Neurath's Boat

Phenomena, Properties, and Documents

I've decided to give this google docs thing a try, and so I put up one of my current works in progress, related to what I was posting about a few weeks ago.  It can be found here, for anyone interested in reading a somewhat lengthier version of the argument I mentioned in this recent post.

Instead of getting much further work done on that paper, I've been reading other things.  I re-read Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World, as well as his Meaning and Necessity, and also read van Fraassen's Laws and Symmetry.  There seems to be a common viewpoint held by Carnap and van Fraassen, and also related to the views of Langton I mentioned earlier.  All concerned seem to hold that if you know the structure of a situation, the various relationships between the parts involved, you know quite a lot.  Further, they all maintain that it's fortunate that structure tells you so much, because it tells you everything you're ever going to get; there's nothing else that can be known.

This is, I think, actually relevant to the philosophy of mind topics I've been thinking about.  Functionalist accounts are, of course, all about structure and relationships, and the argument that a functionalist cannot account for the phenomenal often seems to be based on a view of phenomenal properties on which they just aren't structural/relational.  I also glanced at Chalmers recently, and was thus once again struck at how implausible his argument seemed to me.  The claims he presents as obviously true which strike me as obviously false often involve the word "property;" I'm almost certain he doesn't use the word the way I do (as surely he'd recognize the obvious falsity of his claims if he did).  I'm less sure what he does mean, but it seems likely that he intends the kind of metaphysical meaning Carnap and the rest say is incoherent.  As usual, I'm with Carnap.

Real Experimental Philosophy

Most people don't know about the lab work we have to do in our profession. Fortunately, I've never been zapped by a malfunctioning enknowledgetron; sadly, despite what you read in the comics, in real life such a thing is usually lethal and never grants super-powers.

What is it like to be a bat?

So Scribefire seems to be misbehaving; perhaps some incompatibility with Firefox 3 or something.  As a result, this initially appeared as a blank post.  Still, it was a short one; easy to reconstruct.  I just linked to this post from cocktail party physics, and noted that reading things like that tended to make me think I'd learned a little bit more about what it is like to be a bat.  Which, of course, also leads me to be ever more skeptical of those arguments that I can't know anything about that.

Experimental philosophy

Apparently there's some monstrous new survey up. I am suspicious of web surveys as a methodology, because of the obvious dangers of bias in the sample, but of course methodological perfection is generally unobtainable, and research which falls short can be very valuable in suggesting new theories to test; it just shouldn't be taken too seriously as proving anything. So I'm going to take it, and recommend it to others.

A circle

I've recently been re-reading Langton's Kantian Humility, and pondering a problem connected with her discussion. It seems to me that properties must be identified by what they do. After all, we can come to know about them, and how could we do that except via their effects? Langton argues for a thesis along similar lines, and attributes this view to Kant as well, though she confines the thesis to phenomenal (in the Kantian sense) properties.

However, two Humean theses also strike me as plausible. First, I agree with Hume's rejection of substance. Things are just bundles of properties. Second, I accept a Humean account of causation; causes just are regularities in the occurrence of events.

Combining these views produces a tight circle. Properties are determined by their causal powers, and causes are determined by the pattern of occurrence of properties. Intuitively, this is not a happy situation. This is perhaps part of the reason for Langton's endorsement of Kantian things-in-themselves, with unknowable intrinsic properties; the intrinsic properties of the things in themselves determine their behavior, so they enable an escape from the circle. The perfectly natural properties of Lewis may also be a way out of the circle.[1]

I do not find any of the escape routes plausible. I'm more inclined to think that, contrary to appearances, no escape is necessary. Causal determination is perhaps necessarily asymmetric, but it is clear that whatever form of determination is going on here is not causal. Logical determination is often symmetric. That may not be what the situation involves either; surely what's going on is some sort of metaphysical determination, which many at least would distinguish from logical determination. But whether it's distinct from logical determination or not, it isn't clear to me that it couldn't share logical determination's capacity to be symmetric.

There are, admittedly, other issues raised by simply embracing the circularity rather than trying to find an escape, but I will postpone them for future posts on this topic.

[1] It would also be possible to escape from the circle by supposing that we do know intrinsic properties in the case of conscious experience, in the form of Humean simple impressions, or in what the moderns call qualia. But of course such a thesis would be absurd.

A strange controversy

I follow some of the discussion of the DDT ban myth, often carried out on Deltoid.[1] The controversy is interesting for the lack of apparent motive for those who spread the myth. Nobody makes or stands to make huge profits manufacturing or using DDT; those who spread the DDT ban myth are not shills for some DDT industry in the way the global warming denial crowd are shills for the energy industry. The best theory I've encountered is that this is an effort to discredit the environmental movement in general, encouraged by factions threatened by environmentalism in other ways (like the energy industry, of course).

I mention this now because Lambert's recent attack on a spreader of the DDT ban myth mentions one example of stupidity so breathtaking I can't help but share it with others. Apparently, this J F Beck fellow that Lambert is criticizing believes that it isn't abusive to call someone a "toady." He even defends this claim when challenged on it, saying on one occasion that "toady" means "sycophant" (which isn't abusive?) and later just sticking to his guns and insisting it isn't abusive without explanation. Even some of his supporters seem confused by his determination on this point.

