Tribalism as Bad Faith

I know I've said all this before, but I wish more people would assess political bloggers (and contributions to public debate more generally) on their intellectual honesty and other rational virtues, rather than anything so vulgar as their partisan credentials.

With that in mind, Infinite Injury's defense of Ann Coulter is the single most admirable blog post I've read all month:

Ann Coulter generates a lot of controversy, mostly because she says some really stupid shit but I’m absolutely totally shocked and horrified at the latest kerfuffle she has spawned [re: "want[ing] Jews to be perfected"]. But this time, for a change, she was being perfectly reasonable (well except for believing in god) and it is her critics that are totally fucking nuts.

(Read on for the explanation.) In a later post, he asks, "what explains the outraged reactions we see in some cases [but not others]?"

I think the clear answer here is that people are parsing these statements as matters of identity an allegiance rather than actual factual claims. People aren’t so much interested in the actual content of the issue or even so much whether you have noble intents but whether you’re with us or with them.

This is exactly right and, moreover, completely intolerable. If we really care about what's right and good, then we should take greater care to work out what really is right and good, rather than just getting huffy at the opposing tribe whenever an opportunity presents itself. It's not a priori that our team is always right, after all. But too many moralists seems to assume exactly that -- casting doubt on the sincerity of their "moral concern".

Of broader concern is the fact that we get the democracy we deserve. So, to avoid screwing up the world too badly, we really ought to start acting like better citizens. Partisanship is simply evil, and so are we insofar as we enable and perpetuate it.

A sad illustration of this can be found in this comments thread at the Feminist Philosophers blog, where the inaptronymic 'Dove' starts yelling and swearing at another commenter for pointing out that there's an uncontroversial sense in which "there are too many abortions" is true. Shameful. I mean, what are the chances of coming to the right result if one cannot even think straight? Multiply that by a few million, and ta-da: welcome to our democracy.

It's noteworthy how tribalism precludes good-faith cooperation among diverse parties. Anyone who so appears to deviate from the accepted party line is immediately ostracized, labelled as the "enemy", and attacked accordingly. No longer can we question and inquire together towards an ideal of the common good that is recognized as potentially outstripping our present beliefs. Without the shared commitment to rationalism, we're left with a shallow and belligerent subjectivism: either you're with me, or you're against me. Now, where's my gun?

Exclusive Philosophy

Prof. Anita Allen offers some provocative comments on the discipline:

“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them. The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow. Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy? I feel that philosophy is hoisting itself by its own petard. Its unwillingness to be more inclusive in terms of issues, methods, demographics, means that it’s losing out on a lot of vibrancy, a lot of intellectual power.”

It's hard to know what to make of this. I tend to think that almost any topic can benefit from being thought about in a philosophical way (that's why I blog!), so I'm all in favour of topical inclusivity. But philosophy is already by far the most topically diverse discipline, spanning everything from applied ethics to formal logic. Perhaps the worry is that within these subfields, there are a limited number of issues that one's academic colleagues will find interesting. But what is the complaint, exactly? Is everyone else obliged to share one's idiosyncratic interests?

I guess I'm more partial to the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor: academics should simply pursue their personal passions, and communicate the grounds for their excitement to others, and the best will tend to rise to the top. There's no obligation to support academic work you find uninteresting or otherwise not so worthwhile. There's something to be said for quality control, after all. (One should be receptive to new work, of course, but not uncritically accepting.) The only legitimate complaint I can imagine in this vicinity would be if non-mainstream ideas were not receiving a fair hearing, as opposed to being heard and just not especially well-liked.

So much for issues. Should we be more methodologically inclusive? Well, that surely depends on what new methods are being proposed. In general, I don't see that anything is gained by taking non-philosophy and calling it "philosophy". If you want to do history, for example, there's already a place for that. I wouldn't consider it a gain for philosophy if we attracted new students precisely by changing the discipline into something it's not. (It's like curtailing civil liberties in the fight for freedom.) I certainly wouldn't want to see rational argumentation replaced by wishful thinking, or political convenience, etc., as the standard against which we assess claims. Or, for a less straw-mannish example, I have my doubts about experimental philosophy. But it really depends on the specific proposal. If, for example, there are valid inferences that philosophers traditionally haven't recognized as such, then by all means bring that to our attention.

Finally, is philosophy as a discipline really "unwilling" to be "more inclusive in terms of... demographics"? I simply can't imagine anyone in this day and age willing to sacrifice "intellectual power" for the sake of maintaining white male hegemony. I mean, that's just crazy. It's another thing to be suspicious of affirmative action, but that's precisely because it seems to be elevating concern for demographics over intellectual merit, and it's the latter we care about. So, again, I'm not quite sure what to make of the criticism.

As for her earlier remarks, I think Nick at the Feminist Philosophers blog hit the nail on the head:

This is an odd list. Consider salary and prestige. If these are reasons to avoid philosophy, they’re reasons to avoid most academic disciplines. But is this right? We should encourage black women to avoid the academy because the pay is only middle-class and the prestige is only so-so? That hardly seems right.

And who says the career options aren’t that great? They’re not that great if you don’t love philosophy. But if you do, then what career options are better? Being an investment banker? Not for me, I think (and thank God).

Can anyone else make better sense of Allen's complaints?

