Neurath's Boat

Changing views

Most people like to think of themselves as flexible and willing to change their minds in response to new evidence.  However, we of course notice that others are very stubborn, and there's some psychological literature suggesting that people in general don't change their minds as much as they'd like to claim to.  On the other hand, there are interesting studies in the other direction, suggesting that people mis-remember their past views as being more similar to their present views than they really are, so that surveys on whether people changed their minds will get misleading results if they rely on comparing remembered views to current views.  So perhaps people are right to think that they change their minds, despite the fact that tricks of their memories leave them without much evidence to back it up.

Anyway, since I tend to have a hard time thinking of examples of changing my mind on demand, I thought I'd write about a significant change in order to increase the chances that I'll continue to remember it when I need an example.  I was originally in favor of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.  I expected we'd make a mess of it, especially with Bush directing things, but the Taliban were so awful that I thought the mess we'd make would still be a considerable improvement.

I now think we should probably withdraw from Afghanistan.  I do still have some tendency to think that there could be better ways of doing things which would make our intervention helpful, but I can't see any politically realistic path from our current policies to anything which would be significantly more productive.  In particular, I think we'd probably have to give up the goal of suppressing opium cultivation in Afghanistan, and I don't see any chance of that.  I was aware of this issue in the past, but I apparently underestimated other issues and the results of the various problems interacting; I did not imagine that an Afghanistan with a large U.S. military presence would ever end up with the Taliban again controlling most of the country.  Further, the Karzai government is not nearly as much better than the Taliban as I would have hoped; it appears to be quite horribly corrupt, which isn't really a surprise, but it even has some pretty horribly retrogressive policies on women (the big issue where I thought the Taliban were bad enough to make their removal a goal which overrides almost everything else).

Skill in Plato's dialogues

Socrates is generally presented in Plato's dialogues as being better at some skills than self-styled experts.  He is presented as being superior at rhetoric, for example, and at debate for the sake of debate.  There is also indication that these are pseudo-skills, not involving genuine knowledge of anything.  Thus, I take it that the implication is that one who knows that he has no knowledge has exactly the right kind of knowledge for these pseudo-skills, and that's why Socrates is even better at these skills than people like Gorgias and Lysias who think it's possible to have real knowledge of such things (and that they themselves possess such knowledge).  Perhaps the knowledge of etymology Socrates rather oddly displays in Cratylus is an example of the same phenomenon, if we interpret that dialogue as ultimately favoring the conventionalist view of names (as I have some tendency to think, though I admit I haven't thought about that dialogue a tremendous amount).

I can only think of one case of a dialogue where characters are presented as being completely uncontroversially masters of a completely uncontroversial skill, and where their possession of this skill gets any particular emphasis.  The case is Theatetus, where both Theatetus and Theodorus are presented as having great knowledge of mathematics.  Theatetus is, of course, even credited with a considerable mathematical discovery when we're first introduced to him.  There is no effort to suggest that Socrates could match, much less exceed, the mathematical skill or knowledge of Theatetus or Theodorus; Socrates is shown as having some understanding of mathematics in Meno, but nowhere, in Theatetus, Meno, or anywhere else, is he presented as being on the level of Theatetus, making original mathematical discoveries.  This seems to fit well with the previous point; when a skill is real, when it involves real knowledge, long study and effort are required.  You can't fake real skills just by knowing your limitations.

So far, I think I haven't said anything particularly uncontroversial.  However, there are more interesting cases.  It seems to me that Socrates is consistently shown as being more skilled at interpreting poetry (that is, religious tradition) than anyone he talks to.  I do think that this fits the pattern of skills like rhetoric; that although he's usually somewhat cautious how he states it, Plato does advocate a fairly thorough skepticism about religious tradition.  Of course, in the Laws Plato advocates harsh punishment for atheists, which is a problem for my thesis here.  Apart from my usual dodge of saying I think he was getting senile when he wrote that, I would point out that given his explanation of why atheists are bad, it is not unreasonable to interpret him as defining atheism as the rejection of the existence of forms (and indeed of any kind of truth), rather than as involving doubt concerning traditional gods.

