Specter of Reason

A Modal Anti-Ontological Argument

2012-02-17T00:17:00.004+01:00

I was just checking out Ichthus77, a philosophy blog that focuses on apologetics, because it is hosting the upcoming edition of the Philosopher's Carnival. I noticed a recent entry on the modal ontological argument as developed by Alvin Plantinga and explained by William Lane Craig. The modal ontological argument uses possible world semantics to recast the age-old ontological argument for the existence of God. Here it is, as introduced by William Lane Craig (copied from Ichthus77):

Plantinga conceives of God as a being which is "maximally excellent" in every possible world. Plantinga takes maximal excellence to include such properties as omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection. A being which has maximal excellence in every possible world would have what Plantinga calls "maximal greatness." So Plantinga argues:

1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists.

2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

5. If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.

6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

I don't want to challenge possible world semantics, at least not here. Taking the logic of Plantinga's argument as given, then, it is claimed that the argument can only be defeated by denying its first premise. We can deny the coherence of the very notion of a maximally great being or we can deny its possibility. As it happens, I'm not convinced that the notion of a maximally great being is logically coherent, let alone possible. However, what is more interesting to me at the moment is that the modal ontological argument can be defeated in another, much more damaging and interesting way. All we need is the following defeater: It is possible that a maximally great being does not exist. Taking that defeater as a premise, we can formulate a modal anti-ontological argument:

1b. It is possible that a maximally great being does not exist.
2b. If it is possible that a maximally great being does not exist, then a maximally great being does not exist in some possible world.
3b. If a maximally great being does not exist in some possible world, then it does not exist in every possible world.
4b. If a maximally great being does not exist in every possible world, then a maximally great being does not exist.
5b. Therefore, a maximally great being does not exist.

Each step in my argument mirrors a step in the modal ontological argument. So my modal anti-ontological argument seems just as valid as the modal ontological argument. Therefore, we need a reason to accept 1 whilst rejecting 1b. The striking fact is that to argue for 1 against 1b would be to argue not for the mere possibility of a maximally great being, but for the very fact of its existence. In other words, to overcome my defeater, you must first establish that a maximally great being exists. Yet, that is the conclusion which the modal ontological argument was supposed to establish. So some other argument is required to establish the existence of a maximally great being. The modal ontological argument cannot establish it, and thus fails.

Stanley's Great Error

2012-02-12T13:25:00.000+01:00

I'm not done reading and responding to Stanley's chapter on Ryle, but I've found another big mistake in his interpretation which deserves a post of its own. Stanley says that Ryle claims the following: If intelligent action is guided by rules or if it involves the application of criteria, then those rules or criteria must be intellectually acknowledged prior to the intelligent performance. Stanley couldn't be more wrong. [Stanley's error leads him to mischaracterize Ryle's knowing-how/knowing-that distinction. See update below.]

Stanley rejects the position which he attributes to Ryle. He says Ryle's view is unjustified, because Ryle has not demonstrated that the mere application of criteria requires an antecedent acknowledgment of that criteria. Stanley says (Know How, p. 13): "Ryle therefore needs an argument that the view that 'intelligent performance involves the observance of rules, or the application of criteria' entails that 'the operation which is characterised as intelligent must be preceded by an intellectual acknowledgment of these rules or criteria; that is, the agent must first go through the internal process of avowing to himself certain propositions about what is to be done ('maxims', 'imperatives' or 'regulative propositions' as they are sometimes called); only then can he execute his performance in accordance with those dictates.'"

In that passage, Stanley is quoting Ryle (The Concept of Mind, page 29 in my edition.) Here is the passage from Ryle in full (it starts on the preceding page):

What is involved in our descriptions of people as knowing how to make and appreciate jokes, to talk grammatically, to play chess, to fish, or to argue? Part of what is meant is that, when they perform these operations, they tend to perform them well, i.e. Correctly or efficiently or successfully. Their performances come up to certain standards, or satisfy certain criteria. But this is not enough. The well-regulated clock keeps good time and the well-drilled circus seal performs its tricks flawlessly, yet we do not call them 'intelligent'. We reserve this title for the persons responsible for their performances. To be intelligent is not merely to satisfy criteria, but to applv them; to regulate one's actions and not merely to be well-regulated. A person's performance is described as careful or skillful, if in his operations he is ready to detect and correct lapses, to repeat and improve upon successes, to profit from the examples of others and so forth. He applies criteria in performing critically, that is, in trying to get things right.

This point is commonly expressed in the vernacular by saying that an action exhibits intelligence, if, and only if, .the agent is thinking what he is doing while he is doing it,and thinking what he is doing in such a manner that he would not do the action so well if he were not thinking what he is doing. This popular idiom is sometimes appealed to as evidence in favour of the intellectualist legend. Champions of this legend are apt to try to reassimilate knowing how to knowing that by arguing that intelligent performance involves the observance of rules, or the application of criteria. It follows that the operation which is characterised as intelligent must be preceded by an intellectual acknowledgment of these rules or criteria; that is, the agent must first go through the internal process of avowing to himself certain propositions about what is to be done ('maxims', 'imperatives' or 'regulative propositions' as they are sometimes called); only then can he execute his performance in accordance with those dictates. He must preach to himself before he can practise.

I discussed this passage with Stanley a couple years ago, and I challenged his interpretation of it. I guess I wasn't able to convince him of his error, because he repeats it again in his book.

To see the error, look at the first paragraph of the passage I just quoted from Ryle. He says, and I quote again, "To be intelligent is not merely to satisfy criteria, but to applv them; to regulate one's actions and not merely to be well-regulated." Ryle states, clearly and straightforwardly, that intelligent action entails the application of criteria, and the regulation of one's actions in accordance with criteria. So Ryle accepts the first of the claims that Stanley quotes: "intelligent performance involves the observance of rules, or the application of criteria." On the other hand, Ryle denies that intelligent action must be preceded by an avowal or acknowledgment of a proposition or truth. So Ryle denies the second claim that Stanley quotes, that "the operation which is characterised as intelligent must be preceded by an intellectual acknowledgment of those rules or criteria." How could Ryle suppose that the first claim entails the second, when he clearly affirms the first but denies the second?

Why does Stanley accuse Ryle of supposing that the first claim entails the second? Because in the second paragraph I quoted, Ryle presents an argument to that effect. However, Ryle is showing us the sort of argument he thinks an intellectualist is "apt" to make. Stanley confuses this hypothetical intellectualist's argument for Ryle's own, and so misunderstands Ryle's point of view entirely.

Ryle states his view again on the next page of The Concept of Mind: "Some intelligent performances are not controlled by any anterior acknowledgments of the principles applied in them." Ryle is clear: intelligent performance is guided by rules, but it is not always controlled by "anterior acknowledgments" of those rules. It still involves the application of criteria. Ryle thus distinguishes between following a rule and being guided by a proposition. Stanley's interpretation is simply wrong.

[Updated on February 16 to develop the point as follows:]

Based on his (mis)reading of that one passage, Stanley believes that Ryle thinks knowing-that entails the application of criteria or the following of rules, and that this requires some kind of antecedent triggering or accessing of propositions. Thus, he takes Ryle to suppose that manifestations of knowing-that (unlike manifestations of knowing-how) require prior acts of acknowledging or avowing propositions. He writes (p. 17): "[Ryle] assumes that manifesting propositional knowledge requires a prior mental act, such as the prior triggering of a maxim or rule . . . Second, he assumes that knowing how in contrast can be manifested without there being any prior mental act whatever. . . . Ryle is operating with a metaphysical picture of knowing how according to which one's know how just is constituted by the fact that when one is so situated, one acts thus." Thus, Stanley says, Ryle believes that "my state of knowing how to open a door is manifested simply by my being in front of a door and opening it." Stanley concludes that Ryle's distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that is unmotivated, because intelligently opening a door is properly taken as an employment of knowing-that, or propositional knowledge: It shows that one knows that such-and-such is a proper way to open the door.

The first major problem with Stanley's interpretation is that Ryle does not suppose that knowing-that entails antecedent acts of intellection. In fact, he says knowing-that does not always require intellection at all, as it can be demonstrated by rote recitation of rules. (See Ryle's discussion of the difference between knowing how to play chess and knowing the rules of chess in Chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind, pp. 40-41.) Furthermore, in Ryle's view, knowing-how cannot be evidenced simply by performing an action in a particular situation. According to Ryle, knowing-how cannot be identified or associated with any particular action type. It is not a matter of habit, and so cannot be demonstrated by merely doing a particular thing in a particular circumstance.

In Ryle's view, intelligently opening a door can involve propositional knowledge, but it cannot be reduced entirely to propositional competence. However, merely opening a door out of habit, without the care and innovation that marks intelligent behavior, is not an example of know-how. It could, however, involve (or perhaps share some interesting features with) propositional knowledge.

Ryle and Behaviorism

2012-02-12T12:10:00.003+01:00

Gilbert Ryle begins the last section of The Concept of Mind (1949) with a prophecy: "The general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'" (Ryle, 327). He was certainly right about the stigma, but he may have grossly underestimated the threat it would pose. Behaviorism is the pivot on which Ryle's legacy hinges.

Jason Stanley, a prominent philosopher of language, and Julia Tanney, a leading Ryle scholar, disagree on how to characterize Ryle's relationship to behaviorism. Tanney argues that Ryle wasn't a behaviorist of any sort, not even a 'soft' behaviorist. She says the "soft behaviorist" view is the standard (but mistaken) interpretation of Ryle, according to which "statements containing mental terms can be translated, without loss of meaning, into subjunctive conditionals about what the individual will do in various circumstances." In chapter one of his recent book, Know How, Stanley argues for this interpretation of Ryle: "Ryle certainly thought that mental capacities were not identical to dispositions characterized in terms of a single natural kind of behavior, like squinting. But it is consistent with Ryle's persistent admonishments that he thought of each mental capacity as identical with a very lengthy and complex disjunction of purely physical dispositions" (Stanley, 10). To ascribe a mental capacity to a person is just to make a series of disjunctive conditional statements about their behavior, however vaguely.

Oddly, Stanley claims that the length and complexity of such disjunctions might make it impossible for them to be described in any finite period of time. However right or wrong Stanley is for allowing infinities into his equation, it is quite a stretch to assume that Ryle made the same allowance. More than that, Stanley's assumption goes against the letter and the spirit of Ryle's analysis.

Before continuing, we should pause to remember that Stanley's point is only about a subset of mental-conduct concepts. While Ryle's discussion of mental capacities does lend itself to a more straightforward dispositional analysis, Ryle also discusses "semi-hypothetical" or "mongrel-categorical" statements, which he says are neither wholly dispositional nor wholly occasional. (More on mongrel-categoricals below.) So, even if we granted that attributions of mental capacities were analyzable as Stanley says, Ryle is very explicit that he does not take all mental-conduct concepts in this way. So Tanney is right when she says: "Although it is true that Ryle was keen to point out the dispositional nature of many mental concepts, it would be wrong to construe him as offering a programme of analysis of mental predicates into a series of subjunctive conditionals."

Even if we restrict the discussion to mental capacities, it does not seem that Ryle is willing to reduce them to a definite series of subjunctive conditionals. Ryle says intelligence is "indefinitely heterogeneous," and so cannot be captured in either a finite or an infinite series of propositions. In what follows I will try to explain why Ryle takes up this point of view.

First, it's worth getting a bit clearer on Ryle's notion of mongrel-categorical statements. In the following passage from The Concept of Mind (p. 229), Ryle employs the example of following a tune:

That a person is following a tune is, if you like, a fact both about his ears and about his mind; but it is not a conjunction of one fact about his ears and another fact about his mind, or a conjoint report of one incident in his sensitive life and another incident in his intellectual life. It is what I have called a 'semi-hypothetical', or 'mongrel-categorical', statement."

By "ears," I take Ryle to mean the auditory apparatus. When we refer to a person as following a tune, we are saying something about how their body is functioning (ears, brain, etc.), but we are also saying something more, but it is not a reference to some other happening, function or entity. But then what is this "something more?" Apparently it is close to a subjunctive conditional, but it is not identical to one. For, if it were identical to one, then Ryle's mongrel-categorical statements would simply be conjunctions of occasional and dispositional statements. But Ryle's point is that they are not conjunctions, but something else. That "something else" might look like a great mystery, as if Ryle were postulating some bizarre ontological or epistemological category. But if you're tempted at looking at it that way, then you're misunderstanding Ryle's method.

Ryle is talking about the difference between behavior and action. The ears function--they behave. But following a tune is an action, and not a simple behavior. It is intelligent behavior. Ryle (p. 44) discusses intelligence in terms of "dispositions the exercises of which are indefinitely heterogeneous. . . . Epistemologists, among others, often fall into the trap or expecting dispositions to have uniform exercises. For instance, when they recognise that the verbs 'know' and 'believe' are ordinarily used dispositionally, they assume that there must therefore exist one-pattern intellectual processes in which these cognitive dispositions are actualised." For Ryle, capacities for intelligent behavior do not correspond to any single pattern, nor to a definite set of behaviors. Stanley says that we might just lack the time or capacity to identify them. But Ryle suggests a much stronger view: They simply don't correspond to a particular cognitive pattern or definite set of behaviors.

Ryle's point is not arbitrary. It is central to the view of intelligence which he is developing. According to Ryle, action always involves improvisation. He makes the point several times, such as here, when he discusses the capacity to reason:

[The reasoner] has to meet new objections, interpret new evidence and make connections between elements in the situation which had not previously been co-ordinated. In short he has to innovate, and where he innovates he is not operating from habit. He is not repeating hackneyed moves. That he is now thinking what he is doing is shown not only by this fact that he is operating without precedents, but also by the fact that he is ready to recast his expression of obscurely put points, on guard against ambiguities or else on the look out for chances to exploit them, taking care not to rely on easily refutable inferences, alert in meeting objections and resolute in steering the general course of his reasoning in the direction of his final goal.

The need for innovation, for performing tasks which have never been performed before, implies an inability to correlate the competence with a definite set of dispositions. To improvise is not to do one of a set number of possible things, but to do something which one has not planned or intended to do and yet which still meets some criteria for correctness. But the criteria need not (and indeed cannot) account for every possible correct application. So it is a mistake to suppose that the capacities we attribute to people somehow include every fact which would (or could) make them correct. This is why they cannot be analyzed in terms of a series of subjunctive conditionals.

Stanley is philosophically committed to a certain view of analysis: Every meaningful statement must be analyzable as a statement of fact, and every fact is a true proposition. So, if there is such a thing as a mongrel-categorical statement, Stanley insists that it must be propositional: It must either be a conjunction of dispositional and occasional propositions, or it must be some other kind of proposition. Yet, Ryle is not committed to this view of analysis. In fact, as Stanley indicates, Ryle was quite critical of this philosophical program. It's not that Ryle was "unreflectively and immediately hostile to analysis and reduction of any kind," as Stanley says on page 10. On the contrary, The Concept of Mind can be seen as a certain sort of analysis of mental-conduct expressions. It's just not the kind of analysis Stanley favors. Ryle's is a pragmatic form of analysis, in which the meaning of our expressions is analyzed in terms of how they are used.

As I've said, Ryle analyzes mental-conduct concepts in terms of dispositional and mongrel-categorical statements. To understand the nature of this analysis, we have to understand his notion of inference tickets. Ryle (1949, 124) explains it thus:

Dispositional statements about particular things and persons are also like law statements in the fact that we use them in a partly similar way. They apply to, or they are satisfied by, the actions, reactions and states of the object; they are inference-tickets, which license us to predict, retrodict, explain and modify these actions, reactions and states.

Dispositional statements, in Ryle's view, are not factual statements. They rather give us license to move from one factual assertion to another. Ryle's view is that dispositional statements cannot be analyzed in terms of factual statements. Ryle continues on page 125:

But to speak as if the discovery of a law were the finding of a third, unobservable existence is simply to fall back into the old habit of construing open hypothetical statements as singular categorical statements. It is like saying that a rule of grammar is a sort of extra but unspoken noun or verb, or that a rule of chess is a sort of extra but invisible chessman. It is to fall back into the old habit of assuming that all sorts of sentences do the same sort of job, the job, namely, of ascribing a predicate to a mentioned object.

It's clear from this passage that Ryle is not against analysis simpliciter, but only against that sort of analysis which treats all sorts of sentences as expressions of propositions, or statements of fact.

When Ryle says that some mental-conduct concepts are mongrel-categorical statements, he is not saying they are combinations of propositions of various types, but that they are partly propositional and partly law-like. They function as propositions, as statements of fact, but also as inference tickets, and they cannot be analyzed solely in terms of one or the other, nor can they be analyzed as a sequential conjunction of factual and law-like statements. They function as both simultaneously. (It's worth noting that the phrases "mongrel", "mongrel-categorical," "inference ticket" and "semi-hypothetical" appear nowhere in Stanley's book, according to the search functions at amazon and Google books.)

As we have seen, Ryle takes dispositional sentences as inference tickets. Thus, when he analyzes mental capacities in terms of dispositions, he is talking about the sorts of inferences we are allowed to make about a person to whom we ascribe mental capacities. The crucial point is that mental capacity concepts do not ascribe particular states or functions to people, but rather confer the right to make inferences about people's behavior. This does make mental capacities a matter of behavior, and so might qualify Ryle as a sort of behaviorist. According to Stanley (p. 10), "the view that mental capacities are nothing over and above purely physical dispositions is certainly worthy of the title of 'Behaviorism.'" I don't take issue with that. However, this is not the sort of "contemporary behaviorism" of which Stanley accuses Ryle. This is not the sort of behaviorism anybody needs to be afraid of.

Stanley says Ryle disavowed behaviorism by the late '70s. Yet, we can find Ryle criticizing behaviorism in the last section of The Concept of Mind. He claims that early behaviorists were of two minds: some denied that there was anything properly called "the data of consciousness and introspection", while others acknowledged the existence of mental contents, but denied that such data was scientifically knowable. Ryle rejects both views. He says they both rely on a "two-worlds story" about mind and body, where mental happenings are supposed to exist along side (or behind) bodily happenings. One sort of behaviorist rejects the existence of the mind, while the other rejects its scientific knowability. Ryle, in contrast, has spent the preceding pages of his book arguing that the mind does exist, just not in the same way that bodies exist. Ryle does not stipulate a supernatural or non-physical thingness. He is not a substance dualist, but he is not necessarily a property dualist, either. Single-track dispositions, like fragility, can be considered a property of glass, but the sorts of dispositions that characterize intelligence are not neatly analyzable in terms of properties. When we attribute a mind to a person, we are not attributing a property to a body or organism. We are speaking in a rather different sort of way. Persons are not, in Ryle's vocabulary, identical to or definable in terms of their bodies, just as their actions are not identical to or definable in terms of their behaviors, even though there is nothing over and above bodies and behaviors.

Ryle is maybe best thought of as an eliminative materialist, since he denies that there are any literal states that correspond to our talk of mental states. But Ryle does not eliminate (or reject) the way we ordinarily talk of the mind. He would rather reframe the way we understand that talk. This may explain why his work is so often misunderstood and mischaracterized.

Stanley on Ryle: A Criticism

2012-02-10T01:03:00.004+01:00

I have some more critical remarks to make about the first chapter of Jason Stanley's new book, Know How. I've read a bit more of the chapter, thanks to amazon's "search inside this book" function, but it won't let me read the whole thing. (Funds are tight and shipping to Poland ain't cheap, and neither is the kindle edition.)

Reading Stanley on Ryle reminds me of the parable about blind men describing an elephant, but in this case, it's more like blind men describing various species of bird, but being told that they're all elephants. I often feel like Stanley isn't talking about Ryle at all. Even when he uses direct quotations, he sees birds instead of elephants.

On page one, Stanley introduces Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949) as "the most systematic attempt to prove what philosophers and laypersons typically assume, that what guides us in action is a distinct cognitive capacity from what guides us in reflection."

That's fascinating, since Ryle explicitly and clearly says the exact opposite. According to Ryle, reflection is one species of intelligent action among many. That is what allows him to make the following regress argument (see Ryle, pp. 30-31):

The crucial objection to the intellectualist legend is this. The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid. But if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the circle.

Let us consider some salient points at which this regress would arise. According to the legend, whenever an agent does anything intelligently, his act is preceded and steered by another internal act of considering a regulative proposition appropriate to his practical problem. But what makes him consider the one maxim which is appropriate rather than any of the thousands which are not? Why does the hero not find himself calling to mind a cooking recipe, or a rule of Formal Logic? Perhaps he does, but then his intellectual process is silly and not sensible. Intelligently reflecting how to act is, among other things, considering what is pertinent and disregarding what is inappropriate. Must we then say that for the hero's reflections how to act to be intelligent he must first reflect how best to reflect how to act? The endlessness of this implied regress shows that the application of the criterion of appropriateness does not entail the occurrence of a process of considering this criterion.

I'm not making this up. Ryle explicitly argues that reflection can be done intelligently or unintelligently, mistakenly or appropriately, just like any other sort of action. And on that basis Ryle concludes that intelligent reflection cannot be a prerequisite for intelligent action. This is one of the most important and influential arguments of Ryle's career, and Stanley got it wrong. Not just wrong, but backwards.

This calls for some sort of explanation. It cannot be a lack of intelligence or effort. Moreover, Stanley has got plenty of colleagues nearby to object to his take on Ryle. So what happened? What it suggests, though certainly doesn't prove, is that there is a deep ideological bias against Ryle in the profession.

Moving on . . . After that first howler, there's Stanley's claim that Ryle's argument relies on a variety of verificationism. I've recently countered this accusation at length already, but Stanley is willing to ignore the point. Just as soon as he has made the accusation, he offers to "prescind from the charge of verificationism" (Stanley, p. 7) without explanation. Considering just how misguided the accusation was in the first place, this should give us pause. It could indicate a deeper misunderstanding of Ryle's argumentative strategy.

My claim, which is in no ways novel or controversial, is that Ryle was developing a pragmatic view of meaning in a style which is now identified as part of the ordinary language philosophy movement. Stanley is aware of this, and even mentions it. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle sets out to explore the logical behavior of many of our key mental-conduct terms. The goal is to identify some of the category errors that lead philosophers and psychologists into confusion about the nature of mind and mental faculties. He looks at how people talk about minds and thereby evaluates the currency in which our mental idiom circulates. It is an exercise in philosophical pragmatism, not verificationism.

On the one hand, Stanley says (p. 7) that Ryle "assumes a theory of meaning which connects linguistic meaning to verifiability." Then, immediately after offering to prescind that claim, Stanley indirectly accuses Ryle of making the following assumption: "the only way to make the applicability of mental-conduct concepts knowable is to characterize them as dispositional properties." Stanley thinks that Ryle settled on dispositionalism because Ryle didn't know there were other ways people could know the correct application of their mental-conduct concepts. For Stanley, Ryle's argumentative aim is to find a way to make the applicability of our mental-conduct concepts knowable. If Ryle had been applying a verificationist view of meaning to ground our knowledge of the mind, maybe that's the sort of thing he would have been aiming at, but that's not what Ryle was doing. It's birds instead of elephants.

Ryle wasn't doing epistemology. His aim was to figure out just what people mean when they use mental-conduct concepts. More specifically, he wanted to explain why people get so muddled when they try to understand the relationship between the mind and the body. True, Ryle is interested in what is or is not knowable, and Stanley points to some passages where Ryle discusses knowability. Ryle's aim in these passages is not to account for knowability, but simply to recognize it as one of the salient aspects of our discourse. Ryle takes it as a given that we apply criteria when we make judgments about minds and intelligence. He then wonders: What sorts of criteria could we be applying in these cases? Knowable criteria would certainly trump unknowable criteria--not because the applicability of criteria is a prerequisite for meaning, but because it is a prerequisite of it being criteria in the first place. Ryle approached dispositionalism (but didn't fully embrace it, at least not any naive version of it: see here) because it seemed to him the best way to understand the mental idiom. Ryle wanted to explain the criteria itself, not what allows people to apply the criteria correctly.

Next, Stanley accuses Ryle of presenting a crude behaviorism. After quoting Julia Tanney, a leading Ryle scholar who warns against associating Ryle with behaviorism, Stanley quotes the following passage from Ryle:

Besides being currently supplied with these alleged immediate data of consciousness, a person is also generally supposed to be able to exercise from time to time a special kind of perception, namely inner perception, or introspection. He can take a (nonoptical) '1ook' at what is passing in his mind. Not only can he view and scrutinize a flower through his sense of sight and listen to and discriminate the notes of a bell through his sense of hearing; he can also reflectively or introspectively watch, without any bodily organ of sense, the current episodes of his inner life.

Stanley says that this view of the mind is part of what Ryle was out to reject. True enough. Ryle rejects the idea of introspection as a mysterious, otherworldly sort of perception. This is clear from what he says in the rest of the paragraph (which Stanley did not find relevant enough to include):

This self-observation is also commonly supposed to be immune from illusion, confusion or doubt. A mind's reports of its own affairs have a certainty superior to the best that is possessed by its reports of matters in the physical world. Sense-perceptions can, but consciousness and introspection cannot, be mistaken or confused.

But this does not amount to a denial of inner experience. Stanley draws attention to Ryle's chapter on imagination, where Ryle claims that when we normally talk of mental images, seeing in the mind's eye, or hearing sounds in our heads, we are not necessarily talking about actual images or sounds, and there need not be any actual seeing or hearing going on. Stanley concludes that Ryle is adhering to a "behaviorist metaphysics" which forces him to "repudiate mental images." Yet, what Ryle says in that chapter (Ryle, p. 247) is that "imaging occurs, but images are not seen." Ryle's point is more about words describing perception, such as "see" and "hear," and less about whether or not there is something internal going on which we might call a "mental image."

Ryle does not deny that something hidden from view is going on when we talk about seeing or hearing things in our minds, but argues that what is happening isn't seeing or hearing. His point is that we no more mean that we really see something in our minds than we mean that an actor on stage has really murdered the victim in the story. Thus, Ryle writes: "If a person who has recently been in a burning house reports that he can still 'smell' the smoke, he does not think that the house in which he reports it is itself on fire. However vividly he 'smells' the smoke, he knows that he smells none . . ."

Ryle does not deny internal events, conscious experiences, and such. He only denies that so-called "mental images" are actual pictures, like drawings or photographs. When we imagine a tune, for example, we do not hear it. Rather, we follow it ourselves, employing our knowledge of how it goes (or how it looks, in the case of a visual image). Ryle says (p. 265): "A person with a tune running in his head is using his knowledge of how the tune goes; he is in a certain way realising what he would be hearing, if he were listening to the tune being played." Seeing an image in the mind's eye, Ryle says, is just thinking about what something looks like; it's not actually seeing something that resembles the real thing. So, seeing the Mona Lisa in your mind does not consist in seeing something that resembles the Mona Lisa. It just consists in thinking about what the Mona Lisa looks like. Ryle again, on pages 254-255:

We do picture or visualise faces and mountains, just as we do, more rarely, 'smell' singed hoofs, but picturing a face or a mountain is not having before us a picture of the face or mountain, it is something that having a physical likeness in front of one's nose commonly helps us to do, though we can and often do do it without any such promptings.

We might, with neuroscientific progress, find pictures of the Mona Lisa popping up in the brain. That might help disprove Ryle's thesis, but not necessarily. Such images could be a byproduct of our thinking about the Mona Lisa. It wouldn't prove that our "seeing" the Mona Lisa consisted in us actually seeing the picture generated in our brain.

I'm not interested in defending everything Ryle says about the imagination or conscious experience, but it's clear that in The Concept of Mind, Ryle wasn't the sort of behaviorist Stanley makes him out to be. Ryle does not deny the salience of conscious experience. Yet, Ryle does suggest that "mental capacities are nothing over and above purely physical behavioral dispositions," as Stanley says (Stanley, p. 10). For Stanley, this is worthy of the title "Behaviorism." Okay. I'll take that, but it's not the crude behaviorism Stanley was accusing Ryle of earlier in the chapter. (See here for more on this point.) Moreover, Stanley is mistaken when he talks about Ryle's allegedly post-behaviorist period of the late 70s, when Ryle identified "theoretical thinking" as something detached from the "urgency of the moment." Ryle has not clearly detached any sort of thinking from behavior simpliciter. He has just detached one kind of thinking from one kind of behavior. This is perfectly consistent with The Concept of Mind. The Ryle of 1949 does not assume that thinking is always and only directly related to our immediate practical concerns.

I've argued before that Ryle was friendly with a certain sort of behaviorism: epistemological behaviorism. He approached knowledge in behavioral terms, but he included both internal and external behavior in his bag. He didn't deny that we privately observe and experience ourselves in ways practically unavailable to other people. However, he did analyze knowledge and the mental in terms directly relating to behavior, and nothing else. Still, calling him a "behaviorist" requires a good deal of qualification, since the term is likely to be misleading.

I will have more to say about Stanley's treatment of Ryle. I hope to read the rest of the chapter and complete my criticism sooner rather than later. I haven't even gotten to what he says about knowing how and knowing that, though, as I noted earlier, he seems to have gotten something very big wrong there, as well.

Properly Basic Beliefs

2012-02-07T11:31:00.000+01:00

A while back I got into a discussion of Plantinga's notion of properly basic beliefs with a philosopher who blogs under the suggestive pseudonym "exapologist." I had thought the discussion had ended with one of my comments. I was quite surprised this morning, almost two full years later, when I received a couple emails notifying me that exapologist had continued the discussion. Since he doesn't show the dates of comments on his blog, I can't tell if the new comments are recent or several months old or what. Could the notifications have taken almost two years to get to me? Stranger things have surely happened in the online universe. [Update: exapologist has informed me that his new comments were in fact made last night/this morning.] In any case, I haven't done much research on the topic, and I never was any sort of authority on Plantinga, anyway, so my ability to contribute to the discussion is a bit limited. With that disclaimer in hand, I'll venture an elaborate response to exapologist.

