Haven’t you forgotten something? I’ve been twittering myself for over a year now!

You need to be more outrageous to get more followers. I’d suggest a reality show appearance…

[Deleted]

Yeah, if I were in the least bit interested in what anybody thought about my atheism post, I would left the Comments on.

As you like it; though it’s dogmatism. Whatever happened to “follow the conversation wherever it goes”?

If you say something interesting (i.e., not stuff like “it’s dogmatism”), then I’ll talk to you.

But by email.

Generally speaking, I find the arguments of the New Atheist bloggers both entirely predicable, and singularly uninteresting; I have no intention of providing a forum for them here.

(But I should say that your contributions tend to be slightly more interesting than the norm. Nevertheless, don’t post about it here again. By email.)

Jeremy, while I understand your request, your whole bearing makes me nervous. I am not anonymous. This is why I prefer public discussion.

Whether or not I am interesting enough to be trusted to be worth the time is your call, and I leave it to you. My blog is linked, if you’re interested. If not, fine.

I’m not sure what anonymity has to do with it…

And your position here is slightly odd.

1. You approached me here - not the other way around;

2. You complained - i.e., I’m dogmatic - that I don’t want to provide a forum here for the New Atheist hordes (as if I want a repetition of what has just happened on Jean Kazez’s blog);

3. I offer to talk to you by email;

4. You say - Well no I’ve got to go to your blog…

Why would I want to do that? I’m happy not talking about it!

(I think I was aggressively rude to you once before. Sorry about that. It wasn’t personal. I just needed to make a point.)

I’ll try to be clearer.

(1) I understand why you might not want to get into a conversation about it. But you also clearly wanted to get attention to a post. So clearly you want to talk about it.

(2) Still, refusing to hear good faith rebuttals on it is your call — but difficult for me to wrangle with intellectually. I called it “dogmatism” because turning a deaf era to those who want to discuss the issues that make us most upset is an expression of the worst form of intractability.

(3) I provide my real name in order to give people a sense of trust. I want people to know that I am sincere, so that it isn’t necessary to be unkind or suspicious as a first response. But more than anything else, I want to avoid being bullied in private. That’s why I choose public forums to talk in. And these preferences compound my sense of confusion when it comes to your decision to shut down conversation (2).

I honestly don’t recall when you were hostile in the past; it must have been very muted hostility if I don’t remember! Instead, I’m concerned with affairs in the present tense. Also, I do apologize for hijacking this thread — it wasn’t intentional.

Benjamin

1. Your point 1 is absolutely wrong. It’s entirely possible that one can feel morally obliged to take a public stance, and at the same time hope that actually it doesn’t garner much attention.

2. Your point 2 would only have force in a particular set of circumstances. There’s no general obligation on the part of any particular individual to engage with particular other individuals; and there’s no general obligation to provide a forum for the discussion of a specific issue (or indeed to provide a forum for discussion at all). There are complications here. But they’re not going to play out to your advantage in this particular case.

3. Okay, I understand you not wanting to be bullied in private. But your preferences do not preclude you understanding that maybe one doesn’t want a blog to be overrun in the appalling way that Jean Kazez’s has been in the last 24 hours.

Generally speaking, I’ve just never bought into the idea that if one puts something out in the public realm, one is obligated to talk about it. If I had the power to shut down all discussion about the sorts of issues I raise, and I used it, then that would be ethically dubious. But… well I don’t need to fill in the rest of the argument for you.

Thanks, Jeremy.

(1) I find this to be puzzling. If your post above was not meant to get attention, then I don’t know what it was for! You clearly want to talk about this — hence you talked about it. You must be able to agree to that much, on pain of saying that the post was an irrational activity.

(2) Let’s talk about the relevant complications, then. I’m quite interested to clear the air of dogmatism if possible. But I have to insist that they make sense of good philosophy, as I understand it. In one sense, philosophy is a joint activity confers certain (sometimes unpleasant) obligations.

(4) I do understand not wanting to get “piled-on”, as with Jean. It’s unpleasant, and often unnecessary. There is no philosophical obligation to endure angry mobs. But then again, getting down to the matter of reasoning often seems unpleasant and unnecessary, too; yet there is a philosophical obligation to do it.

The philosopher has to carve out a place where we can suppress populism while raising the vox populi. It is a hard thing to do, so I understand why you would like to avoid it. I encourage you not to. This is a case where I worry that you’re prepared to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Benjamin

Your first point. I don’t understand what you find puzzling. I would say that it’s a reasonably common thought that it is sometimes right to speak out about some particular wrong. This can be the case even if one is entirely aware that one’s speaking out isn’t going to make a material difference. (Indeed, that’s the situation most of us find ourselves in when we speak out.) It can even be the case if you know there’s a good chance that nobody will know you’ve spoken up. Just because… sometimes it’s right to speak out regardless of whether one is heard.

