Good Government requires Civic Culture

Democracy is only as good (or as bad) as the demos. Cf. Matthew Yglesias:

If you have the relevant social conditions to support good government -- competent media, engaged citizenry, civil society groups that can form the basis of electoral coalitions, a political culture that values honesty -- then a politician who engages in a lot of shady behavior is likely to find himself voted out of office whether or not the shadiness in question is formally illegal. Conversely, absent adequate social conditions even the most admirable legal framework becomes a dead letter -- nobody investigates violations and/or nobody cares. At the end of the day there are always going to be loopholes in whatever scheme you create. You see good government when and where the citizens want it and are able to punish those who don't give it to them.

See also Timothy Burke:

The key priority is to rebuild the way the federal government actually functions in both its everyday and extraordinary business... the whole point of the U.S. Constitution [is] that it is an uncommitted, non-partisan prior constraint on the uses of governmental authority. If it turns out that its guarantees rest not so much on its formal provisions, but just on men and women of good will and honest commitment agreeing to live up to their responsibilities under the law and the social contract, then that’s what we need to work to rebuild and restore. The last eight years have been a test, and a lot of people, some of them surprising, failed it. Equally, many people in all parties and factions passed, which is also worth a lot of attention. A lot of the downward momentum has been arrested by people with whom I strongly disagree on political positions, but whose dedication to their office and responsibilities I appreciate. Much of what we know about what has gone wrong in the last eight years is due to Republicans inside and outside the Administration drawing some lines in the sand...

We thought transparency could help, and it does somewhat. Transparency only helps, however, if there are strongly internalized professional and social ethical commitments that are widely distributed both in the general population and among the people who do the business of government, or education, or medicine, or any other major institution. If you don’t have enough people like Grant Woods, the liberal state will fail.

Desiring Thisness

Value-based theorists claim that (in standard cases) whenever it seems that desires provide us with reasons, it is really some valuable feature of the thing desired which provides the normative reason. Ruth Chang, in 'Can Desires Provide Reasons for Action?' (and class last Tuesday), tries to break the dialectical stalemate by discussing a desire for one of two qualitative duplicates, which have all their (intrinsic) features in common.

Think of Buridan's Ass, stuck between two bales of hay, or the ordinary experience of picking a can from the supermarket shelf. It's possible, Chang suggests, for you to just "feel like" one rather than the other, and not for any particular reason. You just feel an affective pull towards that particular object as such, desiring its "thisness" (haecceity or bare identity) rather than any generic feature it happens to exemplify along with the other duplicates.

I don't think this makes much sense, since I don't think haecceities make much sense. But, metaphysics aside, here's a quick counterargument to suggest that these ordinary desires do not, in fact, take bare identities as their objects: we wouldn't care if God secretly switched the duplicates. That wouldn't frustrate one's desire. Having obtained the second can from the left, I now have everything I wanted (so far as cans are concerned, at least). I would not feel in any way cheated to learn that the can has a different 'thisness' from the one I originally set my eyes on. So the 'thisness' could not have been the object of my desire.

(N.B. If you can imagine a case where switching duplicates would bother you, e.g. replacing your wife with a perfect copy, this is arguably because you value the particular causal history connecting you to the one and not the other -- which is just another qualitative feature, albeit a relational one. So there are still no grounds for attributing a desire for bare identity.)

Fortunately, Chang does not need to make such a strong claim. At least if I'm following the dialectic correctly, it should suffice to note that there are no normatively relevant differences between the options in the example, besides the fact that one is desired. (It doesn't matter if the desire is based on some unimportant relational feature rather than being a "feature free" desire for bare identity.)

Is Ignorance So Terrible?

Susan Jacoby laments:

nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

I'm not sure about this. Members of the intellectualist tribe may signal their cultural loyalties by affirming the great need for bilingualism, Shakespeare, learning a musical instrument, and knowledge of geography, history, astronomy and evolutionary theory. These are all fine things, and enriching in their own way, but I'm not convinced that any one of them is vital for ordinary people living ordinary lives. Why would it be "necessary" for average Joe to know the location of Iraq? He's not the one making decisions over there. Or, again, it's easy to poke fun at those who are ignorant of basic astronomical facts, but the intrinsic importance of this is less apparent than the symbolic effect -- drawing our attention to a cultural gap. (I'm reminded of the snob's favourite pastime: constructing lists of books that "every educated person must read".)

As Brandon says, we are all ignorant of a great many things. Moreover, "It is not a crime, or a sin, or a shame, or even a misfortune, to be ignorant of something. It is merely an opportunity." Now, I do think it is important to always recognize the opportunity for further knowledge as an opportunity. We should celebrate and value learning as such. But there are so many things to be learnt, we cannot hope to pursue every one of them. Further, some opportunities for learning will excite us more than others. So, given limited time and resources, it doesn't seem so inappropriate for one to simply disregard some fields as not one's concern. We ought to respect and value others' expertise in an area, of course, but that need not translate into any great desire on our own part to emulate them. There needn't be anything anti-intellectual about this.

I would say there are two broad cases in which the untroubled ignorance Jacoby laments is genuinely problematic. One is general anti-intellectualism, i.e. an attitude which positively denigrates learning, or at least does not recognize it as broadly desirable (an 'imperfect duty', if you will). Think of Huckabee boasting about how he 'majored in miracles, not math'.

