Neurath's Boat

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.

The selfish pose

Wow, it has been a long time since I've posted anything.  I've been teaching an ethics class this fall, and at the moment I'm discussing ethical egoism with my students.  As a result, I've been thinking about why people advocate selfishness.  Certainly people can behave selfishly just because they are selfish, but what would make someone advocate everyone being selfish?  Surely a truly selfish person wouldn't want others to be selfish.

Part of the reason no doubt is that the selfish person wishes his behavior to appear normal and acceptable, but I think that is not the whole story, or even the most important part of it.  Rather, I suspect the major reason is that we have come to associate selfishness with cleverness.  Thus, while ordinarily one would have thought a selfish person would want to avoid advertising the fact, in practice people's desire to appear clever, or at least to avoid appearing stupid at all costs, leads many of them to want to be thought of as selfish.  Hence, they advocate selfish principles in order to try to signal that they are selfish, and so not stupid, and no doubt in some cases they even try to act more selfish than they actually want to be, again because they expect this to be viewed as sophistication.

I wonder how much of the popularity of libertarian views on the internet owes itself to this phenomenon.