Philosophy is another vexed case, especially given the difficulty in separating it from sophistry.  I admit to having a tendency to think that for Plato sophistry is for the most part incompetent philosophy, and not some entirely separate thing, despite what's said in Sophist.  I particularly recall hearing M. M. McCabe explain fairly convincingly that Euthydemus and Dionysodorus were metaphysical theorists, who produced bad arguments because their metaphysical theories were bad, not because they weren't trying to produce good arguments.  If she's right, if that's true of even those two, then I think nearly anyone Plato presents as a self-styled philosopher, sophist, or teacher of virtue is probably to some extent a philosopher.  There may be hope even for Gorgias.

So, how does the philosophical skill of Socrates rank?  And what does that tell us?  I'm unsure of the first, and even more so of the second.  But let's look at examples.  He certainly is vastly superior in this respect to the brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus.  He also appears to be the superior of Thrasymachus, though Thrasymachus certainly shows signs of being able to do philosophy (even if he doesn't seem to emphasize the value of doing so); the idea of distinguishing between strict and loose senses of skill or expertise comes entirely from Thrasymachus, without even the tiniest bit of help from Socrates, and he explains the distinction very clearly, though Socrates ends up being able to make more effective use of the distinction once it is in play.  Clitophon also seems to suggest that we are supposed to think of Thrasymachus as some kind of philosopher, though I would not go so far as some of the Straussians who think Thrasymachus in Republic is closer to the views of Plato than Socrates is.

Protagoras also makes some quite impressive arguments in the dialogue named for him, though overall he has trouble keeping up with Socrates.  Still, I have to say that my impression is that Protagoras looks worse when you evaluate him on the quality of his rhetoric than when you evaluate him on the quality of his arguments, which if I'm right would have quite interesting implications.  Socrates' summary of their argument at the end puts them even, though of course his sincerity in comments like that is especially suspect.

Simmias and Cebes concede defeat in the end, but they both present quite interesting arguments.  One also can't help but wonder whether they might be pulling their punches; how hard would a sympathetic person really try when arguing that there may be no afterlife to someone who is about to die?  So, again, hard to compare, but at least I think Socrates is not presented as the overwhelmingly superior philosopher.

Finally, old Parmenides is able to completely crush young Socrates.  Perhaps this is not a fair fight; perhaps the message is that long practice is extremely important in this area.  But surely Socrates outright losing has some great significance.  I'm just not sure what the significance is.  Maybe we are supposed to take the message of Clitophon seriously, maybe Plato really did think Socrates fell short in not trying harder to develop some positive theory?  Not completely crazy, especially as Plato seems to have done more in that direction than Socrates did.  Or maybe there's some other significance I'm not getting.

Anyway, I really should stop this practice of not posting for a month and then feeling I have to write a book to try to make up for my slacking.

How important was Darwin to philosophy?

Evolutionary theory makes it impossible for biological species to be natural kinds (or at the very least, if naturalness comes in degrees, they're very marginal natural kinds).  Biological species were, for Aristotle, a central example of forms.  Even if there is a good way to make sense of forms of some kind, evolutionary theory again, for the same reasons, makes it clear that there can't be forms corresponding to biological species.

This seems to have profound consequences for many of the hopes of rationalism; many earlier attempts to provide rationalist accounts of human nature seem to have been heavily dependent on there being a form of humanity (and even self-proclaimed critics of rationalism like Kant often make claims which seem to require something very much like such a form).  This is especially clear in the case of ethics.  On the Aristotelian, form-centered view of human nature, variations in humanity are deviations from the basic form.  This made it at least conceivable that undesirable features of humanity could be explained away as merely deviations (if in some cases depressingly frequent ones), leaving open the possibility that the form could serve a normative purpose, that one could derive what humans ought to do from the form of humanity.[1]

Undercutting this is a major change.  On the other hand, Newtonian physics already seems to carve up the world along lines very different from those suggested by Aristotle's forms, and as a result skepticism about viewing any aspect of the world in terms of forms was already well established long before Darwin.  Certainly there were many critics of Aristotelian natural-law morality before Darwin, including, for example, the whole empiricist tradition, which also rejected forms in general.

So, how much difference did the additional reasons Darwin provided for being skeptical of biological forms make?  And, conversely, did the rejection of forms in the British Empiricist tradition help in any way in making something like an evolutionary theory seem conceivable to Darwin and his contemporaries?

