Among educated, thoughtful, sophisticated NPR people, a lot of the time the argument goes meta:
Me: The bankrupt bankers are unbelievably arrogant. The beggars seem to think they still own the world.
Educated, thoughtful, sophisticated NPR person: Well, they’re in a tight situation. A lot of people are gunning for them, and they have to protect themselves somehow. Extorting several trillion dollars from the government by threatening to bring the world economy crashing down was really the only card they had in their hand. I’d say that they’ve played it remarkably well.
This is a good example of the difference between the apodictic reading of a proposition and the problematological reading. From the apodictic point of view, the sophisticated person’s response is adequate. It looks at the face of the proposition itself and answers it based on its meaning, in the context of the tacit (apodictic) background assumptions of the person answering.
Problematologically, however, this response is wrong. The unexpressed context is misread, possibly deliberately*. That is to say, the question to which my statement was an answer was not recognized.
My statement was not answering the question “What would a normally rational, self-interested person do if they were caught leeching billions of dollars from their supposed employer during a period when they were making enormous blunders causing the enterprise to go bankrupt and collapse?”
The question my statement was answering was instead “Why do a few bankers need to be impaled and left out in the hot sun until they expire, in order to give the remaining bankers a clearer understanding of their new place in the world?”
Thus, the educated, thoughtful, sophisticated NPR person’s response was mistaken.
In my first statement, I had left out the context — i.e., had made an apodictic statement — because I had assumed that every normal human being thought as I did. I found this assumption not to be true when the sophisticated person responded as they did. However, responding directly to the sophisticated person’s clueless statement would have been a big mistake, since doing so would have involved me in a pointless, interminable argument about the wrong question. What I needed to do instead was to explicate the problematological context of my original statement, making it explicit rather than apodictic (assumed).
And that’s what I just did.
* “Possibly deliberately” is inexact. It is true that for skilled, self-aware quibblers and confusionists, deliberately misreading the problematology of a question is a primary tactic. However, the phrase “possibly deliberately” makes it seem that the other alternatives are innocent — merely accidental, careless, or ignorant. This is not usually the case. For educated, thoughtful, sophisticated NPR persons, the particular sort of problematological misreading I just exhibited is second nature, part of the very structure of their being, and in fact is the difference defining their species. This particular sort of problematological misreading is essential: whenever we see it, we know that we are talking to an educated, thoughtful, sophisticated NPR person.
*****
This has been a very brief introduction to the philosophy of Michel Meyer. Rhetoric, Language, and Reason (Penn State, 1994) is a good, still short, but considerably longer introduction. It should be noted, however, that Meyer does not advocate impaling anyone.**
**Nor do I! This has been a purely hypothetical example used entirely for the purpose of exhibiting an instance of problematological confusion. Naive commonfolk dabbling in philosophy customarily fixate on the arbitrary example and miss the real point — another instance of problematological error. They have to realize that the fat man and the trolley car are merely constructions of the mind and do not actually exist, and that the truth being expressed is on the higher, transcendent plane.
One well may wonder how Meyer feels about the fact that his most enthusiastic internet disciple is a scurrilous political polemicist.
February 26, 2009 at 10:37 am
Ah. In the comments to this post I suggested to “catch a couple of looters, shoot them on the spot and parade the bodies through the streets. If that didn’t help – rinse and repeat; rinse, reload, and repeat. Until everyone out there becomes convinced that everyone else has gotta be convinced that ‘crime doesn’t pay'”.
Later I heard something similar from Stephen Colbert. This seems like quite a trivial idea, but inevitably it’s percieved as trolling (by thoughtful, educated, sophisticated NPR/BBC persons). Oh well.
February 26, 2009 at 4:38 pm
I remember simpler days when the only thing about NPR that annoyed me was their obsession with including authentic ethnic cooking noises in every other report. Now that they regularly feature propaganda from Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation stooges, I’m really missing the clanking of those woks.
The worst offender is Scott Simon, the biggest patronizing ass in the pack. The day I knew NPR was irrevocably spiritually dead was the day – soon after 9/11 changed everything, y’know – I heard that son of a bitch say that there was opposition to the impending invasion of Afghanistan, but none that mattered. At least Fox doesn’t try to hide its true purpose behind a smarmy liberal facade.
The local Texas A&M NPR affiliate has managed to make mornings even worse with such additions as “Homeland Security Notes,” wherein the friendliest fascist in town gives me weekly updates as to just where we’re going to relocate the liberals when the plutocracy gets nervous about its entitlements.
