Ipsedixitism, Part 1

"Ipsedixitism: dogmatic assertion or assertiveness" (Merriam-Webster). 

"Ipse dixit: an arbitrary and unsupported assertion" (Collins). 

"Ipsedixitism: ... the practice of dogmatic assertion" (The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia: The Century dictionary, 1889).  

The charge applies when one makes an assertion without giving supporting reasons. 

The word 'ipsedixitism' was introduced into English by Jeremy Bentham. He used the word and several of its cognates in his Deontology; or the Science of Morality, a manuscript that was edited by his literary executor, Sir John Bowring, and published posthumously in 1834. 

In an essay that he contributed to that edition, Bowring traced the expression to Cicero: 

The appellative of ipse-dixitism is not a new one; it comes down to us from an antique and high authority, —it is the principle recognised (so Cicero informs us) by the disciples of Pythagoras. Ipse (he, the master, Pythagoras), ipse dixit, —he has said it; the master has said that it is so; therefore, say the disciples of the illustrious sage, therefore so it is.(Bowring, "History of the Greatest-Happiness Principle," [pp. 287-331, at pp. 322-323], in Jeremy Bentham, Deontology; or, The Science of Morality: in which the Harmony and Co-Incidence of Duty and Self-Interest, Virtue and Felicity, Prudence and Benevolence, are explained and exemplified. Vol. I. 'Arranged and edited by John Bowring.' London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne, Green, and Longman, 1834)

Bowring's aetiology resembles the one given in Bentham's "Article on Utilitarianism: Long Version," according to which:

This appellative is not a new one invented for the present purpose, but an old one borrowed from an antique and consequently high authority. It is the principle pursued, so Cicero informs us, by the disciples of Pythagoras. 'Ipse' (referring to Pythagoras) 'ipsedixit': 'He has said the matter is so and so, therefore', said a disciple of the illustrious sage, 'so it is'. ("Article on Utilitarianism: Long Version," in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 5, Deontology together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Amnon Goldworth [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983], p. 305, n. 43) 

It is difficult to determine the author of this last remark. Is it Bentham or Bowring? The editor of the quoted volume, Amnon Goldworth, writes that Bowring wrote sections of Bentham's posthumous works (and did not note when he had done so), adding that since parts of the original manuscript no longer exist, it is impossible sometimes to determine whether a given passage was penned by Bentham or by Bowring. Even if it was written by Bowring, Goldworth says that Bowring had discussed these works with Bentham many times and took himself, when he added material, to be adding only what Bentham had said. 

Both of the above quotations mention Cicero's criticism of the Pythagoreans, which appears in paragraph 10, Book I, of Cicero's De Natura Deorum (The Nature of the Gods). Cicero wrote as follows: 

Those who seek my personal views on each issue are being unnecessarily inquisitive, for when we engage in argument we must look to the weight of reason rather than authority. Indeed, students who are keen to learn often find the authority of those who claim to be teachers to be an obstacle, for they cease to apply their own judgement and regard as definitive the solution offered by the mentor of whom they approve. I myself tend to disapprove of the alleged practice of the Pythagoreans: the story goes that if they were maintaining some position in argument, and were asked why, they would reply: 'The master said so', the master being Pythagoras. Prior judgement exercised such sway that authority prevailed even when unsupported by reason. (Cicero: The Nature of the Gods, ed. and trans. Peter G. Walsh, [Oxford University Press, 1997; electronic: 2016], Book I, paragraph 10; DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780199540068.book.1)

Here is the same passage in H. Rackham's 1933 translation (in the Loeb series), with the original Latin on the facing page (and also available here). 

According to Cicero, a Pythagorean was prone to appeals to authority, resting his/her claims on their assertion by someone whose word provides insufficient support. This error of reasoning is not the same one as making assertions without giving supporting reasons. After all, the Pythagoreans did offer a reason for their claims ('Pythagoras said it!') even if not a very good one. So, the error of ipsedixitism, as defined at the beginning of this post, is not the error that Cicero charged the Pythagoreans with committing. 

Broadly philosophical links

Neuroskeptic on whether 'cognition and perception [are] ultimately inseparable'.

Susan Dominus writes about four guys in Bogota. They are two sets of identical twins: A¹ & A², and B¹ & B². A² and B² were switched at birth. A² is taken home by the B-parents and raised as B¹'s fraternal twin; B² is taken home by the A-mother and raised as A¹'s fraternal twin. The mix-up isn't discovered until the guys are well into adulthood. The story is scientifically fascinating. It's also very moving. The story has been reprinted by the SMH.

Christopher Donohue continues his series on Joseph Agassi.

Harald Sack looks back at Thomas Kuhn.

At the BBC, Melvyn Bragg interviews Melissa Lane, Janet Radcliffe Richards, and Brad Hooker on utilitarianism.

Videos and podcasts from the conference 'New Insights and Directions in Religious Epistemology', which ex-apologist liked.

Carlos Fraenkel recommends five books of philosophy for a divided world. Noël Carrol recommends five books on the philosophy of art. Jerry Coyne recommends five books on 'the incompatibility of religion and science'. Beth Shapiro recommends five books on evolution and such.