[1] For those who are unfamiliar, here's the short version. The myth is that some sort of global DDT ban has been responsible for millions of deaths due to malaria caused by mosquitoes which could have been killed by DDT. In fact, there has never been a global ban on DDT use. Anti-malaria policy is a complicated area in which mistakes have certainly been made, but it is well established that mosquitoes can develop DDT resistance. Such anti-DDT efforts as there have been have primarily sought to ban its use in agriculture, and efforts to prevent such use probably helped make use of DDT against malaria more successful by slowing the development of DDT resistance in the mosquitoes. Even if the efforts to cut down on DDT use did reduce its use for anti-malarial purposes as well (a point which is hotly debated; read Lambert's blog for lots of discussion and links), the resistance issue makes it quite unclear whether using DDT more aggressively would have saved any more people at all, or whether instead any benefits would have been offset by hastening the development of DDT resistance in the mosquitoes.

Barnes on continental philosophy

Leiter bashes Jonathan Barnes for his dismissive attitude toward continental philosophy, alluding to "two hundred years of philosophy since Kant on the European continent." Barnes almost certainly goes too far, but Leiter's response seems to me to be equally ill-informed. "Continental philosophy" does not refer to philosophy done on the European continent any more than a "continental breakfast" is a breakfast eaten on the European continent. It's a much more specific term than that, and much less geographical than its name suggests. The analytic/continental divide did not exist prior to the 1930s, so there has not been two hundred years of continental philosophy for Barnes to dismiss.

Barnes may confuse the issue by mentioning philosophers from before the 1930s in discussing this question, but he identifies the philosophers he mentions as heroes of the analytic and continental tradition, and does not claim that they were all members of the respective traditions (his lists also don't put all philosophers from the European continent on the continental list, since, again, it's not a matter of geography).

Why zombies are inconceivable (short version)

Consciousness does work.  My being consciously aware of various things motivates me to react in various ways, to do things in response.  The zombie scenario claims that consciousness has been removed, and everything else left the same, with "everything else" including the work that consciousness does getting done.  But that's impossible; if consciousness is removed, what it does won't get done unless something else does it instead (and the zombie scenario is certainly not supposed to be adding any substitutes).

To put it another way, if in a physical duplicate world the work consciousness does is still getting done, something physical must be doing the work in that world.  But if it's a physical duplicate world, whatever it is that is doing the work in that world is also present in this world.  But in this world consciousness is doing the work.  So whatever that physical thing that's doing the work is must, after all, just be consciousness.

This didn't end up being as short as I expected.  Still shorter than the last two posts on the topic, I suppose.

Trying to do better

Feminist Philosophers provide a link to an essay on "how to mentor someone who doesn't look like you." I did find it slightly surprising that Professor Wong reported encountering so few philosophers of East Asian heritage, since my dissertation supervisor at Brown was of Korean descent, and before I jumped ship from Santa Barbara, I'd been working with a professor whose ancestry was Japanese. Admittedly, they were also each the only East Asians in their respective departments. Kind of an odd coincidence that I ended up connecting with both of them (even more oddly, they were both undergrads at Dartmouth together, though I don't think they knew one another at the time).

Anyway, check out Wong's tips.

More phenomenal content!

My previous post generated no counter-examples, just a claim that I had changed the subject. It is possible that I was insufficiently clear, so I'll start by stressing something I may not have stressed sufficiently.

The point of the depth perception case was to show that within a single subject, phenomenal characteristics seem to track force and vivacity; something's seeming to be at arm's length depends on how strongly my various ways of perceiving depth are pushing me to believe it's at arm's length, and doesn't depend on which of the various ways is active.

Conversely, absences of phenomenal content track absences of force. For example, blindsight is sometimes mentioned when the topic of phenomenal consciousness comes up; this involves the absence of qualia, but seemingly the acquisition of information via the visual system. It could thus support arguments that qualia are inessential to the functions of perception. But those with blindsight are merely better than chance at identifying features of the visual field they claim not to perceive; they come nowhere near being as good at this as those with normal sight, and in general the information they receive through blindsight has far less influence on them than the information a normally sighted person receives through ordinary visual perception (trivially, nothing they perceive leads them to make comments on what they're seeing, but there are lots of other ways in which the influence is weaker or absent as well). Thus, it is quite easy to account for this phenomenon on my theory; these people get very little force and vivacity from stimulation coming through their eyes, so they don't get anything like our usual perceptual qualia.

To take another case where the role of awareness, its associations and effects, track its phenomenal feel, consider learned abilities to perceive. Words we recognize sound different from words in a foreign language; listening to them feels different. Similarly, a trained musician's experience of a symphony or a wine expert's experience tasting a wine is different from that of a novice (or so such people report, comparing their experiences to before they acquired their expertise). Again, the training changes what the awareness does, and it ends up feeling different.

It is, of course, open to someone to steadfastly insist that no matter how closely differences in phenomenal feel track differences in the functional activity of the mind, there's still a distinction between the feel and the functional activity. But it seems to me that at some point it becomes unreasonable to keep insisting that there just have to be two different things here.

Still, I suppose I'm biased. It just seems obvious to me that consciousness does something, so for me the question is what does it do, and any defects in any functional account merely indicate that we haven't quite gotten the function right yet. I have difficulty wrapping my mind around views which take seriously the possibility that consciousness could be functionally inert. But one must be able to take that seriously in order to take zombies seriously, and lots of people seem to be able to do that. I confess I don't know what it would be like to be able to do that.

