Neurath's Boat

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.

Carnap on Heidegger

So, I'm continuing to try to put together a paper on the motivation and significance of Carnap's criticism of Heidegger in his "Overcoming Metaphysics."  As I see it, the core is not so much the verification principle as Carnap's anti-authoritarianism; he rejected metaphysics as being an attempt to claim the authority of Truth for value judgments, and considered Heidegger an important contemporary representative of such authoritarian trends.

Part of this project requires me to get a much better grip on Heidegger.  After all, Carnap himself spent a long time studying Heidegger before he first presented his anti-Heidegger polemic.  However, I find Heidegger extremely hard to understand (probably far more so than Carnap did, since Carnap was familiar with Husserl and the neo-Kantians and the general German philosophical scene which he shared with Heidegger).  I've tried reading Heidegger's own writings before, and haven't gotten much out of them, so before attempting that again I'm trying to find other readings that might help me figure out what he's really trying to say.

To that end, I've been reading Husserl's introduction to phenomenology, but I have also found that very hard to follow.  Tracing things back further, I looked up some Brentano, which seemed easier to follow, but didn't seem to help much with understanding Husserl.  Probably I should read some neo-Kantian stuff, or perhaps work from the other direction and read some Sartre, since I never found Sartre as hard to follow as some other continental thinkers.  Maybe seeing what Sartre tries to do with Heidegger will give me more of an idea of what Heidegger could have been up to.

I did pick up a book on Nietzsche's influence on the early 20th century German left wing, particularly the Expressionists.  That's also useful for my general thesis, as I find Carnap's approving comments on Nietzsche supportive of my interpretation of Carnap as anti-authoritarian.  Nietzsche's criticisms of metaphysics were certainly directed at the way metaphysicians tried to derive authority from Truth, and the appropriation of Nietzsche by other early 20th century leftists shows that Carnap could easily have picked up on that feature of Nietzsche through his leftist cohorts.

Anyway, suggestions from others are of course welcome.

The metaphysics of funding

My dissertation, which I hope to defend in the next month or two, argues that reductionism is generally a good thing, and in particular mind to brain reduction is pretty much the only rationally acceptable option.  As a general rule, the arguments against reductionism are terrible, but since my orientation is also anti-realist and pragmatist, there is one which is ordinarily not considered fundamental but which must concern me.  Some argue that reductionism carries the danger of distorting funding priorities, of making research into reducible sciences less important and less worthy of support than research into their reduction bases.

Now, there is certainly nothing inherent in the reducibility of A theory to B theory to suggest that B theory is more worthy of research attention, on either the bridge-law model (Oppenheim and Putnam, Nagel) or the identity model (Armstrong, Lewis, Smart, etc).  I suggest that the reason that this conclusion seems so natural is that reduction is taken as indicating that the B theory is more fundamental in some metaphysically weighty sense; that the objects of B theory are more real than those of A theory, or perhaps that reducible things are never real, so that the A theory definitely doesn't deal with reality, while B theory might, unless some further reduction base for B is found.  But this is scarcely intelligible.  Of course,  my own view is that talk about things being "real" is nearly always misleading, either code for something else which should be stated clearly instead of coded, or based on metaphysical prejudices which should not concern us.  However, even if my anti-realism is rejected, there are further problems.  Consider the identity theory; on the identity theory, A theory and B theory are talking about the same objects.  That's what makes a theory an "identity" theory.  How could one of them be talking about real things and the other unreal things, if they're talking about the same things?  How could one be addressing important matters and the other unimportant matters if they have the same subject matter?*

Of course, that reduction should not rationally influence funding does not show it won't; surely plenty of irrational factors influence funding.  I confess to having a prejudice, when facing irrationality, to wish to confront and correct it, rather than invent lies (like the irreducibility of theories) to exploit it.

* I think a similar point can be made for bridge-law reduction, though it would be more complicated.

Freedom

Richard has some interesting questions about freedom.  I tend to think that the negative freedom of non-intervention is quite over-valued, and that we should value some kind of positive liberty, ability to do things, perhaps power in Nietzsche's sense.  Thus, I'm inclined to think that freedom may well be enhanced rather than restricted in the examples Richard cites.  However, I very strongly agree with his Millian point in the comments.  Even if people have no absolute right not to be interfered with, as a general rule we should resist paternalism, because paternalistic authority is too frequently employed corruptly, and even when employed with good intentions, people are usually better judges of what's good for themselves than of what's good for others.