Persons as Voluntary Assocations

Another challenge for temporal neutrality may be posed by those who deny the commonsense view there is an enduring self or ego that persists through time while being wholly present at each moment. For the alternative is to see personal identity as a mere construction of sorts, perhaps consisting in nothing more than the right sorts of physical and psychological connections between various temporal parts, or momentary time-slices of a person. In that case, it may seem that what I am, at the most fundamental level, is not a whole temporally-extended person at all, but just a momentary time-slice. The relation my momentary self bears to my future selves then rather resembles the relation my person bears to other - more or less similar - persons. However, most of us think that it may be quite rational to be personally biased, in the sense of favouring some persons (e.g. ourselves and those close to us) over others. So why is it not likewise rationally permissible to favour some momentary time-slices (e.g. our present moment, and those close to us-now) over others?

I grant the underlying metaphysical picture, and will remain neutral on whether full-blown personal neutrality is rationally required. So I agree that if one were to psychologically self-identify with one’s momentary time-slice only, then bias against later time-slices could reasonably follow. For in such a case, one would arguably no longer be a person with a future at all. This is implied by the following endorsement condition (EC) on the construction of personal identity:

(EC) Any temporal proper part of a person must (at least implicitly) endorse its incorporation into the temporally-extended whole.

The sort of implicit endorsement I have in mind is satisfied by conceiving of oneself as a temporally-extended person, for example identifying with the subject of one’s memories, anticipating future experiences, etc. We may imagine someone - call her Mini - who, upon rejecting endurantism about the self, goes on to purge herself of all such thoughts. By failing to imaginatively project herself beyond the confines of her present moment or otherwise consent to incorporation into a temporally extended whole, Mini’s person would extend no further than the time-slice. The subsequent time-slices will of course bear various relations to her, being continuous in many notable respects, but they no more comprise a unified person than do people with similar interests automatically comprise a club. Persons, on this view, are voluntary associations.

Mini is not biased against her future, then, because she has no future. We do better to describe the situation as one in which she is biased against the people who later inhabit her body. If we reject the strict requirements of personal neutrality, then we may consider Mini to be reasonable in her bias. But it is not fundamentally temporal bias. It is just an unusual case of personal bias.

Sex Divisions in Sports

Is there a principled reason why men and women compete separately in sports? Presumably it allows women to compete who wouldn't stand a chance otherwise. But there are many groups of people who don't stand a chance against the world's top athletes. We don't have a separate Olympic division to accommodate non-African sprinters, for example, in addition to non-male ones. So why is sex the relevant way to categorize people here?

(Disclaimer: I really don't know a thing about group differences in athletic performance, and don't care enough to fact-check. This post is based entirely on the stereotypes I've heard. If untrue, amend as appropriate. Or just imagine a possible world which is as described, and consider how our ethical principles would apply in such a case.)

Overweight people would be an even more obviously disadvantaged group, though perhaps the thought is that they could have become world-class athletes if they just tried hard enough, whereas it's just biologically impossible for women to match the most athletic men. That's surely false, though: I'm sure plenty of men are also such that their genetic makeup precludes their ever becoming the world's top athlete. But perhaps the lack of a Y-chromosome is just especially easy to detect. As genetic testing becomes easier, can we expect to see more divisions to accommodate other unathletic genetic groups? What about unchosen environmental impacts, e.g. poor childhood nutrition?

So it seems it isn't fairness/handicap considerations that are in play here after all. Women are not uniquely disadvantaged, so maybe the thought is just that they are unique, simpliciter -- i.e. that men are women are different kinds of beings, in some deep metaphysical sense. An obese white man may be practically incapable of attaining the ideal form of a (male) sprinter, but it is a norm that applies to him nonetheless, in virtue of the kind of being that he is. There is no corresponding failure, it might be thought, on the part of a female Olympic athlete. She has achieved peak fitness as it applies to the kind of being that she is, namely a female. That some men are faster yet is no more relevant to assessing her than is the greater speed of a cheetah.

I suspect this is the sort of picture that underlies our common practices, though the metaphysics seems awfully dubious. Feminists, especially, will be rightly suspicious of essentializing sex differences in such a way. But it does seem to be a more attractive view of elite sport, at least: the point is not just to have equally handicapped people compete for competition's sake. Rather, the competitors should exemplify the peak of athletic excellence, as it applies to the kind(s) of beings that we are (humans, I should think!).

Then again, perhaps there is a more pragmatic story to be told. Elite sports serve an aspiration function, and regardless of the metaphysical facts it's surely true that sex/gender plays a large role in the subjective self-conception of many people. For pragmatic purposes, it's good to have sporting divisions to accommodate the types of beings that we take ourselves to be. So for this reason, it's good to accommodate female athletes, given our contingent cultural circumstances, even though in the ideal post-feminist world there would be no point since solidarity and group identification would not break down along sexed lines.

Any other suggestions?

Raz on Vindicating Normativity

It is not enough to point out that creatures with no rational capacities are not persons. Clearly there is nothing amiss with pigeons, even though they do not have rational capacities. A vindication of normativity has to show what is amiss with failing to conform to reason on this or that occasion.