A phenomenal theory!

So, I've been thinking a lot about qualia, and trying to get a paper together on why they shouldn't be seen as such a problem for materialism.  It seems to be generally accepted that features of mental life which can be analyzed functionally are not problematic for materialism, so my line is that, contrary to superficial appearances, qualia can actually be adequately characterized by their functional role in our minds.  I propose that what is characteristic of qualia is something like what Hume called "force and vivacity"; their tendency to bring associated ideas to mind, and enliven ideas in the sense of making them more believed or plausible.

Hope for Clinton's campaign

If there turns out to be a set of all sets after all, she may win the nomination, or so says Fafnir. Admittedly, not in so many words (I'm referring to his third scenario, of course).

I probably read too many blogs

And don't post about nearly enough of the things that I find. I follow slacktivist, and enjoy reading his discussion of the Left Behind books, which he's blogging so nobody else ever has to read them (a noble sacrifice on his part). This project has produced a lot of amusing material; here's a little comedy which he was apparently inspired to assemble based on the latest chunk of text:

PASSENGER 2: Say what's that you're reading? Is that the Bible?

PASSENGER 1: What? Oh. Oh, yes. It's the Bible. ... I'm sorry, I've got a lot of reading to finish here and I just wanted to ...

PASSENGER 2: Oh sure, sure. No problem. Sorry.

P1: ...

P2: Sorry, I know you're trying to read, but I couldn't help but notice your lapel pin. That little fish, that's like a Christian thing, right? Like a "born-again" thing?

P1: Yes. The fish is a Christian symbol. Yes. Now, I'm sorry, but do you mind? (gestures back at the book)

P2: Oh right, sure. Sorry.

P1: ...

P2: So how's that work, anyway? Getting "born again"?

P1: Look, really, I don't mean to be rude, but I'd really just like to sit here quietly and read until we get to ...

P2: Hey, that's cool! I didn't notice that before.

P1: Excuse me?

P2: Your T-shirt! It looks just like a Budweiser T-shirt, but I just realized it actually says, "Be Wiser" -- oh, and instead of "King of Beers" it says "King of Kings!" Cool. I guess that means Jesus, right? And that I'd be wiser if I ... Hey, wow! Are those gospel tracts in your bag? Can I have one of those?

P1: Oh for God's sake! Why do I always end up next to you people?

All you zombies

Richard Chappell has been recently engaged in a defense of Chalmer's zombie argument; it has been ongoing, but an early summary of his position is here. One issue has come to worry me. Chappell keeps emphasizing that he's talking about special non-third-personal facts, which is why he's not impressed by Brown's argument against non-physical third-personal phenomenal facts. Now, there are first-personal facts which are known to be irreducible to anything third-personal, as discussed for example in Lewis' "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se." But no zombie scenario is needed to show this. No duplicate of me is me, no matter how close the physical match (and as a counterpart theorist, I'd say that this holds across possible worlds; no physical duplicate of me in another possible world really is me in any strict sense).

Of course, that nobody except me has my perspective does not show that nobody except me has any perspective at all. At least, so one hopes, though the zombie argument does seem to invite us to take solipsism more seriously. It seems that via some sort of empathy, I can imagine being someone else. And I am inclined to think that, within the limitations of the accuracy of my empathic imaginings, the others I empathize with are actually having something like the consciousness of themselves that I'm imagining having.

A zombie scenario is one on which I would be making some mistake in thus projecting my imagined consciousness onto the zombie. Of course, many such mistakes are always to be expected, since there's so much I don't know about what's really going on with the others, but in the zombie case the error is supposed to be total, and not based on any of the usual ways of going wrong. If I think I'm imagining what it's like to be a zombie, I'm automatically entirely wrong.

This leads me to wonder what is supposed to make me wrong. I suppose Chappell wouldn't be very impressed with the question, as he thinks it's a brute fact whether consciousness is present or not, so he doesn't think any explanation should be expected. But I have to say that my sincere inability to figure out what could make me wrong makes me rather inclined to think I can't really conceive of zombies after all.

I suppose this could be turned against me, and I could be asked how I know that nobody else is me. Of course, perhaps I just don't. But perhaps it is just a simple matter of logic that I am who I am, and nobody else is; if it is thus a priori, then this would be a clear difference from the zombie case, where no a priori rescue seems available. I confess that this does strike me as plausible (interesting though the Buddhist alternative response is).

Meta-reasons and subjectivism

J. L. Mackie's classic work on ethics begins by saying "there are no objective values... The statement of this thesis is likely to provoke one of three very different reactions. Some will think it not merely false but pernicious; they will see it as a threat to morality and to everything else that is worthwhile, and they will find the presenting of such a thesis in what purports to be a book on ethics paradoxical or even outrageous. Others will regard it as a trivial truth, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, and certainly too plain to be worth much argument. Others again will say that it is meaningless or empty, that no real issue is raised by the question whether values are or are not part of the fabric of the world."

I am in Mackie's third class; I do not believe that there is a real issue here. But I do agree with Mackie when he goes on to say "precisely because there can be these three different reactions, much more needs to be said." Those who think that there are real differences do, after all, give arguments. If I am right, there must be some problem with the arguments. So I shall try to explain what's wrong with Richard's argument.

