Causalist explanations are vulnerable to an irremediable self-reference flaw
Evidence
I have given an argument that shows that what we thought were issues crucial to legitimacy were not so; and that the objection itself, insofar as it implicates legitimacy, can, I think, be decisively answered. My answer does not require one to count up, as it were, the many reasons for and against judicial review. Instead, it asks that we stick to the actual ‘question being asked. Like Albert, Mark Tushnet is distressed by this and wants to re-orient the question so that it fits the calculations that make the problem so bedeviling in the first place. This is, I believe, the crucial move of the map of explanations. It changes ground, and then claims for itself the primacy of the original discussion. In such maps, one invariably encounters such phrases as, “What we’re really talking about here is … ” or “What the writer was really doing was…,” or “What really motivated him was …” And that is why it is so mortifying when it turns out that the casual causalist has got the facts wrong. … But is that the trouble with such “explanations”? I doubt it. I think, instead, that they are vulnerable to an irremediable flaw. If, as is asserted, the causalist can discern, beneath the surface, an otherwise hidden mechanics, how can we know that he, too, is not motivated by something as obscure to himself as he believes the true motives of others are to them? When, exactly, is Freud’s cigar not just a cigar? — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 666
Categorization
- SEED: The self-referential flaw of causalist/explanatory unmasking — ‘what’s really going on’ claims can always be turned back on the person making them — is a strong essay angle on the rhetoric of debunking.
- XREF: Connects to the map-of-explanations critique and to similar self-reference objections in moral philosophy and psychoanalytic criticism (Freud’s cigar allusion). — connects to: Structuralism introduced a new kind of non-reflective causality between social and mental categories.; Deductive proof must rely on circular reasoning or endless chains — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 963; the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”