Ah, Kant

As I continued to slog through the KRV, I  came across this passage in the Kemp Smith translation:  "Appearances demand explanation only in so far as the conditions of their explanation are given in perception; but all that may ever be given in this way, when taken together in an absolute whole, is not itself a perception."  This all sounds very Kantian, and to be honest it also strikes me as rather true and important.

However, there is one thing which can't help but make one worry.  In a footnote, Kemp Smith indicates that the "not" in the passage above is not based on Kant's German text, but on the fact that the text makes no sense without it.  Indeed, in context, the sentence without the "not" wouldn't make any sense (and Kemp Smith is not the first to have noticed this; he cites Mellin as the source of his reading of the passage), but it is hardly unusual for passages in Kant to be very hard to interpret.

I guess I think the "not" really does belong there, but I really, really wish Kant had had an editor.  Or that he had put some tiny amount of effort into cleaning up his text himself.

Free will

There's a wonderful quote being discussed at the Garden of Forking Paths.  In my dissertation, I have occasion to discuss the connection between pragmatics and truth, and I discuss one prominent example of a disconnect between the two.  Psychologically healthy people have an exaggerated sense of the amount of control they have over the world.  They believe themselves to be able to influence random events, and to be able to exert considerably more influence over non-random events than they actually can.  The tendency to over-estimate one's degree of control declines or vanishes in the case of the severely clinically depressed (even the severely clinically depressed do not tend to under-estimate their degree of control; on average the severely clinically depressed are fairly accurate).

In my dissertation, I note this widespread delusion of control as an example of a false belief that seems to be beneficial; obviously the severely clinically depressed do a poorer job of coping with the world, despite understanding it better.  I also add in a footnote the point that's relevant here, namely that this illusion of power seems like it might account for the persistent belief in implausibly strong free will doctrines.

Ratings

In a discussion thread in an unlikely place, I encountered the absurd claim that Sir Peter Strawson was a greater philosopher than David Lewis.  This got me to thinking about the game of rating philosophers in general, and as I've been getting some work done on the dissertation recently, I have a highly accurate, entirely objective standard to apply.  Specifically, I can evaluate them on the basis of how useful they are to me in my efforts to expand and improve my dissertation draft.

According to that standard, William Lycan is underrated.  His notion of a two-level fallacy in the philosophy of mind is highly fruitful.  Jerry Fodor is overrated.  He says nothing right that isn't better said by someone else, and nothing wrong which is not either better said by someone else or too silly to be worth responding to.  Donald Davidson's reputation is probably about where it belongs.

Ontological metaphors

I just picked up Routley's Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, and it is a weighty tome.  I picked up Meinong's book on Hume as well; Meinong is a philospher who of course is referred to all the time, but he's mostly known for the fact that Russell and Quine made fun of him.  Though he has defenders who claim the criticisms of Russell and Quine were shallow, and the rumor is often circulated that they misrepresented his views anyway, even his defenders rarely seem to have gone so far as to read his work.  Thus, I thought I should check it out.  It looks like I have a busy summer ahead of me, so I don't know how quickly I'll get through it, but I may post more about either Routley or Meinong at some point.

Routley's jungle metaphor caught my attention, though, along with the vivid illustration on the cover.  I don't remember where the jungle metaphor came from, but I do recall Quine once referring to the realm of possibilities as an ontological slum, which he went on to characterize as a breeding ground for disorderly elements.  Quine was fairly infamous for his conservative views ("dinosaur" is how I heard him described by someone not particularly radical in his own politics), so the metaphor is not surprising coming from him.  I wonder if it's important.  Of course, Quine didn't write about politics.  Certainly he never drew any connections in print between his philosophical views and his political views.  There must have been some interaction, though; I don't see how there could fail to be for anyone with the slightest concern with either politics or philosophy.

Of course, Quine is also famous for being an early follower of and later rebel against Carnap, whose politics were quite left-wing; like Quine, Carnap avoided politics almost completely in his writing, but for him we do still have a tiny bit of print evidence, from his intellectual autobiography in his Schilpp volume.  Also, when Robert Cohen was doing work on the development of Logical Positivism and apparently asked Carnap about his politics, Carnap told him that his political views of the 20s and 30s were pretty much the same as those to be found in Neurath's essays and articles of the time (in other words, very big on socialism and democracy, and the need to connect the two, the need for economic equality and political equality to go together if either are to exist meaningfully).

