The Web of Belief

Mes Amis--

2011-07-28T21:35:00.001-04:00

The Web of Belief is officially closed. Let it stand as a record of the intellectual passages of the Tufts community, 2004-2007.

--your moderator.

Burge on Perceptual Systems and Veridicality (Part 2)

2007-11-03T11:01:00.001-04:00

In my previous post, I attributed to Burge the thesis that that the perceptual system, though a product of evolution by natural selection, has a representational function that is apriori connected to normative notion of veridicality. However, this prima facie seems like a problematic claim since natural selection is not itself concerned with normative notions, such as veridicality, and so one may wonder how our perceputal systems come to acquire such a normative concern. In this post, I will attempt to articulate one way this objection may be further unpacked.

According to Darwinian assumption, we have the particular perceptual systems that we do because they promoted the biological fitness of our ancestors. However, this seems to present a problem for Burge’s account. If we accept his insistence that a system which is unreliable may still promote biological fitness, then we seem faced with the following question: what reason do we have to think that our perceptual systems are reliable? In other words, there appears to be a mismatch between the practical mechanism (i.e., natural selection) that produced the perceptual system and the normative role the system is supposed to play. This seems to open up a lacuna between what the perceptual system has been “designed” for—namely, to promote biological fitness—and its representational function—namely, to arrive at true beliefs.

The above objection may be seen as a challenge to Burge’s claim that there is an apriori connection between the representational function of the perceptual system and verdicality. Given that these representational systems were produced by natural selection, it is plausible that they should be apriori connected to biological fitness. However, since natural selection is not apriori concerned with normative concerns, such as veridicality, it remains unclear why we should think that something natural selection has produced would be so concerned. The claim that the perceptual system may be apriori connected to veridicality presupposes that a bodily system may be apriori connected to a goal or function for which it was not “designed”. But why should we accept such an assumption?

Given Burge’s teleological framework, it would seem at least plausible that there is an apriori connection between the cardiac system and pumping blood or the respiratory system and respiration. After all, in both cases, the goals of the systems coincide perfectly with what the systems were designed for by natural selection. But since our perceptual systems were not designed by natural selection to represent veridically (given CIT), then why should we think that there is an apriori connection between the perceptual system and veridicality. Burge’s teleological framework does not seem to offer us a clear answer.

In response to the objection limned above, it may be argued that it is simply part of our concept of what it means for something to be a representational system that it aim at veridicality. But that simply pushes the present line of questioning one step back. The question now becomes, what reason do we have to think that the perceptual system is a representational system in the above (strong) sense? As we noted earlier, natural selection did not design it to be such a system. So what grounds do we have for taking it as such? Whereas before it was suggested that there is a lacuna between a system being a representational system and it aiming to represent veridically, the lacuna is now located between a system being a perceptual system and it being a representational system, in the robust sense just described.

Burge may respond by pointing out that (1) we regularly presuppose that our perceptual system is a representational system and (2) that psychologist often make this very assumption in the course of their theorising. However, it is not immediately clear why (1) or (2) should make any difference. Since we (including psychologists) did not design our own perceptual systems or those of other creatures, we hardly seem entitled to decide what type of system the perceptual system is by definitional fiat. To do so, without supporting argumentation, would be like simply stipulating that in addition to its circulatory function, the cardiovascular system fulfils some other function for which it was not designed. Such a stipulation would hardly seem warranted, even if it would allow us to fulfil particular philosophical desiderata. At the very least, the point would require substantive argumentation. But stipulation is a far cry from argumentation and it is not clear that Burge has offered any cogent argument in defence of the aforementioned proposal.

Burge on Perceptual Systems and Veridicality

2007-10-23T21:16:00.001-04:00

Often when a philosopher says that something is obviously true or true apriori, it is a good idea to pause and pay careful attention. Frequently, such claims conceal many weighty assumptions; assumptions one would do well to make explicit. In his essay “Perceptual Entitlement”, Tyler Burge takes as one of his fundamental tenets the claim that there is an apriori connection between the representational function of an organism’s perceptual system and verdicality:

I take it as obvious that it is known apriori that the central representational function of a perceptual system is to perceive. This function is apriori associated with a representational function (to represent veridically).

This, of course, does not amount to the implausible claim that an organism’s perceptual system is always successful in carrying out its representational function—i.e., that perceptual experiences are always veridical. Rather, Burge is making the highly plausible claim that it is a conceptual truth that an organism’s representational system aims at veridicality. However, as plausible as this claim is, I believe more needs to be said in its defence. In this post I will summarise Burge's views and in my next post on this topic I will present one objection to Burge's account.

The claim that representational systems aim at veridicality is central to Burge’s account, which is unapologetically teleological:

I assume that there are certain functions, ends, and commitments, which bring with them goods for animals and their subsystems….Many ends, goals, and functions can be established as such on biological grounds. I take it that survival, at least long enough to have offspring or to fulfil some other biologically basic functions, is an end for all animals—an end that can be established biologically.

I will refer to the practical and/or biological functions of a particular system, such as promoting survival and the ability to pass on one’s genes, as biological fitness. It is widely agreed that animals and their subsystems were all “designed” by natural selection. I will refer to this claim as the Darwinian assumption.

Burge points out that biological fitness is not the only type of end an organism or subsystem may have. Specifically, when it comes to the perceptual subsystems of higher animals, Burge distinguishes between the practical function of the system and its epistemic function. The former has to do with the perceptual system’s contribution to the overall goal of the organism—namely, biological fitness. However, the latter has to do with the perceptual system’s representational function—namely, to represent veridically—and the role this function plays in achieving the supreme epistemic end of forming true beliefs.

Burge impugns attempts to reduce the epistemic and representational function of the perceptual system to the practical or biological: There are those who ignore or attempt to explain away the representational functions of perceptual and belief forming systems. They see biological or practical functions as the only relevant ones. The good of belief is judged purely relative to such functions. I think such views are clearly mistaken. Burge acknowledges that there may be a “non-accidental” connection between a system’s practical and representational functions.” Typically, a system that represents the world veridically (i.e., the epistemic function) also promotes biological fitness (i.e., the practical function). However, Burge points out that “being true is not in general being useful.” Moreover, it is at least conceivable that a system that regularly gave rise to false beliefs may nevertheless promote biological fitness. Burge cites the example of rabbits, whose representation of “danger” he describes as highly unreliable “because of a dominance of false positives.” In the rabbit case, it prima facie seems as though natural selection has favoured representational systems that are unreliable.

If Burge’s assessment of the representation of danger in rabbits is correct, then we have good empirical evidence to suggest that a creature with an unreliable perceptual system may nevertheless be biologically fit. While I agree with the empirical claim, about which I will have more to say later, for the time being I wish to make a weaker claim. I wish to suggest that it is at least possible that a system may promote biological fitness even though it is not reliable (in the sense of representing veridically). In other words, even if it were to turn out that no creatures on earth were biologically fit despite being unreliable, there is certainly some possible world in which this is the case. Thus, at the very least we should be able to endorse the claim that there is no necessary connection between a system promoting biological fitness and aiming after veridicality. I will refer to this claim as the conceptual independence thesis (or CIT). Since all actualities are necessarily possibilities, but not all possibilities are necessarily actualities, CIT is significantly weaker than the position Burge himself seems to defend, the latter relying as it does on actual real-life examples. Consequently, CIT is a fortiori a claim Burge would endorse.

In my next post, I will attempt to show that CIT, when combined other claims Burge makes, presents a challenge to Burge's claim that there is an apriori connection between the representational function of an organism's perceptual system and veridicality.

A Priori Self-Knowledge: A Real Pain...In the Head?

2007-07-20T07:52:00.001-04:00

Here is a question that has recently been giving me a headache, and I'd really appreciate getting your feedback on it. One major criticism of content externalism is that it undermines a priori self-knowledge. When such critics say that self-knowledge is a priori I take them to mean that self-knowledge is independent of experience (i.e., not based on empirical observation). However, it is not clear to me that self-knowledge is essentially a priori. (This is a point that I believe has been made by Crispin Wright.) Suppose, for example, that I were suffering from a migraine. Presumably, my knowledge that I am currently suffering from a migraine is a type of self-knowledge. However, is my knowledge that I am currently suffering a migraine independent of experience? The answer seems to be ‘no’. I can only know that I am currently suffering from a migraine if I am currently experiencing the migraine. Thus, my knowledge that I am suffering from a migraine is a posteriori.

Am I missing something here? Could there be an alternative definition of a priori according to which my knowledge that I am suffering a migraine counts as a priori? Or am I mistaken in claiming that my knowledge that I am currently suffering from a migraine is a type of self-knowledge? Or perhaps I am missing the point of the critics of content externalism altogether? I should add that the issue of a priori self-knowledge is separate from the issue of infallible self-knowledge and authoritative self-knowledge, so that even if I am right, this does not mean that the content externalist is out of the woods just yet. But presently, I am only concerned with whether a priori self-knowledge is a type of self-knowledge with which the content externalist needs to be concerned.

Tips for Comps

2007-07-13T11:07:00.000-04:00

Hi folks! Hope you're all having great summers.

I took the liberty of writing up my strategy for the comps. Hopefully that (along with the guides I've been compiling) will help make them less painful for some. Please let me know if you have additional tips (or, especially, if you think I'm wrong about something)!

Probable But Still Unjustifiable

2007-05-09T09:03:00.001-04:00

I am attempting to construct an argument against the widely accepted thesis that one may justifiably believe that p based on evidence that makes p probable but which does not guarantee that p. In short, I wish to argue that any belief based on evidence that makes p probable, but with a probability less than 1, is unjustified. My argument utilises a lottery-type analysis†. Imagine a lottery composed of n tickets in which n is large enough to make the following claim putatively true, according to the standard probabilistic analysis, of some particular ticket, t1: S may justifiably believe that her ticket, t1, will lose. For example, most probability theorists would hold that in a lottery of 1,000,000 tickets in which one ticket must win but only one ticket can win, S may justifiably believe that her ticket, t1, will lose. (Of course, S does not know that her ticket will lose, but on the view I wish to impugn she may still justifiably believe that her ticket will lose. You may make n as large as necessary to motivate the relevant intuitions.)

I take it as a truism that a subject may not justifiably believe a set of inconsistent propositions which she recognises to be inconsistent. My argument will take the form of a reductio beginning with the assumption, “S may justifiably believe that her ticket, t1, will lose”, and concluding with the negation of the aforementioned truism. Assuming that the first premise is the least plausible of all the premises in my argument, then my argument should establish that my first premise ought to be rejected. I would greatly appreciate any feedback concerning the structure, validity or soundness of my argument, or questions regarding any of my assumptions or steps. My reductio runs as follows:

(1) S may justifiably believe that her ticket, t1, will lose.

(2) If S may justifiably believe that t1 will lose, then she may also justifiably believe that t2 will lose, she may justifiably believe that t3 will lose ... she may justifiably believe that ticket tn will lose.

(3) S may justifiably believe that tickets t1, t2 ... tn will lose. [from (1) and (2)]

(4) S may justifiably believe that either t1 will not lose or t2 will not lose ... or tn will not lose.

(5) Propositions of the following form comprise an inconsistent set: (a) p1, p2 ... pn, either not-p1 or not-p2 ... or not-pn.

(6) S recognises that propositions of the following form comprise an inconsistent set: (a*) t1 will lose ... tn will lose, either t1 will not lose ... or tn will not lose.

(7) S may justifiably believe a set of inconsistent propositions that she recognises to be inconsistent. [from (3), (4), (5), and (6)]

Prima facie, (1)-(7) only shows that a subject is not justified in believing something she recognises to be inconsistent. Such cases fall under the umbrella of what Jonathan Sutton has dubbed, "known unknowns"—namely, instances in which the subject is aware that she does not have the knowledge in question. But this argument seems ineffective against certain types of "unknown unknowns"—i.e., cases in which the subject does not know that she does not know. Specifically, (1)-(7) does not seem to apply to cases in which the subject fails to recognise that a certain set of her beliefs are inconsistent. In such cases (6) would fail to apply. Thus, for all that has been shown, (1) may be true in cases in which the subject does not recognise her beliefs to be inconsistent. (Moreover, once we have dispatched with the tendentious Cartesian notion of the transparency of the mental, a subject's failure to recognise such an inconsistency in her beliefs becomes a live possibility.)

At least two points should be noted in reply. For starters, we may widen the domain of known unknowns to include beliefs that a subject is in a position to know (say, via reflection alone). Since S is in a position to recognise that the propositions are inconsistent, assuming she is rationally competent, (6) still applies. Alternatively, we may simply note that the failure on S's part is a rational one, which (on even the narrowest J-internalist reading) would ex hypothesi render her belief unjustifiable. Given these considerations, the conclusion of the argument seems generalisable to all cases of belief based on evidence that renders the belief likely with a probability of <1. † See Dana Nelkin's paper “The Lottery Paradox, Knowledge and Rationality” for a discussion of the lottery paradox regarding knowledge and justifiably held belief.

Higher Order Truths about Chmess

2007-04-23T03:05:00.001-04:00

Note: This post represents Daniel Dennett's submission to the 46th Issue of the Philosopher's Carnival.