I confess that I can't see how meta-reasons are supposed to become "mere" for the subjectivist in Richard's argument. Why treat meta-reasons any differently than any other reasons? They do, after all, have consequences, just like other reasons. For example, if things are as Richard describes, and I phi, there seems to be a very good chance that I will come to regret my actions later. This is not to say that potential regret is the sole reason not to phi, only to point out that meta-reasons seem to be connected to my interests and values, just like normal reasons; defying them seems to carry the risk of my interests and values not being served, just like normal reasons.

Of course, in Richard's example, exactly how doing phi conflicts with my values is opaque to me. This is unfortunate, no doubt, but hardly unusual. Probably unconscious reasons have more influence on our behavior than conscious reasons, after all, and unconscious reasons are ipso facto also opaque to us. It is clear to me that the subjectivist is committed to thinking it would be better if one could see more clearly, and so that one should, when possible, figure out what one's unconscious motivations are, or in Richard's case figure out what it is that the meta-reasons are pointing to, but I don't see any way in which the subjectivist is committed to saying that if one can't pierce the opacity, one is required to simply ignore those reasons.

Nozick's experience machine

I have long wondered just how much Nozick's case shows, and really whether it's very convincing at all (sure, most people say they wouldn't plug in, but look at how many hours they spend playing World of Warcraft, and that's not even as good as the Experience Machine). But for some reason it had not occurred to me to ask the question Felipe De Brigard decided to ask, which he briefly describes here. It didn't occur to me even though I always mention "The Matrix" when I discuss the experience machine, and always mention how strange I find it that anyone would want to leave the matrix given the setup in the movie. The results are what I think I would have expected, though that's what we always think when we see experimental results.
Technorati Tags: ethics, hedonism, utilitarianism, Nozick, Matrix

Did Nietzsche know he was a genius?

Clearly he believed he was a genius.  And while this is perhaps slightly more controversial, it also seems to me to have been obviously true.  But of course we all know from Plato that true belief is not enough for knowledge; though it is controversial what exactly are to count as good reasons in general, it is almost universally held that one cannot know on the basis of believing for bad reasons.  So were Nietzsche's reasons good?  Was it even possible for his reasons to have been good?  What could be good reasons for that sort of thing?

It's almost a stereotype that geniuses are misunderstood and neglected in their own times.  But the stereotype seems to have only a shaky basis in reality; quite a lot of revolutionary thinkers were wildly controversial in their own time, but they were of course centers of storms of controversy because they were also targets of enormous amounts of attention, because they were widely considered extremely important.  Those who totally escaped notice among their contemporaries to be appreciated only later seem to be pretty unusual.  On the other hand,  those who escape notice by anyone ever because they're just totally mediocre are, of course, extremely common.  So Nietzsche shouldn't have concluded he was a genius just because he was misunderstood and under-appreciated, and I don't think it's reasonable to attribute that theory to him, either.

Admittedly, being widely acclaimed in your own time is certainly not proof of genius, as there have been plenty of widely acclaimed cranks, and there have certainly been some under-appreciated geniuses, so perhaps Nietzsche should not have worried too much about not having widespread acclaim; perhaps one shouldn't appeal to that either way.  But what other evidence could their be?

Those close to someone are likely to be biased in their favor.  If they care about the person for other reasons, they're unlikely to be too critical of things that are important to the person they care about; indeed, they may genuinely value those things more than they otherwise would just because they associate the things with their author.  Also, people who share similar views are more likely to become close, so anybody who becomes close to you is likely to think you're right about more things than you are, because they're likely to be wrong about some of the same things that you are (and so think you're right about those things).  So while Nietzsche had some friends who thought fairly highly of him, it is unclear how much he could get from that.

As a student, he was hailed as a brilliant classical philologist.  However, he never did very much work in the field, so it is unclear whether he had sufficient grounds for even believing he was a genius in that area; some are far better at impressing teachers than doing independent work, so it is risky to draw conclusions from the evaluations of teachers.  And in any event, Nietzsche clearly thought he was a brilliant philosopher, not just a brilliant philologist.

So what's left?  He came up with results that seemed right to him?  But who isn't able to manage that?

Recent reading

It's gotten to be Nietzsche time for my introduction to philosophy students, so I have been engaged in one of my new procrastination strategies of reading endless material tangentially related to what I'm going to be teaching in the near future.  I was interested to note that the theory that Nietzsche died from syphilis, which I'd always repeated as fairly well established fact, is now pretty much regarded as refuted.  Apparently some of his specific symptoms don't really fit, nor does the fact that the time between his mental collapse and his death was just over ten years (advanced syphilis does not kill quickly, but it is considerably quicker than that).

Instead, the dominant modern theory is some sort of slow-growing brain tumor.  Mostly this is argued on the basis of the symptoms, as well as the fact that the diagnosis at the time was fairly uncertain; obviously at the time they couldn't give him an MRI, so this theory explains well why his doctors at the time weren't quite sure what the problem was.  It may have a further advantage which I'm surprised nobody seems to have discussed.  A disposition to such tumors may be hereditary, and Nietzsche's father died from hydrocephalus, which can sometimes be caused by such tumors.

