Specter of Reason

This month, physicist and popular science writer  Sean Carroll weighs in  on the everlasting debate about free will. He says it's "as real as baseball," which means that it is not the sort of thing that we would expect to find in a detailed physical description of the universe, but that we can't imagine trying to talk about humanity without accepting it as a real phenomenon. I have to criticize Carroll for failing to explain what he means by the phrase "free will" (a phrase which, he explains, does not have an agreed upon meaning) and for failing to give us a reason to think it is as real as baseball. Carroll defends a pragmatic realism--a view that we should take as  real  whatever entities we benefit from postulating in a given language, regardless of whether or not we benefit from postulating them in our widest available language. So, we benefit from postulating the existence of baseball even though there is no need for it in the language of physics, and ...

Over at Russell's blog , I was asked why I would call something an "alternative" if it was never physically possible. If this is a deterministic universe, how could anything ever rightly be called an alternative? My answer: It is represented to us as an alternative which we evaluate according to (often flexible) standards. The process of deliberation may be completely deterministic, but there's plenty of evidence that such processes occur. They occur frequently in plain sight, in public discourse. A comparison to natural selection might help. Darwin's use of the term "natural selection" might seem metaphorical, as if natural selection were fundamentally unlike artificial selection. I don't think that's the case. Perhaps you think determinism means that there is neither natural nor artificial selection --that the term is inappropriate in a deterministic universe. I don't think that makes much sense. As I wrote in my last post, postulat...

Russell Blackford has written an interesting post which has spawned an interesting discussion about free will. Russell's confused a few of his interlocutors and says he feels a little bit alone in his neck of the internets. Since I think I agree with his view of free will and the related discourse, I've decided to throw in my two cents. To say we make a choice or a decision is merely to say that we adopt one plan among given alternatives. This does not imply that the alternatives were ever physically possible, nor does it imply that the decision could have been other than what it was. All it implies is that (1) there are representations of plans as options for future behavior, (2) one of those representations becomes an active part of our behavior (as an intention) and (3) the representation of options as such plays a causal role in the production of the intention (by satisfying some conditions which we normally think of as desires/needs). There need not be a "free...

Not sure how far I'll go with this, but here's the first entry in my "Science Phiction" series. The point is to identify popular writing which mangles, misidentifies, or otherwise wrongly appropriates philosophical ideas or themes in the name of science. If I were going to award points, I'd award generously for writers who get both the science and the philosophy wrong. However, to qualify for entry, you only have to get the philosophy wrong. First up: Astrophysicist Adam Frank gets the time-lag argument terribly wrong: Where is Now? The Paradox of the Present Here's an excerpt: When you look at the mountain peak 30 kilometers away you see it not as it exists now but as it existed a 1/10,000 of a second ago. The light fixture three meters above your head is seen not as it exists now but as it was a hundred millionth of a second ago. Gazing into your partner's eyes, you see her (or him) not for who they are but for who they were 10 -10 of...

I've written another pa per for another graduate "course," entitled "Theories of Linguistic Communication." It's not as strong or thorough as I'd like it to be, and it's a bit disorganized, but I don't have more time to work on it. I'm not sure how committed I am to the views I'm expressing here, either. How's that for a disclaimer? In a nutshell, my arguments and views are still in development, but hopefully this short essay will be of some interest. Rules, Acts and Interpretation: A Wittgensteinian View of Linguistic Communication I According to the standard view of linguistic communication, to know a language is to know a set of rules which allows one to deduce the truth-conditions of any well-formed sentence in that language (Recanati 2002, p. 105). These rules are semantic, which means they relate sentences to the propositions they express. Such rules may be context-sensitive: some linguistic entities may even “wear t...

I wasn't able to convince my professor that KW accepts the picture of 'grasping a rule' which sustains the skeptical argument. She claims that the skeptical argument is (or is similar to) a reductio ad absurdum-- the argument and its intolerable conclusion lead to rejection of one or more of the premises. Thus, she argues, when KW says he accepts the skeptic's argument and conclusion, he only means that he accepts that, given the original picture of 'grasping a rule', there can be no facts about intended meaning. The skeptical solution supposedly replaces that picture, which relies on the history of the individual, with a different picture which focuses on the social construction of rules. I grant that some of what KW says supports such a reading, but it cannot be correct. First, it is hard for me to understand why KW would accept that there are no facts about intended meaning if he rejected the original picture of 'grasping a rule'. Even when we acc...

I've already turned in my paper on meaning skepticism , but I want to get a few more thoughts organized on KW's skeptical solution. As I've already argued, KW does not present meaning skepticism as a logically coherent possibility. Since I don't see a problem to be solved, I see no need to explore possible solutions. Still, it is worth looking at KW's skeptical solution for curiosity's sake, if nothing else. I've already expressed dissatisfaction with KW's picture of what it means to follow a rule. In response to my paper, my professor disagreed with me about KW's attitude towards that picture. She thinks KW rejects the picture, perhaps as part of KW's skeptical solution to the paradox. I don't think that's right. KW's skeptical solution is called "skeptical" because it does not challenge the skeptic's argument or conclusion. It accepts the stipulation that there are no facts about intended meaning: "There i...