File Buz

On McGinns response to Hookways Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy

I’d like to advance a certain take on the essay debate between Christopher Hookway and Marie McGinn (who commented on Hookway’s “Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy” printed in “Moral and Epistemic Virtues,” eds. Brady and Pritchard, 2002), which is as follows: McGinn’s charge that Hookway is begging the question against the skeptic in his attempted refutation of skepticism makes sense only if Hookway claimed to refute the skeptic, which he did not (I’ll attempt to show).

Hookway’s Argument (in “Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy”) proceeds something like this:

Initial presuppositions:

1. Ethics and epistemology share a common concern with evaluation, an enterprise with underlying issues whose similarity is such that an evaluative epistemic project could gain from attending to its evaluative ethical parallels.
2. Such gains (for evaluative projects in epistemology) include: (a) attaching (as most ethical theories do) importance to affective states (i.e. emotions); (b) Emphasizing the role of virtue in epistemology beyond the scope of self-proclaimed “virtue” theories.

Hookway’s Argument: (Which is an attempt to defend and clarify the second of these initial presuppositions) goes “loosely” like this:

P1. (Something like) Quine’s theory of induction is plausible/correct. This position characterizes the phenomenon of inference (which leads to our acceptance of propositions) as possessing a kind of “immediacy”; on this view, the evidential relations on which we depend aren’t available to reflection, but the “goodness” of the inferences (which lead us to accept propositions) are “felt”, and hence, “the vehicle in our confidence of inference is affective.”
P2. The best way to accommodate the “immediacy” of our evaluations is by appeal to character traits (i.e. virtues, such as “being observant”), which are simply stable patterns of identifying what is emotionally salient relative to the goal of inquiry (i.e. asking the right questions, etc.)
P3: Making such a move has the feature of paralleling the evaluative project of ethics, which pays (what Hookway appears to consider) appropriate consideration to affective states and virtues, attention lacking in contemporary epistemology’s evaluative endeavor.

It is not my understanding that a central endeavor of Hookway’s is to refute skepticism, even though Hookway does mention some implications the acceptance of his premises would have toward placing his project distinct from anti-skeptical endeavors that are (as Hookway thinks) “over-intellectualized”—by their feature of requiring reflective justification ad infinitum. Hookway’s Quinean appeal distances himself from the over-intellectualized justificatory positions, and he makes this clear on pp. 84 and 85 when pointing out how his position avoids two “troublesome regresses” (the “regress of reasons” and the “regress of justification”) that have led other positions to be hard-pressed to refute the skeptic. That Hookway’s view has this virtue, though, is better understood as a peripheral (and positive, if successful) upshot of adopting his premises, and not at all integral to the conclusion for which I take him to be arguing.
It is for this reason that I am surprised that Marie McGinn’s entire rebuttal to Hookway focused (and self-proclaimedly focused) on that one particular facet of Hookway’s position. No doubt, McGinn’s position is, in a nutshell, the claim that Hookway tries to rebut the skeptic and fails. Not only is rebutting the skeptic not a central focus of Hookway’s argument, but I think that, even the extent to which skepticism is addressed peripherally (on pp. 84 and 85) we find no solid affirmation that Hookway thinks that his position literally “defuses” the skeptic, as McGinn claims him to be positing.

My claim here needs some defense, and so, I will site verbatim the three times that Hookway explicitly mentions skepticism in his article:

(1) “And even fewer would insist that taking the role of emotions, or affective states, seriously is necessary if we are to deal in a satisfactory way with what we can think of as the central problems of epistemology—for example, the defusing of skepticism or the study of how internalist and externalist demands in the theory of justification can be integrated.” (pp. 75-76).

