Because my brain just won’t shut down tonight.
“Tolerant” Pluralist Postmodern Theologian (TPPT): Look, being a pluralist I’m absolutely committed to the thesis that demons are real. They’re just not what people think they are. What you call a seizure and a neurological disorder, the believer calls the effects of demonic possession. They’re just different vocabularies for the same thing. [Aside: I’m not making this thesis up, I’ve had it or some variant of it said to me on a number of occasions]
Frustrated Materialist (FM): The believer that makes that claim doesn’t think it’s “just a way of talking” but believes there’s a real referent corresponding to those entities.
TPPT: (Sly smile). Look, I’m just being a pragmatist here and am not concerned with questions about truth. For the believer the demons are real. After all, these ideas have effects and that’s gotta be real right? So really the neurologist that calls these things a seizure caused by a neurological disorder and the believer that talks about demons and effects of possession are talking about the same thing.
FM: But they’re not.
TPPT: They’re not? How so? Come on, remember pragmatism? We’re not interested in truth.
FM: Have you heard of Charles Sanders Peirce and Robert Brandom.
TPPT: Sure, both great pragmatists!
FM: Well they’d disagree with your “different vocabularies same phenomenon” hypothesis.
TPPT: What? Why? They’re pragmatists!
FM: Well Peirce said, in his pragmatic principle, that the meaning of a concept is all of the consequences that follow from it; while Brandom said that the meaning of a proposition is all that can be inferred from it.
TPPT: Yeah? So what?
FM: So what? Demonic possession and neurological disorder have entirely different entailments just as the four humors theory of sickness and the germ theory of sickness have different entailments.
TPPT: I don’t follow.
FM: Demonic possession calls for an exorcism. Neurological disorders call for some form of medication and perhaps surgery. These different ontological hypotheses lead to different practices. They’re not just different vocabularies for the same thing and the pragmatists, except for that scoundrel James, say exactly the same.
TPPT: You’re just an intolerant atheist realist materialist that doesn’t respect the worldviews of others!
FM: Well if I were a believer, I can’t say I’d much want to have you as my friend or defender.
TPPT: What? Why not? I respect their beliefs!
FM: It doesn’t seem to me that you do. In fact, it seems to me that you’re rather patronizing. Rather respecting the persons you’re “defending” enough to recognize that they mean what they say and really are asserting the existence of these things, you instead say these are just “vocabularies” and are perhaps potent and meaningful symbols used to describe core things in the human condition to be analyzed by the likes of Jung or Joseph Campbell who are capable of saying what these things really mean. That doesn’t sound like pluralism or respect at all! Rather, it sounds to me like the way adults sometimes pat children on the head when they’ve said something charming but naive. It seems to me that you’re already adopting a materialist and naturalist framework and are just trying to blunt the implications of that framework by saying there are lots of vocabularies to describe the same natural phenomena. Isn’t it really the materialist who’s a pluralist because they respect these others enough to recognize that they really mean what they say and are making genuine claims about beings and not simply claims about meanings?
TPPT: You materialists are so intolerant and mean! Disagreeing with others and challenging their claims is the height of violence!
FM: Are you familiar with the exorcism of Anneliese Michel? Place that in the context of Pierce’s pragmatic principle and Brandom’s inferentialism.
TPPT: I’m leaving now you intolerant cad!
Larval Subjects . 
February 20, 2014 at 7:00 am
You’re parodying a form of cultural or linguistic pluralism here. Easy target. Latour dismisses it just as readily in “An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.” What about ontological pluralism of the sort Latour actually argues for in “AIME”? (particularly relevant here is chapter 7 on the beings of metamorphosis).
February 20, 2014 at 7:22 am
Well said, Levi. Another set of inferences and consequences that follows from belief in demons has to do with the relation between the evolved cognitive tendency to over-detect agency when confronted with ambiguous phenomena and the evolved coalitional tendency to over-protect one’s own group. Demons, angels, ancestor-ghosts, gods, etc. – all are imagined to have a special interest in the behavior of one’s own in-group, and usually the power to punish cheaters, freeloaders and defectors. Shared imaginative engagement with such entities (especially in rituals) heightens hostility toward out-groups, as numerous cross-cultural psychological experiments have shown.
February 20, 2014 at 12:26 pm
Matthew, You argued exactly this two weeks ago and have also defended similar nonsense about astrology. It’s not parody but documentary!
