Neurath's Boat

Honesty and Truth

When there's a view that David K. Lewis held that seems wrong to me, I always feel a little uncomfortable. In the past I've said that this is because he was much smarter than I am, so that it always seems more likely that I'm missing something than that he missed something. But there must be more to it than that. Even as arrogant as I am, and reluctant as I am to admit it, I recognize that there have been and continue to be plenty of other people smarter than me.

Of course, for distant past examples, it's easy to diagnose their mistakes as being a result of their not knowing things which have been discovered since their time. I have little hesitation ascribing errors to Plato, or even relatively more recent figures like Hume. But there are more recent very smart figures that I still don't think about the way I think about Lewis. I have various excuses for why I shouldn't believe what they say, even if they were smarter than me. They have various biases, it seems clear that they would be willing to exaggerate or understate some things in order to push agendas they think are important. I'm pretty sure they'd lie to themselves in service of their agendas, as so many people do, and indeed there's plenty of research suggesting that one of the things being smarter especially consistently makes people better at is rationalization. So while I obviously recognize that there's a danger that I'm rationalizing myself when I dismiss smart people who disagree with me, the fact is that these reasons to be skeptical are often true. So while of course I always try to be aware that I could be wrong about any number of things, one smart person disagreeing with me, even one person I admit is probably smarter than me, doesn't really count for all that much.

But Lewis wasn't just known for his vast intelligence and philosophical talent. It's perhaps less well known, but still an established and well-deserved aspect of his reputation that he was honest to an extraordinary degree. I'm sure a student of his I knew was exaggerating when he described Lewis as literally incapable of lying, but my personal experience with him and every other aspect of his professional reputation that I'm aware of suggest that if this was an exaggeration, it was a very small one. And this means many of my excuses don't work. I don't think Lewis would deliberately lie or shade the truth to his readers because he thought it would be more beneficial to some cause he believed in. I mostly don't think he would even do it accidentally, because he was lying to himself; I can't imagine that there is anyone who never lies to themselves, but Lewis also seems to be someone who did that far less than is normal. So when Lewis said or wrote something, most of my usual excuses sound hollow; someone who is smarter than me and understands philosophical issues better than me, who seems to even be less easily confused or misled by bias than me, has come to this conclusion, and so if it seems wrong to me, the most likely explanation in the Lewis cases still kind of seems to be that I'm the one who's missing something.

Of course, I usually don't disagree with Lewis, so it's not as if this is something that's causing me constant anxiety or anything. I suppose I thought this was worth posting, because while of course plenty have argued for the value of honesty, I have some inclination to think that it is more often underestimated than overestimated. So I thought I would mention my theory about the role it played in making someone my top choice for greatest philosopher of the late 20th century.

Overcoming Metaphysics

With so much content available from free sources these days, I don't really use textbooks any more, instead providing my students with electronic copies of various readings that I've been able to locate in libraries or on the web.  Still, not quite everything I'd want is so easily available.  There is no copy of Carnap's "Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language" on the web that I've been able to locate, so I wrote my own translation to use when I wished to assign it.  The link is here.

In addition to the desire to make a copy available to my students at a reasonable rate, I also wasn't entirely happy with the standard English translation (Arthur Pap's, in Logical Positivism).  My biggest disagreement is with the first word of the title (Pap has "Elimination" rather than "Overcoming;" Carnap surely used one of Nietzsche's favorite words on purpose), but there are a few other differences in my version.  One that may or may not be significant is that I have made certain to use "sense" or a word containing "sense" every time Carnap uses "Sinn" or a word containing "sinn", and similarly to always use "meaning" for "Bedeutung."  Carnap seems to consistently refer to the "Sinn" of sentences and the "Bedeutung" of individual nouns.  I'm not quite sure why he does this, but there may be some significance to it, perhaps connected to the Fregean distinction since Carnap was a student of Frege's.  Pap often uses "meaning" for "Sinn", though in fairness to Pap Carnap himself would frequently use "meaning" in similar contexts in his later English writings.

Updated; link fixed, and the comments now have a link to a copy of Pap's translation that turns out to be available online after all.

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!"