Philosophy is an a priori discipline, like mathematics, or at least it has an a priori methodology at its core, and this fact cuts two ways. On the one hand, it excuses philosophers from spending tedious hours in the lab or the field, and from learning data-gathering techniques, statistical methods, geography, history, foreign languages. . . . ., empirical science, so they have plenty of time for honing their philosophical skills. On the other hand, as is often noted, you can make philosophy out of just about anything, and this is not always a blessing. The point of this little essay is to alert graduate students entering the field to a way in which the very freedom and abstractness of philosophy can be a weakness.

Consider, as a paradigm of a priori truths, the truths of chess. It is an empirical fact that people play chess, and there are mountains of other empirical facts about chess, about how people have been playing it for centuries, often use handsomely carved pieces on inlaid boards, and so forth. No knowledge of these empirical facts plays an indispensable role in the activity of working out the a priori truths of chess, which also exist in abundance. All you need to know are the rules of the game. There are exactly twenty legal opening moves for white (sixteen pawn moves and four knight moves); a king and lone bishop cannot achieve checkmate, and neither can a king and lone knight, and so forth. Working out these a priori truths about chess is not child’s play. Proving just what is and is not possible within the rules of chess is an intricate task, and mistakes can be made that get perpetuated. For instance, a few years ago, a computer chess program discovered a mating net–a guaranteed win–consisting of over two hundred moves without a capture. This disproved a long-standing ‘theorem’ of chess and has forced a change in the rules of the game. It used to be that fifty moves without a capture by either side constituted a draw (stalemate), but since this lengthy mating net is unbreakable, and leads to a win, it is unreasonable to maintain the fifty-move stalemate. (Before computers began playing chess, nobody imagined that there could be a guaranteed win of anywhere near this length.) All this can be pretty interesting, and many highly intelligent people have devoted their minds to investigating this system of a priori truths of chess.

Some philosophical research projects–or problematics, to speak with the more literary types–are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed–and seldom discussed–and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it–though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names. I didn’t bother investigating these questions because although they have true answers, they just aren’t worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover. And that means that if people actually did get involved in investigating the truths of chmess, they would make mistakes, which would need to be corrected, and this opens up a whole new field of a priori investigation, the higher order truths of chmess, such as the following:

1. Jones’s (1989) proof that p is a truth of chmess is flawed: he overlooks the following possibility . . . .

2. Smith’s (2002) claim that Jones’s (1989) proof is flawed presupposes the truth of Brown’s lemma (1975), which has recently been challenged by Garfinkle (2002). . . .

Now none of this is child’s play. In fact, one might be able to demonstrate considerable brilliance in the group activity of working out the higher order truths of chmess. Here is where Donald Hebb’s dictum comes in handy:

If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.

Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy whose participants would be out of work if Hebb’s dictum were ruthlessly applied, but we no doubt disagree on just which cottage industries should be shut down. Probably there is no investigation in our capacious discipline that is not believed by some school of thought to be wasted effort, brilliance squandered on taking in each other’s laundry. Voting would not yield results worth heeding, and dictatorship would be even worse, so let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. But just remember: if you let a thousand flowers bloom, count on 995 of them to wilt. The alert I want to offer you is just this: try to avoid committing your precious formative years to a research agenda with a short shelf life. Philosophical fads quickly go extinct and there may be some truth to the rule of thumb: the hotter the topic, the sooner it will burn out.

One good test to make sure you’re not just exploring the higher order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game. Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you’re right about whether Jones’s counterexample works against Smith’s principle? Another such test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don’t “get it,” you really should consider the hypothesis that you’re following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap.

Here is one way the trap works. Philosophy is to some extent an unnatural act, and the more intelligent you are, the more qualms and reservations you are likely to have about whether you get it, whether you’re “doing it right,” whether you have any talent for this discipline and even on whether the discipline is worth entering in the first place. So bright student Jones is appropriately insecure about going into philosophy. Intrigued by Professor Brown’s discussion, Jones takes a stab at it, writing a paper on hot topic H that is given an “A” by Professor Brown. “You’ve got real talent, Jones,” says Brown, and Jones has just discovered something that might make suitable life work. Jones begins to invest in learning the rules of this particular game, and playing it ferociously with the other young aspirants. “Hey, we’re good at this!” they say, egging each other on. Doubts about the enabling assumptions of the enterprise tend to be muffled or squelched “for the sake of argument.” Publications follow.

So don’t count on the validation of your fellow graduate students or your favorite professors to settle the issue. They all have a vested interest in keeping the enterprise going. It’s what they know how to do; it’s what they are good at. (This is a problem in other fields too, of course, and it can be even harder to break out of. Experimentalists who master a technique and equip an expensive lab for pursuing it often get stuck filling in the blanks of data matrices that nobody cares about any longer. What are they supposed to do? Throw away all that expensive apparatus? It can be a nasty problem.) It is actually easier and cheaper for philosophers to re-tool. After all, our “training” is not, in general, high-tech. It’s mainly a matter of learning our way around in various literatures, learning the moves that have been tried and tested. And here the trap to avoid is simply this: you see that somebody eminent has asserted something untenable or dubious in print; Professor Goofmaker’s clever but flawed piece is a sitting duck, just the right target for an eye-catching debut publication. Go for it. You weigh in, along with a dozen others, and now you must watch your step, because by the time you’ve all cited each other and responded to the responses, you’re a budding expert on How to Deal with How to Deal with Responses to Goofmaker’s minor overstatement. (And remember, too, that if Goofmaker hadn’t made his thesis a little too bold, he never would have attracted all the attention in the first place; the temptation to be provocative is not restricted to graduate students on the lookout for a splashy entrance into the field.)

Of course some people are quite content to find a congenial group of smart people with whom to share “the fun of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.” as John Austin once put it, without worrying about whether the joint task is worth doing. And if enough people do it, it eventually becomes a phenomenon in its own right, worth studying. As Burton Dreben used to say to the graduate students at Harvard, “Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship.” Some garbage is more important than other garbage, however, and it’s hard to decide which of it is worthy of scholarship. In another lecture published in the same book, Austin gave us the following snide masterpiece:

It is not unusual for an audience at a lecture to include some who prefer things to be important, and to them now, in case there are any such present, there is owed a peroration. (“Ifs and Cans,” p179).

Austin was a brilliant philosopher, but most of the very promising philosophers who orbited around him, no doubt chuckling at this remark, have vanished without a trace, their oh-so-clever work in ordinary language philosophy duly published and then utterly and deservedly ignored within a few years of publication. It has happened many times.

So what should you do? The tests I have mentioned–seeing if folks outside philosophy, or bright undergraduates, can be made to care–are only warning signs, not definitive. Certainly there have been, and will be, forbiddingly abstruse and difficult topics of philosophical investigation well worth pursuing, in spite of the fact that the uninitiated remain unimpressed. I certainly don’t want to discourage explorations that defy the ambient presumptions about what is interesting and important. On the contrary, the best bold strokes in the field will almost always be met by stony incredulity or ridicule at first, and these should not deter you. My point is just that you should not settle complacently into a seat on the bandwagon just because you have found some brilliant fellow travelers who find your work on the issue as unignorable as you find theirs. You may all be taking each other for a ride.

Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University

Tis the Season

2007-02-09T12:16:00.000-05:00

I know at least a few of you are, like me, spending most days in anticipation of any word from PhD programs. I'm of the opinion that any news, including the good-for-someone-else-but-bad-for-me, is better than no news at all, so I propose we use this space to post significant application news. I personally expect lots of rejections, so I'm not hesitant at all to share my own info if others do the same. If everyone feels the same, include the list of schools/programs you applied to in the comments below.

Another useful resource might be the Grad Cafe Forum, where people are reporting admissions decisions for grad programs of all sorts. Obviously it's not terribly complete, but it does seem like it will be of some help (for example, I see that two people have received acceptance phone calls from Chapel Hill).

"Internalising" McDowell

2007-01-29T06:05:00.001-05:00

In my post, "Selling Out" McDowell, I addressed the main methodological objection to my claim that McDowell is a J-internalist. In this post, I will attempt to address what I take to be the primary theoretical objection to this proposal.

But first, what textual evidence do I have for holding that McDowell is a J-internalist? Two of the more suggestive passages are as follows:

I agree…that we lose the point of invoking the space of reasons if we allow someone to possess a justification even if it is outside his reflective reach. [McDowell 1998b, p. 418]

And:

[O]ne’s epistemic standing on some question cannot intelligibly be constituted, even in part, by matters blankly external to how it is with one subjectively. For how could such matters be other than beyond one’s ken? And how could matters beyond one’s ken make any difference to one’s epistemic standing? ([McDowell 1998a] p. 390)

I interpret the locution ‘how it is with one subjectively’, as an umbrella term for the sorts of things that are typically taken to be internally available to one, such as one’s thoughts, beliefs etc. By McDowell’s lights the circle delineating what is subjectively available to one exhausts that which may serve as a justifier for one’s beliefs.

When this idea is restated in the argot of possible worlds, we arrive at McDowellian J-internalism, (M-Int):

(M-Int) For all agents S1 and S2 and worlds W1 and W2, if S1 in W1 and S2 in W2 are identical in terms of how things are with them subjectively, then S1 and S2 are identical in all respects relevant to the justification of their beliefs.

Now the main theoretical objection to my proposal can be put as follows: McDowell could not possibly be a J-internalist since he subscribes to a type of content externalism (henceforth, C-externalism) and C-externalism entails the falsehood of J-internalism. This objection hardly seems surprising when we juxtapose the popular construal of J-internalism and C-externalism:

(J-Int) For all subjects S1 and S2 and worlds W1 and W2, if S1 in W1 and S2 in W2 are identical in the intrinsic properties on which their thoughts supervene, then S1 and S2 are identical in all respects relevant to the justification of their beliefs.

(C-Ext) There are subjects S1 and S2 and worlds W1 and W2, such that S1 in W1 and S2 in W2 have the same intrinsic properties but differ in the content of their thoughts.

There is a conflict between (J-Int) and (C-Ext) since the former requires all subjects who are identical in terms of their intrinsic properties to have the same justificatory properties, while the latter allows subjects with identical intrinsic properties to differ with regards to the justificatory properties of their beliefs. For example, consider two subjects, S1 and S2, who are identical in terms of their intrinsic properties, but occupy different external environments, W1 and W2, respectively. Suppose S1 and S2 both performed the following valid deduction:

(A) Water is a liquid.
(B) Water is potable.
(C) Therefore, water is a potable liquid.

According to (C-Ext), the thoughts expressed by sentences (A)—(C) are different for S1 and S2. This is because S1’s thoughts are individuated in terms of water while S2’s thoughts are individuated in terms of twater. The distinct pairs of thought that S1 and S2 express by (A) and (B) are relevant to the justification of the pair of beliefs they respectively express by (C). Consequently, S1 and S2 satisfy the antecedent of (J-Int), since ex hypothesi they are identical in terms of their intrinsic properties, but fail to satisfy the consequent—to wit, they differ in some respects relevant to the justification of their beliefs. Thus, if (C-Ext) is true, then (J-Int) must be false.

There is a strong temptation to assume that this line of argument also impugns (M-Int). But if we take seriously McDowell’s notion of object-dependent thought there is no obvious inconsistency between (M-Int) and (C-Ext). According to McDowell, how it is with one subjectively is in part constituted by objects in one’s environment. For instance, in the Twin Earth examples generated by (C-Ext), the object-dependent thoughts expressed by (A) and (B) in the foregoing deductive inference are different for S1 and S2. Hence, by McDowell’s lights, S1 and S2 fail to satisfy the antecedent of (M-Int) since S1 and S2 are not identical with regards to how things are with them subjectively. Thus, McDowell can, without contradiction, continue to hold to (M-Int) while subscribing to (C-Ext).

References:

McDowell, J. (1998a), ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 369-94, London: Harvard University Press.

McDowell, J. (1998), ‘Knowledge By Hearsay’, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 414-43, London: Harvard University Press.

To Gettier or Not to Gettier

2007-01-05T05:05:00.000-05:00

I recently constructed a Gettier case (described below), designed to show that Justification-reliabilism is insufficient as a reply to Gettier. (For a full discussion of the application of this Gettier case, check out my blog post 'Un-discriminating Reliabilism'.) However, some have questioned whether the Gettier case I constructed is really a Gettier case at all (see comments in aforementioned link). Specifically, one reader felt that the subject described actually does have knowledge. I would like to get other folks intuitions on this question. Do you think the following represents a genuine Gettier case:

Suppose S has strong perceptual evidence for, and comes to believe, the proposition:

(a) There is a red cube in the box on the table.

Now, it so happens that there is in fact a red cube in the box on the table, though the cube is being obscured from S’s visual field by some sort of barrier. Furthermore, the box is rigged up to a computer which projects a visual hologram of a red cube in the box. However, the computer is programmed to only project the hologram of the red cube in the box when there is a real red cube in the box. Moreover, S lacks any of this background information, and forms her belief that (a) purely on the basis of the hologram of the red cube. All of the following seem true in the above case:

(i) (a) is true

(ii) S believes (a) is true

(iii) S’s belief that (a) is justified (i.e., formed via a reliable process)

Ex hypothesi, (iii) is true since the computer is programmed to only project the hologram of a red cube when there is an actual red cube present (one may build in whatever stipulations one likes, such as that the computer is eternal and infallible in its operation etc.). Thus, S’s belief that there is a red cube in the box is reliable (and, according to justification-reliabilism, therefore justified) since the process by which the belief was formed would, given the computer’s programming, tend to produce true beliefs. However, I believe this represents a bona fide Gettier case since, though S has a justified (i.e., reliably formed) true belief, we wouldn’t say that she has knowledge.

