Scattered Thoughts on Method

         I have a penchant for putting the Christian faith in awkward situations. What happens, I often wonder, when you run this or that idea through the theoretical machinery of Christianity? Sometimes I think the machinery fails. That is, one particular brand of Christian theory fails, and a better, more suitable theory must be found to replace it. In the end, this method will probably result in me converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, or something. For now, however, it has only resulted in the near total abandonment of Evangelicalism.

        The problem with this method, I’m afraid, is that I have been raised by and large within an Evangelical setting. So when I say ‘Christian’ I conflate it, and was taught to conflate it, with ‘Evangelical.’ Really, when I say anything ‘Christian’ I probably mean something ‘Evangelical.’ At the very least, my starting stock vocabulary is Evangelical. This is tantamount to saying that I have a biased and prejudiced psychology informed by my vocabulary. We all do. In fact, the salient trait I’ve noted about converts to atheism is the narrowness of their views on Christianity. Rarely do they mean Christianity at large: of my atheist friends in this country, most live on the Eastern seaboard, and by Christian they mean Eastern seaboard Evangelicalism and the theoretical framework it espouses.

        But I know better than that, and realize that the actual facts place Evangelicalism on the fringe of Christian belief—historically, and, in more ways than ten, doctrinally. Ask any contemporary religious theorist, and he will tell you how little work has been done of those odd Evangelicals. Don’t take what I’m saying too far, though, I’m cheating (and so are the theorists) when I use ‘Evangelical’ as if its an agreed upon term. It isn’t. It can mean fundamentalist/ emergent/ anarchist/anti-intellectualist/solo scripturalist/ Calvinist/ Presbyterian/ Baptist/ American / superstitious/ emotivist/ etc/etc/etc. Depending on who you talk to it can be a positive or negative term. Any of these terms can. Fundamentalists do not take offense to being called fundamentalists: they take pride in it. The same with Calvinists and solo scripturalists. As far as I’m concerned, of course, they’re all something equivalent to a clown in a ball pit at the end of a rainbow. But in any event, what I mean when I say Evangelical is informed by the environ within which I grew up. Probably it is a useless word.
        So what am I talking about? If I had the space, and you had the patience, I would give numerous case studies to show what exactly happens in the process of theoretical paradigm shifting. There is a psychology to it. What happens to the literal/eternal view of hell, for example, when you ask the question, “how can God be a just God and require infinite punishment for finite sin”? If you don’t have counter-intuitions, fine, but it’s not because the question isn’t problematic to the view, it’s because you don’t understand the problem. The fact that you neglect the problem demonstrates something about the weakness of your curiosity, not the weakness of the problem. And if, as an alternative view, something like Annihilationism doesn’t, intuitively (and prima facie), solve the problem for you, then you are stilted yet again for some reason or another. In these cases, the problem is not the weakness of the proposed criticism or solution, it is the receiver of said criticism or solution. Where the idea cannot even be understood, how can it be said to be wrong?
        Anyway, its the intuition or counter-intuition I’m after, and I’m after them because I’m after the psychology of theorizing.  Theoretical shifting occurs through the conduit of intuitions, not beliefs or knowledge. What happens when the very intuitions we have are biased in favor of this or that system? All intuitions are biased. What happens, moreover, when the very systems we appeal to are biased in favor of intuitions? All systems are biased. Do we dive into the hermeneutic circle, letting our intuitions inform our overarching theories and our overarching theories inform our intuitions? Probably the answer is that we have no option in the matter, and yes. Time to strap on our speedos and take the plunge.  

        I think when we engage theory this way we find that the dialectic will push us toward a more prominent theoretical structure. I think this method will keep us vigilant and always willing to learn. I think this method will ensure that we have to hold more beliefs in abeyance than we wish—a sort of willing suspension of belief thing. I think this method will make us agnostics, but not dogmatic agnostics.

I Allowed Myself a Rant: Tensionism

In my college days i was accused of a little something called "Tensionism." My friends--critical swashbucklers that they were--invented the term in order to poke fun at my attitude towards theological positions, philosophy, and theoretical preoccupations at large. I liked the possibility of coalescing two seemingly incompatible notions; i liked the idea of saying, 'i don't know' with a calm sincerity, even though certainty felt safer; i liked the excitement of a world bigger than i had imagined, scarier than i was told, and richer than i'd dreamed.

Not much has changed since those days. Probably in fact my tensionistic bents have multiplied exponentially since college. 


This is only natural, of course. I attend one of the most liberally minded universities in America, and am working on a degree in Liberal Arts.

Liberal Arts. You realize, i hope, that that's an actual degree. Liberal: it means i study everything.  If someone asks, "Hey Kevin, what did you get your degree in," i may simply and truthfully answer, "Yes." It means that by the time i am done i will have a certified masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania in ....what have you.The plaque on my future office wall will read:

Kevin Hughes

University of Pennsylvania
Master of "What Have You"

I'm being obnoxious. But i have a point to make too.

Tensionism, God bless it, is guided by the general principle that humans are dumber than they think they are, and therefore everybody just needs to calm the balls down. Look at the current political discussions and think about it: polarities dominate, everyone's an authority, everyone's freaking out, and the whole damn things' a giant kerfuffle. Now compare it to the annoyingly popular debate between Calvinism and Arminianism (btw notice how the best theologians are totally unconcerned with this question). People are freaking out. Now take the rantings of Continental philosophers and compare them to the ravings of the Analytic philosophers. Freaking out. Christians vs Atheists. Freaking out. The formatlists vs. the informalists. Essentialists vs nominalists. etc, etc Dear sweet me where does the list end, if ever?


Look: i've made it my (short) life's ambition to dabble in a lot of different areas, to get a feel for a lot of different experiences, and to engage a host of different people. And if there's one thing that a master of everything learns it is that no one is a master of anything. Someone may know a lot about something (and those who know the most tend to say, 'i don't know' the most), but no one knows much. The truth is that none of us has crossed the pons assinorum of any subject, and we are all more or less just trying to get by.

So give your self a hug, take a breath, and most importantly don't treat theory like its dogma. Have few beliefs and a vibrant imagination. Sentiments work best when tied to beliefs, not to probabilities. The rest will take care of itself.
the end

Phil Of Language Paper: Jabberwocky

I am going to look primarily at two passages from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass—1.) the Jabberwocky poem and 2.) the Humpty-Dumpty pericope—and analyze them in terms of Gricean and Davidson machinery. Of particular interest here is the first (and last) stanza of Jabberwocky which appears in both passages:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I think most of us would agree with Alice that this stanza has all the appearance of meaning something, but that that meaning, if present at all, is unknowable without some form of help. “It seems very pretty,” she says after her first read, “but it’s rather hard to understand. Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are.”[1] Some chapters later Humpty Dumpty gives Alice his somewhat dubious interpretation of the stanza, explaining the meaning of all the obscure words. For example, he explains that toves are “something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”[2] In a way his interpretation does not feel like much of an improvement on the first, blind reading. But the very strangeness of the poem and their conversation about it are, I think, what make it worth analyzing in Gricean and Davidson machinery. Grice’s model supplies us with some  basic materials to make sense of Alice and Humpty’s conversation--including the nature of speaker’s intentions, a Cooperative Principle, and implicatures. Davidson, who both builds on and takes Grice to the extreme, touches more directly on words for which interpreters lack a lexical knowledge (like toves), explaining that  only what he calls a ‘passing theory’ sufficiently explains our ability to guess at these types of meanings.

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     [1] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 164.

     [2] Ibid., 220.