Greatest Philosopher of the 20th Century

Leiter's been running a poll, and Brian Weatherson has some commentary.  He voted for Lewis, and I voted for Carnap, but his post is about why Russell has been doing so well.  I'm actually a little surprised that Lewis is doing so well, though I think he's a perfectly defensible choice.

It seems that part of the reason Weatherson is surprised at Russell's showing is that the project of Principia Mathematica ended in failure.  I find that very difficult to evaluate.  It made contributions to the state of modern logic, and I guess I tend to think that modern logic is a truly enormous philosophical achievement.  However, it's difficult to know how to assign credit for it.  It's amazing how much was already set out by Frege; most of what comes afterward could be seen as just clarifying and patching a few mistakes.  But clarifying and patching mistakes is perhaps not trivial in this area.  How much did Principia move beyond Frege?  It did, I suppose, have some mistakes of its own.  I'm not sure exactly how to evaluate it, but I am skeptical that the failure of its official stated project is a particularly important criterion.

I suppose there are similar issues with Carnap.  I rank him highly both because of his contributions to the unfolding story of modern logic, and because I think his philosophical attitude toward logic was entirely correct.  But how much did he really add, as opposed to clarifying?  And how much did he clarify, if, as I tend to think, so many of his contemporaries and near successors misunderstood him?

Maybe that's an argument for Weatherson's choice.  There is no question that Lewis clarified many things.  But I guess I still think the same is true of Carnap, and of Russell, and that perhaps it is only less obvious for them because what they worked on was so unclear before they got to it that even quite substantial progress still left plenty of murk.

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.

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.

Another important day

I had to be told by Richard Zach that today was the birthday of two of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, possibly the two greatest, Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand Russell.  They also died the same year, a year which would have been an unmitigated tragedy for philosophy were it not for my own birth just before it ended.

The most important work of both philosophers was in philosophical logic, and while logic continues to be a going concern with fascinating new work being done all the time, I tend to think that some of the most important lessons of the early 20th century explosion in logic are being forgotten.  Both more and less can be done with logic than earlier philosophers naively thought, yet modern philosophers, even having all taken their mandatory graduate courses in symbolic logic, continue to try to do what cannot be done, or insist on the impossibility of what has already been done.

Logical symbols can be made to represent anything.  Really anything.  There's no right way to interpret a set of logical symbols; their interpretation is utterly up to us, and if even with that freedom we find it tricky to match up what we're trying to interpret with a given set of symbols, we can just invent more.  Other sets of symbols, with seemingly different sets of rules, can do exactly the same thing as the sets of symbols we're gotten in the habit of using.  Proofs of this are plentiful.

Thus, logic cannot reveal to us the structure of any part of reality.  Completely different logical structures can represent the same reality exactly as well.  That is the sense in which logic does less than some had hoped; there is no legitimate a priori metaphysics.  But there are consequences of this fact.  The extent to which logic can't capture the structure of reality is the extent to which we can't represent the structure of reality; this limitation of logic is not an invitation for "semantic glue" to stick our words to the things they represent, in Putnam's mocking phrase, nor for anything else extra-logical to do the job.  Logic is the story of structures.  If logic says two structures which seem completely different amount to the same thing, then they really do, and one's intuition that one structure is correctly representing reality while the other isn't simply has to be an illusion.  Again, there are in many cases proofs of the equivalence of intuitively different structures, proofs whose validity nobody questions.  If their validity isn't questioned, the consequences must be accepted.

A tiny example of how the great logicians were more perceptive on that point than many since; Carnap used "=" for the biconditional in his Logical Syntax of Language.  Most philosophers since have not done so, because of an intuition that "=" should be used to represent the things on either side being the same, in a stronger sense than logical equivalence.  But logical equivalence means possession of the same truth value, and truth values are ultimately what complete wffs represent.  In what sense are "1+1" and "2" the "same thing" in "1+1=2," such that the left and right formulas in "(p->p)=(pv~p)" are not the same thing?  Certainly some such difference could be built into a system, but in the standard interpretation it is not.  Even logicians seem to attribute spooky properties to identity these days, when they of all people should know better (some of Kripke's work is afflicted with this problem).

Anyway, enough ranting.  Some of us are trying not to forget the lessons of the new logic, and we should celebrate those who helped discover those lessons.  Happy May 18th!