James K. A. Smith reviews Peter Harrison's The Territories of Science and Religion.

Charlie Huenemann on 'early modern revolution':

Spinoza’s advice – to see the universe as determined to follow its own laws, and to console ourselves by turning our minds to what is eternal and divine – was not just pretty words; it was offered as a palliative for existential anxiety and despair. When we ignore their complicated circumstances, we risk mistaking these philosophers for university professors, with nothing more at stake than records of publication.

Partially Examined Life on the philosophy of history, part 1 and part 2 (on Vico).

Mark Jay Mirsky reviews Thought Flights: Stories, Glosses, Literary Fragments of Robert Musil, translated and with an introduction by Genese Grill.

From last October, Arcade's forum on the essay (with contributions on Montaigne, Swift, Borges, and a piece by Thomas Harrison on 'the essayistic novel', which is about Musil).

Fact-opinion 10, Opinions and matters of opinion

Let's begin with a quotation of Raymond S. Nickerson, a psychologist who uses 'opinion' as another term for taste:

We might say that a belief is something that, at least in principle, can be shown to be either true or false. It does not make sense to say that an opinion is true or false, because people differ greatly in their preferences and tastes. ... Here, an effort will be made to use beliefs to represent our ideas about what is objectively true, and opinions to represent such subjective matters as preferences and tastes. (Nickerson, Reflections on Reasoning [Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1986], p. 21)

Granted, Nickerson's claims have an air of stipulation. Still, why limit opinions to taste? Previous posts show that 'opinion' hasn't historically been defined in terms of taste. Indeed, before the 20th century, authors generally kept tastes out of the extension of 'opinion'. For example, here's a bit from Hume's 'Of the Standard of Taste' (1757):

Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness and a false brilliancy: But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions. In all matters of opinion and science, the case it opposite: The difference among men is there oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance. An explanation of the terms commonly ends the controversy; and the disputants are surprised to find, that they had been quarreling, while at bottom they agreed in their judgment. (italics added)

In the first part of this passage, Hume is talking about taste (about which 'critics' dispute). He then turns to 'opinion and science', which are not matters of taste. His use of 'matters of opinion' as being different from matters of taste seems sensible in view of the meaning of 'opinion'. In his time, 'opinion' had come to mean something like a belief for which the justification was less than certain. The opinion would concern some matter of fact (on our more modern use of 'matter of fact'); e.g., it might concern whether all ideas originate in the senses. So, opinions were true or false, even if there was no consensus about their truth value.

Hume's use of 'matters of opinion' fits with the definitions of 'opinion' in today's general dictionaries (addressed in an earlier post). For example, the most recent edition of Webster's has it that an opinion is 'a belief, judgment, or way of thinking about something'. Hume's use is also in synch with the definition of 'opinion' in the American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology, in which an opinion is said to be 'an attitude, belief, or judgment' ^{(2007, p. 648)}.

Hume wasn't alone in keeping tastes out of the domain of matters of opinion. Consider these sentences by Jeremy Bentham:

There is no incident imaginable, be it ever so trivial, and so remote from mischief, from which this principle [of sympathy and antipathy] may not extract a ground of punishment. Any difference in taste: any difference in opinion: upon one subject as well as upon another. No disagreement so trifling which perseverance and altercation will not render serious. (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. 2, sec. 16 [1789])

Bentham is making a general claim about all disagreements. To cover such a wide range, he conjoins differences in taste with differences in opinion, implying that the former are not already included among the latter.

In recent fact-opinion distinctions, it has been customary to categorize expressions of taste as matters of opinion or even to equate opinions with tastes (as Nickerson does). I maintain that before the 20th century, matters of opinion were not equated with, or even taken to include, matters of taste. Matters of opinion concerned beliefs that were true or false and that were subject to logical principles. By contrast, rightly or wrongly, many authors from the 18th century to our own time have subscribed to the adage de gustibus non est disputandum ('there is no disputing about tastes') and have accordingly regarded matters of taste as lying outside the domain of logic and truth claims.

It's difficult to support my contention by finding old (pre-20th-century) examples of authors explicitly distinguishing between matters of opinion and matters of taste. So, I'll have to rest content with the less direct support that I've taken from the above quotations of Hume and Bentham, supplemented by two quotations from less famous sources. First, in his study of the New York Public Library's history, Tom Glynn says that near the end of the 19th century, the library's administrators took the view that 'there is a great distinction between matters of opinion and matters of taste' and that the library's holdings should include materials that represented both sides in debates over conflicting opinions ^{(Glynn, Reading Publics: New York City's Public Libraries, 1754-1911 [New York: Fordham University Press, 2015], p. ???)}. Next, there is a line in a memorial to a Unitarian preacher, James Freeman, where the author says that Freeman 'carried [his] freedom of mind into matters of taste as well as matters of opinion' ^{(James Freeman Clarke, Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit [1865], p. 169)}. The author is compelled to mention matters of taste because they are not included among matters of opinion.

