Neurath's Boat

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.

Esoteric Meanings

I've been reading a bit of Leo Strauss recently, as he's supposed to have been such a huge malign influence.  I still haven't gotten far enough to have much original to say about his ideas; so far, I only note that his reading of Plato is careful and clever (which doesn't always equal right, but I'm sure he's right about some of the things he's said in what I've read so far, and wrong about others), while in his reading of 20th century figures he has an annoying habit of making controversial interpretations without a hint of a citation to support them.  I also can't help but find it odd that he seems to consider Heidegger one of the greats of the 20th century, perhaps the greatest philosopher of that time.  Apart from my own feeling that this absurdly overestimates Heidegger, a Jew having such admiration for a Nazi* introduces further strangeness.  Perhaps this is one of the places where one should seek the esoteric meaning intended by Strauss himself, since he is infamous for interpreting other philosophers as having esoteric doctrines hidden beneath their surface claims.

In any event, thinking about Heidegger and esoteric doctrines brought to my mind Carnap's "Overthrow of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language," which I have long thought to have been under-appreciated.  I do not think that the Straussian notion that philosophers sometimes have concealed some of their intentions because of conflicts with political orthodoxy to be absurd (though I question some of the examples attributed to him), and I've long thought Carnap was almost certainly an example of this.  His exceedingly dry, technical, meticulous writing ensured that if he did challenge the political orthodoxy, the challenge would be difficult to find, and more interestingly difficult to respond to, since responding to Carnap with polemic seems so inappropriate, and beating Carnap on technical points is, to put it mildly, challenging.

So, in the "Overthrow", Carnap states that he is going to show that all metaphysics is meaningless.  Metaphysics includes all of value theory.  Thus, it is implied that Carnap can't be engaged in anything like value theory himself; no dangerous value judgments ahead.  In fact, this implication is false, for what we value is heavily influenced by our understanding of the relevant facts, but while Carnap was surely aware of this, he was equally aware that making value judgments explicit usually hinders understanding.

So, all of value theory counts as metaphysics.  What else counts?  In the course of the text, a number of examples get passing references; a word or two a piece.  Only a tiny handful of philosophers are mentioned by name.  Hegel gets passing unfavorable mentions.  Kant gets mentioned a couple of times and Wittgenstein once, perhaps because it is illegal to write philosophy in German without mentioning Kant, and failing to mention Wittgenstein was similarly contrary to the rules of the Vienna circle at the time.  Nothing of substance is said about any of those three.  On the other hand, Descartes gets an unfavorable paragraph, Nietzsche gets an anstonishing favorable paragraph, and Heidegger is the only philosopher to whom multiple pages are devoted, all harshly critical.

As Ayer would later do in Language, Truth, and Logic, Carnap claims that his example of nonsensical metaphysics is chosen at random.  I doubt that Ayer really made his choice randomly; likely he was simply imitating Carnap's conceit, for he was something of a Carnap disciple at the time.  I am quite sure that Carnap's choice was anything but random.  For the explicit purposes of the essay, the example is perfect; it is precisely Carnap's thesis that Heidegger writes about nothing, that his words have no meaning, and to illustrate this, he selects a passage in which Heidegger writes about nothing, the Heideggerian opposition to being.

The other philosopher who gets any attentive criticism at all is Descartes.  His paragraph on Descartes criticizes the cogito, but elsewhere he mentions the defects in ontological arguments, and while he names no names in his discussion of theology, Carnap also devotes considerable space to theological matters.  He presents his distinction between the mythological, metaphysical, and theological views of religion.  The metaphysical interpretations are, of course, meaningless.  The mythological interpretations are empirically testable, and he does not bother to say that they are empirically disconfirmed.  The theological interpretations waver between the other two as convenient, escaping the criticisms of each via a retreat to the other.

