The first passage below is from Colin McGinn’s book Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997). I’ve chosen it by way of prompting reflections on how we learn to be moral (I’m going to ignore here any putative distinction sometimes made between ethics and morality, indeed, I think it’s only relevant when the latter concept is used in a descriptive sense, while I’m here relying on a normative conception of what’s ethical or moral). From a Platonic perspective, it may be the case that, for the individual, learning to live an ethical life is not first and foremost a matter of being taught how to be ethical, say, in the manner in which one is taught the rules of grammar, or the facts of geography, or the names of birds. In other words, and in a peculiar sense, ethical understanding or moral knowledge is a different kind or peculiar sort of knowledge, at once both robustly objective and subjective, involving both a “knowing that” and a “knowing how” (that is, both propositional and non-propositional knowledge) in a way not conspicuously intrinsic to most things we conventionally group under the rubric of “knowledge.” All the same, Plato does seem to have held that we learn to be moral, that we can become, as Aristotle taught us, habituated to virtue, that we can learn to live virtuous lives (and such virtuous living is not necesssarily confined to lives in the familial and intimate realms of daily life, for its standards are equally relevant to arenas of collective action or the public realm). I hope to speak to this question again in a future post that builds upon the material broached here so suffice for now to keep in mind that any references to “teaching” or “learning” to be moral may be qualified if not clarified so as to incorporate and reconcile what Plato (or Socrates) meant in the Meno by claiming that virtue cannot be taught with the ostensibly contrary message in the Protagoras that argues for the “teachability of virtue.”

“[O]rdinary people—which means all of us—find [the] story mode of moral discourse [i.e., the form which includes parable, the play, short story, the narrative poem, the novel and the film] uniquely palatable and nutritious; it seems perfectly designed to engage our moral faculties. Our moral understanding and the story form seem fitted for one another. No rote learning is necessary: it all seems to flow quite naturally. This is the way our moral faculty likes to operate. It is almost effortless to take in a story, pleasant even, though the story may be replete with moral discourse. The novel, in particular, is a text of a very different kind from the scientific treatise. It is also very different from the philosophical text, which is what philosophers, naturally, are most comfortable with. Thus the novel form has tended to be ignored by moral philosophers: it is not, for them, the place to look for canonical expressions of ethical truth. Yet, quite obviously, it is for most educated people one of the prime vehicles of ethical expression. (Film plays a similar role for the less word-minded.) In reading a novel we have ethical experiences, sometimes quite profound ones, and we reach ethical conclusions, condemning some characters and admiring others. We live a particular set of moral challenges (sitting there in our armchair) by entering into the lives of the characters introduced. [….] Stories can sharpen and clarify moral questions, encouraging a dialectic between the reader’s own experiences and the trials of the characters he or she is reading about. A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (Or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially in contemporary culture. Our ethical knowledge is aesthetically mediated.”

I think McGinn’s conclusion is largely correct: our ethical knowledge is, indeed, “aesthetically mediated,” insofar as we learn about the virtues (whatever particular cluster of same our worldviews place emphasis upon), or how to be moral through narrative aesthetic forms. And such story forms are not just “secular,” for they are often the products of religious traditions. In fact, I happen to believe that for many individuals who at least nominally identify with religious worldviews, this aesthetic mediation assumes in the first instance a spiritual form (‘spiritual’ because its meaning is a bit wider than what we typically denote by the adjective ‘religious,’ and thus, for instance, we can include under this heading the Hellenistic ethical ‘therapies of desire’ as defined by Martha Nussbaum). Furthermore, to the extent that such aesthetic mediation is not “spiritual” or religious, I would contend it is less reliable or dependable as a form or medium of moral knowledge or ethical instruction, especially but not only when we are young. Put differently, spiritual and religious literature is ideally suited for the aesthetic mediation of moral knowledge, for learning what it means to be virtuous, for it is here we find “exemplars of goodness.” It is not the only or even primary way in which we learn to be moral, for we obviously and ideally learn to live a virtuous life, as both Confucius and Plato would remind us, from those who are responsible for our upbringing: our parents, caregivers, teachers, and others who are, it is hoped, suitable “role models,” those entrusted to take care of us until we reach the “age of reason.” Intriguingly, both Plato and Confucius appear to agree that learning to be ethical for children entails a training in the arts, particular arts to be sure, but there is something about the arts that these two philosophers find integral to the habituation to virtue, as a necessary yet not sufficient condition to being moral. And even as adults, we might learn something about virtuous living from those with whom we come into meaningful personal contact in daily life:

