Review of Dancy, Practical Shape

2018

Reviewed by John Hyman, University College London Jonathan Dancy's new book, which he says in the preface he intends to be his last, defends the idea that there is a "common core" to practical and theoretical reasoning, in other words, to reasoning whose purpose is to guide action and reasoning whose purpose is to guide belief, and that "theoretical reasoning is not that core" (p. 2). Defending this idea is a challenge. The conventional view is that reasoning is inference, the "passage of thought" from premises-propositions the reasoner accepts as true, at least for the sake of argument-to a conclusion. This process is subject to rules or norms, which logicians explain and codify, whose purpose is to license or allow some inferences and disallow some others. The rules are not arbitrary, and reasoning is not a parlour game, because the inferences allowed are ones in which the truth of the premises ensures the truth of the conclusion. Truth is therefore the value or desideratum that reasoning aims to preserve. Reasoning can guide action no less than belief. But the conclusion of an inference is something capable of being believed, as opposed to something capable of being done. Hence, reasoning guides belief directly, whereas it guides action only indirectly, by guiding belief.

Philosophical Explorations

Most theories of practical reasoning, Jonathan Dancy tells us in his Practical Shape, 1 first explain practical reasoning on a model of theoretical reasoning independently conceived and then proceed to find practical reasoning lacking in comparison with the model. In this rich and tantalizing book Dancy urges us to turn our attention to the way an account of practical reasoning might look if it didn't have to conform to standards derived from an independently conceived picture of theoretical reasoning. If we managed to thus free our thinking we would find, Dancy argues, that practical reasoning issues directly in action, as the Neo-Aristotelians suppose, but that its form is not the form of deductive reasoning. This move kills two birds with one stone: it helps us into a rich an unprejudiced account of practical reasoning, on the one hand, and it allows us to better understand the nature of all reasoning, on the other. Thus, contrary to what one might expect, an account of practical reasoning is what may illuminate, rather than what may get illuminated by, our view of theoretical reasoning and of reasoning in general. What lies at the heart of all reasoning, Dancy argues, is the tracking of favoring relations: these are the relations in which a set of considerations (considerations giving reality its shape) stand to a kind of response on our part. And what distinguishes practical from theoretical reasoning is the nature of this response. When the response is an action the reasoning leading up to it is practical and when the response is a belief the reasoning leading up to it is theoretical. (PS, 45) Where our response is an action, the considerations that do the favoring favor the action in question by revealing its value. Whereas where the outcome is a belief, the considerations that do the favoring favor the belief in question by raising the probability that the belief is true. Dancy thinks on reflection that truth is itself a value and that once one has sufficiently distinguished practical from theoretical reasoning, one ought to bring them back together and "understand the theoretical side in terms of its 1 In what follows I refer to Dancy's book as Practical Shape or simply PS. The text I have used is Dancy, J. Practical Shape; a Theory of Practical Reasoning, Oxford University Press, 2018. The final draft of this paper has benefitted greatly from insightful comments by Thodoris Dimitrakos, Kim Frost and Megan Laverty. In writing this paper, I have also benefited from ongoing discussions with John McDowell, Robert Pippin and Talbot Brewer, from whom I never seize to learn. own, theoretical values". (PS, 101). In which case, I would add, the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning amounts to a distinction between practical and theoretical values; i.e. between the values that lie in acting a certain way and the values that lie in believing in certain propositions. At this point, one could venture the thought that Dancy's philosophy is Neo-Aristotelian in a deeper sense; for his distinction between practical and theoretical values may be seen as mapping onto the distinction between phronesis and episteme in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. However, I think that Dancy's insightful account of practical reasoning is in fact not Aristotelian. Notice that in this admittedly sketchy summary of his view I have said nothing about the moral. Now, of course, Dancy dedicates a whole chapter of this book to the nature of moral reasoning (chapter 5). But my point in bringing attention to the lacuna in my retelling of Dancy's story is to underscore that his account of practical reasoning is most un-Aristotelian in this respect: there is nothing inherently moral about practical reasoning, on his view of it. Whereas Aristotle's treatment of the syllogismos and of phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics takes place in the context of an interrogation into the question of how to live and who to be. Of course, Dancy acknowledges the existence of moral practical reasoning, but in his view, it figures as merely a species of practical reasoning, whose treatment requires a whole chapter because it is a mischievous kind: one that on occasion issues in (moral) beliefs and not actions. This peculiarity of moral practical reasoning, Dancy takes it, raises a problem for the view that what really distinguishes practical from theoretical reasoning is that in the former case but not the latter the response on our part is an action. For moral reasoning seems to be a kind of reasoning which is both practical-for it is after all essentially concerned with the question of who to be and how to live-and one that issues in beliefs as much as in actions. And he worries that appreciating this may tempt one to view moral reasoning to belief as theoretical and so to fall back into the old habit of thinking practical reasoning as a semi-degenerate form of theoretical reasoning independently conceived. But I want to suggest in this paper that seeing what Dancy sees about moral reasoning puts one in the way of another temptation; one that he does not address in this book and one that I would like to invite him to address here. If we start from these phenomena concerning moral reasoning-the appearance that it is practical and the appearance that it may issue in action and belief alike-we may be tempted to take another route: attempt to save both of these appearances and draw the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning not at the outcome of the reasoning but somewhere else. And, we may also be tempted to think that instead of trying to defuse the sense in which moral practical reasoning may issue in belief, as Dancy seems to be doing, we should, following Dancy's

Philosophical Explorations, 2020

Contribution to symposium on J. Dancy's Practical Shape

Report on TG7,. …, 2003

2011

In Synergetics and his other works, Buckminster Fuller explores the structure of space and its correspondence to human thought process. His books offer a wealth of information about systems ranging from the physical to the metaphysical. Over the last few decades, the systems sciences have explored correspondences (known as isomorphies) between diverse fields such as philosophy, science, and applications. Dedicated to making connections and exploring synergy, these practitioners offer ways to move from being specialized to becoming a generalist. This article will: • Summarize the key ideas of Fuller, particularly geometric systems; • Expand the area common between geometric systems and the systems sciences; • Illustrate the use of geometric systems modeling. For Fuller, the application of thought to Universe reveals fundamental laws (generalized principles). These laws govern the structure and behavior of the physical portion of Universe, but are abstract and weightless. Therefore, they exist in the metaphysical portion of Universe.