If one is in a situation where one believes that speaking out isn’t going to make a material difference, but that speaking out is still necessary, then one might speak out, but rather hope that nobody notices one has spoken out. This is quite likely to be the case if bad consequences are likely to flow from being noticed. There is moral value in taking the risk in speaking out. But it isn’t surprising if one rather hopes one’s speaking out isn’t noticed.

Something like this is true in this case: the bad consequence here for me is having to engage with people whose arguments I don’t respect about a topic I’m not interested in.

(I’m interested in the sociology/psychology of the New Atheists, but not the arguments).

Benjamin - Philosophy may or may not involve certain obligations. I don’t know about that. I guess one could make something out of that idea (though I rather suspect it’d come down to a definitional thing).

But you’re not going to persuade me that a philosopher is obliged always to engage. You’re not really suggesting that if I lead a TPM club to Michael Dummett’s house, and demand that he discuss his latest book with us, that he is morally obliged to do so? Are you?

Jeremy,

(1) Let’s call your view “performativism”. In your view, as I understand it, you aim to speak, but are not obliged to listen because you don’t expect to be heard.

You’re certainly not alone in having this view. I have many radical activist friends who hold the view you take. So I’ll make this clear using an analogy. Suppose you are a reporter, and you walk up to an activist at the G20 and ask them some questions. Suppose the activist refuses to dialogue with you, for various reasons; they hate the media, or some such. Fine.

But I claim:

i) They cannot coherently say that they didn’t intend to talk about X. They are talking about it, they are speaking out; and it was not an accident that the placards appeared in their hands; so they intended to talk about it, and to continue to talk about it. Moreover, to the extent that they recognize that a speech act is a performance, they necessarily recognize that their action is apt for attention.

Maybe they feel morally obliged to speak out, but don’t especially want to speak out; fine. But they still intended to talk about it. There’s just no room for rational disagreement on this point that I can see.

ii) By refusing to dialogue, they are not philosophers, or at least not behaving philosophically. And that leads directly into my worries (2) and (4).

(2/4) Yes, I expect Sir Michael Dummett to respond to his critics and engage in dialogue, etc., to the extent that he is an active philosopher. Clearly, some fora are better than others; he might be understandably grumpy at the fact that you are on his lawn and he is in his bath-robe. But categorical aloofness on matters in which one is publicly invested does not seem to be philosophical behavior, no.

1. No, that’s not my view. I didn’t argue that I wasn’t obliged to listen *because* I don’t expect to be heard.

But anyway:

your claim i)

Yes, but I didn’t claim that I made no speech act. I claimed that it didn’t follow that I made the speech act because I hoped that it would be attended to. And that’s true. Nothing you’ve said falsifies that point.

Also, I’m not sure exactly how you think you’re using the phrase “talk about it”. If that means “engage” then, no - it’s entirely possible to speak without intending to engage - consider the suicide note, for example. Or the diary entry. (An obvious caveat here is that one might define “engage” to mean any speech act that de facto has an effect. But that doesn’t go to intention.)

Your points 2 and 4 (I’m not sure what happened to 3!).

Yeah, so it is a definitional argument. I think your position isn’t nuanced enough. Sure if somebody dogmatically asserts some position, and then never thinks about it again, then that’s not philosophical. But I can imagine a pathologically shy person who is simply unable to engage with other people directly, but who spends all their time thinking about arguments, counter-arguments, etc, etc, and is constantly revising their work and ideas, etc - and I’d say they were a philosopher and not dogmatic.

And anyway, even if one accepts your general point about dialog, and even if one supposes that dialog has to be overt, it doesn’t follow it has to be these things on any particular occasion. The idea that Dummett isn’t a philosopher because he won’t engage on a particular occasion… it isn’t plausible.

We need to be absolutely clear what’s going on here. I’m not interested in what people thought about my atheism post. I don’t care. But it doesn’t mean that in a different context I would not engage about exactly the same issues. Mind you, I must admit I’m not going to engage with New Atheist bloggers if I can possibly help it. Life’s too short, and all that. If that means by your lights I’m not a philosopher then so be it (mind you, the fact that I’ve only ever studied about a term of philosophy might also do the job!!).

(1) To be clear, I used the phrase “talk about it” to mean whether or not you intended to speak about it, not whether or not you intended to engage in conversation or dialogue. Why did I construe the phrase in this way? Because dialogue presupposes mere talk but not vice-versa, and because the presentation of a speech act entails desire for attention. And since this chain of entailments lead to a conclusion that is contrary to your protestations, one naturally expects that it should be of interest.

I’ll try to be clear on another ambiguity: my use of the word “want”. By “want”, I originally meant “intended”. You claim that “it didn’t follow that I made the speech act because I hoped that it would be attended to”. Quite right. But what you hope is besides the point I wanted to make, which is about intentions. And you seem to recognize that that’s the core issue when you write: “An obvious caveat here is that one might define “engage” to mean any speech act that de facto has an effect. But that doesn’t go to intention.”