Of course, religion is also a source of value judgments, a fact which gets no explicit attention whatever in Carnap's presentation.  He merely emphasizes the factual problems of religion, in such a way as to invite the inference that religion is utterly without value.  His final commentary on metaphysics, with which theology has been linked, further strengthens that reading.  His explicit criticism of metaphysics as an expression of values is that metaphysics is ill-suited to the task, but it is here that I think Carnap is perhaps most disingenuous.  Given what we actually know about Carnap's own values, the alternative interpretation suggests itself that the problem with much metaphysics is that it expresses bad values.

This would help make sense of the puzzling paragraph about Nietzsche.  Again, Carnap's reference to Nietzsche is extremely favorable.  Officially, this is because Nietzsche was never confused as to whether he was advancing values or engaged in factual investigations, but why mention Nietzsche at all if this was his only virtue?  Nietzsche is most famous for criticizing theological values; I suggest that in mentioning Nietzsche favorably, Carnap may be endorsing this famous Nietzschean criticism.

Of course, Heidegger is Carnap's main target, and Heidegger is not normally viewed as much of a theologian.  Thus, if the esoteric message of the "Overthrow" is anti-theological, the metaphysics of Heidegger must be seen as some sort of pseudo-theology, endorsing similarly problematic values by other means.  If this was indeed Carnap's view of Heidegger, he was not alone in developing such a view.  He may, however, have been the first.  The reader will have to judge for herself whether it is a problem for my interpretation of the "Overthrow" as a criticism of Heidegger's values that it was written a few years before Heidegger's infamous "Rector's Address"; this could either be evidence of Carnap's great insight, or evidence that my interpretation involves projection and hindsight.

* It is unfortunate how the overuse of Hitler and Nazi metaphors in hyperbole makes it difficult to talk about early 20th century figures who were Nazis in non-metaphorical senses.  Admittedly, Heidegger was not without his disagreements with Nazi orthodoxy (he resigned as rector of the University of Heidelberg Freiberg in protest at being ordered to fire Jewish professors), but he was committed to National Socialism; his admiration for the party continued after the war, when it had ceased to be expedient.

The politics of objectivity IV

The last topic I want to look at is value freedom.  There is a long tradition in the social sciences, as in science generally, of excluding value judgments from our investigations.  In Miller's example, it would be impermissible to explain the fall of the Stuarts by appealing to Stuart injustice (though widespread belief that the Stuarts were unjust could figure in an explanation of the fall of the Stuarts).  Moral features are not to be used in explanations.  Miller identifies Max Weber as the originator of this view in the social sciences; this is surely oversimplified, as the view is surely implicit in earlier theorists than Weber (Adam Smith, anyone?) and adopted by people not much directly influenced by Weber, but Weber is of course pretty huge in the history of the social sciences, and did emphasize this point.

This is not to say that evaluations should play no role in investigations.  Obviously, values determine what scientists will choose to investigate, and it would be absurd to try to do science without allowing values to play that role.  Investigating the prevalence and spread of some terrible disease, or the responses to stress of some material commonly used in constructing human artifacts, not only does but should get vastly more attention than ever more precise measurements of exactly how many grains of sand there are in a particular cubic meter of a Saharan sand dune (to borrow an example from Ernest Sosa).  What other than human values makes the former more worthy than the latter?

However, it is very important, according to the tradition, not to allow values to lead one to cook the books, as it were.  If a scientist feels it would be good to get a particular result, for some reason, and the data doesn't seem to point that way, fudging is generally considered unacceptable.  Richard Miller suggests that this is too closed-minded.  His example involves anthropological investigations of non-white cultures around a century ago.

According to Miller, some anthropologists of the time were highly motivated by opposition to then nearly universal and unquestioned racism, and actively searched for evidence of cultural sophistication in non-white cultures in order to provide a counter to racist inclinations.  It's important to be very careful about what this shows; if they set themselves the task of looking for sophisticated cultural patterns, that's perfectly compatible with Weberian standards.  They only violated the rules if they did or would have fudged the results if their data had turned out to be negative.  Did they do this, and should they have?

