I can now demonstrate that this determinism is unsustainable in this form. If we envision rationality in terms of routines or automatic functioning, of a stock of symbols that combine together according to precise algorithms that we can reconstruct, if we are thus able to predict future combinations, then the scientific discourse must understand itself in the same way. But Simon never claims, when speaking of science, that it is a sequence of routines or a regulated combination of stockpiled structures, and even if he were to do so, it would make his discourse and his activity futile. As a pure sequence of routines, science could not claim to be anything other than a mechanical repetition, always starting over. From this, I can say that the act of reconstructing the scientist’s rationality is a necessary exception to his theory of rationality—Simon’s theory of rationality is not universal because it cannot be applied to its inventor. Because scientific rationality, through its very employment, goes beyond what it says about rationality, it is self-contradictory. And yet—a significant fact—Simon himself recognizes that he cannot explain the rationality at work in the sciences and in particular in the discovery process. He forcefully rejects Karl Popper’s view that discovery is, in the final analysis, irrational but admits that science has not yet achieved a demonstration of the mechanisms that preside over the process of creating new representations. He even speaks of a missing link with respect to the process of creating new representations: “The process of discovering new representations is a major missing link in our theories of thinking and is currently a major area of research in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.”36
It will be said that Simon answers my question here in arguing that we will be able to account for this process in the future. But—apart from the character of this kind of proof by “induction from the future”37 that I have already discredited—it turns out that the model he uses (of computation as a sequence of routines or a regulated combination of stockpiled structures) normally makes the discovery of something new impossible! With his model, Simon prohibits innovation and, at the same time and in the same way, states that a later groundbreaking discovery will demonstrate it. Paradoxically, Simon does not ask future science to confirm his hypothesis but rather, indeed, to demonstrate its falsehood. As it happens, this is not the only “remainder” that Simon acknowledges in his theory. The problem of determining ends and values also remains in suspense. If rationality is a procedure for achieving an end, who decides the contents of the end—for example, Nazism or perpetual peace between nations? However, I am not emphasizing this drawback here but rather the contradiction at work in the discourse of justification.
My analyses’ conclusions are not merely negative, even if they arise from a specific challenge to the contents of a theory x, in this case, a theory in which human thought is reducible to a computer’s functions. These conclusions include an immanently positive side, which I can now present.
Conclusions: A Proposal for a Model of Application
1. I can establish that determinism is, in certain frameworks—in this case, of hypotheses concerning the definition of human rationality—impossible to articulate. Determinism is not only, as Kant would have it in the Critique of Judgment, infinitely improbable from the perspective of certain kinds of phenomena, it is false and this falsity is demonstrable through argumentation. Here we see the difference between this system, which enables a demonstration of determinism’s falsehood, and the current discourse, more or less coming out of the Critique of Judgment (a discourse that I’ve already analyzed), which denounces determinism in the “social sciences” either from “everything happens as if,” that is, from a heuristic hypothesis, whose internal contradiction I have already shown, or from a moralizing viewpoint (determinism—in favor of individual self-interest, etc.—must not be accepted, because it is not good), a viewpoint that Christiane Chauviré has quite effectively criticized in her article “Pourquoi moraliser les normes cognitives?”38 Between the relativism of “everything happens as if” and the moralism of “that ought not be so,” another route remains open for the philosopher: demonstrating that a proposition is quite simply false.
2. Apart from the impossibility of articulating a total determinism, we can also easily show, from the reflexive a priori, why other theories about “human rationality” are impossible: to thus reduce human rationality to a pure calculation of a strictly individual self-interest (a case frequently assumed in economics) amounts to a simultaneous claim that the scientific discourse that maintains this proposition is also the product of pure self-interest—which means that there are no general values, and we can neither discuss nor argue with someone who implicitly does nothing but express a preference or individual self-interest. Briefly, there are many frameworks and theses that can be analyzed from the perspective that I have called the reflexive a priori.
3. Furthermore, these considerations make it possible to outline several concrete positions: thus any political discourse that aligns itself with an ostensibly immutable necessity (divine right, or the necessary laws of economics) or with an ostensibly necessary rationality (like a pure calculation of individual self-interest or an accumulation of routines and automatic functions) can be rejected. We see here that the reflexive a priori, far from yielding no general propositions, leads to a concrete stance, founded in reason. This stance is adopted through consideration of what can be said and what is impossible to say without contradiction or self-refutation. I have demonstrated this for the hypothesis of an entirely determined rationality; I have also shown it to be the case for a conception of rationality as a pure calculation of self-interest. These assertions are not without concrete consequences for an understanding of how a society, a business, an institution, or a state is organized. Consequently, there are many varied fields of application for this general epistemological thesis.