I've also been reading about the Nietzsche/Salome/Ree situation.  I've now finally read Binion's account of the matter, in Frau Lou, and I've now also read Salome's book on Nietzsche.  Binion argues that Salome's account of the events of her relationship with Nietzsche is not to be trusted, and that somewhat surprisingly Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth gives a somewhat more accurate account than Salome.  I think he makes a good case that Salome can't be trusted, but there are points of detail where I can't agree with him.

Binion utterly disbelieves Salome's claim that her interest in Nietzsche was purely intellectual.  Just from having read Salome's physical description of Nietzsche in her book about him, I have to agree with him that there had to be some physical attraction there.  But while Binion is, I think, right to attribute mixed feelings to Salome, he mostly seems to think Nietzsche's interest in Salome was intellectual.  He's not entirely consistent on that point, admittedly, but it seems to me much more plausible to think Nietzsche also had mixed feelings throughout.  Thus, to take one of the most contentious points, while Binion thinks Salome just made up the marriage proposal story, I remain quite uncertain about the matter.

I suppose this is mostly gossip, though.  On matters of actual philosophy, the most interesting thing I've read in this flurry of procrastination via Nietzsche study is a translation of two of Paul Ree's books.  It now seems to me that some of Nietzsche's seemingly less insightful criticisms of English philosophy make much more sense if they are read instead as criticisms of Ree, who was a huge anglophile.  Thus, for example, in On the Genealogy of Morality (first essay, section 2) Nietzsche criticizes the English psychologists for the theory that the usefulness of punishment has been forgotten.  A reader familiar with the English tradition may wonder when any of them said that; none of those in the dominant utilitarian tradition ever made much of a big deal of people's ability to forget usefulness, not even Hume.  But it turns out that Ree advanced precisely this theory.  Ree is, of course, mentioned in the preface to the Genealogy, and there he is also closely connected to Darwin; Nietzsche's usually questionable criticisms of Darwin are perhaps also cases where he's really going after Ree and not being clear enough about his target.

I shouldn't really be surprised

Nietzsche tells us that our central motivation is to exercise our power.  Of course, Nietzsche had a more sophisticated understanding of power than many; generosity can be a display of power.  So this interesting study is perfectly comprehensible on a Nietzschean view.

I suppose it may also give some insight into an unusual friend of mine.  It is fiercely difficult to get him to split the cost of any shared meal or outing; he will go to great lengths to pay for everyone himself.  Clearly he's ruthlessly exploiting his friends for his own pleasure.  I wish I had enough money to do that (actually, I do tend to be pretty generous when I'm feeling financially secure, but sadly that hasn't been the case for a while).

Getting at what's fundamental

I follow an interesting pro-Bayesian blog called "Overcoming Bias," which just recently had a post about reductionism. The post refers to the alleged fact that "there is only the most basic level - the elementary particles and fundamental forces." Now, I'm a great fan of reductionism (it has been some months since my dissertation was completed and accepted, but I haven't changed my mind about the central views I defend there yet). But the idea of a fundamental level is not necessary (or, I think, desirable) for a reductionist view. All of the benefits of reductionism come from accepting that there is only one world. The point of reductionism is to establish the unity of science, as some past advocates of reductionism have put it. But unity only requires that everything be linked to everything else, it doesn't require that there's some privileged foundation that all the connections flow through.

Insisting on a fundamental level saddles reductionism with unprovable metaphysics (as I ask in the comments thread, how do we know there is a basic level?) and also encourages misleading implications. The word "fundamental" sometimes means "most important," and those who make a big deal about the bottom level not infrequently seem to be misled into thinking that the bottom level (whatever they think it is) is fundamental in this sense as well, and not merely in the sense of just being the bottom.

The costs of secrecy

Lindsay Beyerstein's post about a scandal involving the treasurer of the National Republican Campaign Committee has inspired me to post on the topic of secrecy. When I teach introduction to philosophy, one of the things I have my students look at is John Stuart Mill's classic arguments for freedom of speech, from On Liberty. Mill does not discuss the case of censorship of official secrets, but it seems that aspects of his argument would apply to that case as well. His central argument, after all, is that open discussion is the only way to expose problems and find ways to fix them, and any kind of secrets will be a hindrance to the kind of open inquiry he favors. It is simply impossible to establish a means for protecting secrets which does not have the potential to be used to cover up incompetence and corruption, and the historical record suggests that this potential will always be realized. Thus, openness in government is needed not just to ensure that the government is not misusing its power in pursuit of the wrong goals, but also to ensure that, even if it has the right goals, it isn't bungling in the pursuit of those goals, perhaps by allowing those goals to be subverted by corrupt agents, or possibly simply by choosing poor means.

Now, this shows that secrecy is costly (indeed, the historical evidence suggests it is extremely costly). This does not rule out the possibility that there may be cases where it is so necessary that the costs must simply be paid; in warfare, for example, it is likely that among the many other gross violations of normal rules of behavior which are unavoidable, some official enforcement of prohibitions on discussing military plans and dispositions may be necessary. Nonetheless, extreme care must be exercised, and of course war itself is only justified in very extreme circumstances (if then; whether it's ever justified is, of course, somewhat controversial).

