Glouberman. Review of Katz.pdf

8/14/2019 Glouberman. Review of Katz.pdf

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Cogitations by J. J. KatzReview by: M. GloubermanThe Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Dec., 1987), pp. 397-399Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20128615.

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SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 397irreal and built up through the acts of the subject; in either case,

they are transcendent to the act and by no means constituent parts ofit. Ingarden's thoroughgoing anti-psychologism, which owes muchto the early Husserl, is well brought out in Psychologism and Psychology in Literary Scholarship. This essay is in essence a knockdown argument against what Wimsatt later called the IntentionalFallacy : the attempt to reduce the content of the work of art to themental states of its producer. (It is not therefore surprising thatIngarden was for a certain time lionized by the New Critics.)One of the most controversial aspects of Ingarden's view, whichfollows directly from his idea that a work of art is a purely intentionalobject, is his claim that the statements or judgments appearing in aliterary work of art are quasi-judgments, that is, semantic units

which are neither true nor false in the ordinary sense (although theymay be quasi-true or quasi-false within the special confines of thework). As Ingarden points out in On So-Called Truth in Literature, this doctrine is not meant as a depreciation of the judgmentsappearing in a work of art, but instead simply brings out a structuraldifference between ordinary and fictional discourse. Ordinary judgments refer directly or transparently to objects in the real world; theobjects or referents of quasi-judgments are constructs: purely descriptive projections from the semantic stratum of the work into itsobject-stratum. Literary art is the construction of entire fictionaldomains by means of complexes of quasi-judgments.The fictional worldmaking carried out by means of quasi-judgments is not by any means supposed to provide mere pictures ormodels of the real world. In A Marginal Commentary on Aristotle's

Poetics, Ingarden gives an interesting reading of Aristotelian mimesis as the creation of appearances (p. 162), rather than as thetraditional imitation. Literary art provides an alternative versionof the world, not a depiction of it. This goes even for the mostrealistic or naturalistic works. No one, for instance, confusesZola's fiction with journalism; he is constructing, not reporting.Aristotle's view that poetry is more universal than history bringsout the further point that imaginative construction may realize essential human insights (what Ingarden calls metaphysical qualities ) in a way closed to ordinary statements or narratives. Whileworks of art do not say or state truths in the ordinary propositionalsense, they may yet show much that is of basic human significance.As the complete Roman Ingarden Bibliography included at theend of the book makes clear, these essays taken together present but athin slice of the untranslated work. Still, they are sufficient to bringout a sense of the high philosophical value of Ingarden's comprehensive, yet finely nuanced, analyses.?Robert Hanna, New Haven, Connecticut.

Katz, J. J. Cogitations. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,1986. 206 pp. $24.95?Though, in view of Descartes' challenge to theepistemological credentials of reason early in the Meditations, one

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ALISTAIRMORRISON AND STAFFexpects him to resist the claim that the professedly invulnerablecogito argument works through the suppressed premise Everythingthat thinks, exists, interpreters have been hard-pressed to convertcomprendre here into pardonner. Loath to convict Descartes of confusing a psychological point about inferential process with a logicalone about the conditions for validity, many are driven to implausibleconstruals, for example, the ingenious performative construal, onwhich cogito does not express a premise. In this fast-paced studyJerrold Katz, calling on his Chomsky-inspired theorising about natural languages, offers a via media. At the core is the thesis thatvalidity is not always a matter of logical form?hence a rejection ofthe view whose contemporary prestige derives from Frege. According to Katz, the validity of analytic entailments (illustrated by themove from 'John has a sister' to 'John has a sibling') is a function notof logical form but of the senses of the contributing linguistic elements. The cogito argument, Katz maintains, falls into this class.

Thus, comprendre avec pardonner: Descartes is not being evasivewhen he holds that there is an argumentational move from cogito tosum while denying that the argument, as presented, is enthymematic.

