Out of the fly-bottle: genealogy, power, and normativity in the space of reasons

Thesis

Genealogical anxiety is the anxiety that the contingent causal origins of our beliefs, concepts, and values somehow undermine their rational standing. For while I find my beliefs true, concepts apt, and values valuable, I am likely to have found others true, apt, and valuable had I been born into a different household in a different place at a different time. I may thus worry that I have no more reason to reflectively endorse my own beliefs, concepts, and values than those of my genealogical doppelgänger. Such anxiety may strike some as quite strange. For in many normal cases, the fact that our beliefs, concepts, and values vary with the contingencies of history simply indicates that they are appropriately sensitive to what the world is like while, in others, their histories are plainly irrelevant to their rational status. So, what exactly are we supposed to be anxious about, and should we be anxious about it? The argument of my thesis has two components. The first component responds to the question of whether we ought to be genealogically anxious directly. After examining why one might fight the genealogical revelation of contingency anxiety-inducing and setting out a novel typology of genealogy, I argue that the contingency of the beliefs, concepts, and values that one might be genealogically anxious about is in fact a condition on their being semantically contentful at all. I go on to argue that genealogical anxiety arises from the assumption of an erroneous metasemantic framework which, once abandoned, ought to release us from its grip. This means that genealogical anxiety is ultimately unjustified. The second component of my argument investigates genealogical anxiety's conditions of possibility. For while the metasemantic framework on which genealogical anxiety depends lacks foundation, this raises the question of why we are wont to accept it in the first place. I thus go on to show that the metasemantic framework from which genealogical anxiety emerges becomes a viable philosophical option only under the ideological conditions paradigmatic of social inequality. This means that genealogical anxiety is not a philosophical problem at all, but a social one.

Authors: Ratcliffe, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-eo6azazn6
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: metanormativity; ideology; genealogy; power; Wittgenstein
• Subjects: Social philosophy; Philosophy of language; Philosophy; Critical theory