I am going to intention. That has been the point of raising the issue of speech acts as performances: they indicate an intention to receive attention. And that is what falsifies your view. You need to address this in order to grapple with the point. And keep in mind, I did invite you to make your “complications” and “nuances” explicit — but I’m still waiting for that.

As it stands, the only way I can make sense of what you’re arguing is if you thought you were just shouting at the mountains, or at a brick wall. In that case, of course you didn’t intend to attract attention. But then you wouldn’t be performing, nor would you be engaged in rational activity. As speech acts go, it gets consigned to the bin that we keep “ouch!” and “damn!”

Aside: I don’t know what a definitional argument is. All arguments involve formulations of terms as implicit premises, of course. And you might find those premises contentious. The relevant premise, in this case, is that performed speech acts necessarily intend to get attention. I think that’s a plausible formulation. This is based on a conception of speech acts that is buried beneath mountains of philosophy of language: Searle’s latest stuff, Paul Grice, etc. We might be wrong, but you’d have to explain why.

(3) was about my preference for public fora. Since we’re discussing in a public forum, there’s no need to pursue it. Unless you want to; I figured it was moot.

(2/4) Your shy philosopher example is quite right, and fine, and consistent with my views. Heraclitus can stay on the mountain and be a good and happy philosopher if he likes.

But that doesn’t even remotely fit the context. If Zarathustra were to come down from the mountain and ignored the townspeople’s objections and left his own doubts unchecked, then that would be the expressions of a dogmatist (at worst) or a devil’s advocate (at best), not a good philosopher. Or — what’s just as well, for my purposes — would be behaving dogmatically on that occasion, not philosophically.

That’s my accusation. And by all indications, I think you’re on the brink of conceding that I’m right. Hence, my original claim that your behavior is an expression of dogmatism has been vindicated. Whether or not you find this to be an interesting fact of the matter is a separate discussion.

“and because the presentation of a speech act entails desire for attention.”

But you’ve done absolutely nothing to demonstrate that point. You’ve just asserted it.

I’ve explained quite clearly why it isn’t the case. I can perform a speech act and not desire for it to attract attention. Suppose, for example, I’m alone on a desert island. I believe in the value of ritualistic worship, but I don’t believe there is a God who is listening. I perform some act of worship. It involves elaborate speech acts. I’m perfectly well aware there’s nobody listening.

I’ve performed a speech act, but without any desire it should receive attention.

Okay, now maybe you want to say that sort of thing isn’t a speech act, in which yours is an argument by definition (that’s an example of one for you - the term “speech act” includes the desire for attention within its definition). In which case, your point is uninteresting, because in those terms my post is not a speech act. If not, if you accept the desert island example is a speech act, then my point stands.

You realise, in effect, you’re calling me a liar here. I say to you - look I think that speaking out is important; I think it’s important that one puts stuff out there, not because one wants it to be read, but because one wants to stand up and be counted if one should happen to be read. You say - “Ah no, you must want to be read, otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.” Well, I’m telling you, that’s not how it was.

What is so difficult here?

Also, again let’s be clear. It is your claim that speech acts necessarily involve a desire for attention. I’ve given you several examples demonstrating that this isn’t necessarily the case. The onus is on you to demonstrate that your claim is right. You’re making the substantive claim here.

I slipped by using the word “desire”. I should have said “intend”. Sorry for the persisting confusion — it was a slip of the pen (or the keyboard). If it helps, I noticed it just after I posted, and immediately winced in regret.

Regarding your desert island case, see my remarks on shouting at the mountains. As speech acts go, it’s among the “ow”s and the “damns”. Notice that it’s not a rational activity or a presentation. Also, very different from posting on an ostensibly philosophical blog. So your point is merely gratuitous (not to mention that I made the point before you did).

On “lying”. I think you’re in error, yes — that is, I don’t believe you when you say that you didn’t intend to get attention. That’s because, if I were to assume that you didn’t intend to get attention, I would
a) have to assume you are irrational — but that would be uncharitable, so I’m not going to do that;
b) could not make sense of your claims about “standing up”, etc., which (if moral activities) trivially involve drawing attention to your dissent.

Do you see why I have argued this? Would it help for me to explain what I mean when I invoke Grice and Searle?

Hang on, you can’t simply change from talking about “wants” and “desires” to “intentions” - as if the difference isn’t significant. The confusion here is a large part of the trouble (and it’s on both our parts: you started out talking about “wants”; I talked about “hopes”; you started talking about “intentions” - and I sort of followed - but then you moved to “desires”).

Your claim is that all speech acts - except for shouting at mountains, etc - necessarily contain communicative intent.

