Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>
> But one argument won't come along that contradicts your whole view of
> the world, because you would have to give up too many other
> certainties. That's another good point LW makes: a statement is
> certain because it is embedded in a totality of propositions that
> are taken as obvious and true.
This I think parallels Barbara Jeanne Fields in her metaphor of the "terrain" that gives arguments their force.
> The aggregation of the statements
> you are certain about is a mutually reinforcing network. (Thus
> our tendency to doggedly stick to our ideas in the face of
> opposing arguments.) I'll blow a Wittgensteinian raspberry at
> at anybody who claims that philosophical debates about God
> or ontology do anything useful.
This seems right. I would suggest that within certain contexts (e.g., leftist maillists where some of the subscribers try to hang on to religion without god) such debates _might_ be useful. I won't argue the point very vigorously. You once interestingly pointed out the parallel between a devotional practice which makes sense of the holy ghost and a social practice which makes sense of (what seems equally odd to me) "self-expression." I don't know whether arguments over that ("self-expression") can achieve anything useful -- though neither can I resist indulging in such arguments every so often.
Carrol