The second case is when particular knowledge is required to inform one's decisions, but the "anti-rationalist" feels licensed to think and act from a position of ignorance instead. This is where worries about public policy debates come in. Many political partisans are simply 'bullshitters', in the Frankfurtian sense that they demonstrate a complete lack of concern for whether their claims are true. Others are dogmatists, so convinced of their own righteousness that, again, evidence and careful reasoning go out the window. This pollution of the public sphere is, I believe, the height of (common) evil (and it really is imperative that this be more widely recognized).

Private morality is not demanding, but politics is. Those who enter the public sphere, or seek to exert political influence, have an obligation to contribute constructively to the decision-making process. This holds especially for journalists, pundits and other "shapers" of public opinion, but even ordinary citizens have some obligation to become minimally informed before they vote. (Though it remains an open question whether ordinary people have any obligation to act as citizens in the first place. If one were to refrain from ever voting or influencing others by voicing a political opinion, one's personal ignorance might not matter in the slightest.)

Hursthouse on Moral Education

Rosalind Hursthouse writes of The Virtues Project:

unlike anything we philosophers have managed to produce, it is an extremely detailed and practical educational program and well worth our attention. Its admirable pedagogy makes it clear that the actual doing of the virtuous acts is not all there is to "helping children to develop the virtues," important as this is, and contains two features that any Aristotelian should find striking...

[1] from very early days, there is the application of the relevant [virtue] words to a variety of imagined as well as real instances, and the beginning of reflection, a detailed picture of how the training is bound up with thought and talk, where the talk centers around the use of virtue words in specific circumstances. All of this is consistent with, but provides a much-needed supplement to, philosophers' reflections...

[2] the pedagogy [stresses] looking for something to be praised by a virtue word in a child's action (or reaction) rather than for something to be condemned. But it is not, thereby, permissive. In fact, it is markedly strict, by contemporary standards, about "setting boundaries" and offers a number of techniques for doing so by, once again, emphasizing the virtues (and hence "Dos" rather than "Don'ts")... The idea is that, rather than making children think of themselves as bad and lacking in virtue, the way poor Huck Finn does, they are enabled to think of themselves as potentially good, as able to recognize and practice the virtues and find pleasure in doing so.

This is from Hursthouse's 'The Central Doctrine of the Mean', pp. 113-4. She concludes:

All very homey stuff, you may say. Well, yes. It is more impressive -- very impressive I thought myself -- when you read the books and see Popov handling questions, but still homey. But how could bringing up children correctly be anything other than a homey business? Moreover, it encapsulates what I have claimed in this chapter are two of the insights shrouded in the doctrine of the mean: it starts by training children, not to follow general rules but to recognize their central target in particular circumstances, and it develops their natural dispositions towards virtue.

Is Evaluation Holistic?

Which is basic: our evaluation of the world as a whole, or our evaluation of its individual constituents? Are we to work up from my particular desires to find which total state of the world I should prefer? Or do we instead start with my global preferences (a value function over possible worlds) and abstract away various details to yield my more particular desires?

An example of the latter approach might be Liz Harman's analysis: S desires that P ("all things considered") iff S prefers the nearest P-world to the nearest not P-world. One worry: on this view, it no longer seems that we can assign quantitative "strengths" to desires. (And aren't numbers elegant?)

But perhaps the upshot of the holistic picture is just that individual desires aren't really so important anyway. Utility values may be assigned to whole worlds, and combined with credences to yield expected utilities, etc. So it's still an elegant picture, and one which fits well with formal decision theory. It's just that the value of a whole world-state is not reducible to any simpler description of the values of its parts. (For example, you can't just sum all the pleasure and pain if it turns out that sadistic pleasure detracts from, rather than adds to, the overall value of the state of affairs.)

Disability and Teen Pregnancy

Dominic Wilkinson offers an interesting argument from analogy:

The UK government announced this week a multi-million pound program to make contraception more easily available to young people and to reduce teenage pregnancies...

If they are effective, these measures will prevent the birth of a large number of children whose lives would have been worth living. Is it discriminatory to try to prevent the birth of children to teenage mothers? What message does this send to those children in the community who have been born to teenagers about how we value their lives? ... If we spend millions of pounds to try to prevent the birth of children like them, it might be seen to be expressing an attitude that we do not want them, or that we wish that they were not amongst us.

When we make decisions about which future persons will live – children to teenage parents, or children with disability, the types of objections cited above can be expressed. If we think that such objections are convincing, we should not try to prevent the birth of individuals with disability, nor children to teenage parents. If we think nevertheless that preventing teenage births is ethical, then this may give us some important insights into debates about disability.

Are there relevant differences which undermine the analogy? Disability is a feature of the potential child, whereas in preventing teenage pregnancies our focus is simply on a feature of the mother. (We would not think it desirable for her to become pregnant with any child, no matter its intrinsic features.) So this might be thought to explain why preventing the births of disabled individuals, but not teenage births, risks "sending the message" that the type of child in question is undesirable. What do you think?

Reference and Preference

Ophelia Benson has got me thinking about the intersection of ethics and philosophy of language:

A face is shown... What makes it Muhammad's face? Nothing. The caption under the picture, that says 'depicting Muhammad preaching the Qur'ān in Mecca.' That's not much to go on. It could be a volley ball with eyes and a mouth drawn on it, that's just labeled 'Muhammad.' Yet apparently 180,000 people take its genuine faceness seriously enough to fret about its presence on Wikipedia.

When Muslims object to depictions of Muhammad, what exactly is the content of their desire? Suppose philosophers of language established that a causal theory of reference was correct, and historians somehow established that there was no causal chain of the appropriate sort connecting the prophet Muhammad to the picture in question. So it turns out that the face does not, as a matter of fact, depict Muhammad. Would that make the screaming masses happy? Do they really care about something so arcane as the reference facts? Or is it rather the appearance of obedience and acquiescence that they miss (and never mind that nobody's entirely sure just what it is they're acquiescing to)?