It may also be interesting to get a non-philosopher's intuition on this question, so you may consider trying it out on a roommate or friend and letting me know what you come up with. Cheers.

are we not horses

2006-12-15T01:40:00.000-05:00

a new album by a mess of canadians going by ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL:
"a song cycle about mechanical horses programmed to think they're real horses, the implication being that their artificial minds and souls still act like real ones. AND they're caught in the middle of an epic war between good and evil."

check it.

Partial Apathy and Relativism

2006-09-08T06:05:00.000-04:00

I've started to think about moral relativism again, so I dug out the paper I wrote on the general subject last semester. There, I argued that the psychological source of some forms of relativism is a sort of partial apathy. The position seemed plausible to me when applied to relativism involving predicates of personal taste (cf. Peter Lasersohn). It may account for relativism involving vague predicates (cf. Mark Richard). Partial apathy clearly is not the motivating factor for relativism involving future contingents (cf. John MacFarlane) or epistemic modals (cf. Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson). I'm trying to determine if I think the idea can apply to moral relativism. I give more explanation of this on my blog....

The Purpose of Philosophy

2006-06-04T22:15:00.002-04:00

[As featured in Philosophers' Carnival #35!]

At the beginning of the year, Dustin (see previous post) challenged me to say what the purpose of doing philosophy is. Now that the year is over, I realize that I never answered his question.

Partly this is because, at the time, I could think of no justification. The purpose of philosophy, I said, was to make one's beliefs consistent in areas in which it's not clear what to believe. Given two sides of a philosophical problem (say, the problem of free will versus determinism), you're presented with a paradox. The paradox--at least, if you're a philosopher, or are in the right mindset--is frustrating, and you want to know what to believe. Philosophizing ensues. The question I felt unable to address at the time was: Why is this important?

It's possible that it isn't. If you never see philosophical problems as frustrating, because they are below your radar, or because you think they can be dissolved in an obvious way, it isn't important to decide what you believe about philosophical problems.

But if you do see them as problems, deciding what you believe with regard to them is important. To use an old accusation, one would be a misologist (Phaedo), a hater of rational accounts, if one refused to hear them. One could just live as if philosophical problems don't exist; but I don't think that's a good solution. Philosophy is one of the only areas in which we have all the tools to decide for ourselves about the issues in question. Some input from science (and to guide science) is useful; but the problems are conceptual, so their solutions (I propose) will be conceptual as well, and so at least in theory within the reach of all who approach the problems.

There is another reason: I think philosophical problems are important in themselves. They embody important features of our situation as humans, about the way our world is structured; about what it means to know something, or another person, to be free, whether there are any criteria for sense and nonsense at all. These are significant aspects of the lives of both philosophers and non-philosophers, and they are aspects of our lives which produce philosophical puzzlement. I cannot but think there must be some benefit from trying to get things straight with regard to them.

The Meaning of Philosophy

2005-09-11T14:53:00.000-04:00

Hi Everybody, Perhaps it's time for a not-so-frivolous post to kick off the year. I will try to answer the question, what is the Meaning of Philosophy? Difficult, yes, but if I just throw out an answer, perhaps it will get some discussion going.

So, Philosophy is "Love of Knowledge", right? Not exactly... It's "Love of Wisdom." What is the difference between Wisdom and Knowledge, one might ask? Well, Knowledge is knowing things, knowing facts, or having an accurate understanding of things as they are. Of course, there are different definitions and criteria for truth, but those don't really change the fact that we know things. The epistemic question of "how" we know is different from the question of if we have knowledge. Science, for example, is one methodology, or "how," which helps us know facts about the physical world, and which has been quite successful. These facts are not, however, intrinsically valuable. Knowledge as a whole is not intrinsically valuable. Since value is only a result of attitudes we take toward the world--our valuations--then knowledge has only the value that it has for us. Yes, we can place a value on knowing the specific location and energy of an atom in a chair on which we are sitting, but why would we? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge (truth for the sake of truth) is misguided.

What, then, is Wisdom, and how is it not misguided in the way that a drive to Knowledge for Knowledge's sake is misguided? Wisdom, it seems, is having the ability to value appropriately, which then leads us to appropriate action ("appropriate" meaning in a manner conducive to life, health, and happiness.... oh, and ignoring our fellow beings--like Bush does--results in an emotional desensitization and disturbance antithetical to these natural, human goals). Wisdom is having the ability to discern between Knowledge that is useful and knowledge that is not, or is even destructive. Knowledge, being merely a tool to be used for the fulfillment of our natural goals, is definitely one component of wisdom, but only when properly tempered and understood within the context of it's uses. We can see quite plainly, then, that the central field of philosophy, or "first philosophy" cannot be Epistemology, Logic, or Metaphysics, but must be located within experience and is, if anything, a field such as Ethics or Aesthetics, which orient our values such that Epistemology, Logic, Metaphysics, and even Science do not drift off into meaninglessness or even become destroyers of meaning. For, after all, what each of us truly wants--deep down--is a life full of value and meaning, and the happiness which accompanies such a life even in the face of deepest suffering.

Summer Vacation!

2005-07-12T12:41:00.000-04:00

We're scattered all over the country, many of us probably sunbathing, about now. The Web of Belief, therefore, declares a Summer blogging hiatus. This doesn't mean that there won't be any new posts, or that new posts aren't encouraged--simply that there aren't likely to be any. Visitors are invited to look into any of our personal blogs in the "Our Blogs" section of the sidebar, where there may be more activity, and return to The Web of Belief in the Fall.

On the edge

2005-05-10T01:46:00.000-04:00

On www.edge.org, a while ago, a very interesting question was suggested for its contributors: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Well, what do you think?

McDowell

2005-05-08T20:07:00.000-04:00

These are some thoughts on McDowell prompted by the lecture on Friday at MIT. They represent at attempt to bring together an understanding of that talk with the other things of his I've read--Mind & World and a handful of essays.
The McDowell talk at MIT on Friday was very interesting. Several of my questions were asked, and his responses were often those I hoped or expected him to give. Not that the talk entirely made sense. The first part was about modest & immodest transcendental arguments, and he claimed to be offering a transcendental argument that was neither. I still don't understand how, though. The main point seemed to be that the skeptic can accept that our experience is either veridical or it isn't: that, for any particular perception, we're either hallucinating, or we're not. (That's the "disjunctivism.") But 1) I don't think the sort of perceptual experience we make claims about is exhausted by that disjunction, and 2) I certainly don't think experience is exhausted by that disjunction. This is the difficulty with Mind & World: he makes it sound as if we're always in the business of making claims about the world that we must justify. And this goes against the Wittgensteinian insight (and to some extent the parallel Austinian insight) that we only need to justify our claims when a question--an ordinary question--of justification arises; and that we only make claims at all for certain purposes and in certain circumstances.

Anyway, it isn't clear what the point of the disjunction is. Unless we say that it doesn't matter which side of it you're on. And that would be similar to what McDowell says (seems to say) in "Values & Secondary Qualities": that, with regard to perception, there is, on one level, no question about whether what I'm perceiving is real or not. After all, I'm really perceiving it. Ultimately, what I would want to accomplish, were I McDowell, would be a "softening" of the facts demanded by the skeptic when he or she demands that we justify our perceptual claims. The degree of softening necessary would depend on the situation: certain sorts of facts are not rightly demanded in certain situations. And one way to accomplish this softening would be to make it clear that we only need to justify a perceptual claim when there's some real question about it's rightness.

Towards the end of the talk, McDowell seemed to be championing ordinary methods of justification (I can "tell a zebra when I see one")...but it wasn't clear whether he meant to challenge the "internal" skeptic (whose skepticism arises and is settled within ordinary notions of justification) or the "external" or "global" skeptic (whose skeptical questions about justification know no bounds). He talked mainly as if he was addressing the "external" skeptic. This, at least, is the way it sounded given his disjunction. The disjunction, "Either I'm seeing a red cube, or I'm having an experience as-of seeing a red cube" assumes that it's responding to an "external" skeptic. (When else would such a statement suggest itself to us?) I think he intends this rather unnatural disjunction to respond to the "external" skeptic by saying that it's only because we have experiences we're willing to call "(veridically) seeing a red cube" that can we make sense of the possibility of "hallucinating a red cube." The response gestures towards particular contexts without actually describing them.

Perhaps that's what produced the impression in me that the upshot of what he was saying was rather like Austin. Granted, Austin (say, in "Other Minds") does describe in more detail ordinary ways of justifying knowledge claims. But to hold those up against the question of the "external" skeptic leaves "external" skepticism unscathed. It's like saying "it's because of this (what we call "telling a zebra") that you can ask your skeptical question." Ordinary methods of justification are a precondition for extraordinary ones. But that doesn't mean the extraordinary questions are always (should always be) in play.

This is a concern for me because, in McDowell's essays on rule-following, he supports the Wittgensteinian line that justifications come to an end--that at some point we reach "bedrock" in a given activity. His criticism of the anti-realist about meaning (Crispin Wright) is that he looks for "bedrock" "lower than it is" in demanding that we characterize our--for lack of better term I'll say "semantic"--agreement in terms that don't demand an insider's view of the language. This criticism seems right to me, albeit overly general. It's this over-generality--also present in the way he addresses the skeptic in the talk on Friday--that I'm trying to put my finger on.

Why is suicide avoidance a perfect duty?

2005-04-25T18:11:00.000-04:00

I've been grading undergraduate papers on Kant and euthanasia for the last few days, and in making comments, I've come to realize that there's something that I don't get about Kant's argument for the immorality of suicide. I'm far from a Kant scholar, so I might just be misunderstanding Kant's view. (Luckily, my concern hasn't gotten in the way of my grading at all.)

In the Groundwork, Kant argues that suicide is immoral because it rests on the following maxim, which cannot be universalized without contradiction: "From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction."

Something that genuinely loves itself, Kant tells us, cannot desire its own destruction; thus, the maxim results in contradiction. Now, I think it's debatable whether something that loves itself cannot desire its own destruction, but that's not the issue I want to raise. Kant says that suicide avoidance is a perfect duty, which would mean that this maxim results in a contradiction in conception. I think it looks more like a contradiction in the will, which would render suicide avoidance an imperfect duty.

I can see why the contradiction looks like a contradiction in conception. One cannot attempt to kill oneself if one is acting out of desire to preserve oneself. There is a clear contradiction there. But what makes this issue tricky is that it looks like someone who acts out of self-love could not will their own death. Isn't Kant's prohibition on suicide from self-love a case of an imperfect duty then? One can imagine the consequence of everyone killing themselves. That's not inherently contradictory. The problem stems from the willing.

One might try to make the following counterargument: imperfect duties are those that generate fully consistent perverted worlds when their maxims are universalized, but that have maxims that cannot be willed because the perverted world results in one's ends not being met. In other words, imperfect duties come about when there's a breach in a hypothetical imperative. The contradiction in the self-love maxim does not necessarily come about from a person's ends not being satisfied. But I think this is wrong. Self-love, Kant tells us, impels the improvement of life. It looks like the contradiction occurs because death ceases all improvement in life, thus one's ends are not being met.

Moreover, if we don't interpret "from self-love" as making a claim about hypothetical ends, then the maxim Kant offers does not correspond to the traditional "In situation X, I will do Y in order to achieve Z" template. Normally, if a maxim is contradictory simply in virtue of the "in situation X, I will do Y" portion (as maxims condoning lying or promise-breaking are), then it forms a perfect duty. If this is not the case, but the maxim becomes contradictory when Z is taken into account (in other words, the perverted world is consistent but does not achieve the ends of the hypothetical imperative), then the maxim forms the basis of an imperfect duty. "From self-love" seems to fit squarely into variable slot Z. If we insist that it does not but that it still generates the contradiction, then we give up on the standard maxim template, and we have to tell some sort of story about what sort of work "from self-love" is doing and why it's permissible to include in our maxim.

There is one other unique aspect of this maxim that may be relevant. It results in contradiction whether universalized or not. However, I don't know if this influences the perfection or imperfection of our duty, nor do I know why it should.

Cleanliness

2005-04-23T03:05:00.001-04:00

This page now supports expanded entries, thanks to Richard and No Fancy Name. This means you can hide portions of your posts behind a link. This allows more posts to appear on the front page. All you have to do is type a special tag at the beginning and end of the lengthy part of your post. The tags are in the penultimate box (a blue one) on the No Fancy Name page.

Also, commenting is no longer restricted to blog members.

2 suggested paths from mechanism to consciousness

2005-04-23T01:37:00.000-04:00

Irrationality is a necessary (and perhaps sufficient) condition for consciousness?? Think about it this way. You have a system like Drescher's which compiles statistics to direct its actions in a "world." For consciousness, the most important aspect of such a system is that which

"is defined not so much by its particular set of primitives as by its ways of combining structures to form larger ones, and by its means of abstraction -- its means of forming new units of representation that allows the details of their implementation to be ignored." (Drescher, Made Up Minds, p10)

As I read it, what this means is we get a system which combines its primitive processes into higher-level ones so that you get a "commanding" program with any number of functions, or sub-routines. For non-programmers, this means you could have the lower level processes carrying out the detailed statistical analyses to determine actions, while the so-called commanding program is "unaware" of of those activities. All it needs to operate is a "Yes" or "No" from the sub-routine based on its detailed statistical analysis.