February 20, 2014 at 12:29 pm
I’ll add that I think Latour has jumped the shark in AIME and that his modes and felicity conditions are both bunk and do not understand what religion is. He’s an example of the PTTP that a believer would not want as a defender or ally.
February 20, 2014 at 3:29 pm
Setting aside our differences over pluralism (which this post doesn’t address, so I’m assuming this is another pluralist or a straw man), I have to say that the style of this post strikes me as a little petty. In fictionalizing this dialog, you’ve made FM (yourself) appear intelligent and reasonable, and TPPT appear ignorant (“why?” “I don’t understand!”) and emotional (“I’m leaving…”) (with obvious gendered implications). There must be a reason why you did this rather than simply present your arguments outside of a fictionalized dialog. I don’t see this as meaningful debate, and I wonder why you would take this approach.
February 20, 2014 at 3:39 pm
Jeremy,
I think the dialogue is actually a pretty accurate portrayal of how the materialist, non-materialist position was described on the pluralism. Go back and read the descriptors of the non-pluralist position in the various blog entries. Setting that aside, I’m not sure how the argument of this post is a straw man. What I’ve tried to argue here is that the pluralist positions as they’ve so far been described are not, in fact, pragmatist by the criteria laid out by Peirce and Brandom. I’d be interested in seeing the inferentialist argument– which is at the heart of pragmatism –addressed. It could be, however, that I’m just not clear as to what you mean by pluralism. I’ve asked you for clarification but you haven’t given it. So far it’s difficult for me to see how your position is pluralist at all.
February 20, 2014 at 3:48 pm
I will say that I find your response amusing, however, as it puts the lie to your pluralism. In suggesting that I’ve presented a strawman you’re implicitly claiming that there’s a true portrayal of the pluralist position or, at any rate, your position. Yet you’ve repeatedly argued that there is no truth or that you aren’t interested in truth. When does that principle apply and when doesn’t it apply? I guess what I think at the end of the day is that pluralism is a position that just can’t be consistently sustained and that it is the dream of a sort of view from nowhere. Throughout these discussions it’s sounded as if you’re a little upset with me. I sincerely hope that’s not the case as I really am trying to understand these things, what exactly is being argued, and trying to figure out what’s right. :)
February 20, 2014 at 4:38 pm
Levi, I get frustrated with misrepresentations and demeaning portrayals of fictionalized debates whether I agree or disagree with the positions espoused. I don’t have time to get back into this whole discussion right now, but I thought that the style of this post was particularly problematic, and didn’t want to let it go.
February 20, 2014 at 5:29 pm
Jeremy,
I don’t see how you can defend charges of misrepresentation given your rejection of truth as the claim that something is a misrepresentation requires the possibility of a referent and a correspondence. That said, I genuinely don’t think I misrepresented anything. That was how the discussion went. From the pluralist side the position seemed to be that realism and the assertion that a position can be mistaken is a form of horrible violence and that it amounts to being intolerant. I think this is absurd for two reasons: First, I don’t think taking other positions seriously such that you ask yourself whether or not you could entertain them amounts to violence or intolerance but actually amounts to acknowledging the dignity of others. Second, I don’t think it’s possible for pluralism to be internally consistent. This discussion at this very moment is an example of the inconsistency pluralism runs into. On the one hand you want to say that there’s no truth, while on the other hand you want to claim that things can be misrepresented. One cannot hold both positions together. If we grant the possibility that other people’s “worlds” can be misrepresented then we’re ineluctably led to the conclusion that these “worlds” can misrepresent nonhuman, nonanimate beings in the world. We’re then back to truth. Consequently, we’re either consistent pluralists and hold that misrepresentation is impossible or we hold that misrepresentation is possible and abandon pluralism. We can’t have both.
I also think there’s a deeper problem with pluralism of which this discussion is indicative. The pluralist talks a lot about tolerance and decries the alleged intolerance of the realist that believes there’s truth. However, when the pluralist encounters a “world” that can’t fit with their “coda” or their ontological framework, they suddenly denounce that “world” as you’re doing here. The upshot of this is that the pluralist isn’t really pluralist at all but is only able to embrace other pluralists. That’s not pluralism at all.
Please understand that I do respect your positions and you as a thinker. I hope this discussion doesn’t tarnish our friendship. It’s a discussion that I’ve personally found very valuable in clarifying my own positions and commitments.
