Premeditated spontaneity__ oxymoron that really works. By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari& RESTRICTIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES JANICE MOULTON

We never knew we were creating poetry

·         Poetry cannot be contrived; it is to be on the spur of the moment. Well, it is no problem; one just needs to cultivate studied indifference to prove that one never knew what he was doing to prove that utterance is without any external stimulus.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? Albert Einstein

Abu Hurairah (radiallahu anh) reported: I heard the Prophet (salallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) saying, "A person utters a word thoughtlessly (i.e., without thinking about its being good or not) and, as a result of this, he will fall down into the fire of Hell deeper than the distance between the east and the west.'' 
[Al-Bukhari and Muslim] 

RESTRICTIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES

The Adversary Paradigm affects the kinds of questions asked and determines the answers that are thought to be acceptable. This is evident in nearly every area of philosophy. The only problems recognized are those between opponents, and the only kind of reasoning considered is the certainty of deduction, directed to opposition. The paradigm has a strong and obvious influence on the way problems are addressed. For example in philosophy of language, the properties investigated are analyzed when possible in terms of properties that can be subjected to deductive reasoning. Semantic theory has detoured questions of meaning into questions of truth. Meaning is discussed in terms of the deductive consequences of sentences. We ask not what a sentence says, but what it guarantees, what we can deduce from it. Relations among ideas that affect the meaning are either assimilated to the deductive model or ignored. In philosophy of science, the claim that scientific reasoning is not essentially deductive has led to “charges of irrationality, relativism, and the defense of mob rule”.

Non-deductive reasoning is thought to be no reasoning at all. It is thought that any reasons which are good reasons must be deductive and certain. In ethics, a consequence of this paradigm is that it has been assumed that there must be a single supreme moral principle. Because moral reasoning may be the result of different moral principles that may make conflicting claims about the right thing to do, a supreme moral principle is needed to “adjudicate rationally [that is, deductively] among different competing moralities”. The relation between moral principles and moral decision is thought to be deductive. A supreme moral principle allows one to deduce, by plugging in the relevant factors, what is right or wrong. More than one principle would allow, as is possible if one starts from different premises, conflicting judgments to be deduced. The possibilities that one could adjudicate between conflicting moral percepts without using deduction, that there might be moral problems that are not the result of conflicts in moral principles, and that there might be moral dilemmas for which there are no guaranteed solutions, are not considered. There is a standard “refutation” of egoism that claims that egoism does not count as an ethical theory and therefore is not worthy of philosophical consideration because an egoist would not advocate egoism to others (would not want others to be egoists too). It is assumed that only systems of ideas that can be openly proclaimed and debated are to count as theories, or as philosophy. Again this is the Adversary Paradigm at work, allowing only systems of ideas that can be advocated and defended, and denying that philosophy might examine a system of ideas for its own sake, or for its connections with other systems.

There are assumptions in metaphysics and epistemology that language is necessary for thinking, for reasoning, for any system of ideas. It is denied that creatures without language might have thoughts, might be able to figure out some things, because the only kind of reasoning that is recognized is adversarial reasoning and for that one must have language. With the Adversary Paradigm we do not try to assess positions or theories on their plausibility or worthiness or even popularity. Instead we are expected to consider, and therefore honor, positions that are most unlike our own in order to show that we can meet their objections. So we find moral theories addressed to egoists, theories of knowledge aimed at skeptics. Since the most extreme opposition may be a denial of the existence of something, much philosophic energy is expended arguing for the existence of some things, and no theory about the nature of those things ever gets formulated. We find an abundance of arguments trying to prove that determinism is false because free will exists, but no positive accounts giving an explanation, in terms of chance and indeterminism, of what free will would be. Philosophers debate and revive old arguments about whether God exists, but leave all current discussions about what the nature of God would be to divinity schools and religious orders. Philosophy, by attention to extreme positions because they are extreme, presents a distorted picture about what sorts of positions are worthy of attention, giving undo attention and publicity to positions merely because they are those of a hypothetical adversary’s and possibly ignoring positions which make more valuable or interesting claims.