguments that aim to establish a proposition that applies to the objects themselves and their properties (arguments that thus take the form of “s is p”), a transcendental argument must establish a proposition that applies to the concepts or representations necessarily implied in our thinking. As Michel Bitbol, who is interested in the use of transcendental arguments in quantum physics, has emphasized, “transcendental arguments [have] absolutely nothing to tell us from an ontological point of view.”5
In summary, a transcendental argument is an argument that does not directly apply to the reality of the world but to cognitive operations.6 It shows that human beings’ everyday representations would not be possible without a certain number of conditions that the researcher must determine (q, r, etc.). This is why a transcendental argument is often articulated in a negative way, with propositions of the type “We cannot do otherwise than to posit q” or “We cannot not posit certain conditions in order that certain representations become intelligible.” For example, the representation of an object presupposes the possibility of distinguishing it as an entity distinct from ourselves, just as the possibility of understanding a communication presupposes the possibility of distinguishing a speaker. It is clear, in such a framework, that a transcendental argument will be all the more convincing as the initial premise or factum will be difficult to challenge.
Given this first definition of transcendental argument, it goes without saying that it was the object of challenges, contestations, and objections, which justifies the now generally used phrase “the dispute about transcendental arguments.” This dispute has the advantage of uniting two paradigms that are taken to be opposed—the Continental paradigm (references to Kant) and the Anglo-Saxon paradigm, since, as Sandra Laugier recalls in a recent article, “debates about transcendental arguments … have dominated analytic philosophy at the end of the twentieth century.”7 And indeed, from Strawson to Jaakko Hintikka, from Dieter Henrich8 to Richard Rorty,9 from Barry Stroud to Apel, and even, quite recently, from Michel Bitbol10 to Elie Zahar,11 there are numerous authors from both horizons who have taken part in this famous “dispute about transcendental arguments.” Against Strawson’s argument, three major types of challenges can be identified.
TABLE 7.1
Strawson’s Transcendental Argument
* * *
1 That p.
“I perceive an object.”
2. It would not be possible that p if we did not think that q.
“I cannot perceive an object without conceiving it as distinct from myself.”
3. We must think that q.
“It is necessary to conceive the existence of objects outside myself.”
4. It is true or it is necessary that q.
“Objects outside myself exist.”
1. The first objection comes from Barry Stroud in a 1968 article.12 Taking up Strawson’s work, he attacks transcendental argument on the grounds that the latter does not manage to achieve the goals that it is assigned. Thus, for Stroud, transcendental argument had meaning only i
n Kant in opposition to skepticism, that is, for him, to philosophies that deny the possibility of positing the existence of a world beyond thought. I summarize Strawson’s argument in table 1.
Stroud objects that a skeptic will deny the first premise and the possibility of moving from the third proposition to the fourth. Indeed, hallucinations and dreams are two counterexamples that can be used in opposition to Strawson’s argument. Thus Stroud can conclude that it is possible to assert only that the idea of the perception of an object calls for the idea of the existence of objects outside the self. Consequently, the transcendental argument misses its objective. The first question in the debate is thus the following: is transcendental argument’s only purpose to challenge skepticism, itself reduced to the simple position of doubt about the existence of things outside ourselves? And must we conclude, with Stroud and later Rorty, that this purpose cannot be attained, that without an appeal to principle the argument loses any meaning and value?
2. The second objection concerns transcendental argument’s lack of distinctiveness, in that it may be perfectly reducible to a simple logical argument. Indeed, what does proposition 2 (“It would not be possible that p if we did not think that q.”) mean? It can be conjugated in the following way: proposition 1 (“That p.”) presupposes proposition 2 (“It would not be possible that p if we did not think that q.”), meaning that 1 is not true unless 2 is true. Transcendental argument is thus nothing other than a deductive logical argument in which proposition 2 is only a premise having the status of a postulate. Thus Alain Boyer, summarizing a widely held analytic position, asserts that there is no place in science for arguments other than
TABLE 7.2
Objections to a Transcendental Argument
* * *
a. deductive arguments, in which the conclusions cannot contain anything more than the premises and in which, consequently, any supplemental inference is illegitimate. These deductive arguments cannot be said to be absolutely certain insofar as the premises can never be anything other than postulates accepted by pure convention (such as, for example, Euclid’s on parallel lines).
b. Inductive and generalizing inferences, which, as Karl Popper showed, have never had any definitive validity because they are dependent upon experience—nevertheless, these inductions help us to orient ourselves in reality (as is the case, for example, with the proposition “All swans are white”).
Thus, as Boyer concludes, “a reasoning is either deductive or non-deductive; in the latter case it is inductive. Tertium non datur.”13 The question here is thus to know whether there are argumentative systems other than simple deduction (subject to arbitrary postulates or axioms) or simple induction (a simple probabilistic assertion, always subject to falsification).
3. The third objection is transcendental arguments’ possible lack of fecundity. Transcendental arguments may in fact be powerless to help us discover new statements, propositions unknown until now. Indeed, because they almost always make recourse to a negative proposition of the form “You cannot say that x,” they can seem to fail to produce positive statements. Can transcendental arguments be anything other than simple machines for refuting past systems or propositions, and, if yes, what really enables them to do so? This is the third question that arises from this objection. These three objections can be presented in table 2.
