in praise of lost causes

I worry that in the discussion of Eric's last post that people assumed that a necessary condition for being a lost cause in philosophy is that nobody much is defending the view and that there is very little prospects for a revival. Let's call this notion LC_S.

But LC_S is not even materially co-extensive with "lost cause." Not only should it be (in some sense) possible for something to be a lost cause even if most people aren't aware of the fact that it is, but also, in our hearts of hearts we all view certain currently popular views as being lost causes. When one regards a position as a lost cause  (just LC, or LC_C if one must)*  one regards it as genuinely hopeless, such that it will not pan out in any recognizable permutation. 

Here's the thing though; out of basic politeness and humility most of us don't go around parading our list of lost-causes. And I think that this is why people settled into LC_S in the previous discussion. If something really is LC_S then nobody will be offended if you point out that it is. This is not in general true with respect to LC_C.

I do want to give some examples though. Out of politeness, I'll restrict myself to nominating views which are such that they clearly sustain a big caveat:

1. any form of non-cognitivism that involves refusal to grant truth-value to those statements one is a non-cognitivist about, 
2. any form of innateness hypothesis that logically entails anything Fodor and Chomsky have meant whenever they have defended something they refer to as an "innateness hypothesis."

I think there are two interesting further points here. First, the caveat. Assume that both of my examples are correct. I think this shows that it is not a waste of time to work on lost causes. One cannot ignore what was learned while people prosecuted the non-cognitivist program (this should be clear from Schroeder's fantastic discussion), and even the most ardent foes of innateness motivated transformational epicycles will admit that the innateness beliefs were productive at least through 1972 (the year of Aspects, right before the pox-on-both-houses "linguistics wars" commenced).

Second, more damning. We should not allow the usefulness of certain lost causes to make us too sanguine. In the broader sense of lost causes I am pushing here (again, by which I mean views that are absolutely hopeless in any permutation), it should be clear that publication norms in philosophy actually select for lost causes. A really insane view such as  boo-hurrah non-cognitivism is going to thrive in our publication ecosystem because insane views (when a subset of those defending them have enough institutional heft to get them out there) are far, far more likely  to produce so many iterations of counterexamples and patches. Since Socrates we've largely assumed that dialectic leads to the truth, but there's no reason to think that this holds of dialectic plus the need to publish plus unavoidable power differentials concerning who gets to say what where. What will be selected for is views that are productive of more publications, and if I'm correct, this will create an intellectual ecosystem where lost causes dominate the landscape.

Of course the fact that the amount of discussion generated by a philosophical view is directly proportional to its general hopelessness  is a difficult burden, which is why it's easier to dissolve the whole problem by defining "lost cause" not in terms of objective hopelessness (LC_C), but rather in terms of a popularity contest (LC_S). But if I'm right about the selective pressures of the publication ecosystem, then the fact that something shows up as LC_S should be taken as prima-facie evidence that it is in fact not LC_C.

In brief, occasionalism is looking better and better these days.

[Notes:

*I realize this is a major breach of etiquette to name something after yourself in this way. I was going to point to Gareth Evans' naming a class of pronouns "E-Type," but then I remembered the line from the Bob Dylan song

The man says, get out of here
I'll tear you limb from limb
I said, you know they refused jesus, too
He said, you're not him

But I"m being a little bit facetious** in the above, whereas Evans wasn't? I don't know.

**This business with facetiousness cop-out is distinctive of my generation. If everything you say is hidden under a thick enough patina of irony, then you can just be passive-aggressive when people get mad at you.]