“It is not implausible to think we are elevated by others who are more developed than ourselves in their striving for harmonious hierarchical development and for a valuable life. We are aided and encouraged along our own path of development by their striving for self-development and purer feeling; contrast the effects on us of encountering those with a sour mixture of one-upmanship, self-aggrandizement, desire to dominate or destroy, and other festering emotions, the effects of wending our way and bending our attention to their motivations and trajectories. [….] We all know people, I hope, who bring out the best in us, people in whose presence we would be embarrassed to speak or act from unworthy motives, people who glow. In their presence we feel elevated. We are pushed, or nudged further along a path of development and perfection; rather, we are inspired to move ourselves along, in the direction shown. [….] We want to find a way of living whereby our best energies and talents are poured out so as to speak to and improve the best energies and talents of others. We want to utilize our highest parts and energies in a way that helps others to flourish.”—From Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (1981)

In her book, Divine Motivation Theory (2004), the philosopher Linda Zagzebski makes an argument for what she terms a “direct reference” theory of the good. I will not go into the philosophical background and specific premises of her argument but want to invoke it in support of the idea that one of the primary ways by which we learn to be moral is through stories of one kind or another, narratives in which we learn about what it means to live a “good life:”

“I have proposed that ‘good’ is defined by direct reference. If so, it is plausible that ‘good life’ is defined by direct reference as well. It is a life like that, which is to say that we know it when we see it [Plato has some things to say about how this is possible]. Describing lives is one of the functions of literature and biography. [….] If we defined the good life as a life like that, we do not do it independently of referring to persons whose lives we want to imitate. We imitate persons we regard as exemplars, and we imitate lives we regard as exemplary, and these are not independent activities. [….] So what is a flourishing life? I propose that it is determined by what the exemplars say it is. [….] The exemplars make the determination of good lives in the hard cases. If ‘good life’ is defined by direct reference independently of a ‘good person,’ then the life of a good person can come apart from a good life. However, if I am right, that is not the way these concepts work. The lives we want to imitate are lives of persons we want to imitate.”

One lesson we might—or should—draw from Zagzebski’s proposal is that our choice of narrative sources for “exemplars” is fraught with consequences. For example, are contemporary novels, or films for that matter, invariably stocked with characters or protagonists who we might christen “exemplars” of the good life, of characters who exemplify virtuous living? And even if frequently bereft of such characters, might these stories nonetheless have some role to play in clarifying what the struggle to live morally entails, of what the moral life involves, of the relation between evil and the good, or the obstacles and difficulties faced in attempts, among people like us (so to speak) to become virtuous? After all, the vast majority of us are not living lives that call to mind a Socrates, the Buddha, Jesus, St. Francis, Dorothy Day, Maimonides, or “Friends of God” in the Islamic tradition. The hoi polloi, in other words and by definition are not prophets, saints, ascetics, seers, sages, or simply pious and wise teachers. At the same time, save Jesus’ Christian theological status as God incarnate, these exemplary spiritual figures are men and women who provide us with concrete models of human goodness, of what it means to live a spiritually flourishing life, of how to simultaneously engage in the processes of individual self-discovery and self-actualization, of how to incarnate and express moral and spiritual values, not in the sense of slavish and literal imitation but as inspirational exemplars worthy of ethical emulation in the widest sense as part and process of psychological and spiritual (or eudaimonistic) individuation.

The problem of moral development is the problem of discovering the conditions necessary and sufficient for the manifestation of the virtues and the actualization of value(s). Each person is morally obligated, from the perspective of virtue ethics, to sincerely and persistently endeavor to actualize, conserve and defend those values he or she identifies with as the product of self-examination and the prerequisite of self-direction and self-realization. The specific cluster of values so identified may (and usually does) vary from person to person and no one individual is capable of realizing all such values, although one might nonetheless recognize and appreciate all values (or value as such), especially insofar as these values have become identified with other individuals. Individual values identification brings in its wake the intrinsic and intangible rewards of personal fulfillment and flourishing. We are all alike with regard to values-potentialities by virtue of our human nature, but we differ, owing to genetic inheritance, upbringing, circumstance and so forth in the manner of values-identification and actualization. We might see this as the interdependence of value-actualizers, serving to confirm our inherently social nature as human beings. Such interdependence, furthermore, is capable of (has implications for) filling out the meaning of true community.

