Specter of Reason

Two days after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I found myself improvising a melancholic interpretation of Jingle Bells.  I recorded three takes before the moment passed.  The mood and style develop over the three pieces, making them seem like three unique elements of a set, and not simply three versions of the same thing.

Peter van Inwagen has written a response to Bertrand Russell's teapot argument (H/T ex-apologist ) in which he assures us that there are people who accept the following two propositions:      (1) There is no reason to believe that God exists.      (2) Any one who accepts (1) should conclude that the probability of the existence of God is essentially 0. He offers Russell's teapot argument as an example.  However, while Russell clearly accepts (1), there's no discernible evidence that Russell ever endorsed anything like (2).  In the essay which van Inwagen cites ( "Is There A God? ", Russell, 1952), Russell argues that a divine purpose is improbable (on the scientific evidence) and thus that there is no reason to believe in a God.  He deduces the latter from the former, not the former from the latter.  Furthermore, his teapot argument is offered to a different purpose altogether. Here is what Russell writes, and what van Inwa...

A recent article in The New York Times by Professor Richard A. Friedman, M.D., entitled, " In Gun Debate, A Misguided Focus on Mental Illness ," is a bit of a hot item.  I want to agree with Friedman.  I support the fight for gun control.  (If the Second Ammendment really means that all citizens have the right to privately own guns--and I don't think it does--then I think the Second Ammendment needs to be ammended.)  But Friedman's piece is a terribly flawed, confused and misleading piece of work.  Just from the point of view of argumentative integrity, it's bad. Part of the problem is that I can't even be sure about Friedman's point of view.  I want to be charitable, and suppose that his main point is something like this:  Americans shouldn't let the discourse on mental illness distract us from the need for stricter gun control laws.  If that is his main point, then I completely agree.  Amen and all that. I'll assume that was his m...

That's the title of a recent paper I just read by Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa (Journal of Consciousness Studies  19, pp. 67-95; H/T ex-apologist ).  It's an interesting and mostly very clear paper, at least for me, who has not read most of the source material they are discussing.  (They're primarily drawing on Chalmers, Stoljar and Pereboom.) I was most surprised (and pleased) to see that Chalmers has made a significant qualification about the implications of the Knowledge and Conceivability Arguments.  I used to think he believed those arguments entailed the falsity of physicalism.  However, Chalmers now claims that they only entail the following disjunction:  Either physicalism is false or Russellian Monism is true.  Since there can be varieties of physicalism which are compatible with Russellian Monism, then Chalmers must be open to the possibility of physicalism. Chalmers apparently accepts (or perhaps only strongly leans towards) a variety...

I still haven't had a chance to look at Bruce Waller's book, Against Moral Responsibility   (2011) , but I've been reading about it and related topics in my spare time a bit over the past several days.  One reader, David Duffy, was kind enough to bring one of Waller's papers to my attention.  It's called "Empirical Free Will and the Ethics of Moral Responsibility"(2003).  In it, Waller claims that moral responsibility and free will are either conceptually wedded by definition (in which case, he says, we only get confusion) or there is some synthetic (empirical) connection between them.  He then argues that there is no such empirical connection. I question the claim that there is any confusion resulting from regarding a logical (analytic) entailment between moral responsibility and free will.  Unfortunately, Waller does not support his assertion here, though perhaps he addresses the issue in his more recent book.  I think the only conceptual confusion...

As I mentioned in a recent post , I'm not aware of any satisfactory arguments against Kant's demonstration that the freedom of the will can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason.  Kant puts forward that argument in his Critique of Pure Reason .  Yet, in his Critique of Practical Reason , he makes a pragmatic argument for belief in free will: We need to believe in free will because it is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Kant's arguments are not just about free will.  They're also about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  Yet, these days, the latter two are not seen as practically required for morality.  We can have moral responsibility without eternal souls or Divine judgment.  But can we have it without free will? Kant was a deontologist--he believed that morality requires duty and dignity, and not just behavior calculated to maximize some quantity of happiness, pleasure or goodness.  Yet, even those pursu...

I caught Skyfall last weekend and posted this mini-review on my Facebook wall: In some ways, it's excellent. Javier Bardem is unsurprisingly phenomenal. The music is very good, sometimes excellent. In other ways, it's predictably silly (the dialogue and action sequences are often well-crafted, but sometimes ridiculous). The plot is very sophisticated and convincing, and it works as an exploration of Bond himself, even though there are some pretty big holes. Nothing devastating, though. What bothers me, surprisingly, is Bond's relationship with women. Bond has always been promiscuous, but in this one he seems capable of very sincere and passionate intimacy, but without any emotional attachment at all. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I was seriously offended by the way the film depicted his relationship with women. Again, I know he's always slept around, but was it always this bad? (Maybe you need to see the film to answer that question.) Anyway, that point aside, ...

A little while ago William Egginton published a piece about neuroscience and abortion at The Stone .  He criticizes the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Act" (PUCA), which attempts to limit women's freedom to abort by appeal to the fetus' capacity to feel pain.  Egginton's argument is that the Act is philosophically and scientifically fraudulent.  He says that it relies on the false assumption that the mere capacity to perceive pain entails the sort of self-awareness we associate with personhood.  The PUCA argument is that fetuses can respond to pain, and therefore deserve to be regarded as persons under the law.  Egginton cogently argues that pain perception is not enough, scientifically speaking, to indicate the higher levels of consciousness we normally require for personhood. Egginton also makes the much broader claim that neuroscience (or any other science) is not capable of defining the limits of personhood, period.  This a controversial topic, and I woul...