On the empirical question of whether they did, I have no clue.  On whether they should have, I say absolutely not.  It undermines their credibility.  Creating an atmosphere in which fudging data is tolerated for any reason undermines science generally.  Further, tolerance for any kind of cheating is going to benefit the entrenched interests more; there are more people willing to cheat for them.  A zero-tolerance policy on cheating immunizes those opposed to the entrenched power structure from being criticized for cheating (sure, their critics will find other ways, or just lie, but while it's idealistic to suppose the truth always wins out, it is an advantage to have it on your side), and also avoids charges of hypocrisy when the radical critic attacks research favoring the status quo for failing to live up to standards of objectivity.

In Miller's own example, simply setting the question, simply deciding to investigate the cultural richness of non-white cultures, already helps the cause of radical politics.  To bring this back to my positivist revival theme, the positivists favored meticulous value-freedom in the social sciences and very careful attention to logic and methodological issues at a time when the social sciences were dominated by Marxists.  Those of Marxist inclination would, of course, be inclined to investigate how the existing capitalist ruling classes maintained power, what conditions were actually like for the poor, what obstacles existed to the poor improving their circumstances, and so forth.  Objectively investigating questions like that would naturally produce results which would be of benefit to those engaged in radical politics.  Again, injecting bias into the investigation beyond this choice of subjects would undermine the benefits of doing carefully chosen objective investigations.  So it seems to me that the positivists were probably taking the optimal stance from the point of view of advancing their radical political agendas in emphasizing objective science and careful methodology.

Of course, just as encouraging particular lines of research can advance political agendas, so can discouraging lines of research.  Furthermore, encouraging one line of research can ipso facto end up discouraging other lines, since the resources available for research are limited.  So, for example, the radical critique Miller makes of contemporary economics, that its obsession with things like GDP growth is politically problematic, seems to me to be likely well founded.  Injecting bias into the investigation of economic problems is not the solution, though; the solution is to find ways to encourage unbiased investigation of more relevant phenomena.

The politics of objectivity III

Richard Miller also condemns a form of reductionism he calls methodological individualism.  This is the doctrine that all group behavior can be reduced to the behavior of individuals.  In one sense, I think individualist reductionism has to be right; surely groups can only do things via individuals doing things.  This does not, however, mean that there is no value in studying groups as such, and Miller thinks methodological individualism involves a stronger form of reductionism which not only says group talk can be reduced, but largely advocated abolishing group talk.

One of Miller's examples of what's wrong with methodological individualism involves attitudes toward slavery in the American South.  He claims that around 1820, there was a dramatic change in such attitudes.  Prior to that point, there was a widespread feeling that slavery was a problematic institution, perhaps necessary for now but something that would eventually die out.  From 1820 on, the southerners became much more inclined to think that slavery was actually a good thing, because it exerted a civilizing influence on the blacks.

Miller argues that this shift occurred because of technological changes; the cotton gin made a form of slavery-based agriculture extremely profitable.  However, of course none of the southern slave owners would have admitted that this was their motive, and Miller suggests that there is no reason to think they were being disingenuous in giving other motives.  Miller concludes that understanding what happened requires looking at the interests of the slave-owning class, rather than focusing on the motives of individual actors.

I find this particular argument stunningly weak, all the more annoying for the fact that I happen to agree with the conclusion.  Economists, surely the worst offenders when it comes to methodological individualism, do not in any way require that the self-interested motives of the agents they hypothesize be consciously pursued.  They don't care about psychology.  And analysis in terms of the self-interest of agents, with self-interest largely inferred on the basis of what people actually pursue, has a good record of success in providing economic explanations.  It is not at all obvious that this pattern of individualist explanation is not adequate to the case Miller describes.  You're welcome to read his actual work, of course, but I don't recall him including any additional detail in the case which would block this response.

Nonetheless, there are clearly anti-individualist theories (not necessarily non-reductivist, but theories that insist on examining groups as groups).  No doubt they are the kinds of theories Miller is interested in.  It is overwhelmingly plausible that the upper classes have class consciousness, and always have had.  Plato thought so.  Marx (obviously) thought so.  Nietzsche thought so.  Adam Smith even thought so.  Pretty much every historian I'm aware of thought so.  The explicit writings of the upper classes themselves support the hypothesis that some kind of group loyalty is an important motive in the behavior of members of the upper classes.  Really anybody who isn't a political libertarian seems to have noticed this.