No problem (though actually I think there are problems - but let’s leave this to one side). But this isn’t about the nature of speech acts. This is about what I *wanted* or *desired* or *hoped for* when I wrote the piece. See your initial claim here:

“But you also clearly wanted to get attention to a post. So clearly you want to talk about it.”

Now that isn’t true. It’s a claim about my *psychological* state, and it’s wrong. And it’s wrong for the reason it’s always been wrong (even if it is true that all speech acts contain communicative intent).

So again, it’s this analogy:

I’m Shostakovitch. I’m writing the 2nd movement of my 2nd quartet. It’s a time of horrible anti-Semitism. I want to make a statement about it. And I want it to be public, but actually I don’t want anybody attending to it. I just want it out there. It’s important to me. So what do I do: I write the violin, viola and cello parts so they create a backdrop that sounds like it’s out of a Handel choral piece (i.e., Christian!). And then the first violin plays a melody over the top that is explicitly based on the scales used in traditional Jewish movement. So I’m making a profound statement about compassion and common humanity.

Sure this sort of thing has communicative intent - and in a formal way it calls for attention. But do I actually want it to be attended to? Is that my hope?

No it’s not. Because the consequence would literally be death to me and my family. (Happily it wasn’t attended to - at the time - and Shostakovitch survived, albeit by the skin of his teeth).

And that’s the point. It’s entirely possible to want to say something, but to hope that nobody hears.

I think I’ve demonstrated it.

Oh, and by the way, sure you can say that if x won’t engage with group y, then it’s dogmatism. I think it’s a daft definition of the word - since I can imagine the least dogmatic philosopher in the world engaging with all sorts of people, but refusing to engage with group y because of damned good reason z, and they end up dogmatic by your lights - but it certainly isn’t a nonsense.

It’s not interesting, though - which is as I claimed.

Some of your comments here are right in addressing what I said (warts and all), but not at what I meant. What I meant was “intend”, and messed things up by using words like “wants”, “desires”, etc. “Intends” and “wants, desires, etc.” are not synonyms, except in careless everyday usage, which I’ve fallen into. I understand if that has made it hard to follow, and regret the slip-up. But intention is the key to the point I want to make.

The Shostakovitch case is at least on track, but it falls into the same category as shouting at the mountains, “damn”, and so on. Your blog post had the form of an argument, and its message was explicit in a Gricean way. (By which I mean: you presented a thing with the intent of having it received by an audience, and you intended for that presentation to convey a belief/proposition/etc. to an audience as being the result of your intention to present it.) By contrast, I think you’d be hard pressed to seriously maintain that your blog post plays the same communicative role as the symphony. The underlying themes of the symphony do not pass the Gricean test — it is an intent to present a thing to an audience, but not necessarily to have that presentation be apt to convey beliefs or implicatures — let alone presenting the intent to communicate these beliefs.

The point about dogmatism is off base, because you haven’t presented any “damned good reason” for evading your philosophical commitments. Hypatia and Socrates had damned good reasons not to talk in public (though they did anyway). You, by contrast, are attacking people on the internet for their criticism of somebody else, and then deciding to remove yourself from a reasoned debate about it. Even now, I’m not sure if my posts are going to be deleted if I get too close to the meat of the matter. But that moment is going to have to come soon, once we’re done with the philosophy of language and metaphilosophical throat-clearing.

Okay, well the misunderstanding stuff just happens on the internet; there isn’t the same instant correction, etc.

The Gricean argument is besides the point: I would never have engaged with you at the start about the formal nature of speech acts and intentions. It’s not interesting (in this context - it is interesting).

(Also, you’re wrong about the Shostakovitch thing: the presentation is entirely apt to convey implicature (it’s just Schostakovitch was gambling that nobody would be skilled and knowledgeable enough to decode it.))

The simple fact is that I had no “desire” or “hope” that the piece would be read. The fact that it contains arguments, etc., doesn’t negate this point. For me, a blog post is partly just a writing exercise: this one had its own logic - which indeed is a logic implying communicative intent - but there’s no necessary connect between it and my wants and desires.

So I say again - and so far you’ve been entirely unpersuasive in your arguments - I had no desire, or hope, or want for it to be read. In fact, quite the opposite. I would have rather it hadn’t been read.

(This isn’t quite as far-fetched as it might seem. I’m not part of the New Atheist wars. I’ve never engaged in them. And people on this blog virtually never engage on this topic. It wasn’t particularly implausible to think that this post might slip by unnoticed: especially given that it went up at the weekend.)

Also, as a matter of fact, I’ve written a number of books that I’d rather weren’t read (indeed, at least one of them I was hoping as I was writing it that it would never be seen by human eye). And you know what, Benjamin, if that fact isn’t explicable within the context of a Gricean analysis, then so much the worse for Grice.