[1] While evolutionary theory does provide some ability to distinguish the normal from the abnormal (as discussed by Millikan), the lines are much murkier, and not revealed by reason, and prospects for plausibly lining up the evolutionarily normal with the morally good are far worse.

What are we supposed to think of Euthyphro?

One of the reasons I like to cover the philosophical classics when I teach is that they're usually classics for a reason; even after dozens of readings, I often come to new insights about them.  One point that has recently been nagging at me is the presentation of Euthyphro in the dialogue named for him.  Most readers and interpreters seem to take a fairly dim view of him (as I've also tended to do in the past).  However, it has to be admitted that he's committed to the attractive idea that justice should be impartial, and he's willing to stand up for what he believes is right against public opinion.

Furthermore, and this is the point I hadn't really noticed before, he shows what really has to be considered a fairly impressive level of open-mindedness and commitment to the pursuit of truth.  It's made clear at the beginning of the dialogue that he knows who Socrates is, and that he apparently has a high opinion of Socrates.  Knowing who Socrates is, Euthyphro shows no reluctance to engage in a discussion with him.  Further, after he's run into considerable difficulties (and after Socrates has said some at least borderline blasphemous things), Socrates offers him a chance to back out of the discussion (at 9e), but Euthyphro does not hesitate to insist that the investigation should continue.  It is only after another long stretch where no progress is made (with Socrates being, as usual, fairly rude, and throwing in a few more borderline blasphemies), that Euthyphro gives up on the discussion and falls back on conventional answers to Socrates' question (at 14b).

Now, perhaps the conventional answer at the end deserves the abuse that Socrates gives it, but it's not only a bad answer, it also seems quite unworthy of Euthyphro, given what we'd seen of him prior to this point (at the outset he was far more concerned with what was right than with popular, conventional notions).  So what's going on here?  Has talking with Socrates made Euthyphro worse than he started?  What was Plato's intention in presenting the story this way?

The persistance of dualism

The abstract of this paper about a certain rare condition claims to present evidence "this condition, long thought to be entirely psychological in origin, actually has a neurological basis."  I suspect that the authors would claim not to take dualism at all seriously, and yet only a dualist should think that it is even possible for a condition to be entirely psychological in a way which contrasts with it being neurological.  Any materialist should think that all entirely psychological conditions are also neurological.

Interesting research

There's a discussion here of a study into gender differences in the use of tentative communication styles, employment of various forms of hedging and disclaimers.  The stereotype is that women are more prone to this sort of thing, but the study apparently found the situation to be more complex than that.  I think I've noticed a tendency for women philosophers to write more tentatively than men, though of course I've noticed exceptions (nothing tentative about Susan Haack's writing, for instance, while on the other hand this very sentence by a male philosopher is rather tentative).  But, of course, one tends to pay more attention to confirming data for theories one had in advance.  For all I know an objective study of academic writing in philosophy would reveal that it fits the pattern described in the Palomares study, of equal tentativeness when the subject isn't inherently gendered.  I hope somebody eventually does such a study.

Male and female brains

I've always been a little puzzled by transsexuals.  I think of myself as male because of the obvious physical evidence; I don't have any internal feeling that it's somehow "right" for me to be male (or wrong, for that matter).  It's not that I'm indifferent; I'm actually quite comfortable with a lot of aspects of being male, and happy playing a lot of male roles, and if it were easy to choose one's gender I would certainly not choose to change (though if it were very easy to switch back and forth I'm sure I'd try out being female for a short time).  I can easily imagine someone having other preferences than mine, though, and wanting to be female.  But transsexuals almost never describe things in terms of wanting to be the other gender, they claim to somehow know that they really are the other gender (interesting critical discussion here).  Of course, this could be strategic (people are generally hostile to the idea of others doing non-conforming things involving sex and gender simply because they want to; think of how the anti-gay crowd pushes the line that homosexuality is a "choice," as if that would somehow make it wrong), but the impression that I get from what transsexuals say or write is that that wouldn't be the whole story.