What you end up with is a system, if it is indeed ignoring the primitive functions, that is unaware of its own internal processes and how its actions are determined. If it receives a command, say, to stack 3 blocks that are in its world, the primitive statistical processes are going to run in order to determine the locations of said blocks and make the parts move to execute the command. The higher order process of the system, though, undergoes only the "experience" of receiving the command, finding the blocks, and doing it. If you could ask what it is doing, it would say it was following the order, not that it was carrying out statistical analysis. I believe this is the first step towards conscious machines. There is nothing it is like to be a mechanism which merely compiles statistics and uses it to push buttons on and off. And maybe there is nothing it is like to be a higher-level program which "sees" only the results of such compiling and uses the "Yes" or "No" to push other buttons on and off. But maybe there is something it is like to be a higher-higher-higher ... -level program which pulls vast amounts of different types of input together in one orderly mechanism and is ignorant of the extraordinarily complex underworkings.

Why could this be true? Because it could be true that we are such systems. The complex set of processes that go into pouring myself a bowl of cereal feels simpler by orders of magnitude.

Women in Philosophy

2005-04-19T17:20:00.000-04:00

To continue with the "topical" posts:

Some of us on occasion remark on the differences in tone of philosophical exchanges between men and those between women. I confess that I sometimes fail to see what's going on in exchanges between men, and I'm sure the reverse happens, as well. And I often find myself blaming gender for frustrations with philosophical discourse. Yet I also tend to think that gender is not what I ought to be blaming--if I ought to be blaming anything at all--, but something like cognitive styles, which vary along lines that correlate with, without being equivalent to, those of gender. Whether gender itself is a social construction or contains natural kinds is not terribly interesting to me; I would prefer to avoid positing anything external as far as possible. It may, of course, turn out that there is no other option if we want to make progress with respect to specific gender issues; but since I'm concerned with philosophy, and philosophy consists of conversation and thinking, I'm under the illusion that certain differences that fall within that domain don't need to be blamed but owned up to.

Earlier this semester, wondering if others had wondered about differences in philosophical method that tend to correllate strongly (but not exclusively) with gender lines, I found this post at Sappho's Breathing, which suggests that philosophical subfields are "gendered." Hence the title, "Real Men Do Metaphysics." It's a suggestive post, but the correlations don't match up with my experience. What might match up with my experience is a difference in method, regardless of subject matter.

What I mean by "method" must be combination of things, temperamental and cognitive. It's not clear where to draw the line between the two, or which can be rightly given "external" explanations and which cannot. For instance, women talking philosophy tend to be less careful of each other's pride; the interaction tends to be less tense, whereas men often tend towards combativeness. This difference is hard to internalize; it's difficult to think of it as anything more than "beyond one's control."

But combativeness often goes hand in hand with analytic method. Previously, I have referred to this as the "hunt-and-kill" method of philosophy and contrasted it with (what else?) the "gathering" method. Clearly, analytic thinking cannot be dispensed with in analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, I confess to having a preference for getting all the details onto the table before one starts analyzing things; and I prefer that analysis make the problem messier, not cleaner. To what extent these preferences are "gender-based" I don't know. But they are preferences that seem to be more "within one's control" than broader temperamental differences.

About the analytic approach combined with combativeness, Cleis had this to say: "I'm concerned that a primarily adversarial approach to philosophical argument alienates many smart women, who then turn their attention to other fields of study. That is philosophy's loss. I'm also concerned that philosophical talent is recognized most often when it's delivered in an aggressive package" , "The Brights and the adversary method" (no, one has nothing to do with the other).

The broad question I want to ask is, To what degree can the differences between the ways women and men approach to philosophy be ascribed to gender? Will the line be drawn at differences in aggressiveness and social hierarchy issues, or will cognitive differences also come into play? And if cognitive differences do come into play, should we think of them as gender differences? My worry regarding the last issue is that, as intellectuals with responsibilities to understand and make ourselves intelligible to others, there may be very good reasons why we shouldn't blame cognitive differences on (or for) anything.

It's possible, too, that my division of gender differences in philosophy into those that are "beyond one's control" and those that are "within one's control" is just an attempt to knock against the former with the latter, which may or may not be helpful.

Philosophy and Know-Nothing Conservatism

2005-04-17T15:03:00.000-04:00

Perhaps you have a friend who read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind when she was 17, concluded that all contemporary Anglo-American philosophy was bunk, and then decided to dress in school marmish frocks all day and to devote herself to getting money from corporations to disseminate culturally conservative propaganda at the American Enterprise Institute? Perhaps you are that friend from year-17 at an advanced stage of recovery. In any event, next time that friend shows up for dinner and bugs you with her half-informed opinions about your career plans, send her to the evisceration of Ross Douthat's put-down of analytic philosophy (see title link). Follow the connected links to the discussion on Matthew Yglesias' site as well. Ross writes for a blog, The American Scene, along with my dear friend Reihan Salam, who, despite having some Cro-Magnon political opinions, is at least gifted with the capacity for endless self-criticism and creative neurosis. [BTW, I wonder who that Crooked Ember guy is in Comments threads. All these references to contemporary Kantians and cranky Catholic intellectuals. . . Hmmm.]

The World's Greatest Acknowledgements Page

2005-04-17T01:28:00.000-04:00

It's not to a philosophy book, but close enough: link

Uwe Meixner

2005-04-16T14:39:00.000-04:00

Some good, old-fashioned German philosophy. Though I haven't read the book, I pretty much agree with everything in this excerpt: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwmeixner.html

Angry About Politics?

2005-04-13T15:42:00.000-04:00

Not as angry as this man: http://www.nplusonemag.com/thong.html

The Monads

2005-04-12T15:30:00.000-04:00

For those of you who haven't already found these through my blog--I present the apex of what can be done with knowledge of philosophy: songs about David Hume and counterpart theory.

The Monads

"Is there a thesis of Determinism?"

2005-04-09T13:26:00.000-04:00

He asks, while birds most likely chirp.

I will be giving a talk in Metaphysics soon (not this week but next). I will be discussing, among other things, P.F. Strawson's essay, "Freedom and Resentment" (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htm).

I wanted to start this week by throwing out some teasers of what I will be talking about. Getting some early feedback will be helpful in getting me prepared and in anticipating possible concerns.

Early on in “Freedom and Resentment” Strawson says,

“Some philosophers say that they do not know what the thesis of determinism is. Others say, or imply, that they do know what it is. Of these some—the pessimists, perhaps—hold that if the thesis is true, then the concepts of moral obligation and responsibility really have no application, and the practices of punishing and blaming, of expressing moral condemnation and approval, are really unjustified. Others—the optimists perhaps—hold that these concepts and practices in no way lose their raison d’etre if the thesis of determinism is true. [ . . .] If I am asked to which of these parties I belong to, I must say that it is first of all to the party of those who do not know what the thesis of determinism is.”

Since Strawson does not make much of this point (I used to just read it as a coy nod to ordinary language philosophy’s scruples), I want focus this post on this question—that is, on whether there is a thesis of determinism that is intelligible, well-motivated, and substantive. By “substantive” I mean a thesis that gives us reason to believe we are discussing what the actual world, in its most general aspects, is really like—that is, whether determinism is telling us something true about the world we experience on a day-to-day basis and explain via our best science.

One fairly standard way of construing the thesis of determinism is as follows:

“Consider now the existence of certain events governed by natural laws. It appears as if any such events must occur. Given a prior state of the world that is governed by laws of nature, a unique state of the world is forthcoming. It is helpful to think of the laws of nature operating as mathematical functions and the antecedent events as arguments for these functions. Once the function and the argument (input of the function) are settled, the output is necessitated. To implement the mathematical analogy, let f(x) = 5x + 2 and the input of the function be 3. The output of f(3) is 17, a mathematically necessitated result relative to the function and argument. Just as any other result is mathematically impossible—a violation of the laws or rules of mathematics—any event other than the one that actually occurs, relative to the antecedent state of the world and the laws of nature, is naturally impossible. Only by supernatural interference could an outcome other than the actual one occur in a world with the identical prior state and laws. Determinism can then be defined as claiming that it is logically impossible that there are worlds with natural laws and pasts congruent with the actual world and yet with futures distinct from that of the actual world.”

Mark Bernstein, “Fatalism,” Oxford Handbook of Free Will, p. 68

This kind of thesis of Determinism might be called a thesis of Global Determinism. It works as follows:

(1) Start with any possible world W whose causal order is structured by laws of nature. (Assume, for the time being, that the concept, ‘laws of nature,’ is coherent and we know how to construe it. Laws of nature, according to this construal, would operate like mathematical functions in Bernstein’s sense: taking definite inputs as arguments, they would produce definite outputs).

(2) Assume that at some of level of description there are structurally homogeneous, basic particulars in W out of which all complex objects and relations in W are composed (we can assume, to make it easier to imagine, that these particulars are physical, but they need not be to carry through the argument). A definitely describable system of relationships among all of these particulars at some time t is a ‘Global Event.’ Global Events are the “arguments” upon which the laws of nature do their computational work. In the worlds in which these particulars are physical, we can assume that the character of a Global Event will be given by a complete description of the spatio-temporal arrangements of basic particles in fields of force (or whatever our best science tell us is the best idealization of a Global Event).

(3) Conclude that, in any such world W, the laws of nature must compute, at t, only one possible future (one future Global Event at time t2 ).

The reason this is “Global Determinism” is because what the thesis is quantifying over is worlds:

(GD): There is a world W such that if (1) and (2) are true of W, then (3) is also true of W.

If the actual world satisfies GD, then we live in a deterministic world. Do we have any reason to believe we live in a deterministic world? We certainly deliberate and make choices as if there were alternative possible futures, so at first glance we do not act like we believe that GD is true. Are we simply massively self-deceived?—believing one thing in the philosophy classroom (or the physics laboratory) and another in ordinary practical life.

I think the best way of approaching this question is to ask: does the thesis of determinism make sense of the phenomena that our best scientific and common sense theories (including ordinary psychology) explain?

Bernstein’s analogy between laws of nature and mathematical functions is helpful, if massively deceptive. The kind of function that could map a Global Event is, to say the least, slightly more complicated than a one-variable, two-term algebraic equation.

I am sure that those savvy with the computer science, mathematics, and physics involved can help me out, but it would seem that the orders of magnitude involved in computing a state description of the world or ‘Global Event’ would quickly lead us to, at best, intractable predictability problems and, at worst, paradoxes of infinity.

But let’s be philosophers about this. Sure, what we imagine here is impossible for us, but not for an Omniscient Mind or Super-Laplacean Computer. The issues I am raising are a problem for epistemology, not analytic metaphysics. Verificationism died a long time ago. Let it rest in peace.

Ok, so now we are relying on another concept, ‘Omniscient Mind,’ to make sense of the thesis of Determinism (at least in its ‘Global’ variety). Unlike us poor souls, the Omniscient Mind knows that the actual world is composed of basic particulars, knows the number of and relations among these particulars, and knows the function that computes Global Events in our world.

But wait? What use does an Omniscient Mind have for a function? It knows everything, after all. Presumably, it knows the future before it happens. Presumably, the concepts of past, present, and future are useless to it (as well as any computations among them). The Omniscient Mind just looks at the whole of space and time and absorbs it in one gulp.

But wait, what is the Omniniscient Mind 'looking' at? Whether or not the world has a beginning and/or an end in time and space is presumably just an ‘an empirical issue.’ Space and time might be infinitely ‘self’-contorting manifolds. So what would there be for an Omniscient Mind to ‘look’ at? ‘Looking’ implies figure and ground, things that come before consciousness and things that move to the background. But there could be no such definite perspectival structures in the scenario we are imagining: it would just be one inifinite series of one damned indistinguishable thing after another.

These problems are not new (I first encountered them, I think, in Sister Regina’s fourth grade class as we debated whether God can square circles or create rocks he cannot move).

We started this discussion of Determinism by worrying about whether our best beliefs about the ‘world as it is in itself’ might threaten the world as it looks to us when we deliberate in practical life. And yet, it turns out the world as it is in itself is not something we have a firm grip on. We have helped ourselves to some half-formed metaphysical concepts—‘Global Determinism,’ ‘Omniscient Mind,’ ‘Laws of Nature as Mathematical Functions’—but then, as we actually examine how to cash out these shibboleths of our philosophical fancy in precise terms, we quickly lose our grip on the concepts. Better to end where we started--that is, with what we knew perfectly well before we started philosophizing in the first place: that we live our lives by imagining possible futures, deliberating about which among them would be the best, and acting so as to realize as our choices (except when we are weak willed).

The metaphysical question at issue is what kind of world makes this notion of freedom intelligible and whether or not we are justified in believing we live in it; the question is not whether some fantastic thesis of Global Determinism threatens it.

Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline

2005-04-01T12:10:00.000-05:00

I suppose this will be a counterpoint to Tucker’s last two posts, although it does not really express a disagreement with them. I will simply be drawing attention to another quarter within which philosophy moves.

A while back Jason Stanley hosted a discussion on Brian Leiter's blog on related topics, though it was pitched as a debate between (what else?) whether philosophy should move towards becoming an ever-more technical, specialist discipline or engaging with questions of popular cultural concern ( http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/technicalhumani.html ).