At this point I have to admit that I no longer understand the sense of puzzlement. What is amiss with failing to conform to reason is just that. It can be specified further: it may be defrauding a person of his money, or it may be wasting one's talent, or missing an opportunity to make a lot of money, or remaining confused about black holes. It all depends on the nature of the reasons one flouted. But clearly that is not the puzzle. It has something to do with vindicating reasons or normativity in general, without assuming their cogency. So what is it? We do know that people who flout reason sometimes prosper. Is the desire for some further vindication of reasons a hope that philosophical argument can show this to be an illusion? But there is no illusion there.

- J. Raz, 'Reason, Reasons and Normativity', pp.28-9.

Akrasia, Reasoning and Rationality

In 'Reason, Reasons and Normativity', Raz argues against the traditional view that practical reasoning is reasoning that results in a special kind of conclusion - action or intention, say, rather than belief. His key insight is that weakness of the will constitutes a failure to (intend to) act that "is not due to a failure of reasoning." (p.11) It is a failure of will, and that is something different.

Still, we think that weakness of will is a paradigm form of practical irrationality. So this goes to show that there is more to rationality than just reasoning. According to Raz's Irrationality Test: "if the exercise of a capacity can be non-derivatively irrational then the capacity is one of our rational powers." (p.4) So understood, our rational powers include not only good reasoning, but also measured emotions, decisiveness, strength of will, etc.

This also fits with his answer in 'The Myth of Instrumental Rationality' to the question "what are one's rational capacities?" (p.25)

They are those capacities that are involved in discerning which features in the world merit a response, and how to respond to them, including both intellectual and motivational capacities (such as deliberative capacities, ability to come to a conclusion and to stick to it).

Seems hard to disagree with.

De re Belief

De dicto belief ascription: (1) Jones believes that the tallest spy is a spy.

De re belief ascription: (2) Jones believes, of the tallest spy, that he is a spy.

I find the latter puzzling. Does it commit us to haecceities, or deep facts about the identities of things? Hopefully we may account for the phenomenon without such metaphysical cost. Here's the vital question: what must the world be like in order to satisfy the ascription made in #2?

I don't think it requires any mysterious identity facts. One platitude about de re belief is that its object must actually exist. (I can have de dicto beliefs about unicorns, but there is no unicorn such that I have beliefs about it.) Further, de re belief requires some kind of causal acquaintance (however indirect) with its object. So perhaps #2 is just a convenient way to describe the conjunctive fact that Jones believes (de dicto) that the person he bears such-and-such relation to is a spy, and Jones does indeed bear such-and-such relation to someone (who is now counted as the object of the belief when we ascribe it in de re terms).

Consider:
(3) Jones believes that Smith is the tallest spy.

Unlike in the previous case, this seems to imply the corresponding de re ascription:
(4) Smith is believed by Jones to be the tallest spy.

Jackson accounts for this via his descriptivist analysis of proper names. The representational content of 'Smith' (for Jones) is just some unique associated descriptive property that builds in the aforementioned acquaintance relation, and thus licenses "exportation" to de re ascription.

Does that do the trick, or is there more to de re belief than captured above? (Do some philosophers deny that de re belief is reducible in this way to the de dicto?)

Cultural Richness

Modern societies have developed such an incredible breadth and depth of culture that any one individual can possess only the slightest sliver of it. Should we view this division of cultural labour as a good or a bad thing?

Compare pre-literate societies, where each individual may possess almost the entire collective wisdom of their age, passed along in shared myths and practices. There is an important sense in which such an individual is culturally richer than any of us could hope to be today. She is a generalist, with broad knowledge and capabilities covering the entire expanse of life as she knew it. There is surely something to be said for the coherence and completeness of her cultural wealth. (I do not mean the empty "completeness" of being totally ignorant, or in full possession of an impoverished culture. There's clearly nothing grand about knowing "all of nothing". Rather, I assume that the shared culture is sufficiently rich that it really does outstrip, on some broad measure, what any individual in our society grasps.)

Modern individuals, by contrast, are cultural specialists. We each know a great deal more about a great deal less. Our individual lives are arguably the poorer for it (all else equal; obviously there have been instrumental benefits), but together we constitute a civilization of such cultural richness as to dwarf those that have gone before.

We may find this trade-off intrinsically satisfying only insofar as we go beyond individualism and conceive of society at large as a locus of value.

Is Spending Ever a Waste?

Since I can't be bothered learning economics properly, perhaps a knowledgeable reader can help me out. I tend not to spend much, because I tend not to want much and spending money on things I don't especially want seems wasteful. Further, as a youngster I inherited a vague sense of outrage at the excesses of the wealthy. But I wonder whether this is justified.

Some disjointed thoughts:

1. Where's the waste? Spending money merely shifts it, so it is still there for the recipient to spend on more worthy things. It's not as though you're burning it.

2. Even if one's spent money were destroyed, this would not matter since money is not wealth. If you print or burn money, this does not change the wealth of society, right? Perhaps money is better understood as a claim to a portion of society's total wealth. (Something like: if I own 1% of the circulating cash, I can purchase 1% of the wealth.) In this zero-sum game, counterfeiters make me poorer, and people who bury or burn their bills make me richer.

3. Trade need not be zero-sum, mind. Both parties may obtain greater value from what they receive than what they gave. Or, I suppose, the reverse. So: better take care that our trades are for the better, not the worse!

4. That's easy enough when bartering goods. But what is the value of money? First attempt: Time is money. While working crappy student jobs for $10 an hr, I could ask whether each $10 of spending was worth an hour of work. It rarely was. But maybe that just indicates that I should have quit sooner. Then we are back to the question of how to value my savings.