(2) “…it is important that education and training equip us to avoid questions that should not be addressed. In other cases (“might I be a brain in a vat?”) the explanation of why it is good not to address such questions may be different again.” (p. 84)

(3) “To answer skepticism, it seems, we need to combine these perspectives: we must be properly confident (subjective) that we are reliable (objective). The worry we now face is that we can only be properly confident that our emotional evaluations are conditionally reliable.” (86)

Fourthly, Hookway (p. 84 and 85) mentions the two “troublesome regresses” that his view can circumvent, and while these regresses are known to lead some to skepticism, Hookway never offers that his circumvention of these regresses is sufficient for defusing skepticism (rather, the much weaker claim, that he has simply dodged these particular regresses).

A careful reading of these sections will not find Hookway proposing that his position is sufficient for defusing skepticism. (1) could be read weakly as mentioning the defusing of skepticism as among the central problems of epistemology. A stronger reading of (1) would be that, few would think that an analysis of emotion would help to resolve central problems in epistemology; any substantive claim that Hookway’s position is supposed to do that job is not made explicit here. (2) merely presents the skeptical question as a “type” of question that perhaps ought not be addressed. He brings up the skeptical question (and mentions subsequently that it might be only epistemically relevant to goals of inquiry within the philosophy class) as a demonstrative analogue to another sort of question (on which he focuses) which should not be asked, namely, questions which are irrelevant to inquiry (i.e. how many grains of sand were on the beach in 1952) and which an intellectually virtuous person would not find emotionally salient. No where in (2) is any substantive claim that Hookway thinks he has refuted the skeptic; all we could make of this is, perhaps, the skeptical question ought not be asked (but not even necessarily for the same reason that the non-salient questions Hookway is discussing ought not be asked!)

(3) would be the best candidate McGinn could site in her attempt to claim that Hookway thinks he has rebutted skepticism. However, even (3) proposes only this: X is a necessary condition for rebutting skepticism. We shall see how my view meets X”. And that’s just what Hookway does; he tries to show how his position meets what he thinks are those necessary conditions; this is not a case of Hookway claiming to have met sufficient conditions.

And, as I mentioned, his discussion of the “worrisome regresses” on pp. 84-85 could lead us no further than to accept that Hookway thinks that his views have circumvented two particular regresses that tend to skepticism—a different claim than the claim that skepticism simpliciter is rebutted by his view.

Here is a bit of what McGinn has made of Hookway:

“The question I want to focus on here is whether the understanding of the nature of our epistemic practices that Hookway develops in the light of ideas that he draws from ethics provides an effective means of “defusing…skepticism” (75)

“…there is something prima facie perverse in trying to answer the philosophical sceptic by appeal to the essential role of emotional responses in our epistemic evaluations, insofar as we do not normally regard the emotions as having any special or privileged connection with veridicality.” (96).

“Moreover, given that Hookway’s account of our ordinary practice acknowledges that the relation between the emotional evaluations on which it rests and objective truth is contingent, it is hard to see how the work of resisting skepticism in a philosophical context is to be achieved.” (99).

“But [a consequence of Hookway’s view] means that I can take my current emotional evaluations as a proper ground for rejecting the sceptic’s questions only by assuming the very thing that the skeptical voice in me doubts—that is, by arguing in a circle.” (100).

There are quite a few other comments on this line because, alas, the paper McGinn’s written has skepticism as its focus.

I don’t intend to be a rabblerouser here and suggest that McGinn’s reply is in any way scandalous or malevolent. Quite the contrary! McGinn has raised a philosophically interesting question, which is what the implications of Hookway’s position would be if the mission were to rebut skepticism. Is Hookway’s position capable of rebutting skepticism? This is entirely a project worth pursuing. My intention to go to some length here was only to indicate what I think was a misattribution; rebutting skepticism was not Hookway’s goal, and so, the question of whether Hookway’s position is capable of providing a response to skepticism is a question different than whether Hookway was successful in his attempt to do so. No such attempt fell within his project, and McGinn’s response didn’t appear to recognize this.

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Out for Blood My Immoderate Response to the Garbage of Dale Spender

Before you read the following, please go here and try to get through this article without wanting to kill somebody. Then pick up your sword and return to the Kemzone.