The most cliché response to this choice is to claim it expresses a false dichotomy. “Fine,” I say, but then the onus is on the technician who is trying to develop a formal logic for vague predicates to demonstrate how making progress on that question contributes to our understanding of the nature of knowledge or the good life. Technical achievements in logic or science are obviously permanent contributions to our knowledge of the world, but their philosophical importance is always a further question (e.g., think about how much bad philosophy is premised on drawing pop conclusions from Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).

At that time Stanley hosted this discussion, I had responded—rather anonymously under ‘IP’—by including a link to Bernard Williams’ online essay, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” (see title link). Along with Bertrand Russell, Simon Blackburn, and Thomas Nagel, Williams was the first analytic philosopher that I ever read seriously. Even while being sharp, clear, and deep thinkers who were appreciative of science and the worldview it has given us, they were also all characterized by having a sort of old-fashioned, donnish familiarity with the history of Western culture and a concern with the evolution of our self-conception.

I think, as Tucker himself noted, that these concerns are what should separate analytic philosophy from the kinds of scientific inquiry it so often tries to ape. Few people (except for maybe Tucker!) read Bishop Berkeley because he was “right.” He will continue to be read, however, because he took a set of facts about the world (as understood by the best science of his time), drew some of counterintuitive conclusions from them, and then constructed a worldview that could make it all hang together.

If this was the only point that Williams’ essay made—that philosophy should continue to ask the ‘big questions’—then his points would be cogent but fairly uncontroversial. Some might still quarrel that he was asking for too much—that philosophers should stick to being good under-laborers for the scientists—but I think history would probably repay their humility by forgetting they ever existed in the first place. The better response is that almost everything one says in philosophy will be forgotten anyway--better to make a serious attempt at saying something both interesting and true that makes a young person go, "a hah."

Williams’ real point is that the practice of philosophy is incapable of being understood in independence from its history. Current questions about “free will” and “determinism” would, for example, be unintelligible in a different intellectual culture. Likewise with questions about how to balance “liberty” and “equality” or what the criteria are for constituting “personhood” or “knowledge of the external world.” Questions about these concepts are, for some, inescapable. Usually, those people are philosophers (or students and professors of philosophy, if you prefer). Some of the concepts and the debates that stem from them might be incoherent. Wittgenstein thought this about a lot of them. Even if that is the case, however, Wittgenstein thought you have to understand and be entranced by the depth of the problems before you can claim a release from them. Furthermore, what I take to be Williams' point is that you will only understand the depth of the problems if you understand the history of how some fairly strange men (sadly, it is almost universally men) have constructed them. Wittgenstein's own inattention to history may be a reason why his solutions--even while dramatic and revolutionary--have not always been convincing. He simply left a lot that was relevant to the problems unanswered and even unasked.

Finally, delving into such history is what makes philosophy a humanistic discipline in the classical sense: a discipline for understanding arcane texts in order to better understand ourselves. The move towards making philosophy a humanistic discipline does, however, have a cost: the cost is that you are not discovering anything new, in the way that a physicist discovers the existence of a new particle or a new set of symmetries in nature. The only kind of discovery that philosophy is capable of generating is a kind of self-discovery--that is, a discovery of what you and the world were like all along.

Maybe there are people doing philosophy who are really not bitten by the old problems (even if it is only unconsciously—that is, by way of being bitten by the new problems that are really just extensions of the old ones). I wonder, however, what exactly philosophy is doing for them?

New heroes and allies

2005-03-22T10:10:00.000-05:00

I think that any philosophy done in abstentia of science is bull shit--you might as well be picking your ass.

That is not to say that philosophy is the hand maiden of the sciences as was suggested by AJ Ayer. Rather philosophy and science are continuous. Though it seems that you can get a lot further in science ignoring philosophy than I think you can in philosophy ignoring science, I don't think that scientists should ignore philosophy. There is an important role for philosophy to try to understand the results of science, to figure out how to fit those results into our way of thinking and the way we live our lives, and to watch out for the fallacious conclusions that scientists sometimes draw from their work. In essence, one of the jobs of philosophy is to pursue the questions that arise from science which scientists seems so ill-equipped to answer--what does it all mean? But the notion that we can really figure out stuff about the world--even the world inside--sitting in our arm chairs is just preposterous. If there was ever any great use for arm chair commandos, it has long been exhausted. But all that means is that we have to regularly get off our fat arses and leave the philosopher's study, read up on the empirical discoveries of the sciences, and then we can return to our arm chairs to reflect upon that which has been discovered. There should be a continuous dialogue between the sciences and philosophy and the two should interact in a formative way. Science should help direct philosophy and philosophy should in turn help direct science.

I was very pleased to attend the lecture by Michael Silberstien at the BU Phil of Science colloquium called "Resisting Neo-Scholasticism with Explanatory and Ontological Pluralism in Mind." He said basically the same thing that I have claimed above (except perhaps his target was limited to "main stream philosophy of mind"). While I am concerned that somewhere in the talk he might have advocated ontological pluralism, I was very impressed with his overall philosophic opinions as well as his approach to doing philosophy--at least as exhibited in this talk. He described himself as a "crazy holist" a label which I like to claim for myself. I pretty much agreed with everything he said (that I understood). It is very cool to encounter a kindred spirit. I would like to share his talk with any interested parties and so have upload an audio recording of it to my website. I don't know about the legality of making and distributing such recordings so do me a favor and don't tell anyone. But if you want to hear a good lecture on Mind, Science and Reductionism, give it a listen. http://www.tuckerverse.com/crazyholism

To reduce, or not to reduce. That's a stupid question!

2005-03-22T10:08:00.000-05:00

I spent yesterday at BU listening to 5 talks on various issues on the relation between philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. While the issue of reductionism came up throughout the day, the three of the five talks were particularly enlightening. The first was by Stephen Horst called "Beyond Reduction: What can philosophy of mind learn from (recent) philosophy of science?" The second was by Michael Silberstein (see my next post for some puppy like slobbering about this guy) titled "Resisting Neo-Scholasticism with Explanatory and Ontological Pluralism in Mind." The third was by William Bechtel titled "Reducing Psychology While Maintaining its autonomy via mechanistic explanations."

The subject of reductionism has always been a bit puzzling to me. It seems to make many people uncomfortable and I can't imagine why. *Of course* everything reduces to physics! Isn't it obvious? (Perhaps the years I spent trying to become a physicist have prejudiced my judgment?) But since yesterday I have seen the light. It isn't that reductionism is false. It is that the discussions of reductionism is a confused mess and it turns out that until now I didn't know what the hell was going on. And I am now very excited to have something to say about the problem.

Reductionism is false--at least a particular brand of reductionism. Reductionism conceived as a language game where we try to translate the vocabulary of a higher science to that of a lower science is not only false, it is just plain stupid! For example, while I think biology reduces to chemistry, I think it is completely absurd to think that we can translate all of the scientific vocabulary of biology into the vocabulary of atoms, compounds and reactions. Even if you take a sub-discipline of biology like molecular biology that is extremely chemically driven, I still think it is hopeless to try to do this kind of reduction. The macroscopic features and phenomena that we are interested are different in kind of those that are the focus of the microstructure. The vocabulary just can't translate. I think this could be demonstrated by considering any fairly simple example and trying to imagine what it would have to look like talking about the macrostructure by only referring to stuff at the microstructure. Does that look like a good translation? I don't think so.

But this language game is not how I have always understood reductionism. I thought reductionism is just the idea that everything that is going on in the macrostructure is caused by/is explained by/supervenes upon the microstructure. And that just seems obviously true to me. I thought the reduction of chemistry to physics just means that all chemical reactions, atomic structures, molecular structures, etc. are explained by how the sub atomic particles interact, and the various forces and laws that govern the world of the small. That is why in a general chemistry class you spend time talking about the electron orbitals and the electromagnetic attractions of ions. What drives chemical phenomena is the physics of particles and atoms. The structure of molecules depends on the subatomic physics of the constituent parts. The same story will go all the way up so that all the phenomena in the natural world supervenes upon that which is going on in the behavior of the tiny parts of the world. It is in this sense that I think everything reduces to physics. But what that doesn't mean is that we can do fluid dynamics just by considering the behavior of the subatomic particles that make up the molecules of the fluid.

I think this somehow relates to the following problem (I think this came from the Mind class)--water is wet. Find me the wet H20 molecules. The molecules themselves are not wet. Wetness is a macroscopic property of a bunch of water molecules that hang out together.

And this leads me to another issue that came up yesterday--ontological pluralism. The first speaker, Steven Horst seemed to have been advocating some sort of ontological pluralism. I think the second speaker, Michael Silberstein might have also been advocating this, but I am not sure. He seemed more focused on the idea of explanatory pluralism which I whole-heartedly endorse. As I understood it, they took the "failure of reductionism" to give them reason to posit entities at the macro-level that are not reducible to entities at the micro-level. And I find this highly objectionable. Just because our vocabulary doesn't reduce doesn't mean the stuff that we are talking about doesn't. What I take ontological pluralism to mean is that the water in the Kinko's mug on my desk has an ontological existence that is distinct from the individual H20 and slummerville sludge molecules that make up the water.

So here is what I think about reductionism. Everything that exists is made up of little subatomic stuff that is governed by the laws of physics. In this sense everything reduces to physics. But even if we had godish-minds that could get over the epistemological accounting problem of measuring and calculating all the little tiny pieces, by hypothesis, we still would only be talking about what happens to individual particles and not their macrostructures. Macrostructures are a higher level of abstraction. And so the vocabulary cannot be reduced. But the further step to taking the things that our irreducible vocabulary refer to as having distinct ontological existence just doesn't make sense to me. The Bechtel talk which focused on reductionism as mechanistic explanations of how the microstructure gives rise to the macrostructure is correct.

So I want to ask this question to those of you who are uncomfortable with reductionism: Do you dislike the claim that the macroscopic phenomena can be explained by the going ons of the microstructure? If you are still uncomfortable with this conception of reductionism, why? What is missing from this physicalist picture?

What the Free Will Problem is About

2005-03-12T14:12:00.000-05:00

In the effort to increase chatter on this blog, I will continue talking to myself. For a change of pace, this time I will be talking in a widely speculative and impressionistic fashion that is only dimly supported by facts.

The folks at The Garden of Forking Paths ask, "What is the Free Will Problem About?": http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2005/01/what_is_the_fre.html.

Unsurprisingly, the default choices were all surrounding whether something called "Libertarian Free Will" exists (my non-philosophers friends should note: this is a metaphysical idea; it has nothing directly to do with Libertarian Party politics). I'm no scholar of the free will problem, but I doubt anyone could give a satisfactory definition of "Libertarian Free Will," which, as I will argue, is part of the problem. The expression does, however, undoubtedly signify a cluster of vaguely related ideas about locating the ultimate origination and responsibility for an agent's actions within its Deep Self--i.e., the idea that each time I act freely it is a metaphysical fact that I--in a sense that needs to be spelled out--am the definitive causal source of my actions and the only thing that is morally responsible for them.

This notion of Libertarian Free Will is supposed to be incompatible with determinism because if every event, in including any of my actions, is preceded by a set of events in the past that can serve--in conjunction with the laws of nature--as a sufficient cause of my action, then I cannot be the ultimate originator of these actions. Because I cannot be the ultimate originator of these actions, the Incompatibilist picture says that I cannot be ultimately responsible for them. The Hard Determinist infers from this either that I am not ultimately responsible for these actions or that I have no free will. The Libertarian infers from this that determinism is false. The Compatibilist tries to tweak our understanding of the facts so that I am still perfectly responsible, despite lacking ultimate origination.

The entirety of the free will "problem" is, in my opinion, a result of the fact that this notion of ultimate origination and the picture of the Deep Self that lies behind it are deeply confused and artifacts of the way our culture has tried to construct notions of political and moral autonomy.

The free will problem should not be a question about deep metaphysical facts such as, "am I the ultimate causal source and locus of responsibility for my actions and self?" The free will problem should rather be a set of normative questions followed by a corresponding set of practical questions. The set of normative questions would be something like this: "how should I go about taking responsibility for this self?--how should I go about justifying my actions to myself and to others and to the world?--how should I go about endorsing my desires and their fruits in action?--what should the structure of my will be?--what are the desires I should desire to have?" The set of corresponding practical questions would simply be questions about what set of social institutions, laws, and moral duties best describes a program for implementing the answers to these normative questions.

This shift in perspective would make the free will problem a branch of normative and practical ethics, which is fine by me. The result is simply classic extistentialism, filtered through Harry Frankfurt's notion of a hierarchical will from "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" and some thoughts of Charles Taylor's in "Responsibility for Self" (Professor Dennett also seems to have something like this in mind towards the end of Freedom Evolves, so too do Professor White in his essays that touch on free will and Richard Moran at Harvard in Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge).

People are often unsatisfied by a focus on the normative and practical questions because they seem to leave out important factual issues that are necessary for free will. For example, we want to be assured that our selves are actually sources of causal creativity in the world--that is, we want to know that our choices make a difference and that the future is really a place of open possibilities, such that our choices decide between these possibilities and our actions serve to realize the results of our choices. We also want to be assured that we are in at least some sense the originators of our actions--that is, that we are the locus of doings in the world rather than just happenings. Determinism seems to threaten this picture of the self by reducing us to moving points in space through which wider causal stories flow, rather than allowing us to be the productive sources of these causal stories. It seems that, if these gloomy facts about the world are true because of determinsm, then the normative and practical questions raised above cannot even get off the ground: we are left with an empty phenomenology of free will that does not touch down in the reality of the world.