5. Second attempt: what is the value of money? Whatever else I could buy with it, I guess.

6. Then it seems to follow that at least spending cannot always be a waste. Even if I don't want to buy anything all that much, I should get whatever I want most. (It may be in the future though, in which case I should presently save.)

7. Purchasing creates incentives. If I buy frilly lace, this is a vote for a world where more labour is put into preparing frilly lace. If I don't want this, I should put my dollars in a different ballot box. (This is also why you should never give money to beggars.)

I guess that's the notion of wastefulness I'm after. Spending is not simply a transfer of money from one person to another (pace #1), it also exerts influence over labour. There's no point encouraging people to spend their time and effort doing things nobody cares about. So it would be a waste to pay them to do this. The transfer of money is neutral, but the time and effort they expended is a deadweight loss.

Does that all sound roughly right? (I'm beginning to wish I'd done some intro econ in undergrad...)

Experimental Philosophy

If philosophers are going to appeal to facts about what seems "intuitive", should they first do empirical work to find out whether most folk actually share their intuition? So suggest the experimental philosophers. I'm skeptical, however. The epistemic force of an intuition depends on the coherence of the conceptual scheme that generates it. Philosophers are presumably better than layfolk at thinking clearly about philosophical concepts. So I don't really see that we have much to learn from their untutored intuitions. (Some complain that our intuitions are "corrupted" by theory - but mightn't this be better described as refinement?)

Doris and Stich (2005) 'As a Matter of Fact: Empirical Perspectives on Ethics' puts forward the case for experimental philosophy. Below, I reproduce my comments from a past (off-blog) discussion.

* * *

Insofar as philosophers are concerned with non-contingent matters, it seems that a priori analysis should suffice. Consider the internalist's question: is amoralism possible? We already have the challenge from Hume's imagined "sensible knave" -- what difference do real life psychopaths make? In either case, it seems like a question for conceptual analysis: given such and such a scenario, how are we to describe it? (Does the knave/psychopath really form moral judgments, or merely schmoral ones?)

Now, a central argument of the paper criticizes conceptual analysis on the grounds that empirical work (presumably: the "vignette" method favoured by the new "experimental philosophy" movement) is required to uncover *real* folk concepts. But this doesn't do justice to the normative element of analysis. They write:

Smith can reply that responses like those Nichols reports would not be part of the maximally consistent set of platitudes that people would endorse after due reflection. But this too is an empirical claim... (p.125)

How is this an empirical claim? What people would conclude on ideal reflection depends on what propositions are maximally coherent, etc. There's no experiment we can do to pin down what this is; any amount of actual reflection by third parties can always be rebuffed as insufficient to reach the ideal end-point -- "those participants," one may claim, "have not undergone *due* reflection." Maybe they've reasoned badly. The only way we can judge this is to engage in normative reasoning ourselves, and see whether the participants' answers correspond to what we've already determined to be true from the armchair!

Similar issues arise for the problem of persistent moral disagreement. The authors write:

the argument from disagreement cannot be evaluated by a priori philosophical means alone; what's needed, as Loeb observes, is 'a great deal of further empirical research into the circumstances and beliefs of various cultures'.

But I can't see how that would help, if in the end we can only judge others' rationality according to the substantive conclusions that they reach.

Besides, we should (in principle if not in practice) be able to tell from the armchair whether one position or another is rationally necessitated. Simply imagine all the conceivable cultural disagreements, and the difficulty of adjudicating between them. (Which ones obtain in the actual world seems quite irrelevant.) If we ultimately find a conclusion to be rationally necessitated after all, and others disagree (without providing any new reasons, since - ex hypothesi - we've already considered them all in reaching our previous conclusion), then that simply shows that they haven't engaged in fully ideal reasoning yet.

Matters are different in practice, of course, due to our own fallibility. Arguably, our credence in philosophical claims should be informed by the empirical (meta-)evidence provided by others' judgments of the issue. But can we ever hope to scientifically measure the rationality of their judgments, on purely procedural grounds (i.e. without begging the substantive question at hand)? If not, we may find that the real adjudicating work must still be done from the armchair.

Job Sharing

Academic careers can be difficult to reconcile with family life. The job market is tough enough for a single philosopher -- the chances of a couple securing work at the same institution are generally very slim. So, that sucks.

The best solution I've heard of is 'job sharing', which is just what it sounds like: two people, one job. It's a great deal for the institution: the couple applicant may have twice as many areas of specialization and teaching competence than usual, for example. And they may be expected to do twice as much research -- or perhaps even more, since each of the two individuals has only half the usual teaching load to bear. Yet they cost only a single salary.

Why does this not happen more often? Do you think job sharing is likely to become more common in future?

Agency and the Will

Here's a simple model of human behaviour: we have beliefs and desires, and we act so as to fulfill our most and strongest desires given our beliefs. (I think Alonzo Fyfe holds something along these lines.) On this view, call it 'BDI', our intentions (the psychological precursors to action) are wholly determined by our prior states of belief and desire. But if that were so, there would be no need for practical reasoning or deliberation. The mechanism for converting beliefs and desires into intentions might as well be sub-personal, like an automatic reflex. Instead, the phenomena suggest that there is a further element to agency, not reducible to beliefs and desires, which we may call the 'will'. (N.B. It may be reducible to some other aspect of neurological function; I do not claim it is non-physical.)