February 20, 2014 at 10:08 pm
Levi,
What I argued is that one can be mistaken about demon possession as the most pragmatic account of any given situation. There are times when an exorcism will bring relief to the person in question, and times when it will not. I did not argue that the shaman or priest is always mistaken because there is really just one true material truth that neuroscientists have privileged access to. I argued that one can be mistaken, not only about the meaning of “demon,” but about the meaning of “matter.” In my experience it is just as hard to nail down the definition of the former as it is the latter.
But I do not argue for pluralism in the linguistic or cultural sense you are describing. I do not defend that sort of multicultural tolerance. Pluralism for me is ontological, and has little to do with tolerance. Human groups, just like non-human groups, bring forth their own more or less overlapping ontological domains, with their own truth conditions and methods. In some cases, I reserve the right to be intolerant of another group’s world-enactment because of the way it deleteriously overlaps with mine or others (human or not) that I care about. As Latour argues, pluralism is just as much a war of worlds as it is a peace condition. Yes, peace would be nice, but being a pluralist doesn’t mean being universally tolerant.
February 20, 2014 at 10:17 pm
Great post, Levi! No matter what we agree or disagree on, I highly value your acuity and ability to show “what the stakes are,” so to speak, like your point about how demonic possession entails a whole different treatment process compared with neurological disorders.
Of course, I defer to Jung, whose “equivocal writing” was able to equally accept contrary, mutually-exclusive explanations as holding some validity at a level of truth beyond that of actual fact. But I won’t try to defend this, for in some ways I believe it is indefensible, logically or scientifically speaking, as the whole idea of defending something through reasonable discourse is still very much firmly planted in the solar Hero myth of progress that rejects the ensoulled worldview in the first place.
Here is a potentially relevant essay by Richard Tarnas, who I believe is one of the most compelling proponents of a mythopoeic (or perhaps pluralistic) Weltanschauung with his “archetypal cosmology”:
Excerpt:
‘[The] unprecedented revolution of modern consciousness and cosmology […] led to the hubris of modern “Man”, divinely capitalized and masculinized, the highest form of intelligence and purposeful volition in the known universe, the Cartesian monotheistic ego in a disenchanted cosmos, rationally calculating and exploiting the neutralized object of a world void of intrinsic meaning. And eventually, in a kind of boomerang of the reductionist perspective, even this exalted man was reduced to the “nothing but” of random evolving matter and energy, genes and neurons, instincts and needs.’
Thanks again for your excellent article and for hosting this platform for discussion!
Warm regards,
Jonah
February 21, 2014 at 12:38 am
Matt,
Gotcha. That’s much better, though I do think that we have no reasons for believing in demons at present or anything else supernatural.
February 21, 2014 at 1:27 am
I think our positions are closer than they seem and that we are often speaking past one another in our terminologies, etc. There’s a fundamental disagreement, I think, but one that isn’t ultimately that important in terms of practice. That is, for me the question is what if the referent, the thing-itself (not the proposition, not the vocabulary, etc.) is multiple? It’s a question, not an assertion on my part, but it’s a question that underlies my approach to anthropology. I’ll write more on that when I have more time.
As any good anthropologist since the 80s, I am concerned about the politics of representation, which doesn’t depend on a truth claim, but on a claim to legitimacy of representation (who has the power/right to do the representing?). So it’s in that spirit that I object to the style of this post. For some reason, you choose to represent TPPT as ignorant and emotional – you could have simply written your arguments out without the dialog. True or not, there is a politics to that representation.Whether or not this is actually how the discussion went (if so, it was not a discussion I was following), it’s an unkind and unfair representation on your part.
This whole discussion has been taxing. I’m caught between two worlds – defending ontology to anthropologists and pluralism (or whatever you want to call it) to philosophers. On both sides I’ve been attacked by what I see to be high-profile trolls (I’m not talking about you), and frustrated that I can’t seem to convey what I actually mean and end up going around in circles again and again. Forgive me if my messages seem harsh, but being nice takes more energy than I have at times. I still agree with much of what you talk about, and I value your interest and friendship – that won’t change.
February 21, 2014 at 1:49 am
Jeremy,
I actually advocate a version of pluralism, I just wouldn’t call it ontological. This is why I’m so interested in Luhmann and Uexkull. At any rate, I agree that we’re close on a number of points.
Regarding my representation of the TPPT (and I wasn’t referring to you in that portrayal), I would ask you to go back and reread your own posts and James’s posts and look at how you portrayed the realist who rejects some variant of ontological pluralism. The non-pluralist realist was portrayed as intolerant, potentially violent, as having no regard for others, as being rude, as going about fighting everyone, etc., etc., etc. There was a lot of interesting affect in those discussions that attributed pretty unsavory motives and social skills to the non-pluralist realist. Are those kind and fair representations? We’re all unfair, I think, when we’re critiquing something. And as an aside, you know that you, James, Matthew, Arran, and Michael are some of my very favoritest people on the internets, all of whom have helped me grow tremendously intellectually over the years and who I value as the best interlocutors I’ve found in this medium as we’re working through similar problems.