So how did Carnap's politics affect his philosophy?  And did the political differences between Quine and Carnap have anything to do with their break?  I've read a bit of Dear Carnap, Dear Van, but it seems that some of what would probably have been the most interesting letters have been destroyed.

Putnam's Paradox

So I've been thinking about this recently for some reason (I guess I'm always thinking about issues surrounding realism and anti-realism).  In his discussion of Putnam's paradox, David Lewis wonders briefly why Putnam supposes that only an ideal theory is guaranteed reference and truth, when a version of the model theoretic argument can show that any theory is guaranteed reference and truth.  He supposes that Putnam is assuming that our theories are forward-looking, so that their intended interpretations are as according to some future ideal theory.

This seems obviously right to me.  However, I think it shouldn't have been that hard to get to that point.  The lesson Lewis ultimately draws from Putnam's paradox is that global descriptivism can't work; the meanings of the entirety of our language and theories can't be determined by picking what would make them as true as possible, because a cunning interpretation can make virtually any theory true of virtually anything.  This is despite Lewis's enthusiasm for local descriptivism; for individual words and concepts, it is a good approach to interpret them to refer to whatever makes the most, or at least the most important, of our beliefs about them true.

That strikes me as absolutely the point of Putnam's paradox.  We can always interpret some part of our theory in light of other parts of our theory.  This is surely why Putnam only draws the conclusion that an ideal theory must be true.  Any less than ideal theory can always be interpreted in terms of future, more extensive theories, and can turn out to be partly wrong on the basis of that latter interpretation; only a theory that is as inclusive as possible is immune to being so interpreted by further theory.

Of course, from the conclusion that global descriptivism is false, Lewis moves on to maintain that we need some constraints on interpretation beyond making our theory, whatever it is, come out as true as possible.  Infamously, he maintains that theories should be interpreted as much as possible as referring to his perfectly natural properties and things which are built out of them.  The Canberra Credo maintains that Lewis was right about pretty much everything, except modal realism.  If I were to construct a credo, it would say that Lewis was right about pretty much everything, except perfectly natural properties.

Instead, I would say that it makes no sense to try to interpret a complete, ideal theory; all interpretation is internal to our theorizing, and whenever we're evaluating some theory, it is always in light of some further theoretical commitments.  I take it that this was the real point of Putnam's internal realism, as well as the old Logical Positivist rejection of metaphysics (I assume Putnam's "internal realism" terminology came from Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions; Carnap of course rejected external questions).

I should probably look up van Fraassen's paper on Putnam's paradox as well.  I'm usually in sympathy with van Fraassen.

Conceptual analysis

I am somewhat sensitive to the doubt that philosophers have our intuitions corrupted by our training and so are not to be trusted, so I sometimes try to check what the inuitions of the more philosophically innocent are like.  I never much liked Putnam's water/H20 case, so I tried that out on an innocent victim.  Apparently, according to a detailed survey of a large sample size (1) which I assume is representative, XYZ is not water.  Heavy water is water.  Water ions are not water.

I introduced heavy water and ions into the equation because I alway found the view that water is H20 because we always intended to mean stuff having the same microstructure to be dubious in light of the fact that not all water has the same microstructure.  Varying the number of neutrons doesn't matter.  I had previously thought that varying the number of electrons didn't matter either (I thought it was generally held that water ions are water), but based on my exhaustive survey, both electrons and protons matter.  But neutrons don't.  So it's a matter of sufficiently similar microstructure, not a matter of the same microstructure.

That leads nicely into my theory that we don't identify natural kinds in the world, in the way that all these new realists and reference theorists like to insist; instead, we identify similarity clusters, which we like to have as big as possible.  The more different similarities we can bundle together, the happier we are with a concept, and we tend to assume that once we've got a bunch of them together, there are probably more we don't know about, and we get unhappy when there turn out to be unexpected lacks of similarity in new areas (as with jadite and nephrite).  But there's just a continuum of more and less extensive bundles of more and less tight similarities, not any sharp distinction between natural kinds and anything else.

Oh, my extensive surveys have also concluded not only that Gettier was wrong, but so was Plato.  True belief is apparently enough for knowledge.  No justification needed, and obviously accidents are just fine.  Lots of philosophical problems are solved by that one.