There are surely a lot of things going on here.  For one, being a cisgendered male is a position of some degree of privilege, and so the invisibility of privilege is operative; in many cases being a member of a privileged group is usually not conceived of as a special part of one's nature, but rather just as being normal and something one doesn't think about.  I believe women are more likely than men to view sex as an essential property (in the philosophical sense), probably for this reason.  I'm generally skeptical of essences on philosophical grounds, so to the extent that this is what's at work, I suppose I tend to think that this is one more tiny example of the numerous ways in which the privileged are advantaged; they are less tempted by faulty metaphysical views about themselves.

On the other hand, there's a reason so many philosophers for the past few centuries have set themselves the task of tearing down Cartesian dualism; it's incredibly seductive.  Maybe despite my materialism, my tendency to view my sex as non-essential owes more than I would like to admit to some lingering tendency to think of my mind as the "real me", and my body, where my sex resides, as just something that happens to be attached to my mind.

So, which is it?  Am I still a closet Cartesian, as Rorty thought all of us analytic philosophers still were, or am I just a good anti-essentialist?  I'm really not sure.

What counts as an explanation?

A much discussed subject in the philosophy of science.  I am curious as to whether medical researchers have a special meaning for it which is quite different from those employed in everyday life or philosophy, as otherwise this headline is highly misleading.  The article mentions (several paragraphs in) that the correlation between IQ and mortality rates may be the result of a common cause of both low IQ and high mortality, and cites the original study as saying this theory has "much to recommend" it (and given my knowledge of the other correlations so far discovered between SES, various health factors, and IQ, it seems obvious that the authors of the study are right to take that possibility very seriously).  But if that's the case, then it would have to be in some very special sense of "explain" that low IQ "explains" high mortality.

I'd heard about this before

But this is the first link I encountered which prominently mentioned that Neda Soltani, recently murdered in Iran, was a philosophy student.  I suppose it's shallow that this makes me so much more interested in the story, just as perhaps I tend to go for the Khmer Rouge as my favorite example of 20th century monstrosity because of their "kill anyone with glasses" policy.  Anyway, here's hoping the situation improves in Iran, and that we don't get too many more stories like this.

Good things

Usually slither is more philosophically sophisticated, but here we see boy on a stick thinking like one of us.

Sample sizes

Whenever it's relevant (when feminism comes up, or materialism) I talk to my students about the studies of sex differences in the brain.  The press always reports any difference discovered by researchers as proof of innate differences in cognition.  Of course, the biggest problem with that interpretation is that environmental factors affect the brain, so finding something in the brain is not useful for determining where it came from, but I also mention the small sample sizes the studies usually have (a couple of dozen participants at most).

A friend is getting his Ph.D. in neuroscience (incidentally, according to him MRI studies, which are the kind that usually get such press, are all crap) decided to practice his thesis defense presentation on his friends before doing the real thing, so I heard about his research.  It had nothing to do with sex differences (it was about some details of how motor control works in the brain), but I learned something about sample sizes.  I was somewhat shocked to discover that it involved two experiments with a grand total of three monkeys (two per experiment; one monkey was involved in both).  I guess these were hideously expensive cyber-monkeys (they had electronic implants to measure brain activity very precisely during the experiments), so it wasn't practical to use more, but it seems like one could get very deceptive results this way if one were unlucky and got even one atypical monkey.

My skepticism of overly confident neuroscience claims has been further increased.

Strangeness

Hubert Schwyzer, who taught me a great deal about Kant, also occasionally talked about his days as a graduate student at Berkeley in the 60s.  Among his other stories, he reported that a great change in fashion happened at that time.  When he started, all the professors wore ties.  By about halfway through his time there, he said you could tell a professor's political views by whether he wore a tie or not.  By the time he left Berkeley, no professors were wearing ties.

Schwyzer is, sadly, no longer with us, and the story he told was of a time before I was born.  I am thus rather mystified by this piece.  Admittedly, it's about jeans rather than ties, but it's still the same fashion war that his side lost almost half a century ago.  Isn't it time to concede defeat?

(I should perhaps add that I have no objection to people dressing up.  I just object to it being mandatory, as well as its use to reinforce gender roles, which seems to be something Will considers a feature rather than a bug).

