It’s been a long hiatus.  But I want to pick up where I left off.  I have three issues on the table:

1. Cognitive versus non-cognitive theories of art.

2. The very distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive appears to motivate a fact/value divide—as shown most dramatically in the emotivist, non-cognitive theories of ethics/morals developed by the logical positivists in the mid-20^th century.

3. I am still angling to get eventually to a consideration of the connection of art to meaning—with the corollary of considering if meaning differs substantially from information and/or causal explanation. On this last point, I am courting, it would seem, my own dichotomy.  I, for the most part, have no commitment to proving the arts “distinctive” in some absolute way.  I don’t feel a need to show that the arts do something that other activities we would not consider artistic do not.  But I do suspect that a focus on or concern with meaning leads in different directions than a focus on explanation.  To explain how hydrogen and oxygen combine to create water says little to nothing about the “meaning” that interaction might have. At least, that’s my intuition.

But today’s post focuses in on #2, the fact/value divide.  I think I am stealing my basic insight here from my friend Allen Dunn, but will follow a path derived from Wittgenstein and Dewey to make my case.

Consider the following sentences, all of which (except the last two) use some form of the verb “to be,” and take the form of assertions.

1.  There is a red house. [The speaker points at a yellow house.]

2.  There is a dog.  [The speaker points at a cat.}

3.   Henry is taller than John.

4.  Abraham Lincoln was the 16^th president of the United States.

5.  Abraham Lincoln was the greatest president in American history.

6.  Incest is wrong.

7.  “All men are created equal.”

8.  Hitting your child is wrong.

9.  Moby Dick is the greatest American novel.

10.  Moby Dick is a chaotic mess.

11.  Moby Dick is about a milkman who loses his job.

12.  James has Parkinson’s Disease.

13.  William has prostrate cancer.

The usual, intuitive, reasons for believing in a fact/value distinction are 1. The belief that values are human and are added on top of natural facts and 2. The notion that facts, generally, are verifiable and thus non-controversial, while disagreements over values are rife and irresolvable.  It is easy to agree that this copy of Moby Dick has a red cover, but it is harder to reach agreement over the artistic value of Moby Dick.

On number one: my inclination would be to say facts are as human as values—insofar as facts are fabricated (in the ways Bruno Latour’s work has made familiar to us) and that the mobilization of facts, their use in rhetorics of persuasion that aim to achieve agreement, is a human enterprise.  (Let’s leave speculation about the consciousness of animals and plants to one side for the moment.  I am a complete agnostic on this topic.  We learn more and more every year about animal and plant consciousness.  So I do not deny out of hand that these non-human creatures might have their ways of ascertaining facts and, crucially, bringing apprehended facts to bear in subsequent behavior, and communicating with others.)  For humans, the key for me is that facts are understood as pieces of information that have been produced, and then mobilized in processes of deliberation and the formation of individual and collective intentions. 

In other words, once a fact has been fabricated in the Latourian fashion, it then becomes something that is used in making plans and in trying to persuade others to assist with those plans.  Thus, a hurricane is not a fact until it has been made into one by an assemblage of the symptoms and consequences and causes gathered under the name “hurricane” by meteorologists—and then that name (with all that is associated with it) is used (for example) to justify an evacuation order.  In short, on this account, there is no reason to think the creation of values differs significantly from the creation of facts.  Both facts and values are assemblages that bring together various factors to designate something as the case (i.e. hurricanes cause damage; incest is wrong).

What I take from Allen refers to number two, the idea that facts are non-controversial while values generate endless disagreements.  Allen’s point was that we have many value statements that are almost universally accepted.  Very few people insist that incest is just fine.  Far fewer people call incest OK than believe that alien abduction happens.  We cannot sort things into the fact bin and the value bin on the basis of agreement over the truth of fact assertions as contrasted to value assertions.  The American experience of the past four years has merely brought the idea that facts are incontrovertible to its knees.

At this point, the temptation is to throw up one’s hands and say “anything goes.”  This is where Wittgenstein and Dewey can prove helpful—even though they will not “solve” the problem of disagreement.  But they can help us think about it more clearly. 