4. At the end of this analysis, I can also propose a schema (an interpretive grid) to enable a consistency test for a hypothesis or a discourse in the human sciences or the sciences of mind, such as Simon’s thesis about human rationality. Indeed, three factors are to be considered: the economist’s discourse, the contents or the form of rationality attributed to agents, and reality, whether this latter be understood as a system of arbitrary rules or conventions (according to a more or less Wittgensteinian thematization) or as a series of immutable laws (according to a classically positivist or even naturalist thematization). If we return to Simon’s theory, for example, we obtain the following concrete schema:
FIGURE 7.1
The Representation of Representations in Simon
Two kinds of lacunae are immediately recognizable in this schema: The first—which I could show (with the same schema) to apply to many “concrete” thinkers—is to maintain that reality is a proof of one’s hypotheses’ validity (this is why Simon holds that his hypothesis is more viable than Milton Friedman’s or an Aztec myth, which Paul Feyerabend could say does the job just as well), even though one also claims that this reality is not knowable. This first lacuna corresponds to the classic problem of reference. The second is clearly the contradiction that appears between the definition of “human rationality” (Simon’s very ambition, in his own terms) and the use of a scientist’s rationality. This lacuna corresponds to the problem of self-reference—and the failure to consider this problem has led to the serious crisis situation that I analyzed in part 1.
And yet we see that this position is rich with concrete views, with positions on particular propositions in particular human sciences, without which the philosopher would necessarily have to transform himself into an economist and become a rigid specialist, in Nietzsche’s sense of an “expert” concerned with only one-thousandth part of the leech’s brain. In my view, the philosopher can determine which general discourses cannot be maintained in a logical and consistent manner. Having said that, I will certainly be accused of putting philosophy in a position “above and beyond,” so that philosophy presides a priori, as queen of the sciences, over a
ll the sciences with a uniform incompetence. This is why, in order to explain my point of view, I should specify things with Simon as my example. Economics, to put it crudely,39 has had two great phases or directions: In the first, at its moment of birth and modeled after physics, economics is understood as the identification of natural laws. In the second, born from the aporias of the first, economics, as well as identifying the laws of reality (physical laws or systems of conventions), must wonder about agents’ rationality (how do individuals act and interact with one another?). It follows, on the one hand, that, like physics, economics raises general epistemological problems (hypotheses’ realism or antirealism)—debates that philosophers can contribute to without for all that claiming a position “above and beyond”; on the other hand, in its latest developments, economics particularly tends toward the problem of the nature of rationality (is reason an appropriate response to a set of exterior stimuli? is it a simple calculation from individual self-interest? a product of genes? adaptation to an environment?). Here, too, philosophers can have something to say in this debate, without “arrogance” (see, on this point, Popper’s discussions of particular human sciences’—for example, psychoanalysis’s—status in light of his epistemology). From reflexive a priori as the congruence between a statement and its utterance, philosophers can show how a given thesis x about rationality cannot be said. That philosophy can converse with this or that science without for all that becoming one among them is thus clearly demonstrated, and its fecundity is thereby shown.
The ensemble of these conclusions confirms what we discovered at the end of chapter 6, namely, how the question of self-reference enables me to outline certain answers to questions relative to reference to the world. Consequently, far from being a uniquely negative model (which I have shown would nevertheless be important, as “every specification is a negation”), the model of self-reference appears as a model that is likely to yield positive and concrete propositions.
These insights about transcendental argument’s undeniable fecundity and the productivity of what I can now entirely legitimately call the reflexive a priori prompt me to recapitulate all my conclusions by showing how we can now answer Jacques Bouveresse’s challenge.
8
Beyond the Death of Philosophy
The key result of my analyses is to bring to light an a priori principle that was not thematized by Kant (who only accepted the a priori in pure analyticity or in the synthesis of categories and intuition) nor by the logical positivists (who deny any a priori other than tautologies, which are, hence, analytic). This a priori, which is not Kantian and does not fall under simple formal logic,1 is the law of self-reference, which makes possible judgments about the consistency of a system or a certain type of proposition and thereby enables the creation, from itself, of a logic of production structured by a revived transcendental argument. This global conclusion yields several insights:
1. This principle makes it possible to avoid the oscillation so characteristic of contemporary philosophy between skepticism and positivism, positions that cannot be uttered in a consistent manner. Their falsity can be demonstrated by means of argumentation. Their reflexive inconsistency requires their abandonment. This gain is clearly important because, as I have shown, these two options run through different fields of contemporary philosophy and are at the origins of the crisis that the discipline is going through today.
2. Next, I can assert that, thanks to the reflexive a priori, we have arrived at a definition of philosophy as science without indexing its methods and problems to a given existing science. Philosophy is knowledge [savoir] (in contrast to learning [connaissance] about a given object or a given ontic region); this knowledge claims to be the truth; in the framework of philosophy, this truth appears simultaneously as a claim to universality (in that philosophy shares this claim with other sciences) and as the necessity of successful self-application of a proposition to itself. Universality and self-referentiality are thus the two dimensions that delimit the sphere of relevant propositions: propositions concerning validity and truth in general and propositions concerning humanity (or subjectivity, or a certain kind of beings in the world, or speaking beings, or if we want to be even more minimalist and naturalist, a certain species of mammals, the species that the speaker belongs to). This precise delimitation assures philosophy of its distinct status. It is presented not as a language but as a metalanguage. Philosophy’s “meta” function can be carried out and displayed without contradiction. On the other hand, the neglect of this dimension is at the origin of all the contradictions encountered by contemporary philosophy today.
