ONT Re: Priorisms of Normative Sciences
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Note 2
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3.2.8. Priorisms of Normative Sciences (cont.)
| Reason alone teaches us to know good and bad.
| Conscience, which makes us love the former and
| hate the latter, although independent of reason,
| cannot therefore be developed without it. Before
| the age of reason we do good and bad without knowing
| it, and there is no morality in our actions, although
| there sometimes is in the sentiment of other's actions
| which have a relation to us.
|
| Rousseau, 'Emile', or 'On Education', [Rou_1, 67].
Aesthetics, ethics, and logic are categorized as "normative sciences"
because they pursue knowledge about the ways that things ought to be,
their objects being beauty, justice, and truth, respectively. It is
generally appreciated that there are intricate patterns of deep and
subtle interrelationships that exist among these subjects, and among
their objects, but different people seem to intuit different patterns,
perhaps at different times. At least, it seems that they must be seeing
different patterns of interrelation from the different ways that they find
to enact their insights and intuitions in customs, methods, and practices.
In particular, one's conception of science, indeed, one's whole approach
to life, is determined by the "priorism" or the "precedence ordering"
that one senses among these normative subjects and employs to order
their normative objects. This Section considers a sample of the
choices that people typically make in building up a personal or
a cultural "priorism of normative sciences" (PONS).
For example, on the modern scene, among people trained to sport
all of the modern fashions of scientific reasoning, it is almost
a reflex of their modern identities to echo in their doctrines,
if not always to follow in their disciplines, those ancients who
taught that "knowledge is virtue". This means that to know the
truth about anything is to know how to act rightly in regard to
it, but more yet, to be compelled to act that way. It is usually
understood that this maxim posits a relation between the otherwise
independent realms of knowledge and action, where knowledge resides
in domains of signs and ideas, and where action presides over domains
of objects, states of being, and their changes through time. However,
it is not so frequently remembered that this connection cuts both ways,
causing the evidence of virtue as exercised in practice to reflect on
the presumption of knowledge as possessed in theory, where each defect
of virtue necessarily reflects a defect of knowledge.
In other words, converting the rule through its contrapositive yields
the equivalent proposition "evil is ignorance", making every fault of
conduct traceable to a fault of knowledge. Everyone knows the typical
objection to this claim, saying that one often knows better than to do
a certain thing while going ahead and doing it anyway, but the axiom is
meant to be taken as a new definition of knowledge, ruling overall that
if one really, really knows better, then one simply does not do it, by
virtue of the definition. This sort of reasoning issues in the setting
of priorities, putting knowledge before virtue, theory before practice,
beauty and justice after truth, or reason itself before rhyme and right.
It is not that reason sees any reason to disparage the just deserts that
it places after or intends to diminish the gratifications that it defers.
Indeed, it aims to give these latter values a place of honor by placing
them more in the direction of its aims, and it thinks that it can take
them up in this order without risking a consequential loss of geniality.
According to this rationale, it is the first order of business to know
what is true, while purely an afterthought to do what is good.
It is not too surprising that reason assigns a priority to itself in its
own lists of aims, goods, values, and virtues, but this only renders its
bias, its favor, its preference, and its prejudice all the more evident.
And since the patent favoritism that reason displays is itself a reason
of the most aesthetic kind, it thus knocks itself out of its first place
ranking, the ranking that reason assumes for itself in the first place,
by dint of the prerogative that it exercises and in view of the category
of excuse that it uses, from then on deferring to beauty, to happiness,
or to pleasure, and all that is admirable in and of itself, or desired
for its own sake. This self-demotion of reason is one of the unintended
consequences of its own argumentation, that leads it down the garden path
to a self-deprecation. It is an immediate corollary of reason trying to
distinguish itself from the other goods, granting to itself an initially
arbitrary distinction, and then reflecting on the unjustified presumption
of this self-devotion. This condition, that reason suffers and that reason
endures, is one that continues through all of the rest of its argumentations,
that is, unless it can find a better reason than the one it gives itself to
begin, or until such time as it can show that all good reasons are one and
the same.
So the maxim "knowlege is virtue", in its modern interpretation,
at least, leads to the following results. It makes just action,
right behavior, and virtuous conduct not merely one among many
practical tests but the only available criterion of knowledge,
reason, and truth. Sufficient criterion? If a conceptual rule
is the only available test of some property, then it must be an
essential criterion of that property. This conceives the essence
of knowledge to lie in a conception of action. This maxim can
be taken, by way of its contrapositive, as a pragmatic principle,
positing a rule to the effect that any defect of virtue reflects
a defect of knowledge. This makes truth the "sine qua non" of
justice, right action, or virtuous conduct, that is, it makes
reason the "without which not" of morality. Since virtuous
conduct is distinguished as that action which leads to what
we call "beauty", "beatitude", or "happiness", by any other
name just that which is admirable in and of itself, desired
for its own sake, or sought as an end in itself, whether it
is only in the conduct itself or in a distinct product that
the beauty is held to abide, this makes logic the sublimest
art. (Why be logical? Becuase it pleases me to be logical.)
| It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.
|
| President William Jefferson Clinton, August ?, 1998
Of course, there is much that is open to interpretation about the maxim
"knowledge is virtue". In particular, does the copula "is" represent a
necessary implication ("=>"), a sufficient reduction ("is only", "<="),
or a necessary and sufficient identification ("<=>")?
Jon Awbrey
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