The last word
New York, 1997
Abstract
Reason possesses a universal authority that cannot be reduced to personal, cultural, or biological dispositions. Subjectivist and relativist challenges to this authority are inherently incoherent because any attempt to classify a category of thought as merely “local” or “perspectival” must itself rely on an objective framework to identify those limits. Justification terminates not in the shared practices of a community, but in fundamental principles of logic, arithmetic, empirical science, and ethics that remain valid independent of any specific point of view. These forms of thought are inescapable; they are necessarily employed even when attempting to criticize or qualify them from an external psychological or evolutionary standpoint. While human beings are biological specimens shaped by natural selection, the validity of rational thought cannot be explained by evolutionary utility alone. A purely naturalistic reduction of reason is self-undermining, as it must presuppose the logical principles it seeks to demote to contingent adaptations. Ultimately, the final court of appeal in any inquiry belongs to the first-order reasons themselves, which dominate any attempt to bracket them as mere psychological phenomena or manifestations of a specific form of life. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
[T]he appeal to reason is implicitly authorized by the [subjectivist] challenge itself, so this is really a way of showing that the challenge is unintelligible. The charge of begging the question implies that there is an alternative—namely, to examine the reasons for and against the claim being challenged while suspending judgment about it. For the case of reasoning itself, however, no such alternative is available, since any considerations against the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reasons against it, and these must be rationally assessed. The use of reason in the response is not a gratuitous importation by the defender: It is demanded by the character of the objections offered by the challenger.