Draft Lessig!

Lessig '08:


You can join the Facebook group to encourage Lessig to run for congress.

Update: Julian Sanchez has more: Lessig wants to build a "creative commons in Congress"

Theorizing about Desire

What do we want from a theory of desire? Should it match our intuitive judgments -- are we just analyzing the folk concept of 'desire'? Or are we aiming for a theory with some predictive/explanatory power? Or is it meant instead to have some kind of normative significance, so that fulfilled desires are pro tanto good for you? (These three options might lead us to focus on affect, drive, or evaluation, respectively.) Whether we opt for one of these, or something else entirely, seems to make a difference for how we deal with so-called "instrumental desires", for example.

Suppose I see a plastic apple, and - mistakenly believing it to be real - feel tempted to eat it. Should a theory of desire yield the result that I desire to eat it? Intuitively: sure. Normatively: no way. Behaviourally: whichever. (It's presumably just as explanatory to say that I desire some ultimate end -- a yummy taste, perhaps, or good nutrition -- and mistakenly believe that eating the plastic apple will serve these ends. This combination of attitudes suffices to explain why I might try to eat the plastic apple. If anything, it probably does a better job of explaining why I will stop eating it as soon as reality impinges itself on my beliefs!)

I'm most interested in the normative project, and this leads me to think that ultimate (non-instrumental) desires are the only desires we should count. Suppose I want to break out of prison, and believe that a hacksaw could help me achieve this end. Compare the following situations:

(1) I get the hacksaw, but it proves useless, so I remain imprisoned.
(2) I get the hacksaw and escape.
(3) I simply escape (no hacksaw required).

Surely the right thing to say here is that I get all that I want in situations (2) and (3), whereas in situation (1) I don't get what I really wanted at all. It's not as though I can console myself with the thought, "Well, at least I got this hacksaw I wanted!" I don't really desire the hacksaw at all; I just wanted to get out of prison. Similar problems arise when comparing (2) and (3). It's not as though I get more of what I want, in any interesting sense, in case (2) -- that would be double-counting! As an escapee in case (3), I won't feel the slightest frustration at having my 'desire' for a hacksaw remain unsatisfied.

So it is only ultimate desires that are philosophically interesting, I think. Sure, one could use the term in such a way that one counts as having a 'desire' for the believed means as well as the end. But what's the interest in that?

Another example: Liz Harman suggests that many apparent conditional desires, e.g. to be a fireman when you grow up, are really unconditional desires that simply weren't thought through all that carefully (i.e. one took the rationale / apparent 'condition' -- that you still want to be a fireman as an adult -- for granted). Maybe this fits better with folk intuitions, or a natural way of talking, or some such. But I don't really see why that should matter to us. Treating the desire as conditional gives us a neat explanation why it doesn't impact one's welfare when the condition isn't met. What does the alternative account give us?

Desires with Presuppositions

Kris McDaniel and Ben Bradley have a great article, 'Desires' (forthcoming in Mind), which argues that desire is a three-place relation between a person and two propositions: the object of the desire, and the condition on its applicability. (Though for ordinary unconditional desires, this is a mere technicality: the condition is the trivial proposition that any old thing is the case.)

This is motivated by the thought that some desires are neither satisfied nor frustrated, but simply cancelled (or inapplicable). Consider a child's desire for Santa to have a nice Christmas, or my desire to have an icecream later if I still feel like it. Even if these things never come about, it doesn't necessarily seem as though my past desire was thwarted. (Ask my earlier self: "Do you desire that, even if your future self no longer feels like it, you still get the icecream anyway?" I will answer, "of course not!") The desires come with certain presuppositions: that Santa exists, or that I will continue to want icecream, etc. When those conditions fail, the desire simply no longer applies.

McDaniel and Bradley compare their view to Strawson's suggestion about non-referring expressions: "the question whether his statement ['the king of France is wise'] was true or false simply didn't arise, because there is no such person as the king of France." So it goes, I suppose, for the person who desires that the king of France be wise. The question whether their desire is fulfilled or frustrated simply doesn't arise. To further illustrate, the authors suggest that conditional desires are like conditional bets: if the condition isn't met, you neither win nor lose; instead, the bet is off.

How should a utilitarian take cancelled desires to figure in the calculus? The obvious option is that cancelled desires have no normative significance, whereas fulfilled desires have positive value, and thwarted desires have disvalue. So if we can find a desire the thwarting of which doesn't matter in the slightest, that might be taken to show that it's a conditional desire which has been cancelled.

One thing I disagree with: the authors claim that ordinary desires (e.g. for Bob to be happy) are conditional on their not having terrible consequences (e.g. a billion deaths). But that just seems false to me. I still want Bob to be happy, it's just that I want to avoid a billion deaths even more. The former desire is outweighed, not cancelled. (One might restrict the term 'desire' to non-outweighed or 'all things considered' desires; but I can't imagine why we'd want to. I'm still going to lament Bob's unhappiness; this is importantly different from my cancelled desire for icecream.)

In general, I think it is tempting to over-apply the conditional apparatus. In class, someone suggested the example of a desire for tea on the condition that there's sugar. But this is more plausibly seen as an unconditional desire for tea and sugar. The absence of sugar doesn't cancel the desire, it thwarts it. (Again, the test is to ask whether lacking the object of the desire is in some sense bad from the perspective of the person with the desire.)

