Neurath's Boat

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!"

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.

McCarthy and Positivism

I've been reading the Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism, and finding quite a lot of interest.  It is generally material I was vaguely aware of, having been interested in this area for some time, but there's a lot of detailed evidence which I'm very glad to now have available.  Thus, for example, I had long thought that the general lack of awareness in the United States of the rather far left political leanings of the Logical Positivists was probably partly a result of their tending not to emphasize such leanings during the early years of the Cold War, especially since they had the added vulnerability of being immigrants.  But George A. Reisch has a paper on that topic in this volume which actually cites the FBI files on some of the leading positivists.  Apparently, both Carnap and Philipp Frank were targets of J. Edgar Hoover's overzealous investigations.

Reisch further suggests, and I certainly agree, that this had a terrible effect on the movement.  The positivists, to varying degrees,* attempted to avoid suspicion by shifting to a very austere, apolitical picture of science, totally disconnected from human values.  Such a view is obviously untenable, and made the positivists much more vulnerable to the sort of criticisms Kuhn and others would make in the 60s and later.

* According to Reisch, Feigl was especially guilty of this, while Carnap stuck to his principles far more than most of the other positivists.

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.

GF-A's bleg

This looks like a very interesting book to me.  I was, sadly, not able to find much by way of problems (though the sentence of Heidegger's which Carnap made fun of was "Das Nichts selbst nichtet;" the manuscript mysteriously and consistently omits the "selbst").  I did find the very end rather rushed and under-argued; it occurred to me that surely Carnap and Neurath could admit that any statement or set of statements could be incorporated into unified science, but claim that pragmatic concerns made it undesirable to do so with metaphysical claims.  This makes the criterion less forceful, of course, but it is not clear that it makes the criterion entirely worthless.  In any event, I found the manuscript quite interesting and plausible, and it made me think I should look at some of the material in the Carnap archives at some point.  I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of analytic philosophy.

Projects and translations

It's good to hear that I am not alone in some of my wacky views.  For far too many years, I've had a project on the influence of Nietzsche on the positivists in the back of my mind, but my feeling that I'd need to work on my German and that I had too much else that was of higher priority held me back.  With the dissertation about done, I need new projects, though, and I also feel that it is long past time I did work on my German.  Anyway, scholarly investigation of the Logical Positivists is getting trendy; I wish I'd gotten in on the ground floor of the trend, but I'd better exploit it before it goes away again.  I suppose another obstacle is that, as Jim noted, some of Nietzsche's influence on the Logical Positivists was surely indirect, via Wittgenstein, and my enthusiasm for serious investigation of Wittgenstein is not so great.

Jim's comment also cited Carnap's paper under the standard English translation, as "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language."  This is in no way misleading regarding Carnap's purpose, but "Ueberwindung," the first word of Carnap's original German title, was one of Nietzsche's favorite words, and I don't know if it's ever rendered as "elimination" in any Nietzsche translation; Kaufmann usually (always?) uses "overcoming."  That's why I suggested that the title was somewhat Nietzschean, a fact obscured in the standard translation.  Issues like that are among the reasons I really do need to examine the sources in the original German for my project.

In any event, the recent scholarly work has noted that pre-Nazi German philosophy involved considerable mutual influence among the competing schools.  The sharp analytic/continental divide was greatly helped by the way the leading analytic figures on the continent almost all fled the rise of the Nazis, producing a geographical divide between the schools which served to help heighten their distance in less literal respects.  Thus, it is probably in general misleading to impose the analytic/continental distinction on pre-Nazi philosophers, and if I'm right about Nietzsche being a major influence on the Logical Positivists, that would be further evidence of the untenability of the division for philosophers prior to the mid-20th century, since Nietzsche is standardly associated with the continental school.

More on norms

It has been suggested in comments on my previous post that an evolutionary theory of norms is "purely descriptive," at most a basis for an error theory.  There is certainly something to that.  An evolutionary theory is, or at least should be, far closer to a skeptical theory than to a typical magical theory.  Evolution has no authority over us; discovering that we have evolved to have this or that concern does not provide an additional reason for having that concern, it only explains why we have it.