One of the issues we discussed was how we define a properly basic belief as such. The idea is that a belief is properly basic if it is warranted (or justified) without any need for argumentative support. Plantinga claims that theistic beliefs are properly basic even though they are often criticized and made a subject of debate. One possible objection is that beliefs we commonly criticize or interrogate are, by that very fact, not properly basic beliefs. This is sort of the argument that Quinn poses to Plantinga, and which exapologist discusses. Quinn's point is that adults have been exposed to possible defeaters of theistic beliefs, and so their own theistic beliefs might not be properly basic any more (assuming that these same beliefs were properly basic when the adults were children). To put it another way, if you are aware that your beliefs have coherent objections, then you are aware that your beliefs are open to discursive interrogation. That means your beliefs are no longer properly basic.

Plantinga's response seems to be something like this: Theistic beliefs are so strong that their beliefs can never be defeated. So no alleged counterarguments are going to diminish their status as properly basic beliefs.

If we look at this as a psychological issue, then Plantinga might have a point, but it's not one that advances his agenda. The point may just be that people can be so stubborn in their unwillingness to acknowledge objections to their beliefs that they never fully recognize the fact that coherent objections have ever been made. However, I don't think Plantinga is making an argument about stubborness. Rather, his argument is that theistic beliefs are just so strong that they defeat any possible defeaters. But, then, how can we decide that these beliefs really are that strong, and that these "true believers" aren't just being very stubborn?

We need some criteria for deciding whether or not a belief is properly basic beyond the mere saying that it is so. As exapologist and I discussed, Plantinga seems to be relying heavily on the fact that there are believer communities which are invested in their theistic beliefs being properly basic. I will quote one of exapologist's comments at length:

Plantinga follows Roderick Chisholm in his rejection of epistemological methodism, on the grounds that always requiring criteria for how one knows something leads to a vicious infinite regress, and thus to skepticism. He also follows Chisholm in adopting a particularlist, inductive method of generating criteria of proper basicality. As Plantinga puts it:

"We must assemble examples of beliefs and conditions such that the former are obviously properly basic in the latter, and examples of beliefs and conditions such that the former are obviously not properly basic in the latter. We must then frame hypotheses as to the necessary and sufficient conditions of proper basicality and test these hypotheses by reference to those examples." (Plantinga, Alvin. "Reason and Belief in God", in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (U of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 76.).

So the idea is that clear cases of particular instances of knowledge are epistemically prior to general criteria for knowledge. From the particular cases, one examines what features they have in common, and then formulates hypotheses to the effect that all beliefs with those features are tokens of knowledge.

For what it's worth, I think Plantinga goes wrong by liberalizing and relativizing Chisholmian particularism. Plantinga intends his use of "obviously" in the passage above to be relativized to epistemic communities ("obvious to us folks"), so as to allow controversial beliefs that are nonetheless strongly held in a given epistemic community to qualify as "obvious", and thereby to allow for correspondingly relativized, theism-friendly criteria of proper basicality. This goes against the spirit of Chisholm's approach, as his intent was to only countenance Moorean facts as clear cases of knowledge.

Ironically, Chisholm warns against the dangers of a liberalized standard of clear cases of knowledge in The Problem of the Criterion, the very book Plantinga appeals to as the basis of his fundamental epistemological approach: “We are all acquainted with people who think they know a lot more than in fact they do know. I’m thinking of fanatics, bigots, mystics, and various types of dogmatists.”

So, on the one hand, Plantinga wants an inductive method for identifying properly basic beliefs, but on the other hand, his criteria is relativized to particular epistemic communities.

It looks to me like a properly basic belief is defined as whatever a particular community decides is beyond rational criticism, but exapologist warns against making such an assessment. As he points out, Plantinga's discussion hinges on the notion of a trigger. Properly basic beliefs are "naturally and spontaneously" triggered in certain situations. So, for example, if I am looking at at tree, I form the properly basic belief that I see a tree. If I am trying to recall what I had for breakfast this morning, I form the properly basic belief that I had an apple for breakfast. If I look at a person's face, I might form the properly basic belief that that person is angry. So the idea of a properly basic belief is a psychological notion, a matter of what the members of an epistemic community will believe given the right stimuli. On this account, it makes sense that the status of a belief as properly basic should be relativized to a community: Different communities will produce people who respond differently to the same stimuli. But then, a belief is properly basic because of psychological conditioning and instinct.

There is a problem here, because the sorts of ordinary beliefs we are discussing are clearly open to rational criticism. For example, I might look at a tree and form the belief that I see a tree, but I can be convinced that what I see is not a tree. Similarly about my memory of my breakfast, or my interpretation of a person's emotions. There is nothing that prevents people from engaging in a rational discussion of their beliefs about what they see, what they've eaten, and how people look. So why claim that these beliefs do not require argumentative support for their justification or warrant? These are just the sorts of beliefs that can be questioned and defended with argument.

If we regard properly basic beliefs as whatever beliefs are "naturally and spontaneously" formed in various situations, then they are not clearly justified (or justifiable) without argumentative support. Calling a belief "properly basic" does not give one license to avoid rational criticism. It just says something about the origins of their beliefs, in terms of psychology and circumstance. We need something more if we are going to say that some beliefs are justified without argument.

I can be mistaken about what I had for breakfast, what I see in front of me, and how the people around me feel. There is room for multiple points of view about whether or not I am seeing a tree, or whether or not I had an apple for breakfast. When we talk about I see a tree or I had an apple for breakfast, there is nothing mysterious or inscrutable about the referents, and this distinguishes ordinary beliefs from theistic beliefs. Theistic beliefs are not obviously referential at all--and if they are referential, it is not obvious what the referents are supposed to be. A polite way of putting it is that theistic beliefs are either non-referential or referentially opaque. I am a theological noncognitivist, which means I don't think theistic beliefs are propositional attitudes. I do not think they involve propositions which refer to or attribute properties to things. So I don't think theistic beliefs (e.g., "God exists") refer to anything. Cognitivists about theistic belief will say that the beliefs are referential, but then there is the problem of opacity. I believe this is why some theists claim their beliefs do not require argumentative support: They cannot overcome the problem of reference. I therefore find it hard to think that Plantinga isn't just bending over backwards trying to excuse theistic belief from rational debate.

An Objection to Stanley's Accusation that Ryle Appeals to Verificationism

2012-02-01T21:05:00.040+01:00

As I noted in my previous post on Jason Stanley's new book, Know How, Stanley makes the troubling claim that Gilbert Ryle appeals to verificationism. It's an odd claim if only because Ryle was a critic of verificationism (as Stanley observes in a footnote) and developed a very different theory of meaning. For Ryle, meaning is a matter of use. Therefore, if we are going to accuse Ryle of appealing to verificationism, we should make sure the evidence is very strong, or else charity would warn us against it. As it stands, the evidence looks exceedingly weak.

Stanley's allegation is that Ryle supposes that mental-conduct terms would be meaningless if their correct application were not known in particular cases. That would look like a variety of verificationism, but it isn't what Ryle seems to be saying.

Here is the passage from Ryle which Stanley quotes (the original can be found in chapter 1 of Ryle's The Concept of Mind):

"According to the [Cartesian] theory, external observers could never know how the overt behaviour of others is correlated with their mental powers and processes and so they could never know or even plausibly conjecture whether their applications of mental-conduct concepts to these other people were correct or incorrect . It would then be hazardous or impossible for a man to claim sanity or logical consistency even for himself, since he would be debarred from comparing his own performances with those of others. In short, our characterisations of persons and their performances as intelligent, prudent and virtuous or as stupid, hypocritical and cowardly could never have been made."

Ryle says our characterizations "could never have been made," and not that they would be meaningless. This is a causal-historical point. We do make characterizations; we do apply criteria; yet Cartesianism says we cannot. If Cartesianism were true, then we would have no possible causal-historical explanation for our mental-conduct concepts. It's not that our terms would lack meaning as per verificationism, but that we would have no way of accounting for how the meaning (as use) of our terms came about. The meaning of our terms would be impossible in the sense that the use of our terms would have no possible causal-historical explanation. Ryle's claim is not that meaning requires knowing how to apply criteria in specific cases, but that having criteria is worthy of a causal-historical explanation. Cartesianism says we cannot know how to apply our criteria, which means the fact that we do apply criteria is absurd.

Ryle continues to explain his point (Stanley cuts him off in mid-sentence):

"In short, our characterisations of persons and their performances as intelligent, prudent and virtuous or as stupid, hypocritical and cowardly could never have been made, so the problem of providing a special causal hypothesis to serve as the basis of such diagnoses would never have arisen. The question, 'How do persons differ from machines' arose just because everyone already knew how to apply mental-conduct concepts before the new causal hypothesis was introduced. This causal hypothesis could not therefore be the source of the criteria used in those applications. Nor, of course, has the causal hypothesis in any degree improved our handling of those criteria."

The question Ryle raises is this: How could it be that we talk so clearly and effectively about other people's minds, when we lack the foundation that Cartesian philosophers say we need before we can apply our concepts to other people's minds? The very fact of our everyday judgments is a testament to the fact that we don't need a Cartesian foundation to talk about other people's minds.

Ryle's is a clear example of pragmatic reasoning. To understand our discourse about minds, we have to understand how mental concepts are used, and that means understanding the behaviors which the discourse attempts to manipulate, explain and predict. But, if Cartesianism were true, then the use of our discourse would become a mystery. If our mental-conduct concepts were disconnected from observations of other people's behavior, then our entire discourse would lack a causal explanation. By disconnecting our discussion of the mind with our perception of behavior, Cartesianism makes it impossible to account for the fact that we talk about minds at all. All talk of minds would become a great mystery (one which somebody like Alvin Plantinga would be only too happy to exploit).

Jason Stanley's "Know How"

2012-01-31T22:16:00.013+01:00

I've been wondering when Jason Stanley's book, Know How, would come out. I wasn't watching closely enough, cuz it's been out for a few months now and I didn't know it. I searched inside the book on amazon, and was happy to see that he acknowledges me as one of the people whose comments "occcasioned changes" to the book. I'm eager to see how he develops his criticism of Ryle and his epistemological views. I was only able to read up to page 6 on amazon, but I'm anticipating a big problem already.

It's clear from the outset that Stanley wants to give Ryle more credit than he has done in past publications. I don't know what, exactly, he wants to give Ryle credit for, but he says on page 2 that he wants to "distinguish Ryle's correct insights about action from his incorrect conclusions about the relationship between knowing how to do something and knowing that something is the case." That's a welcome addition to Stanley's previous scholarship on Ryle.

Stanley then spends a few pages laying out the agenda and strategy behind Ryle's distinction between knowing how and knowing that. He weeds out a possible appeal to verificationism in Ryle's argument, which is particularly odd since Ryle was a critic of the verificationist program. I'm not sure that Ryle was appealing to a theory of meaning in the passage Stanley quotes. Nor am I sure what Stanley ultimately makes of it. I'll have to read more to find out.

My problem with where Stanley seems to be going comes a bit later, when he writes (on page 5): "If Ryle can show that knowing how to do something is identical to a disposition or an ability, then on the assumption that knowledge of a truth is neither a disposition nor an ability, he will have refuted the intellectualist view that actions have intelligence properties in virtue of guidance by propositional knowledge." This looks very similar to the interpretation of Ryle that Stanley and Williamson advanced in 2001. My problem is that it does not seem to be a fair account of how Ryle proceeds.

As I've observed in the past (click on any of the tags at the bottom of this post), Ryle regards knowing-that-something-is-the-case as just as much a matter of abilities and dispositions as knowing-how-to-do-something. The difference is not between abilities and something else, but between abilities to act intelligently and abilities related to the jobs of didactic discourse. These are not mutually exclusive areas of ability, either.

I presume Jason Stanley is aware of my own thoughts on this topic. It seems, however, that they were not among those that occasioned changes to his monograph. I won't jump to any conclusions about the value of Stanley's treatment of Ryle. However flawed his approach may be, it is probably full of interesting insights and observations, and I look forward to reading it.

In any case, Ryle is only central to the first chapter. The rest of Stanley's book looks equally interesting. I get the impression that he is primarily out to challenge dominant conceptions of propositional knowledge. As he suggests in this recent interview with Richard Marshall, he thinks of propositional knowledge as something grounded in emotional investment and practical action, and not something mysteriously generated by disembodied minds contemplating Truth in a vacuum. I appreciate that. I even agree with it. But our approaches are quite different. Not just in our differing interpretations of Ryle, but in our opposing sympathies in the philosophies of mind and language in general. We just seem to have different ideas about how to paint the right epistemological picture. I'd like to think we're not all that different after all, but it'll probably take a lot of work for me to figure that out.

The Philosophy of Cosmology

2012-01-23T21:51:00.007+01:00

Tim Maudlin makes some interesting comments about the philosophy of cosmology. I have a few objections and observations. (See update at the bottom for an additional criticism.)

First, Maudlin claims that the universe is just "one huge physical object." This could be a significant conceptual error. I'm not convinced that "the universe" picks out a unique physical object.

I'm not a non-cognitivist about the universe. I do think "the universe" picks out a single, coherent idea. But I doubt that idea represents or corresponds to a thing.

I'm not an idealist, exactly. I'm a realist about everything that we say is part of, or constitutive of, the universe. But none of the objects of our experience--nothing we can conceptualize--fully constitute the universe. So "the universe" is an idea about something we never directly indicate. So I have this suspicion that when we conceptualize the universe, we are using a different logic than the one we use when we talk about things we can directly indicate and which play causal roles in the universe. Furthermore, considering that space and time are (according to Relativity Theory) functions of the universe, and considering that there is no privileged "now" which marks the present of the universe, it is impossible for me to conceive of the universe as a thing at all. But still, even if we go back to the time before Einstein and think of the universe as a set of all things which exist in space and time, I don't think the idea of the set of all things is itself a thing which could be treated like any other.

Next, Maudlin says, "Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that."

Maudlin's objection is to the idea that physics shouldn't be burdened with trying to make sense of its predictive tools. According to the Bohr-Heisenberg school (home to many renowned physicists, including Richard Feynman), we shouldn't try to translate fundamental physics into ordinary language, because we'll just end up with nonsense. Maudlin says that's just wrong. Maybe he's right, but I don't see any reason to think so.

The farther our physics gets from the frameworks of our everyday experience, the greater the gap between our physical theories and our common way of thinking about the universe. Why suppose that this gap can ever be filled? I'm curious to know Maudlin's reasons.

The final point I want to address is how Maudlin curiously frames philosophy as emerging from a single question. He writes: 'The basic philosophical question, going back to Plato, is "What is x?"'

I don't want to read too much into Maudlin's remark here, but it looks profoundly deficient. Sure, Plato's dialogues often focus on "What is X?" questions. But what makes the dialogues philosophical is not that question, but the way the answer to the question is pursued. Plato takes up such familiar and basic concepts as justice and beauty and shows that our understanding of them is not as clear or available as we might have thought. His dialogues explore and manipulate the way people think about their own understanding, forcing them to reflect on the form of their thinking and argumentation. That is what makes his work philosophical. It isn't that he asks "What is X?"

Update: I forgot to comment on Maudlin's remarks about evolution. This part is a bit over the top: "What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value."

First, who does he think hasn't noticed that humans are unique in our development of technology? Is that a serious criticism? In any case, the argument here is not valid. The fact that only one species has developed technology does not mean that it is not very useful, or that it is not of much evolutionary value. That's simply a non-sequitor.

I think Maudlin is probably right that we have no reason, or very little reason, to think that there is life on other planets which has evolved the ability to develop advanced technology. But that point does not depend on his curious claim that technology isn't very useful.

Berkeley and Theological Non-Cognitivism

2012-01-23T21:04:00.005+01:00

Here's something I didn't know: Bishop Berkeley argued for non-cognitivism with respect to a number of linguistic terms, such as "self," "personality" and "substance," as well as more obviously theological terms, like "grace" and "trinity." You can read a very nice introductory discussion of Berkeley's arguments by Lewis Powell at The Mod Squad, a new group blog devoted to Modern Philosophy.

Like Powell, I wonder how Berkeley negotiated his non-cognitivism with respect to his religious beliefs as a whole. It's hard to imagine how he could be a non-cognitivist about grace and the trinity, and yet still be a realist about God. Powell suggests Berkeley may have tried to have it both ways, though I'm not clear on how that is supposed to work. In any case, Berkeley used unconventional linguistic principles to very strongly suggest, if not plainly conclude, that the core of theological discourse is nothing more than the emotional manipulation of people aimed at producing good Christian behavior. That's impressive.

Is "Baptist" an insult?

2012-01-21T08:59:00.010+01:00

Can you be sued in Australia for mistakenly calling somebody a Baptist? We might find out, if Melinda Tankard Reist follows through on her promise to take Jennifer Wilson to court. In addition to being legally threatened for calling Tankard Reist a Baptist, Wilson is getting heat for saying Tankard Reist has been dishonest about it.

It's pretty silly, if you ask me. If Tankard Reist isn't a Baptist and takes offense at being called one, she can say so publicly. I don't see why she'd want to sue somebody over it. What kind of PR move would that be?

From what I can tell, Tankard Reist's public attitude towards her religious views is anything but forthright. That could make it hard for her to build a case against Wilson. It also makes it unlikely that she'd want to take Wilson to court, since her religious views and sympathies would take center stage.

Even if it's an idle threat, the threat itself is a powerful tool. As Russell Blackford has been warning in a series of blog posts recently, a lawsuit like this could financially ruin Wilson. We have to wonder how often vital and sincere debate has been stifled by legal bluffs. It may be too easy for people with money (or the right connections) to use empty threats to silence those without the means to defend themselves. Unfortunately, I'm skeptical that there's a good way around the problem.

Russell wants to deter people from filing defamation cases, but that might do more harm than good. It could make it easier for real defamation cases to go unprosecuted, and it won't stop people from making idle threats. Unless the court is going to relieve defendants of court costs (or postpone them until and unless there is a conviction), the problem isn't going to go away.

Epistemological Behaviorism and Plantinga

2012-01-16T01:08:00.018+01:00

A while back I posted an argument against Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). At the time, I didn't do a whole lot of research about other arguments against EAAN, but I looked aroung a bit and didn't see anybody making the sort of argument that I was making. I let the topic go until just recently, when my interest in the subject was aroused by a discussion over at Russell Blackford's blog on a new book by Plantinga and Dennett. From what I can tell, the book is an extended version of a recorded debate between the two philosophers which took place a couple years ago. I haven't read the book, nor have I listened to more than the first fifteen minutes of the debate, so I won't speak about either directly. Still, EAAN is not new, and I don't think its formulation has changed significantly over the years.

As I said, my interest was aroused. I've contributed a few lengthy posts over at Russell's blog, and I also did a little more research. It didn't take long to find this 1993 essay by J. Wesley Robbins, which is very similar to my own argument against Plantinga. Curiously, I haven't been able to find any evidence of a response to Robbins by Plantinga or any of his defenders.

The similarities between my and Robbins' arguments might not be obvious to some readers. My argument focuses on epistemological behaviorism, the idea that the understanding of beliefs and knowledge is grounded in, and ultimately reducible to, an understanding of behavior. I do not claim that beliefs are themselves behaviors, nor do I suppose that they are neurological states or functions. Rather, following Ryle, I take beliefs to be understandable in dispositional terms, though in an indefinitely heterogeneous way. In other words, there isn't a simple, one-to-one relationship between belief and behavior. Furthermore, when we attribute beliefs, we are not making statements about specific entities which may or may not exist. We are rather giving ourselves license to make a broad and indefinite set of explanatory-cum-predictive statements about how people are likely to act. Though our understanding of beliefs cannot be reduced to a finite description of behaviors, it is entirely a matter of behavior and nothing else.

Robbins does not draw specific attention to Ryle or behaviorism, but instead frames the issue in terms of 'generically pragmatic' views of the mind. Still, epistemological behaviorism seems to be largely, if not entirely, what Robbins is talking about.

I took the term 'epistemological behaviorism' from Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It's a term he uses to describe pragmatic approaches to epistemology such as we find in the later Wittgenstein, Ryle, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty himself. Robbins' point is that EAAN doesn't make sense from such views, and that it appeals only to 'generically Cartesian' views of the mind, which eliminate the fundamental connection between our understanding of mental contents and our understanding of behavior.

My argument against Plantinga might be a little stronger than Robbins', because I may be a bit harder on the sort of epistemological view Plantinga is advocating. While Robbins does raise questions about Cartesianism, he does not attack it fully. According to my argument, however, we simply cannot imagine a person who acts just as we do but who has nothing but false beliefs. If we divorce beliefs from the behaviors they are used to predict, we end up with nonsense.

It might be hard for people to accept that our understanding of beliefs is just a matter of behavior, and nothing else. We seem to have some direct access, some internal awareness of beliefs, which does not require behavioral evidence. Don't we understand our beliefs without observing how we act?

How do we know that we believe something? Perhaps we voice a statement of belief in our heads. Perhaps we feel strongly about something, and associate that feeling of trust with a particular proposition. But how is my belief understood? That is, what do I understand when I interpret myself as believing that it might rain? I suppose that my understanding is just the same as when I interpret somebody else as believing that it might rain. My knowledge of my own believing is a matter of how I predict I will act in an indefinite set of situations, and nothing more. The fact remains that, however our beliefs arise and however private our access is to our own beliefs, we understand beliefs in terms of observable behaviors.

Before I end this post I want to comment on the other of the two main theses Plantinga puts to Dennett. This is the thesis that theism is compatible with evolutionary theory. From what Russell says, both he and Dennett accept this thesis. They claim that, if you are willing to twist and bend your concepts enough, you can make just about anything compatible with evolutionary theory. But, then, so what? It doesn't mean there's any evidence in favor of your view.

As I understand Plantinga, however, he does not think belief in God is the sort of belief that requires evidence. He says it is properly basic. I have a very big problem with this claim, though I won't get into it here. Suffice it to say that, without a strong criteria for properly basic belief, and without a coherent definition of 'God', Plantinga's argument about properly basic belief looks like nothing more than an attempt to deflect rational criticism. The point, however, is that I don't think Russell and Dennett's response to Plantinga is strong enough--assuming I have understood them correctly.

In my view, there's a basic incoherence at the root of theistic claims which makes it literally impossible for them to be compatible with any legitimate explanatory framework. So we are giving away too much if we accept the claim that theism is compatible with evolutionary theory.

One might object that surely it is conceivable that some great intelligent being has secretly worked behind the scenes, causing just the right mutations to occur in just the right times, fine-tuning each and every environmental factor to guarantee that evolution would, over the millenia, produce human beings. I agree, for the sake of argument, that it is conceivable. What I don't agree with is that this has anything to do with theism.

What is not conceivable is that this supposed being is supernatural. I just don't see a coherent notion of "supernatural" on the table. Perhaps this is just a personal problem. Maybe my cognitive or intellectual abilities are too limited to grasp the concept. But it seems to me that people who advocate belief in the supernatural rarely suppose that any coherent definition is on offer. And when they do attempt to offer one, they either appeal to other inexplicable notions or to some inexpressible sort of experience. So I don't think it's just me. I think the discourse of theism is an elaborate sleight of hand, nothing more.

Power and Determination in the Consequence Argument

2012-01-11T23:52:00.006+01:00

Just one more quick thought on the Consequence Argument. Consider the premise, "If we have no power over X, and X completely determines Y, then we have no power over Y." The logic of this statement seems to conflate power and determination.

One of the common ways "determinism" is defined is as follows: If you are given the state of all of the elements of the universe at any particular time, you can theoretically deduce any future state of the universe. The idea is that we, as investigators, can determine what will happen by looking at what has happened, or what is happening. Similarly, if determinism is true, then what happens is determined by what has happened in the past, which means that whatever happens is the necessary consequence of what has already happened. Determinism doesn't postulate some particular relationship of power between all past and future events. Nothing in the notion of determination implies anything about what events have power over other events.

The meaning of "power" is less clear. To have power over an event is, perhaps, to directly cause it to happen. If that is the case, then you don't need to determine an event in order to have power over it. Everything in the future may be determined by (i.e., be the necessary consequence of, be theoretically deducible from) what has happened at any particular time in the past, but only that which happens immediately before a future event has power over that future event. Thus, we can say that everything is determined by what has happened already, but that we still have power over the future because we directly cause future events to happen.

Alternately, perhaps "power" is supposed to mean "power to do that which has not been determined to happen." But in that case, the Consequence Argument is relying on a notion of power which is explicitly rejected by compatibilists. Compatibilists claim that free will only requires the power to act, and not the power to act in ways which were not determined to happen. So all the Consequence Argument shows (if it is a sound argument) is that determinism is incompatible with some non-compatibilist notions of free will. But the Consequence Argument was supposed to be an argument against compatibilism. So it fails.

More On The Consequence Argument

2012-01-10T19:30:00.013+01:00

The consequence argument is as follows: If we have no power over X, and X completely determines Y, then we have no power over Y. If determinism is true, then the past and the laws of nature together completely determine the future. We have no power over the past or over the laws of nature. Thus, if determinism is true, then we have no power over the future. Thus, free will and determinism are incompatible.

I've posted on the Consequence Argument a couple times in the past. My conclusion was that the argument is flawed because it ignores the role the present plays in the way the past shapes the future. If we recognize the present as an integral part of the process by which the future is determined, then the argument loses its force.

I want to elaborate on my point of view and point out some weaknesses with the Consequence Argument. I am not a staunch determinist. However, I do think that any coherent notion of free will (that is, any free will worth having) is compatible with determinism. Thus, for the sake of argument, in the rest of this post I am going to assume that determinism is true.

Consider how supporters of the Consequence Argument might counter me. They might say that, even if the present is an integral part in determining the future, the present has no power over the future, because how the present shapes the future must also be determined by the past, and the present has no power over the past. The implication is that if we attribute power to some entity, that power cannot be completely determined by any prior entity. The logical result of this point is that only a first cause can have power in the universe--that is, unless we allow for time-reversed causality.

If we allow for time-reversed causality, the Consequence Argument loses all of its force. For, if the present has causal influence over the past, then we in the present have power over the past, and so we have power over that which has power over the future. If, on the other hand, we don't allow for time-reversed causality, we back the Consequence Argument into a tight corner. This is regardless of how people respond to my previous argument. Consider . . .

If causality only works forwards in time, then any event at T2 cannot have power over events at T1. Therefore, any event at T2 cannot have power over the future, because it is completely determined by some prior event which has complete power over the future. Remember that, according to the Consequence Argument, if X completely determines Y, then only that which determines X can have power over Y. If the more recent past has no power over the less recent past, then the more recent past cannot have any power over the future. Since every event is caused by a prior event, then no particular event in the past can be said to have power over the future, unless we stipulate a first cause--a cause which completely determines everything, but which itself is not caused by anything.

I don't think determinism benefits at all from the hypothesis of a first cause. On the contrary, I think the idea of a first cause is more of a nuisance than a laudable explanatory hypothesis.

If we don't assume a first cause, we can attribute causal powers to all past times equally, in which case we are justified (indeed, obligated) to attribute them to the present.

We might say that all events at all times completely determine each other. Or perhaps the notions of a universal past, present and future are incoherent, and that the past/present/future distinction only works locally. In that case, perhaps causality itself only makes sense as a way of interpreting local phenomena, and not the universe as a whole. I think I should explore this line of thought more. In any event, either we accept that there is/was a first (and only) cause at the "beginning" of the universe, or we reject the Consequence Argument.

Thor on DVD

2011-09-25T14:14:00.011+02:00

I rented Thor on DVD last night. I'm glad to say that much of the drama, comedy and action held up well on the second viewing. However, I want to add a bit to my initial review. Despite its notable flaws, I'd originally given the film four out of five stars. Unfortunately, I can only give the DVD version three-and-a-half, and that only barely. One reason is the lack of 3D. The 2D film isn't nearly as visually enthralling and impressive, and this makes it much easier to get distracted by the film's faults. When I left the theater the first time, I was charged and ready for more. After watching it again on DVD, I didn't feel much of anything at all. On top of that, I found one more plot point to criticize.

One of the main ideas in the film is that Norse mythology is based on historical fact. In the film's world, beings from another world once interacted with earthlings. All the myths about Odin, Thor and so on are based on these historical experiences. This allows the filmmakers to bridge the so-called gap between science and mythology, and I'm all for that. But there's a gaping hole in the way they go about it, one so big I'm surprised I didn't notice it the first time around.

In the film's backstory, which is explained at the beginning of the film, the immortal gods of Asgard defeated the Frost Giants, who were threatening humanity on earth, and then returned back to Asgard for the last time. Norse mythology should only be influenced by everything that happened up until that final retreat, and not later. But this makes it impossible for the mythology on earth to have anything to do with Thor, since he was, at best, an infant when Odin defeated the Frost Giants. So how, in this fictional world, is Norse mythology supposed to have incorporated facts about the hammer-wielding Thor?

Oh well. Not a perfect film. Still a lot of fun, and with some great acting and directing. I didn't have time to watch the film again with Branagh's commentary, but I did watch the special features, which include a small handful of deleted scenes. None of them belong in the movie, but they all work as entertaining and interesting supplements.

Descartes Contra Wittgenstein, Revisited

2011-09-24T16:08:00.002+02:00

A while back I wrote a post in which I took a Wittgensteinian line against Descartes' cogito ergo sum. I was never all that happy with parts of it, and finally got around to fixing it. I'm not going to repost it, but here's the link: Descartes Contra Wittgenstein. I took out some parts that were a bit sophomoric and added a little to give a better sense of what Descartes was on about. I wouldn't say the piece is now perfect, but it's a lot better than it was before.

Stanley v. Romano

2011-09-22T22:50:00.009+02:00

Jason Stanley has posted part of his and Carlin Romano's recent "Philosophical Progress and Intellectual Culture" panel discussion.

There's a lot of humor and good spirit here, until Carlin Romano starts talking. Jason Stanley is a bit all over the place, but his points tie together nicely enough and are delivered with panache. I am entirely sympathetic with his presentation and point of view (except about the propositional nature of practical ability, but that's pretty irrelevant here, and I think Stanley is even a little tongue-in-cheek about it at the end). Then Romano gets up and immediately goes on the assault. His criticism of academic and analytic philosophy is incredibly arrogant and ignorant.

