Neurath's Boat

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?

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.

Expressivism, Kantian views, and A Priori Ethics

I've been thinking further about Carnap, as I've just read Michael Friedman's A Parting of the Ways, and also because I've been thinking about my dissertation, in which I borrow heavily from Carnap.  Friedman's discussion of the Kantian influences on Carnap's thinking has led me to return to a thought I've had before.  Carnap of course subscribes to what Quine called the "linguistic doctrine of logical truth," logical and mathematical truths for Carnap are established by implicit linguistic conventions.  They are prescriptions of language, chosen for pragmatic reasons.

Though Carnap wrote very little about ethics, he shared the general positivist enthusiasm for expressivist meta-ethical views; when he presents his own view of ethics in response to one of the papers in his Schilpp volume, the view is clearly expressivist.  In particuar, normative ethical claims generally involve the expression of commands or prescriptions.  Naturally, this is not to say that there are no reasons for them; there can of course be pragmatic reasons for expressing particular endorsements.

Though I cannot think of any expressivists who have made this connection explicitly, I see a fascinating parallel here.  Many philosophers have, of course, maintained that ethics is an a priori discipline.  Sometimes this is claimed because of a feeling that the a priori is more secure, or more universal, or somehow more exalted, but not infrequently another reason that is given is the more prosaic observation that it's hard to think of what could possibly count as empirical evidence for or against basic ethical principles.  Certainly with respect to my own normative views (utilitarian, of course, as regular readers of the blog will know), I cannot think of any evidence I could give someone who didn't already find happiness valuable to convince them that they were mistaken.

So, the conventionalist maintains that logic and mathematics are expressions of the norms and prescriptions of our linguistic practices.  This is the conventionalist's account of the paradigm cases of a priori knowledge; to the extent that a conventionalist can be said to have a theory of the a priori, that is how the conventionalist thinks a priori knowledge works.  The expressivist maintains that moral claims are expressions of the norms and prescriptions of our moral practices.  Would that not make ethics a priori, in the conventionalist sense of that notion?

This must have occurred to Carnap, even if it seems to have escaped many of the other positivists.  One of the main goals of his efforts to construct ever more sophisticated logical devices was to facilitate mutual understanding; he dreamed of universal languages which would insofar as was possible remove barriers to communication by enabling everyone to express themselves accurately in ways comprehensible to everyone else.  I cannot imagine how he could have missed the parallels to the Kantian project of finding a universal morality to remove barriers to cooperative effort.  Further, there seems no necessity for imagining Carnap to have been that dense, as despite the silence of his published work on the topic, his letters and other private communications of which I am aware suggest strongly that he did believe that there was just such a connection.

Analytic philosophy is commonly accused of having become immersed in dry technical details and having lost touch with the purpose of philosophy in connecting to life.  Carnap no doubt made himself more vulnerable to such charges by his efforts to avoid making any explicit statements about the political or personal consequences of his views in his writings.  No doubt this was wise; he was associated with communism anyway, and would likely simply have been dismissed on the basis of his socialist views had he explicitly drawn the connections he believed to obtain between his logical system-building and his socialist ideals.  However, he clearly believed such connections to exist, and I tend to agree.  As Stephen Colbert says, reality has a well known liberal bias.  Getting technical issues and matters of methodology right will have a natural tendency to advance the cause of the good.  Further, focusing on such issues, rather than merely engaging in partisan preaching, will help shield one from charges of bias.  Perhaps Carnap's approach still has some merit in modern times.

Probability and skepticism

It seems to me that there are at least two senses of "probable" which almost certainly need to be sharply distinguished, though there is a long philosophical history of confusing the two (one notable place; Hume clearly muddies the distinction in the section "Of Miracles" in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, though the arguments remain plausible once the distinction is straightened out).

First, there is a mathematical sense of probability.  On the basis of enough statistical data, one can make claims of the form "it's 90% likely that X", that it'll rain tomorrow, that a patient with a particular disease will die, that a kicker will make a field goal at a certain distance, and so forth.  This kind of probability is likely unproblematic.

However, there seems to be another sense in which we say things are probable.  When the evidence in favor of a particular claim is univocal, but not based on very many cases, then it is impossible to assign a statistical probability to the next case (unless it's of a category of claims to which we can give a statistical analysis, but this will surely not always be an option).  And, of course, there's always the question of whether the data from which we construct our statistical analysis is any good; if we've put effort into getting good data, we're inclined to say it's probably good, but this is another case where we can't be making the statistical claim.