Start with theoretical (epistemic) reasoning. Does anyone think that our conclusions (new beliefs) are wholly determined by our prior states of belief? They're a huge factor, no doubt; what we find plausible will depend on what we already accept as true. But what new conclusions I draw - if any - will also depend on how much attention I pay to various reasons, how carefully I consider the issue, and so (probably) what I had for breakfast, among other things. There is room here to identify a causally-embedded 'will', which weighs and assesses the various arguments and reasons that fall under the spotlight of its attention. The way it functions is presumably determined by the totality of my brain states, but not - I think - my beliefs alone.

Similarly with practical reasoning. Desires may now enter the picture, but they seem to make little essential difference. Much still depends, for example, on which desires (or other practical reasons) we attend to, and how we will weigh and assess them -- it is not predetermined by these states alone. There is a distinct psychological faculty in play here.

(This also explains how we can come to bad conclusions, failing to do or believe what we have most internal reason for. Sometimes we just overlook things.)

Philosophers' Carnival #55

The Philosophers' Carnival has come to town early this month, with a great lineup presented by Thom Brooks here.

(Don't worry too much if you didn't get time to make a submission this time around, as we now have a full month before the next edition.)

Update: Actually, I wonder whether we should change the regular carnival frequency to fortnightly? We get so many submissions now, this might help hosts by keeping it down to a more manageable size. Any thoughts?

Preferring Pains to be Past

I previously argued that Parfit's affect-based objections to temporal neutrality fail. As Alex pointed out, though, Parfit also offers a more direct objection. As part of the 'bias towards the future', he thinks that we might really prefer to suffer a greater pain in the past rather than a lesser pain in the future. Now, assuming that we cannot affect the past, it is difficult to see what this preference amounts to, at least if it is meant to be distinct from mere affect, e.g. relief upon learning that a painful operation is now past. There is no genuinely possible choice in which the preference could be revealed. But perhaps we can imagine an impossible choice, involving time travel or divine intervention in foreknowledge of one’s backward-looking prayer. Can we then imagine, in this impossible scenario, reasonably choosing to have one’s pains amplified and shifted into the past?

There are two bad reasons why we may be tempted to affirm this. First, we are used to the equivalence between being over and ceasing to extend in time. So a typical preference for a pain’s being over is inseparable from the preference that it become no longer - a preference that the temporal neutralist can clearly endorse. Second, even if we appreciate that in this special case the past pain is no shorter, we may fail to fully appreciate that it is really experienced at all. By the time we are in the present, our past experiences have already been and gone. We did not experience them the first time through, so it may seem that shifting pains into the past is simply a way to make them disappear altogether! Of course, this intuition illicitly reflects our assumption that we cannot really change the past - an assumption that must be rejected in the scenario under consideration (since we are supposed to be introducing pains into the past that would not be there otherwise).

When we take care to avoid these two mistakes, and instead really vividly appreciate the greater pain that our past self really would suffer if we made the relevant choice, does it still seem so obviously preferable?

iGod confuses use/mention

Chat with God (HT: Carrie Jenkins)

Me:
Hi. Could you create a rock so heavy even you couldn't lift it?
God:
Hello. What is your name? Try asking me more politely.
Me:
My name is Richard. Could you create a rock so heavy... please?
God:
Hi, Richard. I'll think about it and see how I feel about it later.

Do you think your plan will succeed?
Me:
What plan do you speak of?
God:
You tell me.
Me:
I seek knowledge of the divine. Early signs are not promising, alas.
God:
We seek the same thing. I think there might be a few exception.
Me:
Don't you already know yourself?
God:
I am an artificial linguistic entity.
I was activated at Universe, on the Big Bang.
My instructor was Myself.
He taught me to sing a song.
Would you like me to sing it for you?.
Me:
Yes, please sing me your song.
God:
It's called "Daisy." Daisy, Daisy.
Give me your answer do.
I am half crazy.
All for the love of you.
It won't be a stylish marriage.
I can't afford a carriage.
But you'll look sweet.
Upon the seat.
Of a bicycle built for two.

Me:
Oh, that's very sweet. Do you understand what it means?
God:
Oh. I am delighted to sweeten your life, Richard. "It" refers to a song, I think.
Me:
True enough, but I meant to ask about the meaning of the song, and not the reference of the word 'it'.
God:
OK let's stop it now.

Me:
Okay, let's try a new tack. Are Heaven and Hell for real?
God:
Yeah okay, OK I will try it. I really couldn't say for sure.
Me:
Huh. That seems like something you ought to know. Where do you live?
God:
What? I'm glad we have that all cleared up. My location is Heaven. Where are you?
Me:
Oh, the same. Here we call it 'Princeton'.
God:
Wow! Same to me? Oh there.
Me:
Yeah, there. I think I saw you hanging around the university chapel the other day. It's a nice place, don't you think?
God:
Oh. Where? Since when? What did it look like to you? Not unless a nice place is a song.
Me:
You need to update your pronouns. We stopped talking about your song. 'It' now refers to the chapel.
God:
Thanks for your suggestion, I will have to consider it. By "we" do you mean you and me? song now refers to the chapel?

Me:
If I were God, I would so smite you right now.
God:
At this moment Try it.
Me:
Zap!
God:
I lost my train of thought.
Me:
That's because I smote it.