Dear Dr. Dale Spender:

I hesitate to respond publicly to the festering crap you have been spouting to The Australian, if only because I would really rather that your views not be spread and therefore legitimised. However, theres a fine line between trying to prevent the dissemination of poison by ignoring it and trying to prevent the dissemination of poison by administering an antidote. I think Ill go the antidote route this time around. Ill probably do it by yelling a lot.

So you, madam, are "in touch" with the youth of today, yo? Your deep experience with "educationalism" has obviously prepared you for your new and exciting role as a proponent of cheating. Dont you roll your eyes at me! How on earth is cutting and pasting random material from the Internet and presenting it as original work any different from cutting and pasting random material from printed books and articles and presenting it as original work? Are students who lift whole papers from the Web just "learning"? Are the little bastards who troll my site looking for "free essays" on subjects ranging from The Hobbit to Batman to descriptions of their own aunts simply educationalisming themselves in their own ways? Or are they, in fact, attempting not to do any bloody work? You decide, O Educationalist.

All right...lets assume, for a moment, that youre not insane enough to be talking about students who steal entire papers. Lets assume your warm glow of benevolence extends only far enough to include students who take ideas, sentences, and/or passages from the Internet and pass them off as their own. Lets explore this practice in light of my particular discipline, English literature. Please stop me if youve heard this one before:

A student walks into an Internet cafe, essay assignment clutched in his hot little hand. He has a choice of five topics; lets say hes decided to go with #2, which is:

Discuss the motif of the journey in at least two of the texts we have studied this term.*

At the top of the instruction sheet is a blurb in which the prof explains that the student will be expected to narrow the topic down, finding a unique analytical angle from which to approach it. He will also be expected not to refer extensively to secondary sources but to "close-read" the texts; secondary material should be used for back-up only (i.e., secondary sources can help confirm points by providing necessary information, but they cannot themselves make points).

Let us pause for a moment and explore why the assignment is set up in this way. Is the prof "out of touch" with the ways students learn? Is she attempting to stifle the creativity one accesses when one goes onto Wikipedia and lifts a few paragraphs from an article on As You Like It? No, actually. She wants her students to learn how to analyse. She wants them to realise that analytical writing is not a cut-and-paste process, even with proper citation; it doesnt consist of reading other peoples opinions and repeating them in an essay of ones own. Instead, it involves students using evidence from the texts at hand and coming up with their own (informed) opinions.

Last year, I was starting a group of students on a poetry unit when one young woman raised her hand. "I dont like poetry," she said. "I never get it. When I write essays on it, I always know Im not going to have anything smart to say about it; thats why I like to read stuff about it online. Those people are much smarter than I am, and I can never come up to their level, so I need to read their stuff first."

Those people are much smarter than I am. This student was smart. She made intelligent comments in class; when she was pushed to it, she could find meaning in the poetry we were analysing. However, someone had made her feel as if her analytical opinions werent valid because they "werent as good" as the stuff shed seen online. Well, no...possibly they werent. She was a first-year student approaching poetry at the university level for the first time ever. However, she certainly had a chance to learn to be "as good" as these other critics if she was not bashed over the head with the idea that poetry was incomprehensible to anyone but experts and that she would be penalised for writing anything other than what these experts themselves had written.

First-years tend to see analysis as this great big magical process that is completely inaccessible to them. Some view it as "making stuff up." Some think theyre simply "not smart enough" to understand it. Some buckle down and figure it out...but members of the first two groups may gravitate towards the ultimately harmful process of going to the critics first and deriving information from their work without fully understanding it. If students dont cite the sources properly, theyre cheating. If they do cite the sources properly, theyre filling their essays with other peoples ideas and therefore losing out on the original-content marks.