Now, as has been pointed out by naturalistic approaches to the free will problem (especially by Professor Dennett in Ch. 3 of FE, "Thinking About Determinism"), what we are imagining here about the threat that determinism poses to the self's causal creativity is simply contrary to fact. The parts of our brain that instantiate the decision-making faculties of our minds are of such a complexity that our actions are inherently not-maximally-predictable to cognizers in the outside world and even to ourselves prior to the formation of an intention-in-action (this is especially true of the gut-wrenching decisions made under uncertainty and emotional ambivalence, which seem to stir up something like chaos in the brain).

When we imagine a Laplacean God taking in the spectacle of our choices and smiling at our naivete, we are probably not imagining something coherent. It is still a very open question as to how to interpret Libet's experiments on the brain--i.e., an open question as to what kind of information about our decisions the observable spikes in Readiness Potential encode. Any Laplacean God--**who cannot read my thoughts**--is going to have to picture my actions as events under a certain description: if the dimensionality of the description is too low, then the Laplacean God runs into amplified quantum indeterminism; if the dimensionality is too high, then the Laplacean God runs into the fact that I eat Cheerios on Monday and Corn Flakes on Tuesday, despite the fact that the decisions are caused by the same equally foul mood each morning (i.e., a mood which keeps me from taking the time to cook some eggs). Some Libertarians, such as Robert Kane, are willing to grant all of this, but they then say that Libertarian Free Will demands not only in-principle epistemic unpredictability, but also in-fact metaphysical indeterminism. I say that a difference that can make no difference to us makes no difference: if we can't count whether the number of stars in the universe is odd or even because of deep physical limitations in our cognitive faculties that could never be remedied by technological advance, then there is simply no fact of the matter as to whether there is an odd or even number of stars in the universe (I get this example from Professor White).

Now, what this inherent unpredictability does not get us is "Ultimate Responsibility," because we are still being situated within a network of wider causal forces, all of which impact our decisions, and some of which we cannot even plausibly be held metaphysically responsible for (even if we must normatively take responsibility for them). What inherent unpredictability does get us, however, is individuality and openness to the future. The plasticity of the brain is such that I cannot be seriously taken as a 'robot' in the colloquial sense of a being that is inexorably implementing the program that nature has designed for its life. There is no such program, because at each instant my mental program is being rewritten in objectively undpredictable fashion, partly as a consequence of the decisions I make. Moreover, if the future is inherently unpredictable, then the fatalistic itch cannot get scratched (and some interesting metaphysical issues in the logic of tensed statements open up).

However, the flip side of all this is that "who I am" is not something that "I am . . ."--in any deep metaphysical sense--". . . responsible for," but it is something that "I must take responsibility for." The key practical question of free will becomes: how do I build self I am willing to take responsibility for? Here, the 'I' can be taken somewhat loosely, because in giving up Ultimate Responsibility, I am no longer as concerned with issues of autonomy: I can use the social and physical world as active tools in order to get the self I want. The issue becomes less one of personal power than "the experience of freedom," which is something like one's picture of the world under a certain value-laden description being realized.

The main challenge that remains to this picture of free will becomes dealing with the sci-fi extremes: is being a brain in a vat that is pumped with pleasant sensations a kind of self worth wanting, if all that matters is getting the "experience" of having one's values realized (Nozick's question in the "Experience Machine" thought-experiment from Anarchy, State, and Utopia)? Clearly, what we want is for the world to be a certain way as well. I have no response to this dilemma, other than to say that the normative question of free will is not just a question about what kind of self I should want to take responsibility for, but also what kind of society and world I should want to create.

Externalism About Content: Nail Meet Coffin?

2005-03-09T14:05:00.000-05:00

[Note: the tone and content of this post have to do with my firm conviction that, given the mediocre stakes involved in philosophical debate (narcissistic enterntainment, the possibility of getting tenure, understanding the meaning of life), it should be conducted like a battle between improvising rap MCs, bloggers, or members of the British Parliament. The post that follows was originally posted to Blackboard for my Metaphysics class. Since I am currently trying to develop a viable internalism about content that meets Kripke, Putnam, and Burge's objections, I would appreciate any and all comments.. For more on the connections between blogging and rapping, see the work of my acquaintance and comic genius, Josh Levin, here: http://slate.msn.com/id/2113913/]

Quote: "The upshot of these reflections is that the patient's [ed., the like-an-arthritis-virgin's] mental contents differ while his physical and nonintentional [sic] mental histories, considered in isolation from their social context, remain the same."--Burge (end of IIa)

Burge's claim for the non-individualism of the mental can be understood in two ways. The first way of understanding it makes it true, but uninteresting. The second way of understanding it makes it deep and interesting, but it is also false.

The first, uninteresting way of understanding Burge's claim is via the idea that the content of the beliefs that can be ascribed to rational beings is causally dependent on the particular society and physical environment they are placed in. This is true because most, if not all, of our reasoning about the world depends upon the manipulation of linguistic or other symbols, and ensuring the correct use of those symbols is dependent on getting feedback from our social and physical environment. We have to know how to apply our terms to the world, as well as how to use them in inferences, and the only way to learn how to do that is to make conjectures about (i) what other people use these symbols to do and (ii) what the world is like.

Say, for example, that you are Aristotle, and you believe that the substantial form, the metaphysical essence, of all water is such that it ensures that any and all samples of water--one of the four basic elements of the universe--will be nourishing to animals. The essence of water dictates, by necessity, the kinds of efficient causal interaction it can figure in.

So, taking a sample of heavy water and feeding it to his owl, Minerva, Aristotle is shocked to find that it dies. Minerva, we assume, is not very comforted by Aristotle's protestation that water is "by its real definition" nourishing and life-sustaining.

In order to forget his grief, Aristotle buries Minverva in the river Lethe. As a result of this cathartic experience (which, incidentally, he uses up to come up with his theory of the emotional effects of experiencing ritual suffering in stage drama), Aristotle decides to revise his concept of water--that is, feedback from his external environment (i.e., the de facto discovery of heavy water) has caused a change to the content of his internal beliefs , a change that he and others would ascribe to him. Even if he does not , or even cannot, articulate this change in concepts, we know that his reactions to possible water samples in the future will be different.

Aristotle almost decides to revise his concept of metaphysical essences that constitute and individuate natural kinds as well, but because he is famous for this doctrine (it got him tenure at the Lyceum) he decides to conclude his career, like most philosophers, by upholding a quirky, retrograde idea that none of the young , upstart Turks at the skeptical Academy take seriously.

Burge's strong, interesting, and false claim is not that Aristotle's beliefs are caused by interaction with his external environment and society, but that, even if we kept all those causal interactions constant and simply transported Aristotle to a new society, then being in that new society will be enough, by itself, to metaphysically constitute his beliefs in a new way, even if nothing is different about Aristotle on the inside (nothing is different about his ability to use the beliefs in his head to reason about the world and communicate with others in his society) .

Let's take Burge at his word.

We put Aristotle in a tele-transporter and beam him up to Professor Koslicki's Metaphysics class, 3/8/2005. We shall put aside any philosophical quibbling over whether this would still be the same Aristotle. The questions we are interested in are not about personal identity, at least not directly about personal identity.

We stipulate that everything about Aristotle on the inside, the individualism of his mental, is the same. He is liable to make the same inferences and communicate the same beliefs (begging the question for a second), as well as respond to his environment in the same way (AT LEAST GIVEN THE SAME INPUT). He is like Burge's like-an-arthritis-virgin, simply a molecule for molecule duplicate of an original person who is transplanted into a new society.

Of course, the one change we have to make is that Aristotle now speaks modern English, but we will simply stipulate that all his concepts, including the malformed ones, translate perfectly into English with no loss to the kind of reasoning Aristotle can engage in (and no change to the physical constitution of his brain, behavioral propensities, etc.).

Burge's strong, false claim about the non-individualism of the mental amounts to the claim that, even though Aristotle would behave exactly the same in this new environment (e.g., he would irrelevantly weep the same crocodile tears for Minvera every time he sees a sample of ordinary H20), we would ascribe different beliefs to him, because we as a society assign a different extension to terms like 'water.'

Our knowledge of water in modern America, or at least our intention as a society to refer to a different set of objects by using 'water,' is enough to change the constitution of Aristotle's beliefs on Burge's picture.

Let's put aside for the moment the technical issues in the philosophy of language that motivate Burge's discussion. These are issues about how best to understand the logical form of propositional attitudes. For example, there is the issue of how the truth-value of a sentence like 'I believe that X' behaves as we substitute different co-extensional descriptions for 'X,' as well the issue of what kind of inferences 'I believe that X' licenses (e.g., it does not license the inference that 'X' is true).

Putting aside these technical issues, the main point we have to make is simply that there is no good reason to believe Burge's premise that Aristotle is the same, "on the inside," when transplanted to his new society. The reason is that the beliefs we hold on the inside are not just static entities--that is, something like sentences one holds true inside the "belief box" within one's head at any given time. This simply cannot be the case. The number of sentences we are liable to affirm at any given moment is probably infinite (eg., "I believe that 1 is a number, "I believe that 2 is a number". . . ), but there is only a finite storage capacity in our brains. Beliefs are instead something like dynamic potentials within a person's mind---the potential to make some intellectual judgment or other, whether via a private mental or public speech act--in response to new input from one's physical and social environment.

The persistent beliefs that we ascribe to others and to ourselves are much more coarse-grained and informationally ambiguous than the individual judgments that manifest these beliefs at any given time. So, while it is true (in the uninteresting sense described above), that the beliefs ascribed to Aristotle in his new environment are different, this is simply because a belief is defined by its potentialities. Aristotle's beliefs encode different potential judgments in his new environment because the input he is liable to get--especially from all of the sophisticated scientist types questioning his biology, chemistry, and physics (that's you, Ang!)-- will be different.

Now, why do these claims I am making not amount to an agreement with Burge? If a change in society or physical environment automatically equals a change in beliefs, then I should be agreeing with him. Yes, but this is an agreement only under the uninteresting understanding of 'externalism' described already. The essential issue regarding the "metaphysics of belief / mental content" is decidedly different in my picture than Burge's. The difference Aristotle's society makes to the content of his beliefs is still a difference within Aristotle (i.e., methodological solipsism is preserved). Aristotle is still the authority for deciding the content of each of his own beliefs (even if he cannot articulate the content of these beliefs well, his behavior will usually show us what he actually believes. That is the sense in which he is the authority on the content of his beliefs).

Burge's claim that nothing within the like-an-arthritis-virgin changes after he is transplanted into a new society is simply not true. In the original social context, the like-an-arthritis-virgin was somewhat clueless. In the new society, he is still clueless, but so is everyone else. Within each respective social context, his beliefs manifest the potential to produce different acts of intellectual judgment, simply because the difference in societies dictates that he will be responding to different input. For example,

Social Encounter A :
Question asked: "Why are you rubbing your thigh?"
Judgment given: "Because I've got arthritis."
Response: "I think you do not know what you are talking about."

Social Encounter B (once transplanted):
Question asked: "I see you are rubbing your thigh, how long have you had arthritis?"
Judgment given: "Two weeks."
Response: "Yeah, if you think that's rough, my wife has had arthritis in her belly for nine months."

Burge's false premise comes from the philosophical canard that understanding the metaphysics of belief is best pursued by taking individuals through various counterfactual scenarios and then asking questions like,

"What beliefs would we, as outsiders looking in, ascribe to this individual (eg., Aristotle), given what we know about how the society in question intends to use its terms in order to refer to certain objects in the world?"

The better question is,

"How do this individual's beliefs get manifested via the judgments he is liable to give in response to questions from his society and causal interaction with his environment?"

This second question preserves methodological solipsism. It is also seems like a much more useful question for philosophical psychology than Burge's.

The Bishop and Me

2005-03-06T20:09:00.000-05:00

So I think there is a mind independent noumenal world out there, but we are each isolated in our own private phenomenal worlds. I believe that the noumenal world is an Nth Dimensional static object with nothing like time, change or motion. It is one thing and not differentiated into individual things like tables and chairs. We, and everything that exist subsist within the noumena--we are part of it, and everything in our phenomenal worlds supervene upon the noumena. Our subjective experiences--the phenomena--are grounded in this external reality and it is that objectivity that makes it possible for us to communicate. Though our individual phenomenal worlds are isolated, the phenomenal worlds of the individuals within a community are sufficiently similar that we are able to communicate with one another. The process of assimilating our native culture is the process by which our phenomenal worlds are shaped and so people within a community share experiences (in the sense that they have very similar experiences).

But if we are forever locked away from the noumena, why think that it even exits? My answer is precisely the description above. We need some external, mind independent reality to ground our shared experience and for the development of things like language. Because the noumena is external and independent it can explain the extreme similarity between your phenomenal world and mine. The fact that we are isolated from the noumena explains why our phenomenal worlds differ. We each literally live in separate worlds, but the closer we are in culture, personality, and past experience, the more similar our phenomenal worlds are. We have each encountered people who see things pretty much the same as we do, as well as people whose thoughts and perceptions are so foreign that we think they must be from another planet. Though the noumena provides a grounding and some stability, it is so different from that which we perceive and conceptualize that it does very little in the way of providing interpretation and the noumena can be experienced in an extraordinarily diverse variety of ways.