The reason this blog has been so quiet

I'm afraid I've just been too awesome to post.  (Kaufman 2009)

Greatest Philosopher of the 20th Century

Leiter's been running a poll, and Brian Weatherson has some commentary.  He voted for Lewis, and I voted for Carnap, but his post is about why Russell has been doing so well.  I'm actually a little surprised that Lewis is doing so well, though I think he's a perfectly defensible choice.

It seems that part of the reason Weatherson is surprised at Russell's showing is that the project of Principia Mathematica ended in failure.  I find that very difficult to evaluate.  It made contributions to the state of modern logic, and I guess I tend to think that modern logic is a truly enormous philosophical achievement.  However, it's difficult to know how to assign credit for it.  It's amazing how much was already set out by Frege; most of what comes afterward could be seen as just clarifying and patching a few mistakes.  But clarifying and patching mistakes is perhaps not trivial in this area.  How much did Principia move beyond Frege?  It did, I suppose, have some mistakes of its own.  I'm not sure exactly how to evaluate it, but I am skeptical that the failure of its official stated project is a particularly important criterion.

I suppose there are similar issues with Carnap.  I rank him highly both because of his contributions to the unfolding story of modern logic, and because I think his philosophical attitude toward logic was entirely correct.  But how much did he really add, as opposed to clarifying?  And how much did he clarify, if, as I tend to think, so many of his contemporaries and near successors misunderstood him?

Maybe that's an argument for Weatherson's choice.  There is no question that Lewis clarified many things.  But I guess I still think the same is true of Carnap, and of Russell, and that perhaps it is only less obvious for them because what they worked on was so unclear before they got to it that even quite substantial progress still left plenty of murk.

Qualia and Intrinsicality

Jaegwon Kim once told me that he thought secondary qualities were intrinsic if anything is.  Since that time, he seems to have shifted from being a reluctant defender of reductionist functionalism to a reluctant adherent of something like Chalmers' view (a relatively small shift, since in each case the reluctance consisted of his strong pull toward the other of the two options).  As I've alluded to in the past here, and here, I think the view that qualia are intrinsic is important to the debate about qualia.

I shall approach this topic from a distance; at the most abstract level of fundamental metaphysics, it seems to me that staying away from intrinsicness has produced some spectacular results.  Buddhism teaches that there is no self with any intrinsic nature; the self is just a placeholder in a network of relations.  To put it somewhat tendentiously (as the Buddhists themselves sometimes did), the self is an illusion.  This view did not, of course, maintain that the self was an illusion in the midst of a world of non-illusionary things; the world experienced by the self is also an illusion on this view.  There's just a network of relations, with things being only placeholders for positions in the network.

I suspect that this is why it was Indian mathematicians who invented the concept of zero; to the ancient European mathematicians, numbers were things, and so an absence couldn't be a number.  This is also why the Pythagoreans got so stressed out by irrational numbers; they could make sense of a ratio between countable collections of things, but how could something that wasn't either a count of things or even a ratio between such counts exist?  To the Indians, on the other hand, numbers as placeholders in a network of relations no doubt seemed natural (since they were used to thinking in that way anyway), and it's obvious that idenfying the zero spot in the network of relations is useful.  This view of mathematics as being about such relations is of course orthodoxy in modern times, and has been very good for mathematics.

I think it's not just good for mathematics.  Intrinsic properties just cause trouble; structures and relations are where all of the answers are to be found.  I think we shouldn't believe in intrinsic properties anywhere.  This is somewhat of a paradoxical position, admittedly, and of course there are some, such as Rae Langton, and if her plausible account is right, Kant, who think that while we can't know anything intrinsic, there must nonetheless be intrinsic properties.  I find such views even more puzzling than a complete rejection of intrinsic properties; we can know there are these specific things we can't know about?  But Kant scholars have been debating that sort of thing endlessly since his own time.  I shall leave it aside for now, as the topic I'm most interested in involves qualia, and qualia are not supposed to be uknowable.  So take just the place where extremists like myself agree with Langton and Kant and other moderates; we can't know anything intrinsic.

This is enormously relevant to the issue of qualia.  Phenomenal character appears to be an intrinsic property of experiences.  This, it seems to me, is the main intuitive obstacle to a functionalist account of phenomenal qualities:  functional properties are quite obviously non-intrinsic.  But if the intrinsic can't be known, then apparent intrinsicality is always an illusion.  And if such appearances are always misleading, then they're misleading in this case, so the intuitive obstacle can be swiftly dismissed.