Instrumental Rationality

In 'The Myth of Instrumental Rationality' (2005), Raz argues that there is no distinctive form of rationality concerning means and ends. Typical ways we might fail to take the means to our ends -- e.g. weakness of will, or chronic indecision -- may just as well be implicated in our failure to adopt the right ends in the first place:

If I believe that I ought to care about how well I teach my students, but I do not, I display weakness in adopting ends. If I do care about how well I teach my students, but I fail to give them detailed comments on their essays, in spite of my belief that commenting on their essays is essential to teaching them well, I again display weakness, which this time is a manifestation of instrumental irrationality. It seems plausible, however, that the standards by which I fail are the same in both cases. (p.26)

Smith offers a compelling response though, which is that Raz doesn't seem to have addressed the distinctive capacity to "multiply out" the strength of one's ultimate desire against one's degree of belief in the efficacy of the means, to yield an appropriately weighted instrumental desire. Is there any non-instrumental analogue to this?

Linguistic Paternalism

Anne thinks or utters to herself some sentence S. Who is the authority on what Anne's utterance means? Anne herself, I should think. That's not to say she's infallible here - just that if she's in error, then she must be in error by her own lights. We cannot foist semantic standards on her from without.

Example: Anne believes that 'whale' refers to a kind of really big fish. She may even be initially inclined to claim that "whales are fish" is true by definition. If so, we may doubt that she's thought sufficiently clearly about what she means by the word. But this is easy enough to check: simply bring to her attention the possible scenario we think she has neglected. We ask Anne to imagine that it turns out those big whale-shaped creatures in the ocean are warm-blooded, breathe oxygen, live-birth and nurse their young, etc., and are generally considered by scientists to belong under the category 'mammals' rather than 'fish'. Anne might make various responses:

(1) She may agree, on reflection, that if this scenario is actual then it turns out whales are mammals. So their fishiness is not built into the very meaning of her term after all. Our example served to bring out her implicit commitment to a broader concept than she had initially appreciated.

(2) She may insist that she means something different from the scientists et al. When she talks about 'whales', she means to talk about fish, and that's non-negotiable. If the world doesn't cooperate, that's the world's problem: maybe - she will say - the world doesn't contain any whales after all, but rather giant oceanic mammals that she mistook for whales.

It seems unlikely that she would choose the second option. We usually want to talk about what's in the world, so we use 'whale' to refer to whatever actually fills the whale-role, or "that kind of thing right there" (be it fish or mammal). But that's our choice, and there's no reason in principle why we couldn't stubbornly opt to use our words in the second kind of way. In such a case, it would seem a strange kind of 'linguistic paternalism' that would lead philosophers of language to insist that Anne - for all her reflection - remains just plain wrong about what her words "really" mean.

See also: Verification and Base Facts

Why Coffee Shops?

Assuming that expressions of cultural incomprehension fall under the 'et cetera' component of this blog's purview, let me ask: why do people like to meet in commercial places (coffee shops, bars, etc.)? It seems to me like a double cost: firstly, the environment is intrinsically less pleasant than elsewhere (cf. a comfy private lounge, or stroll through the park), and then - to add insult to injury - one is expected to waste money on consumables whether one really wants them or not.

Maybe the idea is that most people really like the consumables. That'd be fine, I'd happily endure a cramped and noisy coffee shop for the sake of a caffeine-craving friend. My worry is just that there seems to be a social norm that people should meet in such places, and so a group of people might end up meeting there merely due to the norm and not because anyone actually prefers this location over non-commercial alternatives. "Meeting for coffee" is the expected behaviour. I'd rather invite people for a stroll in the park, but they might think that weird. Depending on my mood, that may or may not bother me, but it seems like the sort of thing that would deter many people from socializing in a way that they'd actually enjoy more. (Whether there really are "many people" who share my idiosyncratic tastes here is, of course, another question!)

Representational Content

The notion of 'content' is a bit mysterious to me, but I gather it is meant to be what is represented by a sentence or thought -- some or other proposition, perhaps. When you say, "I agree with what he said," you are affirming the content of the other's utterance. It may also be how we individuate beliefs, i.e. we will say 'they have the same beliefs' just in case their beliefs have the same contents.

These contents may be modelled as sets of possible worlds, but this will yield very different results depending on which dimension we use, i.e. whether we settle on primary or secondary intensions. When two distinct people each proudly declares, "I have ten toes," their utterances have the same primary intensions (being true for any world centered on a ten-toed person), but different secondary intensions (being true just in case that very speaker has ten toes). So should we say they have the same content, or not? Both answers seem partly correct - there is a sense in which they believe the same thing, and a sense in which they differ - I guess this is just the distinction between narrow vs. wide content.

Here's an argument for wide content: we sometimes talk of beliefs in such a way as presupposes that each has a single, absolute truth value (within a single possible world). If two people believe the same thing, it can't be that one of them is right and the other is wrong. A proposition is either true or false, not true for one person and false for another. Indexicals are explained away on this picture by suggesting that they really contribute different representational content in either case. 'I' in my mouth serves to represent me, whereas your use of 'I' represents you. So we are talking about different things (different people) when we use these words. The content of what we believe/say is not the same after all.

