--- Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> wrote: >
> >
> My diss adviser Allan Gibbard offered the following objection to the theory
> put forward by Richard Brandt, that the good is what you'd want after
> "cognitive psychotherapy," if you knew the relevant facts and removed
> distorting influences, e.g., an obsessive compulsive wouldn't want to wash
> his hands all the time if he realized that ordinary germs weren't harmful.
> Gibbard said it would be rational to reject cog psychotherapy, especially if
> you knew it was going to effectively change your desires. The obsessive
> would say: but I wouldn't _want_ to be the sort of person who doesn't mine
> germy hands, eeyeeww! --jks
>
Hrrrmph. A clearer example of why we need Foucault (ie; to stop us from syaing fucking stupid things about mental illness like that), one could not ask for.
The whole point about Foucault, and the main reason why he can't be pigeonholed as a "very good sociologist of knowledge" (in fact, he was arguably a *very bad* sociologist of knowledge, in the sense of regularly inventing his history for convenience), is that he takes seriously the fact that propositional reasoning of the sort which the Anglo-Saxon philosphers elevate to a higher status, is actually a very weird and unusual way for human beings to behave. I doubt I spend more than twenty minutes out of any given day behaving in that manner, and I regularly put other people's money at risk, which one might have thought gave me the incentive to be as "rational" as possible.
In fact, if someone was an obsessive hand-washer, and if they then started to reason in the way Justin suggests, we'd say that there was something utterly weird about the way that they related to themselves; something much more difficult to understand than simply washing your hands a hundred times a day.
In fact, all that Foucault says about truth can be rephrased in terms that even WVO Quine wouldn't have any problem with; that all logical reasoning (even mathematics) is a particular behaviour-pattern of one kind of land-mammal on the Planet Earth. It's just that Foucault tries to take this important truth seriously rather than saying it portentously and then going on as if nothing else had changed. But I suspect that a lot of us "don't want to be the kind of person who thinks that way", perhaps because we suspect that that kind of person is French.
dd
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