On Seeing the Point

"Our blindness to the point of primitive modes of life is a corollary of the pointlessness of much of our own life."
     -- Peter Winch, "Understanding a Primitive Society" (1972)

This line comes in response to some arguments made by Alasdair MacIntrye, in a paper called, "Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?" MacIntrye's ultimate answer appears to be: No. But he takes a long way round to this answer, via the attempts of sociologists and anthropologists to understand primitive (read: non-Western) cultures. Upshot: primitive belief in witchcraft is empty because the discourse can only be made intelligible (i.e. non-contradictory, rational) if the "theory" of witchcraft is rendered unfalsifiable. (This is roughly the story MacIntryre tells.) Ditto for Christianity in the eyes of the skeptic, viz. it's empty, pointless (read: explains nothing).

Winch doesn't take up MacIntyre's discussion of (Western) religion, but focuses on what he sees as M's minsinterpretation of his own views about understanding primitive cultures. But I can see a version of what Winch says being exactly the sort of thing a religious person might say to a skeptic...

(Something that puzzled me about the MacIntyre paper is that while he argues that religion has lost its context (read: point) in the West overall, he is resistant to what he sees as a Kierkegaardian embrace of the apparent paradoxes of religious views, and the internalization of religion, as "too easy." I don't know much about MacIntryre, but the description of a Kierkegaardian approach to religion as "too easy" strikes me as something someone could only say as a result of not reading Kierkegaard very closely...am I missing something?)

More Understanding without Agreement

I've recently expanded (and hopefully improved) the paper I've been calling "Understanding Without Agreement". You'll notice that the paper actually questions how to make sense of the thought that we can understand people without agreeing with them, at least on certain issues of moral judgment.

In this newest version, I've added a couple examples, treated in some length, to help illustrate the difficulties in grasping other perspectives--at least, that our disagreement might reasonably lead one who has that perspective to say, "Well, you haven't really understood." (One example involves Elizabeth Costello of J.M. Coetzee's "The Lives of Animals", later included in the novel Elizabeth Costello. The other has to do with Amish forgiveness, as exemplified a few years ago in the Nickel Mines shootings.)

Comments here or by e-mail will be greatly appreciated!

Understanding without Agreement

[Update: The second and third links in the text below now take you to a newer version of this paper.]

I've been thinking about the relationship between understanding and agreement, specifically, about whether there are cases where we can't really be said to understand a person with whom we disagree.

I've been drafting a short paper about this, and would appreciate any comments. It's a bit compressed, but I'm hoping, if the project seems on the right track, to try to submit it to a conference or two in the spring.

Here's a short abstract:

When two people disagree about a matter of judgment (say, about a moral issue), the disagreement will often be explained in terms of psychological differences. This leaves it open that one party to the disagreement could understand the other without agreeing with her. This paper explores the thesis that there are cases in which understanding and agreement do not come apart because psychological explanation is not always an adequate way of explaining the disagreement. That is, sometimes it may be that we cannot claim to understand a person unless we have also come to agree with her.

Again, the paper is here.