One thing I'm unclear on is precisely how a conditional desire (for P given Q) differs from the preference for (Q&P) > (Q&~P). The authors suggest that the conditional desire implies the preference, but not vice versa. Let Q be that you crave chocolate, and P be that you eat chocolate. If you are stuck craving chocolate, it's certainly preferable that you get to have some. You should have the above preference, then. But this needn't imply any actual desire - even conditionally - for chocolate. That sounds right, but then what more is required for desire, exactly? (Not a desire for the condition to obtain, else it might as well be an unconditional desire for P & Q.) Some current pro-attitude towards the object, perhaps? This just seems a little unclear to me.

Philosophers' Carnival #63

... is here.

Do Beliefs Exist?

Contrast two competing models of belief:

(A) [Full-blown existence.] Beliefs are something like sentences in the head, written in the language of thought, and physically located in one's "belief box" -- a special area of the brain, perhaps.

(B) Beliefs are more like useful fictions, patterns (Dennett compares them to centers of gravity), or projections that track certain dispositions. So they do not have any independent existence. Rather, S's believing that P is reducible to its being correct to ascribe or attribute this belief to S -- where the correctness conditions for this ascription make no further appeal to beliefs as such.

One may initially be tempted toward the first view on the grounds that it better captures the distinction between explicit and implicit beliefs. Explicit beliefs are literally there in your belief box, whereas one implicitly believes whatever can be easily inferred from one's explicit beliefs (for some appropriate standard of 'ease').

But this doesn't work at all, as Stalnaker points out in 'The Problem of Logical Omniscience, I'. What we want is a distinction between accessible and inaccessible information, but this is independent of the explicit/implicit distinction given to us by the belief box view. After all, just because some information is etched in our brains doesn't necessarily mean (given our search and computational limitations) that we will be able to find this information when we need it.

Imagine the phonebook man (I forget whose example this is), who has memorized the entire phonebook, ordered alphabetically. This way of storing the information means that, given a name as input, he can easily find the number that goes with it. But the reverse is not true: given a random phone number, Phonebook Man has little chance of finding the corresponding name in any reasonable period of time. So it would be misleading to say that he knows (or believes) that #555-5555 belongs to John Smith, even though this information is explicitly stored in his belief box.

On the other hand, he clearly does know the equivalent proposition that John Smith has phone number 555-5555. (He can look up John Smith and get the answer, no trouble.) The dispositions which underlie "belief" are thus relative to a question or probe. This seems to contradict our common-sense notion of belief.

How are we to resolve this puzzle?

Content as Possible Worlds

One argument for a possible-worlds analysis of content is that it helps us make sense of partial understanding, as found for example in children and animals (Stalnaker, Inquiry, p.65):

The child who says that his daddy is a doctor understands what he says, and knows it is true, to some extent, because he can divide a certain, perhaps limited, range of possibilities in the right way and locate the actual world on the right side of the line he draws. As his understanding of what it is for Daddy to be a doctor grows, his capacity will extend to a larger set of alternative possibilities or, rather, the extension of this capacity will be the growth of his understanding.

A second issue is that one may have a belief 'by default', so to speak, taking something for granted even if one has never explicitly thought about it -- and sometimes only because one has never thought about it, as Stalnaker insightfully notes (p.69):

With riddles and puzzles as well as with many more serious intellectual problems, often all one needs to see that a certain solution is correct is to think of it--to see it as one of the possibilities.

Stalnaker accounts for this as follows (pp.68-9):

Attitudes are primarily attitudes to possible states of the world and not to the propositions that distinguish between those states. A belief state can be represented as a set of possible worlds. Individual beliefs are properties of such a belief state: to believe that P is for the proposition that P to be true in all the possible worlds in the belief state. If one conceives of beliefs in this way, they look like something negative: to believe that P is simply to be in a belief state which lacks any possible world in which P is false.

Can these two challenges be met just as well without appeal to possible worlds?

Comment Registration

Apropos of nothing in particular, I've turned off anonymous comments. Commenters must now register either with Blogger (highly recommended, since it gives you the option to receive email notification of comment replies) or another OpenID provider such as Wordpress, Livejournal, AIM, etc.

If you find this hugely inconvenient, send me an email and I'll reconsider. (I strongly dislike seeing 'Anonymous' appear in the comments, though. He's an unpredictable and not entirely trustworthy fellow!)

Examples of Solved Philosophy

Given my complaints about the perennial accusation that philosophy never settles anything, I figure it'd be worth offering some examples of philosophical knowledge. (Nothing is for certain, of course, but I think that the following claims are at least as well-established as most scientific results.) Feel free to add you own examples in comments.

1. Knowledge does not require certainty. But nor does justified true belief suffice.

2. Psychological egoism is false: it is possible to act from non-selfish desires, i.e. for some good other than your own welfare.

3. Rational egoism is false: we are not rationally required to always and only act in our own self-interest.

4. (E.g. Moral) Principles may take situational variables into account without thereby sacrificing their claim to objectivity.

5. The question whether God actually exists is independent of the question whether there is genuine normativity ("ought"-ness).

6. Valuing tolerance needn't lead one to moral relativism. (Quite the opposite.)

7. Red herrings may (and black ravens may not) constitute evidence that all ravens are black.

8. It's not analytic (true by definition) that cats are animals. But it is metaphysically necessary: there is no possible world containing a cat that is not an animal.

Slightly more controversial (but still extremely well-supported, IMO):

9. "Common-sense" morality, with its agent-relative ends, is self-defeating.