Potter

There may possibly be some kind of extremely subtle spoiler here, though like the author of the post I can't figure out what it could possibly be.  But the feeling I've long had that one of these days I need to get around to finding someone to borrow the Harry Potter books from is getting stronger.

Subjectivism and Realism

While I apparently have some philosophical readers, I expect that my last two substantial posts might have bored any readers who came here for politics.  This post will not return to politics directly, but will address an issue often raised in the context of political debates.  I want to talk about ethical subjectivism (sometimes people use "relativism" to refer to the same thing) and ethical realism, and eventually connect that to larger philosophical issues.

It seems to me that the view that ethical principles are objective is not nearly as problematic as is often argued.  There's a view of how objective ethical principles can be discovered which has long been a part of the utilitarian tradition and which is, so far as I can tell, now held by many in other ethical traditions.  We can view our ethical intuitions, our judgments about particular moral cases, as data, and we can try to construct theories which serve to explain and unify those judgments.  It is difficult to see anything in such a procedure which is more problematic than the way we proceed in the sciences, by treating our observations as data and constructing theories to explain those observations.

Of course, people don't all agree about the data, but that's true in science as well.  Some phenomena are extremely difficult to observe, and some people simply have disfunctional sense organs.  Further, treating ethics on a par with science in this way certainly doesn't rule out reform; our scientific theories sometimes lead us to reject some of our observations, and likely a good moral theory will similarly entail some revision of what we count as reliable moral judgments.  Similarly, disagreement about what theory really does best explain the data is not much of a disanalogy; there is widespread agreement in some sciences about some issues, but certainly not in all sciences about everything.  If ethics is similar to science, it's surely similar to a science in which we haven't made much progress, but that's a far cry from an argument that there's nothing objective in ethics at all.

Still, having said all this in favor of the reasonability of ethical realism, I do not endorse that position myself.  It seems to me that everything which might make us think ethics is objective can be adequately handled by some kind of Humean view.  If what's right is determined by our individual feelings about things, that does not eliminate the need for ethical investigation and debate; very often, our feelings concern what outcomes we desire, and it can be very difficult to determine how to bring about or avoid particular outcomes.  It is unclear that productive ethical debate very often includes much more than that.

Of course, it is philosophers who worry if subjectivism accurately characterizes ethical debate.  The more common worry outside the seminar room is that if ethics is just a matter of our feelings, doesn't that mean whatever feels right to someone is right?  But surely lots of horrible things we don't want to endorse feel right to all sorts of bad people.

Partly, I think this is already answered by looking at the need to evaluate not only our feelings about outcomes, but the empirical questions of how those outcomes can in fact be brought about.  That doesn't resolve the whole issue, though; likely some people act in ways we'd want to condemn because they have fundamentally different feelings, not because they disagree about the methods for bringing about particular outcomes.  However, even in those cases, I'm not sure how badly off the subjectivist is.

It is often emphasized by ethicists that ethics is supposed to be a practical endeavor; the goal is to figure out the right way to live, and encourage people to follow it.  So I think it is instructive to ask, as a practical matter, what can be done about people with fundamentally different feelings.  Hume said sympathy was the most fundamental feeling relevant to morality; consider someone who lacks that, a sociopath.  To be consistent, it seems a Humean must say that when such a person engages in theft, say, or murder, they are in a sense not acting wrongly; their feelings don't oppose the actions they are taking.  But this sense is not very important to how the rest of us should deal with a sociopath.  Surely we need to defend ourselves; that the sociopath considers his actions justified is irrelevant to our concerns.  Many possible options are available, such as prison or simply killing the sociopath.  I have never been able to determine why anyone would think subjectivism rules out dealing with such problems in the same ways as other moral theories would recommend.

If I can't see where the problem is for the subjectivist view, it should come as no surprise that I equally can't see the advantage for the objectivist view; they are two sides of the same coin.  Sure, on the objectivist view the sociopath is just wrong about some moral facts.  But as far as the practical matter of how to deal with him, I can't see how that helps in the slightest.  Does anyone really think a sociopath could be brought around by being subjected to Kant's proof of the categorical imperative, or Mill's arguments from Utilitarianism?  Mill didn't think so; indeed, even for much easier cases he had doubts about how much could be done for the sufficiently morally confused.  That was why he emphasized early education so much.  And of course Plato, to take another prominent ethical objectivist, clearly believed that there were hopeless cases; part of the point of Gorgias and of book I of Republic is that Callicles and Thrasymachus are just such hopeless cases (and in the case of Thrasymachus, we're also shown how to deal with a hopeless case.  Thrasymachus is treated as a wild animal, pretty much how I say a Hume-style subjectivist should view a sociopath).  The practically available options are pretty much the same, either way; if someone's moral outlook is just too fundamentally off, you're pretty much left with brainwashing or violence as a response, whether you think that the outlook being off involved factual error or distorted feelings.

