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Intellectual Robotry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
I shall discuss what I have chosen to call the phenomenon of ‘intellectual robotry’. Intellectual robotry is a disease which is manifested in various different ways by some intellectuals, though not by all. (I suffer from it myself so this is one of the reasons why I have written this paper. Writing is, one hopes, sometimes a form of therapy.) What do I mean by ‘intellectual robotry’? I mean, among other things, a habitual indulgence in clever words for their own sake (what I shall later refer to as a pathology of words), a fixation about the potency of arguments and a sort of involved commitment to certain fashionable ideologies. One of the main characteristics of intellectual robotry is that the practitioner of it invariably loses sight of the person he is talking to, or allegedly talking to. He, the intellectual, is intent on pursuing his own momentum of metaphysical or ideological or political or whatever talk because he believes he has something rather important to say, but as he talks—you can almost see it in his or her eyes—he is no longer talking to a person.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1986
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1 And this is what I meant by saying at the beginning that some intellectuals have a fixation about the potency of arguments.
2 What I am saying here must be clearly distinguished from J. S. Mill's petitio principii charge against the syllogism. Mill complained that the conclusion was (clearly) already contained in its premises so the syllogism appeared to have a circular look. What I am saying is that the truth of the conclusion, whether or not it is ‘contained’ in the premises, must exist in the first place if the argument or the proof is to demonstrate it.
3 ‘Existing truth’, you ask? This is a queer locution. It is only statements which can be said to be true and statements can only exist while they are being uttered. This is a sad, nominalistic theory of truth. I say ‘sad’ because it overlooks the (plain) fact that for a statement, e.g. the statement ‘Tom lied’, to be true it's got to have been true (or it has got to have been the case) that Tom lied … ‘that Tom lied’ is not just yet another collocation of words, or a mere (partial) ‘statement’; ‘that Tom lied’ is a particular use of the words in question, a use in which there is an on-going reference to a particular event (or a case) in the world; ‘that Tom lied’ points to an existing truth in virtue of which the statement ‘Tom lied’ is true.
4 If you refuse, in an a priori way, to accept this then I think you are falling into the pathology of misandry. (‘Misandry’ is a Greek word meaning hatred of men. Misandry is on the same moral footing as misogyny.)
5 This is partly what my friend Plato meant when he said in the Republic that philosophers should be kings. Most commentators, including Sir Karl Popper in particular, overlook this.