It is also arguable that the lower classes have often had class consciousness, and of course Marxists of Miller's type would tend to argue that part of the reason modern capitalist institutions get away with so much inequality is because they do a good job of undermining the class consciousness of the lower classes, fragmenting them into mutually hostile groups.

It is quite plausible that any group which is successful and powerful must have mechanisms for encouraging group loyalty, various rewards for supporting the club and punishments for betrayals of the group.  While investigating exactly what those mechanisms are is, of course, a fascinating project in itself, for an old, well-entrenched group, they're likely to be quite diverse and complicated.  Thus, for some purposes it may be more useful to just study the group, noting that it engages in purposeful behavior and that the interests of the group sometimes explain the behavior of individuals more perspicuously than trying to tease out all the little incentives that cause a particular individual to act in the group's interest in a particular case.

This pattern of explanation again particularly makes sense for powerful groups that are effective at perpetuating themselves, and so it seems natural that this form of explanation should work better for ruling classes than for lower classes (which seems to be the pattern in historical explanations).  Still, whether this sort of group-based approach to explanation is overall desirable is clearly an empirical question.  I'm inclined to think this form of explanation probably is desirable, but Miller's example, and his discussion of it, are woefully inadequate to establishing that fact.  Much more wide-reaching investigation, a much greater variety of examples, and ideally examination of a variety of disciplines would be needed to establish that claim.

Which, incidentally, brings up a quick bleg.  Anybody know of any good recent work that's been done in this area?  I'm sure somebody must have a better discussion of these issues than Miller.

The politics of objectivity II

I mentioned in my previous post on this topic that Richard Miller was one of my foes on the issue of politics and objectivity.  He discusses the issues in this book, among other places.  Three dogmas of the social sciences which Miller sets out to slay are the ideal of value freedom (most relevant for our purposes), methodological individualism, and the Hempelian covering-law model of explanation.

To take them in reverse order, Miller rejects the Hempelian covering-law model of explanation in favor of a causal model.  Hempel's model is, uncontroversially, quite oversimplified and does not work in many cases.  Many of us still think it's a useful model, and that one of the best ways of proceeding is to describe this model, describe its problems, and try to understand specific cases in the philosophy of science by applying the model and keeping alert to the known ways it can break down (many introductory philosophy of science books endorse essentially this approach, either openly or implicitly in their practice).  Miller's criticisms are actually a lot weaker than the standard set.

He complains that the covering-law model does not account for the fact that an explanation may be judged satisfactory even if there's no very general law that would account for it.  In one of his examples, he notes that a historian may successfully explain a counter-revolutionary uprising in one region of 18th century France by appealing to a clerical monopoly on access to outside sources of information, even if such a clerical monopoly on outside information did not produce counter-revolutionary uprisings in 9th century Japan.  Conversely, he notes that an explanation may be unsatisfactory even if there is a law that would account for it.  Though being appointed by doddering old coots of heads of state is reliably connected with people becoming heads of government, that Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg would, according to Miller, be an inadequate explanation of his seizure of power if the Nazi's support among the German economic elite would have resulted in their eventually seizing power regardless of Hindenburg's actions.

To summarize this argument of Miller's, sometimes an explanation is acceptable even if it's not very good because it's the best we can do, and sometimes a good explanation isn't good enough because it's possible to do better.  How these obvious points are supposed to show that we need Miller's causal account of explanation (which I won't bother to try to summarize, as it's never stated very clearly) rather than Hempel's model is, to put it mildly, unclear.

The politics of objectivity

So, the dissertation has been making massive progress recently.  I'm feeling very good about the current draft.  It needs some revisions; more cites, a few little fixes, but everything feels like it hangs together nicely in a lovely grand pattern of argument.  I'm feeling so good about it I not only anticipate defending it within a few months, but am contemplating publication prospects.