It seems to me that the non-statistical sense of probability is both indispensible and deeply problematic.  We cannot help but rely on many claims for which we surely don't have certainty, but where are doubts are quite impossible to quantify statistically.  Most of us think we probably aren't victims of Cartesian demon deception, for example; where are the studies on the relative frequencies of demon deception to back that one up?  And for that matter, as already indicated, in order to make use of the statistical analysis, we need to count on our data being good, which is at best probable in the non-statistical sense.

But, indispensible though it is, this second sense of probability is deeply murky.  How do we know that Cartesian demons are unlikely?  That our perceptions are probably accurate in most cases?  I fear that there is no easy answer.  Certainly, there is no hope to solve the problem by appealing to the statistical notion of probability, though some have tried that; the non-statistical probability is, unfortunately, the more fundamental of the two, and not to be analyzed in terms of the less fundamental.

Why such a small vessel?

But otherwise, this seems to me to be on the right track.  Still, the raft?  For Neurath, it was normally a ship; I'm actually demoting the theory in my blog title.

Uses of children

I've long thought that the dream argument for skepticism is the most disturbing.  Many skeptical arguments are quite fanciful, and it's easy to dismiss talk of evil demons and brains in vats as just silly.  Of course, the silly can sometimes be true, so I'm not sure categorizing those cases as silly helps much, but obviously this line of response is in any event totally unavailable for the dream argument.  It's not at all silly or fanciful to suggest I could be dreaming.  It happens almost daily.

A seemingly unconnected opinion of mine is that I've long been skeptical that children are worth the trouble.  I mean, I can see how raising a child could be immensely rewarding, but there seems to be an extraordinary amount of nuisance involved; it seems like I could find other ways of being fulfilled that would take less effort, and I have a perhaps unfortunate inclination toward laziness.

However, it has now been pointed out that children, at least very young ones, could have a benefit that had never occurred to me.  They might provide help with the otherwise seemingly intractable dream argument.  Though given the mechanism involved, I wonder if they open one up to the equally devastating hallucination due to lack of sleep argument.

Circularity and the Analytic

I recently read Michael Friedman's Reconsidering Logical Positivism.  As one might have guessed from the title of the blog, or one of my earlier posts, I think the renewed interest in positivism in recent years is a positive (sorry) development in philosophy.  A short summary of Friedman's thesis in this book is that the positivists were much more Kantian than is generally recognized, and also more sophisticated than a lot of their critics give them credit for.  He particularly examines the views of Carnap.

While Friedman defends Carnap from many of his critics, he apparently believes a roughly Quinean line of criticism can be successful.  If he's right about that, then a lot of people need to take a close look at those arguments, as Kantian views have thrived since the collapse of positivism.  If positivism was more Kantian than is generally believed, but the Kantian view doesn't work either, then that would present serious problems for many modern philosophers.

Myself, I am not convinced by Friedman's Quinean arguments.  In essence, Quine complains that analyticity is impossible because analytic truths can't just be arbitrary and do the job that is required of them, but there is no way to make them non-arbitrary, except by connecting them to experience.  At least, that's my brutally oversimplified version of Quine's argument.

One worry about relying on experience in any way to justify logic and mathematics is that surely we need logic and mathematics in order to make the kind of sophisticated determinations which would be necessary to figure out what our experience requires in terms of logic and mathematics.  So an appeal to experience appears likely to be inevitably circular.

Certainly Quine's own theory is circular.  In "Epistemology Naturalized", he suggests that we should trust our methods of inquiry to be truth-indicative, because earlier homonids who were bad at discovering truth would have been weeded out by natural selection.  But the evolutionary theory Quine appeals to here was, of course, discovered via our current methods of inquiry.  So our methods of inquiry tell us evolution happened, and evolutionary theory tells us our methods of inquiry can be trusted.  It's all very Cartesian.

Of course, one of the reasons philosophers are still fascinated by Descartes is that the Cartesian circle is so hard to break.  I do not believe Carnap thought he could break it.  His analytic truths were not meant to be any kind of absolutely certain starting points (otherwise what was up with the principle of tolerance?)  Rather, he thought it was useful to treat some statements as analytic in his sense, where of course determining what's useful does depend on our experience and there is a certain degree of arbitrariness and triviality in the whole procedure (his response to Quine in the Carnap volume of the Library of Living Philosophers is especially clear on this point).  Certainly it is possible to draw a line between the analytic and the empirical, as Grice and Strawson emphasized in their response to Quine, and whether it is useful to do so is surely an empirical question, and one for which Carnap tries at various times to provide evidence, and against which Quine only raises a priori criticisms.