At some point in the 20th century, authors began to include tastes among matters of opinion and even, in some cases, to use 'matters of taste' interchangeably with 'matters of opinion'. For example, in a 1958 article, David Peace writes that '"Matters of taste" are matters of opinion' ^{(Peace, 'Planning and the Promotion of Good Taste' The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health 78 [1958]: pp. 339-40)}.

Similar views are evident in empirical research about when children are able to distinguish between statements of fact and of opinion. In one study, the authors say, '3-year-olds acknowledge and understand disagreements between individuals about matters of taste and opinion more readily than disagreements about matters of fact' ^{(Larisa Heiphetz et al. 'What do Different Beliefs Tell us? An Examination of Factual, Opinion-Based, and Religious Beliefs' Cognitive Development 30. April - June 2014 [2014]: 15–29)}. Here, statements of taste and opinion are lumped together as being mere subjective expressions that must be distinguished from statements concerning objective matters of fact (claims about what's true independently of us). In the 'Appendix' to Heiphetz et al., all of the 'statements of opinion-based belief' that were used in their research are expressions of taste (e.g., 'Oranges are the tastiest fruit', 'Monopoly is the most fun game'). Something similar happens in this report about an article by G. P. Goodwin and J. M. Darley ^{('The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism' Cognition 106 [March 2008], pp. 1339-1366)}. (One sometimes gets an impression of similar uses of 'matters of opinion' in the literature on faultless disagreement, though contributors to that literature are generally more careful about the phrase.)

Even if we set aside its deviance from the pre-20th-century use of 'matters of opinion', this recent equation of matters of opinion with matters of taste is puzzling. After all, one today hears occasionally about opinions as including primitive prejudices that stand in the way of science. That seems to account for the popularity of this Hippocratic line: 'There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.' (For more about this quotation, see the end of this post.) But if opinions were mere tastes, then how could they obstruct science? After all, claims about what is the most fun or the tastiest don't pose any apparent threat to scientific data or theories. Clearly, if opinions are to include anti-scientific prejudices, they can't be mere expressions of personal taste; they must involve (wrong-headed) truth claims about something other than tastes.

Somehow, the phrase 'matters of opinion' slipped its moorings and drifted away from the standard meaning of 'opinion'. This slippage has prompted some authors to consider the possibility that many opinions (even those that do not count as knowledge) do not concern matters of opinion ^{(Reuben Stern and Sam Wilkinson, '“That’s Just Like, Uh, Your Opinion, Man”: Jesus, the Dude, and Ordinary Language Philosophy', in The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom, ed. Peter S. Fosl [Wiley, 2012], p. 244)}.

As an antidote to this frankly screwed-up change in the use of 'matters of opinion', I recommend Michael Scriven's 1971 contribution to the Diablo Valley Education Project in Orinda, California. Scriven's paper is called 'Values and the Valuing Process' (pdf). Scriven there writes, 'Matters of opinion are issues where the possibility of the opinion being right or wrong exists; matters of taste are not' (p. 3).

There's also a 2009 psychology paper in which the authors try to make sense of some recent data by distinguishing between matters of opinion and questions of taste. They say, 'we define matters of taste as essentially arbitrary preferences that therefore have no intrinsic power or prestige associated with them, whereas opinions (like beliefs) refer to views that can at least in principle be evaluated at some level for their correctness' ^{(Russell Spears, Naomi Ellemers, and Bertjan Doosje, 'Strength in Numbers or Less Is More? A Matter of Opinion and a Question of Taste' Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 [2009]: pp. 1099-1111)}.

Sebald, Shakespeare, Josipovici, Bentham's mummy and so on

Theda Bara

A neat article on Prague and Kafka

An interview with Susan Bernofsky on translating Robert Walser

A roundup of choice Walser links from the past few years

Another review of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future

A new translation of Theodor Fontane's poem, 'The Tragedy of Afghanistan' (1859)

A review of Hannay's translation of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Gladstone: the grandest of old men

Via Maitresse, the new translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex has errors, hopefully to be corrected in time for the US release of this work

Will Self's Sebald Lecture

'Weavers, scholars, and writers, Sebald claims, tend “to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, [and] it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created.”'

The Mookse & the Gripes on Sebald's Rings of Saturn

'Love Across the Borders' by Gabriel Josipovici

Notes on Josipovici's Everything Passes by Paul Griffiths, Mr. Waggish, Stephen Mitchelmore, Richard Crary, and Dan Visel.

Aussie radio is on to Albert Camus, the James Dean of philosophy

More antipodean radio -- this time on David Eagleman, neuroscientist & novelist

Bellow-ing away at depression

A brief review of Breon Mitchell's new translation of The Tin Drum

Herta Müller's folk (with a tantalizing remark in the 4th paragraph about the roots of the Dracula story)

A three-week workshop on writing theology with Marilynn Robinson in Princeton (ht F&T)

Issa rocks out with a jukebox full of lit rock (ht Books, Inq.)

Bentham's mummy, Ginsberg and Kafka in one post

'There are more things in heaven and earth than ...,' -- okay, now let's look at some philosophers on Shakespeare. Here's a review (via Books, Inq.) of Colin McGinn's book on the bard, and McGinn's review of a book on Iago, and Martha Nussbaum's review from last year of McGinn's book along with Nuttall's and Zamir's