I see science as a sort of search algorithm trying to get closer and closer to the noumena by trying to find the most general and objective characterization of our phenomena. Though I think it is impossible in principle that we ever access the noumena, we can use scientific inquiry to try to strip away the rich and varying textures we project upon it until we find the most fundamental features of our phenomenal worlds, features shared by all perceptual minds. And this is as close to the noumena as we can get.

There is a third world in my picture and that is what I would like to call the interface world (I get the term from Stephen White's "interface diagram" in the Humean argument for skepticism). The interface world is the one of common sense realism. I would like to say that of the noumenal, phenomenal, and interface worlds, only the interface world is not real. The noumenal world is the external objective reality of the noumena and it is real in what I think is the most common understanding of that term (though it is inaccessible). The phenomenal world is also real, though I have yet to figure out what I mean by that. It exist within the noumena and supervenes upon it. It depends on the noumena for its existence in an asymmetric relationship as the noumena does not depend on phenomena for its existence.

By contrast, the interface world has things like tables and chairs, and they are all mind independent objects. It is the world that most people believe in. It is the world of planets that go on circling the sun long after all minds that perceive their existence and motion have passed through the sands of time. It is the product of us projecting our phenomenal ordering of the noumena outside of our minds. It takes its independence from the noumena but retains all of the phenomenal character we infuse it with. But as the noumena is not in itself differentiated into objects and has no time or motion, it cannot be this interface world. And as the phenomenal world thoroughly depends upon our cognitive operations for its existence, it is not the interface. And so the interface world is error. It does not exist. It is the utter and complete fallacy of common sense.

Now, what is this noumena, and what justifies my believing in it? Aaron Hoitink was pressing me on this issue after my talk on Friday. My answer to these question is above, but he pointed out that the god hypothesis is just as compatible with all the facts I appeal to in my abductive arguments. Doesn't it bother me that my answer is no better than the god answer? Do I have any reason to prefer my answer to George Berkeley's idealism? Couldn't this all just be thoughts in the mind of god?

I have given this a great deal of thought and decided that it doesn't matter in the least. Since we are locked away from the noumena, there is very little we can say of its nature. But the principle I would like to try to invoke is that we should say of it as little of the noumena as is necessary such that it can fulfill the grounding role I want it to play in my metaphysics. And this has some interesting consequences, I should think.

I have always thought of the noumena as material, but different from the way we ordinarily conceive of matter, for we think in terms of particles and their motions in time. But in the timeless character of the noumena these particles are but frayed strings in the fabric of the universe, woven together in a variety of complex patterns which we project our concepts onto in the process of object generation. What do we mean by 'material'? The more I think on it, the emptier the concept becomes. One name I am certain I have not heard mentioned in the two years I have been at Tufts is Baruch Spinoza. When I studied him as an undergraduate I was very moved by his many great insights. He denied that there were two substances--mind and matter; thinking and extended. There is but one substance--god--and everything is unified together. All that exits is god and what we call mind and what we call matter are just aspects of god conceived through two distinct attributes. God has an infinite number of attributes through which it could be conceived, but mind and matter are the two accessible to us.

Now Spinoza is deep and my recollection and understanding is shallow, but the more I think on these matters, the more I see it as parallel to my own metaphysics. Is the picture I have attributed Spinoza substantially different from my own view?

Berkeley's idealism eliminated the material substance leaving us only with thinking substance--phenomena. All that exists are thoughts in the mind of god. But god's mind is external to and independent of us. Is this characterization substantially different from my own characterization of the noumenal/phenomenal world distinction? Our minds are within the mind of god--within the noumena. The mind of god is external and independent, as is my noumena. What difference is there between the Bishop's idealism and my own metaphysics? I ask again, what do we even mean by 'material' and what does that add to our metaphysical picture?

So does it bother me that my argument for my metaphysics is completely compatible with it all being god? No, for I do not see two hypotheses. I see two sets of completely compatible and translatable labels for the same thing. The Bishop may be know for saying "to be is to be perceived" but if you take this to mean the world disappears when you close your eyes, you are mistaken, for the all seeing perceptive eye of god is ever present. Kinda takes the bite out, doesn't it? My noumena and Bishop Berkeley's "mind of god" seem pretty damn similar to me.

So perhaps you might find this bothersome because you find god bothersome. This is certainly understandable because god has been a pain in all our asses of late. But let us be cautious with what we mean by god. Remember that the noumena is in principle inaccessible. Calling the noumena god does not make it any more accessible, nor does it change it in the slightest as best as I can tell. Remember my tack on Ockham's Razor when it comes to the noumena. Let us not attribute anything more to it than is necessary for the explanations in which we employ it. What do you find troublesome about god? Is it that He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, etc, etc. Is it that He loves you and watches over you? Is it that He has a mind like ours? Is it that He favors the Israelites and smites thine enemy? I will just say that each of these characterizations adds to the concept of god, more than is necessary for the explanation. And to substantiate such attributions, one must give independent arguments. Following my principle one must find elements of the phenomenal world that need or suggest these attributes in the noumena to justify making the attribution.

And that is why I am not worried. I would like to thank Aaron for pressing me on my metaphysics, for the challenge and the thinking have forced me to greatly advance my development and understanding of the view I wish to advocate.

Enlightening as a Rock

2005-02-27T08:47:00.000-05:00

I thoroughly enjoyed Winston’s talk, “Every Body is a Zombie”, this past Friday. As I understood him, Winston was trying to push against functionalism, using some argument from Putnam about functionalism entailing rocks are conscious. The basic idea had something to do with the "fact" (I put quotes because I find it an incredible claim but am in no position to challenge it) that for every possible function, there is some interpretation under which the random (or ordered) movement of molecules within a liquid or the brownian motion of stuff in a rock, or maybe the subatomic particles (I don't really know) will generate that functional state. Or something like that (I am not sure the proper way to describe it). So if consciousness is just a matter of computing functions, then the universe is replete with consciousness. There are minds (under some interpretations) inside the rocks and just about everything else.

I want to look more at this view because I don't buy it as a serious challenge to functionalism. But that strikes me as a straightforward scientific claim that I could investigate. Here are some challenges to the view that came up in the discussion. First, it isn't clear that the level of complexity for the functions that would characterize our consciousness (if there be such functions) is going to be present everywhere as is hypothesized. Second, there is this phrase 'under some interpretation' which might be smuggling in the result. The interpretation would likely have to be many, many orders of magnitude more complex than the actual system that is being interpreted, in order to get it to the function we want. Now, here it seems to me that the "consciousness" is being smuggled in through the interpretation. Now, I don't know how strong of an objection this is, but my intuition is that we have to tell some story about what it means to give an interpretation, where interpretations come from, who is doing the interpreting. I suspect these are incredibly serious question with big implications.

And that is why I am writing about this. I think this might be an important piece of the puzzle of my own view. I think there is a noumenal world out there that is a mind-independent material sort of thing (where ‘material’ is a more inclusive word so that it incorporates things like energy and fields and maybe some other stuff having to do with physics), but the noumena is nothing like the mind-independent world of "common sense". There is also this phenomenal world that is mind dependent and that is the world we "inhabit". Everything in the phenomenal world supervenes upon the noumena and that is why it seems so objective and mind independent. The noumenal world acts as some sort of external constraint that infuses our phenomenal worlds with a certain amount of objectivity. But the phenomenal worlds are really nothing like the noumena. The noumenal has nothing like time, movement, change, causation, etc. It is an Nth dimensional static object. All of that stuff is supplied by our consciousness, something about the way we order our experience of the noumena (can anyone say Kant?).

But of course, this is a crazy metaphysics and there are all kinds of problems. I want to claim that the phenomenal world is real, but I haven't a clue exactly what I mean by 'real'. In a sense, I want phenomena to have metaphysical substance but I don't want to be any kind of crazy dualist. My allegiance is solidly to naturalism. (I am afraid I might have to bring about some sort of phenomenal revolution to naturalism in order to make my crazy metaphysics work, because I won't give up the flag.) Anyway, I am left with all kinds of problems relating to the metaphysics of phenomena.

But there are other problems relating to explaining how phenomena arise out of the noumena. I have thought a lot about this question but haven't come up with anything I can articulate (though my head is teaming with a blooming buzzing confusion with just the right tenor to make me think there is a solution in there somewhere--if only I can find it). A couple of weeks ago I was talking to Richard and he sort of pressed me on this issue of how phenomena are "part" of my Nth Dimensonal static universe that isn't itself differentiated into parts.

But (boy I like starting paragraphs with that word) I am now wondering if Winston hasn't pointed me in the direction of a solution. Let's imagine for a minute that rocks are conscious. That is not to say that rocks are living, thinking things with their own thoughts and desires. It isn't like the rock is an organism or self aware. What is going on is that somewhere down in the substructure of the rock there is some configuration of molecules or particles or something that constitutes a mind. What is going on in that mind is dependent upon that configuration (or more likely, upon the interpretation I suspect). But the rock is full of consciousness. And who is to say what that consciousness is experiencing? Now let's take the example a step further. Take a suitably large body of water, Lake Titicaca for instance, and consider a single moment of time. You have this mass of water molecules, but no motion or movement. We are frozen in time. I am assuming the argument for conscious rocks can be applied here as well. There must be some interpretation under which the molecules form Jim (Winston's one-dimensional-mind-example-guy). If the body is big enough, then there may also be some interpretation under which we can find our own mind-functions in there (though I am sure for my mind we would need a much larger body of water :). And this might be just the picture I need for my ND static universe.

So we have this object, the universe, that has a particular shape. And within that shape there are patterns, and some of those patterns, under a particular interpretation are the functions of our minds. And that is what consciousness is. So now I just have to figure out the metaphysics of interpretation. I am sure that will be a piece of cake.

Also, I found this cool website with Conway's Life stuff: http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage

Parthood and Indeterminacy

2005-02-23T21:25:00.000-05:00

Normally I'd post this comment to the Phil. Mind. message board, but the graduate students are swamping that thing out of existence, and what I have to say is veering away from Phil. Mind., so I thought I'd post it here.

When discussing the indeterminacy of the word 'gavagai', Quine gives 'rabbit fusion' (that is, the set of all rabbits), 'rabbit', and 'undetached rabbit part' as possible referents of the word. It strikes me is that all these concepts are united in parthood. A rabbit is part of the set of all rabbits; an undetached rabbit part is obviously a part of the rabbit.

In our Phil. Mind. class, Professor Dennett suggested that natural kinds nestle into hierarchies, and it's indeterminate which of those natural kinds a folk term like 'water' refers to. Does 'water' refer to certain isotopes of H2O, all isotopes, or a higher-level natural kind that includes D2O (heavy water)? We might have different intuitions, but it seems we need to lay down a stipulation. Just appealing to a 'natural kind' as Putnam does doesn't help, because there are many. Another example: if a marsh tribe has a word for a smelly gas that erupts from the bog outside their village, that word might mean methane, gaseous hydrocarbon, or simply gas. Note that parthood seems to be in play in these examples too! Methane is a part of the set of gaseous hydrocarbons; gaseous hydrocarbons are a part of the set of gases.

Here's my question: what's the relation between Quinean indeterminacy and parthood?

A fun wee game

2005-02-23T02:54:00.000-05:00

Do you all like to play games that stretch your minds? I thought you did! Here is a link to such a game. It is on the blog of a known Phil. Mind. guy. Whose blog? I dare not write his name here - and you will know why if you go to his site and then come back here and look at the clipped prose of my post.

I wrote A New Quiz, but it is not that good. Oh well, I tried.

Why does no one write posts for this here Tufts site? It is a shame. Come on, all of you! Show some love!

Notes on Posting

2004-12-30T10:43:00.000-05:00

So at least one person has expressed confusion over the Blogger interface, so....

To Post

Go to Webpage (www.webofbelief.blogspot.com).
Click on little orange "Blogger" button in the upper lefthand corner.
This should take you to a page titled "Dashboard"; here you can log in; if you are already logged in your profile will be displayed in the righthand column.
Next to "Blog Name" you'll see the options "New Post" and "Change Settings."
To Post, click on "New Post."

Alternatively, you can get a desktop publishing client that works well for Blogger, and you'll never have to deal with the confusion of opening the webpage in order to post. A good one is w.bloggar.

Unrelatedly, does anyone who went to the APA conference want to describe events? I'm sure those of us who couldn't make are wondering what we missed.

Meta-Newcomb

2004-11-30T20:12:00.000-05:00

Everyone in this department seems to love/hate talking about Newcomb's problem, so I might as well feed the fire. Here is a new take on the Newcomb problem by Nick Bostrom. All you two-boxers can just suck it.