I can see how being-between as you are would be extremely difficult and frustrating. I don’t see any way of getting around the need for anthropology to be methodologically pluralist. There’s a sense in which anthropology– as I understand it –is doing something like “empirical ontology”. That is, it’s exploring the different theories of being held by different peoples. I think this is an absolutely vital project and I lament the fact that more philosophers don’t read just a little bit of ethnography as it would at least call into some of the assumptions they make about how things are, allowing them to adopt a more critical stance with respect to their own assertions. I think where we might diverge a little is that when it comes to building a common world as you put it, matters of truth do emerge where people communicate with one another trying as best they can to figure out what is the case. Rather than portraying this as one person having the truth and the other being mistaken, I’d prefer to think of this as people working towards truth together with no side “having it”… Though I’m not willing to go as far as Matthew with demons!
February 21, 2014 at 6:47 pm
Hey Everyone, I’ve been following the pluralism debates from afar for weeks now. I haven’t had as much time to participate as I would like, but I have been slowly cobbling some thoughts together as time allows. Here is a long-ish response to the larger discussion you guys might be interested in reading:
http://knowledge-ecology.com/2014/02/21/three-types-of-pluralism/
March 5, 2014 at 1:31 pm
I sympathize with your overall point, but you’ve got this stuff about ”different vocabularies same phenemenon” all backwards. And it affects your argument counterproductively, so I would suggest you revise it the next time you (perfectly legitimately) have a swing at these demons-fans.
“Peirce said, in his pragmatic principle, that the meaning of a concept is all of the consequences that follow from it; while Brandom said that the meaning of a proposition is all that can be inferred from it.”
True, that is quite accurately what Peirce and Brandom says. Propositions about “demon-possession” and propositions about “neurological disorders” have very different inferential properties. But that only establishes – as you yourself write – difference in meaning. But frankly, that’s VERY uncontroversial: “neurological disorders” and “demon-possession” are not synonymous. But that is not denied by TPPT either: He is not claiming that they are synonymous, rather he is claiming their co-referentiality. And co-reference does not imply or presuppose sameness in meaning. The two definite descriptions, “the hurricane named Katrina” and “the incident described on page 4 of the Times”, are obviously different in meaning, but may very well turn out to be co-referential on closer inspection. And that is what a (refined) TPPT-proponent is claiming (rightly or falsely): “demon possession” and “neurological seizure” turn out to be co-referential on closer inspection.
In general, it will also be a bad move for frustrated materialists to deny the ”different vocabularies same phenemenon”-thesis, since this thesis is needed to establish, for instance, correspondence between “pain” and “C fibers”, to take a classical example.
March 11, 2014 at 10:48 pm
I see no gain in a real versus unreal distinction when what sort of real is always the key issue, whereas possible versus impossible has much more materialist meaning.
March 11, 2014 at 11:25 pm
Better to ask what sort of real? Something we can all share and point at like a mirage yet can’t drink. Something we can all taste like banana flavour if we have the taste receptors. Some literary category like the sublime discussed in a million books. All have material basis and cultural elaboration. The least so, well the imagined thing, the imagined structure, in the single brain, but held out as a happening, even a repeating one for this individual, individual brain, such may be its reality, but such ‘ghosts’ can be realised, painted, written about, shared, manifested in some way. Such is possibility and creativity, spooky seeming stuff, yet like Frankenstein’s monster can be brought into fully solid and agentive material form. Matter is incredibly fecund, amazingly so, hardly surprising that we imagine gods or hidden transcendent realms to explain this overflowing actualisation of possibilities. Maybe god is a real possibility, ever actualised? Seems not, although some see divinity in some lives, Christ for example, although interestingly Christ dies, so what sort of real do we think that is? We can all discuss, we may or may not reach much agreement, but we can discuss, agree and disagree on the different aspects of the real that any object realises, but tag it as unreal? Where does that get us? Obviously objects that can bang into things can do that without our describing or experiencing them, but plenty of other objects can be experienced or referred to only in human cultural contexts but such objects play roles in real human events and processes, however briefly or singularly, it is all real, unless like the Greeks you want permanence or nothing!