10. Capitalism is not intrinsically just. (Libertarianism must be defended on consequentialist grounds, if any. Those who think otherwise are confused about the nature of property and coercion.)

11. It is possible for desires (or ultimate ends) to be irrational. So there is more to rationality than just instrumental rationality.

12. One may be harmed by events that took place prior to their coming into existence.

And those are just the examples I found from a cursory glance through my archives. What else would you suggest?

Belief Content and Linguistic Error

Suppose young Timmy mistakenly takes 'prime number' to be roughly synonymous with 'cool number'. So he goes around saying things like '666 is a prime number'. Does he believe that 666 is a prime number? Presumably not. He certainly doesn't have a de dicto belief involving the concept prime number, since he lacks this concept (he associates the words, 'prime number', with a different concept entirely). Nor does he have any de re beliefs about primes, i.e. beliefs which talk about this property under a different guise: he does not believe, for example, that 666 is divisible only by itself and 1. What Timmy believes is that 666 is a cool number (or, more likely yet, that '666' is a cool numeral), and he mistakenly takes the sentence '666 is a prime number' to express this belief.

What of Timmy's meta-beliefs? He might not have any, if he's very young, but let's suppose that he's aware of himself as a believing agent. What does he think he believes? Jack suggests to me the following: Timmy believes that he believes that 666 is a prime number. But this attribution seems mistaken for exactly the same reasons. Timmy lacks the concept prime number, so he can't have any (even meta-) beliefs involving it. And nor can he have any de re beliefs about primeness (under whatever guise), because he lacks any alternative grasp of the property in question. He's not capable of having primeness feature in his mental content at all.

Instead, I would suggest that Timmy has entirely accurate meta-beliefs. (We have no reason to doubt his introspective abilities.) He believes, truly, that he believes that 666 is a cool number. That's all. It's only his linguistic beliefs that are false. For example, he falsely believes that he can express his above (true) meta-belief by asserting, 'I believe that 666 is a prime number.' He can't; this assertion means something different from what Timmy thought. It means something that happens to be false, whereas all Timmy's non-linguistic beliefs are true.

The upshot of this is that sincere assertions do not always succeed in expressing your beliefs. Linguistic errors may mean that what you end up saying actually means something different from what you believe (i.e. what you meant to say).

This seems to me the tidiest way to make sense of what's going on in these cases. Is there any residual problem that the above analysis fails to deal with?

Philosophers on Bloggingheads.tv

This is cool. Bloggingheads' first [see comments] philosophy 'diavlog' is with Josh Knobe. Here's a clip:



There's plenty there to disagree with (does he really answer the question whether philosophical questions are irresolvable by suggesting that philosophers should do science instead?), but it's great to see philosophers involved in such public discussions. I'm told Bloggingheads.tv is looking to have other philosophers on the show (/site) over the next few months, so it'll be interesting to see how (and who) they turn out...

Is Imprecise Credence Rational?

If you haven't the faintest clue whether some proposition p is true or false, what subjective probability (credence) should you give it? 1/2? A common answer these days is that you shouldn't give it a precise credence at all. Instead, your credence should be spread over an interval, such as [0,1]. Greater precision than that ought to be based on real knowledge, e.g. of objective probabilities. Mere ignorance doesn't qualify one to make such claims.

Roger White, in his talk 'Evidential Symmetry and Mushy Credence', offers a neat argument for the old-fashioned answer of 1/2,* which goes roughly as follows:

Coin Game: Suppose you're given a fair coin which has 'p' plastered on one side, and '~p' on the other. Moreover, you know that whichever one is true was plastered over the Heads side. You toss the coin and it happens to land on 'p'.

(1) It's a fair coin, so you should initially give P(heads) = 1/2.

(2) This should not changed upon seeing the coin land on 'p' -- you have no idea whether p is the true one or not, so there is no new evidence for you here. So your updated P+(heads) = initial P(heads) = 1/2.

(3) Since the coin landed on 'p', this will be heads-up iff p is true. Hence P+(p) = P+(heads) = 1/2.

(4) But the coin landing on 'p' doesn't tell you anything new about the proposition's truth value. So your prior credence P(p) should also have been 1/2.

Convinced?

* Correction: the argument merely shows that your credence in p shouldn't be imprecise (for that entails, contradictorily, that it should be precisely 1/2). Maybe it should be some other precise value, though; that will depend on the details of what proposition p is.

Time-warped Experiences

This is interesting:

If the brain sped up when in danger, the researchers theorized, numbers on the perceptual chronometers would appear slow enough to read while volunteers fell. Instead, the scientists found that volunteers could not read the numbers at faster-than-normal speeds.

"We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix, dodging bullets in slow-mo," Eagleman said.

Instead, such time warping seems to be a trick played by one's memory. When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain. "In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories," Eagleman explained. "And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took."

Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by."

Never mind physical (un)responsiveness; does your experience last longer when scared? Do you obtain more pleasure and pain by time seeming to you to pass slower? Does this give us additional reason to bring joy to children (and give less priority to aiding the elderly)?

I'm beginning to think that the way to count or measure an experience is not through its objective duration at all, but simply its richness of representational content (which may better reflect felt duration in any case). This may support my claim that multiple experiences matter less the less qualitatively different they are. Merely repeating the same old information over and over again does nothing to enrich the representation, after all.

Thoughts?

Consciousness and Time

Inspired by the discussion at Pea Soup, let's distinguish:

(1) the external, physical duration of a phenomenal experience,
(2) the internal, felt duration of the experience, and
(3) the believed duration of the experience.