His most humorous error results from his lack of familiarity with Grice's notion of implicature. He quotes Stanley, who says that "asserting that p implicates knowledge that p." Romero interprets this as a ridiculous error. He thinks Stanley believes that only a person who knows that p could ever assert that p, that the mere making of an assertion implies that what is asserted is true. That's not what Stanley means at all. Stanley's point is rather that part of what is communicated in an assertion that p is that the person making the assertion knows that p. But what is communicated is not necessarily true. The making of the assertion does not in fact imply that the person knows that p. It only means that the meaning of the assertion includes a statement of knowledge. (If this isn't clear, consider: I cannot assert that p whilst simultaneously asserting that I do not know that p. For example, the sentence "It is raining, but I do not know that it is raining" is problematic.) Romano is apparently unaware of this idea, which means he can't have much knowledge of Grice and, by implication (not implicature), the philosophical tradition in which Stanley is working. As a result, he makes a ridiculous accusation against Stanley. This got some great reactions from the crowd.

What's impressive is not Romano's ignorance. You wouldn't expect anybody to get these subtle distinctions without training. But that's the point. Romano fails to recognize that he is not qualified to speak critically about Stanley's book, and yet he focuses his entire presentation on a criticism of that very book.

Romano thinks philosophical writing should be accessible for everybody. Or, if not everybody, at least for himself. He thinks he should be qualified to criticize every philosophical work. But he's not. If I were going to psychoanalyze, I'd suggest that he's insecure about his inability to understand the bulk of analytic philosophy. He expresses his frustration by criticizing academic and analytic philosophers for their inaccessible writing. As if it is their fault he can't understand them.

I wonder, would he make the same criticism for specialists in other fields, such as biology, physics, mathematics, or psychology, or does he think philosophy is such that it is not worthy of advanced specialization?

I'd like to see how the rest of the discussion played out. From what we can see here, Stanley showed a decent amount of restraint and generosity in his initial response to Romano.

UPDATE: There's a good discussion with several links to other parts of the conference at Leiter's blog.

Philosophical Progress?

2011-09-11T11:10:00.006+02:00

Brian Leiter mentions an upcoming Symposium on Philosophical Progress to be held at Harvard next weekend. The question is, will the consumption of alcohol lead to violence?

Jason Stanley and Carlin Romano will be pitted against each other in a panel discussion entitled "Philosophical Progress and Intellectual Culture" immediately after a wine and cheese break. Stanley, it is safe to say, will come down hard on the side of progress. He stands behind decades of advanced work in linguistics and epistemology. He doesn't just stand behind it. He banks on it. Carlin Romano, on the other hand, represents the literary critic's vitriolic rejection of so-called "positivist epistemology," a phrase which presumably is meant to cover any sort of philosophy which is not literary criticism--in other words, any sort of philosophy which calls itself "philosophy" without irony.

I'm not sure you could find panelists more invested in such incommensurable approaches to philosophy. Even without alcohol, this could easily become a heated exchange. Will there be pokers on hand? Hopefully a video of the symposium will be available online.

Time to Vote for the 3QD Philosophy Blog Post Competition

2011-09-07T06:59:00.002+02:00

Voting is open until Sept. 11.

3rd Annual 3QD Philosophy Blog Post Competition

2011-08-30T07:10:00.002+02:00

This year Patricia Churchland is doing the honors. Nominations are open.

A Clown with Delusions of Philosophical Grandeur

2011-08-28T16:29:00.029+02:00

For no particular reason, I just returned to this discussion at Butterflies & Wheels, in which Peter Beattie charges Massimo Pigliucci with two counts of deplorable argument. I was surprised to find that one of my comments had been deleted. Nobody had said anything about it. I don't follow B&W. That discussion is the only one in which I've ever participated, so I'm not sure what to think.

The deleted comment consisted of me pointing out to another commenter that I thought we had been "wasting our time on a clown with delusions of philosophical grandeur." I was speaking of Peter Beattie. I'm not sure, but I presume this is the Australian politician who was Premier of Queensland from 1998 to 2007. That's not why I called him a delusional clown. I called him a delusional clown because he was acting like one.

I don't blame anybody for deleting senseless insults, and if there was no justification for my comment, so be it. But sometimes harsh criticism is warranted. In this case, I believe the comment was both justified and accurate. I'll give a brief overview of the circumstances for those who aren't inclined to peruse the long thread. However, I do recommend the discussion to anyone interested in Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape and surrounding debates.

The problems started when I told Peter I thought he could have been a lot more charitable in his assessment of Pigliucci's review of Harris' book. Peter responded with a little condescension, telling me my "simple counter-assertion" was "not particularly helpful."

I elaborated. Peter claims that Pigliucci made two "deplorable" errors. I, in contrast, don't find anything deplorable about Pigliucci's review, however imperfect it may be.

First, Peter quotes Pigliucci, who wrote: "If these sentences do not conjure the specter of a really, really scary Big Brother in your mind, I suggest you get your own brain scanned for signs of sociopathology.” Peter responds as follows: "That anyone, let alone a professor of philosophy, should literally argue, ‘If you don’t agree with me, you should get your head examined’, is deplorable."

Let's look at Pigliucci's comment in context:

Indeed, Harris’ insistence on neurobiology becomes at times positively creepy, as in the section where he seems to relish the prospect of a neuro-scanning technology that will be able to tell us if anyone is lying, opening the prospect of a world where government (and corporations) will be able to enforce no-lie zones upon us. He writes: “Thereafter, civilized men and women might share a common presumption: that whenever important conversations are held, the truthfulness of all participants will be monitored. … Many of us might no more feel deprived of the freedom to lie during a job interview or at a press conference than we currently feel deprived of the freedom to remove our pants in the supermarket.” If these sentences do not conjure the specter of a really, really scary Big Brother in your mind, I suggest you get your own brain scanned for signs of sociopathology (or watch a good episode of Babylon 5).

Pigliucci's comment about getting your head examined needn't be taken as an argument at all, and certainly not the literal argument Peter says it is. Pigliucci's comment looks like a semi-humorous, if abrasive, way of saying that Sam Harris' views are bordering on the sociopathic. That's an observation, not an argument. Maybe Pigliucci's language was a bit unprofessional, but the tone of the review is clearly informal. I don't see anything deplorable about that. I have no doubt that Peter's interpretation is uncharitable and implausible. Yet he chose to deny this, claiming that either Pigliucci was making a deplorable argument, or he wasn't supporting his assertions with an argument at all, which would be "at least as deplorable" for a professional philosopher.

The second "deplorable" point is where things got more heated. According to Peter, Pigliucci has grossly misrepresented Harris. Here's what Pigliucci says:

Harris says: “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy … I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ … directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.” That’s it? The whole of the only field other than religion that has ever dealt with ethics is dismissed because Sam Harris finds it boring? . . .

Harris entirely evades philosophical criticism of his positions, on the simple ground that he finds metaethics “boring.” But he is a self-professed consequentialist — a philosophical stance close to utilitarianism — who simply ducks any discussion of the implicatons of that a priori choice, which informs his entire view of what counts for morality, happiness, well-being and so forth. He seems unaware of (or doesn’t care about) the serious philosophical objections that have been raised against consequentialism, and even less so of the various counter-moves in logical space (some more convincing than others) that consequentialists have made to defend their position. This ignorance is not bliss . . .

Here's what Peter says in response:

Harris excuses his omission of philosophical jargon by (only half-jokingly, I suspect) asserting that it every piece of it “directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe” (TML, 197n1). Pigliucci says this amounts to a dismissal of all of metaethics, that Harris finds it boring, that TML as a whole “shies away from philosophy”. (And so on and all-too-predictably on.) Not only is this implausible even given the quote that Pigliucci used; Harris explicitly gives his reasons for “not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy”: he arrived at his position not because of that literature, but for independent logical reasons; and he wants to make the discussion as accessible to lay readers as possible. Again, in such a way to distort a position beyond recognition is deplorable.

Peter's claim about jargon is plainly wrong. Harris explicitly says that he is avoiding many metaethical "views and conceptual distinctions." He is avoiding "much of the literature." He's not just leaving out the jargon. True, Pigliucci is being hyperbolic when he says Harris is dismissing the whole field of metaethics, but his criticism isn't so far off the mark. Other professionals have responded to Harris in a similar fashion. For example, in another review of Harris' book, Troy Jollimore writes:

It would be one thing to try to write intelligently about moral skepticism while avoiding the language of academic philosophy—or at least, the unnecessarily finicky aspects of it—with the hope of reaching a general audience. But to try to avoid not only the terminology, but large portions of the subject matter itself—the “views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible”—is to commit oneself to providing an incomplete and highly distorted account of the subject.

I pointed Jollimore's review out to Peter, but he was implacable. Instead of accepting the point and acknowledging his error, Peter insisted that Harris was just leaving out academic jargon that would make his ideas inaccessible. He accused me of being "more than careless" and said that my interpretation of Harris is "the least charitable one the text will (barely) support." When I pushed the point that Harris was not simply leaving out jargon, but dismissing arguments and ideas, Peter took issue with the word "dismiss" to the point of parody, insisting that Harris explained why he was not tackling so much of the literature in his book. But I never said Harris was dismissive without reason. The point is that Harris does, in fact, dismiss much of the literature, and that this has consequences for the value of his book. Perhaps it makes his book more accessible, but that does not invalidate Pigliucci's and Jollimore's criticism.

I was also getting fed up with Peter's tone. I took offense at the accusation that I was being careless, but Peter refused to apologize. He said he was just making a "factual statement" about my behavior. It appeared that I didn't "care enough" about the discussion. Yes, calling somebody a delusional clown is making a factual statement, too, but clearly there's room to disagree about whether or not that is appropriate. Instead of an apology, I received only condescension from Peter and thus ended the discussion.

After witnessing another participant arguing in circles with Peter, whose argumentative strategies and philosophical acumen were consistently poor, I then made the comment about having wasted our time on a clown. It was a fair assessment, I think.

The Venemous Martin Luther

2011-08-14T17:03:00.011+02:00

I won't be blogging so much in the coming months, since the school year begins in little more than a fortnight. I'm starting with King Lear, and this marks my first pedagogical venture into Shakespearean territory. To prepare, I'm reading a number of canonical texts from the Early Modern period and which I ashamedly admit I have not before read, including Bacon, Montaigne, and Machiavelli. Today, I looked at Martin Luther's famous De Servo Arbitrio ("The Bondage of the Will"), an impassioned rejoinder to Desiderius Erasmus. (Roughly, Luther's position was that mankind is not free to choose good or evil, but is determined to do so by divine providence. Erasmus believed that the question of freewill was itself unnecessary.) Without analyzing the philosophical or theological issues, I just want to draw attention to Luther's rhetoric (in the first six sections of De Servo), which is pretty extraordinary. It betrays a desire to not simply counter Erasmus, but to pummel him into desperate submission.

Luther begins by responding to Erasmus's assertion that Erasmus is "so far from delighting in assertions, that [he] would rather at once go over to the sentiments of the skeptics, if the inviolable authority of the Holy Scriptures, and the decrees of the church, would permit [him]." The issue, then, is about assertions, whether we should delight in them, and how they relate to the authority of Scripture and the decrees of the church.

Luther immediately admits a need to bite his tongue: "I consider, (as in courtesy bound,) that these things are asserted by you from a benevolent mind, as being a lover of peace. But if any one else had asserted them, I should, perhaps, have attacked him in my accustomed manner." So Luther is giving us a restrained criticism, one deserving of a good-hearted opponent, and not as he is apparently wont to give someone of less worthy metal. And yet, Luther makes clear, Erasmus has touched a nerve.

Luther then proceeds to say that a Christian would not make the argument Erasmus has made: "What Christian would bear that assertions should be contemned? This would be at once to deny all piety and religion together; or to assert, that religion, piety, and every doctrine, is nothing at all." He makes the same point a little later, in equally forceful language: "As though you could have so very great a reverence for the Scriptures and the church, when at the same time you signify, that you wish you had the liberty of being a Sceptic! What Christian would talk in this way?"

Luther says Erasmus presents a position both "absurd" and "impious." Yet, Luther soon reminds us that he is holding back his true feelings: "What I should cut at here, I believe, my friend Erasmus, you know very well. But, as I said before, I will not openly express myself." Later, he says that Erasmus has put forward statements which are "without Christ, without the Spirit, and more cold than ice." Even better: "What shall I say here, Erasmus? To me, you breathe out nothing but Lucian, and draw in the gorging surfeit of Epicurus. If you consider this subject 'not necessary' to Christians, away, I pray you, out of the field; I have nothing to do with you." Shortly thereafter: "And it is difficult to attribute this to your ignorance, because you are now old, have been conversant with Christians, and have long studied the Sacred Writings: therefore you leave no room for my excusing you, or having a good thought concerning you."

Luther presents a complete and utter rejection of Erasmus, not only as an intellect, but as a person, and such is ever magnified by the assertion that Luther is holding back! I gotta say, philosophy and theology aside, that's some awesome writing. And it sorta puts recent debates about religion, atheism and rhetoric into perspective.

Luther is also known for writing harshly against the Jewish people, where the power of his rhetoric is just as evident, even in the opening lines:

I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that those miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews and who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them.

As terrible as his words are, and as damaging as they were and have been, I cannot help but admire Luther's ability to wield language to his ends. Can we not admire the art even when it is designed to such ill effects?

Science Phiction #3 (take two)

2011-08-12T17:24:00.002+02:00

I've rewritten my critique of Alva Noe's analysis of gender and neurobiology. As I explain at Science Phiction,

Last week I critiqued philosopher Alva Noe's discussion of gender and neurobiology. I ended up editing that piece a couple days after posting it, because I had given Noe a very uncharitable reading. I had thought he was making the absurd claim that neuroscience cannot help us understand behavioral differences in general, when he was most probably just talking about behavioral differences between men and women; and I thought Noe's error was the result of a poor grasp of Rylean philosophy. I do take issue with some things Noe has said about Ryle in other places, but they are not necessarily relevant here. Realizing my lack of charity, I took out the parts about Ryle and adjusted my criticism accordingly. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to rewrite the whole piece until now, and what I left was rather poorly organized and somewhat difficult to read--not the sort of writing I want to see on Science Phiction. Therefore, I'm giving the subject another go.

The new piece is here.

Science Phiction #3

2011-08-07T00:39:00.002+02:00

CUNY philosopher Alva Noe takes on gender and neurobiology, and may be sporting a bias concerning the relationship between brains and behavior.

Libertarian Free Will?

2011-08-03T21:40:00.011+02:00

Putting together a few thoughts on free will which I've been toying with lately, I've come to consider two possible views of libertarian free will. One might be possible, I think, but the other doesn't seem to work. (I should mention at the outset that I'm not considering any version of metaphysical libertarianism that postulates supernatural entities.)

First, some general observations about free will and what it means to make a decision.

To be an alternative is to be represented as an alternative. To have an option is to have a representation of something as an option. Whether or not that representation corresponds to a physical possibility, or whether or not the choosing of that option is physically possible, is irrelevant. Viable options must be logically possible, not physically possible. All that matters for people to have options is for them to have processes of a particular sort which regard options as such.

If somebody snaps their finger to my left, and I turn my head to look, I have not necessarily made a choice. I only chose to turn my head if part of my behavior involved regarding turning my head as an option. This need not have been a conscious act. I don't see the harm in supposing that we can make unconscious choices. However, I think it is evident that we do make conscious choices. Sometimes turning our heads to look at something is a conscious choice, and sometimes it isn't. To say it is a conscious choice is only to postulate a certain amount of reflective awareness (or control) over the deliberating process.

When we make a choice, we utilize a certain sort of process which can be wholly deterministic. However, I'm not sure it has to be deterministic for our choices to be valuable to us.

Libertarian free will is, on some accounts, the ability to make choices which are in line with our beliefs and desires, but which are not determined by our causal histories. This sort of free will is commonly rejected on the grounds that, if the choice is not based on our causal histories, then it cannot be based on our beliefs and desires--it can't be our choice.

Yet, if the generation of options (which, remember, are options by virtue of the fact that they are represented as options in our decision-making processes) utilizes a purely random process (such as quantum physics might allow), then we might have a decision-making process that uses our beliefs/desires to choose between alternatives which are not fully determined by our causal histories. I wouldn't assume that we have any such random-option generators, but I see no reason to discount the possibility. So this sort of libertarian free will may be worth having.

Interestingly, even if we don't have this sort of free will now, we might be able to develop it. Imagine a computer which, given a particular problem, produced possible solutions by utilizing a purely random process. If we acted on an option generated by the computer, then we will have, in a very real sense, chosen an alternative that was not determined by our causal histories, and yet which was based on our beliefs and desires. This sort of libertarian free will is thus a theoretical possibility for our futures, even if it is not a fact about our present.

What must be clear, however, is that we don't need libertarian free will to make decisions. What makes a behavior a decision is the choosing between alternatives. It doesn't matter how the alternatives were generated.

The final point is that we don't need libertarian free will to have genuine responsibility. Freedom from causal history cannot make us more responsible for our actions. At least, not in a way that matters. When we judge people by their decisions, our judgment does not depend on their alternatives having been detached from their causal histories. The judgment is about what they chose to do, and the fact that they had other options to choose from. If I'm guilty of X-ing and not Y-ing or Z-ing, then it doesn't matter if I represented any of those options via some quantum indeterminacy. I'm guilty because I intentionally X-ed when I shouldn't have. Maybe I represented X, Y and Z to myself thanks to a quantum generator. Maybe I didn't. It doesn't matter.

Consider the paradox that would result if we took the opposite view, and said that we can only be responsible for choices if we were not determined to have them as choices. In that case, I could not be responsible for using quantum indeterminacy. But, then, how could I be responsible for the outcome of my use of quantum indeterminacy, if I wasn't responsible for the use of it in the first place? I certainly can't be responsible for the outcome of the randomizing process alone, since that was random. And yet I can't be held responsible for the utilization of the process. So there is nothing left for me to be responsible for.

We are responsible for our actions, not the processes which ultimately make them possible.

If libertarian free will is the idea that responsibility requires that we make decisions which are not determined by our causal histories, then I don't think it is a viable option. If, however, libertarian free will is just the idea that we can make choices in accordance with our beliefs and desires, and yet which were not determined by the past or the laws of nature, then I think it's a legitimate possibility. However, I don't see any legal or social matters riding on it. It's an interesting question, and it would be a great discovery about how our brains work, but it won't change how we think about responsibility.

Mathematical Intuitions

2011-08-02T13:07:00.008+02:00

I recently had a brief discussion about the non-existence of numbers with a friend and student of physics. I'm a skeptic when it comes to the existence of numbers. I think math is something we do, and that numerals and their corresponding words are tools without referent. There is no number 2, but only various roles filled by the numeral "2" and the word "two." I wouldn't even say the numeral "2" denotes a rule (or rules) for its use.

My friend agreed there was something obviously correct about my approach, but said that we still have to wonder about the correspondences. I didn't have time to respond, but the remark seemed to betray a common intuition about mathematics: that mathematical equations and theorems in some way correspond to facts. I don't think there's any reason to suppose this is true. Math does not correspond to anything, just like hammers don't correspond to anything. I don't think there's anything corresponding to the number two, for example. Nor must there be anything corresponding to the equation 2 +2 = 4, or to any of Peano's axioms, and so on.

What we might want to account for isn't correspondence so much as utility. Why does math work? The obvious answer is: because organisms have evolved to do certain things. Roughly speaking, math is the formalization and utilization of systems of quantification in the identification and deployment of patterns. Why does that work? Well, why does the heart work? This is something that we are able to do, for some evolutionary reason. There is a good answer, or set of answers, but not a philosophically puzzling one, even if we don't know all the details yet.

There might be another aspect of math that seems philosophically puzzling: that is, why does it seem like mathematical theorems are discovered, and not invented? In some sense, the theorems of mathematics seem to already be "out there." But where is "out there?"

One possible answer: As we develop our mathematical system (or systems), we constrain the possibilities for their development. A mathematical theorem is not simply invented out of nothing. So what is "out there" are the parameters of possible mathematical theorems determined by the mathematical system we are already using--or, perhaps even better: determined by our innate capacity for mathematical invention, which is often integrated with the constraints of our current mathematical system.

Free Will and Randomization

2011-08-01T03:01:00.005+02:00

A thought just occured to me. If we are capable of utilizing a purely random process, such as quantum mechanics might offer, then we could presumably use it in our formulation of potential plans/intentions prior to conscious deliberation. The randomization need not be in the conscious selection of a course of action--in the making of a decision itself--but in the unconscious production of options. Thus, we might choose to do X (as opposed to Y and Z) according to our beliefs and desires, and yet we come to identify X, Y and Z as options--and, indeed, come to have them as options--by a process which was not completely determined by past events. This only requires neurological processes devoted to randomly generating and selecting possible intentions. So, in choosing X, we are choosing something that was not determined by our causal history, and we are still acting on our beliefs and desires. We still choose what our physiology, psychology, etc., determines is the best option.

So, if there is something like quantum indeterminacy, we could have evolved a way of utilizing it. And it therefore seems that we could act in accordance with our beliefs and desires while also having alternatives which were not determined by the past or by any physical laws.

Somebody else must have put forward an argument like this before. It seems too simple to have gone unnoticed. I haven't read much of the literature on free will, but still, I'm a little surprised I hadn't thought of this before.

The Consequence Argument

2011-08-01T00:23:00.012+02:00

I recently wrote about the consequence argument and suggested that it might involve a notion of power which we don't necessarily need in order to have an influence over the future. I just came up with a much better response to the argument, however, which does not require any fussing over the word "power."

The consequence argument is as follows: If we have no power over X, and X completely determines Y, then we have no power over Y. Since we have no power over the past or over the laws of nature, and the past and the laws of nature together completely determine the future, then we have no power over the future. Thus, free will and determinism are incompatible.

The problem with the argument seems to be that it regards agents as existing outside of the causal nexus comprising the past and the laws of nature. If we think of ourselves as part of the past and the laws of nature, and we accept that the past and the laws of nature determine the future, then we are part of what determines the future. To the extent that we are part of what determines the future, we have power over the future. This looks pretty obvious.

The problem is the desire to situate ourselves entirely in the present, as if there was a decisive break between the past and our present moment of reflection. On the one hand, when we reflect on ourselves as rational agents, we are reflecting on the past as well as the present. We might thus put it this way: The past and the laws of nature determine the future via the present. Therefore, what exists in the present determines the future.

Science Phiction #2

2011-07-31T22:25:00.004+02:00

In case you haven't noticed, I've started a new blog devoted to science phiction: the mangling, misappropriation, misrepresentation or misunderstanding of philosophical ideas in the name of science. I posted my second entry today, on Sean Carroll's recent contribution to the free will debate: Sean Carroll and Free Will.

I'm not very regular about updating Specter of Reason, and that's fine with me, but I'm going to try to be a bit more consistent with Science Phiction. I'm shooting for one post a week. My target audience is anybody who enjoys reading popular science and philosophy writing, so I'd like to make an effort at making my writing more enjoyable for a wider audience. Unfortunately, that might take a lot more time than I have to spare.

Alternatives in a Deterministic Universe

2011-07-31T13:40:00.005+02:00

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, postulating an uncaused event would not make our decisions any more real. It would only make them utterly arbitrary.

Back to Darwin . . . Natural selection occurs when genotypes dominate their competitors in a population. They are differentially selected, which means that they dominate because they satisfy certain conditions better than their competitors. The same happens in artificial selection. The only difference is that, in artificial selection, the process has a new, unnecessary element: plans. The conditions which must be satisfied in artificial selection are part of breeding plans.

So, in both artificial and natural selection, the process can be completely deterministic, and yet the term "selection" has a precise and appropriate meaning, and this meaning is not so different from what we normally mean when we talk about decisions and choices. The main differences are that (1) in the latter case, we are selecting plans themselves, and not genotypes, and (2) the outcome of the process of selection is not the prevalence of a genotype in a population, but the adoption of an intention (represented plan of action) in human behavior.

Just as genotypes can be selected in a deterministic universe, so too can plans. We call the former sort of selection "speciation" and "breeding," and the latter sort "making a decision."

A Compatibilist Notion of Free Will

2011-07-31T03:26:00.006+02:00

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" act which takes us from (1) to (2). There simply need be (1), (2) and (3). That's enough for there to be a decision/choice.

I think that's the sort of thing Russell has in mind. It fits our normal talk of decisions/choices and it doesn't require any indeterminacy in the universe. And I agree with Russell that any stipulation of an uncaused act which would presumably get us from (1) to (2) would not make our decisions any more real. There is no benefit (explanatory or otherwise) to postulating such an uncaused event. It would make our decisions free in a particular way, but it would also make them utterly arbitrary. We do have the ability to make more or less arbitrary decisions, but our sense of responsibility and accountability certainly does not depend on, and would not even slightly be enhanced by, an utterly arbitrary decision-making process.

When we say "I could have done otherwise," I suppose what we normally mean is that we did not feel strongly compelled to act one way rather than another. Or, if we did feel so compelled, we regard that compulsion as the result of a prior decision which was not compulsory. So we are admitting to a degree of weakness in the conditions which define our decision-making processes. This entails a degree of freedom with respect to a particular variety of causal influence--namely, freedom with respect to our own wants/needs. So maybe free will, in common terms, is just the ability to choose without compulsion--that is, without the feeling that we have to choose one option rather than another.

Science Phiction #1

2011-07-29T11:55:00.004+02:00

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 a second in the past. Yes, these numbers are small. Their implication, however, is vast.

We live, each of us, trapped in our own now.

The simple conclusions described above derive, in their way, from relativity theory and they seem to spell the death knell for a philosophical stance called Presentism. According to Presentism only the present moment has ontological validity. In other words: only the present truly exists; only the present is real.

Anyone want to count the errors?

Update: I've decided to start a Science Phiction blog.

Rules, Acts and Interpretation: A Wittgensteinian View of Linguistic Communication

2011-07-09T11:33:00.027+02:00

I've written another paper 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

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 their context-dependent nature on their sleeve,” as Jason Stanley puts it (Stanley 2002, p. 150). Kent Bach thus distinguishes between wide and narrow context: there is “a short list of variables, such as the identity of the speaker and the hearer and the time and place of an utterance” which combines “with linguistic information to determine content (in the sense of fixing it)" (Bach 1997, quoted in Recanati 2002, pp. 110-111). This list comprises the narrow pragmatic context, the identification of which is recognized as a part of semantic interpretation, because the goal is not the evaluation of speaker intentions or beliefs, but the recovery of the truth-conditional content expressed by a sentence. When the goal of interpretation is the speaker’s intentions and beliefs, a different process of interpretation must occur, one which takes into account the wide context—in other words, one which is sensitive to any and every possible fact. There is no set of linguistic rules which limits the number, type or range of entities which can influence our interpretation of speaker intentions and beliefs. Speaker meaning is thus distinguished from sentence meaning: the former requires pragmatic processes of interpretation while the latter requires semantic processes. Semantic processes are distinguished both by their reliance on linguistic rules and their goal of identifying the values of lexical items. A composed list of such values is called an explicated proposition, or what is said by an utterance. Pragmatic processes may result in the construction of another proposition, one which is implicated by an utterance. Pragmatic processes do not tell us what a sentence means, but only what a speaker means when they use a sentence. Speaker meaning and sentence meaning may often be identical, but in many cases diverge.

Since speaker meaning and sentence meaning often diverge, it would be misleading to suppose that one knows a language if one does not know the conventional uses of the language which account for this divergence. To fully speak and understand a given language, one must be privy to the idioms which allow language users to easily recognize when words are being used to mean something other than what they say. Furthermore, this divergence cannot be explained by semantic rules and is not identified by means of semantic interpretation—indeed, that is what distinguishes implicature as such. If it could be determined by semantic interpretation, it would not be an implicature. Thus, knowing a language cannot be simply a matter of knowing the semantic rules of deduction and the syntactic rules of combination. Rather, knowing a language must also include knowing the conventional rules which govern implicatures. If these rules are sensitive to any and every possible fact, however, it is not clear how determinate they can be. Unlike semantic interpretation, pragmatic interpretation is in some fundamental sense indeterminate.

The question I have so far been discussing concerns the nature and extent of the rules governing linguistic communication. At this point, I want to raise and address a few related questions which have divided contemporary theorists.

1. What is the relationship between semantic and pragmatic interpretation? According to the standard view, they are distinct processes and semantic interpretation is primary in normal linguistic communication. Pragmatic interpretation is not always necessary; it is only vital when speaker meaning diverges from sentence meaning. According to Recanati (2002), however, semantic interpretation is always dependent upon pragmatic interpretation: the fixing of the narrow context can only be done by appealing to the wide context. Semantic rules are not sufficient to determine what is said. Then there are relevance theorists, who claim that semantics and pragmatics are combined in a single process of interpretation, that the identification of speaker meaning occurs through the same process as the interpretation of sentence meaning, whether or not these meanings are identical or divergent (Carston 2002). Recanati agrees with the relevance theoretic view that no propositional content is recovered prior to pragmatic interpretation, though he still distinguishes between semantic and pragmatic processes of interpretation. In his view, the distinction rests on the conscious availability of premises about speaker intentions. Recanati claims there are pragmatic processes (secondary pragmatic processes, to be exact) which take beliefs about speaker intentions and beliefs as arguments in inferential processes concerning the intended meanings of utterances. Thus, when Recanati claims that pragmatic interpretation is always involved in linguistic communication, he means that primary pragmatic interpretation is always involved; he does not suppose that normal communication requires inferences about speaker meaning and intention.

2. Is semantic interpretation constrained by syntax? According to Stanley (2002), it is: “all the constituents of the propositions hearers would intuitively believe to be expressed by utterances are the result of assigning values to the elements of the sentence uttered, and combining them in accord with its structure" (Stanley 2002, pp. 150-151). According to relevance theorists, however, there are elements of what is said which cannot be determined by syntax and semantics alone.

3. Does semantic interpretation rely on inferences about speaker intentions and beliefs? According to inferentialists, semantic interpretation is an inferential process which relies on premises about the intentions and beliefs of the speaker. According to anti-inferentialists, no such inferences normally occur in linguistic communication. What is said, as opposed to what is meant, can be recovered without inferences from speaker intentions and beliefs. Linguistic communication is, in normal cases, as direct as perception.