This also strikes me as being the real heart of a lot of the arguments surrounding anti-materialist theories of qualia.  Lewis, for example, in "What Experience Teaches," goes through a very lengthy discussion of what knowledge of phenomenal qualities can't be like.  It seems to me that a good short summary of the argument is that if phenomenal qualities are to serve the role they are supposed to serve in Jackson's knowledge argument, they must be intrinsic, but looking at all of the things we know about our experience, it turns out that we can't find any role for anything intrinsic; looking for knowledge always turns up extrinsic things.

To take another example, it seems to me that Chalmers' zombie argument works by asking us to separate out the intrinsic properties of experience, and imagine that they're absent in the zombie world.  Obviously, if experience has no intrinsic properties, this procedure is impossible; either all worlds are zombie worlds, or (more reasonably) there's some account of phenomenal experience in terms of relational properties, and any world with the right relational properties has phenomal experiences.

It's just one book, but...

Given the continuing poor state of philosophy when it comes to feminist issues, it seems necessary to watch out for this sort of thing.  I just picked up The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, and happened to glance through the bibliography.  There turned out to be a surprising gap.  By most accounts, Susan Haack's 1977 paper on Kantian elements in Carnap's Aufbau was one of the more important early studies contributing to the current Carnap revival, and the current Carnap revival is the topic of the book.  But Haack is absent from the lengthy bibliography.  It may be an innocent accident, it may mean nothing, but with philosophy's depressing history of ignoring the contributions of women, one can't help but worry when it seems like there might be yet another instance of the problem.  Haack is even around, and I thought pretty well respected; usually the historical pattern has been that women in philosophy have sometimes been able to get recognition among their contemporaries but have almost always been been ignored by later generations.

Empiricism and A Priori Ethics

One way of characterizing the difference between traditional empiricism and traditional rationalism is that traditional rationalists have been dazzled by the impressive certainty of our a priori knowledge.  Logic and mathematics are so remarkable that many rationalists have literally accorded them the status of magic, attributing them to some mystical contact with the divine.  It is likely not a mere rhetorical device when Parmenides presents his logical arguments as having been given to him by a goddess.  Plato accords his forms a kind of divine status, and says we know them from previous exposure to them when our souls were in a higher realm of existence; Descartes says what may amount to the same thing, that mathematical knowledge and a few other items were implanted in our souls by God.

Those in the rationalist tradition have also almost always classified ethics as a priori.  Of course, lots of specific reasons for that could be given, but there are also very general motivations from the rationalist tradition which push that way.  First, of course, rationalists have generally been imperialists when it comes to the application of reason; since a priori knowledge is the really good knowledge, the rationalists have sought to reduce everything, or at least as much as possible, to the a priori, to have the best possible knowledge of everything.  Further, ethics specifically is about what's valuable, important, and good, and when it comes to knowledge the a priori is, according to the rationalist, the most valuable, important, and good, so while this does not itself amount to a rational argument, there seems to be some affinity between ethics and the a priori.  This further connection is no doubt enhanced by the tradition of connecting moral good to the divine; since the rationalists also connected the a priori to the divine, this would further encourage bundling the two together.

Of course, the mainstream  of the empiricist tradition has long maintained that the reason logic and mathematics have their apparent infallibility is that they are not actually giving us information about the world; since they don't tell us how things stand with the world, the world cannot refute them.  But the empiricists insist that real truth is about the world, so these a priori matters the rationalists regard with such enthusiasm are at best some kind of honorary truth.  A priori claims embody useful tools, ways of thinking about the world, but don't report facts.  The rationalist project of relying only on the a priori is, from the empiricist perspective, a project of ignoring the real world, of casting aside the only truth worth looking for.

Empiricists have thus traditionally sought to reduce the scope of the a priori, rejecting for example the a priori approaches to science championed by some of the rationalists.  It is perhaps for this reason that some empiricists have tried to argue against a priori ethics as well, saying that we need to be more naturalistic in our approach to ethical matters.