To illustrate the differences: Experience machine A gives you pleasant experiences for 100 years. Machine B (allegedly) gives you all the same experiences, feeling exactly the same from the inside, but packed into just a single real-time day. Machine C gives you one day of pleasure, and then simply implants in you the false belief that it felt like it lasted for 100 years.

A key question is whether dimension (2) is stable and independent of the others, i.e. whether Machines B and C are really distinct. But first, we must consider whether qualia (conscious experiences) are to be identified with brain states or their contents:

Our talk of conscious experience risks conflating two distinct objects: the qualities (properties) of the vehicular experience or representation itself, versus the qualities represented in the experience. It's plausible to think that we can access only the latter. For information to be available to us, it must be represented in our minds...

This includes experience itself: there may be facts about it of which we remain unaware. This is plausibly true of the temporal properties of our experiences, for instance. It seems to me that I experience A before experiencing B, but in actual fact all I have access to is my mental representation as of "A followed by B"... I don't really have a "mental eye" in my head to tell me what's going on in there, independently of what eventually enters into a conscious representation. Our introspective capabilities are hence severely limited.

Clearly, the brain states themselves last only a day in Machine B's case. But they represent 100 years' worth of happenings. How are we to describe this? Here are two options:

(i) What you experience is the brain state itself, and hence lasts for only a day; it's just that you're left with the false impression that it lasted longer than that. Machine B was misdescribed: in fact it is no different from C.

(ii) What you experience is the content as represented by the brain state, viz. 100 years. It is truly the same content/experience as given by Machine A; it's merely the physical bases of the experiences which differ, and that's nothing to care about.

I'm inclined towards (ii). But if experiences can so radically come apart from their underlying brain states, we may question whether Machine C is actually as deceptive as we'd assumed. If the implanted belief changes the contents represented in our phenomenal states, perhaps this actually gives us 100 years of experiences?

One reason for doubting this is reflection on the paucity of the representation. It's one thing to write a story which says "100 years passed", and quite another to fill out the details for 100 years' worth of fictional events. So, if we think of Machine A as taking a long time to impart rich informational content (lots of pleasure), and Machine C as taking a very short time to impart a very thin representation (very little pleasure), the question whether Machine B imparts a lot or only a little pleasure comes down to the richness of the representations it implants. Sound right?

WWSD?

Interesting post from Mark Rowlands at Secular Philosophy:

To a considerable extent it is society that has decided what is and what is not emotionally aberrant. What you should and should not feel when your most cherished beliefs are attacked is, in part, socially determined, and so what you actually do or do not feel is, to a considerable though not exhaustive extent, socially constructed. This is a theme brilliantly explored by J.M. Coetzee in various novels, most notably The Lives of Animals. And, for one reason or another, our society has determined that emotional outpourings of a sort that would be regarded as aberrant in the case of other beliefs are perfectly legitimate in the case of religious beliefs...

Part of what is involved in being an adult – part of the wonder of growing up – is being both able and willing to have one’s beliefs subjected to critical examination without existentially shrivelling in the process. If society discourages us from this by making us believe that extraordinary outpourings of emotion are OK in connection with certain beliefs rather than others, then society is simply trying to prolong our childhood. And if anyone doubts, or is interested in, the rise and rise of infantilization in contemporary society, I heartily recommend Michael Bywater’s Big Babies.

If Christians ask themselves ‘what would Jesus do?’ philosophers should, it seems, ask themselves, ‘What would Socrates do?’ It’s a long time since I read any of the Platonic dialogues, but if my memory is not deceiving me, Thrasymachus didn’t break down when Socrates cast doubt on his claim that ‘justice is the advantage of the stronger.’ But even if he had, I don’t think it would have stopped Socrates.

New Feature: Blog lists

Blogger have released a cool new feature which lets you list your favourite blogs, sorted by most recently updated, and including an optional snippet from each. I like it! (For one thing, having a second blogroll frees up more room to include others on my 'neighbours' list.)

For all you Blogger users: log in at http://draft.blogger.com/ and try it yourself. (It's preferable to third-party blogrolling apps, as the folks at Blogger explain: "The Blog List writes all links out in HTML so that, unlike JavaScript-based blogrolls, you pass PageRank goodness on to the blogs you link to.")

Update: another semi-recent feature you may have noticed is that if you comment using your Blogger account, you have the option to sign up for email notification of follow-up comments. Very handy.

(P.S. I've noticed that some blogs still link to my old blogspot address. If you could update your links to www.philosophyetc.net that'd be great. Thanks!)

Election Notes

(1) I'm fascinated by the Washington state GOP caucus debacle. There appears to be some possibility that the local GOP officials stole the election for McCain. That is, they waited until he edged ahead, and then -- with 13% still to go -- stopped counting the votes and simply declared him the winner. Bizarre. (See Talking Points Memo for more, e.g. here.) Huckabee's sending in lawyers; it could get messy. A story to keep an eye on, anyway.

(2) What's all this 'superdelegates should follow the will of the people' nonsense? I'm with Clinton on this one: it would defeat the whole purpose if they did not exercise their own judgment. (Why else have superdelegates at all?) Of course, they have most reason to favour Obama in any case...

(3) Stanley Fish bizarrely claims that the fact that Hillary Clinton would more likely lose the general election is somehow not a legitimate reason for thinking that she would not make the best Democratic nominee:

Electability (a concept invoked often) is a code word that masks the fact that the result of such reasoning is to cede the political power to the ranters.