There are less clearly ethical cases where we can see the same calculation. A criminal organization must keep secrets; it must conceal its activity from the authorities. But this necessity comes at a high cost. It dramatically increases the risks of internal corruption, as members of the organization can use the same means which are employed to conceal activities from outsiders to conceal their own activities. It thus comes as no surprise that this situation is in fact often encountered in criminal organizations. It's not actually true that someone who would scam the government or scam a random citizen would necessarily be more likely to scam their employer; psychologists tell us that people's behavior does not display the level of consistency we imagine it to. So you're probably wrong if you think it's natural that criminals would steal from one another because criminals are just like that. On the other hand, it is true that someone who has more ways to avoid being caught is more likely to cheat; the same psychological studies support that one. People's behavior is very heavily influenced by circumstance.

Thus, if an organization is not engaged in any criminal enterprise, perhaps it should not be so eager to keep secrets; some secrets may be valuable, but they're all costly, and usually too little attention is paid to the costs. I leave the reader to judge what lesson, if any, the Republicans should draw from that.

McCarthy and Positivism

I've been reading the Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism, and finding quite a lot of interest.  It is generally material I was vaguely aware of, having been interested in this area for some time, but there's a lot of detailed evidence which I'm very glad to now have available.  Thus, for example, I had long thought that the general lack of awareness in the United States of the rather far left political leanings of the Logical Positivists was probably partly a result of their tending not to emphasize such leanings during the early years of the Cold War, especially since they had the added vulnerability of being immigrants.  But George A. Reisch has a paper on that topic in this volume which actually cites the FBI files on some of the leading positivists.  Apparently, both Carnap and Philipp Frank were targets of J. Edgar Hoover's overzealous investigations.

Reisch further suggests, and I certainly agree, that this had a terrible effect on the movement.  The positivists, to varying degrees,* attempted to avoid suspicion by shifting to a very austere, apolitical picture of science, totally disconnected from human values.  Such a view is obviously untenable, and made the positivists much more vulnerable to the sort of criticisms Kuhn and others would make in the 60s and later.

* According to Reisch, Feigl was especially guilty of this, while Carnap stuck to his principles far more than most of the other positivists.

Logical truth and logical consequence

As GFA notes, there has come to be something of a sentiment that logical consequence is a more fundamental notion than logical truth. He cites Read and Etchemendy; Dummett also takes this view (I've been reading Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language). GFA questions how anybody can say this when the two are (usually) equivalent; usually you can translate a logical truth into the claim that some consequence relation holds, and vice versa.

GFA does note a couple of exceptions to this equivalence. It is not exactly an exception, but is perhaps also relevant that in providing a minimal basis for a logical system, it is possible to give only rules of inference and no axioms (in fact, this is often done; the logic I'm teaching in my intro class this semester is a "natural deduction" system which uses this approach). On the other hand, it is not possible to give only axioms; some rule of inference is always needed ("axiomatic" systems normally have modus ponens, as well as some sort of substitution rule; substitution rules may be a special case, but modus ponens is clearly a rule of logical consequence). At least, the only way to give a purely axiomatic system would be to make every logical truth an axiom.

Whether all of this suffices to make consequence the more "fundamental" notion, I'm not sure. I am by nature very suspicious of claims that anything is more fundamental than anything else. On the other hand, I sympathize with some of the motives for saying that consequence is the more fundamental notion. Dummett notes that the 20th century saw quite a bit of controversy over the status of logical truths; whether they could be understood to be "analytic" (whatever that means anyway; another issue that was much fought over) and what status they did have if they couldn't be classified as analytic. Dummett seems to consider this largely ink spilled in vain (certainly nothing much was ever settled by all these debates), and also thinks there wouldn't have been so much fuss over it if people had been thinking in terms of consequences rather than logical truths. Perhaps there is more of an intuition that a logical truth needs to be about something, that something needs to make it true, than there is any corresponding intuition regarding logical consequences.

If such an intuition has indeed been a source of frivolous worries, then the equivalence of logical consequence and logical truth ought to be enough to undermine the intuition; if logical truth and logical consequence are equivalent, then it's possible, even if not compulsory, to give a reductive account of the former in terms of the latter, so intuitions that special explanations of logical truths are needed should already be undermined. But they're not precisely equivalent; as GFA's examples show, and as mine may also show, logical consequence is an ever so slightly broader notion. This surely wouldn't justify any extravagant metaphysical thesis that logical consequences are built into the structure of reality in a way that logical truths are not, but of course I don't myself think any extravagant metaphysical theses are ever justified, and if Dummett is right the great benefit of focusing on logical consequence is that such a metaphysical thesis has no intuitive appeal anyway. If we set aside such metaphysical concerns, though, we do seem to be left with a meaningful sense in which consequence is more fundamental. Still, perhaps the terminology is less than ideal, since the word "fundamental" has so many associations with the metaphysical concerns.

Bookshelves

Though a quick check showed, barring extreme memory slips, that I have read nearly all of nearly all of the books in my living room, and that probably only drops down to most of most of if I look at all the books I own, I still agree with Ezra Klein on this issue.  Well, apart from not being the sort of person who would read 900 page books on Lyndon Johnson or the Reformation.  So I seem to disagree with him on a lot, really.  But the central point remains; owning books is for showing what sort of person you are, and has relatively little to do with the activity of reading books.  This is regardless of how seriously you take the latter activity, or at least this is so for an academic like me, since I have such easy access to such great libraries.