The geometric analogy is often mentioned to make logical pluralism plausible, nonetheless, how far the analogy should be taken is an issue hardly ever discussed. Rescher in [24] gave one of the most detailed analyses of the analogy, and at the same time one of the most severe critiques to the idea of taking the analogy seriously. More recently Priest in [20] has argued for the legitimacy of the geometric analogy, trying to reject some of Rescher's criticisms, but I will show that he failed. Here I will argue that Rescher's arguments against the idea that the subject matter of logic is not necessarily its canonical application, but a pure mathematical subject akin to that of geometry, are not conclusive. In particular, I will show that Rescher's denial of the analogy and his rejection of the idea of a pure logic are grounded on some historical fallacies regarding the development of geometry, as well as on an uncritically assumption about the nature of logic as an essentially applied theory.

2004

What are shapes? The ancient Greek geometer is perhaps the most familiar with these entities, but shape is general enough to transcend domains of inquiry. In this communication I present a broad examination of shape and related notions, such as form, boundary and surface. I aim to explore this question and describe the category of shape by identifying some of its most general features. I contrast geometric (or perfect) shapes with physical or organic shapes (the shape of objects), discuss granularity, artifactuality, the cognitive aspect of shape and introduce a preliminary ontological hierarchy of shape. II With regard to lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_%28geometry%29. It is reasonable that geometric entities were used, posited or introduced by the ancients as representations of objects in the world. That geometry has been practically used (art, navigation and surveying, etc.) since antiquity, and that it likely started as a practical enterprise, attests to that. III This is not to say that shapes literally occupy our minds (as if they were physical occupants), only that abstract and perfect geometric shapes are not found outside of the mind. XII [2] and [20] uses the term ‗quality' instead of ‗property'. XIII See the end of section 2.0.

The present work is devoted to the exploration of some formal possibilities suggesting, since some years, the possibility to elaborate a new, whole geometry, relative to the concept of “opposition”. The latter concept is very important and vast (as for its possible applications), both for philosophy and science and it admits since more than two thousand years a standard logical theory, Aristotle’s “opposition theory”, whose culminating formal point is the so called “square of opposition”. In some sense, the whole present enterprise consists in discovering and ordering geometrically an infinite amount of “avatars” of this traditional square structure (also called “logical square” or “Aristotle’s square”). The results obtained here go even beyond the most optimistic previous expectations, for it turns out that such a geometry exists indeed and offers to science many new conceptual insights and formal tools. Its main algorithms are the notion of “logical bi-simplex of dimension m” (which allows “opposition” to become “n-opposition”) and, beyond it, the notions of “Aristotelian pq-semantics” and “Aristotelian pq-lattice” (which allow opposition to become p-valued and, more generally, much more fine-grained): the former is a game-theoretical device for generating “opposition kinds”, the latter gives the structure of the “opposition frameworks” containing and ordering the opposition kinds. With these formal means, the notion of opposition reaches a conceptual clarity never possible before. The naturalness of the theory seems to be maximal with respect to the object it deals with, making this geometry the new standard for dealing scientifically with opposition phenomena. One question, however, philosophical and epistemological, may seem embarrassing with it: this new, successful theory exhibits fundamental logical structures which are shown to be intrinsically geometrical: the theory, in fact, relies on notions like those of “simplex”, of “n-dimensional central symmetry” and the like. Now, despite some appearances (that is, the existence, from time to time, of logics using some minor spatial or geometrical features), this fact is rather revolutionary. It joins an ancient and still unresolved debate over the essence of mathematics and rationality, opposing, for instance, Plato’s foundation of philosophy and science through Euclidean geometry and Aristotle’s alternative foundation of philosophy and science through logic. The geometry of opposition shows, shockingly, that the logical square, the heart of Aristotle’s transcendental, anti-Platonic strategy is in fact a Platonic formal jungle, containing geometrical-logical hyper-polyhedra going into infinite. Moreover, this fact of discovering a lot of geometry inside the very heart of logic, is also linked to a contemporary, raging, important debate between the partisans of “logic-inspired philosophy” (for short, the analytic philosophers and the cognitive scientists) and those, mathematics-inspired, who begin to claim more and more that logic is intrinsically unable to formalise, alone, the concept of “concept” (the key ingredient of philosophy), which in fact requires rather geometry, for displaying its natural “conceptual spaces” (Gärdenfors). So, we put forward some philosophical reflections over the aforementioned debate and its deep relations with questions about the nature of concepts. As a general epistemological result, we claim that the geometrical theory of oppositions reveals, by contrast, the danger implicit in equating “formal structures” to “symbolic calculi” (i.e. non-geometrical logic), as does the paradigm of analytic philosophy. We propose instead to take newly in consideration, inspired by the geometry of logic, the alternative paradigm of “structuralism”, for in it the notion of “structure” is much more general (being not reduced to logic alone) and leaves room to formalisations systematically missed by the “pure partisans” of “pure logic”.

These Are Situationist Times, 2019