Perhaps contemporary literature (at least some of it) provides us with the narrative and biographical equivalent of “middle terms” that modulate for us the gap between ideal (and idealized) moral and spiritual virtues, and the morally messy lives lived in the shadows of such overwhelming or intimidating goodness: most of us cannot “stare” into the Sun, the Platonic metaphor of the Good in the Allegory of the Cave, but we can nevertheless look upon, and thus learn from, that which it illuminates. And even if one attains the Platonic vision of the Sun at the summit of dialectical ascent, one is obligated in Plato’s account to return to the Cave, to make the corresponding dialectical descent into the realm of particularity and the concrete, the world of the “ten thousand things” (wanwu) in Chinese philosophy, and it is with that world our contemporary novelists and filmmakers can be fairly said to be well acquainted, if sometimes or even often in a confused or uncertain manner, at least with regard to ethical values and moral insight. The extent to which we envisage contemporary literature, or any narrative vehicle, playing such a role appears to importantly depend upon our ability to make aesthetic and ethical discriminations and judgments as to what is morally and spiritually availing, another issue Plato addressed in as much as he asked how we can come to recognize goodness unless we are not already, in some intuitive or inchoate but no less real sense, in possession of or have some acquaintance with such goodness.  

In a future post I hope to expand upon some of the ideas and themes introduced and sketched here in a preliminary fashion.

 [Cross-posted at ReligiousLeftLaw.com]

The following is the second half of an installment begun at the Ratio Juris blog in which I introduce analogy (Part 1) and metaphor (Part 2) in conjunction with posting of my select bibliography for same: Analogy & Metaphor: A Select Bibliography and Introduction, Part 1. As I was having problems posting it there I thought it would be equally appropriate here at the Literary Table. Be forewarned: it is fairly long.

Philosophers have repeatedly insisted, both in defense and in dismissal of metaphor, that it is deeply different from literal communication because it is indeterminate, complex, rich, evocative, and openended. They have failed to notice that not all metaphors fit this model, and that much literal speech does.—Elisabeth Camp (2006b: 21)

Metaphor is at once fully aesthetic and fully semantic. It is fully aesthetic, in that its production calls for artistry and its understanding calls for taste. Without some minimal sensitivity to certain aesthetic values, we’d be deaf and dumb when it came to metaphor. Metaphor is fully semantic, in that it constitutes one of our most basic and indispensable strategies for equipping words and phrases with referents, equipping sentences with truth conditions, equipping utterances with speech act potentials, and so forth. If we were completely deaf and dumb when it came to metaphor in particular, we’d be as good as deaf and dumb across the board. Our possession of language, not just our enjoyment of it, would be disastrously compromised.—David J. Hills (2006b)

[E]ven the most austerely ‘scientific’ models operate through analogy and metaphor. The Rutherford-Bohr model depicts hydrogen atom as a miniature solar system. Darwin’s concept of ‘natural selection’ is analogous to the ‘artificial selection’ practised by animal breeders. ‘Plate tectonics’ is about thin, flat, rigid areas of ‘crust’ floating on a highly viscous but fluid ‘mantle.’ Linguists talk of the ‘brain mechanism’ by which grammatical language is generated. And so on. Scientific theories are unavoidably metaphorical. [….] Sometimes a ready-made model can be taken over from another branch of science—for example Fresnel’s model of light as the vibration of an elastic medium. Sometimes the key elements come out of everyday life, as in von Neumann’s model of economic behaviour as a ‘game,’ or the molecular-biological model of DNA as a genetic ‘code.’ This heterogeneity is not a serious defect. The scientific value of a theoretical model, as with all metaphors, does not require it to be literally equivalent to the system it represents. It resides in the variety of phenomena that it makes plain, or suggests. This understanding seldom comes through elaborate formal analysis. [….] Indeed, analogy and metaphor cannot be driven out of scientific reasoning. Scientific ideas cannot be communicated through the ‘literal’ medium of formal logic. [….] [In fact], the history of a scientific discipline can be traced through its changing repertoire of models and metaphors—what Gerald Holton calls its themata. Modern physics, for example, deals in ‘forces’ and ‘fields,’ or ‘waves’ and ‘particles,’ and has no place for pre-modern themata such as ‘sympathies,’ and ‘attractions,’ or ‘essences’ and ‘effluvia.’ [….] It is clear that scientific maps, models, metaphors, themata and other analogies are not just tools of thought, or figures of speech. They are the very substance of scientific theory. As sources of meaning and understanding, they stand on equal footing with explicit verbal and symbolic representations.—John Ziman (2000: 149-150)