The sentences I offer at the top of this post are Wittgenstein-like.  For sentence one, where a speaker calls a yellow house red, we would first ask him to look again.  If he repeated his assertion, we could only conclude that he is color-blind (and would arrange for him to be tested for that condition), or that he doesn’t understand how the word “red” is applied in English (and would proceed to try to teach him the color terms and their application in English.) 

For sentence two, where the speaker calls a dog a cat, we don’t even have known medical condition to appeal to.  Now it is simply telling him that “we” (the speakers of English) call that animal a “dog” not a “cat.”  This looks like sheer compulsion.  There is no underlying reason or fact that justifies using the word “dog” instead of the word “cat.”  It is just the way we do things in English.  The agreement is motivated (perhaps) by its usefulness in facilitating communication, but nothing else underwrites the convention.  For Wittgenstein, reasons stop at a certain point.  This is where my spade turns, he writes.  Reasons come to an end, and there is just the bald statement: this is what we do, this is how we think and act, this is what we believe. 

What Dewey adds to this Wittgensteinian picture is the notion of “warrants.”  Where there are disagreements over an assertion, there are reasons I mobilize in an effort to convince another that my assertion should be credited.  It is important to recognize that the warrants vary widely depending on the nature of the assertion.  The warrants for sentences one and two are, from a positivist point of view, pretty feeble.  The only “verification” is to show that this use of the words “red” and “dog” is actually what English speakers do.  There is no connection to natural facts involved.

When we get to sentence three, Henry is taller than John, we can stand the two boys next to each other.  Here there appears to be a fact of the matter that can be “shown.”  Agreement still depends on both parties understanding the term “taller” in the same way, but there is also (as the positivist sees it) “direct’ evidence for the assertion.

Sentence four shows how quickly the positivists’ view of facts falls apart.  There is no “direct” proof that Lincoln was the 16^th president.  In a very real way, we must take that fact on faith, placing credence in various documents.  We in 2020 can have no first-hand knowledge of Lincoln having been president.  In part, we take that fact on authority.  But we also believe that fact because questioning it would undermine all kinds of other beliefs we have.  Our beliefs “hang together” to establish a holistic picture of our world and our place in it.  To discredit a single assertion can, in many cases, threaten to unravel a whole web of beliefs.  We are, for this reason, “conservatives” in the matter of beliefs, William James says.  We want to conserve, to not upset the apple cart.  We have to have very strong reasons (of interest, or argument) to give up a settled belief.  Saying this, however, indicates the extent to which we believe what it is “comfortable” to believe—and thus points to the ways we can believe things that, to others, seem to patently disregard compelling evidence to the contrary.  On the other hand, “confirmation bias” points to the ways we credit anything that seems to shore up our current beliefs.  We humans can be remarkably resistant to what others will claim are “the plain facts of the matter.”

Dewey’s notion of “warrants” tells us that what will “count” as evidence will vary from case to case.  The evidence brought to back up the assertion that Lincoln was the 16^th president is different from the evidence called up to claim he was the greatest American president.  Of the asking for and giving of reasons there is no end.  But the kinds of reasons offered must be deemed pertinent to the matter at hand. 

Thus, when we get to the statements “incest is wrong,” or “all men are created equal,” we might be tempted to argue in terms of consequences.  There are harmful biological consequences for inbreeding, and there might be harmful social consequences (violence, resentment, various other forms of conflict) from treating some as inferior to others.  But incest was considered wrong long before there was any understanding of genetics, and the harmful consequences of inequality are uncertain.  In the case of incest, there is not much (if any) disagreement.  Certain persons might violate the injunction against it, but they recognize the force of the assertion in their keeping its violations secret.  I am tempted to say that the assertion “incest is wrong” is akin to saying “that animal is a dog.”  It is just the way this community does things.  It is foundational to our being a community (we share a language; we share a belief than incest is wrong and that it should be forbidden).  Our spade turns there.