Here’s a tip. You’ll do better with this stuff if you come to recognise there is a disconnect between a person’s psychological state (including their hopes, wants and desires) and whatever is formally implied - (and frankly in this particular instance, I’m not convinced it is) - by their actions.

On the other thing: The fact that I haven’t given damned good reasons, doesn’t mean there aren’t damned good reasons. If I choose not to discuss these with you - and I will choose not to do so - it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If you accept that damned good reasons mitigate against dogmatism, then you must accept that I might not be dogmatic - it’s just you have no way of knowing whether I am or not.

Anyway, I’m just about done with this now. It’s been reasonably diverting, I guess.

Hey Benjamin

You’ve got me thinking about this business of speech acts and intent, etc. So leaving aside our disagreement, I’d be curious to hear what you think about the following scenario.

A radical Palestinian group kidnap my wife, and they tell me that I have to create a banner, and then wave it around on one of their marches. The banner is to say: “Death to Israel.”

I love my wife, so I do as they ask.

Okay, so there’s clearly communicative intent in the act of waving the banner; and in the words on the banner. So in that sense I’m intending to communicate a particular message.

But is it also true that it’s my intention to attract an audience? I think we can say:

a) I have no desire to attract an audience;

b) I hope I don’t attract an audience;

But can we say it’s not my intention to attract an audience?

We can certainly say my actions are not *motivated* by an intention to attract an audience. And I think most people would deny it was their intention to attract an audience (they’d say - “Bollox, my intention is to save my wife’s life.”)

So what do you think? I’m curious.

Hello Ben: I’d try to describe to you what I’ve experienced when I tried to intervene in Butterflies and Wheels (the only new atheist blog which I’ve ventured into), but I’m sure that you will argue that I shouldn’t have experienced what I experienced, that my experience is not valid. Most of us are fairly complicated, illogical creatures, and we write things that we hope that no one will read. Why do we write them? Out of a sense of duty, out of sense of solidarity with someone who is being attacked, out of boredom. In most of us, feelings preponderate over reason and logic, and if I feel attacked by a mob in a blog, I feel attacked by a mob, even if the 23 people who attack me sign a sworn
affadavit that they do not constitute a mob. That feeling is ratified if others have the same experience. Of course, I will tend to seek out others who ratify my experience as will you. Perhaps, unless one has very sure evidence that the other does not experience what he or she experience or that said experience leads to crimes and/horrors, prudence dictates that one recognizes the diversity of experience, and lives and let lives. There are some people online (I’ll not name names out of good will), who refuse to accept gestures of peace. However, that is not the case with you, I’m sure. Peace, Paz, Shalom.

I’m afraid that once my contributions to the misunderstanding are out of the way, a lot of the most recent post just falls by the wayside as well. Again: you are right about hopes, desires, wants.

But now you’re treating the main issue of intentions in parentheses. In your example, the composer did not think people had the technical expertise to understand. In some ways it is much like Grice’s example of the man who leaves behind a picture. (http://www.hist-analytic.org/Grice.htm) Hence, it fails to be even an implicature.

Perhaps you think Grice is wrong. However, of the two of you, it seems that he has far more nuances, in the sense that he has an articulate position. If you want to argue against him, a first step would involve making your views on this minimally explicit. So far, you have not tried.

The advice is unmotivated for that reason. We already both understand that the main issue is intentions. But, if Grice is right, then intentions are among the psychological states that are formally implied by speech acts of the relevant kind (not ouches and damns and yelling at mountains, etc.). There’s no room for disconnect if the two are connected.

Finally, I do not mean to sound curt (or worse), but: I do not ask for advice from those who by all appearances are in a dogmatic mood. I can’t — and it is not even reasonable to ask anyone to, unless there is or ought to be a trust relationship involved. Still, I do thank you for your interesting opinions on these matters.

Apologies — the post above was made before I read your and Amos’s recent posts.

Jeremy, that’s an interesting case. I don’t think it meets Grice’s criterion. It is not an intent to communicate the relevant message, “Death to Israel”, in such a way that it produces a belief in which the audience recognizes you as presenting them with some message that is intentionally presented. The person under threat in that situation doesn’t want to intend to present that message in that way. But I do think there’s clearly an intention to perform something, albeit under duress, and as a means to an end. I’m not sure there’s any way around that.

Amos, yes I’ve seen you receive some pretty rough handling. Me too. (Check out the Oliver Kamm thread. Phew!) But the life of reason and curiosity earns you rough handling everywhere. Still, you know you’ve run into good honest people when you try your best — and even if they get angry, they think twice about it the next morning after cooling off. That’s the only foolproof test of good faith that I know of, and since I’m hardly a saint myself, it’s the only test I’m comfortable hoping that I can pass. Pax.

Benjamin - The thing about intent and my particular blog post is that once the misunderstandings are cleared up we don’t disagree about the thing I’m interested in (the hopes, wants, etc).

