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.

Carnap vs. Heidegger

I ran into my favorite former student today, and the meeting reminded me of a topic I've been thinking about for some time.  I have posted numerous pro-Carnap views on this blog, but while one might thus have correctly guessed that I take Carnap's side against Heidegger, I don't think I've explained satisfactorily where I think Heidegger is wrong.  Indeed, as with most philosophers, I've come to respect Heidegger more as I've studied this issue; I am increasingly of the opinion that Heidegger really did understand Carnap's position fairly well, and that he understood the problems with his own position (though obviously he didn't consider those problems fatal, and that's where we disagree).

The basic disagreement between Carnap and Heidegger is that Carnap rejects all authority, and Heidegger considers the rejection of all authority to amount to the unacceptable rejection of all value.  It certainly is the rejection of objective value as that is usually understood; an objective value would be something that would have authority over us.  So Heidegger is allied with many other defenders of objective value.

Still, Heidegger correctly recognizes that he has opposition; the scientific world-view excludes all authority.  Science merely discusses "the truth about what-is," it doesn't make decisions for us.  In a puzzling but revealing clause, Heidegger says that the scientific method of objectivising what-is "provides itself with the possibility of future advance;" it is in this sense that Heidegger sees the scientific world-view as manifesting the will to will, the will to power (quotes from the postscript to "What is Metaphysics?")

Science "provides itself with the possibility of future advance" because it treats everything as questionable.  This is unacceptable to Heidegger; a value which could be questioned, which could be rejected, is no real value at all.  If there isn't some authority, something beyond the questions and theories of the scientific, then life is meaningless.  And because of Heidegger's belief in the authority of authority, he thinks he has a powerful criticism of science; in denying that there is any such thing as authority, science is admitting that science itself has no authority (a point he probably got from Nietzsche, though Nietzsche of course didn't draw the conclusions from this that Heidegger did).  If science has no authority, then how can it tell us not to look for authority elsewhere?

Still, the whole idea of Heideggerian authority is a puzzling one, and Heidegger's method illustrates well why.  After all, he investigates and theorizes and raises questions about metaphysics, about his authenticity and about nothing.  How can it make sense to raise questions about what can't be questioned?  How can he theorize about what is beyond our capacity to theorize, what he himself describes as beyond logic?  Heidegger himself says that it's very hard and one is constantly in danger of slipping into nonsense; Carnap's view, that in fact it's impossible and Heidegger is not merely in danger of slipping into nonsense but spends most of his time there, is only a slight step beyond what Heidegger himself confesses.

For my part, I think that whatever we can think about, we can think about.  Whatever we can talk about, we can talk about.  Whatever we can question, we can question.  Note that this is very different from saying that what we can think about now is all we can ever think about.  People are forever finding new things to think about, to talk about, to question; science "provides itself with the possibility of future advance," as Heidegger says, or "overcomes itself" as Nietzsche might say, but no worthwhile scientist says otherwise.  There are certainly those who misinterpret science as giving final answers and try to use it as an authority, but even Heidegger recognizes that those people don't understand science; Heidegger shows by the nature of his criticism of science that he recognizes what the scientific world-view really involves.  But there is only one final answer, and if Nietzsche was right that most philosophers have really been seeking that final answer (death, of course), I also think he was right that it's time to give up on this immature desire for final answers.

Still, people find the absence of authority very hard to cope with, or even to make sense of.  Positivists like Carnap are often interpreted as having made sense data and/or logic into authorities, and then condemned because by their own principles they shouldn't have such authorities.  The criticism is right that they shouldn't, but I think wrong that they did.  Observation is important to the positivists because if a claim is based on observation, people can look for themselves; they don't need to rely on authority.  But looking isn't another kind of authority; it makes perfect sense to question what we see, and we do so on many occasions.  Observation is the start of questioning, not the end.  As for logic, they of course struggled with how to understand that, but the mature Carnap, with his principle of tolerance, was obviously not treating that as beyond question either.  "In logic there are no morals!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.