Well Jim that is a fair question, and the reason is that there are times
that Satan may want to contact John and since John travels alot, a cell
phone seemed the most prudent.

Steve



--- Jim Tantillo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi again,
> 
> McDowell writes (and I apologize for the length of this, but this is an
> exceedingly difficult section of his paper for me to summarize, so I'm
> just
> going to quote it and hope for the best <s>):
> 
> .. . . "On the face of it, this [i.e. fear] might seem a promising
> subject
> for a projectivist treatment (a treatment that appeals to what Hume
> called
> the mind's 'propensity to spread itself on external objects').  At any
> rate
> the response that, according to such a treatment, is projected onto the
> world can be characterized, without phenomenological falsification,
> otherwise than in terms of seeming to find the supposed product of
> projection already there.  And it would be obviously grotesque to fancy
> that a case of fear might be explained as the upshot of a mechanical . .
> .
> process initiated by an instance of 'objective fearfulness.'  But if
> what
> we are engaged in is an 'attempt to understand ourselves,' then merely
> causal explanations of responses like fear will not be satisfying
> anyway.
> What we want here is a style of explanation that makes sense of what is
> explained (in so far as sense can be made of it).  This means that a
> technique for giving satisfying explanations of cases of fear--which
> would
> perhaps amount to a satisfying explanatory theory of danger, though the
> label is possibly too grand--must allow for the possibility of
> criticism;
> we make sense of fear by seeing it as a response to objects that *merit*
> such a response, or as the intelligibly defective product of a
> propensity
> towards responses that would be intelligible in that way.  For an object
> to
> merit fear just is for it to be fearful.  So explanations of fear that
> manifest our capacity to understand ourselves in this region of our
> lives
> will simply not cohere with the claim that reality contains nothing in
> the
> way of fearfulness.  Any such claim would undermine the intelligibility
> that the explanations confer on our reponses.
> 
> --"The shared crucial features suggests that this disarming of a
> supposed
> explanatory argument for unreality should carry over to the case of
> values.
> There is, of course, a striking disanalogy in the contentiousness that
> is
> typical of values; but I think it would be a mistake to suppose that
> this
> spoils the point.  In so far as we succeed in achieving a sort of
> understanding of our responses that is in question, we do so on the
> basis
> of preparedness to attribute, to at least some possible objects of the
> responses, properties that would validate the responses.  What the
> disanalogy makes especially clear is that the explanations that preclude
> our denying the reality of the special properties that are putatively
> discernible from some (broadly) evaluative point of view are themselves
> constructed from that point of view.  (We already had this in the case
> of
> the fearful, but the point is brought home when the validation of the
> responses is controversial.)  However, the critical dimension of the
> explanations that we wants means that there is no question of just any
> actual response pulling itself up by its own bootstraps into counting as
> an
> undistorted perception of the relevant aspects of reality.  Indeed,
> awareness that values are contentious tells against an unreflective
> contentment with the current state of one's critical outlook, and in
> favour
> of a readiness to suppose that there may be something to be learned from
> people with whom one's first inclination is to disagree.  The aspiration
> to
> understand oneself is an aspiration to change one's responses, if that
> is
> necessary for them to become intelligible otherwise than as defective. 
> But
> although a sensible person will never be confident that his evaluative
> outlook is incapable of improvement, that need not stop him from
> supposing,
> of some of his evaluative responses, that their objects really do merit
> them.  He will be able to back up this supposition with explanations
> that
> show how the responses are well-placed; the explanations will share the
> contentiousness of the values whose reality they certify, but that
> should
> not stop him accepting the explanations any more than (what nobody
> thinks)
> it should stop him endorsing the values. . . .
> 
> --"It will be obvious how these considerations undermine the damaging
> effect of the primary-quality model.  Shifting to a secondary-quality
> analogy renders irrelevant any worry about how something that is brutely
> *there* could nevertheless stand in an internal relation to some
> exercise
> of human sensibility.  Values are not brutely there--not there
> independently of our sensibility--any more than colours are; though, as