Having introduced analogy and analogical reasoning in Part 1, here we’ll do the same for metaphor, a far more difficult topic to tackle, and no less so even if our aim is only, as it is here, to provide a taste of the subject matter. If metaphor is construed as involving a gap between the conventional meaning of words and their occasion-specific use, its analysis would appear to fall largely within the rubric of pragmatics (or ‘speaker’s meaning’) rather than semantics (the meaning of an utterance or sentence in a given language and involving ‘truth-‘ or ‘assertibility conditions,’ i.e., epistemic justification). But if we think of metaphor as somehow continuous with literal speech (which need not deny a ‘contextualist’ component: metaphor as a contextually variable semantic meaning), semantics earns pride of place in the first instance, and thus pragmatics is parasitic upon semantic analysis, such analysis a necessary condition yet perhaps not a sufficient condition for understanding metaphorical utterances. Pragmatics clearly has something to contribute to an understanding of metaphor for, as Elisabeth Camp (2009: 265) explains, “the same sentence can receive dramatically different metaphorical interpretations in distinct contexts. For instance,

‘Juliet is the sun.’

will be interpreted differently when spoken by Romeo (very crudely, as meaning Juliet is beautiful), by his friend Benvolio (Juliet is dangerous) and by his rival Paris (Juliet is the most important socialite in Verona).” Relatedly, metaphorical utterances have been associated with Gricean implicature (Grice 1975), although a body of work suggests metaphor is more often about “direct and explicit” meaning, that is, about “what is said.” All the same, recent research about the “mental processing of unfamiliar and  novel metaphors does find something like Gricean “indirectness” applicable: “it seems plausible to take ‘indirectness as claiming that a good rational reconstruction of successful metaphorical communication will first rule out a literal interpretation as being contextually inappropriate, and also appeal to that literal meaning in determining the speaker’s intended meaning” (Camp 2009: 265). Camp proceeds to enumerate a number of reasons why we might not want to assimilate Gricean implicature to metaphorical understanding, in other words, against treating metaphors simply as implicatures.

In speaking of semantics and pragmatics, we’ve begun our discussion within the framework of philosophy of language[1], a field that has engaged some of the best philosophical minds of our time. Yet it is not the preferred starting point among the more popular academic treatments of metaphor, which favor vantage points provided by linguistics and cognitive psychology, or “cognitive because conceptual” accounts of metaphor, while accounts in which metaphor is in the first place a linguistic phenomenon and frequently “cognitive” in a broader sense, are found among philosophers of language (this does not rule out the possibility there are, increasingly, exceptions to this division of labor and one should not read too much into the labels, especially before examining the respective arguments in detail). Let’s take a moment to look at a few of the actual and possible relations between philosophy and cognitive science, if only because the “conceptual” accounts and accounts in which metaphor is about a “figure of speech (i.e., a non-literal use of speech within a class that includes irony, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, and meiosis) and sometimes even “non-cognitive,” tend to fall out into science and philosophy respectively, although philosophers like Camp have proven adept at appreciating the relative epistemic virtues found among all the parties in this discussion. Philosophers who collaborate with researchers from the sciences often uncritically defer to their scientific colleagues, at least in the sense that they do not thoroughly examine or question the fundamental conceptual and philosophical presuppositions and assumptions that undergird (psycho)linguistics or cognitive science. Instead, they assume the role of the Lockean “underlaborer” for the natural sciences, to adopt a term from the idealized distinction drawn by Steve Fuller (2006) (and first used by Locke and later part of Roy Bhaskar’s ‘critical realist’ theory of science) between the “philosophical legislator” “who questions the presuppositions of ongoing scientific research” (cf. Bennett and Hacker 2003 with regard to neuroscience), and the “philosophical underlaborer, whose role is one of clarifying and defending the presuppositions and assumptions of a particular scientific research program.