Um, no. The political power of the right-wing ranters comes from their ability to vote (and advocate) in the general election. Given the fact that they have this power, we are faced with the question how best to deal with it. Burying one's head in the sand doesn't seem advisable. Assuming that it is of great importance that the Democrats win the general election, it is important that we do what we can to raise the probability of this vital outcome. That means: select a nominee who is more likely to win the general election. (That means: Obama.)

A surprising number of people declaim such reasoning on the grounds that it amounts to "blaming the victim". This assumes a strangely narcissistic conception of an election. The question is not who of Clinton or Obama we want to reward or 'deprive' of our votes. If you want to do something nice for Clinton, send her some chocolate. But the election is not for her. It's for the country. And electing Clinton as the Democratic nominee is not (ex hypothesi) what can be expected to do the most good for the country. End of story.

Schooling for Democracy

A NYT op-ed argues that we should lower the voting age to 16:

Legal age requirements should never stand alone. They should be flexible and pragmatic and paired with educational and cognitive requirements for the exercise of legal maturity...

16-year-olds who want to start voting should be able to obtain an “early voting permit” from their high schools upon passing a simple civics course similar to the citizenship test. Besides increasing voter registration, this system would reinforce the notion of voting as a privilege and duty as well as a right — without imposing any across-the-board literacy tests for those over 18.

I would go further: Imagine a 'democracy' class in which students researched and debated issues of public concern -- immigration, war and foreign policy, civil liberties, health care, crime and justice, etc. -- learning about social science and political philosophy, and applying their knowledge to the real-world problem of who to vote for. What better way to prepare the next generation of citizens? Of course, it would depend upon good teachers offering critical but unbiased guidance. And anti-rationalist parents will be outraged at what they can only imagine to be 'indoctrination'. Cf. my old post: Teaching Values.

As Peter Levine writes in his excellent paper, 'Youth-Led Research, the Internet, and Civic Engagement' [PDF], pp.11-12:

public schools court controversy whenever their students engage in political advocacy and/or “faith-based” community action. Yet forbidding politics and religion drastically narrows the range of discussion and action; as a result, service-learning often becomes trivial.

Many of the best programs are found in Catholic high schools, where service experiences are connected to a challenging normative and spiritual worldview: post-Vatican II Catholic social thought. There is no evidence that these programs cause their graduates to agree with the main doctrines of Catholic theology; but students do develop lasting engagement with their community.

(He goes on to recommend "public-interest research using the new digital media" as a more 'neutral' alternative for public schools.)

On his blog, Levine adds:

Developmental psychology tells us that civic experiences in adolescence have profound, lifelong effects on civic participation, whereas experiences in adulthood tend not to affect people much. Therefore, if you want to build a public, you must give teenagers positive civic opportunities.

The opportunity to vote in national elections would be a good start. But it is possible to make do in the meantime, as Kids Voting USA demonstrate:

After classroom preparation, students take part in a voting experience using a ballot that mirrors that of the adults with the same candidates and issues. This “real life” practice dispels the mysteries of the voting process and reinforces the knowledge and skills gained through Kids Voting classroom activities...

It is the combination of classroom instruction, family dialogue and an authentic voting experience that makes Kids Voting USA a powerful strategy for achieving long-term change in voting behavior.

I recall reading elsewhere that these programs even result in immediate increases in voter turnout, due to broader family involvement.

Engaging persons or ideas

[My worries about history requirements reminded me of this old draft from a couple of years ago that I never got around to publishing. Better late than never, I suppose.]

It often happens that a reader "takes away" something quite different from a piece of writing than the original author intended. Does this matter? I think that the answer is "sometimes", but I'd like to get clearer on precisely which times those are.

Let's say a blogger goes away and writes up a response to the idea X they "took home" from another writer W, whom it turns out really meant to say Y instead. I'm wondering: in what circumstances is the latter fact relevant? This seems to turn on the further question: is the blogger engaging with idea X for its own sake, or are they instead trying to respond to whatever person W might be saying? Which should they be doing? Here are a few cases where engaging with the person (and their actual claims) seems important:

1) If you insult or dismiss W on the basis of what they're (allegedly) saying.

2) If W is specifically trying to engage you, say by offering an objection to an earlier argument of yours.

3) If you're in a forum where W gets to choose the topic, e.g. commenting on their blog post.

Are there any others?

Those cases aside, I'm partial to the "disembodied ideas" approach, myself. Of course, it's worth listening to W all the same, because this new idea Y might be more interesting-in-itself and worthy of your attention than X was. But if not, that's fine too. As a general rule, the intellectual interest of an idea shouldn't turn on which particular people believe it. (Though I guess winning the support of a reliably discerning person might constitute 'abstract'- or meta-evidence that an idea is worth a closer look.)

Public interest may be another issue: of all the possible bad arguments out there in logical space, we're usually only interested in refuting the ones that are (or threaten to be) actually taken seriously by a significant section of society. Even so, the Writer's personal beliefs don't seem directly relevant here. But perhaps egregious misreadings are. That is, if nobody else is likely to interpret W the way you did (as arguing for X, say), and no-one else has defended X either, then arguing against it doesn't serve much of a public purpose. But hey, not everything has to: if you found it interesting to clarify the issue in your own mind, or whatever, then that's fine. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.

To address the flip-side: how should we, as writers, react when others offer false "responses" to our posts, e.g. criticising claims that we're not really committed to? Again, it may depend on the particular situation, but it seems like the ideal would simply be to clarify your position without forcing the other person on to the defensive. (E.g. "Note that my post merely meant to establish Y, which is consistent with your denial of X. So I don't think we really disagree here.") Focusing on the assessment of disembodied ideas seems more likely to lead to a pleasant exchange than some of the more conflict-ridden person-involving alternatives.

