Neurath's Boat

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.

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.

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 meaning of religious claims

P. Z. Myers has recently been in a bit of a flap over his claims that religious belief is foolish and irrational.  I've also been hanging around with Dan Dennett's goddaughter a bit, and Dennett of course pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing religion.  I have myself thought about the content of religious claims before, as I find it to be a profound puzzle how anyone can take them seriously, and recent events have gotten me back on that subject.

Most philosophers know that the old positivists were in the habit of dismissing religious claims as meaningless, devoid of cognitive content like the various metaphysical claims they so famously opposed.  In fact, that is slightly oversimplified, as they standardly distinguished between what they called mythological religious claims and what they called metaphysical religious claims.  The terminology may not be ideal, but I don't have any really good replacements, so I'll stick with their terms.

Mythological doctrines essentially involved treating the tales of gods and miracles as historical claims, which of course we have every reason to think are false.  This is the version of religious doctrine which Myers and Dennett so like to mock.  The positivists, on the other hand, paid virtually no attention to this interpretation of religious claims.  Partly this is because they saw religious philosophers as more prone to the metaphysical than the mythological, and partly this is because they saw many religious believers as equivocating between the mythological and the metaphysical, but I think there is more to it.

On the metaphysical interpretation, religious claims are, according to the positivists, devoid of cognitive content.  There is no test to determine whether the god of the philosophers, that metaphysical abstraction, exists or not.  It is very unclear what the claim that such a god exists even means; the religious philosophers themselves often emphasize the mysteriousness of the absolute.  The positivists argued that it's so hard to interpret the metaphysical religious claims because in fact they have no content at all; they aren't really saying anything which could be true or false.

Now, it is not clear why it would ever be a problem that people sometimes make meaningless noises.  We already knew that.  So a little appreciated question is why the positivists considered metaphysics to be in need of being attacked, of being criticized, if really it said nothing at all.  If it's all just babbling, wouldn't that make it harmless?  The reason the positivists thought otherwise is that they didn't think metaphysics lacked any content whatever.  According to the positivists, metaphysical claims encoded disguised values.

This is why viewing metaphysical claims as true or false was, according to the positivists, anything but harmless.  The encoding sought to put the values above criticism.  Since they were being presented as truths, the usual examination to which we subject values (contemplating what we really want and trying to coordinate our aims with one another and with those of other people) are ruled out; truths are not matters to be negotiated.  But since they weren't really truths, they couldn't be tested as truth claims usually are either; no such tests were applicable.  Thus, the metaphysical values could not be criticized at all, and it is this attempt to conjure up absolute values and shut down any possible challenge to them which the positivists found profoundly dangerous and harmful.

I think this explains why the positivists focused on the metaphysical aspects of religion.  We read polls that more than 90% of Americans believe in God in some form, and far more specific and empirically questionable claims are also endorsed by very large numbers.  But I think that's misleading.  It's questionable to me that a majority of those people really believe what they claim to, at least in the sense that they believe, for example, that ripe bananas are yellow or George W. Bush is president.  As Hume noted, no Christians act as if they believe they'll go to hell if they sin.  Very few of them will go to faith healers rather than doctors if they're sick.  Very few of them consult religious authorities on any factual questions about how the world works which are relevant to their lives.

I think even for the religious rank and file, the religious claims are metaphysical in the positivists' sense.  The strange, crazy religious doctrines are value judgments of various kinds, disguised as truths.  Thus, they are not treated as truths by most of the believers in everyday life.  Still, they are presented as truths, and this disguise plays a vital role (insulating them from being seen as evaluative preferences, subject to negotiation).  Thus, criticizing them as truths still challenges them, and the religious will respond fiercely to any such challenge.  They will be all the more passionate about it since it is their values that they see as really under attack, but they have to defend the claims as truths in order to maintain the edifice of disguised values.

Of course, this diagnosis of what's going on does not immediately indicate what to do about it.  Since religious values are often deeply problematic, and confusing truths with values probably does have some tendency to foster other confusions about truth, I agree with Myers and Dennett that it would be profoundly preferable if more people could be freed from viewing religious claims as true in any sense.  But the fact that religious doctrines are not held for anything like the reasons most factual beliefs are held makes it hard to know how to question them; questioning their factual basis seems like it won't work very well unless the factual basis is actually relevant to the holding of the belief.  Still, other alternatives are not obvious either.

A stunningly unoriginal thought, I'm sure

One way of looking at what's distinctive of Platonist/Rationalist/Realist views, which can be collectively referred to as "the bad views," is that they prioritize identity over similarity, when similarity is the more fundamental concept.  The Platonist characterizes similarity as identity in some respect; in the view advocated in Plato's writings, they are similar because they participate in identical forms.  All forms of rationalism have some form-like elements which play the same role, and even modern, supposedly scientific varieties of realism get all superstitious about "natural kinds," basically forms in modern dress.

Similarity, however, is the more fundamental idea.  We only arrive at the notion of things sharing the same property on the basis of observing their similarity.  Plato himself saw this, which is why he made the unsatisfying move of locating the forms outside of the world of our experience, because it is so obvious that we do not experience them in this world.  However, while the various mystics have proposed a number of different unsatisfying ways we might perceive the genuine, unchanging forms, the only ones who have claimed that similarity is something truly universal, objective, and unchanging have been those who interpreted it in terms of presence of identical universal, objective, and unchanging forms.  Otherwise, it is obvious that our recognition of similarities is heavily influenced by our contingent interests and our past experiences.  Thus, the similarity view encourages pragmatism, empiricism, and anti-realism, "the sensible views," to give them an all-encompassing name.

I know David Armstrong makes much of the need for identical properties to ground similarities between things.  I'm trying to think of who else has seen the status of similarity vs. identity of properties as a crucial perspective on the great philosophical divide.