>
>
>--- 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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