The philosopher as underlaborer is close to Paul Thagard’s (2009) proposed conception of the indispensable role of philosophy for cognitive science: philosophy does and should continue to contribute “generality” and “normativity” to an interdisciplinary field like cognitive science. Generality betrays a concern for the “unity” of the sciences (such as that traditionally purchased by commitments to reductionism or naturalism or represented by E.O Wilson’s notion of ‘consilience’), hence it “attempt[s] to address questions that cross multiple areas of investigation, thereby helping to unify what otherwise appear to be diverse approaches to understanding mind and intelligence” (or nature and reality, for that matter) (Thagard 2009: 238). Normativity is necessary because cognitive science, in performing its descriptive work, may assume or imply how people “ought” to think and act, and thus philosophy can assist science in making explicit this unavoidable normative and prescriptive enterprise; as Thagard rightly says, “Cognitive science often assumes epistemological and ethical norms without adequate philosophical discussion” (246). While Thagard’s model would appear to soften the distinction between the philosophical legislator and underlaborer insofar as it takes on board the question of normativity, he makes it clear that the role of the underlaborer does not aim to provide philosophical (e.g., metaphysical) foundations for any of the sciences (although reference to same is unavoidable insofar as we’re anxious to demonstrate the ‘unity’ of the sciences) and, what is more, it does not see itself as involved in clearing up any alleged “conceptual confusions in the study of the mind” (238). Thus, for example, philosophy of mind has no privileged role vis-à-vis cognitive science, that is, unless it’s inclined toward scientism or is unabashedly scientistic: “Philosophy can be…useful to cognitive science in providing defenses against philosophical arguments challenging the core assumptions of cognitive science concerning representation and computation. In this way, philosophy can provide self-defense methods for cognitive scientists against philosophers critical of the whole field” (238).

I think this envisages an unduly deferential and defensive role for philosophy in relation to (cognitive) science. It’s not that one can’t imagine a philosopher justly playing the part of an underlaborer, but the underlaborer model hardly does justice to the various roles philosophy might assume in relation to cognitive science or any other natural or social science. We’ll return to some of these issues near the end of our introduction, but for now it helps us appreciate why some philosophers have been critical of the immensely popular conceptual theory of metaphor within cognitive linguistics first formulated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980 and 1999), and have chosen instead to examine metaphor from within the parameters provided largely by philosophy of language (without in any way belittling the pioneering contributions of Lakoff and Johnson). In effect, they have not seen their role as constrained by the model of the “underlaborer,” thus they frequently point out contestable presuppositions and assumptions from perspectives provided by philosophy of language or philosophy of mind (and those perspectives need not be ‘consensual’ within these branches of philosophy).

This “big picture” is especially important for legal theorists to consider, given their historic tendency to embrace with unbridled enthusiasm this or that finding from the latest scientific enterprise or research program: the empiricism of legal realism, the rational choice model of neo-classical economics, behavioral economics, social psychological “situationism,” cognitive linguistics or cognitive science in general, evolutionary psychology, and so forth and so on. And this enthusiasm is not even tempered by awareness of methodological doubts, discussions and debates within the social sciences themselves! By way of illustration, we need only read Dennis Patterson’s (2003) review essay—aptly titled “Fashionable Nonsense”—of Amsterdam and Bruner’s Minding the Law (2000) and Winter’s A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind (2001), to be apprised of some of the more glaring philosophical pitfalls and blind spots that result from uncritical reliance on the latest scientific literature from a popular or (potentially) interdisciplinary field of study, evidenced of late among legal theorists in the fawning over the latest findings of neuroscience (see Pardo and Patterson 2010). Given the structurally “conservative” character of legal systems and institutions, it’s perhaps not surprising that legal theorists look to science by way of analyzing the law, especially owing to the difficulty of having anything original or creative to contribute to analytic jurisprudence or traditional philosophy of law, which still pivots around questions generated from  well-worn debates between theorists of natural law and legal positivism.