The interpretative claim is ambitious. More ambitiously, Katzmaintains that the cogito argument, so construed, works. This requires defense of intensionalism against contemporary criticismfrom a Quinean quarter, and much of the book is devoted to the task.Since the arguments deployed are familiar, and the formalities of thetheory of sense of mainly technical interest, let me focus my remarkson the exegetical thesis.Descartes' distinction between deduction and intuition, used to explain the invulnerability of the cogito argument, purports at leastthis: the argument is so simple as to be proof against problems that(may) affect (other) multi-stepped pieces of reasoning. But analyticentailments can themselves have any degree of complexity. Themove from Trigger is a palomino to Trigger is an animal ismorecomplex than that from Trigger is a horse. And what is complexabout the logical transition from p & q to pi Katz responds withLewis Carroll's point about rules of inference. But this, while classifying the logical move as non-simple, has the implausible consequence that any piece of reasoning involving a rule of inference isenthymematic. Not only is that rather far-fetched in respect ofDescartes' distinction, but it also has the considerable liability of

making the distinction absolute, which is at odds with Descartes'contention that one cogniser, God, can accomplish intuitively what wemortals can accomplish only deductively.Less ambitiously, Katz might show that, whether justifiably or not,Descartes' cogito argument is illuminated by a tentative identification of intuition in this case with non-complex analytic entailment. But this too is rough going, for the following reason. Katz'smodern opponents include some who undo the connection betweenmeaning and sense?thus Putnam's fantasy in which cats turn out tobe automata. Katz deflects this by indicating subscription to weakintensionalism. The validity of the analytic entailment, Cats are

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SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 399animals is secure, but only on the level of types. The Putnamian

discovery does not threaten that. But if security is thus purchasedfor analytic entailments, the cogito argument is in trouble. Descartes is out to establish, of a particular thinker, that that thinkerexists. Just as Tabby may turn out not to be a feline, compatiblywith the analytic security of Cats are animals, so the cogito-arguermay turn out not to be thinking. Nor is this a remote, even paranoid,objection: eliminative materialists have not shrunk from denyingthat there is anything answering to the concept thought. So weakintensionalism is compatible with the falsity of Descartes' tokenlevel conclusion in a way that must cause severe discomfort.This illustrates how Katz's discussion tends to divert attentionfrom what is crucial to the Cartesian argument?in this case theclarity, as Descartes calls it, of cogito. This obscure notion leadsinto the tangles of Cartesian epistemologico-metaphysical analysis,far-removed from Katz's aseptic philosophico-logical treatment.An approach such as Katz's is always open to the charge of anachronism, but is none the worse for that. There are grounds forbelieving, however, that Katz's terms of discussion not only fail exactly to fit the original, but that they exactly fail to fit it. Descartesis a stated opponent of language, often speaking of it as in principlerepresentatively inadequate. Consider here his express repudiationof Aristotelian predicables: genus, species, difference, property, accident. But these very notions are integral to Katz's theory of sense, asthe cat example indicates. Obviously, Descartes' antilinguisticism isnot self-explanatory. Katz's shotgun union of two controversialpoints of view is therefore attended by ill omens. Cartesian scholarswill find much to question regarding the book's substance and evenmore regarding its methodology. It's main interest lies in supplyinga relatively painless introduction to Katz's own views in the philosophy of language.?M. Glouberman, The University of British Columbia.

Llewelyn, J. Beyond Metaphysics? The Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1985. xvii + 238 pp. n.p.

Llewelyn, J. Derrida an the Threshold of Sense. New York: St. Martin'sPress, 1986. xiii + 137 pp. $27.50 cloth, $10.95 paper?John Llewelyn's two books concern theories of understanding and significationin continental philosophy. Beyond Metaphysics? examines Heideg

ger's argument that existentials constitute a prescientific understanding of the categories of scientific knowledge. He exploreshow the hermeneutic circle is beyond metaphysics, if metaphysics isregarded as the epistemological relation of objects presented to subjects. Following a chapter on how Husserl's phenomenology anticipates Heidegger's fundamental ontology, the remainder of the book isdevoted to examining the extent to which some Continental philosophers agree or disagree with Heidegger's notion of the fore-structure

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