The equality assertion is more debatable (as is the assertion that hitting a child is wrong).  Arguments (reasons) are offered for both sides.  Disagreements over consequences (installing equality breeds mediocrity; sparing the rod spoils the child) will be rife.  Kant, of course, offers a different argumentative strategy, one that depends on seeing the contradiction in making an exception of oneself.  You, Kant says, don’t want to be treated as an inferior.  So why should you think that it is right for another to be so treated?  Kantian arguments have proven no more decisive than consequential ones.  But the point is that these two kinds of reasons are typical of the “warrants” offered in cases of moral assertions.  Where they fail, we can only say “I have nothing more to offer. Here my spade turns.”  The kinds of evidence/reasons offered are different than the kinds I offer against claims of alien abduction or that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election, but there comes a point where what I deem more than sufficient reason to believe something does not work for others.  At that point, there is nothing further to be done.

 The Moby Dick sentences make the point that in debates over aesthetic values different kinds of assertions will call for different “warrants.”  The assertion that the novel is about a milkman is akin to someone calling a dog a cat.  There is no place to go with such a disagreement; the parties to it are literally not speaking the same language.  Wittgenstein’s point is that only where there is a fundamental agreement—we can call it the minimum required to be part of a community—can a disagreement then unfold.  I can’t play a game of tennis if my opponent says balls that go into the net are do-overs.  Unless we both stand within the constitutive rules of the game, the competition of an actual match cannot unfold.  I can’t have a conversation about Moby Dick with someone who thinks it is the story of a milkman.

But the other two sentences about the novel require different warrants.  To talk about it being the greatest American novel (just as any talk of Lincoln as the greatest American president) requires some kind of articulation of what makes a novel great and some attempt at comparison with other American novels my interlocutor might consider great.  To say Moby Dick is a chaotic mess need not involve any comparison to other novels, while the criteria for “chaotic mess” will be different from the criteria for “greatness.”  In both cases, I will presumably appeal to features of the novel, perhaps quoting from the text.  In the Latour vision, these appeals to the text are acts of assemblage, of putting together my case, calling into presence various available sources—features of the text, the opinions of prior readers and critics, my own responses to the novel’s shifts of tone and topic etc.—to make my assertion credible.

I have included the last two sentences, which provide a diagnosis of Parkinson’s and prostrate cancer, to indicate how warrants in medical science also differ from one case to another.  In prostrate cancer, we have blood tests and various forms of imaging that establish the “fact of the matter.”  In Parkinson’s there are no such definitive tests.  A patient is judged to have Parkinson’s on the basis of a bundle of symptoms (not all of which will be present in the majority of cases) and on the basis of how they respond to certain drugs or other treatments. 

There are two conclusions to draw, I think.  The first is pluralism.  Our reasons for believing assertions vary; we offer to ourselves and others different arguments/reasons/evidence to undergird (or justify) what we do assert, what we do hold to be true or to be good to believe.  (I recognize that I am going to have to think about the word “true” and the work it does when I take up the questions of meaning.) 

The second is that the kind of reasons offered in different cases do not separate out along lines that coincide with the traditional way of understanding the fact/value divide.  A consequential argument about the damage hurricanes produce takes a similar form to a consequential argument about the damage done by physically punishing a child.  In both cases, we might very well point to previous instances to show what those consequences might be—or we may point to larger-scale studies of multiple instances to show the odds of bad consequences, even while admitting that in some cases not much harm ensues.  And if, in the two cases of the hurricane and of child-rearing, we argue that humans should do all they can to mitigate the possible damage, we are asserting that suffering is a bad thing and to be averted wherever possible—an argument that can probably only be underwritten by some kind of Kantian reasoning about the good (the right) of all beings to avoid unnecessary pain.

Various writers—of the ones I know, Kenneth Burke and Hilary Putnam prominent among them—argue that fact and value are inextricably intertwined.  That the two comes packaged together in our apprehension of the world.  In Burke’s account, we have an “attitude” toward things and situations embedded within our apprehension of them.  But this Burke position still accepts the analytic distinction between fact and value, even if that “analysis” comes after the moment of their combination in actual experience.  The pluralism that Dewey points us toward suggests the distinction between fact and value misleads us altogether by suggesting that some things (Facts) are given and incontrovertible while others (Values) are human contrivances.  Better to look at how both facts and values are “made” (just as William James asks us to consider how “truths” are made), while paying attention to the plurality of ways of making humans (and other creatures) deploy.