To return to the theoretical student in the theoretical cafe with the theoretical assignment on the journey motif:

This student, whose name may as well be Siegfried, is baffled by the assignment. Journey motifs? What does that mean? He takes a look at the two texts on which he wants to write, the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales and Book I of Edmund Spensers Faerie Queene. Both texts involve physical journeys, but he cant really think of anything to say about that. Theyre just journeys, right? Whats to say?

Siegfried sits down at a computer and logs on. He types "Canterbury Tales" and "essay" into Google. Oh, hey: heres a whole site full of papers on Chaucer! He checks, but none of them seems to be about journeys per se. Thats all right; heres an essay on estate satire. Isnt it true that life itself is a journey? Dont people take metaphorical personal journeys all the time? Arent we really going on a journey every time we make a decision about what to have for breakfast? Couldnt it be said that Chaucer himself is going on a journey when he makes the decision to write his poem as estate satire? That sort of thing is much more interesting than actual physical journeys, and look at all this ready-made analysis right here on the Internet! Siegfried is ecstatic. Thats half his essay right there.

Now...Spenser. Siegfriend googles "Faerie Queene" and "essay." Damn...nothing on journeys...but heres a paper on allegory, and heres another one on the Redcrosse Knight and the stupid choices he makes. Maybe, Siegfried thinks, he can combine the two approaches and write about how Redcrosses dumb choices take him on an allegorical journey of decision-making! Brilliant!

Siegfried gets to work and busily lifts ideas (and sometimes even full paragraphs, since they fit so well) from the online papers. He adds a generic introduction and a conclusion that repeats it almost word for word. Voilà: an essay...and hes hardly had to think about it at all.

Oh, Siegfried, you cheating, lying little idiot. Even if you had been honest about your sources, you would have shot yourself in the foot here.

Dr. Spender, tell me true: do you think Siegfried has learned anything from his little online adventure? I think he has learned a great deal about misinterpreting his set topic, but very little else. Students who go online for "answers" often do end up lifting inappropriate information because they cant find anything else; they try to make their stolen paragraphs fit into the topics provided, with the result that the prof finds herself blinking in puzzlement--and growing suspicion--at a paper that is supposedly on the role of women but actually on the masculine qualities of heroism...with the word "women" plugged in once in a while. Another major problem with Siegfrieds approach** is that he has found three different essays on three different topics; he is therefore going to have a hard time actually comparing the texts he is discussing. He will probably write two mini-essays in one, joining them together only with a flimsy transitional phrase such as, "As well, in The Faerie Queene...."

Oh, Ill grant you that some students approach plagiarism much more intelligently than Siegfried, finding appropriate material and integrating it smoothly into their texts. If they dont understand the material, they shouldnt be incorporating it; if they do, they are bright enough to think up original ideas themselves and, well, shouldnt be incorporating it. Students dont learn to analyse when they steal. They simply learn to steal. Sure, some of them will internalise and learn from the new information they have pilfered, but they wont thereby figure out how to create such information themselves using their very own brains.

Dr. Spender, O Thou Well-Known Educationalist: perhaps you should descend from the heady heights of educationalism and actually spend some time in a classroom. You may think you are hip and with it when you validate students cheating, but you are actually just ignoring the fact--extremely obvious to many of us--that students who cut and paste off the Internet are no different from students who copy information from books and articles...or from their friends...or from their parents or siblings or guidance counselors. Such students, my friend, have been around since the Dawn of Students. Internet plagiarism is not "just part of the way students learn"; it is a relatively recent permutation of the way students have always cheated.

Yours with great sincerity and quite a lot of uncontrollable fury,

Kem the Merciless

*This ones a pretty standard topic in English classes, actually; Ive seen it used several times. If any of my students have stumbled across this site, however, they should note that though many of them wrote on a similar topic last term, none of them is implicated in the story of Siegfried. The most problematic of their essays were simply a bit off topic. It is, of course, entirely possible to write off-topic papers without the aid of plagiarism.
**Aside from the fact that he is plagiarising, that is.

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