Relevance theorists do not claim that linguistic interpretation rests on inferences about speaker beliefs and intentions. Rather, they claim that interpretation produces judgments about such beliefs and intentions as output. They deny that implicatures require prior outputs about sentence meaning as arguments in an inferential process of interpretation (what Recanati calls “secondary pragmatic processes.”) Recanati also rejects inferentialism, claiming that normal linguistic communication requires only primary pragmatic processes, and that no inferences of any kind need occur at all.

Carston (2002), a relevance theorist, claims that, because of the “highly context-sensitive nature of sense selection and reference assignment . . . they are matters of speaker meaning, not determinable by any linguistic rule or procedure for mapping a linguistic element to a contextual value, and so just as dependent on pragmatic principles as the process of implicature derivation” (Carston 2002, p. 134). Recanati observes this same context-sensitivity, which he calls “semantic underdetermination.” According to this thesis, the values of lexical items can only be determined by appealing to the wide context of utterance. The notion of wide context is distinguished by the fact that it is indeterminate: any fact at all might enter the wide context and influence the interpretation of an utterance. Thus, the correct interpretation of an utterance requires pragmatic interpretation: it cannot rely on semantic rules alone.

As noted above, Recanati distinguishes between two types of pragmatic interpretation: primary and secondary. Primary pragmatic processes are not determinable by linguistic rules and procedures for mapping lexical items to their values. Primary pragmatic processes do identify what a speaker means, and not simply what a sentence says by itself. Sentences do not, on Recanati’s view, say anything by themselves. Yet, Recanati observes, primary pragmatic processes do not rest on inferences about what a speaker means. They need not involve any inferences at all.

Carston goes further. Instead of relying on the relatively uncontroversial claim that semantic interpretation is deeply sensitive to context, she claims that semantic interpretation is not normally constrained by syntax:

There is a wide range of cases where it seems that pragmatics contributes a component to the explicitly communicated content of an utterance although there is no linguistic element indicating that such an element is required. That is, there is no overt indexical, nor is there any compelling reason to suppose there is a covert element in the logical form of the utterance, and yet a contextually supplied constituent appears in the explicature (Carston 2002, p. 135).

These constituents are what Stanley calls “unarticulated elements.” Stanley’s method of refuting the existence of such elements is to identify, on a case by case basis, hidden (but articulated) lexical items and so account for the explicature (aka “what is said”) in terms of the logical form (syntactical structure) of the uttered sentence.

Stanley’s methodological suggestion is that “an unpronounced element exists in the structure of a sentence just in case there is a behavior that would be easily explicable on the assumption that it is there, and difficult to explain otherwise” (Stanley 2002, p. 152). As an illustration of the application of this principle, Stanley presents an argument for the existence of unpronounced by-phrases in passive constructions, such as “The ship was sunk to collect the insurance.” The by-phrase, he says, must be present as a local controller of the unpronounced pronominal element, ‘PRO,’ which is supposedly the subject of infinitival clauses. How does Stanley know that there is an unpronounced pronominal element which must be controlled? Because, he says, sentences like “The ship sank to collect the insurance” are ungrammatical. Ships are not the sorts of things that can collect insurance. For Stanley, to say that a ship is not the sort of thing that can collect insurance is to say that “the ship” cannot control the pronominal element in “The ship sank [PRO to collect the insurance].”

Pace Stanley, it is not obvious that “the ship sank to collect the insurance” is ungrammatical. It is unusual, perhaps, and this is because we usually do not attribute to ships the ability to collect insurance. The only obvious fact is that collecting insurance is an intentional activity, and ships are not intentional agents. So we reject the content of the sentence, but not its grammatical form. If the sentence is grammatical, however, there is no need to postulate an unpronounced pronominal element. It does not seem easier to stipulate an unpronounced pronominal element, and so Stanley’s criterion is not satisfied.

I take the preceding argument as grounds for rejecting Stanley’s example, though it is worth exploring Stanley’s full application of his proposed criterion. Stanley’s argument is that the alleged unpronounced pronominal element in passive constructions (such as “The ship was sunk to collect the insurance”) is controlled by unpronounced by-phrases. Stanley concludes that all passive constructions must include such unpronounced by-phrases. For example, I cannot say “The student was well-informed” without saying who or what informed the student. I doubt Stanley would claim that I necessarily know who or what informed the student. Rather, for the sentence to be true, somebody or something must have informed the student well, even if I don’t know who or what it is, and that somebody or something is what enters into the proposition.

My objection is that it need not be the case that a determinate somebody or something is responsible for a student being well-informed. Arguably, we sometimes use the passive voice in such cases where no determinate element exists. So it is implausible to suppose that a by-phrase must be saturated for such sentences to have meaning. Stanley might be better off saying that there is an unpronounced by-phrase only in case it is required to control the alleged unpronounced pronominal element. Yet, we lack sufficient grounds for supposing any such element exists, and it would be circular to argue for their existence by appealing to them. True, it does seem that “The ship was sunk to collect the insurance” is true only in case there is some value for the entity which intended to collect the insurance by sinking the ship, even if I do not know who or what that entity is. Yet, we can claim that the by-phrase is implicated by the sentence and not a part of its syntactical form. The existence of an agent is implied—it is a logically necessary consequence of the sentence meaning—without being an articulated element of the sentence.

It is not obvious that there are ever cases in which the only, or even the easiest, way to explain linguistic behavior is to postulate unpronounced lexical items. Stanley’s project appears to have an insurmountable methodological difficulty. In any case, this does not necessarily support Carston’s position that the logical form of an explicature underdetermines its meaning. That point ultimately depends on how we understand logical form.

III

I propose a distinction between the syntax of a sentence and its logical form. If the meaning of a sentence has logical entailments, then we might suppose those entailments are a part of its logical form. Indeed, there does not seem to be any principled way of distinguishing between what a sentence means and what is logically entailed by that sentence. This was evident in the case of “The ship was sunk to collect the insurance.” In so far as that sentence logically entails that somebody intended to collect insurance by sinking the ship, then we might suppose that agent is part of the proposition expressed by the sentence. Certainly, if no such agent exists, the sentence is false. Is it false because of the content expressed by its logical form or is it false because of a proposition which is logically entailed by its logical form? I do not suppose there could be any principled way of deciding this question. There is no methodological basis for distinguishing between meaning and logical entailment. If we take the proposition expressed by a sentence to have a logical form (as Carston and Stanley agree must be the case), then we have no reason to reject any logical entailments as being distinct from the proposition so expressed.

Stanley and Carston both equate the logical form of an explicature with the syntactical construction of its linguistic elements. Thus, while Stanley claims that logical form constrains the proposition expressed by a sentence, Carston claims that it does not. Yet, I propose that we instead take the logical form of an explicature to be the logical form of the proposition it expresses. Logical form is not determined by the sentence alone, but rather by the speaker’s intentions and beliefs as they are manifested in the use of a sentence.

Stanley claims that the logical form (taken as identical to the syntactical structure of a sentence) expressed by a sentence is determined by the speaker’s linguistic intentions (Stanley 2002, p. 150). However, according to Stanley, speaker intentions are constrained by the rules of the language. Speaker intentions determine logical form in so far as a speaker intends to utilize such-and-such properties of a language. It is because a speaker intends to assert X that the sentence uttered has the logical form of X. Another speaker might utter the same words without the intent to make an assertion, and so would not express a proposition at all. What distinguishes an assertion from the mere production of sounds or markings is an intention to make an assertion. I suppose that this, for Stanley, is why the logical form is determined by speaker intentions: the speaker intends to follow the rules of the language.

The crucial question, then, is whether or not the intended sentence contains elements corresponding to all of the elements of the proposition it expresses. Does syntax determine logical form? If we take a sentence to be more than what is physically produced—more than an assortment of sounds or markings—but as a combination of elements which can be used to express a proposition, then the sentence may be said to have a logical form—to be a token of a logical type. What makes it a token is its logical form, and this seems to be what we mean when we talk about syntax. And if the logical form is identical to its logical entailments, then the sentence contains everything that is logically entailed by the utterance.

Yet, there must be some constraint on what can be considered a logical entailment. For what counts as logical entailment in ordinary discourse depends on assumptions about relational properties. What a person logically entails is a matter of what that person believes about the world. These beliefs cannot be deduced from logic or language alone. So it appears that logical entailment is really just a matter of intended entailment. The proposition expressed by an utterance cannot be deduced by the rules of logic and language alone, but must follow from the speaker’s beliefs and intentions. This is not to say that the process must take speaker beliefs and intentions as argument. It is only to say that some accordance with speaker intentions is required, and this accordance cannot be produced by strict adherence to the rules of logic or language. In so far as logical form is a matter of logical entailment, it cannot be a matter of syntax alone.

We now have a picture of logical form which is not limited by the syntactical properties of a sentence, but by the truth-evaluable properties of what a speaker intends a sentence to say. Sentence meaning is always intended sentence meaning, which is still distinguishable from speaker meaning—not because the latter alone is uniquely intended by the speaker, but because only the former incorporates syntactical features of the language. There are no principled, rule-based criteria for assigning logical forms to sentences. Syntax must play a part in sentence meaning, but it does not completely determine its logical form.

If the question is “What constitutes sentence meaning?”, then we seem to end up with a dilemma: we cannot identify any proper constituents of sentence meaning, because we cannot identify the essential properties of a sentence apart from its syntactical components, and these are not sufficient to determine logical form. Perhaps the question should not be What constitutes sentence meaning?, but rather, How are notions of sentence meaning constructed? This question is a question about how interpreters of speech acts go about creating notions such as what is said and what is meant. If we approach the topic this way, we may regard the notion of sentence meaning as the result of interpretation. Of course, we still want to be able to say things such as, “That is not what I meant.” We want to be able to test interpretations against intended meanings. Yet, we cannot do so by appeal to facts about particular sentences. We can only do so by fixing sentence meanings as interpreters of our own discourse. The notion of sentence meaning, then, is not determined by speaker intentions; rather, speaker intentions and sentence meaning are co-determined by the interpretation of utterances.

Sentences have meaning in so far as there are interpreters who interpret them. And it is permitted to postulate a sentence meaning in so far as our interpretation of certain sorts of behavior requires it. So, if there are linguistic rules which determine the logical form of sentences, these rules must exist as elements of interpretation. There are no facts about what a sentence means—or even about whether or not a sentence has been produced—prior to the interpretation of a speech act as such.

If we are going to investigate linguistic communication, then, we should focus on the processes of interpretation. This is not to say that speech production is irrelevant. Rather, it is to say that speech production cannot be identified unless we understand what it means to interpret speech. We might even define speech production as the intentional triggering of processes of linguistic interpretation. Whatever intentionally triggers processes of linguistic interpretation is, by definition, a speech act. Thus, there can be no study of speech acts apart from the study of interpretation.

The view I am promoting owes some gratitude to Wittgenstein and his rule-following paradox. In the controversial but influential formulation proposed by Kripke (1982), the dilemma takes the following shape: there can be no facts about the intended meaning of an expression which determine any future uses of that expression. According to Kripke, Wittgenstein held that there are no facts about intended meaning at all. I am not convinced this is correct. I believe we can read Wittgenstein as denying that there are any facts about intended meaning which logically necessitate future uses of expressions. However, I do not think Wittgenstein thereby supposes that there are no facts about intended meaning at all. Wittgenstein is only rejecting the ability of any such facts to constitute a logical foundation for our metalinguistic discourse.

If we attempt to determine what rule we are following by our use of a particular expression, we end up with an infinite regress: we can only appeal to other rules or other expressions of the same rule, and so never arrive at a final interpretation of the rule we are intending to follow. Wittgenstein concludes: “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases” (Wittgenstein 1953/2001, section 201, p. 69) In other words, processes of semantic and pragmatic interpretation cannot themselves be wholly circumscribed by rules. The indeterminacy of pragmatic interpretation was noted at the outset, when it was observed that sensitivity to every possible fact indicates a fundamental lack of linguistic control. The Wittgensteinian view of logical form should not be surprising, then, once it has been acknowledged that semantic interpretation relies on the wide context.

According to inferentialists, you cannot understand an utterance without inferring from beliefs about the speaker’s own beliefs and desires. To correctly interpret an expression, you must first interpret the speaker’s beliefs and then deduce the correct interpretation of their utterance. Anti-inferentialists, on the other hand, claim that the correct interpretation of an utterance does not depend on any inferences from speaker beliefs, but can be determined solely by knowledge of the language and determinate features of the context of utterance. My view is perhaps more sympathetic to anti-inferentialism. We cannot identify that any of a speaker’s beliefs and desires are entailed by her utterance without first interpreting that utterance. We cannot infer from the beliefs and desires to sentence meaning when that very meaning is what leads us to stipulate beliefs and desires. It appears that both the beliefs/desires we attribute to a speaker and the meaning we attribute to her utterance are interpreted together; we can speak of what a speaker says only because we can speak of her relevant beliefs and desires, and we can speak of the latter only because we can speak of the former. Our ability to interpret speech must depend on our ability to interpret personal qualities. The interpretation of speech is an interpretation of personal qualities. While the personal qualities might not enter the process of interpretation as premises, they are represented in judgments about that speech. Still, this process need not be inferential.

I am also sympathetic to Carston’s relevance theoretic approach. I see no reason to reject her position that semantic and pragmatic interpretation (even Recanati’s “secondary” pragmatic interpretation) cannot occur in a single process of interpretation. There does not seem to be a principled method for distinguishing between explicature and implicature. No set of conventions could decide ahead of time whether or not a particular speech act was conventional or unconventional, and whether or not an entailment was explicated or implicated. This is not to deny that some meanings are not more implicit than others, or that some are not less conventional than others, nor is it to deny that there is any such thing as “literal meaning.” It is rather to make the Wittgensteinian point that these notions are not wholly circumscribed by rules, and that there is no criteria to satisfy prior to acts of interpretation.

Recanati’s distinction between primary and secondary pragmatic processes relies on the notion of conscious availability. Supposedly, when an utterance defies normal interpretation, secondary pragmatic processes kick in and, using the sentence meaning as argument, infer possible speaker meanings. But the notion of conscious availability seems too weak to do much work here. We do not always need to take sentence meanings as argument when we identify implicatures. The identification of an implicature can be as automatic as any act of interpretation.

There is a temptation to say that some uses of a linguistic construction are simply incorrect or unconventional. However, we necessarily lack the means of determining what distinguishes the conventional from the unconventional, or the correct from the incorrect, in advance of particular cases. In other words, whether or not we should regard any given use of a linguistic construction as “correct” or “conventional” (or, conversely, as “incorrect” or “unconventional”) is theoretically undecidable.

This Wittgensteinian view is not opposed to analyzing content in terms of logical form. However, it is opposed to the notion that we could define logical form in advance of our analysis of content. Thus, when we interpret a speech act, we do not first identify the complete logical form and then apply rules to identify the content. We rather identify the logical form by virtue of our understanding of the content.

Theorists like Jason Stanley will always be able to revert to hypotheses about hidden lexical elements in attempts to defend the view that “every feature” of the communicated content “must be the semantic value of something” in the syntactical form “or introduced via a context-independent construction rule” (Stanley 2000, quoted in Stanley 2007, p. 36). Yet, since there is no way to determine the correct analysis of logical form in advance of our treatment of particular cases, Stanley’s strategy is suspect. It will always be possible to stipulate some hidden elements to account for the particular use of a linguistic construction. This does not mean that logical form somehow preceded that particular use. For Stanley’s method to work, we need an independent indication of logical form apart from actual speech acts—a purely semantic and syntactic theory—against which we can test our empirical observations. Yet, Stanley seems open to the possibility that any such theory will be open to possible revision when new pragmatic evidence is revealed.

What is the point of supposing that logical form precedes speech acts? Presumably, those who favor such a view suppose that correct linguistic interpretation requires adherence to rules for correctness, and such rules require some kind of linguistic discipline: Communication must be “under linguistic control,” a Stanley puts it (Stanley 2007, p. 10). From the Wittgensteinian view, this is not even wishful thinking: it is simply untenable. Linguistic control does play a role in communication, but it is not foundational. Linguistic control is the result of acts of linguistic communication, and so cannot be a condition of such acts.

The view I am promoting is not that there is no role for rules in linguistic communication. Rather, it is that this role is not foundational—or, rather, that the foundational aspects of rules do not precede our formulation of them. There are unquestionable cases in which disagreements or uncertainties about meaning are resolved by appeal to linguistic rules. Yet, it is a mistake to suppose that those rules somehow preceded our use of them in resolving our disputes.

Works Cited

Bach, Kent. 1997. The semantics-pragmatics distinction: what it is and why it matters. Linguistische Berichte, 8, 33-50.

Carston, Robyn. 2002. Linguistic Meaning, Communicated Meaning and Cognitive Pragmatics. Mind & Language 17, Nos 1 and 2 (February/April): 127-148.

Kripke, Saul. 1982. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Harvard University Press.

Recanati, Francois. 2002. Does Linguistic Communication Rest on Inference? Mind & Language 17, Nos 1 and 2 (February/April): 105-126.

Stanley, Jason. 2000. Context and Logical Form. Linguistics and Philosophy 23: 391-434, reprinted in Stanley 2007.

Stanley, Jason. 2002. Making It Articulated. Mind & Language 17, Nos 1 and 2 (February/April): 149-168.

Stanley, Jason. 2007. Language in Context. Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953/2001. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Publishing.

Kripkenstein, Pt. 3: The Skeptical Solution Revisited

2011-07-06T18:25:00.011+02:00

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 accept a reductio, we do not accept the conclusion. We rather accept the argument as a refutation of the set of premises, and we do so because we reject the conclusion. KW accepts the skeptical thesis. He accepts both the argument and its conclusion. His skeptical solution is not to reject the conclusion, but to show that it is not as intolerable as it first appeared. So it does not appear that he rejects any of the premises or presuppositions of the skeptical argument.

Second, Kripke emphasizes that the solution does not take rules to be social constructs. When we say a person follows the rule of arithmetic, we do not mean they have followed the rules of society. Kripke quotes Wittgenstein: "Does this mean, e.g., that the definition of the same would be this: same as what all or most human beings . . . take for the same?--Of course not." And also, "Certainly the propositions, 'Human beings believe that twice two is four' and 'Twice two is four' do not mean the same." Kripke observes that, if we tried to solve the skeptical problem by treating rules as social constructs, we'd just be providing a different set of truth conditions. Worse, we'd be reaching for a set of truth conditions which are intuitively unappealing. We're not talking about social constructions when we talk about identity or the rule of addition, even if social constructions are required to support our talk about such rules.

The skeptical solution does not treat rules as social constructions. In fact, it does not treat rules as anything at all. For KW, rules need not even exist, though we are justified in talking about them. What does exist, at least, is our agreement and our discourse, and the former justifies the latter.

To draw on the parallel to Hume which Kripke observes: For Hume, laws of causality need not exist, even if regularities in nature justify our talk about them. We would not say that Hume has offered a different picture of causality. Rather, Hume has denied any knowledge of causality, but justified the discourse on causal laws by appealing to something else: regularities in nature. Similarly, KW does not offer a different picture of intended meaning and rules; he only denies any facts about intended meaning and rules, instead justifying the discourse by appealing to regularities in our use of expressions. So the original picture of intended meaning and rules remains, just as the original notion of causality remains for Hume.

The original picture of intended meaning is thus: To (correctly) mean plus by "plus" is to act in accordance with one's past intentions regarding the use of the term "plus," where those intentions determine unique answers to an indefinite (perhaps infinite) number of future cases. That is the picture which KW accepts, and in this picture we see KW's notion of what it means to grasp a rule: to formulate (via representations) an intention to follow a rule which determines answers for an indefinite number of future cases. KW gives no indication that he wants to reject this picture. He only rejects the claim that this talk of intended meanings and rules has truth conditions. In other words, he only denies that this picture actually shows us anything.

The point here is a little hard to construe. In fact, it's downright confounding. Before I explore it a little more, let me spell out where my professor and I presumably agree. We agree that KW's skeptical solution denies that there are any truth conditions which could justify our talk of intended meaning or rules. Furthermore, we agree that the skeptical solution denies that our talk of intended meaning and rules entails or implies any such truth conditions. According to KW, when we talk of intended meaning, we're not appealing to facts which constitute an intention to mean one thing rather than another. We're appealing to our general agreement; and yet, we don't mean our general agreement. For, if we meant that, we'd claim that "the same" just means "what most people more or less agree is the same." But that's not what we mean by "the same." So what we mean must be distinguished from what justifies our discourse. And what we mean, as KW notes, is that we intend the same thing we intended in the past and which determines answers to an indefinite (perhaps infinite) number of future cases.

Kripke does explicitly say that following a rule (on the skeptical solution) amounts to agreeing with your community. So, I admit, it does look a little like he is presenting a different picture of rule-following. According to KW, whether or not we can say we are following a rule depends only on whether or not we are in agreement with our community. And he explicitly offers this as an alternative to the original way of thinking about rule-following, which focused on the solitary individual. So, I admit, it does look a little like KW rejects the original picture of rule-following in favor of a picture which focuses on the community, just as my professor claims. Yet, at the same time, and for the reasons I've already given, KW cannot reject the original as a picture of what we mean when we talk about rule-following. He does not suppose we mean something about our community's acceptance when we talk about grasping a rule or meaning plus by "plus," nor does he suppose that such talk is meaningless. What it means, then, is a picture which lacks factual content. A picture which guides us without showing us anything.

If this looks incoherent, I think that might be because KW's skeptical solution is fundamentally inconsistent. KW acknowledges that we speak of intended meaning as determining an indefinite number of as-yet-unknown future uses of a rule. For example, KW would not ban me from saying,

(1) The word "plus," as I intended it in the past, indicates a rule which determines answers for an indefinite number of cases which I have yet to encounter, and which I follow by my use of the word "plus" today.

What KW says is that no facts actually constitute what I ever mean by "plus." So I cannot justify (1) by appealing to any facts about what I or anyone has ever intended to mean. In short, (1) lacks truth conditions. I cannot (objectively/superlatively) claim that any rule has ever determined anything at all. So KW has us in a bind. We can talk about rules and intentions, but at the same time, we do not do so truthfully. We can justify this talk (pragmatically, we might say) by appealing to the fact that we all generally agree about how to use the word "plus." But if we try to look for some other sort of justification, we'll end up nowhere.

The meaning skeptic says that there is no way the use of an expression can be metalinguistically correct or incorrect, which is to say that there are no facts which determine whether or not the present use of an expression is in accordance with previous uses. KW accepts the skeptical position, and so agrees with the indeterminacy of metalinguistic correctness. But this does not mean KW rejects talk of metalinguistic correctness, or denies the picture of rule-following it entails. To do so would be to deny the sense of (1). KW denies that (1) has truth conditions, but he does not deny that it makes sense. He does not deny that our language-game produces this picture of rule-following, nor does he deny that this picture plays an important role in our language-game. He only denies that it shows us any (superlative) facts.

As I noted in my last post, KW's skeptical solution hinges on an opaque distinction between two types of facts, superlative and ordinary facts. There is some sense in which it is a fact that I meant plus by "plus," but there is another sense in which it is not a fact at all. There is a sense in which (1) states a fact, but another sense in which (1) leads us to look for facts in the wrong places. Unfortunately, this distinction is anything but clear. It is no wonder if KW seems to simultaneously accept and reject the original picture of intended meaning and grasping a rule. I think he must accept the original picture. I see no other way to interpret his skeptical solution. But I admit, it is hard to see why he should accept it, since he denies that it is a picture of anything at all. What KW fails to explain is why anybody would ever want that original picture in the first place.

Kripkenstein, Pt. 2: The Skeptical Solution

2011-07-02T11:10:00.009+02:00

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 is no objective fact--that we all mean addition by "+", or even that a given individual does--that explains our agreement in particular cases. Rather our license to say of each other that we mean addition by "+" is part of a 'language game' that sustains itself only because of the brute fact that we generally agree." The point is that we were looking for justification in the wrong place, or perhaps justification of the wrong sort.

KW first challenged us to find a fact about our past usage which justified our present answer to "68 + 57." But, KW now says, we don't need any such fact to justify our claims about intended meaning. We use "+" in certain ways, and we generally agree about how to use it. There is no fact which could justify such agreement. There is simply agreement, and that is enough to give us license to say things like "I mean addition by '+.'"

As Kripke explains, he does not like KW's skeptical solution because it requires that we distinguish between the ordinary, everyday use of the word "fact" and a philosophical notion of objective or "superlative" facts. The skeptic is right that there are no facts of that peculiar philosophical sort, but there are facts of the matter, in our everyday way of talking. Of course, if this is the case, then why can't we answer the meaning skeptic by appealing to everyday facts?

The problem is, how can we understand the distinction KW draws between truth conditions and assertibility conditions? If we are licensed to assert that we mean addition by "plus," then how is that different from saying it is a fact (an "objective" or "superlative" fact, as KW provocatively puts it) that we mean addition by "plus?" If there are assertibility conditions, isn't it a fact that there are? And can't we say that fact justifies our ascriptions of meaning?

It seems KW is saying both that there is a fact of the matter about what we mean and also that there is no fact of the matter--there is a fact of the matter in so far as we are licensed to say that there is a fact of the matter, and whether or not we are licensed to say there is a fact of the matter is a matter of our agreement in the use of expressions. Since our agreement is a brute fact, then our justification does ultimately relate to facts. So perhap Kripke is right to express displeasure at KW's skeptical solution.

As I've already noted, I don't see a real problem for KW to solve, so the fact that his skeptical solution rests on an opaque distinction between truth and assertibility is not so disconcerting. Still, I must contend with my professor's question: Does KW accept the picture of rule-following which sustains the skeptical argument?

The answer must be yes. First, because KW's solution is, in fact, a skeptical solution. As Kripke says, KW's solution does not in any way challenge the skeptical argument. So how could KW reject the picture of rule-following which sustains that argument?

But, it might be argued, KW is certainly rejecting something of the skeptic's argument. KW's skeptical solution rejects the skeptic's claim that we need some kind of factual (or superlatively factual) justification for our attributions of intended meaning. So isn't KW saying that, no, we don't need to conform to our past intentions in order to follow a rule?

Recall the picture of rule following which sustains KW's skeptical argument: In order to follow a rule, you must follow the same rule you intended to follow in the past (by virtue of mental and external representations). You must conform to your past intentions. If KW now says there is no superlative fact of the matter about those past intentions, then isn't KW saying you don't have to conform to them in order to correctly follow a rule? Instead of conforming to our past intentions, we only have to conform to our community's standards of agreement. So KW has ultimately rejected the picture of rule-following which sustained the skeptic's argument.

If this is so, then KW's skeptical solution is not skeptical at all. And perhaps it could be read this way, but Kripke most certainly doesn't read it this way. If he did, he presumably wouldn't call it a "skeptical solution." But if this is not how Kripke reads KW's solution, then how does he read it?

Remember, KW says, "our license to say of each other that we mean addition by "+" is part of a 'language game' that sustains itself only because of the brute fact that we generally agree." The claim is not that we successfully follow a rule because we generally agree. Rather, it is that we are licensed to say we have successfully followed a rule because we generally agree. But when we say we have successfully followed a rule, we do not thereby mean we have just done what is generally accepted in our community. According to KW, we rather mean that we have intended to follow the same rule we have always followed. Indeed, there is an everyday sense to saying that, when we do addition, we follow the same rules we have always followed. KW does not challenge this sort of talk. Rather, KW says that what justifies such talk is not facts about our intended meaning, but facts about our general agreement. So, what it means to follow a rule is still a matter of conformity with past intentions. It's just not a matter which could, in principle, be resolved by appeal to extra-societal facts.

Kripke explains it in more detail:

When the community accepts a particular conditional [e.g., "if he means addition by '+', his answer to '68 + 57' should be '125'"], it accepts its contraposed form: the failure of an individual to come up with the particular responses the community regards as right leads the community to suppose that he is not following the rule. On the other hand, if an individual passes enough tests, the community (endorsing assertions [such as, "he means addition by '+'"]) accepts him as a rule follower, thus enabling him to engage in certain types of interactions with them that depend on their reliance on his responses. Note that this solution explains how the assertions [of the two sorts just mentioned] are introduced into language; it does not give conditions for these statements to be true.

There is therefore a bifurcation between what justifies the use of expressions and what make them true. What would make these assertions true is just what the skeptic says would make them true: facts about conformity to past intentions. Since there are no facts, there are no truth conditions. Yet, the language is justified for other reasons. So the picture of rule-following holds. What would make it true that so-and-so followed a rule are facts about past intentions. Since no such facts exist, KW is a skeptic about intended meaning. But this doesn't prevent KW from accepting the language of intentionality, because KW recognizes a wholly different justification for it. I thus conclude that KW does accept the original picture of what it means to grasp a rule.

Kripkenstein

2011-06-23T11:39:00.007+02:00

I'm writing a paper for a graduate "course" on skepticism, my first paper for a philosophy class in over a decade. (I say "course," because it is independent study: I have not been to any classes, and I have only met with the professor once, at which time we agreed on the topic of the paper without discussing anything of philosophical substance.) The assigned topic is "meaning skepticism." Here's a work-in-progress draft (sans references). Comments, criticism and questions are welcome, as always. I will probably add a bit at the end about Kripkenstein's "skeptical solution."

Two Problems with

Kripkenstein's Argument for

Meaning Skepticism

According to Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein produced “a new form of philosophical skepticism,” which I shall call meaning skepticism. Kripke does not give it this or any other name, though some commentators refer to it as rule skepticism. This may be justified by the fact that Wittgenstein frames the problem in terms of a paradox about following rules. Kripke quotes such a passage by way of introducing the problem: “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” However, while “rule skepticism” might be an apt name for Wittgenstein’s dilemma, it does not clearly fit the matter of Kripke’s concern. Kripke’s focus is entirely on meaning, or, more specifically, about intended meaning.