Scientific literature, by its very nature, is ripe for exploitation by legal theorists, providing a veritable endless resource pool of potential research topics for bringing to bear fresh perspectives on the law: after all, science deals with the enormous complexity of both the natural and social worlds, encompassing what, after Nicholas Rescher (2000), we might characterize as the “cognitive inexhaustibility of things.” The scientific enterprise transforms what at first glance appears as a liability, namely, the “cognitive opacity of real things” (including the fact that we will never be ‘in a position  into avoid the contrast between things as we think them to be and things as they actually and truly are’), into an intellectual and disciplinary virtue: “[the] susceptibility to further elaborate detail—and to changes of mind regarding this further detail—is built into our very conception of a ‘real thing’”(Rescher 2000: 31). If the “ongoing process of information enhancement” intrinsic to the scientific endeavor entails a concomitant process of “conceptual innovation,” legal theorists will find it hard to resist the temptation to turn to science by way of tilling and cultivating fertile fields of research (one might say they are, metaphorically and otherwise, the academic equivalent of post-colonialist capitalists or ethical cosmopolitans in the era of neo-liberal globalization: they are well poised and positioned to engage in cross-disciplinary cognitive trades and raids). The progress of scientific knowledge is marked by the “proliferation of ever more restructured specialties,” which in turn prompts attempts at interdisciplinary synthesis. Attempts at interdisciplinary synthesis are naturally attractive to legal theories cognizant of the non-linear character of legal systems and institutions, for they require holistic and comprehensive inquiries belied by scientific models bound to the parsimony of Ockham’s razor. Conditions of opacity and complexity are quickened for legal theorists who look to both the natural and the social sciences, the latter marked by need to explicitly address questions arising from the nature of consciousness (or, more broadly, subjectivity), intentionality and normativity, questions that invariably bring the social sciences within the province of philosophy.  Unlike their counterparts in the natural sciences, who more often than not can go about their work with little attention devoted to the philosophy of science, taking the Lebenswelt more or less for granted, social scientists, and legal theorists after them, cannot (or should not) avoid deliberately confronting what, at bottom, are difficult philosophical topics on which there exist a proliferation of plausible perspectives, indeed, so much so that it can undermine the credibility of “expertise:”

“Economists, for example, are notoriously at loggerheads on the explanation of how modern commercial culture actually ticks. Even when they are not uttering the wishful thoughts of a political party or sector of industry, they do not produce knowledge which a sensible person ought to trust unreservedly in deciding to build a factory or buy a block of shares. [….] [M]any university-based researchers are now so reliant on government contracts for research on practical problem that they cannot easily dissociate themselves from government policies. [….] In effect, to obtain resources for research, many post-academic human scientists are forced to relaunch themselves as technical consultants. They compete with one another for research projects on political, social or industrial problems commissioned by private or public organizations. Very often, however, their research findings and expert advice are desired as much to rationalize a particular policy on a contentious practical matter as to present an independent analysis of the situation.” (Ziman 2000: 177-178)[2] 

All of this by way of an indirect apologia on behalf of a view closer to the “philosopher as legislator” model, in other words, in defense of an introduction to metaphor by way of a few philosophical accounts, albeit accounts that are not non-cognitivist in any polemical or agonistic sense. While an avowed bias for pragmatics in the study of metaphor finds common ground among philosophers and cognitive scientists, philosophers of semantic suasion, notably Josef Stern (2000), have brought renewed philosophical respectability to “Literalist” (v. ‘Contextualist’) accounts of metaphorical interpretation.[3] While earlier and well-known analytic accounts of metaphor by the likes of Max Black[4] and Donald Davidson thought truth-conditions were irrelevant to metaphorical interpretation, both contemporary Contextualists and Literalists concur in the belief that metaphors express truths of a kind, the differences centered on the precise determination of the truth conditions of a metaphorical utterance, perhaps an implicit reference to the fact that we cannot abandon the dependency of the metaphorical on the literal in making such a determination. Indeed, there are, as Stern (2008) has argued, “semantic constraints on both metaphor and deferred reference imposed by the meaning of the literal vehicle.” And in the spirit of Black’s seminal thoughts on metaphor, Stern notes “how a metaphorical mode of expression can bear a kind of information apart from its truth-conditional content that carries explanatory power in belief-ascriptions” (Stern 2008: 276-277). At the very least, it would seem those who identify with Contextualism or Pragmatics will have to concede one facet of Stern’s Literalist brief: “that metaphorical interpretation falls in part under semantics” [emphasis added]. Stern’s analysis in fact softens the boundaries between Pragmatics and Semantics, for his theory of metaphorical meaning “takes into account both its context-dependence and literal dependence:”