> with colours, this does not stop us supposing that they are there
> independently of any particular experience of them.  As for the
> epistemology of value, the epistemology of danger is a good model.
> (Fearfulness is not a secondary quality, although the model is available
> only after the primary-quality model has been dislodged.  A
> secondary-quality analogy for value experience gives out at certain
> points,
> no less than the primary-quality analogy that Mackie attacks.)  To drop
> the
> primary-quality model in this case is to give up the idea that
> fearfulness
> itself, were it real, would need to be intelligible from a standpoint
> independent of the propensity to fear; the same must go for the
> relations
> of rational consequentiality in which fearfulness stands to more
> straightforward properties of things.  Explanations of fear of the sort
> I
> envisaged would not only establish, from a different standpoint, that
> some
> of its objects are really fearful, but also make plain, case by case,
> what
> it is about that that makes them so; this should leave it quite
> unmysterious how a fear response rationally grounded in awareness
> (unproblematic, at least for present purposes) of these 'fearful-making
> characteristics' can be counted as being, or yielding, knowledge that
> one
> is confronted by an instance of real fearfulness" (175-178).
> 
> In conclusion, McDowell writes:
> 	"Simon Blackburn has written, on behalf of a projectivist
> sentimentalism in ethics, that 'we profit . . . by realizing that a
> training of the feelings rather than a cultivation of a mysterious
> ability
> to spot the immutable fitnesses of things is the foundation of how to
> live.'  This picture of what an opponent of projectivism must hold is a
> piece with Mackie's primary-quality model; it simply fails to fit the
> position I have described.  Perhaps with Aristotle's notion of practical
> wisdom in mind, one might ask why a training of the feelings (as long as
> the notion of feeling is comprehensive enough) cannot *be* the
> cultivation
> of an ability--utterly unmysterious just because of its connections with
> feelings--to spot (if you like) the fitnesses of things; even
> 'immutable'
> may be all right, so long as it is not understood (as I take it
> Blackburn
> intends) to suggest a 'platonistic' conception of the fitnesses of
> things,
> which would reimport the characteristic ideas of the primary-quality
> model"
> (178).
> 
> ==========================
> 
> Jim again:  I think McDowell's conclusion touches on the point I was
> trying
> to make when I remarked previously that, in a sense, all education is
> "aesthetic education."  (Somehow, I "fear" that this unfortunate
> locution
> of mine provoked much objective anger and hostility among my readers,
> but
> at the same time, I never felt a sense of "danger" about their
> reaction).
> :-)  McDowell here is making the point that countless other commentators
> on
> both aesthetics and value theory have made: that a "discipline" of
> aesthetic and moral training is possible, given the objective reality of
> the underlying moral and aesthetic qualities that exist (albeit at the
> secondary and tertiary quality level of our understanding).  For a very
> nice discussion of these and related points, I recommend Charles
> Wegener's
> book, *The Discipline of Taste and Feeling* (U. Chicago Pr., 1992).
> 
> Anyway . . .  I offer the foregoing assessment of McDowell's work partly
> in
> attempt to defuse the notion that my "infamous 'three qualities'
> proposal"
> somehow makes me the equivalent of the epistemic antichrist. . . . I
> like
> to think, in contrast, that I'm just your ordinary, humble environmental
> ethics joe, just trying to do my job. :-)
> 
> Okay, let's turn these two emails loose and see what new kinds of pain,
> anguish, and transempirical angst I can unleash in the cyber world. . .
> .
> 
> Jim Tantillo
> 
> ps.  I must say that I was *very* amused to read of Steve V's nomination
> of
> John Foster to the Academy of Satanic Sciences.  I admit to feeling a
> bit
> shocked that it only took three instances of John's agreeing with me
> (me?)
> to earn him his secret devil worshipper decoder ring.  I suspect that if
> my
> account above of John McDowell's discussion of secondary qualities makes
> a
> believer out of John on *this* subject, then I shall have to concede the
> Number Two spot on the hierarchy of Satan's Little Helpers to John.
> (Steve
> will of course always be Numero Uno, given the Veggie Biggs endorsement
> and
> all that.)  But a question for Steve: why should John need a cell phone
> for
> calling the Big "D" when he's already got the infrared transempirical
> hotline plugged in direct . . .  ?  <grin>  just a question.  jt


=====
"In a nutshell, he [Steve] is 100% unadulterated evil. I do not believe in a 
'Satan', but this man is as close to 'the real McCoy' as they come." 
--Jamey Lee West

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