Though Kripke does not say so, he might not be surprised to have it pointed out that his focus differs from Wittgenstein’s. As Kripke acknowledges, he makes alterations to Wittgenstein’s argument, and not always in ways Wittgenstein would accept. In his own words, Kripke’s text “should be thought of as expounding neither ‘Wittgenstein’s’ argument nor ‘Kripke’s’: rather Wittgenstein’s argument as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him.” Since the skeptical argument is not directly attributable to either Kripke or Wittgenstein, it is conventional to refer to it as “Kripke’s Wittgenstien” or even “Kripkenstein.” I will refer to it as “KW.”

KW’s skeptical position is that there are no facts about what people mean by their use of particular expressions. To put it another way, there are no conditions which could make attributions of meaning true or false. Consider the following example: A person says “68 plus 57 is 125.” If they are using “plus” to indicate addition, then “125” is the correct answer. However, KW says, there is no justification for claiming that they mean plus, and not quus. Quus is a function of Kripke’s own invention, and it goes as follows: x quus y = x plus y, if x,y < 57, else x quus y = 5. Since there is no fact about whether or not a person uses “plus” to mean plus and not quus, there is no fact about whether or not their calculation is correct. If they mean quus, then they should say “68 plus 57 is 5,” not “68 plus 57 is 125.” The skeptical position is that nothing justifies one answer as opposed to the other.

Note that the position is not that there are no rules as such. Nor is the position that there are facts about intended meaning, but only that we cannot know them. Rather, KW says there are no facts about what rule a person intends to follow by their use of a particular expression. KW’s skepticism is ontological, not epistemological, an it is about intended meaning, not rules. It is skepticism about the existence of facts which determine what people intend to mean with the use of linguistic expressions.

KW begins by describing a certain picture of what it means to grasp a rule:

I, like almost all English speakers, use the word ‘plus’ and the symbol ‘+’ to denote a well-known mathematical function, addition. The function is defined for all pairs of positive integers. By means of my external symbolic representation and my internal representation, I ‘grasp’ the rule for addition. One point is crucial to my ‘grasp’ of this rule. Although I myself have computed only finitely many sums in the past, the rule determines my answer for indefinitely many new sums that I have never previously considered. This is the whole point of the notion that in learning to add I grasp a rule: my past intentions regarding addition determine a unique answer for indefinitely many new cases in the future.

There is something wrong with this picture. First, let me emphasize the key points here: We grasp rules only via internal and external representations. Second, when we learn how to follow a rule, our intentions determine how we should answer certain sorts of questions which we have never before considered. When we successfully follow a rule, we intend to follow the same rule we learned in the past, and it is that rule which determines the answer we should give. Thus, to follow a rule is, in some sense, to do just the same as one has done before. The problem, then, is how we could ever suppose that a person has followed a rule for the first time. If, in order to follow a rule, you must intend to follow the same rule you had intended to follow in the past, then a person could never follow a rule for the first time. Nobody could ever learn how to follow a rule.

It might be supposed that a person can only follow a rule if they have learned to apply a particular mental representation. KW suggests as much by focusing on the need for mental representations. However, this runs into the same difficulty. The application of the representation must be learned, and this must entail yet another 'grasping' of yet another rule. The picture of grasping a rule, as presented, invites an infinite regress. It seems evident that we cannot stipulate that a person can only correctly follow a rule if they intend to follow the same rule they intended to follow in the past. I shall return to this point shortly. For now, let is see what KW does with this picture of ‘grasping a rule.’

Given the assumption that we have finite minds, KW supposes that there are numbers greater than any of the numbers we have added in our history of using “plus” and “+.” For example, we can imagine a person who has learned how to add but has only added numbers less than 57. We can even imagine that we are such a person, and that we have never solved “68 + 57.” While 57 is a rather low number, the point is a general one. It does not matter what numbers we choose as our example, so long as it is accepted that some numbers are greater than any we have added in the past.

Having established a framework for talking about rules, KW sets the stage for his skeptical challenge. Again, say in our entire history we have only added numbers less than 57. We are then asked to calculate “68 + 57.” We respond with “125.” Assuming “68”, “57” and “+” mean 68, 57 and plus, respectively, “125” is the arithmetically correct answer. However, KW identifies another sense in which this answer might be correct: in addition to the arithmetical sense, according to which 125 is the sum of 57 and 68, there is also the meta-linguistic sense, in which the term “plus” denotes the same function it was intended to denote in the past, such that, if I had been asked “What is 68 plus 57?” in the past, I would have applied the same rule then as I applied in the present case.

For the answer “125” to be correct, it is not enough that I mean plus by “plus” in the present. I must also have intended to mean plus by “plus” in the past. According to KW, my present meaning requires conformity with my past intentions. To correctly answer the question, I must not only provide the arithmetically proper result, but I must also use the language in the way I had previously intended.

This is precisely the point I find problematic. It is unreasonable—in fact, illogical—to suppose that I can only give the correct answer to a question if I intend to use my words in the same way I intended to use them in the past. As I shall now show, this weakens the force of KW’s skeptical challenge.

The meaning skeptic asks us to reveal the fact which constitutes our prior intention to mean plus by “plus” and thereby determines how we should respond to “68 + 57.” For example, asks the skeptic, how do we know that in the past, when we used “plus,” we did not mean quus? KW admits that the likelihood of anyone having ever meant quus by “plus” is extremely low, but it is not a priori inconceivable. We might imagine, he says, that we are currently experiencing an altered mental state (due to temporary insanity or a drug-induced hallucination, say) which prevents us from remembering how we used “plus” in the past. While we think we have always used "plus" to indicate addition, we actually used it to indicate quaddition.

There is no such fact, says KW. Therefore, there is no fact about our past intention. As a result, there is no fact of the matter about whether or not we are following the same rule in the present that we followed in the past. Since our ability to follow a rule was based on our ability to follow the same rule we followed in the past, we can no longer claim to have any ability to follow any rules. We cannot claim that we are following any rules at all when we use the term "plus." To put it another way, there is no fact of the matter about what we presently mean by "plus."

As I have suggested already, there need not be any fact about our past usage of an expression in order for there to be a fact about our present use of an expression. There need not be any past usage at all. Therefore, even if KW is right in claiming that there is no fact about our past intended meaning, it does not follow that there is no fact about our present intended meaning. Still, we might wonder, if there are no facts about our past meaning, how could there be any facts about our present meaning?

Before we let ourselves get distracted by that question, another question must be addressed: Can KW consistently maintain that there are no facts about our past meaning? I think the answer is "no."

Kripke notes that Wittgenstein does not distinguish between past and present intended meanings. He thinks his introduction of the past/present distinction is an improvement over Wittgenstein, whose own formulation Kripke believes is too confusing. In fact, Kripke says, if we do not distinguish between past and present intended meanings, the skeptical argument cannot be formulated at all. Any doubt about our present usage would have to be made by appeal to our present usage, and would thus be inconsistent. A person cannot coherently doubt what they mean by a term while they are using it. But, KW says, we can doubt our past use of a term without such difficulty: “if I use language at all, I cannot doubt coherently that ‘plus,’ as I now use it, denotes plus! Perhaps I cannot (at least at this stage) doubt this about my present usage. But I can doubt that my past usage of ‘plus’ denoted plus. The previous remarks – about a frenzy and LSD – should make this quite clear.”

Yet, a related difficulty does arise and it confounds KW’s argument. Consider how KW’s skeptic operates: A person is asked how they know they meant plus, and not quus, in the past. They say that they remember learning that ‘plus’ denotes a rule that is applied in the same way for all positive integers, so it could not have been quus. KW responds: How do you know that when you used “positive integers” in the past, you did not mean positive integers less than 57? Perhaps we answer that we remember learning that “positive integers” refers to an infinite set of numbers, but the skeptic continues: How do you know you used “infinite” to mean infinite? The skeptical challenge, then, is to ground our use of expressions to denote rules without appealing to more expressions denoting those same rules. To answer the skeptic, we must get outside of our language. We must show facts which connect our words to the rules they purport to express. KW says no such facts exist. That is the skeptical position.

My concern at present is not with the skeptical position, but with KW’s argument. Again, KW says no facts exist which determine what we meant by “plus” in the past. However, KW does not consistently maintain this position. Recall that KW appeals to ideas about insane frenzies and drug-induced hallucinations to cast doubt on the integrity of our pedagogical histories. KW does not ultimately want to suppose that there is anything wrong with our memories. If the skeptical position were based on appeals to psychological dysfunction, it could only be regarded as an epistemological form of skepticism: While there may have been facts about how we learned to use certain expressions, we cannot know them, because our memories are not reliable. Yet, KW does not draw an epistemological conclusion. KW explicitly denies that our inability to show facts about what we meant in the past are the result of any psychological or mental limitations: “nothing in my mental history or past behavior – not even what an omniscient God would know – could establish whether I meant plus or quus.” The appeal to frenzies and LSD is “a dramatic device” which is only meant to show that our past usage might not be the same as our present usage. It is not meant to show that we are psychologically limited in our access to the relevant facts.

This does not work. KW’s argument relies on there being an unobserved change in usage between our past and present utterances of “plus,” such that our present usage no longer conforms to the rule we had originally learned. Whether it was through drugs, insanity, or some less suspicious means, we no longer mean by “plus” what we once meant. This is a change in our mental — our intentional — history. Thus, KW is explicitly relying on facts about our past usage of the term “plus.” If there is some fact about my mental history, such that it marks a shift in my usage of the term “plus,” then there is some fact about what I meant by “plus” in the past. KW thus both appeals to and denies that there are facts about our past usage of expressions. As a result, KW’s argument is inconsistent and cannot sustain meaning skepticism.

I suppose any attempt to formulate meaning skepticism will run into such a problem. We cannot doubt that we mean anything by our present expressions, nor can we doubt that we mean one thing as oppose to another. Indeed, we cannot claim that meaning skepticism is true, because if it were, nobody could intend to use "meaning skepticism" to denote meaning skepticism. Meaning skepticism does not appear to be a coherent philosophical position. It is no wonder that KW's argument is invalid and rests on a faulty picture of 'grasping a rule.'

Nevertheless, KW has challenged us to identify what facts comprise our intending to follow one rule rather than another. While KW’s skeptical position does not appear to constitute a direct threat to notions of intended meaning, it does invite closer inspection of the phenomena of rule-following and intentionality.

Cinematic Greatness

2011-06-01T18:32:00.008+02:00

Russell Blackford's followed up his question about Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese with a more direct discussion of cinematic greatness and whether it is objective or subjective. His claim is that it is subjective, not objective. I have a problem with that. My response (awaiting moderation on Russell's blog) is more or less as follows:

There's a movie by Alejandro Jodorowsky called "El Topo." I don't much care for it, but I'm willing to say that it's a very good film--maybe not great, but very good. Yet, very few people have ever seen it, and I don't expect many would want to sit through it. I doubt many would like it. There's another Jodorowsky film that I absolutely love, and I think everybody should see, called "The Holy Mountain." This is a great film. One of the greatest. But I doubt most people would be able to sit through it. Few would like it.

If I reject that there's some objective sense of cinematic greatness, then how could I make sense of what I've written about Jodorowsky's films?

If I say that cinematic greatness is subjective, then how could I say a film I don't like, and which most people wouldn't like, is very good? Obviously I'm appealing to some standard which I adhere to, and yet which is not based on my tastes or anybody else's. So either I'm talking nonsense, or I'm appealing to an objective notion of greatness. If you say it's nonsense either way, then I think there's something wrong with your analysis. Because what I've said about Jodorowsky's films seems to make perfect sense, and I can even analyze it rationally.

I recognize artistic achievement in Jodorowsky's work. I recognize the vision, technique and effort that went into it. I recognize it's distinction as a work of art. Part of that distinction is that it is not easy to watch. It's not light entertainment. It's not conventional story-telling. It's not something most people want. But that's all intentional. Its success has nothing to do with how many people like it.

We can objectively define the success of a work of art in terms of intentions and results of the work. That's a plausible and objective way of approaching the topic. It doesn't mean people should like Jodorowsky. It doesn't even mean everybody should see it (though, as I said, I do think everybody should see "The Holy Mountain"). People interested in experimental cinematic technique and/or subversively religious symbolism should watch Jodorowsky. That's based on fact, it's the source of his greatness, and it doesn't mean anybody should actually like his work. Similarly, I think Allen's greater than Scorsese, but I wouldn't fault anybody for preferring Scorsese over Allen. Liking a director and recognizing their greatness are two different things.

What distinguishes artistic appreciation from, say, personal taste or moral judgments, is that it evaluates the work in terms of how well it brings about intended effects in its intended audience. With personal taste, we're just talking about how something affects us individually, and regardless of how it was intended to affect us. With moral judgments, we might be talking about how something affects our entire community, or the species, or all living beings, etc., and intended effects may or may not be relevant. Since art has intended effects for an intended audience, and we can speak objectively about these matters, we can evaluate the greatness of art in objective terms.

Allen or Scorsese?

2011-06-01T11:01:00.007+02:00

Russell Blackford asks, Which is the greater filmmaker: Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese? His aim is not to settle the matter once and for all, but to provoke a discussion of the concept of "greatness." I just posted a response which is still awaiting moderation, and I didn't save a copy, so I'll have to go over my main points from memory.

First, I think if you want to discuss the concept of "greatness," you shouldn't ask people to judge which of two filmmakers is greater. What it does is set up a context in which everybody knows how to use the words "great" and "greater," and in which nobody would normally fuss over the meaning of the word "great." What we can--and should--do when discussing the relative greatness of two filmmakers is discuss available criteria for greatness. We all know what "great" means, but we might not agree on what makes something (or someone) great. So, I laid out the following rough criteria for evaluating the greatness of a filmmaker:

1) How much work they have produced;
2) How influential that work has been;
3) How positively we can evaluate that influence;
4) How high their films' standards for artistic achievement are;
5) How well their films satisfy their own standards.

I don't have a set standard for measuring these quantities or a calculus for evaluating their relative weights. These are just the five most important things I think we should look at when talking about how great a filmmaker is. I don't expect them to be decisive in all cases.

With that in mind, I favor Woody Allen. I have great respect for a number of Martin Scorsese's films. In addition to getting outstanding performances from his actors (especially Robert De Niro), I think he has an exceptional sense of style. I'd even say he's a style hound, and not necessarily in a good way. He's tried out a variety of other people's styles but hasn't established one of his own. He hasn't created a unique cinematic voice. Woody Allen has.

Woody Allen's well past his prime. He's made a lot of bad movies since the 90s. But if you look at his films from 1966 to 1999, the run is phenomenal. And it's not all dominated by his patented neurotic, middle-aged Jewish male character. Unfortunately, though understandably, that character turns off a lot of people. But that character is not Allen's sole, or even most significant, contribution to cinema. His films are rather distinguished by (1) a signature breaking of the fourth wall and (2) an often darkly comic exploration of deep philosophical and psychological problems through everyday relationships and dialogue. I might add a third quality which is unique to a number of his films: a realistic depiction of the struggle between intellectual and emotional life through human relationships. This third aspect might better be thought of as a subset of (2), though.

I think anybody can understand and either agree or disagree with my views here without taking issue with the word "great." You might take issue with my criteria or their application, but there doesn't seem to be much point in playing like you don't know what the criteria is meant to accomplish. Which is not to say that people can't be confused about what this is all about. People might legitimately be confused about what the word "great" means. But then, people might be confused about what the word "tornado" means, too. That's not necessarily an interesting problem.

Cryptic Letter from Synthese Editors in Chief

2011-05-15T20:55:00.013+02:00

I find the letter from the EiC of Synthese rather cryptic and I don't think it should be satisfying to anyone who took the petition seriously. The petition is as follows:

"We, as members of the philosophical community, call upon the Editors-in-Chief of Synthese to:

1. Respond forthrightly to the allegations in the 'open letter' from Glenn Branch and James Fetzer, the Guest Editors of the special issue on "Evolution and Its Rivals" (their open letter is available here:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2011/04/synthese-editors-cave-in-to-pressure-from-the-intelligent-design-lobby.html#tp)

2. Apologize to the Guest Editors and the contributors for the unprofessional manner in which this issue, and the insertion of a "disclaimer," were handled.

3. Retract the "disclaimer" in a subsequent print edition of Synthese.

4. Disclose the nature of complaints and/or legal threats from Francis Beckwith, his supporters, and supporters of Intelligent Design that were received by the Editors-in-Chief after the on-line publication of "Evolution and Its Rivals" last year."

As to the first point, about the allegations made in Branch and Fetzer's letter, the EiC do come clean about some relevant aspects of the editorial process. They seem to acknowledge that the guest editors had good reason to think that no disclaimer would be included. Yet, they do not say why the guest editors or contributors were not informed about the disclaimer. They only say they were "unable to properly communicate" the final decision to the guest editors. Why "properly"? It doesn't seem that they communicated it at all, properly or improperly. And why not? Could it have been a legal issue? I find it strange.

Also about the first point, the letter from Branch and Fetzer also mentions pressure the EiC placed on Barbara Forrest to revise her paper after it had already been published online, but the EiC do not address this point in their response to the petition.

As for the second and third points, the EiC do not apologize or suggest that they are considering retracting the disclaimer.

Finally, they do not disclose the nature of the legal threats they have received, but they do confirm that they have received such threats. Most interestingly, they say that the "challenges" posed by these threats make it impossible for them to disclose the nature of the threats. And they make a point of saying that the threats do not come from Christian philosophers. They make this point twice, in fact. I don't see why it had to be made once. Perhaps they are telling us that Francis Beckwith did not threaten them with legal action. Does he count as a Christian philosopher? Maybe so, I don't know. But either way, somebody who works with him could have done it. Or maybe he wasn't involved in the threats. That was never much of an issue. Who cares if the threats are coming from philosophers? In fact, if the Discovery Institute or some such organization is behind this, then we wouldn't expect them to send philosophers to make legal threats and negotiate terms, would we?

I think we can draw some conclusions here: After the special edition of Synthese was published online, the EiC were threatened by legal action. These threats came from Christian ID supporters, probably executives or administrators of some kind. These legal threats were so imposing that the EiC (possibly under pressure from Springer) cut the guest editors out of the loop, published the disclaimer, gave Francis Beckwith unusual leeway in responding to Barbara Forrest, and are now under legal advisement not to discuss any of these facts openly, other than to say what is required to take full responsibility for their actions.

It is possible that they made some or all of these decisions before receiving any legal threats. They do not say one way or the other. But if they only received legal threats after any of these important decisions had been made, you would think they'd mention that fact.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of miscommunication and ignorance about the whole affair. Some PhD students and philosophy professors I talked to in Szczecin had gotten the wrong idea about what had happened and what the petition was about. There's also an attitude going around that the disclaimer was harmless and that "the Americans" are blowing it out of proportion. Also, I talked to Michael Devitt (CUNY) about it the other day. He didn't know about the petition until he got to Poland on Thursday. He said he doesn't follow blogs, and nobody had mentioned it to him before.

Devitt Comes To Szczecin

2011-05-15T12:41:00.015+02:00

This week I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Distinguished Professor Michael Devitt (CUNY). On Thursday he gave a talk at the University of Szczecin, and on Saturday there was a full-day workshop focusing on his current work in the philosophy of language. In between, on Friday night, he socialized with local philosophy students over beer and wine (and food). I was fortunately able to participate in all of these events.

Devitt and I are both naturalists and atheists. We are both sympathetic to ordinary language philosophy and Ryle, and we both have big problems with Stanley & Williamson's 2001 paper, "Knowing How." Unfortunately, however, I don't think Devitt is Rylean enough.

I see talk of minds and mental states just as talk of complex and indefinitely heterogeneous dispositions. Devitt sees it as talk about functional structures which supervene on neurological states. Devitt is strongly anti-behaviorist, favoring the Representational Theory of Mind (and with a sympathetic ear to the Language of Thought hypothesis), though he says he's amazed at how ingenious defenses of behaviorism can be. I'm sympathetic to behaviorism and amazed at how weak the arguments against it tend to be.

This difference might explain a disagreement we had during the workshop on Saturday, when I asked what support he had for his claim that any theory of linguistic communication must start with an analysis of the representational properties of linguistic terms. To me, that's just wrong. It's like saying any theory of team sports must start with an analysis of some particular properties of teams. Linguistic terms may have representational properties, but such properties are not required for them to be used in communication. Even when an entity has representational properties, those are not necessarily their only or most important features. At least, that's my view. So I asked Michael why he makes that first step, claiming representational properties are the most important and fundamental elements of a theory of linguistic communication. His response was a verbose variation on the incredulous stare. How could it be otherwise? he asked. He cannot imagine how else such a theory could begin. So I explained my behaviorist alternative. I pointed out that even in his own examples, what is first observed and analyzed is behavior, and that representational properties are only postulated if they help us explain the behavior. He seemed to simultaneously accept this point and reject it. Somehow. Maybe it's more accurate to say he dismissed it and moved on.

I raised some other points during the workshop, such as the fact that he does not properly motivate a theoretical distinction between what is said and what is meant. He argues heavily against the tendency to trust folk intuitions, saying that we must find independent, theoretical motivations for our distinctions. So while we both agree that there is a useful folk distinction between what is said and what is meant, I don't think it is theoretically interesting. Devitt disagrees, but his argument is too weak.

On Thursday and Friday, we discussed some issues concerning his recent paper, "Methodology and the Nature of Knowing How," which he presented on Thursday.

The first and biggest problem is that Devitt misinterprets Stanley & Williamson (S&W). This is partly explainable by the fact that S&W misrepresent Ryle. Devitt rightly interprets Ryle's knowing-how/knowing-that distinction more or less along the lines adopted by cognitive scientists, psychologists, and the like: Knowing-that is declarative knowledge while knowing-how is procedural knowledge. Devitt isn't quite so clear on what this distinction entails, but he suggests that knowing-that alone entails conscious and explicit representations. It is therefore dependent upon language use. Procedural knowledge is not. In fact, in Devitt's view (which I agree with), language use depends on non-propositional linguistic competence, which we may call a variety of knowledge-how. So knowing-that depends upon and cannot be reduced to knowing-how, just as Ryle says.

The problem is, S&W do not identify knowing-that as declarative knowledge. They call it "a relation between a thinker and a true proposition." They do not suppose it requires explicit, conscious representations or even linguistic articulability. Jason Stanley says (in correspondence) that it is just silly, even idiotic, to suppose that propositional knowledge must be articulable in a language. It's thus clear that Stanley's (and S&W's) distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that is not the distinction between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. But this undermines Devitt's entire line of argument. His criticism is that they challenge the empirically proven declarative/procedural distinction on purely linguistic grounds. They do no such thing.

I pointed this out to Devitt, and he seemed taken aback. He seemed to have no idea what sort of view of propositional knowledge they could have in mind. How could propositional knowledge be inexpressible, he asked? I pointed out that S&W make no metaphysical commitments, and that they say knowing-how can exist solely in virtue of having complex sets of dispositions. This didn't sit well. Devitt sees no reason to call procedural knowledge "propositional." Devitt would rather abandon talk of propositions altogether, in fact. We can talk about declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge, so far as those are useful for scientists. So he is willing to call declarative knowledge "propositional." Any other notion of "propositional knowledge" is more trouble than its worth. I have made a similar argument, in fact. In any case, while this might amount to a legitimate criticism of S&W, it is not the criticism Devitt makes in his paper.

Another issue I raised was with Devitt's discussion of a paper by Bengson, Moffett and Wright (BM&W) entitled "Folk Intellectualism," which tests Alva Noe's prediction that the folk will not attribute knowledge how to X to a person who has never been able to X. Noe is wrong, as it turns out. For example, imagine an accomplished skier and successful ski instructor who teaches people how to perform complex stunts, but who has never successfully executed any of them herself. The folk show a very strong tendency to attribute knowledge how to do these stunts, even though the instructor has never been able to do them.

Devitt thinks this research counts as a mark against Ryle. That is mistaken. BM&W's results contradict Noe, but they have no implications for Ryle. BM&W even acknowledge that Ryle's view of knowing-how is more complex than the one they are considering, which they prefer to call "Neo-Ryleanism."

BM&W make a mistake, though. They correctly suppose that knowing-how involves understanding X. Ryle makes the same observation: Understanding is part of knowing how, and this can be by virtue of any number of complex, indefinitely heterogeneous dispositions, and not simply the ability to X. However, BM&W wrongly conclude that they have motivated radical intellectualism, the view that knowing-how just is a case of knowing-that. They suggest that knowing-how is a combination of knowing-that-X and understanding X. Perhaps sometimes knowing-how involves both propositional knowledge and understanding. However, knowing how need not involve propositional knowledge at all, a point which BM&W have not refuted. So their intellectualist conclusion lacks motivation.

Getting back to Devitt, he makes one more mistake with this BM&W business. During his talk, he misrepresented BM&W's research, saying that the ski instructor was able to instruct people merely by giving verbal descriptions, and that the ski instructor could not ski at all. Yet, as I noted above, the instructor in their scenario is an accomplished skier and the nature of the instruction is not specified. In his paper he says that BM&W show that the folk attribute know-how to a person who can merely give a full description of a performance without being able to carry out the performance. This is not true. They do not say the instruction is purely via verbal descriptions. They do not draw the conclusion he says. They only conclude that a person who cannot do a complex stunt successfully, but who instructs a person to do that stunt successfully, can be said to know how to X.

When I pointed this out, Devitt asked, "What's the difference?" What's the difference between a person instructing by giving a full description and instructing in some other way? I think the answer is obvious. A computer can provide any finite description of a behavior, but we would not say the computer can thereby instruct. Instruction requires interaction, where the instructor observes and responds intelligently. The right sort of computer could be a ski instructor, of course, but not simply by giving descriptions. It has to interact intelligently. That's the Rylean point. Devitt didn't accept it, though, and frankly seemed a little unhappy about it. He rather abruptly changed the subject.

Celebrating Death

2011-05-03T22:05:00.010+02:00

So much talk about the morality of celebrating bin Laden's death. There's this idea going around that death is just not something that should ever be cause for celebration. That death is always and essentially bad. That killing is evil, even if it is sometimes a necessary evil.

I can't buy into it. First of all, killing never increases the amount of death in the universe. The only thing that increases the amount of death in the universe is procreation, and I don't think procreation is bad. (I am a proud father, as it happens.) So, even if death is bad, killing isn't necessarily bad. But is death necessarily bad?

Death can be terrifying to anticipate, and it can be devastating to families and communities. And, of course, death can be painful--even cruel. But it is not inherently any of these things. And, even when it carries these negative consequences, it may still outweigh them with positive ones. We might tell ourselves that it would be better if we didn't have to die, but I think we're just fooling ourselves. We don't know what it would mean if death didn't have to happen, if life just went on and on forever. It could very well be unbearable.

I can't rationally say that I want to live forever. I can't say I want to die, either, though I hope that one day, when I have grown much older and seen my family flourish, I will be ready for my end. Death is something I struggle to embrace, not something I spit at and pretend could be avoided.

So it is curious to me to see so many Americans (on Facebook, because that's my main connection to people outside of Poland) posting about how it is just so wrong to be happy about a person's death. They say that the military victory may be cause for celebration, but bin Laden's death is not. Many links are circulating, such as this from NPR and this from popular author and Buddhist, Susan Piver.

The NPR piece warns against confusing the desire for retributive justice with the desire to win the war against terror. Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard is quoted as saying, "If we have any feeling of victory or triumph in the case, it should be because we have succeeded in disabling him — not because he is dead." Why not? Is there no justification for openly celebrating retributive justice?

In her piece, Piver says there is "a real problem" if anyone experiences even a hint of happiness at bin Laden's death. Why? Well, she follows up the comment by saying it is delusional to believe that bin Laden's death can compensate for any of the suffering he caused while he was alive. True enough. It's no compensation. But whoever said it was? I doubt many, if any, people have been celebrating because they believe the terrorist balance sheet has finally been settled. Osama bin Laden's death is largely symbolic, and I see nothing immoral about celebrating it as such. I see nothing morally wrong with openly expressing positive feelings about his death.

Piver's concern is that we're losing sight of the us-ness. It's not us-vs.-them, she says. We're all us.

That's just spiritual nonsense to me. On the whole, I think the "don't celebrate death" thing is ultimately motivated by a great fear of death, by an inability to embrace it, and not by the appreciation of some great spiritual truth.

There are some legitimate concerns raised in the NPR piece--about putting bin Laden's death in perspective, about considering how America's reaction looks to other nations, especially those which might be more sympathetic to bin Laden. Those are important issues. I haven't seen the footage, but I would not be surprised if many Americans are all-too-typically letting their arrogance get the better of them. There may be legitimate concerns about the way people are celebrating bin Laden's death. But there's a big difference between saying we should celebrate death properly and saying we should not celebrate it at all. In any case, just how much respect do people need to show al-Qaeda?

Film Review: Thor (2011)

2011-05-02T23:18:00.021+02:00

Kenneth Branagh's Thor has something to say about science and religion, but that's not what I'm going to write about. I'm glad that the film is friendly to naturalism, explicitly forwarding the view that so-called "magic" is natural phenomena that we don't yet have the science to explain, but this philosophical issue is not what's motivating my review. I just enjoyed the movie and I want to review it on purely cinematic grounds.

First, I'm not a comic book aficionado, and I knew nothing about Marvel's Thor going into the film. My expectations were based only on the fact that this is a well-received film adaptation of a comic book superhero version of Thor, and that it is directed by Kenneth Branagh and features Sir Anthony Hopkins and Natalie Portman. That said . . .

Thor is gorgeously filmed and well-balanced between action, drama and comedy. It's not flawless, but it is exceptional in many respects--far better than most superhero movies. In fact, I'd say it's an epic fantasy film and not a superhero film at all, though it plays with some superhero tropes and it is well-suited to tie in to superhero films (as it will in the upcoming The Avengers, which I'm thrilled to say is co-scripted and directed by Joss Whedon, of the woefully ill-fated Firefly series and other, more popular things).

Perhaps I was due for a bout of escapism, but I was enthralled by Thor. I had one of those rare movie-watching experiences where I realized that the film was probably about halfway over, and I felt a little sad because I didn't want it to be, and I hoped that the second half would be as good as the first.

It was. I left the theater ready for more.

