Metajustification

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Metajustification - it seems to me that a lot of the philosophical “work” involved in arguing for a position takes place at the “meta” level, i.e. at the level of choosing evaluative frameworks of some sort to apply to philosophical problems (or to put it yet another way: at the level of choosing normative frameworks within which to assess descriptive philosophical facts) — the rest seems to consist mainly in working out when disputes arise from operating within different evaluative frameworks or people grinding through the nitty gritty of applying those frameworks to philosophical (that is not to say that these are inconsequential tasks of course!) - but then one might ask: how does the same thing not occur at the “meta” level too? how is the most interesting level not the “meta-meta” one and so on? - a possible answer may be found in the change in justification that appears to take place once one moves to the “meta plane” - it seems that a lot of the time a metajudgement is a consequentialist judgement, i.e. a metaphilosophical approach is justified in terms of its consequences at the level of philosophical theory (its ability to dissolve particularly vexing philosophical quandries, etc.) — {[green it would be interesting to explore whether or not this is the only way one may justify and stop the regress to the next level of “meta” ]} - by making the judgement at the meta level dependent on the next level down instead of up (up moves possibly being characteristic of what takes place in ordinary philosophical discourse), the potential infinite regress problem is overcome — indeed, even if one holds that perhaps one or more extra levels of meta are needed, as long as the final level displays the appropriate “downward” justificatory trajectory, the infinite regress is averted — it would also be interesting to explore why one would wish to postulate more than two levels on which philosophy (or any other human (?) action) takes place — an intial thought in response to this: perhaps if one wished to advocate some sort of pluralism of normative frameworks, then one would need another “upper” in which to situate this view normatively also? - another interesting question: which is primary, the metaphilosophical or the philosophical? — initially it seems that at least these two levels are both needed: there has to be something “downward” to assess consequences with respect to and there has to be something “upward” to give normative value (in some sense) to the lower layer — indeed, that question itself seems to presuppose some other normative framework in which the metacontent can be viewed as descriptive and thus assessed - of course, the fact that content at the meta level is argued for in a consequentialist way seems to point to another level of theory: the level at which the consequentialist doctrine is positted - however, can one avoid this by somehow positting that consequentialist reasoning is “primitive” (i.e. that it seems to be the sort of thing one could almost have prerationally)? — to put it in a sort of intuitionistic way: that consequentialism (in some form) is a kind of base reasoning that we then constructively build from - {[green A side note occurs to me here: perhaps one can embark on a sort of phenomological project with respect to these foundational matters. Just as on some level we just do experience the external world, and some level we just do hold our beliefs, reasoning, etc. to have foundations. But what can one “get out” of such a realisation? ]}

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Chris Wilcox

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[[red There’s a very similar issue in philosophy of statistics. But it can’t be resolved downwards using consequentialism! Because one of the two base-level positions I’m interested in evaluating is consistent with consequentialism and the other one isn’t, so to assume consequestianlism would be unfair. Or at least would short-circuit the discussion.

Jason ]]

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