3. This field is made possible by a rigorous method of argumentation: transcendental argument. Neither deduction from a given hypothesis,2 nor induction from an empirical fact,3 nor reasoning from the absurd,4 nor a climb toward conditions of possibility from a factum initially taken as true,5 nor a pure formal decomposition,6 transcendental argumentation is presented as a method for clarifying the presuppositions attached to the class of propositions defined above.
4. This recourse to transcendental argument makes it possible to recast the relation between philosophy and the empirical sciences concerning humans, or its relation to what is traditionally called the human sciences, formerly the sciences of mind or of culture.7 Philosophy can make claim to a position not of negation from “above and beyond” but of putting certain general claims of the human sciences to the test. I have shown that any thesis concerning human rationality must be subject to a model or schema in which three factors—not two, as in physics—must be considered: the scientist’s discourse, the contents and the form of rationality attributed to humans, and, as in physics, reality, whether this reality is conceived as a system of arbitrary conventions or rules (according to a more or less Wittgensteinian thematization) or as a series of immutable laws (according to a classically positivist thematization). This conclusion also made it possible to show that the law of self-reference is not unimportant for the ultimate question of reference. As I have proved, establishing the nature of reality sometimes goes through a self-referential type of reasoning.
5. This model or schema makes possible a demonstration of a certain number of more directly concrete theses, such as the impossibility of strict determinism as far as human reason is concerned, or even the falsity of a reduction of the subject to a pure calculation of self-interest. These last results serve only to better underscore the difference between the transcendental argument that comes from the reflexive a priori and the positivist positions that would claim to naturalize humanity or, on the contrary, the more or less skeptical stance of “everything happens as if,” a stance common to a certain version of Kantianism as well as Stanley Cavell.
From a general point of view, I can summarize these insights by shedding light on a theory of signification. As I showed in part 1, the theory of signification can be understood either in terms of the semantic triangle or from a consideration of saying within the said, which can take the form of a pragmatic theory of the utterance (Austin or Searle) or else the form of a phenomenological theory of signification (Levinas). We saw, taking up Putnam’s analysis, how
if we take semantic theory since Frege, we incur a certain number of risks depending upon which side of the famous semantic triangle (sign, meaning, reference) is emphasized. If we emphasize the sign, we risk a semantic relativism; if we emphasize meaning … [we risk] mentalism through intentionality [or] a Platonic objectivism … ; [and if we emphasize] reference (denotation), we risk naturalizing reason or ontologizing meaning, which precedes a metaphysical realism.8
I have carefully examined several of these sides (Rorty, the forms of scientism, Quine) and have shown how, with a theory of saying and the said, the semantic theory can be superseded, not by denying it but in completing it with another dimension. This makes it possible to avoid emphasizing any one of these sides, which always implies a theoretically self-refuting figure. However, my “theory of saying and the said” is neither L
evinas’s theory—who, as I have shown, attempts within phenomenology to climb over the first Husserl’s overly semantic theory—nor even a pragmatic theory—Austin. I have shown the aporias proper to each of these theories; we have seen in part 2 how, in contrast to Austin, the conditions of utterance here are not the consideration of a contingent context in which the individual is immersed more or less by chance. Pragmatics thus does not consist, for me, in defining the context of utterance, nor in specifying the limited circumstances that make a discursive act either successful or failed.9 The reflexive a priori, defined as a principle of performative noncontradiction, supersedes contingent conditions and is the condition of philosophical meaning. Thus reformulated, the theory of signification makes it possible for me to bring out another relation between reference and self-reference.
This is why, from my conclusions thus far, I could judge that I had proposed an answer to Bouveresse’s challenge—that those who would be “the first to wax indignant over Rorty’s proposals”10 (namely, “that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline”)11 would be well advised to say why philosophy can still be considered to be distinct and autonomous. Simultaneously overcoming the self-dissolution of philosophy in a supposedly exact science (scientism) and the renunciation of the concept of truth (skepticism), the reflexive a priori makes it possible, at the end of this journey, to affirm what at the beginning was only improbable, or even extravagant—namely, that philosophy is a distinct, first, and rigorous science. It is a science because a truth claim is intrinsically linked to its utterance; it is distinct because it is able to define its field (propositions concerning truth and humanity) and its methods (application of a proposition to itself and transcendental argument); it is first because it consistently asserts its function as a metadiscourse; and it is rigorous because it is endowed with a mode of reasoning—transcendental argument, which turns out to be rich in discoveries or future propositions. Therefore, the antiphony of the death of philosophy can be purely and simply abandoned.
The Death of Philosophy Page 26