From the EditorPerl, Jeffrey M.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299018
In this introduction to the silver anniversary issue of Common Knowledge, the journal’s founding editor explains the unusual format of CK 25:1–3. Arranged in eleven “conversations” of pieces published since 1992, the format fulfills a promise made in that year to Richard Rorty that a full issue would be devoted, some day, to conversations among people who have inspired in each other “interesting and important” intellectual disagreements. The editor further explains how, over the intervening years, the disagreements among contributors have evolved. While Common Knowledge began as an enterprise of “Left Kuhnian” or “Left Wittgensteinian” contextualists, hoping to get beyond the problem known as “incommensurability,” it has become over the past quarter-century a venue in which the commensuration of paradigms and worldviews, even religions and cultures, is continuously essayed. As he writes: “The question, in other words, is [no longer] whether worldviews are commensurable. The question is whether we should do what it takes—all that it takes—to communicate and reconcile with those we fear. . . . But whoever—let us admit it—takes on the task is going to end up with dirty hands. This job is not one for contextualists in white gloves. . . . There is no clean methodology for reconciling worldviews at odds. . . . By this time . . . our hands are filthy, and our shoes unwearable indoors.”
Commensurability and the Alien MindQuine, W. V.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299042
In this brief essay Quine clarifies and limits his sometimes misconstrued and misapplied thesis of the “indeterminacy of translation.” It does not imply, as some have claimed, that translation is impossible or arbitrary. Nor does it say (as due consideration of the place of observation in science confirms) that arguments from the indeterminacy of translation can be extended properly to a supposed incommensurability of scientific theories.
Potentially Every Culture Is All CulturesFeyerabend, Paul;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299054
With a focus on the role of Achilles in the Iliad, this essay argues that it is a mistake to assume that languages and cultures are closed totalities impervious to influence from the outside and from internally driven transformations. If we eliminate that assumption, several others likewise become untenable, including the assumption that precise meanings for words or concepts are available in principle. Objectivism and relativism are claimed to be equally chimerical.
Exchanging PerspectivesThe Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologiesde Castro, Eduardo Viveiros;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299066
Originally published in 2004 in the Common Knowledge symposium “Talking Peace with Gods,” this article elaborates the nature and consequences of the perspectivist cosmologies of Amerindian societies. Contemporary Western cosmologies regard humans as ex-animals who became differentiated from other nonhuman species through the acquisition of advanced cognitive capacities. Amerindian cultures, by contrast, regard animals as ex-humans who became differentiated from both modern humans and other animal species via a series of physical adaptations. Underneath these physical differences, both humans and nonhumans retain a shared human soul; what is more, each species perceives its own kind as human and all other kinds—including humans—as animals. Viveiros de Castro distinguishes this “perspectivism” from relativism: whereas Western relativism assumes multiple valid cultural models, Amerindian perspectivism holds that human and nonhuman species possess a common values system and cultural framework. While this commonality is ordinarily obscured by biologically grounded, perceptual differences, the gap in perspective may be bridged by shamans, whose gift of adopting nonhuman subjectivities enables them to see other species as they see themselves—namely, as humans partaking in human culture. Perspectivism influences both the practices that Amerindian peoples adopt toward nonhuman species and their attitudes toward other human groups, especially in the context of warfare. The Amerindian warrior’s capacity to overcome an enemy ultimately depends on a shaman-like entry into the subjectivity of another: rather than denying the personhood of his enemy, the Amerindian warrior must acknowledge the affinity between them.
Self-SubversionHirschman, Albert O.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299102
In a survey spanning over half a century of his own work, Hirschman, among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century on political economy, celebrates the ability to undermine one’s own claims and theories. Whereas skepticism toward other people’s work is not noteworthy, Hirschman argues, self-critque is crucial in relation “to one’s own generalizations or constructs.” But self-criticism and interpretive changes do “not in the end cancel out or refute the earlier findings”; rather, they help to define domains of the social world where originally postulated relations do not hold. Exercises in “self-subversion,” while often experienced at first as traumatic, are eventually, as Hirschman’s own career attests, “rewarding and enriching.”
The Achievement of AmbivalenceSegal, Hanna;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299114
Segal traces the development and use of the psychoanalytic concept of ambivalence from Eugen Bleuler to Freud to Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion. Segal’s own argument, ultimately, is that ambivalence is an achievement rather than a problem, though only when it is acknowledged and not repressed. Her essay concludes its survey with Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” and Segal’s own meditation on the cultural implications of failure to acknowledge ambivalence. In their efforts to overcome ambivalence, groups often depend on the most primitive psychotic mechanisms, dealing with aggression by projecting it outward and thereby creating enmities. Merging with a group superego allows for the perpetrating of atrocities in wars and revolutions that would never be pursued in our personal lives. Segal warns that the price for failing to recognize ambivalence in the nuclear age is very high, perhaps even the survival of the human race.
Are There Rationally Undecidable Arguments?Frank, Manfred;Morris, Ruth;Allen, Barry;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299126
Frank in this article treats the disagreement between François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas over whether there are arguments that cannot be decided rationally. Lyotard identifies rational undecidability as the “postmodern condition.” Habermas objects that reasonable procedures do exist that are adequate for the resolution of any argument among reasonable participants. Frank judges Lyotard’s argument as unpersuasive yet blames Habermas for dismissing altogether the idea of rationally undecidable disagreements. Frank then turns from contemporary philosophy to early German Romantic hermeneutics and literary theory to substantiate a claim that unresolvable disagreement exists even amid consensus. “Every consensus,” Frank writes in explication of Friedrich Schleiermacher, “contains a residual misunderstanding that will never entirely go away, and this is why no consensus as to either the meaning or the interpretation of the world can ever be final or universally valid.” Frank moreover cites the even more radical position of Friedrich Schlegel: “All truth is relative—but together with that proposition another must be coordinated: there is essentially no such thing as error.” Frank’s own conclusion, reached after comparing these Romantic notions with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, is that “the shaping of consensus will never lead us to a universal symbolism that everyone must make use of in the same way.”