"One man's journey to answer the question of a generation. A global search for the truth.
- Dailywire
Dailywire's recent blurb for self-ascribed "theocratic fascist," Matt Walsh, is a sad attempt to whitewash his misguided white knight crusade, "What is a woman,” which may best be described as a bad attempt at the Socratic method directed at the unsuspecting to the delight of his unread, uncritical fans.
Now the Socratic method is here employed by the self-proclaimed skeptic (in this case the punker, Walsh) to force his victim (the punkee) into an unwanted and uncomfortable engagement with what the skeptic assumes to be the truth. Walsh, in smarmy hat-in-hand Socratic fashion, annoys his victims by asking seemingly innocent and allegedly objective questions which conceals his intentions. The predicament of the punked is most aptly put by 20th c. American analytic philosopher, Robert Nozick,"
"Unsuspectingly he answers, and then is pushed, not to an unwelcome consequence of what he really does believe, but to an unbelieved consequence of what he literally and uncarefully has said."1
This duplicitous procedure even has a name, the Socratic fallacy:
A. If you are correctly predicating a given term “T” you must know what it is to be a T (have an accepted criterion for a thing’s being T).
B. It is no use to try and arrive at the meaning of “T” by giving examples of things that are T.
Abusing the "Socratic method," Walsh takes his truth conditions to be self-evident. This is extremism: the tendency to view things as either totally T or not T at all and is little more than question begging disguised. ". . . in Socrates' case, there is no secure set of genuine instances of F, nor does Socrates operate as though there were."2 So why dot it at all? For rhetorical effect, of course. In his own authoritarian mindset, Walsh assumes success when his victim on the street gives up in the face of this profound mockery and professes ignorance. Contrary to what we are supposed to believe, language and meaning are the victims in this unrelenting right-wing war of attrition.
Point not conceded, however. There exists no one definition of woman which stands up against all scientific and philosophical scrutiny. In fact, a thoroughgoing survey of philosophy to the present regarding the question of woman turns up little indeed, something which decades of feminist philosophy has sought to redress with mixed results. Suffice it to say, philosophy is not in the definition business. No theory, no definition is ever complete in itself. The "incompleteness theorems" of twentieth century Austrian mathematician, Kurt Godel, militate against the Platonic/Socratic view that having a “general account” of what it is to be T is sufficient to know T. And then there's the Sorites paradox. The way Tim Morton puts it, "Since a human is a heap of things that aren’t humans, just as a meadow is a set of things that aren’t meadows, such as grasses and birds, either ecological and biological beings don’t really exist or there’s a malfunction in the logic we have rather uncritically inherited from Aristotle."3 "If we're going to have tables and RNA and badgers and silt, in all their specificity, we might have to give up the idea that we can be totally definite about them." 4
Authoritarians and Fundamentalists like Walsh and fellow alt-right trolls who live to force women back to the pre-modern era and defame transgender persons instead champion an instrumental reductionism instead. They commonly resort to a pre-scientific use for the term biology, their code for DNA and the absurd fundamentalist Christian belief in design. This system of beliefs is aptly referred to as "God's eye reductionism" by British philosophy of science professor, John Dupre. 5 "Just as evolutionary theory has put an end to certain traditional ideas about biological classification, so it underlies more contemporary views." 6
Of course our opponents do not hold contemporary views unless one counts the current revival in the populist-nationalist imaginary of retrograde views as such would treat women instrumentally as pro-creative property. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the enemies of open society demonstrates the danger when religious beliefs become dogma, let alone the law of the land as we have just witnessed.
References:
1. Nozick, R., “Socratic Puzzles,” Phronesis 1995, Vol XL/2 (Accepted November 1994). P.149.
2. Wolfsdorf, David. 2004. “The Socratic Fallacy and the Epistemological Priority of Definitional Knowledge.” Apeiron 37(1, March): 35-68. P.67.]
3. Morton, T., Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Columbia University Press, New York, 2016. 209pp.
4. Morton, T., Fun with the Sorites Paradox, Ecology Without Nature, Tuesday, June 7, 2011, , retrieved on June 25, 2022.
5. Dupre, J., "Metaphysical Disorder and Scientific Disunity," in The Disunity of Science, Stanford University Press, Galison, P. & Stump, D., eds. Jan 1996. P.108.
6. Dupre, J., The Constituents of Life, Royal Van Gorcum, Amsterdam, 2007. P.17.