The acting and directing are excellent. Chris Hemsworth is thoroughly believable as Thor and I can't think of anybody who could have done a better job. Hiddleston and Hopkins are equally perfect as Thor's brother and father, respectively. The whole cast is terrific.

One flaw in the film is Jane (Natalie Portman): She's drawn too shallow. Portman is enjoyable enough, and she and Hemsworth have chemistry, but her character is just not very interesting. In fact, the female characters are mostly weak. Jane's colleague, Darcy (Kat Dennings), is a third wheel, just there for often-forced comic relief (which is unnecessary, since there's plenty of genuine comedy elsewhere in the film). Thor's mom (Rene Russo) should have had a bigger role, too, but at least she's got heft when she's on screen.

Another problem: The antagonist (it's not a great mystery who it is, but I won't say it--I didn't know anything going into the film, which is how I like it) is pretty absurd in his plan and strategy. It's hard to believe any of it worked. More, his motives and emotions are a little confusing, and it's hard to accept that he would do what he did. He must be seriously disturbed, and there are hints at why, but it's not developed. Actually, the entire history of the character is hard to believe, too, but I can't say why without spoiling it a bit. The antagonist is still very interesting and compelling, and acted well enough that I didn't mind the problems so much--though they were noticeable, and they lingered in my mind after I left the theater.

Final, minor qualm: The attempts at scientific legitimacy fail miserably. It's not even clear what Jane's area of scientific expertise is supposed to be, or what her very important research is really about. She is researching meteorological phenomena at the beginning, which is never explained. Then she recognizes worm holes (or thinks she does) . . . by visible patterns in the desert sand. Ridiculous.

All in all, the film captivated me despite its flaws. Result: an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Revelations in the Synthese Affair

2011-05-02T10:34:00.003+02:00

This should put to rest any doubts about whether or not the Editors-in-Chief of Synthese should be petitioned. Leiter's comments are right on the mark. I just wonder why it took so long for this evidence to be revealed.

Synthese Petition

2011-04-27T07:30:00.013+02:00

As Brian Leiter explains, there's now a petition being signed over the Synthese affair, which centers around a controversial disclaimer shrouding the print edition of the journal's recent special edition entitled "Evolution and Its Rivals."

There have been some interesting developments over the last week. Leiter posted the full response from the journal's Editors-in-Chief, which does not address the concerns about their behavior. Lots of good points are made in the comments section, especially this, by Ingo Brigandt. (There's also some rather absurd criticism of Leiter and defense of the EiC by one Darrell Rowbottom.) The guest editors formally responded to the EiC, expressing their dissatisfaction. Also, Leiter ran a poll. It looks like a strong majority agrees that foul play is afoot, while the community is split over whether or not to boycott.

The petition is a less drastic means of putting pressure on the EiC to come clean and make ammends. As of now, over 200 professionals (representing a good many schools, including a number of top philosophy departments) have signed. The demand is for more information, for an apology, and for a retraction of the disclaimer. If this doesn't work, support for the boycott may strengthen.

There's ample evidence of foul play here, and I'd sign the petition if I could. Unfortunately, I'm not qualified. I was once a grad student in Philosophy, but that was a long time ago, and I still don't have a graduate degree. I'm working my way into the Philosophy PhD program here in Szczecin, but I'm not there yet.

P.S. John Wilkins is keeping track of the situation (with links to various discussions) at Evolving Thoughts.

See update: Cryptic Letter from Synthese Editors in Chief

The Forrest Controversy

2011-04-18T20:53:00.011+02:00

A storm is churning over Barbara Forrest's paper, "The Non-Epistemology of Intelligent Design: It's Implications for Public Policy," which appears in a special edition of Synthese (a highly reputable philosophy of science journal) devoted to controversies surrounding evolutionary theory, called "Evolution and Its Rivals." As a result, Brian Leiter is organizing a boycott.

Leiter's problem is not with the article, but the way the editors-in-chief handled it. Most offensively, they hung a disclaimer over the entire issue, claiming (perhaps disingenuously) that it is not up to their professional standards. This, even though they guaranteed the guest editors that they would not do so. The disclaimer makes the guest editors and all of the contributors suspect. Even if they had singled out Forrest's contribution, it would have been an insult to her and the guest editors who approved her paper. (That is, assuming her paper is not a departure from the norm. I haven't read it, and don't have easy access to it, though I'd very much like to see for myself.)

Why'd they do it? Apparently it's because there's been a widespread, vitriolic reaction to Forrest's article in the ID community. (The article had been previously published online.) There's a strong effort to dismiss her work, and this disclaimer is only going to help. Have the editors-in-chief of Synthese compromised their principles and buckled under the weight of ID politics? Or is Forrest's paper unworthy of Synthese? Again, I'd like to see for myself. Either way, the journal's handling of the situation is highly suspect, and the boycott might not be a bad idea.

See follow-up: Cryptic Letter from Synthese Editors in Chief

Procedures and the A Priori

2011-04-16T09:03:00.005+02:00

I want to flesh out the idea, which I expressed yesterday, that a priori knowledge is knowledge of rules which exist solely by virtue of knowledge of them, and which therefore is not justifiable in principle. The idea is a little obscure, but I think I can make it plainer. First, we have to recognize the distinction between propositional knowledge (representational knowledge, often called "knowledge that") and non-propositional knowledge (competence, often called "knowledge how"). A priori knowledge is not a matter of representational verisimilitude, but a matter of competence.

Proceduralism is the view that mathematical truths express cognitive procedures. The equation "2+2=4" does not represent a fact which could be corroborated by empirical observation, but a procedure which exists solely by virtue of the minds which carry it out. In that sense, it is a rule which is known, but which exists solely by virtue of the fact that it is known--that there are minds which can carry out the procedure.

A difficulty arises when we consider that "2+2=4" is a mathematical expression: it represents a procedure, and so we seem to have knowledge that "2+2=4" is a rule. So even if we adopt a proceduralist position, we want to recognize that we have propositional knowledge of mathematical rules. Still, there is a difference between knowing the procedure and knowing that it is a procedure. We need mathematical formulae (or other linguistic expressions) to express our knowledge that something is a rule; but what that knowledge is about--what the expression represents--is a variety of knowledge which itself is non-representational.

We cannot believe that 2+2=4 in the sense that we can believe Obama is POTUS. Knowledge of the procedure which "2+2=4" represents is not belief, but competence. Yet, we can have beliefs about the representation. We can have beliefs about what procedure "2+2=4" represents, for example, or about whether or not "2+2=4" is a well-constructed formula. Those beliefs are contingent and they are empirically justifiable. Such knowledge about mathematical rules is not a priori. But mathematical knowledge itself is a priori, because it is knowledge which constitutes those very rules; it exists only as procedures (or, rather, as dispositions to carry out procedures) in minds. This is not just the case for mathematical procedures, but all instances of a priori knowledge.

Devitt and the A Priori

2011-04-15T15:19:00.009+02:00

I've just looked at Michael Devitt's paper, "Naturalism and the A Priori." He claims that epistemological naturalism cannot accommodate the a priori. According to epistemological naturalism, he says, all knowledge is justified by experience and nothing else. Since a priori knowledge is, by definition, knowledge which does not rely on empirical evidence for its justification (regardless of whether or not it is obtained by experience), then a priori knowledge is incompatible with epistemological naturalism. And since he is an epistemological naturalist, he claims there cannot be a priori knowledge.

I won't go through all of his arguments, which are largely critical: he is primarily concerned with criticizing various arguments for the a priori, though he does lay out two arguments against it: the first is that the notion lacks motivation; the second is that it is too obscure to be taken seriously. (This latter argument reminds of one of Mackie's argument against moral realism: that the notion of objective morality is just too bizarre to be lent any credence.)

My concern is that the way Devitt frames the debate seems questionable. His primary strategy is to focus on the issue of justification: we all know what it means to have empirical knowledge, because we know what it means to learn from experience. Experience justifies our beliefs. And, Devitt says, knowledge is justified true belief. So why claim that some justified true beliefs aren't justified by experience? What could they be justified by, if not experience?

When framed that way, his argument has a good deal of persuasive force, even if you don't agree with it. But why frame it this way? Why assume that all knowledge is justified true belief? If a priori knowledge is not the sort of knowledge that could be justified, even in principle, then Devitt's entire argumentative strategy is inappropriate. The question is, what sort of knowledge is it?

My proposal: A priori knowledge might be knowledge of a certain class of rules which can be defined as those rules whose existence depends only on their being known. The knowledge of such rules cannot be justified in principle, because the existence of what is known depends only on the fact that it is known. So, for example, "2+2=4" is knowable a priori, in the sense that it is a meaningful proposition which has meaning only in so far as it is known--which is to say that what is known is an aspect of the knowing, and not distinct from it.

This is surely an incomplete picture of a priori knowledge. But I find something compelling about it.

See follow-up: Procedures and the A Priori

Two Views of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction?

2011-03-28T22:12:00.005+02:00

I just reread this post of mine from June, 2008: The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and The Knowledge Argument. My approach to the distinction is quite different from the one I presented ten days ago, but perhaps these two views are complementary.

In the first post, I approach the distinction in epistemological terms. Analyticity and syntheticity are two different ways of testing the validity of the same propositions. They are different propositional attitudes--different knowledge relationships towards propositions. In my more recent post, I regard the distinction as a way of indicating different sorts of speech acts: one in which rules are stated and another in which predictions about the world are made.

On the face of it, these are distinct ways of looking at the distinction, though they don't seem so far apart from each other. I'll have to think more about it to see if one entails the other. For now, I have to say that both views make sense to me, and I think there is a connection.

Szabo on Semantics and Pragmatics, Part I

2011-03-27T08:51:00.022+02:00

For my own edification, I present the following review of a paper I'm reading called "The Distinction Between Semantics and Pragmatics" by Zoltan Gendler Szabo, which appears in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (2006). (All page references are to this text unless otherwise noted).

I. Introduction

Szabo defines pragmatics as "the study of contexts of utterance, or more precisely, a study of the way context can influence our understanding of linguistic utterances" (363). Semantics, in turn, is presented as "the study of linguistic meaning, or more precisely, the study of the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings" (363).

This might look simple enough, but I find it impenetrable. Presumably, what a linguistic expression means in some circumstance depends on context. Thus, following Szabo's characterization, pragmatics and semantics both study the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings. Similarly, if the relation between an expression and its meaning relies on context, then semantics must involve a study of contexts, and so semantics must also be a study of the way context can influence our understanding of linguistic utterances. So semantics includes pragmatics and pragmatics includes semantics. It does not seem like Szabo has identified two distinct areas of study.

Szabo presents the semantic/pragmatic distinction as a way of understanding different types of disagreement: semantic, substantive, and contextual. If two people disagree about the definitions of words, then they have a semantic disagreement. For example, two people might argue about whether or not the Evening Star is a star. This disagreement could simply be a disagreement about what the word "star" means. That would be a semantic disagreement, and not a substantive one. Szabo isn't so clear when it comes to contextual disagreements, however. He refers to a situation in which one person says X="The table looks good here" and another says Y="The table looks terrible here." In this case, the people could be referring to different places or different tables, they could be using different standards of evaluation, they could be talking about different points of view, and they could even be performing different sorts of speech acts: one could be asserting a belief while the other could be making a joke. In this case, Szabo says, the disagreement is not a disagreement about what the words mean. He says that the disagreement can persist even if both people agree on what the words they are using mean.

This isn't clear. I'm not sure what sort of disagreement Szabo is trying to characterize. If I say X in earnest and you respond with Y in jest, we do not have a disagreement. I might think we do, but I would be mistaken. If we are talking about different tables or places, again, we do not have a disagreement, even though we might confusedly think we did. If we are talking about different points of view, we do not have a disagreement, either. The only disagreement could be if we are arguing over different standards for evaluating the appearance of the table. I suppose we might regard such a disagreement as contextual, but that seems like a strange way of putting it. Whatever we call it, it still seems substantive. I wouldn't say it's factual, but who says all substantive disagreements are factual? While there is no authoritative source for deciding on the correct standard of measurement here, and so no fact of the matter to be settled, we are still disagreeing about something of substance: namely, whether or not we should apply one standard over another. That has consequences outside of our discourse. That sort of disagreement determines where the table ends up getting placed.

Szabo hasn't clearly defined what a contextual disagreement is or how it could be distinguished from a semantic or a substantive one. Yet, there is a line to be drawn, Szabo says, and he says it is the line between semantics and pragmatics. Unfortunately, I don't think he's clearly argued for any sort of line at all.

At this point, Szabo has so far only introduced the problem, so we must read on to see how well he resolves this apparently confused situation. His next step is to discuss problems with some of the ways other people have tried to draw the line between semantics and pragmatics. He discusses three, which he calls the semiotic conception, the indexical conception, and the cognitivist conception.

II. The Semiotic Conception

Szabo presents and then discards a classic work in semiotics, Charles Morris' Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938). Morris distinguishes between syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. This tripartite distinction still exists today, though the sense of the distinction remains contentious. Morris characterizes it thus: Syntactics is the study of the relations between signs and signs; semantics is the study of the relations between signs and what they designate; pragmatics is the study of the relationship between signs and their interpreters. A sign is defined by a process of mediation, such that "something takes account of something else mediately, i.e. by means of a third something" (Morris 1938: 3-4; quoted on page 365). Szabo clarifies that semantics is not the study of all the relations between signs and disgnata, but only those relations that define the sign as such.

Szabo's criticism of Morris is wrong in many ways. First, he says Morris "assigns a rather narrow scope to semantics" (366), because according to Morris, semantics does not deal with the meanings of terms that do not designate anything (such as prepositions, quantifiers, logical connectives, and so on). This is not a persuasive objection. For one thing, there are ways of treating all of these signs as having designata. Logical connectives might designate mental operations, for example. Or we might say that they have no designata, and that they have meaning in so far as they are related to other words; thus, their meaning is a proper subject of syntactical analysis, and not semantics. Either way, Morris' view is not clearly problematic.

Szabo next claims that, on Morris' account, semantics does not account for the meaning of indexicals (like "this" and "that"), either, since we need to know context in order to determine what they designate. Here Szabo is inserting his own view of pragmatics, assuming that pragmatics alone is able to identify contextual relevance. But Morris does not distinguish pragmatics in that way. Rather, as Szabo apparently forgot, pragmatics is principally a study of the relationship between signs and their interpreters. Of course context is important for pragmatics, but it can also be relevant to semantics, too. So the fact that we need contextual information to identify the designatum of a sign does not mean it is no longer a semantic issue.

Szabo then says Morris includes too much in the scope of pragmatics: since much of human life is occupied with signs, Szabo says, pragmatics would amount to "a comprehensive theory of human interactions" (367). That's rather hyperbolic. Surely humans interact in many ways without signs. But, yes, much of our interaction does involve signs. How is that a problem for Morris' approach?

Next Szabo accuses Morris of confusing the role of signs in biology. According to Szabo, "Morris suggests that the concept of sign may prove as fundamental for the biological sciences as the concept of atom is for the physical ones" (367). This reminds me of a point Dawkins makes in The Selfish Gene: A biological description of human beings should include cultural artifacts, like clothes, glasses, and so on. Indeed, wouldn't it include language and signs in general? Why not suppose that a biological study of human beings would include an account of how people use/interpret signs? Morris is right. Yet, Szabo says the only sorts of signs that are of any interest to biologists are DNA, since they are information carriers. It looks like Szabo's completely missed the point. And, by the way, DNA aren't signs by Morris' definition. They don't operate as mediators in a semiotic process.

Szabo's final criticism is that Morris fails to recognize an asymmetry between semantics and pragmatics. Szabo says that, while semantics can operate "in relative ignorance" of pragmatics, pragmatics must take semantics into account. Morris (wrongly, according to Szabo) says that pragmatics abstracts from semantics just as semantics abstracts from pragmatics. But it's not so clear Morris is wrong. Szabo rather seems to be presenting a very misleading picture of what Morris actually says. Szabo says that, according to Morris, the study of pragmatics cannot even recognize that signs bear relations to particular designata, that we can only pursue pragmatics by ignoring the fact that signs bear relations to things. This cannot be what Morris means. There is a difference between abstracting from semantic relations and simply ignoring them. I don't think Morris is suggesting that pragmatics can be developed without any knowledge of semantics. I think Szabo might also be mistaken in supposing that semantics (as defined by Morris) can operate in relative ignorance of pragmatics. If semantics is the study of relations between signs and designata, and these relations are defined via an irreducibly triadic relationship between signs, persons, and designata, then there is no way you could have a robust semantics that remained ignorant of pragmatics, just as you cannot have a pragmatics that remained ignorant of semantics.

In sum, Szabo's rejection of Morris' approach has no discernible basis, other than confusion.

III. The Indexical Conception

Szabo now turns to Richard Montague, who proposes that pragmatics should be firmly rooted in the notions of truth and satisfaction. On this view, the difference between semantics and pragmatics is that the former treats truth-function without worrying about context, while the latter treats truth-function "relative to an interpretation and also to a context of use" (368). What this means, says Szabo, is that the need for pragmatics is nothing more or less than the need to account for indexicals. It seems, however, that this idea is more clearly present in Bar-Hillel, and not so explicit in the quotations Szabo provides from Montague. I'm not familiar with Montague, however, so I cannot make a forceful objection. Whether it is really Bar-Hillel or Montague who advocates it, the view on the table is that pragmatics comes into play only when we need contextual information to assign designata to indexical signs.

Szabo identifies some problems with this approach. The first is that it is unwieldy. It is too hard (perhaps impossible) to systematically treat all of the ways truth-functionality depends on context. The second problem is that Montague does not account for implicatures--that is, situations in which the literal meaning of an utterance is not what the speaker means to say. For example, an utterance of "The ham sandwich is getting restless" may, in ordinary situations, be used to refer to a person, and not a sandwich--for example, if it is used to inform a cook that a customer is losing patience. Yet, we run into trouble if we start treating ordinary descriptions as if they were indexicals. So the indexical conception of context-dependence seems incomplete.

On the face of it, I agree with Szabo's criticism of the indexical conception of pragmatics. I haven't read the rest of the paper yet, but I hope to read it and have the rest of my review up soon.

The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

2011-03-18T15:06:00.005+01:00

I've been discussing moral noncognitivism lately, and the topic turned to the question of whether or not mathematical truths are analytic. Analytic truth is truth by definition (or truth by virtue of meaning), whereas synthetic truth is truth in relation to what is the case. There's a lot of controversial history in philosophy over how to construe this distinciton, and whether or not we should even take the distinction seriously. Some say it is not a principled distinction at all. Much of the disagreement stems from different attitudes towards the very notions of meaning and truth.

I prefer a pragmatic view of the distinction, since I regard meaning and truth as matters of how sentences are used, and not as properties of sentences themselves. Thus, sentences are neither analytic nor synthetic, but they can be used to make analytic or synthetic assertions. One consequence of this view is that all sentences can be used to make both analytic and synthetic assertions.

The distinction is drawn thus: An assertion is analytic if it is properly taken as a definition or rule. An assertion is synthetic if it is taken as a statement about a possible state of affairs.

For example, take this common example of analytic truth: "All bachelors are unmarried." Since the term "bachelor" means "unmarried man," the definitions of the terms indicate that this sentence is analytic. We naturally suppose that the sentence itself is true by definition. Yet, the sentence doesn't say anything. Only people say things, and a person could use this sentence in both analytic and synthetic ways. If somebody is using it to state the rule that equates bachelorhood with being unmarried, then they are making an analytic assertion. If they are using the sentence to say something about what may or may not be the case, however, then they are making a synthetic assertion. For example, somebody could use it to assert that every living bachelor is unmarried. That is a statement about what is the case. If we then investigated whether or not every living bachelor was unmarried, we would be able to confirm or deny the truth of the claim.

Of course, since we regard it as a rule, we expect that we must find that every living bachelor is unmarried. How could we possibly find one that was unmarried? Yes, if we regard the sentence as a rule, then of course it is a rule. My point is that we don't have to regard it that way. The sentence itself does not force this reading. It's only a convention which defines the sentence as a rule. If we have a hard time understanding this, it's only because we are so accustomed to this convention.

I think anybody who takes the analytic/synthetic distinction seriously will agree that analytic truths are rules. What is true by definition is true as a rule. It should be agreed, then, that analytic statements are assertions of rules. They can be corroborated by appeal to some rule-defining authority, but not by appeal to what is the case--unless we have disagreement about what is an appropriate rule-defining authority. My view is unique only in claiming that what defines a rule as such is not a sentence, but a convention, and that sentences can be used in both conventional and unconventional ways. I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take in the philosophy of language.

It might be harder for some to accept in the philosophy of mathematics, but I think the same goes for mathematical truths, like "2 + 2 = 4." We can take such equations as analytic truths, in so far as we regard them as rules. But we don't have to regard them that way. We can also use "2+2=4" to express a synthetic truth: namely, that if you add two to two you will get four. This statement is about what will happen, and not about what is or is not a rule.

There is nothing about sentences or equations themselves which makes them rules. We only think of them as rules because we use them to state rules.

Richard Carrier on Moral Realism

2011-03-17T22:00:00.030+01:00

As I've noted before, Richard Carrier has a problem with definitions. His recent argument for moral realism has several awkward moments, like when he says being a moral realist means "being able to ontologically ground the existence of moral facts"--as if the mere presence of moral realists proved that moral realism was true! But it's his ludicrous discussion of "ought" which prompted me to blog.

He approaches the definition as a rational choice theorist might: "ought" means whatever we would do if we reasoned logically and knew all of the relevant facts. But he makes no mention of goals, as if any logical and knowledgeable person would do the same as any other in any given circumstance. Furthermore, we generally make "ought" statements without supposing knowledge of all of the relevant facts. "Oughts" might normally imply a "given what we know" qualification, but not a "given what we would know if we knew everything we would need to know to make a fully informed decision."

Carrier then makes the absurd statement that moral oughts are just like ordinary oughts, differing only in that they supersede all the others. How is that supposed to work? If what one ought to do is whatever a logical and all-knowing person would do, then what sort of imperative could supersede that? Moral oughts are apparently what we would do if we had more than all of the relevant facts!

We might try to be charitable, and suppose that Carrier was just stumbling on his way towards his main point, which is that moral oughts define "supreme values." But the problem remains. How are these to be distinguished from other values? I guess whatever are your most superlative values are your moral values. But how does this play out? If I'm wondering whether or not I should buy rolls when I go to the store, how do I decide if this is a moral imperative? Do I wonder if buying rolls is what I should do above all else? Do I evaluate the imperative in relation to all of my other obligations? Do I see that buying rolls is not the most important choice in my life, and thus see that it is not a moral ought? And what if the choice is whether or not I should give to a charity? If I don't think of giving to a charity as being something I should do above all else, then should I conclude that my giving money to a charity has no moral dimension?

Carrier's definition of "moral ought" doesn't work for me. Moral oughts are unique, but not in the way Carrier suggests. They are unique in the sense of the obligation, and not merely in its relative strength.

In any case, one person's moral values are not necessarily shared by anyone else. Surely people can disagree about moral values. But if moral realism is correct, then such disagreements are disagreements about matters of fact. Yet, the disagreeing parties don't necessarily disagree about the facts of the matter. They might just have different values (or differently weighted values). Carrier has no way around this. He tries to ground moral facts in social welfare, but his attempt is hyperbolic and insufficient. He says, "the Golden Rule, like fire and language and tools, was universally invented by all cultures because adhering to it is the only way to maintain social and psychological homeostasis" (emphasis added). Again in the spirit of charity, I'll suppose that Carrier really meant to say something like this: the golden rule can be interpreted as a variation on the tit-for-tat strategy for cooperation, and there is evidence that tit-for-tat is a relatively stable social strategy which appears in many forms (or, perhaps, under various permutations) across most, if not all, known civilizations. But what's the point? That our moral values should be means of maintaining a stable and harmonious society? That we should value the greater good over our personal interests? If that's the case, then Carrier is defining a moral imperative into his definition of moral imperatives. That's not an ontological ground for moral facts. It's a moral one.

Perhaps Carrier wants to say that we do define moral oughts in terms of the greater good, and not in terms of our personal interests. So then moral facts are defined as facts about what is best for society as a whole. We could debate that. But even if we allowed it, it doesn't give Carrier what he wants. To ontologically ground such facts, you would need some metric for measuring the prosperity of society at large, and you would need some way of showing that your metric was the right one. Carrier hasn't made one step in that problematic direction.

Carrier isn't close to being able to ontologically ground the existence of moral facts. I guess he's not a moral realist after all.

Sketches of a Non-Cognitivist Account of Morality

2011-03-01T21:57:00.006+01:00

I recently discussed my reasons for thinking we should look for a non-cognitivist account of morality. Now I want to take some positive steps outlining what I think such an account might look like. I'm still working through all this, so I expect to stumble a bit here and there.

First, there might be a misconception that moral non-cognitivists don't believe in morality, or don't believe that moral statements have the sort of reason-giving power that people normally think. The concern is that non-cognitivism doesn't account for morality as it is commonly understood, and that it tries to undermine the common notion of morality. On the contrary, non-cognitivism (in my view) should fully account for everything philosophically and psychologically interesting about morality. Morality is taken as a given, as a process which we all observe and participate in, and which stands in need of psychological exploration and philosophical elucidation.

Another common concern is that non-cognitivism reduces moral statements to statements of personal taste. We can easily see the difference between statements like "The Beatles are great!" and "Abortion is immoral." When we make moral judgments or commandments, we are making statements with a special sort of force. We are putting pressure on other people to do (or not do) something.

We should not underestimate the importance of statements of personal taste, nor should we oversimplify the non-cognitivist's position on this matter. Statements like "The Beatles are great!" do have some reason-giving power. Expressions of taste can direct other people's actions. They are significant and they can motivate people, cause conflicts, and even lead to a strong sense of camaraderie.

Yet, statements of taste don't quite seem morally binding. At least, if they are, it is in a very weak sense. It's common, I think, to feel some small sense of moral indignation when our favorite musical groups, sports clubs, artists, or what have you are disrespected or unfavorably treated by friends, neighbors, in the press, and so on. We think that they deserve better, and we might be sad or frustrated that the world doesn't share our views. There are plenty of degrees of difference here--how we feel about music is probably much stronger than how we feel about flavors of ice cream--but there is presumably a spectrum, and characteristically moral statements might be at one end of it. I'm not sure that the difference between "The Beatles are great!" and "Abortion is immoral!" is so fundamental. The difference may be one of degree, though the difference is significant enough to warrant an explanation.

Our moral sense is intrinsically connected to our sense of personhood. When we make moral judgments, we are making judgments about what it means to be a person. For example, when we are morally outraged, we might say somebody is not a person, but a monster. Or we might ask, "What kind of person would do that?" Moral corruption is corruption of personhood. Exhibiting moral excellence is being a good person.

We also seem to define ourselves--who we are, the kind of person we are--by our tastes. So, again, questions of personhood can involve questions of taste as well as questions of moral integrity. These questions might not be so dissimilar.

Personhood is not a biological concept, but a normative one, though I expect there are biological constraints on what we could rationally consider a living person. I suspect that we have physiological mechanisms which motivate our interest in converging on a shared sense of personhood, too. We have a biological interest in harmonious normativity. We thus produce morality, which is a process of constructing and enforcing norms. We thereby seek out and foster dignity, which is the feeling of being a good person.

We don't respond well to seemingly arbitrary moral dictums, nor are we always inclined to listen to people who express moral disagreement with us. When we confront each other with contrary moral views, we either attempt to negotiate a shared understanding of what it means to be a person or we reach an impasse. In such cases, we might appeal to some particular moral system or principle which we believe serves as a measure of dignified action. Not just anything can count as a standard in that regard, but it is not the case that some measures are the right ones and some are the wrong ones. There is no standard by which we could conceivably measure our standards of personhood. (And if we did devise such a meta-standard, we would still lack a standard by which we could judge that one.)

We can make factual statements about norms, of course. I can say, "It is wrong to X," and (thanks to contextual implication) just mean that X is not permitted by some agreed upon ethical system. In this case, my moral judgment (if I am making one at all) is not specifically about X, but about following a particular ethical system. So, it is a fact that X is wrong according to some system, but it is not a fact that it is morally right or wrong to follow that system.

Against non-cognitivism, Russell Blackford says that, in some cases at least, people who say "X is morally wrong" mean that X is objectively forbidden, and he says that such statements are simply false. I think "X is objectively forbidden" is incoherent, unless it means that X is forbidden by some objectively known set of principles. In that case, "objective" just means, "capable of being recognized by any properly situated observer." Any properly situated observer can recognize the principles laid out in, say, the American Declaration of Independence, for example. So that could provide us with some kind of objective moral authority. Not an absolute one, of course, but the notion of an absolute moral authority seems incoherent.

People might appeal to some objectively recognizable moral authority to justify their moral judgments, but I do not think that the meaning of any moral judgment just is an appeal to some moral authority. If that were the case, then the judgment would not be that X was wrong per se, but that some particular authority should be followed. If my moral judgment is that X is wrong because it is wrong to go against Y, then my moral judgment is about Y, not X. And this is still a normative claim, not a factual one.

The premise here is that moral commandments and the like are of a logically different kind. They are not factual statements. They are more like promises, such as the promise we make when we say "I do" during a marriage ceremony. It has a great deal of significance and force--it is even contractually binding--but it is not a statement of fact. And what is a promise, but an act of setting some inter-personal condition on ourselves? Moral statements are like that, except instead of imposing inter-personal conditions on ourselves alone, we are imposing them on all persons as such.

There's a lot more to be said on this topic, but hopefully I've sketched out some interesting ideas. In sum, we can (and do) rely on facts in our assessments about what is or can be considered a person. Moral judgments can be based on factual knowledge. I do not claim that all talk of persons is normative or outside the scope of factual discourse. But the category of persons, as such, is normative. It does not reduce to biological or physiological categories. Furthermore, when we make moral judgments, commandments, or statements in general, we are constructing a notion of personhood which extends to all conceivable persons (though it may entail epistemic or other constraints; for example, I might think X-ing is immoral, but I might not say you were immoral for X-ing if you lacked the required knowledge base to recognize the salient features that made your behavior immoral.). We are not appealing to biological or physiological facts, even if what we are doing is informed by such facts. We are forging a sense of personhood, imposing it on others as well as on ourselves. That is the sense of moral prescriptions.