But anyway, now I’m interested in the speech act thing. I’ll read the Grice and get back to you.

Sure thing.

Amos

“Why do we write them? Out of a sense of duty, out of sense of solidarity with someone who is being attacked”.

Well exactly. But I don’t think Benjamin is actually disputing this. I think his claim is that one cannot engage in a communicative act without intending to speak to an audience (it’s part of the nature of the act).

Benjamin - I haven’t read the Grice yet (I’m not that quick), but I just got a glass of water, and I’ve come up with another scenario that I’d like your opinion on.

I live in a totalitarian state. If I’m caught criticising the state I will die. My moral code tells me that there is no moral *obligation* to speak out against the system because I’m not required to sacrifice my life. But I do think it is necessary to risk my life. It’s worth risking my life. So I come up with the following plan.

I devise a broadcast system. It’ll broadcast my message of freedom to the whole society. Everybody will know it’s me talking. But…

It’s set up so that it will only actually broadcast on 25% of occasions. I have no way of knowing whether my message will go out over the airwaves: I just know it will on 25% of occasions.

In this situation, what is my intention?

I guess you’ll argue that I’m not making a speech act unless the thing is broadcast (it’s just shouting at mountains otherwise). But that’s weird because it makes my intention conditional upon something I have no knowledge of or control over… (also I could add a delay variation into the broadcast system, so that my intention is determined retroactively).

Let me try to sum up my impression of the whole situation.

There are two groups of people, the old and the new atheists.

The new atheists feel that atheists are one of the most persecuted and oppressed groups in society. Most of them feel personally persecuted or oppressed qua atheists.

The old atheists feel that they are not especially persecuted or oppressed. It’s has been over 40 years since someone has asked me what my religious beliefs are.
Even when I attended parents’ meetings in my son’s Catholic school, no one ever questioned my obvious lack of enthusiasm and participation.

The new atheists feel that the old atheists are traitors to the cause, are Uncle Toms. The old atheists don’t feel that the cause of atheism is particularly urgent. Hence, when the old atheists venture into new atheist blogs, suggesting, for example, that atheists and liberal religious believers should unite to deal with the world’s “real” problems, they are attacked.

The old atheists feel that they have been attacked by a mob; the new atheists feel that they are defending a just cause against traitors, sell-outs and Uncle Toms.

Being oppressed has subjective and objective dimensions. The subjective dimensions are impossible to measure, but are real, as any gentleman who tries to hold a car door for a radical feminist learns. Thus, the new atheists’ feeling of being oppressed by society is real.

So too with the old atheists’ experience of being attacked by a mob in the new atheist blogs.

The experiences of new atheists and of old atheists are real and valid. However, as long as each group tells the other group that they should not feel what they feel, that they are not entitled to their experiences, this senseless war will continue.

I know that the above is bit simplistic, but I think that it outlines the situation. Thanks.

Amos. I’ll leave this here because it’s you; but I really, really, don’t want the New Atheist stuff on here.

Jeremy,

I’m fairly sure that case passes Grice’s expectations. The message is intentionally broadcast, in such a way that our hero intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of his intention. There is surely a gap between the intention and the performance in your scenario, but that doesn’t alienate it from Grice’s proposal.

Amos,

Yes, that has to be a part of it. And there are sociological/psychological reasons for that generation gap; post-9/11 hangover sorts of reasons.

But also, there’s a debate over strategy. Most affirmative atheists claim to believe in strategic diversity. Accommodationists claim they exclusively believe in invitational rhetoric. Both groups will sometimes deviate from their doctrines, in ways that are by now quite familiar, but there’s an underlying debate there.

Framed in this way, the claims of the affirmative atheists seem to me clearly right. Some people need calm debate. Other people — esp. authoritarians — need to be shouted at. It depends on situation and personality. Obviously calm debate is preferable, though, and most academics are embarressed or nervous at the prospect of getting flustered, so naturally the vivaciousness of the affirmative atheists might seem peculiar and out of place.

Of course, these points about strategy may or may not apply to the present situation. I only bring it up because your remarks were phrased at a wide level of generality.

Jeremy: Thank you. I’ll not belabor the subject any more.

Benjamin

Hmmmm.

“in such a way that our hero intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of his intention.”

So you’re saying that even if the utterance isn’t broadcast the intention remains the same?

Or is it that the intention is conditional: If the utterance is broadcast then…?

The same intention to broadcast at some unknown point or other applies to both the 75% of cases where it isn’t broadcast and the 25% where it is. But needless to say, the intention alone isn’t sufficient for the act. The relevant speech behavior itself is also necessary. Suffice it to say: 100% of the time, the intention is there, but the speech acts occur only 25% of the time.

“The same intention to broadcast at some unknown point or other…”

Are you sure that’s right?