“[T]he different metaphorical interpretations that utterances of one expression (type) can express in different contexts and on different occasions are their (propositional) contents, the factors that bear on the truth-value of their utterances. Because the individual features (e.g., being greater than her peers for ‘is the sun’ [as in ‘Juliet is the sun’]) expressed in these contents depend in part on the speaker’s extra-linguistic skills and presuppositions, the contents of these metaphorical interpretations are not themselves known solely in virtue of semantic competence. But it does not follow that metaphor lies entirely outside semantics. What the speaker does know in virtue of his semantic knowledge is the character of the metaphor, that is, a rule or directive to map the parameter of the context into the content of the metaphor in that context. Metaphorical character constrains which contents can be metaphorically expressed by which expressions in which contexts. And insofar as the function of meaning is generally to constrain which intentions can be expressed by which linguistic items on which occasions, we can takes its character to be the meaning of a metaphor.” (Stern 2008: 270)

More…

I’m grateful to Allen for bringing these thoughts to the table for discussion.

I suspect the portrait of the “environmentalist’s dilemma” is a bit exaggerated on both sides. It reminds me of the first vociferous “debate” in the environmental movement between so-called “Deep Ecology” and “Social Ecology” Greens (the latter largely the acolytes of Murray Bookchin). This debate was perhaps more imagined than real (insofar as it took place among a handful of writers and intellectuals and was less apparent ‘on the ground’), although it did reflect underlying tensions and questions within the Green movement having to do with the kinds of worldviews that inspired and motivated those engaged in environmentalist/ecological politics in the broadest sense. On one side, the more (loosely) spiritual-oriented folks were busy canvassing if not rummaging through the globe’s various worldviews for philosophical perspectives they believed evidenced a more holistic and harmonious metaphysical and ethical picture of mankind’s relation with the natural world; on the other side (and again, loosely), were those of Left and New Left vintage who understood the new ecological politics to emerge from within a tradition that was more beholden to the likes of Marx and Kropotkin or the Wobblies and the SDS, and thus were prone to carcicaturing their ecological counterparts as New Age whackos with irredeemably bourgeois sensibilities afflicted by historical amnesia utterly lacking in “true” socio-political and economic sophistication when it came to social analysis and understanding the dynamics of social change. There were truths to be learned from both camps, although egos and polemicizing served to obscure that fact (in time, both sides began to dismantle their character armour somewhat and the debate itself virtually vanished).

Robert E. Goodin’s book, Green Political Theory (1992) helps us to understand some of the reasons that animate the above debate as well as a more significant divide within “green political theory” and praxis. Goodin writes of a “green theory of value” that, in short, “provides the unified moral vision running through all the central substantive planks in the green political programme.” Conceptually and politically distinct but thought by many to strictly follow from this green theory of value is a “green theory of agency” that tells us how to go about pursuing the green theory of value(s). Goodin points out that part and parcel among those who concentrate their energies on the “agency” aspect of green politics are a belief in and commitment to the propogation of views revolving around choices of personal life-style, questions of New Age cosmology, and the desire for transformations of consciousness, views that tend to trivialize or crowd out more pragmatic and practical orientations and strategies that rely on conventional politics for the realization of the green theory of value. Those cleaving to such views make the price, so to speak, for subscribing to or endorsing a green politics too high for the vast majority of citizens and thus, in the end, prolong the realization of a green theory of value(s). Some years ago I wrote that while I thought Goodin was a bit hard on some of the “agency” folks, he made a compelling argument. On the other hand, he may not have sufficiently appreciated the very real obstacles presented by conventional politics for the realization of green values (this would be the position, say, of the late Rudolf Bahro or even the late Arne Naess).

The “economists” of the post would therefore be identical with or at least similar to the practical or pragmatic folks (including those willing to ‘dirty’ their hands in conventional politics) Goodin believes better capable of implementing green moral values, in other words, more likely than those “moralists” who, fewer in number, can be a bit too self-righteous or unrealistic in their advocacy of wholesale lifestyle and worldview (‘belief’) changes of the sort that could not, it seems clear, occur anytime soon, a fact with dire consequences if one is convinced of the necessity and urgency of the green political program.

In several respects, I think Goodin’s argument provided a way out of the impasse, in any case, it addressed questions of a more down-to-earth sort than those intrinsic to the theoretical and rarefied debate that took place between the deep ecology and social ecology greens and it made the larger point that “being green” did not strictly entail adopting wholesale the idiosynractic or unfamiliar worldviews of green intellectuals and movement leaders, nor did it mean adopting a radically new lifestyle on the order of the hippies and countercultural devotees of an earlier era.