As for the risk of being embarrassed by being asked about a book you haven't read, which many of the comments on Klein's post seemed to suggest was a decisive reason to avoid having such books on shelves, I find this unconvincing.  There are plenty of books I have read that I couldn't tell you much of anything true about, and I imagine Klein has interesting things he could say about Johnson or the Reformation to deflect the conversation away from the specific contents of those books he hasn't read.

Tufts colloquia

On Friday, I attended a talk by Claire Finkelstein on contracts under coercion.  I've been trying to attend a lot of colloquia recently, as they can be a source of ideas and it seems to be a good thing to be getting out and talking to other philosophers.  Discussion at this one was spirited.

Finkelstein's argument centered around an example; a robber threatens to kill me unless I can pay him, and I have no money on me, so I promise I will get the money and pay him tomorrow.  Obviously, this is of no value unless the robber actually believes I will pay, so in order for this move to save my life, I must somehow bring it about that the robber believes this.  It would thus be very much in my interest if it were possible for me to call on some external enforcement mechanism, to sign a guarantee of some sort which, say, the state would compel me to honor.

Of course, as the law stands now, I could not do such a thing; contracts entered into under coercion are unenforceable.  And so my situation is hopeless; I can't provide the money now, and my promises to do so in the future are not credible, so the robber will shoot me.  It seems that I should wish that the law did not take this stance on coerced contracts.

Finkelstein supposes that the reason we do not enforce coerced contracts is that we wish to discourage people from engaging in coercion, by reducing the rewards, but she notes that this not only imposes a cost on the one engaged in coercion (who is denied access to some rewards) but also on the victim (who is denied the possibility of a less bad escape).  She considers it quite unfair to impose this further cost on the victim, and so suggests that we really ought to be increasing the penalty to the robber in other ways (since there are always other ways to ramp up punishment), finding ways that don't impose a cost on the victim.  So she argues that coerced contracts should be enforced.

Endless complications and debate arose, and my own general reaction was that, as usual, sorting through the strained and tortured logic of consent and voluntary action and rationality reinforced my fondness for utilitarianism.  It may be hard to figure out what will produce the best outcome, and sometimes the advice is unpleasant, but other approaches seem to provide even sillier results, when they provide any results at all.

At the dinner after the talk, I was pointed toward a presentation of an extraordinary view.  Finkelstein told us that Richard Posner had argued that criminal activity in general could be seen as all involving bypassing of efficient market mechanisms, and so that the interest of the state in enforcing criminal law could be seen as entirely concerned with protecting the market.  He actually suggests in one paper that even rape fits this model; it can be seen as bypassing implicit markets in dating.

Posner considers the possibility that the rapist may want non-consensual sex specifically, something in which there is not (and cannot be) a market, and on that issue Finkelstein was actually slightly unfair to him; she reported him as saying that it was too hard to distinguish such cases from other cases of rape, so although the state had no interest in discouraging rapes of that form as such, they should still as a practical matter be punished like other rapes.

In fact, Posner isn't quite that silly in the paper, though I can see where Finkelstein gets that impression.  He does suggest the approach Finkelstein reported, but he also allows that there are situations where people's interests are in conflict, where there is no consensual market solution to the conflict.  He does not actually say the state has no interest in such cases; he suggests that when leaving it up to the people involved to resolve it without interference produces decreased utility, that also constitutes a form of inefficiency, and he explicitly puts rape in this category.  However, this seems to undermine Posner's central point, since it concedes that bypassing market mechanisms isn't really the only way to go wrong.  Perhaps Finkelstein was charitably seeking a more consistent interpretation of Posner.

An idea whose time has come?

Is it time to bring in the robot overlords?  Even the monkeys are suggesting that the answer may be yes.

PZ Myers stands up for philosophers!

Critics of intelligent design sometimes suggest that it ought to be discussed in philosophy classes rather than biology classes. A recent post at Pharyngula recognizes that intelligent design's total lack of intellectual content makes it of little more interest to philosophers than to biologists; it's so nice to see someone who isn't a philosopher recognize this point.

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Diplomatic ambiguity

The issue of what to do about Iran's nuclear program has been much discussed recently; the leftist blogs have extensively discussed the way the top Democratic candidates are going to such lengths to be sure to say that the option of attacking Iran is not "off the table." The diplomatic theory underlying this, of course, is that our negotiating position is stronger if Iran thinks we might actually use military force, so we should never say we would definitely not do that. One problem with this line of thinking, as many have noted, is that constantly reminding Iran that we're willing to attack them is quite likely to make the government of Iran think that they need nuclear weapons to deter such an attack. I'd like to mention another flaw in the reasoning.

We have overwhelming military force. Everybody knows this. Thus, every country in the world knows that, potentially, the United States could use that military force against them. There is no need to say we're going to do that, or make a big deal of our willingness to do things like that, in order to ensure that other countries take this into account in their planning. Paranoia, plus the extreme badness of any outcome which involves us actually attacking, guarantees that countries are always going to take that into account, whatever our public rhetoric. Thus, it is frivolous to engage in saber-rattling in order to prove to our enemies that we're a threat; they know that perfectly well and need no proof.

Instead, the most likely consequence of publicly making threats is to guarantee that any concessions that our enemies make to us appear to the world to be made under duress. Since many of our enemies appear to be as neurotic about "appearing weak" as our own administration, this is only going to make them more reluctant to make any concessions.