Even the explanation of why we have it can get very complicated on the evolutionary story, and the evolutionary story is quite well able to explain how we could come to have goals which are counter-productive from the point of view of survival or reproduction.  Even apart from the possibility that some of our systems might be defective (in the sense of being unsuited to their evolved functions), or appropriate for a different environment than that we presently occupy, there is the further point that there are many levels of intermediate functions between the goals of DNA and our goals.  That at one level of analysis we pursue goal D because of its connection to the pursuit of goal C at a deeper level, and that this in turn is because of goal B at a still deeper level, which is because of goal A at the next level after that, in no way means that goal D can be collapsed to goal A, and goal D may indeed be quite different from goal A.  With enough levels, there may be Ds which are consistently opposed to the original As.  At some point, if too many of the higher level goals are too poorly coordinated with the goals of the DNA, that is going to produce the extinction of the species, but that sounds to me like a decent enough description of what often happens to cause species to go extinct.

Of course, it is wildly implausible anyway that evolution would tell us what we should value.  Such suggestions are far more often found in straw evolution theorists constructed by magical theorists (whose theories do tend to claim to be able to tell us what we should value, and who imagine any theory must be trying to do the same) than in any claims made by actual advocates of evolutionary theories of normativity.

It seems to me that the very thin, perhaps purely descriptive (if there really is any such thing as being purely descriptive), account of normativity from evolution is nonetheless sufficient for the only critical purpose, making our beliefs and desires intelligible.  For anything more, I am quite in sympathy with much of the non-cognitivist and error-theoretic tradition.  Nothing has the sort of authority over us that most magical theories claim to have.  While some norms can be justified instrumentally, of course, on the basis of other norms, at some point it stops making sense to ask why a norm has force for us, and this is not because the force is somehow inherent.  Rather, we either care about the norm, or we don't; if we care, we don't need a further reason, as our concern is motivation enough, and if we don't care, that norm has no power over us.  Even some who otherwise appear to be magical theorists seem to recognize this.  Plato doesn't seem to believe that there is any way to reach a Callicles.

Who is "the positivist?"

I am continuing to use the break afforded by Thanksgiving to re-read Kuhn, partly in response to a recent comment on the blog, but more in response to a friend who protested enthusiastically when I recently dissed Kuhn.  Final conclusions await my completion of my re-reading, but I note that Kuhn makes reference to the philosophy of science of "the positivist."  I am unable to determine exactly who this character is.  It is certainly not Carnap, or Neurath, or Schlick for that matter.  Even Ayer doesn't fit very well, though he may be the closest fit (if so, the allusion to "early Logical Positivism" is quite inappropriate, of course).  Rather, "the positivist" seems to be some horrible Frankenstein's monster, constructed by blending together mostly the worst elements of Schlick, Popper, and Ayer (Popper, of course, not even having been a positivist).

So, one preliminary criticism of Kuhn; he seems determined to impose a Whiggish, progressive narrative on the history of the philosophy of science, as evolving from a positivist conception toward the sort of philosophy of science he favors, which seems to fit the history of the philosophy of science even more poorly than he claims such views fit the history of science.

Was Carnap a hypocrite?

So, having gotten an ordinary political post out of the way, back to obscure philosophy.  To recap, Carnap chose Heidegger as the primary target of his scathing polemic because he believed Heidegger's obscurantism provided cover to reactionary values which he abhorred.  However, Carnap made no mention of the content of Heidegger's values, or his own, in the course of his attack; he discussed only the logical mistakes of which he believed Heidegger to be guilty.  A friend has suggested that in failing to make clear his own political commitments and their connection to his choice of target, Carnap was himself being less than forthcoming, and that one might take this as having been dishonest, perhaps even obscurantist.

I guess I think that Carnap's failure to mention his own political commitments was not a problem, as he believed his criticisms of Heidegger to be legitimate (and I tend to agree); he chose to direct those criticisms at Heidegger specifically because of Heidegger's importance and concerns about the political implications of his views, but he really did think the mistakes he complained of in Heidegger were mistakes.  Perhaps his mention of Nietzsche is also relevant here.  Of course Nietzsche was no Nazi, but Heidegger hadn't joined the Nazis yet either when Carnap first attacked him, and Nietzsche's values could not have been terribly congenial to Carnap's communitarian ideals.  But Carnap goes out of his way to note that Nietzsche did not commit the errors of Heidegger.  Since this can't be because Carnap agreed with Nietzsche's values (he didn't), the only explanation is that Carnap thought (correctly again, in my view) that Nietzsche actually didn't commit the errors of Heidegger, and he was strict about only making accurate criticisms.  Being strict about accuracy does not totally immunize you from concerns about partisan bias, of course, but I do think it probably discharges you from the obligation to make your partisan commitments explicit in all your writings.

This is certainly an issue on which I'm very curious about what others think.

Expressivism, Kantian views, and A Priori Ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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