Because of this absence of any practical difference, I tend to favor subjectivism simply because it seems to make less extravagant claims.  However, the absence of a practical difference means I also don't think this issue is very important, certainly not nearly as important as some of the debates over it might have led one to believe.

I claimed I'd try to link this to larger issues, but I think this post is already pretty long, so I'll do that very briefly.  It is my suspicion that objectivity in general, at least in the deep metaphysical sense many philosophers intend, is not of any more value than the objectivity in ethics I discuss here.  So, in the end, I agree with Bentham and Mill that ethics is something like science, but not for the same reason.

Carnapian pragmatism about ontology

Earlier this summer, I sat in on a couple of sessions of a reading group on ontology, in which one of the texts we examined was Sidelle's argument for essentially Carnap's view.  Carnap thought that the ultimate questions of what things exist depend on how you want to talk about them, and which way of speaking about things was to be preferred was a purely practical question.  It seems such sensible views are on the ascendant, at least if the conference Chalmers reports on is any indication.  Chalmers himself apparently advocates a Carnapian view of ontology, and was apparently not alone at the conference.  If only his views on the philosophy of mind were so reasonable.

The only rival view which I think is anywhere close to being as tenable is universalism, which allows unrestricted mereological composition.  What that means, for the non-philosophers, is that any two things considered together constitute a third thing.  There is a thing which is my left toe plus one of the electrons running through my computer as I type this plus the moon.  No combination of things is too gerrymandered to count as a further thing according to universalism.  Of course, we rarely talk about absurdly gerrymandered things except when giving examples to explain universalism, but I don't know how serious that flaw is.  David Lewis, among the most prominent universalists, explained away this sort of problem by saying that normally we speak with restricted quantifiers; when we talk about what things there are, we're almost always talking about what relevant things there are, so the fact that we wouldn't ordinarily refer to the mereological sum of two apples on a table as a third thing on the table doesn't mean it isn't there, only that we don't normally consider it relevant.

Since there is indepedent evidence that we restrict quantifiers a lot (one of my favorite examples from Lewis:  "all the beer is in the fridge" can frequently be used to say something true, even though it's never been the case that all the beer in the world has been in any particular fridge, because we immediately understand that the 'all' is being restricted to the relevant beer, perhaps the beer brought for the party), I think it's reasonable to appeal to restricted quantifiers to resolve problems.  However, once this move is made, I don't really see a whole lot of difference between the Carnapian view and the universalist view.  Of course, believing that you can adopt whichever view you like is adopting the Carnapian view, so unless there's a difference I'm missing Carnap presently wins this debate for me, but only by a narrow margine.

Evaluating the God Hypothesis

There has been considerable discussion on some of the blogs I frequent of the view of Alex Tabarrok that, for someone who believes in God, doubting evolution is rational.  Pharyngula, among other commentators, correctly points out that the existence of God wouldn't change any of the evidence we have in favor of evolution, so if we had conclusive evidence of God's existence, we ought to believe in both God and evolution.

I suspect that Tabarrok's mistake is an instance of a common error one encounters among those examining theistic hypotheses.  He seems to radically over-estimate the explanatory power of simply postulating God's existence.  The same mistake is made by those who suggest that God is a simpler explanation of any given phenomenon than an alternative scientific explanation.  Unfortunately, God's existence on its own has minimal explanatory power.  In order for "God exists" to explain anything, a supporting theological framework is required; we need theories about the intentions of God, and how those intentions would be fulfilled by the phenomena observed.  Absent a framework which explains why God would want the species we observe, evolution is still the best explanation for why we see the species we do.

The need for the theological framework also ruins the theory that God is a simple explanation.  I do not know of a theological framework of that kind which is remotely adequate to explain the world we observe.  In the absence of an example to examine, it is impossible to judge with confidence whether a theological framework comparable in explanatory power to our best atheological theories would be simpler or more complex.  Still, there's a slight reason for expecting it to be more complex rather than simpler, since it will have to include at least one significant additional entity (God, obviously).

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.