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Influences

I am teaching a class on freedom at Rhode Island College this semester, and in a fit of doubtless excess ambition I decided that one of the things I wanted to do was to carefully go through Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.  I take the book much more seriously than I used to.  Of course, this is because I find the view and the arguments presented more interesting than I once did, but while I think I can explain what it is that I find in the work that I didn't always see (I certainly hope so, since I want to explain that to my students), I wonder whether the reason I found it is rationally suspect.

One of my favorite teachers, Tony Anderson, was a grad student at UCLA while Carnap was still alive.  Carnap had retired by then, but Tony got the chance to meet him.  Apparently Carnap had gone blind, and the UCLA philosophy department had a volunteer from among the graduate students help him out by reading his letters to him and writing replies for him.  Tony enthusiastically volunteered for this job, and after dealing with the letters, he says that he and Carnap would talk about philosophy.

One story Tony tells about this time is that he was taking some class or seminar where Kant's moral theory was under discussion.  He made some disparaging comment to Carnap about how silly some part of Kant's moral theory was, expecting Carnap to immediately agree (Carnap was, after all, a non-cognitivist).  Instead, Tony reports that Carnap said "you shouldn't be so hasty.  There is something to what Kant is saying there."

Tony tells this story to indicate that Carnap's reputation as a rigid and dogmatic thinker is undeserved, but while I certainly think that Carnap was in important senses quite open-minded, for me that explanation isn't quite satisfactory.  I'm sure that's not what Carnap would have said if Tony had instead made a comment about, say, Heidegger.  It seems to me that the only reason Carnap would have said there was something to what Kant was saying was if he thought that there was something to what Kant was saying.  So this story puzzled me for a long time; I wondered what Carnap though there was in Kant's moral theory that was on the right track.  And that's what I, these days, think I've figured out.

Of course, one of the things this story emphasizes is the contingency of our (or at least my) knowledge.  The path by which I was led to the insight in question (if it is one) seems utterly accidental.  I do not know exactly what lessons to draw from that.

Descartes interpretation

Brian Weatherson proposes a heterodox interpretation of the argument of the first meditation.  At least, he thinks it is heterodox, and it sounds heterodox to me, but I can't claim to be familiar with the full range of Descartes scholarship.  The interpretation also strikes me as having some merit; it does stand out, as Brian says, that Descartes never really solves the evil genius problem.

I've been teaching Descartes again, which has me pondering my own heterodoxies.  Or at least, again, that's what I take them to be.  In particular, I've been pondering the question of what this God that Descartes claims to be able to prove the existence of is.  Some interpretive problems are solved (and others are generated) if for Descartes God just is the mathematical structure of the world, the union of all the logical and mathematical truths.

Of course, speaking of the union of logical and mathematical truths suggests a composite God, and the possibility of somebody being right about some parts and not about others.  But all the parts are necessary, and anyway it's not clear that we should speak of parts in this case; all necessary truths are equivalent, after all, and necessarily so.  On some ways of counting and individuating (perhaps the metaphysically appropriate ways), there is only the one necessary truth.

If that's God, then in attributing necessary existence to God Descartes is not saying much more than that the necessary truth is necessary, so it becomes less mysterious why he thinks this is something easily established by logic.  Admittedly, there may be a tiny bit more; in talking about "existence," he may be implying a Platonism which would not necessarily be shared by everyone who thinks that there's a necessary truth which is genuinely necessary, but Descartes of course was a Platonist, and made a point of emphasizing that at the start of his 5th meditation proof for the existence of God.

Now, there are those who would deny this necessary truth; Mill, Nietzsche, and Quine would presumably all reject it, and many others would say that misleading things have already been said about necessary truth even in my highly abstract discussion.  But while this wouldn't produce smooth sailing for Descartes, it would make his attempt at an ontological argument far less absurd.

The most glaring problem for this interpretation is that even if there is a necessary truth, it hardly seems that this would have the traditional attributes of God.  In what sense is necessary truth loving or benevolent?  In what sense is necessary truth a cause of the world?  What sense does it make to worship or pray to necessary truth?  What connection does it have to the Catholic tradition Descartes claimed not to be completely abandoning?

Perhaps most pointedly for Descartes specific project in the meditations, what sense does it make to say that necessary truth is not a deceiver, or if it can't deceive (perhaps because it's true, though it seems truth can mislead, or perhaps because it can't cause anything and so can't cause deception), how does the mere fact that there is necessary truth establish that clear and distinct perceptions must be infallible?

On the present picture, Descartes claim that God is not a deceiver is perhaps on a par with Einstein's claim that God does not play dice; an assertion that the ultimate principles of nature are not utterly cut off from us.  This, of course, increases my suspicion that I'm being anachronistic in attributing this to Descartes, though perhaps it is not shocking that two great physicists might end up agreeing on some metaphysical points.  But if that is what he means, I'm not sure what reason he can be seen as giving for thinking that it's true.

Maybe the unity is supposed to help here, though.  If there's only the one necessary truth ultimately, then perhaps the notion is that if we can grasp it at all, and we seem to know a bit of mathematics, that means that the necessary truth is within reach (of course, if it's just one thing, it's puzzling how it seems we can know some necessary truths and not others, but everybody has that problem).  Perhaps this is why Descartes makes so much of the fact that he claims to have an idea of God.

Of course, to be thoroughly anachronistic, most people these days think Einstein was wrong about the dice.