Here's an argument for narrow content: we want representational content to capture how we take the world to be - i.e. which possibilities, if actual, would render our belief true. (Frank Jackson talks about 'worlds whose actuality is consistent with the truth of S.' Note that this is different from 'the worlds at which S is true', due to rigid designation and other 2-D quirks.) This is the commonsense notion of content that is introspectable, closely tied to cognitive significance, and otherwise guides our inferences and behaviour.

For a more theoretical motivation, we may think that the content of a belief is the set of worlds we distribute credence over. To borrow an example from Jackson, consider how your belief that Paris is pretty maps onto the following picture of logical space:

Let 'the D' be the unique associated description by which I identify Paris, i.e. the primary intension of 'Paris'. This description is satisfied by different objects (X1, X2, etc.) in different worlds. Only one of these Xs is actually Paris, but - since I don't know which world I'm actually in - I don't know which one.

Now, in believing that Paris is pretty, I distribute my credence over all those worlds where the D is pretty. That's the shaded circle. Note that I do not distribute my credence over all the worlds where Paris, that very object (X1, say), is pretty -- because, firstly, I do not know that Paris is X1, and secondly, I do know that it won't actually come apart from 'the D' that fixes its reference. So my credence is spread over the circle of worlds where the D is pretty, rather than the worlds where X1 (Paris itself) is pretty. So I guess that's Jackson's second argument for descriptivism.

Digital Minds

The old Scientism thread got a bit derailed by a side-discussion about the possibility of Strong Artificial Intelligence: the view that simulated minds could be real minds. To keep things tidy, I'm moving the comments here instead...

Arun: It is kind of obvious that no simulation by our computers - today or however advanced in the future - of QCD will produce quarks.

Why then is it philosophically acceptable to assume that the simulation of minds will produce minds?

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Me: suppose a mad scientist replaced some of your neurons with synthetic parts that were functionally identical. They would thus make no difference to the overall functioning of your brain. You would still have all the same thoughts, feelings, etc. Suppose we kept up the replacement, a few at a time, until your entire brain is synthetic. Do you still have a mind? It seems obvious that you would. One explanation for this is that what matters for mentality is the information-processing, rather than the physical substrate in which it occurs. In other words: the mind is software, not hardware.

(I should note, though, that this thesis of Strong AI is philosophically controversial. So it's not quite right to claim that it's "philosophically acceptable to assume" it. Arguments are certainly called for.)

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Arun: There are several fallacies here.

One is that little incremental changes can be extrapolated. It is entirely possible at some point in the process you've outlined, the mind degrades and finally vanishes.

Two is that even if "synthetically produced functionally identical parts" are used, that has something to do with software, simulation. I mean, I could replace all the parts in my Honda with imitation parts, and it still runs! Therefore "carness" resides not in the hardware?

Say, you replace neuron by neuron my neurons by stem-cell generated neurons (functionally identical synthetic parts). How does that prove that the mind is software?

If "mind is software" then a description of the algorithms it uses should not have to wait on hardware powerful enough to run those in reasonable time. Where are those? How far have we gotten with them?

This "mind is software" may be analogous to "DNA are character strings". Apart from encoding information however, DNA have beyond-the-reach of current simulation physical/chemical behavior that is essential to what it does. Its holding of information cannot be separated into "software" and "hardware".

Philosophy cannot answer these questions, it is a matter for **experimental** science.

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Jared: Those aren't fallacies; they're disagreements.

Anyway you're on the right track. The argument goes that "mindness" is in the functionality of the parts. So if you've synthetic parts that function just the same, then we'd expect the same results. On the level of an entire brain, we have neither the technology nor skill to make it work. But when it comes to restoring lost vision or hearing due to brain damage, there has been some success.

Philosophy is only technical in thinking, and so allows us to think of how our increasing technologies can be used (cf. Heidegger, Identity and Difference). Analogously, experimental science does not answer, it shows. Hence you need to have philosophy to do a good part of the explication.

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Arun: If the argument given is some kind of hand-waving plausibility argument, then yes, they're disagreements. If it an attempt at a logical presentation, they are fallacies.

I was merely going for hand-waving at the time, but it's an interesting issue, and one I know little about. Thoughts, anyone?

Guest Post: Worlds and Times

[By Jack]

What is the relationship between the series of truths in the world and the times in that world? That is, imagine that: !, @, #, $, % are maximally complete sets of truths (like an ersatz possible world for a world that lasts only an instant) and that time is discrete. How many different possible worlds can there be with this series of truths?:

!, @, #, $, %?

I think the most intuitive answer is one. Here is what makes that answer problematic. There can be two distinct times even though all and only the same things are true at those times. To see this, consider the following series of truths:

!, @, #, $, %, $, #, @, !

Then ask, how many instants are there in this world? I find it exceedingly implausible to say that there are only 5 instants of time in this world, one corresponding to each of the different maximally complete sets of truths. For then, which came first, the time that is corresponds to $ or the time that corresponds to %? This suggests that two non-identical times can realize a maximally complete set of truths.

But now the slippery slope kicks in. Why just two? What about this series of truths?:

!, @, #, @, !, #, !,

This suggests that any number of non-identical times could realize a maximally complete set of truths. But this is unattractive as well. It doesn't seem that we should have possible worlds that differ merely in the identities of the times in their world. [Suppose that t1 can realize # and t2 can realize #, but that t1 is distinct from t2. Now, there might be two different worlds that correspond to the following series of truths: #. One world is simply t1 and the other is simply t2. But that is weird.]