[See update at the bottom for a very brief review of Death Proof .] 2007 saw the closing of the original Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin, TX.  Quentin Tarantino marked the event with an on-location film festival.  It was not his first at the Alamo Downtown, a theater which reveled in the independent, low-budget, nitty gritty feel that he and Robert Rodriguez celebrated in Grindhouse (including Death Proof  and Planet Terror ), which also came out in 2007. I had gone to a Tarantino film festival at the Alamo Downtown just two years earlier, in 2005, the year Entertainment Weekly ranked the Alamo Drafthouse as the #1 movie house in America .  (That was when the Alamo Drafthouse had just begun to expand outside of Austin, but was still limited to Texas locales.)  It was Tarantino's sixth film festival, " QT6 ."  I and about ten or so others managed to attend all of the screenings, including the all-night horror marathon. Tarantino introduced on...

Several scientists have made a declaration on consciousness .  (You can read coverage from a  Scientific American blog  here .) Unfortunately, I think the declaration is more likely to promote confusion rather than clarity. What does it mean to "experience affective states?" What characterizes intentional behavior as such? These are problematic questions and I don't see this declaration helping matters. They seem to be ignoring the difficulties, not overcoming them. One basic difficulty is that the word "consciousness" has multiple recognized definitions. For most people, I think if you told them octopuses had consciousness, they'd think that octopuses had self-awareness, higher order thoughts about their lives and experiences, and such. But that is not what the science shows. (I'm not saying octopuses don't have these things, but only that the science doesn't show it.) I suspect that the scientists making this declaration take "consciou...

I've completed my masters thesis.  It's over one hundred pages, by far the longest thing I've ever written.  And it's not half bad, in my opinion, though there are a few arguments I would have liked to flesh out in more detail. The first half is on the history of the concept of subsidiarity and its relation to the foundations of human rights law, including some criticism of the liberalism we find in Mill, Rorty and, most recently, Nussbaum.  I advocate an alternative, which I call pragmatic secular constructivism .  It is secular in the sense that it does not give religious belief a privileged place in political discourse; however, I take an accepting position towards the inclusion of religious language in political affairs.  My argument is that religious perspectives are going to influence politics one way or another, so long as religion is an influential factor in social life; and that if explicitly religious language is barred from entrance into the politic...

I want to clarify and expand on a point I recently raised against Ryle. A friend has suggested that I moved a little too quickly through the points, especially concerning the relevance of Wittgenstein, so I'll try to make it a bit more cogent. I'll draw some connections to Dennett, Millikan and Kripke in the process. It begins with Ryle's distinction between museum-possession and workshop-possession of factual knowledge (see Ryle, "Knowing How and Knowing That," 1946). Let MUSEUM(p) = museum-possession of knowledge that p. Let WORKSHOP(p) = workshop-possession of knowledge that p. Ryle claims that MUSEUM(p) is impoverished with respect to knowing-how, where "knowing how" is a general term for intelligence associated with the application or expression of knowledge. In order to intelligently exploit one's propositional knowledge that p, one needs WORKSHOP(p). Ryle is also clear that, in order to know that p, one must establish or derive the f...

I often qualify the music I post online, saying I'm still rusty, that it works well enough despite the imperfections, and so on.  Not this time.  I'm completely happy with these two recordings.  (Actually, I don't have any problems with  the last one I posted , either.) These were both recorded on the same day.  The first is an improvisation which develops into something meant to conjure the spirit of McCoy Tyner: Second, an original composition I'm calling "Serenity Junction": If you're paying attention, you'll notice that the first recording is actually based on the opening of "Serenity Junction."

I want to further explain my misgivings about Ryle's account of knowing-how ( see here ).  Ryle's positive view of knowing-how is embedded in his arguments against intellectualism. As Jason Stanley noted during his "meisterkurs," these arguments are targeted against a number of different positions at the same time, and Ryle lumps them all together under the banner of "intellectualism." First there is the notion that all knowledge is knowing the answer to a question. This is the position Jason wants to defend. Ryle is also arguing against the view that the intellect is the defining feature of the mind: that to be a person is to have a mind, and to have a mind is to have an intellect, where the intellect is defined as that which considers and grasps propositions, or truths. I think Jason wants to defend this position, as well; and it may very well be entailed by the first position. Along with these views is the view that, in order to act intelligently, ...

I'm just 24 hours back from Jason Stanley's "meisterkurs" at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. It was phenomenal. It was great to finally meet Jason in person. He was wonderfully receptive and gracious. I didn't have time to ask him everything I wanted, but a number of important bases were covered. He was excited and good-humored and always kept me on the edge of my seat. I was glad to see him being critical of some of the arguments in his recent book. At one point, he seemed to want to reject the idea of practical ways of thinking as a natural kind or category of cognitive capacities. He said he had never claimed they were necessary in the first place, at which point I picked up my copy of his book and turned to page 130 and read aloud: "[Practical ways of thinking] are necessary to explain the acquisition of skill on the basis of knowledge of facts, which are true propositions." Jason responded that he didn't know what he meant by...