By the way, someone else post or comment. It's getting lonely.
===

Consider the following twist of the Newcomb problem.
Meta-Newcomb
There are two boxes in front of you and you are asked to choose between taking only box B or taking both box A and box B. Box A contains $ 1,000. Box B will contain either nothing or $ 1,000,000. What B will contain is (or will be) determined by Predictor, who has an excellent track record of predicting your choices. There are two possibilities. Either Predictor has already made his move by predicting your choice and putting a million dollars in B iff he predicted that you will take only B (like in the standard Newcomb problem); or else Predictor has not yet made his move but will wait and observe what box you choose and then put a million dollars in B iff you take only B. In cases like this, Predictor makes his move before the subject roughly half of the time. However, there is a Metapredictor, who has an excellent track record of predicting Predictor’s choices as well as your own. You know all this. Metapredictor informs you of the following truth functional: Either you choose A and B, and Predictor will make his move after you make your choice; or else you choose only B, and Predictor has already made his choice. Now, what do you choose?
“Piece of cake!” says a naïve non-causal decision theorist. She takes just box B and walks off, her pockets bulging with a million dollars.
But if you are a causal decision theorist you seem to be in for a hard time. The additional difficulty you face compared to the standard Newcomb problem is that you don’t know whether your choice will have a causal influence on what box B contains. If Predictor made his move before you make your choice, then (let us assume) your choice doesn’t affect what’s in the box. But if he makes his move after yours, by observing what choice you made, then you certainly do causally determine what B contains. A preliminary decision about what to choose seems to undermine itself. If you think you will choose two boxes then you have reason to think that your choice will causally influence what’s in the boxes, and hence that you ought to take only one box. But if you think you will take only one box then you should think that your choice will not affect the contents, and thus you would be led back to the decision to take both boxes; and so on ad infinitum.

Philosophy Break-Up Lines

2004-11-25T16:30:00.000-05:00

My favorites:

The Solipsist: It’s not you, it’s me.
The Anti-Solipsist: There’s someone else.
The Presentist: There just isn’t any future for us.
The Eternalist: At least we’ll always have that weekend in Paris.
The Nominalist: I'm afraid of commitment.
The Moorean: Here’s one hand. Here’s another. What do I need you for?

Post your own!

Brainport

2004-11-23T02:33:00.000-05:00

I just read an article in the NY Times about devices that translate one type of stimulus to another. For example, one of the devices translates visual input from a video camera to tactile stimulus on the user's tongue. And the user can "see", at least to some degree. Another guy who has no feeling in his hands was able to feel once again by using a special glove and some sort of stimulus device on his forehead.

What's especially interesting in the latter case is that the guy claims that the sensation was as though it was from his fingertips. On the BrainPort web site, there are some some video clips of a blind guy learning to use the video camera-tongue thing. His perceptions seem to be somewhere between mentally translating tactile sensations and "real" vision. This is a grown adult (who was able to see) learning to do this. I'd bet that a newborn baby with one of these things would be able to function very naturally in the world -- I'll have to restrict myself to talking about how people behave and report the sensation, because, not having experienced it, I have no idea how to talk about "what it's like."

I find this totally fascinating and tremendously relevant to philosophy of mind -- when I told my roommate Jonathan about this, he looked at me for a moment and then said, "I want to know what it's like to be a bat."

Amazing Research Tool

2004-11-18T09:56:00.000-05:00

Google just released Google Scholar, a web crawler that searches online academic journals and articles. Type in the name of a book or article you like, and it can pull up all the papers it can find that cite that work. (Example: here are the articles it can find that cite George Ainslie's Breakdown of Will). Very cool.

No Authority?

2004-11-10T18:34:00.000-05:00

I was very excited that Blakely created this blog but haven’t had time at all to even read it. It’s that time of the semester when things are starting to pile up and you never know if you are coming or going. But Stephen White canceled Epistemology tonight so I have some unexpected free time. Then on the way home I heard something on NPR that has awaken me from a confused slumber (well not really, but it definitely has me thinking).

I think the show was Fresh Air and they always have various editorial commentaries. Tonight there was a lady who is a high school English teacher and was talking about the struggle of teaching high school students. She talked about the way students struggle without authority in interpreting books like Huck Finn. She said that you start to get the idea that maybe Huck isn’t the most reliable narrator and Twain keeps the characters alive in such a way as to make it ambiguous who the good guys and bad guys are. We aren’t sure what to think of the different characters and it isn’t clear who we should be rooting for. The teacher said that this lack of authority is difficult for her student and they are constantly asking her to define these issues for them. They want to know whether or not Hamlet is crazy or just acting. She gave a third example that I thought was really good, but now I am drawing a blank.

What she was trying to stress is that what she and any good teacher try to do is to get the students to think about these questions and answer them for themselves.

So why am I writing about this? Well, it really struck me that this is one of my primary problems with my own study of philosophy. Obviously philosophy is all about learning arguments from various perspectives, thinking about them, and then making our own conclusions about them. We try to use rigorous critical thinking and reasoning in our analysis, but ultimately it is up to us, the individual philosophers to figure out how to interpret things and criticize them. (There may be another branch of philosophy in which you spend the time and effort trying to figure out what so-and-so meant when they said whatever they said. I don’t think this is very interesting philosophy and it certainly isn’t what I want to be studying. That should be more a matter of history of philosophy than actual philosophy, but this is beside the point—almost.)

But what struck me was how much I identify with the students desperately clinging for some solid ground or truth (I think those were the speaker’s words, or at least a close paraphrase). I don’t have a very strong background in philosophy and I am always trying to figure out what it is I am supposed to be getting from the various arguments. What did so-and-so mean when they said what they said? What are the standard interpretations and am I getting it? I am always trying to extract from my professors what it is I am supposed to be thinking about the various philosophic positions. But really it isn’t their job to break it down for me in that way. Maybe they are just supposed to make the questions just clear enough so that I can think about it and do the analysis for myself. Maybe I need to quite struggling for the right interpretation and analysis and just find my own.

But as I am writing this, that just seems like an obvious point. Of course we are supposed to be looking for our own philosophic voice. Nevertheless, I am not sure I want to go all the way (still clinging?). I am here to get my philosophic footing and a part of that must be learning the sort of history of philosophy stuff that doesn’t really interest me that much. Don’t I have to learn what others have said and what the traditional interpretations are? Don’t I need a sort of broad view, lay of the land sort of thing before I can jump in to do my own work?

The question I am trying to ask is how much of my study here should be about assimilating information versus really doing philosophy? Can you assimilate without doing philosophy? Can you do philosophy without assimilating it?

Links

2004-11-02T03:16:00.000-05:00

Blakely, this is the COOLEST. Thanks for doing this. For my first post, I may as well inflict my web habit on you guys and offer up some hopefully unknown philosophy-related links. Warning: very naturalized. May not meet your standard of relevance to philosophy.

Online Papers in Philosophy

Philosophy Radio

(and the associated Philosophy Lectures. Many broken links.)

Coevolution of Language and Theory of Mind

The Leiter Reports and Crooked Timber

(Probably the two most prominent philosophy blogs.)

Water's Water Everywhere

(An especially excellent article on recent analytic philosophy by Jerry Fodor published in the LRB. Links to his other LRB articles are on the bottom-right of the page.)

Edge

Languagehat

(A great linguistics blog)

The Loom

(A science blog)

And finally, some assorted comics that are kind of about philosophy (NSFW, maybe? Bob the Angry Flower is done by a fellow Edmontonian):

Body Swap
The Time Looker-Forward Tube
Schrodinger's Fridge
Just in Case
The Difference Being

I'll post some responses to Winston's and Daniel's posts later. Anyone else have any good philosophy links? Post them in the comments! (Winston, I don't think it's going to be much of a problem to conduct discussions in the comments sections. It's what is done at most other philosophy blog sites, and it seems to work out fine).

Determinism and Prediction

2004-11-02T02:11:00.000-05:00

This post is a response to Daniel's post below. Be sure to read his post -- otherwise, this one won't make much sense. I originally put it in the comments of his post, but I think it's interesting enough to post as its own topic, since it's something I've thought about a lot. Also, maybe we'll get more lively discussion this way? I have a feeling that the usual blog format (each post with its own comments) isn't the best format for an broad, ongoing discussion -- not that I think that everybody posting their own new entry whenever they have anything to say is the best either. We'll just have to use some discretion, I think. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to express your views as a comment on this post, where no one will ever see it.

Anyway... I've spent a lot of time puzzling over the problem of prediction and determination, spurred on by interminable discussions of Newcomb's problem. I've decided that the problem that Daniel describes, the paradox of action and prediction in a deterministic world, is not really a problem at all, but an illusion, one that I hope to dispel here.

Say we have a prediction machine P. Give the state of a system S at time 0, it can predict the state of S at time t, before t actually comes about. I'd like to note that we actually have devices that can predict what a system is going to do (ie. a computer calculating a projectile trajectory), but these differ from our machine P in an important way: they simplify the problem by making certain assumptions about the system and throwing out irrelevant information. In a deterministic world with P being a perfect predictor of any S in that world, P must take into account every bit of information about the initial state of S. This, I think, is not an unreasonable picture.

The problem arises when you try to use P to predict the behavior of a system that contains P itself. If P's output/behavior is dependent on its prediction of what it is going to do, this is an impossible feat. (There is the trivial case where all possible predictions would lead to the same output, but that situation isn't very interesting. I'm going to focus on P's output is conditional on P's prediction of P's output.) Suppose P could predict it's own output, and its behavior was conditional on that prediction. It has two output lights, labeled A and B. You ask it to make predictions this way: "If you predict John Kerry will win the election, turn on A; otherwise turn on B." In this case, we make the following request: "If you predict that you will turn on light A, turn on light B. Otherwise turn on light A." So if it predicts A, then it'll flash B, and if it predicts B, it'll flash A. Now we flip the swith to make P go. Which light turns on? We've stipulated that P can predict what P is going to do, but to actually do so, it must see to the end of an infinite regress. The absurd conclusion gives us a reductio, so we should reject that there can exist a P that makes self-prediction-conditional actions.

So the Minority Report-like paradox that you propose isn't possible, because in this case, the predictor's output necessarily depends on its prediction of its output. Here's the picture: P predicts your action, but since your action depends on its prediction, it must first predict its prediction. And as we've seen, that's not possible. You could take a step back and say that the predictor just makes a very good guess instead of a perfect prediction (as in the actual Minority Report movie) but then the paradox is no longer a paradox. It's still a conundrum, to be sure, but of a different sort. It becomes a question of whether or not you believe the predictor, and how much reason you have to doubt it, and so on.

Now it's time to take back some of what I said: I stated that P was impossible, but I don't mean that in the strict sense of the word. Let me put it this way: if P were possible, we would have to give up a lot of things we take for granted; we'd have to cut out a huge swath of our web of belief. Though I haven't actually done it yet, I'm pretty sure that I could concoct a system in which, using a similar method, a group of predictors act as a Turing machine that can predict its own output, thus solving the halting problem. The halting problem is the thesis that no Turing machine program can predict, for every Turing machine program, whether that program will halt. As I understand it, the halting problem is equivalent to Godel's incompleteness theorem, which states that in any formal system powerful enough to represent arithmetic, there are statements that can not be proven true or false. So if P existed, it would be a physical method of proving an unprovable (via logic) statement true or false. If we can make P, then perhaps we could decide the truth value of "This statement is false" after all. If we could physically prove things that we can't logically prove, well, then the world is a much weirder place.

This scenario of revising logic is unlikely, but it's happened before: Quine and Putnam suggested that quantum mechanics necessitated adoption of a nonstandard system of logic, so I suppose that in a very broad sense, P is possible (but exceedingly unlikely, given what we know about the world now). That said, I don't think they had anything quite this radical in mind.

Addendum: It's 8 hours later, and I've changed my mind. I think it's completely impossible for the predictor to exist. Forget all that clever stuff about Godel and the halting problem. In the flashing light setup above, there's simply no answer it can give that will be correct.

Does determinism matter?

2004-11-01T22:42:00.000-05:00

Hi all,

Had a thought today about determinism in P&E that I want to explore. In light of Heidegger's da-sein, can we put the determinism we get out of physical reductionism into the same place as external skepticism? That is, maybe we're brains in vats or being toyed with by an evil demon, but so what, it doesn't feel that way so it doesn't really affect our lives at all. Similarly, if we somehow found out tomorrow that our lives and actions and decisions ARE reducible to physical principles and everything is determined, it wouldn't change the way we live our lives since it never at any moment FEELS as if that is what is going on. I for one would still care about all the same things and still make conscious decisions and still have the same goals. I would still "take care" in the world, as Heidegger would say. For that is what it is to be human. If we lost this condition of "taking care" we could no longer be classified as human beings (da-seins).

Now, this is all being said under the assumption that we somehow discovered determinism was true without being able to use it to know in advance everything that was going to happen. Naturally, if we did we WOULD make some changes in our cares and decisions and goals. For example, if we could foresee that Harry was going to commit some heinous crime next week, we might find it in our power to prevent this from happening, but problems would arise immediately here.

One, we would also foresee that we try to prevent Harry from committing the crime, but he must somehow commit it anyway if we foresaw it. But then why go through the trouble of trying to prevent it? Or, if we DID successfully prevent it then what we foresaw was wrong. But to be fair to determinism and escape the immanent paradox, we never would have foreseen him committing the crime, we would have foreseen ourselves foreseeing the crime and preventing it, but not actually foreseen the crime happening.

Does anyone want to pick up on the next step here? Does this make sense or sound interesting? I know it is a lot like "Minority Report" but I've never seen it. No time to continue this at the moment, but I want to expose that there is still a paradox here, and also that moral issues are raised (as they always are when determinism is involved).

Great idea!

2004-11-01T20:53:00.000-05:00

Thanks Blakely! I thing this is a great idea. I hope it takes off.

Welcome

2004-11-01T13:54:00.000-05:00

I thought it would be good to have a weblog to use as an all-encompassing discussion board. To, you know, share the love. If we like this, we could (depending on whether the idea of professors finding it excites us or terrifies us) 1) place a link to it on the department site or 2) make a more professional-looking blog hosted on the department site. Enjoy!