As to impalement, I’ve always been a big fan of the “putting some heads on pikes in conspicuous public places” school of societal enhancement.
February 27, 2009 at 2:28 pm
I take this post to be a tactful demolition of this comment, but I can’t resist adding a link to this article.
February 27, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I meant to reply to that, but got (even more) distracted (than usual).
I think that a lot of the malefactors are caught in a mush of wishful thinking, testosterone, magical thinking, partial understanding, excessive self-love, ambition, tunnel vision, etc., so that they may not think at all about the consequences for others. Other malefactors are predatory and proud, Randians and Social Darwinists, etc. The first group might actually fit the “non-agency” model we’ve argued about, but they’re still culpable malefactors and I think that in all cases there were moments when they knew what they were doing.
But sophisticated, state-of-the-art, amphetamine-powered math, and multi-layered derivatives that no one really understood, certainly made the self-serving ignorance and misuderstanding easier to attain.
February 27, 2009 at 3:44 pm
There was a pitiful story here about a church group that got sucked into a puny little $50 million pyramid scam. Even the prosecutor felt sorry for one of the terribly remorseful but utterly clueless defendants, even though he was clearly guilty under the law, and even though he’d destroyed the retirement plans of dozens of people he knew personally.
But he was a honky of the honkies, so he got a lot of unearned sympathy and indulgence.
February 27, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Yeah, it’s funny how the sympathy goes. Everyone loves a financial con man. They’re so respectable, and so sorry when they’re caught.
Meanwhile, around the state where I live (Massachusetts) decriminalization of marijuana possession, I heard the statistic that Massachusetts alone imprisoned more than 6,000 people for nonviolent possession (not sale) of drugs last year. Can you even imagine how many people 6,000 people is? It’s more people than you’ll know in a lifetime, for most values of “know”.
And the cops are all worried about what they’re going to do about this new decriminalization. From here:
“Police say they have two main problems with the law.
Many complain that their current citation books lack a check-off box for marijuana possession and they have yet to receive updated ticket books, although temporary forms are available through a state website.
More fundamentally, they complain that officers have no way of determining the identity of people they stop on the street for smoking marijuana. Before the law was changed, officers could arrest them, or threaten them with arrest to force them to show identification. Now, they say they cannot force users to show IDs, and cannot arrest them if they refuse to identify themselves. ”
No ticket books with the correct check mark! It’s like something out of an absurdist play. There’s a true face of America, right there.
February 28, 2009 at 12:22 am
This, good man, has been passed along.
February 28, 2009 at 3:25 am
Oh my I’ve been faux apodictic for all my life and never new.
I think I’m going to sign my name
Robert Waldmann self-aware quibbler and confusionist
From now on. Ah if only I had the guts to claim to be skilled.
OK I admit it. Sometimes I’m an educated, thoughtful, sophisticated NPR person, but usually I just act dumb to amuse myself.
February 28, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Robert, I’ve never thought of you as a faux-apodictic educated, thoughtful, sophisticated NPR person skilled in quibbling and confusionism at all! Never! Instead I think of someone who’s trying to help Delong escape from the toxic paradigm imposed on him in grad school.
If you wish to be dissociated from my seemingly (but not really!) murderous posts, I could shift your link from “Friends” to “Where We Troll”.
March 2, 2009 at 2:28 am
I think that we should help HIV mothers and their children. That being said, we are (in my opinion) increasingly a nation of people who are into instant gratification and screw any negative consequences. Concepts of right and wrong and good and evil have become so corrupted that anything goes. Situational ethics made right and wrong compromised concepts.
March 3, 2009 at 4:25 am
John,
Nice explanation. But how do you know the NPR person thought what you’re attributing to them? What I mean is, suppose it seems to be a good enough explanation of behavior I wouldn’t be able to explain any other way. On the other hand, someone might just be argumentative.
Rich,
I’ve seen the same newspaper stories, and unfortunately, it seems plausible enough that the cops really haven’t been given adequate instructions, and can’t get anything done about it unless they complain to the press.
March 3, 2009 at 4:55 am
I think that it is a good enough explanation of the behavior. But it was a thoroughly silly response to my statement, which was meant to be interpreted as an expression of rage. It’s as if someone were to say “Well, of course he killed the fourteen schoolgirls. He couldn’t afford to be identified.” The NPR statement is true, but the NPT framing (problematology) is objectionable.
I’d say about the same about the police. Framing the issue primarily as an inconvenient paperwork problem shows a pretty twisted awareness, and I suspect that there was something more behind it.