Seth Vannatta

Functional Realism: A Defense of Narrative Medicine

In this paper we (1) define and describe the practice of narrative medicine, (2) reveal the need for narrative medicine by exposing the presuppositions that give rise to its discounting, including a reductive empiricism and a strict dichotomy between scientific fact and narrative value, (3) show evidence of the effects of education in narrative competence in the medical clinic, and (4) present Peircean realism as the proper conceptual model for our argument that the medical school curriculum committees should give space to the employment of the scientific and literary knowledge in medical practice. On account of our argument, we contend that the medical community should tend to latitude and openness with regard to the tools we use to resolve medical problems. These tools include both biomedical and narrative knowledge.

Teaching to the Test: A Pragmatic Approach to Teaching Logic

The proper goal of an introductory logic course, teaching critical thinking, is best achieved by maintaining the principle of continuity between student experiences and the curriculum. To demonstrate this I explain Dewey’s naturalistic approach to logic and the process of inquiry, one which presents the elements of traditional logic in the context of student experiences. I offer an example of a logic textbook which models the maintenance of the principle of continuity I advocate. Last, I advocate a pluralistic and experimental approach to accomplish this, including methods that rely on the role of the body in learning and reasoning.

Phenomenology and the Question of Instant Replay: A Crisis of the Sciences?

In this article, I address the question of whether or not the use of instant replay in sports improves the ability of officials to make correct calls. I pay special attention to the use of instant reply in American gridiron football. I first explain the method of static phenomenology, by recourse to Edmund Husserls work and apply a static phenomenological method to the officials quest for evidence in the analysis of a still frame of video. Second, I expose Husserls genetic method of phenomenology and apply it to the officials search for evidence and accuracy when assessing a play in a frame-by-frame or super-slow-motion analysis. I then look critically at the intersection of these two methods in instant replay analysis. My conclusion is that in cases calling only for a static analysis, I think that instant replay is beneficial. In other cases, the application of a static, frame-by-frame analysis, abstracted from lived experience, to a context of movement, can disrupt the normality of perception such that it yields problematic evidence. The problems that ensue from employing a static analysis to a situation calling for a genetic analysis cause me to recommend a limited use of instant replay in the types of cases which involve a genetic analysis. Epistemologically, I think that lived-time analysis is the optimal mode of perceiving and judging certain events. Humanistically, my concern is that the use of instant replay can disrupt the life-world of sport.

Conclusion: Detachment and Engagement in Conservatism and Pragmatism

William James, in his Pragmatism, offered the idea that one’s temperament guided one’s philosophical commitments. The tough-minded thinker is committed to empiricism, concrete facts, particulars, and plurality, while the tender-minded is committed to rationalism, abstract concepts, universals, and unity.1 Similarly, Ralph Waldo Emerson described the opposition of the temperaments of Conservatism and Innovation. Emerson postulates that the opposition between these is so old as to have its seat in human constitution itself: “It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason.”2 Conservatism is founded on human limitations and circumstance, while reform supposes human infinitude and power. Conservatism is social, believing that men’s temper governs them, while reform is “individual and imperious” and more trusting of principle. Emerson claims that only taken together are these two metaphysical antagonists worthy of praise. I have ventured to fuse these adversaries in an articulation of hopefully praiseworthy methodology.3

Conservative and Pragmatist Politics

Utopian political writing has a long history, dating back to, perhaps, Plato’s Republic. Traditionally, utopian political writing attempts to depict a just political arrangement, and by doing so, presents a tacit critique of social and political conditions that differ significantly from the ideal society depicted. Thomas More’s Utopia and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and perhaps Plato’s Republic, are examples of this type of theoretical engagement. But other theoretical strategies — those which attempt to define the principles and justification for legitimate political, legal, and moral activity antecedent to any particular situation — are utopian in a different way. These types of theoretical endeavors begin in overly abstract scenarios and often ignore actual cultural context. The particularities of place and time are marginalized in favor of abstract justifications of first principles. Political, legal, and moral principles, then used as justification for a substantive program, appear to be ahis-torical but attempt a sort of logical perfection. These begin not with custom, experience, taste, and prejudice, nor with the sentimental induction summarizing our collective experience, but with first principles and imaginary scenarios. Those Enlightenment political figures discussed in Chapter 1, Hobbes, Locke, Paine, Rousseau, and Kant, each conceived of a mythical, imaginary beginning in the state of nature to begin their inquiries into the essence of legitimate political authority and just legislation.