The New Version of the Argument as a Possible Overcoming of the “Dispute About Transcendental Arguments”
How does the principle of self-reference bring about a different version of transcendental argument, capable of overcoming the current terms of the dispute about transcendental arguments?
In the first place, the initial factum is very different from Strawson’s “mental facts” or Apel’s “facts of communication.” This initial factum is not a mental given (like “I perceive myself as distinct from objects”) nor an empirical given (in fact, we communicate) but is rather a claim inscribed in certain types of statements—a claim to truth and to universality implied in scientific or philosophical statements. It is thus a question of examining a demand at work in the structure of sentences and not of starting from a fact that is considered to be indisputable. In this sense, transcendental argument here does not repeat Kant’s stance—which has been criticized since his time, notably by Karl Leonhard Reinhold, for whom the Critique of Pure Reason’s structure is clearly hypothetico-deductive because it can be analyzed in these terms: if mathematical and physical propositions are valid (the initial factum), then this can be only under certain conditions (intuition, concepts, etc.). But this does not start from a fact that could be considered primary or originary; it is a matter of determining under what conditions certain types of statements (statements that make a universality claim) can be consistent. In a parallel fashion, this does not start from a fact that could be considered true (the discipline of mathematics) but from the truth claim.
The type of argumentation employed can therefore be expressed like this: (scientific) validity claims or (philosophical) truth claims require that a certain number of rules or conditions, that an explanation can bring to light, be respected. Thanks to this formulation, we can understand why this is about a type of transcendental argument, for it is understood in terms of the conditions or requirements indispensable for a given x. At the same time, it allows us to precisely define its difference from the canonical formula, for the factum in question is a class of statements, those that make universality and truth claims.
Thus defined, how can this transcendental argument answer the objections I’ve enumerated? Against Stroud’s and Rorty’s arguments, I can show that it is not at all about establishing some sort of realism against skepticism.14 Against the attempt to reduce the argument to other, more classic forms of reasoning, I can show the irreducibility of this reasoning. From there, I can establish its fecundity.
First of all, to respond to the skeptics, I must say that transcendental argument is not about trying to secure the existence of objects outside ourselves.15 Transcendental argument has no immediately ontological value but, on the other hand, has an epistemological bearing insofar as its concern is to examine the validity claim inscribed in nucleo in any philosophical discourse. Transcendental argument concerns the status of a discourse that makes a truth claim, not the limited contents of this or that philosophical or scientific proposition. In other words, from physics to economics, from mathematics to philosophy, from biology to sociology, a speaker claims to say something true and cannot assert that in the framework of the practice of his science he claims to say things that are entirely false (even if in fact he can make false statements, he does not claim to do so without giving up the particular status of his discipline, which is to want to say the truth). It follows that if the skeptic wants to challenge a transcendental argument thus reformulated, he must understand that the question does not concern the relation between our representations and exterior objects but rather the relation between a speaker and what he says when he wants to hold a discourse that makes truth claims. Can a skeptic go so far as to say that everything he says is false, including the proposition that he just uttered that “everything is false”? It is thus the status of a discourse that is at stake in this renewed version of the transcendental argument.
Next, to the objection that the argument lacks originality or distinctiveness, we must recall that transcendental argument rests upon the ground of the congruence between what is said (the contents of a discourse) and the procedures employed to be able to say what is said. The argument here does not consist in drawing a consequence from a given premise (deductive reasoning). Nor is it the generalization of an empirical given. The cognitive process required by this type of argument is thus to reflect, at the same time as one articulates the effective contents of a proposition, on the procedures of utterance underlying one’s statement. The argumentative process consists in reconstructing the conditions upon which a proposition—or a series of propositions—acquires meaning, coherence, and consistency. Each proposit
ion refers in fact to a network of more or less implicit statements and conditions for its consistency. These are the propositions tacitly presupposed “to be able to say what is said” that transcendental argument means to methodically reveal in every philosophical system. Argument thus comes back to find the grounds intrinsically and implicitly attached to an assertion that makes a truth claim. It is thus a matter here, as Jaakko Hintikka put it, of directly confronting the question, “How do we know that we know?”16—or, to put it differently, “How can a scientist say what he says?” It is clear, in doing so, that this is not a matter of drawing a logical consequence from an initial axiom nor of generalizing a given experiment. Consequently, it appears that transcendental argument, thus defined, possesses a distinctive and original structure—in any case, it cannot be folded back into the modalities of reasoning of the form modus ponens. For all that, this argumentative structure cannot be relegated, as those who hold to a strict logicism would have it, to the group of propositions that are invalid because they are neither deductive nor inductive. Tertium datur [a third choice is possible], we could say, in that transcendental argument thus conceived is “totally new,” and, as Bitbol notes, its employment “could considerably alter our understanding of what constitutes physical theories”17 and, as a general rule, of what constitutes any system of propositions that claim the truth of what they say.
To complete my response to these objections, I must address the third criticism—is transcendental argumentation anything other than a simple machine for refuting opposing statements, such as skepticism, critique, strict positivism (scientism), etc.? Is it doomed to establishing a list of what cannot be said without ever indicating what must be said? This objection, by far the most formidable, requires that we tackle the other major aspect of transcendental argument’s fecundity.
The Death of Philosophy Page 24