On skepticism

Brian Weatherson drew my attention to this fascinating example of a collision between philosophical thinking and real-world thinking.  It does raise the question of why the system should reward people who are clearly either liars or delusional, as most of those who say they are certain they will never repeat their crimes must be.

Epistemology and Metaphysics

Tim Maudlin has a paper, "Why be Humean?", which criticizes the Lewis doctrine of Humean supervenience.  Maudlin is an advocate of some kind of non-Humean account of laws of nature specifically.  Most of the paper argues that there are problems for the Humean account, but he ends by considering, and rejecting, such arguments as he finds that can be given in its favor.

He identfies 4 pro-Humean arguments.  First, he says that there is a semantic argument, which he attributes mostly to the Logical Positivists; this argument says that because we have no way to experience non-Humean laws, we have no way to refer to them.  Second, and relatedly, he identifies an epistemological argument.  We have no way to know whether there are non-Humean laws or not, so we should keep them out of our theories.  Third, there is a methodological argument, that we have no need of non-Humean laws so we should exclude them from our metaphysics on the basis of parsimony.  Fourth, there is the prejudicial argument, that non-Humean laws are simply too weird to believe in.

The only argument which gets any respect from Maudlin is the methodological argument, and he doesn't think it's strong enough to support the Humean view.  I believe he underestimates the methodological argument.  However, Barry Loewer has some very good discussion of that argument, so I would like to instead examine one of the other arguments.  The semantic argument seems to me to be parasitic on the epistemological argument, and the prejudicial argument seems to me to have been included by Maudlin primarily as an ad hominem against the Humeans, but I think the epistemological argument deserves to be taken much more seriously than Maudlin is willing to allow.

I advocate a view which I am inclined to call anti-realist.  One of the ways of describing what I mean by anti-realism, which I believe connects with traditional debates about realism, is in terms of how closely a view ties epistemology and metaphysics together.  Realism involves making a sharp divide between the two; questions of what there is, on a realist view, depend little or not at all on what we know or can know.  Anti-realism brings the two closer together, insisting that it makes little sense to construct theories of what there is without considering whether there's any way we could know about those things.

Maudlin's rejection of the epistemological argument involves his commitment to a strong form of realism in my sense.  He explicitly rejects my kind of anti-realism on the basis of a sort of slippery slope argument.  He says, reasonably enough, that a theory which said only what we actually know to be true is true would be absurd.  Thus, any view which ties existence to knowledge must involve appeal to things being knowable in some sense, rather than actually known.

So far, so good.  However, Maudlin thinks that ultimately there is no reasonable way to make sense of knowability.  His way of putting this is that knowability, for a Lewis-style Humean, must involve the truth of counter-factuals, which depends on goings-on at nearby, similar worlds.  So, to take one of his examples, the truth or falsity of the claim "Socrates had blood type O" depends on what happens at possible worlds where a sample of Socrates' counterpart's blood survives until blood type tests are developed, or perhaps where the technology to test blood types is developed in ancient times.  Maudlin says that this is absurd; "Socrates had blood type O" is either true, or false, as the case may be, because of the Socrates in our world, even though there is no way anyone in our world will ever know whether it is true or false.

I believe this is a highly misleading and prejudicial way of representing the Lewis position.  Certainly I do not think it adequately represents mine.  What makes "Socrates has blood type O" a claim that I would categorize as knowable is that it is very similar to claims that are known or that it is very easy to come to know, namely claims about the blood types of present and future people.  The primary evidence of knowability is similarity to the known.  This is not particularly different from the Lewis view on the matter; part of what makes the closest possible worlds where the blood type of Socrates is actually tested similar to ours is that they contain a Socrates counterpart who is a human being like us, so it is the fact that Socrates is a human being like us, and so with a blood type, that makes the weird possible world story which Maudlin finds so irrelevant true.

In contrast, it is not clear that non-Humean laws are similar to anything at all in our experience.  Thus, it seems to me that a case can be made that it is possible to divide the knowable from the unknowable in such a way that the ordinary facts everybody wants to save end up on the knowable side, while non-Humean laws end up on the unknowable side.

Of course, Maudlin could, and probably would, still insist that knowability should not constrain metaphysics, but I don't think he can use the argument that knowability can't be a criterion because it unavoidably excludes what uncontroversially must be included.