However, there seems to be another possible reaction, which I'm surprised hasn't been more common.  Many empiricists have also been meta-ethical subjectivists (Hume being probably the most famous example).  Such empiricists should find it quite congenial to categorize ethical claims as honorary truths, useful tools which don't reports facts about the world.  So why is it so rare for empiricists to treat ethics as a priori, just like logic and mathematics?  A good reason does not occur to me.  I can think of some bad reasons; perhaps even empiricists are partly under the spell of the apparent certainty of logic and mathematics.  Thus, perhaps they ignore the historical controversies in logic and mathematics, and think that the controversies in ethics show that ethics must be something entirely different from our stable logic and mathematics.

Actually, on one interpretation Kant might be an example of the sort of philosophy I think should be more common.  Of course, Kant claims to chart a third way, neither empiricist nor rationalist, but it has been very common to be skeptical of this.  Many interpreters take him to have simply been either a sneaky rationalist or, less commonly, a sneaky empiricist.  If he was a sneaky empiricist, he was an empiricist of the rare kind I've been puzzling about.  I wonder if the fact that people generally don't connect a priori ethics to empiricism has contributed to the empiricist interpretation of Kant being the less common reading.

An unexpected result

So, a large majority of my ethics students at Rhode Island College said they thought there was nothing wrong with prostitution if it's voluntary.  Admittedly, I elicited this result in a potentially suspect way; when nobody said anything about why prostitution would be different from any other job, I told them to raise their hands if they thought it wasn't different, saying I'd call on someone who didn't have their hand raised.  It is thus possible that some falsified their responses to avoid being called on (though I'd have thought some might also have lied to avoid admitting to endorsing prostitution).

Evaluating scientific evidence

Thanks to overcoming bias, I was led to this amusing study.  A friend of mine went skydiving just a week ago; I wonder how she'll react to my informing her of the state of research into the health benefits of parachutes.

I am also trained in mereology

If you can't afford a celebrity mereologist like L. A. Paul.  Thanks to Leiter Reports for finding this instance of a political blogger recognizing the need for philosophical expertise.

Epistemology and ethics

I went to a friend's dissertation defense today.  Jerry Steinhofer, the friend in question, seeks to account for the value of knowledge by proposing that the distinctive feature of knowledge is that it involves true belief which is deserved, and this fitness between the true belief being deserved and its being possessed is what distinguishes knowledge.  This enables him to employ analogies with other forms of desert in filling in his details.  There has, of course, recently been a great deal of interest in general in the analogies between epistemology and ethics, particularly with the popularity these days of virtue theories in both areas.

While listening to the defense, I thought about this analogy.  Suppose one wished to construct a consequentialist epistemology, with true belief playing the role of pleasure in utilitarian ethical theories.  Utilitarians do have things to say about desert, especially if they're rule utilitarians, so it's possible that such a theory could endorse Steinhofer's suggestion that desert is the criterion of knowledge.  However, there doesn't seem to be an obvious candidate for an analog in ethics to the role that knowledge plays in epistemology.  Various possibilities suggest themselves:  1) the absence of such an analog suggests a defect in the utilitarian picture of ethics, 2) knowledge is given too much special attention in epistemology,  3) there is some difference between ethics and epistemology which explains the lack of an ethics analog to knowledge, or 4) I'm not looking hard enough and there is some analog after all.

Plenty of philosophers would enthusiastically take option 1, and option 2 has had some advocates, but I want to look at 3.  In the case of utilitarian ethics, it seems that there can be cases where someone deserves something bad (cases where punishment is appropriate).  In such cases, if the person gets what they deserve, the fitting between what they deserve and what they get is still good, but what they get itself is bad.  On the other hand, it seems that nobody ever deserves to have a false belief, or at least if they do it seems that the kind of desert involved can't be epistemic.  In epistemology, it seems you can only deserve true belief or not deserve it, there's no further negative state of deserving something actively bad.

Thus, in epistemology, if someone gets what they deserve, that's always an unmixed good, while in ethics, if someone gets what they deserve, that can involve a component of badness, if what they deserve is something bad.  This may explain why epistemology has a highly positive evaluative term for people getting what they deserve (knowledge), while there is no such highly positive evaluative term in ethics.  Perhaps on this account the closest ethical analog to knowledge would be justice, an altogether more problematic notion.

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.