Enlightenment Moral Theory and British Conservatism

The thematic unity to the moral and political theory of the Enlightenment expresses itself as an extension of the method of the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution was paradigmatic for ethical theories which followed it. Once Greek teleology and metaphysics lost their general support, ethics underwent a revolution on par with cosmology. The modern era dispensed with Aristotle’s teleological account of humanity’s natural purpose and end in happiness. For Aristotle, the final cause of man was flourishing, and virtue was “an activity which completed or perfected the individual.”1 In place of this view, the Scientific Revolution posited a mechanistic view of man as a part of nature governed by universal and abstract laws. The ethical question became how to subsume any given act under the proper law or to find the proper law which guides any given act. Thus, the paradigm was of “discrete, individual events obeying absolute, universal laws.”2 Enlightenment moral theories of several sorts have this paradigm in common: they seek to apply universal moral principles to specific acts in order to count them as good or bad. Furthermore, they isolate the act from the general character of the actor and largely from the particular morally problematic situation. Thus, a moral life did not concern the happiness of the individual reflected by his character or virtuous activity over his lifetime, but would only be the “succession of events obeying a universal law.”3

Enlightenment Political Theory and British Conservatism

Social contract theory, as representative of a strand of natural law theory during the Enlightenment, displayed some common features, to which a conservative political movement would react. These theorists began their inquiries into the nature of legitimate political authority with myths of a beginning, evoking “states of nature” and postulating the laws therein as a function of reason. Reason revealed its critical force against the inherited traditions and dogmas of the Church, against the static hierarchies of the feudal system, and against the economic structures of the guild system, agrarian economies, and mercantilist policies. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the authoritarian and the libertarian respectively, were both exemplars of the strength of reason to erect systems meant to stabilize both the disorder of the English Civil War and to redress the transgressions of unlimited monarchical power, backed by the theory the divine right of kings. Reason, on this model of social contract thinking, gives us access to the laws of nature, which prescribe the way legitimate government operates. Reason also secularizes political discourse by attacking the divine right of kings and presenting criteria for legitimate government beyond the rule of inheritance.

Pragmatist Responses to Enlightenment Reason

Pragmatism as a philosophical method emerged in part as a reaction to the same Enlightenment excesses to which conservatism was a reaction. Common themes in the anti-foundationalist epistemologies of three philosophers illustrate this origin. The first, Charles Sanders Peirce, reacted to the Cartesian approach to philosophy. He rejected the capacities Descartes claimed for man and articulated the consequences of these incapacities. The second, John Dewey, reconstructed philosophy by turning away from the Enlightenment quest for certainty toward a view of inquiry and the knowledge claims inquiry begets that are situated, contextualized, fallible, social, and embodied. Dewey illustrates that some knowledge is not guided by formal reason, but by habit and emotion. He transformed the end of inquiry from an emphasis on truth towards warranted assertability and from a focus on certainty towards the resolution of problematic situations. The third, F.A. Hayek, taking Cartesian rationalism as a foe in common with Peirce, shows that the Cartesian criteria for the validity of claims was overly narrow and failed to understand both the permanent limitations of our epistemic capacity and the way embodied knowledge evolves socially, forming spontaneous orders whose origin is not the design of human reason.

The Problem of History

Once Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Maine, as representative figures of the 19th century, proffered a historical analysis of Enlightenment era concepts, the question of history itself became, at least potentially, either silent and opaque to the historian or open to explicit philosophical investigation. Thus, when we use historical analysis, we do better to make more transparent what we think the meaning and purpose of historical analysis is.

Conservatism and Pragmatism in Holmes’s Jurisprudence

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. shows us how pragmatism and conservatism intersect methodologically with respect to legal theory and practice. Holmes, in his reaction against formalism in legal theory, applied Peirce’s pragmatism. The following chapter illustrates that Holmes’s moral philosophy revealed the sentimentalism and skepticism of rationalism resonant in the work of Hume and Burke.