Public Displays of Atheism

2011-02-27T11:57:00.013+01:00

I've been discussing public displays of atheism with Jean Kazez, and it's about time I've made my case in a bit more detail. Jean says some prominent atheists are presenting views that aren't appropriate for general consumption. Jean mentions two specific views: first, that atheism is incompatible with objective morality; second, that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. She says she's more confident about the first point, and that there is room for "reasonable" disagreement about the second one. I guess this means it would be unreasonable to even suggest that atheists should reject objective morality in public. That means I and a number of other atheists, including Russell Blackford, are unreasonable.

There is a whole lot of history here--not so much between me and Jean, but between her and several bloggers far more prominent than myself. I'm talking about Russell, Ophelia Benson, and Jerry Coyne, among others. There are difficult questions about who has been unfair or how we should best interpret some particular comment or other, and I'm in no position to answer them. I'm not involved in a significant sense, and that means maybe I should never have opened my mouth to begin with. But, for better or for worse, I've expressed some concerns over at Jean's blog, and she's been very willing to engage me. Now I'll do my best to continue the discussion and address the substantive issues without paying attention to any of the animosity or unfair play that's been going around.

As I said to Jean recently, I think the underlying concern is that she has a too-restrictive view of what is an acceptable public discussion of atheism. The problem isn't that she wants to silence atheists outright, or that she thinks atheism is publicly unacceptable. On the contrary, she's an atheist and she looks highly upon many strong public expressions of atheism, including some work by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, among others. So she's not against atheism in public. She's just against atheists presenting some of the views which atheists are known to promote.

In her last comment to me, Jean says that she doesn't "owe" Jerry Coyne a new argument to support her position. That's fine. I'm in no position to say she owes anybody anything. But then she says, "Coyne never looks at the argument. He just makes fun of the conclusion." I don't think that's fair. Coyne wasn't just making fun of Jean's conclusion. He was making fun of her argument. He certainly wasn't nice about it, I admit, but I don't think he was just missing the point. More importantly, I don't think Jean has adequately addressed Coyne's underlying concern. And I happen to share that concern. So, even if Jean doesn't owe anyone a response, I think she should reconsider her argument.

Maybe Jean's right, and some common atheist positions are better left out of, say, USA Today. As true as that might be, it is a highly controversial claim and it is likely to offend a lot of atheists. It therefore stands in need of a strong argument. Jean's argument is very weak. On top of that, it is offensive. She's making an offensive argument for an offensive position, and it's getting her a lot of negative attention.

Atheists are one of the most maligned minorities in the world. We are verbally abused, misrepresented, disrespected, mistrusted, and otherwise alienated from the general public. Fortunately we have not been the target of violence the way other minority groups have been, so it is hard to complain too much. It could be much, much worse. But still, as Ophelia Benson has recently observed, the social pressure felt by atheists is significant.

Atheism--or, rather, public atheism--has a largely political dimension. It often entails political views about the role of religion in society. Public atheism is becoming more and more acceptable, and I'm optimistic that the situation will continue to improve. More and more efforts are being made at philosophical engagement, and in a wide variety of public venues. There's much room for improvement, of course. The effects are not always heartening, but at least efforts are being made. The biggest changes will come when public policies change, especially policies about education and the rights of religious institutions.

For atheists like me, there is one issue that matters most in all of this: the role of religious authority in society. I'm not saying atheists are concerned with this issue above all else. Not at all. They might be more concerned about global warming, say, or human rights violations in third-world countries. What I am saying is that, for many atheists, atheism is first and foremost about the rejection of religious authority. Public atheism is first and foremost about putting religious authority in its proper place. For us, to be a public atheist just is to deny that there is any objectively valid moral authority which religions could claim and to deny that religious authority is similar to, equal to, or in any methodological or philosophical sense compatible with scientific authority. If we cannot argue these points in public, then we cannot be public atheists in the way that is meaningful to us. If we followed Jean's advice, we would not be able to promote atheism the way we need to in order to address the relevant policy issues.

This doesn't mean Jean is wrong. It just means she's making a very strong claim which is understandably going to offend a lot of people.

I don't think Jean means to challenge our ability to make the best case for atheism. Rather, she just has different ideas about what public atheism should look like. I've noticed this before. For example, I was critical of Obama's use of religious talk in his Tuscon Memorial speech. I thought it was inappropriate. A US civil servant should not use her office to promote religion unless doing so serves a secular purpose. Jean defended Obama on the grounds that it was a time for the President to console the public as best he could, and that included religious language. I found the disagreement odd, because it just seems obvious to me that Obama was using his office to promote religion, and not for any secular purpose, and that this just isn't something he should do, even if the general public wants it. So Jean and I disagree on some issues about the role of religion in society, and I suspect this relates to her views about what is and is not an acceptable public display of atheism.

I don't claim to have gotten at anything profoundly significant about Jean's views on atheism or religion. I'm just observing that her views are her own, and that she likely does not realize how directly she is challenging some other people's views of what it means to be an atheist. I'm trying to be charitable and I'm taking her at her word that she does not think people should be appalled by her views. Because, I think if she understood how a lot of people felt about atheism, she would understand exactly why we are appalled.

Again, none of this means Jean is wrong. To see why she is wrong, we have to look at her argument. As I noted, one of Jean's concerns is that Coyne (and others) are taking offense at her conclusion without properly considering her argument. I don't think that's true. Her argument is, first, that candor is not always appropriate. That's fine. Sometimes we shouldn't be too open or honest. That's an acceptable premise. But then she goes on to argue that certain topics related to atheism are too complicated and sophisticated for the average person to grasp, and that, because they are too difficult to grasp, a public discussion of them will do more harm than good. She doesn't think any of the ideas are harmful as such. She doesn't think atheists are worse off for having these ideas. She just thinks they're likely to be misunderstood by the general population. People will think atheists are saying one thing, when we are really saying something else. In other words, either people are too stupid to understand these ideas, or atheists are too inept at presenting them. Either way, it's offensive.

Okay, even if her argument is offensive, that doesn't make it invalid or senseless. But it is offensive, and this is a point Jean doesn't seem willing to accept.

All that aside, it's a very weak argument. First, there's the fact that Jean's lines are arbitrarily drawn. USA Today is not a good place for a discussion of the science/religion issue, but The New Republic is okay? It's okay to write books about error theory for a general audience, but we can't have reviews of them in popular newspapers? Second, there's the fact that atheism itself is a subject worthy of deep philosophical exploration. Jean hasn't shown that atheism is any less philosophically complex than the issues she is worried about. In fact, as I noted above, some people think atheism entails these other complex issues. You can't understand atheism without understanding the issues about religious authority. Jean's argument is not just that these other issues are more complex, but that it will be harmful if they are misunderstood. So, it's okay if atheism is misunderstood. It's just a problem when those other issues are misunderstood. But this doesn't work, because the same harm is done in both cases.

Let's look at the example of error theory, which Jean feels most confident about. While error theorists are perfectly willing to take stands on matters of public policy, they claim that moral claims are not true. So, "It is morally wrong to torture babies" is not true, according to moral error theorists. Noncognitivists too say it is not true; they say it is not the sort of statement that could be true or false. Yet, Jean is not willing to come down against noncognitivism in public . . . yet. For anti-realists of all stripes, these issues do not in any way pose a problem for discussions of public policy. We can still be for or against things like abortion and gay marriage without contradicting our metaethical principles. Yet, Jean says, the public won't understand that. They'll think that anti-realists are really tolerant of people who like to torture babies. She says that, if a prominent atheist and error theorist like Russell Blackford were to get way famous and start presenting his views to the general public (which he already has, by the way, even if he's not way famous), then atheism will be tarnished. It would hurt atheism in general. The public will think that atheists have no moral compass.

News flash: The public already thinks atheists have no moral compass. People just don't understand these issues, but they think they do. That's the real problem: people are ignorant of their own ignorance. The public needs exposure to what atheists actually think--not in an inaccessible, academic way, but in a clear, practical and relevant way. Right now, they're mostly relying on misinformation when they criticize atheists. Jean says that, if we try to correct them, we're going to do more harm than good. But the harm she says we're going to do is just to reaffirm what they already think, which is that atheists approve of torturing babies.

She is less explicit in what harm might come from discussing the science/religion issue, but it is hard to see how it could be more harmful than or different from the harm already done by the public's misunderstanding of atheism.

Jean's argument ultimately rests on the claim that people cannot learn what many atheists want them to learn, and that, at best, our efforts at education will be fruitless. This is what Coyne seems to be bothered about. It's not just Jean's conclusion. It is her argument that is so upsetting. Atheists like me are less willing to settle for the status quo. We are far less satisfied with the public's current perceptions of atheism. Furthermore, we would rather give the public the benefit of the doubt. We are optimistic that the public can learn a whole lot more than Jean seems to think. Of course, atheists will continue to be misunderstood and misrepresented for a long time to come. But the discourse might move forward nonetheless. It certainly won't help if we stop trying.

P.S. I should mention that, regarding the point about science/religion incompatibility, Jean's view is that we should focus on limited incompatibilities, such as differing views about the age of the earth, and not on sweeping incompatibilities, such as the claim that religion and science are methodologically or fundamentally at odds. For atheists like me, this is akin to treating gunshot wounds with band-aids. Band-aids can do some good, but not nearly enough.

Why I'm a Moral Noncognitivist

2011-02-21T10:18:00.021+01:00

Slightly modified on 24 Feb 2011.

Moral noncognitivism is the view that moral statements (e.g., "X is morally wrong" and "Y is morally obligated to Z") have no truth conditions. They do not express propositions, and therefore cannot be said to express beliefs, where beliefs are defined as propositional attitudes. All this means is that moral statements do not denote facts about the world. Phrases like "morally wrong" and "morally obligated" do not cash out in factual terms. These phrases do not predict, explain, or otherwise refer to any properties, behaviors, or laws.

When we look at the grammar, moral statements don't seem different from other sorts of expressions. We can add "I believe that" or "It is true that" at the beginning of moral claims. This might seem to count as a mark against noncognitivism, but I don't think it does.

First, to clarify, the noncognitivist does not deny that such statements make sense. The point is only that they lack factual content. In the moral idiom, the phrase "it is true" functions differently than it does in other idioms. The challenge for noncognitivism is to account for the widespread belief that moral statements do express beliefs which could be true or false.

One strategy is to claim that there are moral beliefs, but that these are not propositional attitudes, and that moral statements can be true or false, just not in a factual sense. This is a way of respecting common sense without conceding any metaethical ground. The idea is that words like "true" and "belief" have different meanings when they are used in the moral idiom. The noncognitivist still has to account for this difference.

At this point, I want to shift gears and argue that such an account is worth looking for. To do this, I will explain why I reject cognitivism. (It's often easier to reject theories than it is to argue for them.) The basic premise of cognitivism is that there are facts about the world which make moral statements true or false. Moral realists, moral relativists, and error theorists all accept this premise.

Moral relativists believe that moral facts are subjective, and that moral statements are therefore true or false relative to particular individuals or cultures. When we say "X is wrong," we are saying it is wrong according to some set of values. This view seems to be supported by the fact that different people and cultures seem to value different things and that their moral discourse reflects these differences. The problem is that, when people make moral judgments, they are not deferring to some established set of standards or values. Instead, they are promoting a standard. The difference is between saying "X is wrong" and "X is wrong according to the principles of Y." The latter statement is a report about some set of principles, and not a moral judgment about X.

Furthermore, when people say "X is wrong," they are not saying it is wrong only for themselves, or only for people who share their values. They are rather saying that X is wrong for anybody in a given situation. Moral statements apply to any properly situated person regardless of what that person happens to want. If "X is wrong" just meant "X is not permitted by our shared values," one could object that our shared values are morally suspect. For the moral statement to have moral force, we would have to add, "and we are morally obligated to respect these shared values." This reading of moral statements is absurd, since "we are morally obligated to respect our values" would have to mean "our values do not permit us to disrespect our values." We might still wonder whether we should respect our own values. In any case, is such a statement really implied by every moral statement? I don't think this is an accurate description of moral statements. So much for moral relativism.

According to error theorists and moral realists, what makes moral statements true or false is the existence of some fact which objectively defines right and wrong. The difference between them is that moral realists believe that some moral statements are true and some are false, while error theorists believe that they are all false. The moral realist seems to have the upper hand here, since it is rather bold to claim that, while moral statements could in principle be true, they all just happen to be false. Couldn't some of them just happen to be true? How could we know?

That last question is worth repeating: How could we know whether or not a moral statement was factually true or false? If there is no way of knowing, then why should we think they could be?

This suggests a bigger problem with cognitivism: There does not appear to be any sense in saying that a moral statement is factually true or false. Clearly moral statements have meaning. Noncognitivists don't deny that. What we deny is that this meaning cashes out in factual terms. Since we have no grasp of what it means for a moral statement to be factually true or false, we cannot assume that the meaning of such statements entails factual truth or falsity. Yes, we all know what we mean when we say that "X is wrong" is true or false; yet, nobody has any idea what sort of fact this could indicate. The obvious approach, I think, is to suppose that we aren't talking about facts at all.

Like the moral relativist, I think that moral statements do relate to values and norms. However, unlike the moral relativist, I don't think moral statements can be judged by appealing to values and norms. Rather, I think they are constructive, creative acts which help produce norms. When we say they are true or false, we are promoting or voting for a norm. Votes make sense, but there is no sense in saying they are true or false.

Moral realists appeal to some natural (or supernatural) fact which is supposed to make moral statements right or wrong. They ask us to suppose that there is some natural (or supernatural) phenomenon rightly called "the good" which all moral statements are about. A moral statement is true or false depending on whether or not it properly denotes the good. But what makes the good good? Is it good because people value it? Or do people value it because it is good?

If it is good just because people value it, then we cannot tell people they should value it. So, if somebody disagreed with us about what was good, we would have no basis for saying they were morally wrong.

If people value it because it is good, however, then we have to wonder what makes it good. It must be good independently of any values. But this doesn't make sense. The term "good" is an evaluation--it is based on values. The idea of "good in itself" is incoherent. This goes for talk about God as well as talk about neurological states which could somehow ground our moral discourse. What makes a particular neurological state good? It cannot be good in itself.

Some error theorists recognize that the search for a ground of the good is hopeless in principle. They conclude that all moral statements are false. What they have not realized is that, if there is nothing in principle which could make moral statements factually true, then there is nothing which could make them false. They have no truth conditions.

The door to moral noncognitivism is wide open. Moral statements are meaningful, but not factual. They don't cash out in non-moral terms. They are normative, creative acts in which we produce standards of human dignity. There isn't a factually correct answer to the question of whether or not a person deserves their dignity, but we want dignity all the same.

Ryle on Medicine and Psychology

2011-02-19T22:56:00.005+01:00

Here's a nice quote which is relevant to some recent discussions on health and morality:

Much as 'Medicine' is the name of a somewhat arbitrary consortium of more or less loosely connected inquiries and techniques, a consortium which neither has, nor needs, a logically trim statement of programme, so 'psychology' can quite conveniently be used to denote a partly fortuitous federation of inquiries and techniques.

--Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 1949, p. 323

Ryle on Science and Descartes

2011-02-19T16:05:00.030+01:00

I once again find myself having to defend Ryle against confused interpretations of his work. In this instance, the false allegations are that Ryle hated science, that Ryle didn't understand science, and that Ryle denied that human behavior has internal causes. These claims were made during a discussion at PhilPapers by Jonathan C. W. Edwards (Jo, as he prefers to be called), who apparently is a retired university faculty member in the field of biomedical sciences, and who is now a graduate student in philosophy. Jo started the discussion to talk about Descartes' attitude towards science and physicalism. One of Jo's more bizarre claims is that Descartes' mind/body distinction is a scientific and metaphysical precursor to the contemporary boson-fermion distinction in particle physics. I challenged him directly on that point, but I won't go into the details here. I'm more interested in defending Ryle.

Jo is interested in Ryle primarily because of Ryle's well-known objection to what he calls "Descartes' Myth": the notion that human bodies are controlled by some kind of "ghost in the machine" (Ryle, The Concept Of Mind, 1949, Chapter 1). This "double life legend" has it that the lives of our bodies are paralleled or complemented by an inner life--the life of our minds--and that this inner life has unique causal properties all its own. The mind is not "in space" the way our bodies are in space. It does not move about according to the laws of motion. On the contrary, it acts according to some other laws or principles.

Ryle argues that this approach to understanding the mind and human behavior is a mistake. However, he does not thereby argue that minds actually do act according to the laws of physics or any other science. Rather, he says that minds aren't the sort of thing that can be said to act at all. Ryle replaces the double-life legend with a different view of the mind: the mind is not a special place or sort of thing with causal properties at all. Minds don't exist in that sense. Rather, the language we use to attribute and talk about minds has a different logic--it circulates as a different sort of currency. Minds are better thought of as complex sets of dispositions exhibited by complex organisms, says Ryle, and not as things or systems, or even processes, which act in the world.

Ryle is a physicalist. He does not suppose that human dispositions entail some non-physical components. Everything that happens is governed by the laws of physics, he says, and he accepts the possibility of discovering all of the physical causes of human behavior. He certainly wouldn't deny that brains (or any other internal organs) are of the utmost significance on that front. Yet, he argues that once we start talking about persons--once we adopt the mental idiom, attributing intelligence, decisions, judgments, and thoughts, for example--we are no longer in the sphere of physics, chemistry, or physiology.

Ryle makes the point repeatedly. For example, on page 78, he writes: "there is no contradiction in saying that one and the same process . . . is in accordance with two principles of completely different types and such that neither is 'reducible' to the other, though one of them presupposes the other." The logic of psychological explanations is not reducible to the logic of physical explanations, even though the subject matter--human behavior--is subject to both types of account, and even though a psychological account presupposes a physical one. No aspects of human behavior are outside the province of physics; yet, the logic of psychological explanations is not reducible to the logic of physics. The terms we employ in psychological accounts cannot simply be absorbed by physics. If we were to describe human behavior in the language of physics, we would not find any terms which would be equivalent to "mind" or "thought." We'd rather just have found a way around those concepts. So, for example, questions like "What are the physical, chemical, or physiological properties of a decision?" are nonsensical, the result of a category error, and are likely to mislead our attempts to understand human behavior.

Jo's initial objection to Ryle was this: Ryle says that Descartes claims that bodies and not minds exist "in space," whereas Descartes does not suppose that anything, not even bodies, exist "in space." The point is that Descartes denied that there was empty space which was just lying around waiting for stuff to move about in it. Yet, Descartes does have bodies "occupying space," and he differentiates minds and bodies on that basis. For Descartes, bodies are by definition extended, which means they occupy space; minds are not extended, but are "thinking things." The notion of spatial extension is fundamental to Descartes' mind/body distinction. So, while Jo might have a point that the phrase "in space" can potentially cause confusion in a discussion of Descartes' physics, this does not count as a substantive point against Ryle. Ryle is critiquing Descartes' mind/body distinction, and that critique does not depend on his using the phrase "in space" instead of "occupying space."

To defend Descartes against Ryle, we need to look closer at what Ryle says. Jo unfortunately hasn't come through on his end of the discussion. He instead seems bent on dismissing Ryle as an anti-scientific incompetent. Jo tried to use Ryle's non-reducibility argument (from page 78, mentioned above) as evidence that Ryle denies that science can account for human behavior. That is just absurd. Then, to support his claim that Ryle hated science, Jo relies heavily on a piece by Dennett from the 1970s in which Dennett states (without any argumentative or textual support) that Ryle had an anti-scientific bias. I don't see a good reason to give Dennett the benefit of the doubt here, since he is in direct conflict with what Ryle says on the subject. (We should not appeal to the fact that Dennett was one of Ryle's students. Even very intelligent students can misunderstand their teachers some of the time, and Dennett is on record as being confounded by Ryle's indirect teaching methods.) Furthermore, after I explained that Ryle's argument was about the difference between mental and physical idioms, and not about the causes of human behavior, Jo claimed I was making Ryle out to be more complex and sophisticated than he really is. Jo says that if I'm right, then Ryle does not clearly state the purpose of The Concept of Mind. Yet, I don't think Ryle could have been clearer. He explicitly and repeatedly states that he is talking about idioms, that he is concerned with the logic of the language we use to talk about human behavior.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so concerned when Ryle gets this kind of treatment from a grad student. The problem is that it also happens by professionals in published papers. There is still work to be done towards recovering Ryle's insights and arguments.

Morality and Health

2011-01-30T14:13:00.058+01:00

In his arguments for a science of morality, Sam Harris relies heavily on the following analogy: well-being is to morality what health is to medicine. His claim is not simply that morality is a natural phenomenon which can be studied as rigorously as any other. Rather, it is that moral prescriptions can be as scientifically grounded as medical prescriptions. That there is no basic difference between a doctor giving a patient medicine and a moral scientist prescribing right conduct.

Of course, when a doctor says, "take two and call me in the morning," she is, in a sense, prescribing right conduct. She is telling her patient what to do. More often than not, I think, the patient trusts her to give good medical advice. That is, the patient is listening to the doctor precisely because he wants to recover from some malady, and believes that the doctor knows how to help him get over it. The prescription would not be morally binding unless we were to suppose that people had a moral obligation to do what their doctor says. But that is not an attractive moral principle. Our doctors tell us what is best, and--even when we believe we have been given the best available medical advice--we are left to decide whether or not taking that advice is something we should do. Medical advice is not morally binding. Doctors don't prescribe right conduct in the moral sense of "right."

If the advice of moral scientists is just like the advice of medical doctors, then it is not morally binding. Indeed, the sort of advice Harris defines as "moral" is just advice about how to promote well-being, and that seems to be health, or a particular sort of health--perhaps mental or emotional health. But now we have a problem. Advice about well-being was supposed to tell us what was morally correct. But if the science of morality is just like medicine--if it is just the science of well-being--then this "moral" advice is not morally binding. Even if moral science tells us what is right and wrong, it is ultimately up to us to decide whether or not it is right or wrong to follow the advice of moral science. Moral science is no better than any branch of medical science when it comes to making moral prescriptions. Once you start discussing the morality of these prescriptions, you are no longer pursuing science.

There is a big difference between ordinary medical prescriptions and the sorts of moral prescriptions Harris is talking about. He is talking about prescriptions based on how our actions are likely to affect other people. Instead of telling us what we should do to promote our own health, Harris' moral science would use the same medical science to tell us what we should do to promote the health of other people. By shifting the focus from ourselves to other people, we find a lot more room for moral responsibility. However, while the moral scientist may appeal to our sense of social responsibility (or familial responsibility, or global responsibility, or what have you), the science does not provide or ground any such sense of responsibility. Science does not tell us what we should value.

We need something more than science to get us from medical science to moral judgment. This is Harris' most profound failing; but his entire discussion of health is confused. In his recent defense of his book, he ridicules the following three claims:

(1) "There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone else's."

(2) "Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science."

(3) "Even if we did agree to grant "health" primacy in any discussion of medicine, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure health scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of medicine."

Yet, (1) and (2) seem true to me. Of course, you could use science to make an argument that somebody should value health, but your scientific argument is not binding on all rational people--not even on all rational people who value science. The problem is, your scientific argument will only be relevant to people who share some other values--values which go beyond the basic value set of science itself. As for (3), it is false, but not for the reason Harris supposes. It is not difficult to define "health" with rigor. Medical science has a rigorous, working definition of "health." According to the NIH's online medical dictionary, health is:

the condition of an organism or one of its parts in which it performs its vital functions normally or properly: the state of being sound in body or mind; freedom from physical disease and pain.

This is a working definition only in the sense that we are still learning about some of the functions of our bodily organs, not in the sense that we might one day discover that "health" doesn't mean what we thought it meant.

Harris rejects (3) for a less compelling reason. He claims that we can study health scientifically even though we lack a rigorous definition of it. He denies that we have a rigorous definition of "health," and thus concludes that you don't need a rigorous definition to pursue something scientifically. Thus, he says, the fact that we lack a rigorous definition of "well-being" should not prevent us from studying it scientifically. But we do have a clear, rigorous, and uncontroversial medical definition of "health."

If "well-being" is just taken as a general term for mental or emotional health, then we already have ways of talking about it scientifically. We have clear enough definitions for mental and emotional health. If we didn't, the scientific discourse would not exist. If "well-being" is taken to mean something else, though--something other than health, or a known variety of health--then it isn't clear what that could be. It is incoherent to say that we can study "it" scientifically, if we don't at least have a working definition of what "it" is. Furthermore, if "well-being" is taken to refer to an indefinite, vague, and heterogeneous set of health-related characteristics (as it seems to be), then it would be wrong to suppose that any measurements of it would be rationally binding. There is room to disagree about whether or not we should call any particular measurement a measurement of well-being, and this is not a disagreement about facts. Of course, we can apply science in our consideration of any and all of those characteristics we regard as constituting well-being. We can, for limited purposes, define "well-being" to refer to specific characteristics with such-and-such relative weights, and then come to scientific conclusions about well-being under those well-defined constraints. But such an analysis of well-being would be based on the values we had assumed at the outset. It would not tell us what to value. And when different actions can be shown to promote different aspects of well-being, science cannot tell us which of those aspects we should value more than the others. Harris might accept that such is the case--that people who have different ways of regarding well-being will come to different, but equally rational, conclusions about how to promote it. What he doesn't accept, however, is this logical conclusion: that his view looks a whole lot like moral relativism.

Harris' argument for moral righteousness comes down to his claim that facts about general well-being are morally binding, that what is morally right is always and only what most promotes general well-being. This is the "ought" he says is beyond reproach. But it isn't beyond reproach. Despite the problems with defining "well-being" indicated in the previous paragraph, I'm not convinced that the worst possible scenario is one in which all sentient beings suffer for as much and as long as possible. I (and others from various cultural backgrounds I've asked) would rather see everybody suffer equally than see a universe where a planet of sadistic aliens caused the worst possible suffering for the rest of the sentient creatures in the universe, and relished it as one might a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast. Morality might best be thought of in terms of fairness or dignity, and not well-being--which is not to say that well-being is unimportant or irrelevant for a great many of our moral concerns. While many of our values certainly involve concerns about well-being to a large extent, they are not obviously all reducible to them. Furthermore, even those values which are reducible to concerns about well-being are not clearly reducible to a concern for universal well-being. And whether or not they should be is not a question of fact.

The best we can say is that the science of well-being (taken as the science of health itself, or specifically as mental or emotional health) can help us make informed decisions on a wide range of issues. However, it cannot prescribe right action in any morally binding sense. It cannot tell us which creatures we are morally obligated to care about. It cannot tell us what we should value without appealing to what we already value. And, again, while it may be obvious that we should value the promotion of general well-being, it is not obvious that this should be our primary--let alone our only--concern. All science can do is tell us what the likely consequences of our actions will be. That's good medicine, but it's not what Harris is selling.

A Science of Dignity

2011-01-23T15:15:00.008+01:00

In my previous post I said "x ought to y" just means "if F(x,y), then x will foster x's dignity." [On second thought, since the moral "ought" implies an obligation, I think "x ought to y" rather means "if not-F(x,y), then x will not foster x's dignity."] This means that "we ought not foster our own dignity" is a logical absurdity. This might seem intuitively obvious to many people, but it might not be that easy to understand. Why is it absurd to say that somebody shouldn't foster their own dignity? Here's an attempt to answer that question, and also to work out some related knots.

Dignity is what defines us as moral agents. The imperative "should" implies an appeal to one's sense of moral agency, and we cannot simultaneously appeal to and negate somebody's moral agency. So, when I say morality is the process of fostering dignity, I just mean it is the process of fostering moral agency. This leaves completely open the question of whether or not there are objective moral truths, or whether any particular actions are morally permissible or impermissible. Though it does suggest that there might be a set of objectively immoral actions: namely, acts of abjugating moral agency. Perhaps we can, with full objectivity, say that people should not abjugate their moral agency. However, doing so may sometimes be necessary to foster dignity. For example, I might sabotage my future ability to be a moral agent because it is the only way I can foster my moral agency today.

Are there scientifically discoverable means of fostering dignity? Are there scientific methods of being moral? I would say yes, in a sense, and no, in another sense. Yes, in the sense that we can scientifically discover methods for enhancing our moral drive. The drive to dignity is surely based on physiology, and this can be manipulated with science. So I don't see why science cannot help us foster dignity. The question is, while this would make us more moral in one sense, it wouldn't necessarily make us more moral in another sense. It wouldn't help us establish objective foundations for morality. It wouldn't even necessarily make us "good people" by any given standard.

Dignity can be fostered in a great many ways, possibly an indefinite number of ways, and I don't see how there could be objective truths about the relative values of different ways of fostering dignity. When we foster dignity, we are not thereby getting something right. We aren't discovering a fact. We're establishing and/or following social norms. We're (1) helping define what it means to be a good person and (2) evaluating ourselves with respect to the rules we have helped create. The process of fostering dignity includes a process of creating moral precepts, and these are not justifiable with science alone. We might be able to use science to enhance our moral impulses, and we can certainly use science to better understand how the world works and thus better understand what might or might not be valuable to us. However, we cannot use science to discover moral precepts which are "right" in any objective sense. Science can help us foster dignity, but it cannot help us find "the right moral precepts," as if there were any such thing.

Edited on January 23, 2011 21:45 GMT

Harris Replies to Blackford

2011-01-23T14:01:00.010+01:00

Sam Harris has responded to Russell Blackford's review--or, rather, to Jerry Coyne's summation of Russell's review--at Why Evolution Is True. I've joined the discussion with a number of elaborate comments. I'm reposting my most recent comment below (with slight modification), since I think it is of the most general interest, and because it develops some of my own ideas in interesting ways:

About defining “morality,” I think there are two assumptions in play here:

1) Evolution has favored ways of thinking which promote general well-being.

2) What people call “morality,” though different in many details, is just those ways of thinking which promote general well-being.

If we accepted these two premises, we could argue that what is moral is just what promotes general well-being. There is no sense in saying something could be moral without promoting general well-being, because the definition of “morality” doesn’t allow it.