Surely it either gets broadcast on this particular occasion or it doesn’t (in terms of the way I’ve set it up) - there are no unknown points here, are there?

You’ll have to fill in some gaps for me…!

(There is a point to all this, which may or may not become clear, depending on what you teach me in the meanwhile!).

If I have understood your thought-experiment correctly, then by hypothesis, our hero has a standing intention: to produce a certain recurring pre-programmed message (x) through a radio relay at some arbitrary times (t1…tn) during some period (p1…pn). This is just to say that our hero does not know when, in particular, (x) will be broadcast: he is ignorant of when and how each (t1…tn) will coincide with (p1…pn). He only knows the all broadcasts (t1…tn) will make up 25% of some period of time (p1…pn).

If I’ve got that wrong, then I’m not sure what else you have in mind, or if I’ve understood your thought experiment correctly. If he does not have that kind of standing intention, then what else could his prior intentions be? I can only think of two other logical possibilities. We might attribute novel intentions to each pre-programmed repetition of the same broadcast, or we might attribute different intentions to our hero depending on whether or not the pre-programmed broadcast is sent out. But neither option seems at all plausible.

Benjamin

Ah, I think maybe I wasn’t clear enough with my thought experiment. It’s not that at all.

Our hero - let’s call him Mr Sock - has the following thoughts:

1. I’m not required to sacrifice my life, therefore, I’m not required to speak out against authoritarian regime (let’s call that Ditchkinsville!).

2. I am required to risk my life: it’s reasonable that I risk my life.

Here’s what I’m going to do:

3. On *one* occasion I go to my specially constructed radio station, and speak a message of resistance into a microphone;

4. There are 2 special things going on here:

a) The microphone is attached to a machine that will determine according to some specified percentage whether or not the message will go out. I have no way of knowing in advance whether my message will go out. If it doesn’t though, that’s it - it hasn’t gone out;

b) There is a delay between my speaking and the broadcast (maybe only 5 minutes, but there is a delay). I cannot alter the outcome during this delay. And I can’t find out what it’s going to do during this delay.

So the pertinent difference between this and what you’ve been responding to is there is a greater chance the message won’t be broadcast than will be broadcast, and Mr Sock knows this in advance.

Hope that’s clear. Sorry for not being clearer the first time around. I tend to be hurrying with this stuff all the time (which partly explains the confusion we had earlier about wants and intents - I didn’t read your posts closely enough!).

Ah, I see. In that case, the intention is as we expect it regardless of the outcome: your hero intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of their recognition of his intention. The speech act fails if it is not broadcast, and succeeds if it is. It seems to be the same intention either way, because your hero recognizes they are taking a risk for something regardless of the outcome; his attitude towards the risk involves a single intention, so why should he have separate intentions in the case of outcomes when it comes to the act itself?

No matter what happens, it isn’t a case of shouting at the mountains in the sense I’ve been talking about. By “shouting at the mountains”, “ouch”, etc., I am referring to the illocutionary point (the speaker’s point). The relevant part of the speaker’s point is the direction of fit of the speech act. When you’re shouting at the mountains, you are not expressing a belief, nor a desire, nor are you making any promises or commitments: you are just expressing. This is not at all the same case as when a person attempts to perform a speech act for others, but happens to fail; that (presumably in this case) involves the intent to communicate desires, beliefs, etc.

Okay. So let’s shift percentages.

If he sets up the machine so that it only broadcasts the message 1 in a million times.

Is it still the case that we’re talking about an “intent to communicate desires, beliefs, etc”?

(What I’m interested in here is whether people might have *intentions* that are in tension: not merely beliefs, desires, etc).

Thanks for indulging this, by the way.

Depends on where the obstacle comes from. If it’s self-imposed, then we have reason to believe that the hero is confused and doesn’t really know what he intends to do, and the speech act can be dismissed as non-rational. The authorities can even say: “[hero] didn’t know what he was saying, don’t take him seriously.”

If it’s not under your hero’s control, on the other hand (say, the authorities are constantly blasting static that makes it hard to communicate) then the intention is unchanged.

But our hero isn’t in the least bit confused. He knows exactly what he’s doing. And he certainly has *an intention* that is absolutely clear:

To make a speech that has a 1 in a million chance of being heard by an audience.

And from the point of view of his moral framework this is explicable (I hesitate to use the word rational for… well a number of reasons).

Well, what he’s doing is confusing, at any rate, whether or not it’s confused!

You might say, he intends to risk conveying an intention in such a way that the broadcast of x should produce some effect in an audience by means of their recognition of the intention. But, my goodness, what’s the point of all this, and what’s the point of the self-induced obstacles? It is hard enough trying to cement Grice’s polyadic relation in one’s mind without producing more and more barriers for oneself.

