Neurath's Boat

Modal Realism and Oracles

There have been some discussions, starting here and continuing here, about the relationship between certain epistemological worries for modal realism and some other worries for consequentialism.  I find the discussion of modal realism puzzling.  I certainly don't want to saddle Lewis with outright pragmatism and verificationism, but he did have a certain sympathy with both of those views, and as a result I'm not sure the kind of case that's described makes sense on the Lewis view.  Certainly his argument for modal realism is that it's a very useful theory.  Lewis doesn't consider any kind of evidence for or against modal realism except evidence of this kind, and it is hard to see how there could be any other evidence for or against it (for the usual causal reasons).  It's not clear that it even makes sense to speak of the oracle as knowing there are no other concrete worlds if it isn't based on something like this; the oracle cannot, of course, have causal contact with the other worlds or anything of that sort.  Perhaps the oracle doesn't know anything, but only says things that are true.  But how do we know what the oracle's statements mean?  How do we know the oracle is talking about modal reality?  Again, for Lewis, the only evidence concerning modal reality outside the actual world is usefulness; we could understand the oracle as speaking of modal reality if the oracle could be interpreted as talking about useful theories of modality, but we can't, for example, understand the oracle as speaking about modal reality because of any causal contact between the oracle and any modal reality (again, that's metaphysically impossible for Lewis, so we can't even give that power to hypothetical oracles in thought experiments).

Perhaps it would be more useful to put the point by analogy.  What should anyone's reaction be if the oracle tells us there are no sets, or that there are some sets, but not others (perhaps there are all other kinds of sets, but no sets contain donkeys as elements, by analogy with Richard's case).  How would that affect our beliefs about sets?  Would the latter even make sense?

Of course, one obvious response is to reject the analogy on the basis that sets are abstract and the Lewis worlds are supposed to be concrete, but another part of the Lewis argument for modal realism is that the concrete/abstract distinction is too messy to do any serious philosophical work, so anybody who took this line in response to Lewis would need to answer those arguments and provide a convincing account of this concrete/abstract division and why it matters to comparing sets to the Lewis worlds.

The survey results

There's been a survey of views among philosophers, and apparently there was widespread participation; it produced some interesting results concerning the distribution of views among philosophers.  As a Carnapian, I was particularly interested to notice that 2/3 of philosophers believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction; apparently people are no longer as impressed with Quine's argument as they once were (assuming they ever were as impressed as is usually reported; there's no survey from a few decades ago to compare).

Of perhaps more general interest, there has been some discussion of the fact that while around 3/4 of philosophers generally are atheists, the numbers are reversed for philosophers of religion.  Trent Dougherty suggests that we should take this as evidence in favor of theism, that the experts lean toward that view.  I'm not so sure.  It's the only area I can find where there's such a sharp difference between the specialists and other philosophers.  Given that the other philosophers are certainly not completely uninformed (it's hard to be completely uninformed on this topic, and certainly anybody who does history of philosophy can't avoid lots of contact with philosophy of religion), it seems unlikely to me that such a big difference could be based solely on the experts having better evidence; their evidence surely isn't that much better.  So I tend to think that there's some other explanation for this pattern, though I don't have a firm opinion as to which of the possible explanations apply.

In addition to proposing that theism among philosophers of religion may be based on good evidence, Trent proposes a more sociological explanation for widespread naturalism.  While there certainly are fashions in philosophy, I actually think philosophers have been more inclined to naturalism than the general public for as long as there has been philosophy.  And I would have thought that the reason that the trend has over the course of the modern era become stronger and more entrenched is surely because of the success of science in progressively explaining more and more of the world.

Nietzsche and democracy

"His disciple cried impetuously 'but I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I still have in my mind against it.'"  The Gay Science 106

According to Heidegger, the scientific worldview represents the will to will, the will to power (so he says in the postscript to "What is Metaphysics?").  Of course, I think he's right, apart from not viewing this as a criticism of science.  I also think, though I know it's controversial, that Nietzsche must have seen things that way.  He's such a passionate seeker of truth, so committed to the cause of knowledge and science, that I can't see how he could possibly be interpreted as really rejecting all that.  Rather, it seems clear that his criticisms of science and the pursuit of truth, frequent and harsh though they are, show something else.  He thinks the project is just too important to be done wrong, so every tiny misstep must be ruthlessly exposed and obliterated.  And really, criticism is essential to science.

Of course, it wouldn't do to take Nietzsche as an advocate of every cause he criticizes; I think it's easy to do so in the case of science and the pursuit of truth because he also so frequently praises those endeavors, and perhaps more to the point is constantly engaged in the quest for truth.  But I wouldn't try to reinterpret his harsh criticism of Christianity as involving secret advocacy, for example, since he hardly ever has a kind word for Christianity and at no point seems to be trying to be a good Christian.  On the surface, his attitude toward democracy seems to be closer to his attitude toward Christianity than it is to his attitude toward science.  But is it really?  He himself seems to see democracy and science as deeply intertwined, and after all he proudly proclaims himself a free spirit and a good European, aligning himself with people whose politics are pretty much exclusively liberal.  And criticism is essential to democracy as well (and not to Christianity).

Thoughts inspired by teaching the first part of the Genealogy of Morals yesterday.  Nietzsche says that all "higher natures" are a battleground between the master morality and the slave morality; surely he thought his own was a higher nature, but if there was any part of himself that was an advocate of slave morality, I find it much easier to believe that he felt a part of himself believing in democracy than that he had a Christian part.