I do feel, however, that there is one place where the draft is extremely thin, and that is in the realm of political/ethical consequences of the views advocated.  I don't want to make that a major theme of the work at all, and it's probably good to have it be pretty minor for dissertation purposes, but I also think that if I do try to get it published, including slightly more than a passing mention of politics could help sex it up a bit.

So, anyway, some of my biggest philosophical heroes, the boys of the Vienna Circle, idealized and very nearly fetishized objectivity.  They called themselves "logical" postivists because they were obsessed with the new logic, and its potential to help produce truly universal intellectual standards.  They were also obsessed with science (many were scientists) because the dramatic results obtained by scientific methods suggested to them that science had good intellectual standards.

They were also a bunch of commies.  Well, not all of them, but certainly two of the three leaders, Carnap and Neurath, were very far left.  These two facts may seem to be unrelated, but to them, they were not.  First, the Logical Positivists saw truly universal standards as inherently democratic and egalitarian; as defining good inquiry in a way which made it possible for anybody to employ them.  Second, in the context of the time, the social sciences were dominated by Marxist notions.  Marx may not have been a very good scientist, but he stressed heavily the notion that social science should be scientific, in his rhetoric if not in his practice.  Comte, of course, the source of the name "Positivism", equally emphasized the use of science in looking at society.  Since the social sciences were generally left-wing, providing standards which the social sciences could attempt to live up to created the potential that the left-wing results of the social science investigations could be defended as objective, thus hopefully increasing their authority.

In more recent times, there has been a sharp divorce between the radical left and the idealizers of science.  Science and its ideals of objectivity are often portrayed by the radical leftists as tools of oppression, entrenching the values of the privileged Western elite.  The positivists themselves are often accused of having done this (almost always by people who are completely unaware of the actual positivist attitudes toward privilege; they could argue that the positivists tried and failed to be radical, but most of the critics don't actually know positivism well enough to be remotely aware the positivists tried).

In this dispute, I'm almost entirely on the side of the old fashioned positivists.  My dissertation defends the ideas of a unified science and methodological absolutism about truth (though stressing that both are worthy for purely pragmatic reasons, not because of any connection to the fundamental nature of reality).  I would like to include a bit about how the politically motivated criticisms of such ideals are especially misguided, but I'm not quite sure how to do it yet.  Anybody have any good recommendations for work on the political consequences of ideals of scientific objectivity?  I guess recent stuff I have looked at closely which was on my side included Louise Antony's "Quine as Feminist", and I've read some of Richard Miller's stuff for the anti-objectivity side.

Early influences

One of the blogs I read raised the topic of who one's earliest influences in philosophy were.  Cohen's answer reminded me that I really didn't get started looking at philosophy until college.  My intro to philosophy class looked at Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, and I thought they were both brilliant.  I still think that Hume was largely right, though I now find Ayer's version of positivism little more than a caricature of the real thing.

"Theories and Their Interpretations"

I just heard this paper by Larry Sklar.  Among the topics he raised was the issue of what he called "quasi-positivist" intepretations of certain kinds of puzzling scientific results.  This is the tendency of physicists, confronted with a situation where multiple seemingly quite different interpretations of a theory produce identical theoretical results, to retreat to a claim that the theory is really about those results, and so that the seemingly different interpretations amount to the same thing.

Sklar gives several examples of scientists doing this in practice, and most interestingly from my perspective he suggests that this might provide a different perspective on traditional positivism.  If positivism is viewed as a generalization of all these partial quasi-positivist projects, then Sklar suggests that some of the traditional objections to positivism will seem to be missing the point.

Since quite a number of the leading positivists were physicists (Mach, Schlick, Carnap, a good candidate for a list of the three most influential positivists, is also a list of two physicists and one person whose study of physics got to the Ph.D. candidate phase), and Sklar's examples are all drawn from physics, this interpretation may have the further virtue of reflecting what the positivists were really up to.  That would certainly explain why they always did seem to think their critics were missing the point (that was quite explicitly Carnap's attitude to the Quinean criticisms).