I think (1) is possibly true, but it hasn't been established beyond a reasonable doubt. In contrast, (2) does not seem true at all. Russell’s criticism of Harris is worth repeating here (actually, I’ll rephrase it slightly, but the substance is the same): If “x ought to y” just means “If F(x,y), then general well-being will be promoted,” then the statement “we ought to promote general well-being” would be a tautology. It would just mean “by promoting general well-being, we promote general well-being.” This is not something we could logically refute. Yet, we can say “you ought to promote general well-being” without saying anything apparently tautological. We can, in fact, rationally wonder whether or not promoting general well-being is something we ought to do. This makes the proposed definition of “morality” very unattractive.

There are other reasons to suppose that our moral thinking is not just about promoting well-being. I tend to think of moral thinking as more about fostering a sense of one’s own dignity. Our moral impulse is our impulse to be dignified rational agents. So, “x ought to y” really means “If F(x,y), then x will foster x’s dignity.” The statement “x should foster x’s dignity” would be tautological, and this isn’t so hard to accept. For it would seem illogical to say to somebody that they should not foster their own dignity. So I would rather define “morality” as “the process of fostering dignity,” and not “ways of thinking which promote general well-being.”

Follow-up: A Science of Dignity

Russell Blackford on Sam Harris and Me

2011-01-23T13:26:00.009+01:00

I've been discussing Sam Harris a bit at Russell Blackford's blog, Metamagician and the Hellfire Club. Russell's published a review of Sam's new book, The Moral Landscape, and he makes some very strong criticisms, all of which I agree with. Russell has also quite surprisingly and kindly drawn attention to me and Specter of Reason, even though he has suggested that I'm a bit too hard on Sam. I am indeed much more critical of Sam's recent work on moral philosophy.

I cannot help but worry about popular attitudes towards atheism and philosophy, and I don't think New Atheism has always and only been of help. Don't get me wrong. The New Atheists have done a lot that is good. But they have also done some harm, and I'm worried about their overall direction. Sam's recent work (his public appearances as well as his new book) may be the worst so far. It strikes me as both arrogant and ignorant (a dangerous combination), and exploitative of the intellectually impoverished times. Philosophy and atheism deserve better than this.

I used to defend Sam Harris' approach to atheism, even though I never agreed with him on many of the finer points. Now I find it impossible to support him. His recent work is an insult to philosophy and I can't see it doing any good. It will hopefully inspire other, more sophisticated thinkers (like Russell) to become more vocal. It may even help them attract a wider audience. But that is no reason to praise Sam's recent work. I wouldn't celebrate a famine which devastated an impoverished community just because it inspired long-overdue aid.

I am not happy that Sam Harris represents popular atheism. Of course, I appreciate the need for many voices. I wouldn't try to stop him from speaking or publishing--not like I could, anyway. But that doesn't mean I should pretend that I like it. It doesn't mean I should support him.

As I recently commented on Russell's blog:

'I was once very happy to see people like Harris and Dawkins lead the atheist movement, even though I would have done things a bit differently than them. But I'm afraid they have failed to give popular atheism the philosophical integrity it needs and deserves. They've turned off many would-be allies, and they've made it pretty easy for many people to use "New Atheism" as a pejorative. Maybe the current situation is the best we could hope for at this historical and cultural juncture, so maybe I shouldn't be too hard on them. But I do wish atheism had a better public voice.

I think the hullabaloo over Harris' new book is a product of the intellectual poverty of our times. When Harris dismisses the majority of moral philosophy, he is preaching to a choir of ignorance. The public has no patience or appreciation for philosophical sophistication. Perhaps they shouldn't, but neither should they act as if they knew better. It's the arrogance coupled with ignorance that is so damaging. The poor public opinion about philosophy may even be affecting our institutions of higher learning. Philosophy departments (even some of the best) are being gutted. I'm deeply concerned about atheism and philosophy, and as much as I respect what Harris has done in the past, I'm worried about how he might be affecting the future of both.'

I'm not sure how much Russell would agree with my concerns here. He hasn't been so explicit about it, but he has made a concerted effort to praise Sam's work in developing the New Atheist movement, and he strongly encourages pretty much everyone to buy Sam's new book. Russell has already admitted to a possible bias, though. He has a vested interest in seeing the market for such books improve. I wouldn't chalk too much up to bias, though. I'm sure he really does think there is enough value in Harris' book to warrant such a strong recommendation. Still, I wonder (at the risk of inappropriate speculation) if the bias might be in play a little bit. In any case, his review has not sold me on the book, but maybe that's because I'm a bit more familiar with the philosophical issues than Harris' intended audience.

Merry Christmas, or, Ryle's Idiotic Idea

2010-12-24T12:29:00.056+01:00

I fondly remember last Christmas Eve, when Jason Stanley said Ryle's view of propositions was "idiotic." We were nearing the end of a brisk yet short-lived correspondence, the bulk of which spanned about 30 emails over the preceding 48 hours. I was home in bed, alone and barely mobile, recovering from a herniated disc in my lower back. My wife had taken the kids to her family's house, leaving me glued to my computer, surprised and inspired by Jason's interest in my ideas. My view was (and is) that Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (S&W) profoundly misinterpret Ryle in their oft-referenced 2001 paper, "Knowing How." I am not alone in thinking this. The same point is made in a number of published papers, though in a variety of different ways. Still, I couldn't convince Jason that S&W misinterpret Ryle, and he couldn't convince me that they don't.

At least we agreed on the distinction I had made between propositionalism and intellectualism.

Propositionalism is the view that all mental states (or, in a purely epistemological version, all varieties of knowledge) involve propositions. For example, if I know that snow is white, my knowledge involves the proposition that snow is white. If I think or believe that snow is white, I similarly have some attitude towards that proposition. Jason Stanley is a propositionalist, at least of the epistemological variety.

Intellectualism, as identified by Ryle in Chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind, is the view that all intelligent acts are consequences of intellectual acts; that behaviors which we characterize as intelligent are the result of antecedent acts of intellection; that to do something intelligently you must first think about what you are going to do. Jason Stanley is not an intellectualist.

Jason agreed with me that propositionalism does not entail intellectualism. Or, more accurately, what I believe is that only some varieties of propositionalism entail intellectualism, and that there could be varieties which do not. Jason said that Ryle's mistake was in thinking that propositionalism entailed intellectualism. I don't think that's accurate. Given the only view of propositions which Ryle found acceptable, propositionalism does entail intellectualism. Furthermore, I am not convinced that there is a coherent alternative to Ryle's view on the table.

Look at "Merry Christmas." When people say "Merry Christmas" to each other, are they stating a proposition? Most often, "Merry Christmas" is not a statement of fact. We might say it is short for "I wish you a Merry Christmas," which might look more like a fact. However, when I say "Merry Christmas" (in the right context), I am not reporting a sentiment I had previously made. I am rather just forming (or performing) the sentiment. My utterance does not correspond to some fact, and so could not be either true or false. It is not the case that all speech acts are propositional, in the sense that they all have contents which can be either true or false.

One variety of propositionalist--the intellectualist--might respond that the speech act does report a fact, that some inner thought process formulated the wish which was later expressed by the utterance. This will not do for Ryle, however, because the postulated inner formulation of the wish does not seem markedly different from the one we see and hear coming from a person's mouth. If some inner wish-making is required to make sense of the outward behavior, then why isn't some other inner wish-making required to formulate the inner wish, ad infinitum?

Another variety of propositionalist (Jason's variety) might agree that "Merry Christmas" does not report an inner wish, but simply performs the task of making a wish. This propositionalist will insist, however, that the making of the wish is itself a propositional act; that it entails or manifests a relation between a person and a proposition via some propositional state. Unfortunately, I don't see any good way of making sense of that. It is certainly untenable with Ryle's view of propositions, and it is not clear how an alternative view of propositions could work here.

Before I explain this, I have to come clean about an unfortunate error I made during my exchange with Jason Stanley. I suggested that Ryle's regress argument against intellectualism cannot be framed in terms of knowing-how and knowing-that. Jason wouldn't stand for that, and rightly so. Ryle's regress argument can be formulated in those terms, and Ryle does suggest such a formulation, but not in the way S&W claim.

S&W say Ryle adopts the following two premises:

S&W-P1: If one Fs, one employs knowledge-how to F.
S&W-P2: If one employs knowledge that p, one contemplates the proposition that p.

I don’t think Ryle adopts either of these premises. On the one hand, he defines knowing-how in terms of intelligent behavior; on the other hand, he does not claim that every employment of knowing-that entails an act of contemplation. Rather, examples of knowing-that just entail the acknowledgment or statement of a fact. So a more accurate representation of his regress argument might look like this:

P1: If one Fs intelligently, one employs knowledge how to F.
P2: If one employs knowledge-that p, one states or acknowledges the fact that p.

He then observes that, if knowing-how is reducible to knowing-that, then,

R: If one employs knowledge how to F, one employs knowledge that r is a rule for F-ing.

It follows that, if knowing-how is reducible to knowing-that, then one cannot act intelligently without stating or acknowledging a fact about a rule for that behavior. The problem is that facts can be stated or acknowledged correctly or incorrectly, appropriately or inappropriately. The fact must be intelligently acknowledged or stated, which increases the number of intelligent acts by one. This second intelligent act would also have to be guided by another one, ad infinitum.

The propositionalist might try to avoid the regress by claiming that some intelligent actions just are instances of stating or acknowledging a fact about a rule for that action. The propositionalist may thus reject the intellectualist's claim that the relevant employment of knowing-that is antecedent to the behavior in question. This is Greg Sax's approach in "Having Know-How" (forthcoming). Greg interprets Ryle's knowing-how/knowing-that distinction as a distinction between implicit and explicit propositional knowledge, so that the intelligent behavior itself is an implicit expression of propositional knowledge. Greg's conclusion is that Ryle's argument against intellectualism is consistent with S&W's propositionalism (though Greg does not frame it in these terms).

Greg's interpretation is not quite consistent with Ryle, however. Ryle acknowledges that the rules explicit in our exhibitions of knowing-that are implicit in our demonstrations of knowing-how, that when we act intelligently we apply criteria. However, this does not mean knowing-how is an implicit (or "practical," in S&W's terminology) form of propositional knowledge. At least, it is not clear how it could mean that. While rules might be implicit in our intelligent behavior, we can distinguish those rules from propositions which enjoin them.

Intelligent acts do not seem like implicit acknowledgments or statements of facts about rules for those acts. A musical improvisation, for example, does not seem to be a statement or acknowledgment of a fact about a rule (or rules) for itself. One's know-how, as demonstrated through a musical improvisation, does not seem to consist in knowledge that some particular rule is a rule for that performance--though an intelligent performance can be used as a rule for future performances. So I am not inclined to agree with this response to Ryle's regress argument.

A second strategy is to deny P2 and claim that employments of knowing-that do not always entail the statement or acknowledgment of a fact. I just don't know what could count as an expression of factual knowledge, other than the statement or acknowledgment of a fact. Ryle's characterization of knowing-that is intuitively appealing, and I am not aware of any compelling alternatives.

What is at stake here is just the notion of proposition. S&W are in the Fregean-Russellian tradition, which is marked with deep conceptual difficulties. (Here is a very good, recent paper by Stewart Candlish and Nic Damnjanovic on the topic.) Ryle contested this approach in 1931, arguing that "there are not substantial propositions," but only facts and symbols which are used to make statements of fact; and that the word "proposition" denotes the same as the words "sentence" and "statement," or "might be extended to cover all other symbols which do or might function as symbolic presentatives of facts." (See Ryle, "Are There Propositions?", in Collected Papers Volume 2: Collected Essays 1929-1968, p. 39) For Ryle, any exhibition of propositional knowledge entails some symbolic presentation of a fact. On this view, propositionalism does entail intellectualism. Perhaps some other view of propositions can save propositionalism from the intellectualist's fate, but I do not know how.

I don't think S&W fully appreciate Ryle's view of propositions and knowing-that, and this is part of the reason they misinterpret his argument against intellectualism. Ryle regards knowing-that in terms of abilities, specifically competences related to "the jobs of didactic discourse" (The Concept Of Mind, 1949, Chapter 9). He does not regard it in terms of a relation between a person and a Russellian or Fregean proposition. Ryle does not accept the Fregean-Russellian conception of propositions. Yet, in their paper, S&W put a traditional, Russellian view of propositions in Ryle's mouth, and say that Ryle does not regard knowing-that as an ability or anything similar. Thus, as I wrote to Jason last Christmas Eve, I think S&W are talking past Ryle. That's when Jason said he thinks Ryle "carved out an idiotic notion."

See also:

RIP Don Van Vliet, 1941 - 2010

2010-12-19T11:14:00.008+01:00

In honor of the esteemed artist, here are some aural and visual moments in the life of Don Van Vliet, who died on Friday.

"Bat Chain Puller," live on French TV in 1980:

Here's "Electricity" and "Sure 'nuff 'n Yes I Do," live in Cannes, 1968:

Now some album cuts. Here's "Moonlight On Vermont" and "Pachuco Cadaver", my two favorite songs from Trout Mask Replica (1969):

Here are a few songs from Capt. Beefheart's most underrated album, Bluejeans And Moonbeams (1974), which shows a completely different side of Beefheart. Some say he was selling out, but I think it's one of his best albums. First, here's "Observatory Crest":

Allmusic.com says that's one of the two good songs on the album, and says the rest is basically crap. They say the following two songs ("Pompadour Swamp" and "Captain's Holiday") are the worst to bear the Captain's name:

I think these are great recordings and the people who wrote and published that review are idiots. They also slight the band, saying that Beefheart is just playing with "anonymous session musicians." In point of fact, the Magic Band is well-represented on this album. Sure, there were some session musicians involved, too: a number of good ones, like Jimmy Caravan, Gene Pollo, and Bob West. (Here's some info: http://www.beefheart.com/datharp/albums/mbmembers/sidemen.htm.)

To wrap it up, here's a Van Vliet appearance on David Letterman in his post-Beefheart days, with some nice images of his paintings:

Also, if you haven't seen it yet, there's a fantastic BBC documentary from 1997 available on YouTube. Part 1 is here, but the highlight may be part 4.

Sam Harris' Attempt to Go From 'Is' to 'Ought'

2010-12-19T09:52:00.014+01:00

Conversational Atheist has posted Sam Harris' proposal for grounding moral dictums in the process of scientific discovery. Harris proposes nine "facts" which are supposed to demonstrate the scientific foundations of moral righteousness. I won't comment on all of them, but I have some things to say about a few of them. As I'll explain, I cannot accept at least four of the nine.

To start with, for the purposes of this post (and only this post), I'll tentatively accept Fact 1:

FACT #1: There are behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which potentially lead to the worst possible misery for everyone. There are also behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which do not, and which, in fact, lead to states of wellbeing for many sentient creatures, to the degree that wellbeing is possible in this universe.

While I'm not sure there is such a thing as "the worst possible misery for everyone," I don't think this notion is the most problematic feature of Harris' argument, so I won't object to it here. Thus, with the same qualifications, I'll tentatively accept Fact 2:

FACT #2: While it may often be difficult in practice, distinguishing between these two sets is possible in principle.

As I suggest in an earlier post, however, even if we play along with Harris here, we should not assume that most, or even many, actions fall into either set. There may not be any fact of the matter which puts any given action squarely in one set or the other.

Moving on, I do not accept Fact 3:

FACT #3: Our “values” are ways of thinking about this domain of possibilities. If we value liberty, privacy, benevolence, dignity, freedom of expression, honesty, good manners, the right to own property, etc.—we value these things only in so far as we judge them to be part of the second set of factors conducive to (someone’s) wellbeing.

I do not think values are best thought of as ways of thinking about the well-being of conscious creatures. Harris' focus on the well-being of conscious creatures is without foundation. It appears to rest solely on his belief that the most dire situation possible is the one in which every sentient creature in the universe suffers as much and for as long as possible. My previous post suggests that we can imagine a worse case. Harris is just wrong. A universe in which suffering is maximized is not the worst possible universe. Suffering is not the primary factor in our moral thinking.

I think the functionality of morality is more about fostering dignity; our concern with suffering is secondary. This may be obvious, when we realize that suffering is commonly justified if it fosters and does not pose a threat to dignity. (For more about dignity and morality, see my posts from this past June from the 22nd to the 24th.)

We might say that values are ways of thinking about dignity, but that is too broad. We can think about the evolutionary function of dignity, for example, and this way of thinking about dignity is not what we mean when we talk about values. Values are not just ways of thinking, though they may well entail ways of thinking about both dignity and the well-being of conscious creatures.

So what are values? Perhaps they are the ways in which our desires and needs are prioritized. This affects our ways of thinking about all sorts of things, and not just suffering.

Moving on, I cannot accept Harris' Fact 4:

FACT #4: Values, therefore, are (explicit or implicit) judgments about how the universe works and are themselves facts about our universe (i.e. states of the human brain). (Religious values, focusing on God’s will or the law of karma, are no exception: the reason to respect God’s will or the law of karma is to avoid the worst possible misery for many, most, or even all sentient beings).

I don't think values are judgments. We do make value judgments, of course. When we apply our values in particular cases, we are making value judgments, and these are about the universe. But values and value judgments are not simply brain states. Judgments are not brain states, and nor are dispositions. I'm not suggesting that values and value judgments have a non-physical or non-biological existence. I'm just saying that we might not want to think about them in terms of states, even if they do depend in some way on neurological states.

But, yes, values and value judgments are in some sense about the universe. And we may say they entail beliefs about the universe--at least, value judgments do, if not values themselves. This does not make our values (or our value judgments) factual--they are not necessarily propositions which could be true.

Harris' concern with this point--that values must be a sort of fact--seems silly and confused. What Harris wants to say is that there are facts about what people should and should not value. He says that people might disagree with him about morality (as I do). Some people might reject his thesis that values are about the well-being of conscious creatures (as I do), but he thinks we are justified in ignoring these people. His basis for ignoring the opposition is not principled, however. So (skipping ahead) I cannot accept his Fact 8, which states that, "if the term “ought” has any application at all, it is in urging us away from the worst possible misery for everyone."

As for Fact 5, it does not fit with my understanding of values:

FACT #5: It is possible to be confused or mistaken about how the universe works. It is, therefore, possible to have the wrong values (i.e. values which lead toward, rather than away from, the worst possible misery for everyone).

Values cannot be confused or mistaken. They might not be beneficial to us or any number of individuals or organizations, but there is no sense in which they could be wrong. That is, unless you were to stipulate a correct manner of organizing your needs and desires, but Harris has no basis for any such stipulation. He just says that we must place the well-being of conscious creatures at the top of the list--it must be our highest priority--and that anyone who disagrees with him is not worth taking seriously. That's not an argument. It's just a statement of non-tolerance.

I'm sure I could find more things to say about Harris' "facts," but I think I've made my case well enough.

The Worst-Case Scenario?

2010-12-18T12:51:00.011+01:00

Sam Harris says the worst imaginable universe is one in which all conscious beings suffer as much as they can and for as long as they can. This is not just categorically bad, but the categorically worst-case scenario. This is supposed to be intuitive. Yet, my intuition tells me we can imagine a worse situation.

Imagine planet X populated by as-yet-undiscovered aliens. Now imagine a universe in which all the animals on earth suffer for as long as possible and to the highest possible degree, and in which the aliens on planet X enjoy this suffering greatly. The suffering on earth gives the aliens more pleasure than anything else in their entire history. They celebrate it annually, laughing at and finding joy in documentary films, pictures, and reenactments which graphically depict the unspeakable horrors experienced on earth.

My feeling is that this scenario, in which the suffering of some produces great pleasure in others, is less appealing--less morally satisfying--than the scenario in which the inhabitants of planet X suffer as much as the inhabitants of earth. It doesn't seem better to have the inhabitants of planet X enjoy our suffering. I am not convinced that the minimization of overall suffering is the highest good, or that the maximization of overall suffering is the greatest evil.

Sam Harris . . . Again

2010-12-17T23:02:00.023+01:00

I just watched a few segments from the recent "The Great Debate" discussion panel on "Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong?" At the moment, I just have a little to say about Sam Harris' bit. I'm impressed by the lack of an informed and substantive argument in Harris' presentation. He is a very good speaker. He is natural and compelling. And I'm sure he's selling a lot of books. He just doesn't make a good argument.

He begins by presenting his view that values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures; that statements of value are just one variety of factual proposition. He believes that, when I say I like something, or prefer a certain course of action, or believe that such-and-such is good, I am expressing a belief about the well-being of conscious creatures, and that the veracity of such beliefs can be tested against reality using the tools of scientific discovery. He ends by challenging us to act; it is our moral responsibility to develop a science of morality, because we are in a position to do so.

Let's momentarily leave aside the fact that Harris makes no mention of what grounds our sense of moral responsibility. Even if a science of morality is possible, all he can say about moral responsibility is that the well-being of conscious creatures is in our hands. Whether or not we should be concerned about the well-being of all conscious beings is an issue Harris seems ill-equipped to address.

Harris makes some compelling points, but they do not add up to a coherent argument. I agree, for example, that when we make explicit value judgments, we often do have some thought for the well-being of conscious creatures, even if we cannot give an uncontentious definition for "well-being" (or "conscious," for that matter). It may even be that all value judgments entail beliefs about the well-being of conscious creatures. That is possible, but it does not make Harris' case. It does not mean that such values are facts in disguise. While value judgments may entail beliefs and while beliefs may be either true or false, it does not follow that the values in question just are those facts which determine the truth or falsity of the relevant beliefs. Harris has not posed a coherent challenge to the fact/value distinction.

Harris goes on to develop his position with the claim that all of our moral judgments--all of our decisions about how to act--are on a continuum between the Absolute Bad and the Absolute Good. Absolute Bad is that state of the universe when every conscious creature is suffering as much as possible. Any action which moves the universe closer to the Absolute Bad is bad, categorically bad, says Harris. Any action which moves the universe away from that state--and, perhaps even better, towards a state of maximum bliss--is categorically good.

There are a number of immediately obvious problems here. The most general one is this: It is hard to conceive of the sort of continuum Harris envisions. Perhaps we can imagine what he calls "the worst possible misery for everyone"--that's the Absolute Bad. At least, we may think we can imagine this situation, in which all conscious creatures suffer as much as they can and for as long as they can, though I see no reason to believe that there is one particular quantity we could call "maximal suffering", or another we could call "maximal happiness." I don't think we are imagining a real, distinct scenario when we play along with Harris. This is grounds for being suspicious of, if not outright rejecting, his thesis

Let's suppose that there is such a state as Absolute Bad. It would seem that this state could be realized in more than one possible universe. In some cases, we may be moving away from one Absolute Bad only to find ourselves moving that much closer towards another Absolute Bad. The fact that we can imagine, or indicate, a categorical bad does not imply that this is a singular state which we are always either moving towards or away from. It does not indicate a continuum.

Harris might say that there need not be only one Absolute Bad and one Absolute Good for his argument to work. So long as we are moving away from all the Absolute Bads, we are on the right track.

One problem with this view is purely practical. If evaluating the rightness or wrongness of an action relied on plotting the course of all conscious beings in the entire universe, then any science of morality would seem hopelessly befuddled by complexity and overdetermination. The sort of computational and observational power required is so unfathomable, it is plausibly impossible.

I don't think Harris is banking on the success of such a venture. His point isn't that we can imagine a science that accounts for the well-being of all conscious beings in all possible universes. Rather, he paints this large and implausible picture only to urge us to accept the thesis that our values really are facts related to the suffering of conscious creatures. The question Harris suggests is, how could the scenario of extreme suffering be so obviously and categorically bad, if values are not reducible to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures--that is, creatures who can suffer?

Harris' rhetorical question is not an argument. It doesn't even suggest an argument. The answer, or part of the answer, to his question is this: Since we do have values which entail beliefs about the well-being of some conscious beings, we desire the cessation of suffering for some conscious beings. So a state in which all conscious beings maximally suffer is obviously going to repel us, just as a state in which all beings maximally prosper is obviously going to attract us. This, I think, is obvious. What is not obvious is why Harris thinks that values are a variety of fact.

Imagine we had the science to gauge the well-being of all conscious creatures. Let's say we even had some way of determining maximal and minimal well-being. How do we go from that to the view that some particular course of action is really right? What if there are competing options which are equally beneficial in the overall scheme of things? Since the continuum picture is implausible, so is Harris' belief that one and only one action can be optimal. People can value different things, and there may be no fact which makes one better than the other. Even if we accepted Harris' criteria for moral rightness, we must suppose that the set of scientifically undecidable moral questions is potentially quite large, and possibly even all-encompassing.

But why should we accept Harris' criteria? It is rather obvious that people do not ultimately and only hope for a maximized state of happiness for all conscious beings, and Harris is in no position to say that we all should make this our highest priority. Furthermore, we must suppose that, until we account for the well-being of all conscious creatures in all possible worlds, we cannot be sure that what seems so obviously bad to us is not really moving us in the overall "right" direction (or one of the "right" overall directions). Sometimes you have to step backwards before you can move forward. Maybe slavery and child abuse are temporary causes of suffering which will ultimately lead us to better and heretofore unknown sources of well-being. For example, could we as a civilization have developed the sense of morality we have if we had not learned lessons from such past evils?

To this, I think all Harris can say is that we've got to do our best with the knowledge and values we have. In practice, this means nothing at all. Not only has Harris offered a questionable notion of moral correctness; his notion has no practical applications. Harris is arguing for a view which, if taken to its logical conclusion, has no consequences for our everyday moralizing and which has nothing new to offer our philosophical and scientific pursuits. (Unfortunately, Harris seems much more inclined to dismiss the majority of work in moral philosophy than he is inclined to engage with it. That strikes me as terribly lazy, arrogant, and insulting to people who take this stuff seriously.)

Even if Harris has pointed out one possible fact about values--that they entail beliefs about the well-being of conscious beings--he is certainly not the first to do so. As Simon Blackburn notes in his own presentation, this view has been around for a very long time and appears in several world religions and popular secular philosophies. Also, even if Harris has correctly identified a scenario worse than any other imaginable--his Absolute Bad universe of maximum suffering, which may or may not be a real possibility--it does not follow that all values and value judgments can be judged by their relation to this state. It may be that only some of our values entail beliefs about the well-being of conscious creatures, and that other values function independently of that set. (As it happens, I don't think he has correctly identified the most undesirable universe imaginable. See my follow-up post here.)

I find it dismaying that a person who has no reason to be heralded at all, except for the fact that he has written some bestsellers and has come to prominence in public debates over science and religion, is virtually leading the discussion in a panel with such established figures as Peter Singer, Patricia Churchland, Steven Pinker, and Simon Blackburn. The fact that he's parading such an impoverished argument and unduly dismissing the vast literature in moral philosophy makes it that much more of an insult. It gives the impression that our intellectual culture values personality over rigor.

Melville's Affidavit

2010-10-07T18:06:00.011+02:00

It is said that the best way to learn something is to teach it, a truth I'm discovering now as a teacher of American literature. I've been reading Moby Dick with an intensity of interest I can only attribute to this, that I want to do right by my students and present this material as best I can. It helps that I love the book, its philosophical and narrative exploits, as well as the literary virtuosity of the thing. Starting on any given page, one cannot read it for more than a few minutes without finding something worth quoting. Here are two of my favorites:

Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans. -- spoken by Ishmael

and

He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. -- spoken by Ahab

I am posting this, not simply to share my appreciation of Melville's achievement, but to make an observation which I find remarkable--perhaps the more so because I have been unable to find it made anywhere else, and I would be very surprised to be the only person to have discovered it.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Moby Dick is the ways in which it is not a novel, but a manifesto or, even more, a testament. In chapter 45, "The Affidavit," Melville suggests the Biblical dimension of his narrative, comparing his descriptions of whales to Moses' descriptions of the plagues of Egypt. The whole point of this chapter is to ground the story of Ahab's mad pursuit of the white whale in historical fact, to establish it as not mere fable or allegory, but as a true description of whales and those who hunt them. Yet, by comparing his tale to that of Moses, Melville suggests that this story should be taken as myth, one comparable to a Biblical tale.

No doubt, Melville wants to convey some of the truth of whaling. Chapters are devoted to the history and science of whales and whaling. Some of it is speculative, some critical, but little does any of this further the narrative. Rather, it is aimed at documenting Melville's own experience and insight into the subject. Others have pointed out that, in such chapters, the narrator may as well be Melville himself, and not Ishmael.

Melville so experiments with narrative voice that, even though Ishmael begins and genereally carries the narrative, several other characters become narrator in various chapters. In still other chapters, the narrative is given in the omniscient third-person, a phenomenon which can alternately be explained by the supposition that Ishmael is taking liberties with his own style, or by the view which I find most compelling, that Melville is not tied to Ishmael as narrator.

This is my observation: There is at least one chapter in which the narrative voice cannot be attributed to Ishmael or any other character in the book, but which can only be that of Melville himself. I am talking again about Chapter 45, "The Affidavit." While several of the other chapters, such as those pertaining to the classification and description of whales, might be attributed either to Melville or Ishmael, Chapter 45 belongs to Melville alone.

Our curiosity is aroused at the very beginning of the chapter, when the narrator acknowledges the fact that this is a book, and that the narrative of the book itself is fractured. It would be strange for Ishmael to speak of the narrative as if from the outside, though this, I admit, is not conclusive evidence. Nor is it conclusive that, in this chapter, the narrator appeals to historical facts--for Ishmael may himself be privy to such facts. No, the conclusive evidence comes when the narrator identifies himself as the nephew of one of the historical figures he is discussing, one Captain D'Wolf. As a point of fact, Herman Melville was this captain's nephew.

Would Melville have us believe that Ishmael is to be his own brother, or perhaps his cousin? If such were Melville's intent, he would surely have gone about it in a better way. The simplest and by far the most plausible explanation is this, that Melville had no qualms about speaking openly, as himself. This makes sense, considering his goal of blending fact and fiction in the mythologizing of whales and whaling. His willingness to speak as himself solidifies his effort to write more than a novel, but a testament to his own existential quest.