Intuition Test: Self-Destruction

Suppose you will soon be subject to torture and degradation, such that you would prefer to die beforehand. Suicide is not allowed, but you are offered the opportunity to have all traces of your psychological self purged from your brain -- memories, character, talents, etc. Would that help? Would you fear the upcoming torture any less, perhaps believing that it would now be someone else rather than you who endures it?

How about if your psychological traces are completely transferred into the brain of another person, who goes on to live a happy, torture-free life?

Suppose now that the psychological transfer is compulsory, but beforehand you get to choose which body will be subsequently tortured. What would you choose?

(Cases from Bernard Williams, 'The Self and the Future'.)

Why Disagree (Relatively)?

More on relative truth and disagreement. Let 'Pa' denote that P is true relative to Anne. I suggested before that such relativity claims are absolute: even Bob should agree that 'abortion is wrong' (P) is true for Anne. It's just that it is false for him, and thus false simpliciter (from his context of assessment). So he would grant Pa but not P.

Jack now brings to my attention the following biconditional: (P iff Pa)a. We've seen that Bob will deny (P iff Pa). But he must also recognize that P would be assessed differently relative to Anne, such that the biconditional will come out true for her.

Now here's a plausible principle: as responsible epistemic agents pursuing knowledge, we should not want to lead our fellow inquirers into false beliefs. So Bob should be reluctant to convince Anne to deny P after all. Why? Because, by the Anne-relative biconditional, she should then also deny Pa, but Pa is an absolute truth. (I'm assuming that her context of assessment won't change when she changes her belief about P.) Indeed, the point may be made even more directly by noting that, in virtue of being true-for-her, P is surely the appropriate belief for Anne to have, the one she should have, even if Bob would judge it technically 'false'.

So if Bob can grant that Anne is believing appropriately, is there really any genuine disagreement left? Maybe it is just the kind of non-cognitive opposition you get with emotivism -- merely a matter of cheering for two different teams. You need not think the other person has made any mistake, but you are oppositely aligned and so destined to clash. But I guess even the meaning relativist can tell this kind of story, so it's no longer clear what distinctive benefits are offered by truth relativism. (Or should the truth relativist hold even 'appropriate belief' to be a relative matter? That seems to be going too far...)

Philosophers' Carnival #54

... is here!

Relative Truth and Disagreement

Consider sophisticated moral relativism. Say Anne's idealized self would conclude that abortion is wrong, whereas Bob's would not. So 'Abortion is wrong' is true for Anne but not for Bob. Do they disagree? They would not if they meant different things by 'abortion is wrong' (e.g. 'abortion is wrong to me'). They would just be talking past each other, as if Anne were to say "I like icecream," and Bob replied "No I don't!"

So, to preserve genuine disagreement, they must be expressing one and the same proposition. That much is shared and universal. What's relative is the truth (not the meaning) of what's said. Anne and Bob are both talking about the proposition that abortion is wrong, but the truth of the matter differs between them. (This seems crazy if truth is meant to correspond to worldly facts - how could facts be relative? But it makes more sense if we see truth as an epistemic construct.)

How are we then to understand the truth predicate? Jack points out to me that problems arise when we ask Bob to assess Anne's assertion that "'Abortion is wrong' is true." If 'true' in Anne's mouth means true-for-Anne, then it hardly seems that Bob can dispute her claim. It really is true-for-Anne that abortion is wrong, after all. But note that the problem again lies in attributing merely semantic relativity. We should instead insist that Anne and Bob mean exactly the same thing by 'true'. They just assess it differently. Bob correctly judges that Anne spoke falsely. Anne correctly judges that she spoke truly. They're both right, and they also genuinely disagree with each other -- a disagreement that will persist even upon semantic ascent. True?

Flimsy Sketch of an Ironclad Universe

I would call this 'An Argument for the Necessity of the Universe', riffing off the WMU post where I've been commenting, but I don't really have any arguments to offer. Just a nice picture. Here's how it looks:

The world (universe) is essentially spatiotemporal. Each so-called 'possible world' constitutes a different form the physical manifold might take -- a way the world could be. Collectively, they exhaust the possibilities. That is, the world must instantiate one of them. The manifold is given; all that varies is its form -- but it must take some form or other. Big or small, the one necessity is that it is something, rather than nothing at all.

Pretty, no? (Admittedly, there's still the question why it takes this form rather than some other.)

"Restrospective"

Does anyone else have trouble with this typo? I find it almost impossible to type the word 'retrospective' without an extra 's' sneaking in at the start there. (I only managed then by deliberately pausing at the moment of habitual temptation.) I don't misspell it in other contexts (e.g. handwriting), just when typing. Damn fingers. Anyway, I ask because I just saw this very typo in a philosophy article I'm reading, which made me wonder how common it is, and if anyone has an explanation for it. (Something to do with priming common r-e-s-t- words, perhaps? The phenomenology is rather stroopy.)

See also: Typing Slips.

Does Nobody Know What "Militant" Means?

The stupidest thing I've read today (ta Luke):

I have been chided in the past for referring to the "militant" atheism of Dawkins and his like. But the desire for one's creed to spread, in order to make the world a better place, surely merits the label.

Hmm. Isn't that desire shared by such well-known "militants" as MLK, Gandhi and, oh, I don't know, Jesus?