Sounding an Idol: The Television as Imagetext in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

The response of critics to Don DeLillo’s seminal novel White Noise has centred on the connections that can be drawn between this work and the critical context that surrounded it upon its publication in 1984, namely the climate of radical scepticism ushered in by critics like Jean Baudrillard. This article attempts to argue that the relationship between the novel and this critical climate is far more antagonistic than has been acknowledged previously. Drawing upon the critic W.J.T. Mitchell’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “sounding”, as opposed to the iconoclastic smashing, of idols, the article will “sound” the idol which is at the centre of DeLillo’s novel: the television. This will show the critical distance that DeLillo deliberately established between his text and the texts of postmodern theory that were fashionable throughout the later twentieth century (particularly at the time White Noise was published) and will place DeLillo in a more contemporary context, his face turned not only to the past, but to the critical horizons ahead of him.

Grounds for justification

We must distinguish between the condition of a proposition’s being justified in one’s situation and the metaphysical grounds determining that this condition obtains. While the former is luminous, the latter need not be. It is argued that knowing is a strict full ground for doxastic justification, and being in a position to know is a strict full ground for propositional justification. It follows that facts about one’s evidence that serve as strict partial grounds for knowing are strict partial grounds for doxastic justification, and facts about one’s evidence that serve as strict partial grounds for being in a position to know are strict partial grounds for propositional justification. Even if only partial, such evidential grounds can only be assumed to be available in some, but not all, cases in which one has doxastic justification without knowing, and propositional justification without being in a position to know. A more comprehensive account identifies facts about evidential probabilities as facts that yield strict full grounds for justification. While one’s evidence is the totality of what one is in a position to know, the evidential probability of p equals the probability of p conditional on one’s evidence. The account requires taking the notion of evidential probability as primitive. It uniformly applies to all cases of justification, including the bad cases envisaged by radical scepticism. Degrees of strength of justification are explained in terms of facts about evidential probabilities. Just as their grounds, degrees of strength of justification are not luminous, even if justification is.

Revisionism Gone Awry: Since When Hasn't Hume Been a Sceptic?

In this paper, we argue that revisionary theories about the nature and extent of Hume's scepticism are mistaken. We claim that the source of Hume's pervasive scepticism is his empiricism. As earlier readings of Hume's Treatise claim, Hume was a sceptic – and a radical one. Our position faces one enormous problem. How is it possible to square Hume's claims about normative reasoning with his radical scepticism? Despite the fact that Hume thinks that causal (inductive) reasoning is irrational, he explicitly claims that one can and should make normative claims about beliefs being ‘reasonable’. We show that even though Hume thinks that our causal (inductive) beliefs are rationally unjustified, there is nonetheless a ‘relative’ sense of justification available to Hume and that he relies on this ‘relative’ sense in those places where he makes normative claims about what we ought to believe.

Précis of The Illusion of Doubt

The Illusion of Doubt shows that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of our evidential situation—the view that my epistemic grounds in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ cases must be the same. It is this picture which issues both a standing invitation to radical scepticism and ensures that there is no way of getting out of it while agreeing to the sceptic’s terms. The sceptical problem cannot, therefore, be answered ‘directly’. Rather, the assumptions that give rise to it, need to be undermined. These include the notion that radical scepticism can be motivated by the ‘closure’ principle for knowledge, that the ‘Indistinguishability Argument’ renders the Cartesian conception compulsory, that the ‘New Evil Genius Thesis’ is coherent, and the demand for a ‘global validation’ of our epistemic practices makes sense. Once these dogmas are undermined, the path is clear for a ‘realism without empiricism’ that allows us to re-establish unmediated contact with the objects and persons in our environment which an illusion of doubt had threatened to put forever beyond our cognitive grasp.

Contradictions

The conflict between the greatness and the wretchedness of human nature is considered on a more philosophical level. The Stoics do justice to our moral ideals but the Pyrrhonists (whom Pascal sees as implicitly putting humankind on a level with non-human animals) seem better to describe human beings in the mass. The quest for an essence of human nature is compromised by an awareness of the power of custom to determine our beliefs and values. Even our belief in fundamental principles may be based on custom. Yet radical scepticism is in practice unacceptable. The clash between dogmatism (the belief that we have knowledge) and scepticism is irreconcilable. Only the Christian doctrine of the Fall can enable us to get out of this impasse.

Perceptual Entitlement and Skepticism

What are the implications for perceptual anti-individualism for radical scepticism about perceptual entitlement? Previous ambitious arguments are criticized: one can only know a posteriori the extent of perceptual entitlement. But one can know a priori that one is not the only sentient being to have ever existed. Brueckner presented a reconstruction of an argument thought to be discernible in Burge’s “Perceptual Entitlement.” It was supposed to be an a priori argument for the existence of perceptual entitlement. Though it was not touted as such, the argument would be a kind of a priori anti-skeptical argument. For if it could be demonstrated a priori that we have entitlement to hold our perceptual beliefs, then this would answer a skeptic who claimed that our perceptual beliefs have no positive epistemic status, given our inability to rule out his skeptical counterpossibilities in a manner that itself possesses positive epistemic status.

3. Defending knowledge

‘Defending knowledge’ considers some of the different philosophical responses to the problem of radical scepticism. It begins with the natural response to a philosophical puzzle: to insist on our commonsense principles and work back from there, focusing on the work of G.E. Moore. It then looks at a different kind of response to the sceptical problem, which involves the idea that perhaps there is some sort of context-shift in play in the sceptical reasoning. Finally, it discusses a more radical approach to the problem of radical scepticism outlined by Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is no one particular solution to radical scepticism, but numerous philosophical responses to the problem.

1. What is scepticism?

Scepticism concerns doubt, primarily doubt about what is true. So construed, the sceptic is not proposing that truth is just subjective opinion in the way that the relativist is. Indeed, what is motivating scepticism is rather the worry that our beliefs might not be true in an objective sense. However, scepticism can slide into relativism if the former becomes extensive enough. ‘What is scepticism?’ asks how we would differentiate between a healthy scepticism that targets only specific claims, and a more generalized radical scepticism that has pernicious consequences. It considers different types of knowledge—propositional, ability, and perceptual—and why it might matter to us that we do have the widespread knowledge that we take ourselves to have.

2. Is knowledge impossible?

‘Is knowledge impossible?’ considers an influential argument that purports to show that we do not know much of what we take ourselves to know. If this argument works, then it licenses a radical sceptical doubt. It first looks at Descartes’s formulation of radical scepticism—Cartesian scepticism—which employs an important theoretical innovation known as a radical sceptical hypothesis. The closure principle is also discussed along with the radical sceptical paradox. If this radical sceptical argument works, then we not only lack knowledge of much of what we believe, but we do not even have any good epistemic reasons for believing what we do.