It flirts with irrationality — which makes it a hard business to attribute any intentions to him, at least on independent grounds. Of course, we can attribute intentions to him by hypothesis; but this is unrevealing, since it will just provide either you or I with an argument that succeeds by fiat alone. And if we fix the scenario so that it were intuitively informative, we would have to make sure that the thought-experiment is set up in such a way that its purpose is not to moot our intuitions under the weight of highly exotic conditions.

The dilemma I’ve posed is this: it’s either an intent to get attention, or it’s irrational behavior. Your scenario makes it hard to tell which is going on. But you seem to lean towards saying it’s irrational. Now, let’s suppose that’s so. Why might this matter?

Here’s my attempt at an intuition-pump. Suppose we have a different situation in the same style. Our heroine, Janine Moonenbaum, is suffering under the harsh totalitarian regime in the land of Ophecoynistan. Janine wishes to do a similar act of resistance as your hero, except that she is full of terror. So she decides to perform a symbolic action that she thinks is more or less guaranteed to gather no attention at all, but means something to her. That is, in the harsh land of Ophecoynistan, where it is constant night, the seas are red, and the stars have gone black, she intends to (for a moment) turn off the light of the lighthouse to show the people of the dark city below just how bleak their world is. But she knows that most people will pass it off as a momentary power failure, and she knows she could do better if she just had the gumption.

To me, this is clearly a case of a person who does not know what they want to accomplish. Unlike your case, it’s *obviously* not rational behavior. There are two putative intentions: one, to make people aware of a dire situation (which she thwarts); and another, to engage in therapeutic behavior (like screaming at the mountains). Moreover, and so much the worse, according to a long (somewhat plausible) tradition in the philosophy of social science, without being able to attribute rationality, it is nigh impossible to attribute any sophisticated symbolic intentions on independent grounds. For lack of boldness, her intention is an inscrutable mixture.

Still, suppose you were to absolutely insist (I think implausibly) that she surely must have EITHER one intention, OR the other. Either she is doing something irrational, or she is doing something therapeutic. Suppose, further, that her goal is to make people aware of the dire situation. In that case, I would want to know what viable moral system would recommend or laud such an irrational action. It seems to me that at some point, even the enlightened egoist has to put him/herself on the line, most effectively by challenging the dysfunctional system of social cooperation, and hence, by challenging its underlying conception of rights and duties. There’s usually room for prudence in moral action, of course, but our dystopian thought-experiments have raised the stakes so high that it is hard to see where prudence has any elbow room.

Thanks Benjamin. I think we might be getting somewhere (well maybe!), but I can’t reply right now - busy, not dogmatic (well I might be dogmatic, but I also need to do a few other things before I get to this). But I will return! ;)

Oh, by the way, Grice’s:

“your hero intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of their recognition of his intention.”

Is almost identical to the way that George Herbert Mead specified communicative intent. (Habermas goes through it in one of his books on communicative action.)

Sounds good. :) Sorry if that last one was a bit long — we’re delving more deeply into territory in philosophy of language, social science, and ethics. Hopefully it’s clear enough.

Interesting. I knew some stuff about Mead and Cooley beforehand, but didn’t know Grice was tacitly or explicitly summoning symbolic interactionism (or just stumbling upon the same ideas with a kind of Oxford clumsiness). Which book by Habermas? Theory of Communicative Action (vol.1 or 2)?

Just quickly, but:

It’s volume 2 of Theory of Communicative Action (first 100 pages or so, if I remember correctly).

I suspect Grice just stumbled on the (more or less) same idea. Mead has this notion that meaningful communication emerges as we develop the ability to take the attitude of the other towards our own communicative gestures. So, for example:

“When, in any given social act or situation, one individual indicates by a gesture to another individual what this other individual is to do, the first individual is conscious of the meaning of his own gesture…in so far as he takes the attitude of the second individual toward that gesture, and tends to respond to it implicitly in the same way that the second individual responds to it explicitly. Gestures become significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in an individual making them the same responses which they explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals, the individuals to whom they are addressed.” (”Mind, Self and Society”, p. 47)

So as a result of this ability, we’re able to address symbols with communicative intent; specifically, at the point at which we become aware how a symbol is likely to be interpreted, that awareness is incorporated into the communicative exchange, and symbols can be employed in the expectation that they will, or will not, arouse a certain response.

Go figure. It goes to show that it is a minor tragedy that Habermas is not widely read in Anglo-American philosophy of language, and instead is largely confined to sociology departments.

Sorry I wasn’t clear. That’s not Habermas. That’s Mead. Habermas talks about this stuff in Theory of Communicative Action.

But the argument is Mead’s. (It’s basically a social behaviourist specification of the Self. Long story. It’s worth taking a look at his collected papers.)

I will get back to you on our substantive discussion. Just need more time to reply to that.

Oooh look. Empirical support for Mead:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=of-two-minds-listener-brain-pattern-2010-07-27