It often seems to be the case that those who provide the vision and leadership of the green movement are more toward the “moralist” and “agency” end of the spectrum, for what has motivated their own idealism, activism and politics is often a conversion of some sort, to a new worldview (or the radical transformation of an existing one) and or a new lifestyle, the presumption or assumption being that it’s changes of THAT sort that are necessary for others to begin the turn toward ecological and environmental thinking and praxis. But to support and vote for green politics rarely requires such dramatic and wholesale changes among the masses. For us, the changes are more likely of a piecemeal kind (e.g., recycling, buying a more fuel-efficient car, less wasteful consumption decisions generally) and often at the ballot box (voting for a more environmentally sound politics that facilitates the progressive and wider adoption and realization of green values). And with regard to worldviews, this more often that not means people will come to simply modify their existing belief systems in ecological and environmentalist ways (see, for instance: http://fore.research.yale.edu/). Thus, in effect, we overcome the “environmentalists’ dilemma” on the ground, not unlike, at least in some measure and certain respects, Thoreau himself did.

With a brief nod to a literary dimension, it bears noting that “social ecologists” rightly took to task the ideas and tactics of those in the environmental movement who belonged to groups such as Earth First! (and the early writings of its co-founder, David Foreman), that wing of the movement farthest from a Gandhian-like practice of nonviolence (some would claim their praxis was nonetheless a species of nonviolence). These radical ecologists were avowedly inspired by the writings of Edward Abbey (e.g., The Monkeywrench Gang, 1975) who, while not accountable for their actions, most notoriously “eco-sabotage” (or ‘monkeywrenching’), seems to have endorsed them. Insofar as these actions were ‘underground’ (i.e., intentionally not public), and involved destruction of property or possible harm to living beings, they were understandably anathema to others in the environmental movement. Earth First! philosophy or political theory, such as it was, came dangerously close to if not actually espousing an ecological version of Malthusian Social Darwinism, the fundamental or representative ideas of which are enshrined in Paul Ehrlich’s writings (e.g., The Population Bomb, 1968) as well as Garrett Hardin’s formulation of “Tragedy of the Commons” idea (incisively critiqued by Partha Dasgupta, among others), alongside his later and more disturbing notion of “lifeboat ethics” (for a nice discussion of this variation on Malthusian themes, please see Robert C. Paehlke’s Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics, 1989).

The environmentalist “economists” cited in the post are of course constrained in part by conceptual and value presuppositions and assumptions that heretofore have helped define their discipline (cf. S.M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, 2003, and works by Philip Mirowski), especially insofar as they are trained in and beholden to essential tenets of neo-classical economics. Alas, this kind of economics has become increasingly obtuse when it comes to forthrightly addressing questions of ethics or morality (environmentalist or otherwise). Amartya Sen details some of the historical and conceptual shortcomings of the discipline in his book, On Ethics and Economics (1987). In addition to informing his colleagues of how economics  can benefit from a more intimate relation with ethics, Sen makes a subsidiary point regarding the benefits that follow from ethical thinking being informed by a basic knowledge of economics. Another important work by way of addressing the moral shortcomings of contemporary economics as a social science discipline and thus useful for environmentalists of an economics suasion, is Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson’s Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy (2^nd ed., 2006). A book I believe sets the standard for a morally and ecologically sensitive economics, is Partha Dasgupta’s Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment (2001). Finally, a fine example of the  increasing sophistication of environmentalist reasoning and praxis is Moral and Poltical Reasoning in Environmental Practice (2003), edited by Andrew Light and Avner de-Shalit. The entry on “environmental ethics” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is helpful by way of ascertaining to what extent our “dilemma” may afflict environmentalists as well as thinking though these topics more generally.

A word of caution: I think some environmentalists who are making their argument within the parameters of economics, try too hard to demonstrate their capitalist bona fides, thereby unnecessarily constricting the imagination of prospects and possibilities for a more ecologically and environmentally sustainable tomorrow. In short, and by way of a conclusion, we might say that the “Environmentalists’ Dilemma” arises in the first instance because the profession of economics is morally impoverished, a conceptually contingent and remediable state of affairs, foreshadowed in fine fashion, as Allen helps us see, in Thoreau’s Walden.

Readers may also be interested in a compilation from several years ago of titles on “environmental and ecological worldviews:” http://www.jurisdynamics.net/files/documents/environmental_and_ecological_worldviews.doc