(Which is not to say that I always live up to these ideals, of course.)

P.S. A related question for historians of philosophy: is it intrinsically important to discover what old philosophers "really" meant, or should we use them more instrumentally, to garner whatever interesting ideas they might suggest to us? (Or do you think that the historical task is essential to the instrumental one?)

Distribution Requirements

Should graduate coursework be subject to distribution requirements? I certainly approve of having wide-ranging interests and a broad philosophical background. But I'm not so sure it's a good idea to force this on graduate students. Some may want to focus exclusively on, say, epistemology, and I'm not sure why we should want to deny them that option. (Faculty advisers may strongly encourage branching out into related areas that they believe would make their student a better and/or more employable philosopher. But shouldn't the student have the final say? The alternative seems awfully paternalistic. And I certainly wouldn't expect one-size-fits-all departmental requirements to be more reliable than the individual students themselves when it comes to determining their educational needs.)

I know some students who are happy with (some) requirements, as they provide the necessary 'prod' to get them to do work in other areas they value which they might not otherwise get around to. So this may make the case for so-called 'soft paternalism', i.e. setting things up so that the default path is to do a bit of everything. But it should still be possible for any students who don't appreciate the requirements to opt out of them.

This seems to be the approach favoured by Princeton:

Students who wish to do especially intensive work in one area of philosophy through extra work either in the Department of Philosophy or in related areas in other departments may be granted variances permitting them to do less than the norm in some other areas of philosophy, if this is required to allow them to pursue their special interests. Such variances will require approval of the department.

(Though I'm not sure how often such requests are granted.)

Question: what do you think is the educational upshot of distribution requirements? What would you expect a metaphysician to gain from studying ethics, or a contemporary philosopher to gain from studying history of philosophy? Answering this question seems vital for crafting appropriate and worthwhile distribution requirements. For example, if you think it is important for students to have a broad knowledge of the history of philosophy, or to appreciate a whole system of thought, merely requiring them to write a unit paper or two on specific historical topics is not going to serve this end at all. (Better, perhaps, to have them attend a broad survey course and pass a multiple choice exam at the end, as a friend of mine suggested.)

I know a lot of people - including myself - who are especially unsure about what they can expect to gain from doing history of philosophy. But I also know that many readers of this blog are very sympathetic to historical philosophy. Do you think that everyone should be doing it? If so, I ask you: why? What good is history to me? In particular, why might you expect it to be better for me than doing additional work in contemporary ethics or metaphysics?

SEP on Evo Psyc

The latest addition to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be of general interest: "There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise..."

Dimensions of Desire

Following Alonzo Fyfe, I once accepted the following thesis:

(BDI) People always act so as to fulfill their most and strongest desires, given their beliefs.

But this is either trivial or false.

It is trivial if we weight desires according to their eventual behavioural impact, so that BDI stipulatively defines 'desire'. But this is rather pointless, since it means that we cannot tell what desires someone has until we see which act they perform. (And if their decision is highly sensitive to trivial situational changes, as seems likely, then desires would seem not to have any stable prior existence.) So it seems like a bad definition. In any case, interesting truths cannot be arrived at by mere stipulation.

If we want BDI to be a substantive thesis, it must invoke some independent notion of desire (strength). The most obvious contender here is the felt strength of a desire in our conscious phenomenology. But then BDI is simply false: we are not always bound to follow that which most tempts us -- the will may override mere feelings.

Finally, there is the (more morally important) dimension of reflective endorsement, where we may more naturally speak of 'ends' than 'desires'. But again, this interpretation renders BDI false: unfortunately, we do not always pursue those ends we believe to be best. We may be waylaid by mere (unendorsed) desires.

This distinction is captured rather nicely in Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (1890). The suggestion that "adoption of an end means the preponderance of a desire for it" - precluding the possibility of instrumental irrationality - is due, he suggests, to "a defective psychological analysis" (p.39):

According to my observation of consciousness, the adoption of an end as paramount -- either absolutely or within certain limits -- is quite a distinct psychical phenomenon from desire: it is to be classed with volitions, thought it is, of course, specifically different from a volition initiating a particular immediate action.

Defining 'Fair Use'

Tim Wu:

[I]t is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines: no one (well, nearly no one) would watch Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs” as a substitute for “Star Wars”; a book review is no substitute for reading “The Naked and the Dead.” They are complements to the original work, not substitutes, and that makes all the difference.

This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web. Fan guides like the Harry Potter Lexicon or Lostpedia are not substitutes for reading the book or watching the show, and that should be the end of the legal questions surrounding them. The same goes for reasonable tribute videos like this great Guyz Nite tribute to “Die Hard.” On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.

We must never forget that copyright is about authorship; and secondary authors, while never as famous as the original authors, deserve some respect. Fixing fair use is one way to give them that.

Rape by Fraud

Suppose an evil twin tricks his brother's wife into having sex with him (by pretending to be his brother, her husband). This is presumably rape. The deception seems, in this case, to nullify the target's consent (much as hypnosis, brainwashing, or immaturity might). We might capture this by suggesting that the woman only consented to have sex with her husband, not with his evil twin. The action she actually ended up with is not the one she consented to.

However, it isn't clear that misinformation always nullifies consent. Suppose a Tom Cruise impersonator picks up a girl at the bar, who would not have gone home with him if she knew his true identity. There's something morally dubious about this, but intuitively it doesn't seem to reach the bar for rape. But why not? Can't she say that she only consented to have sex with TC, not with his lookalike?

An obvious difference between the two cases is that only the former involves a pre-existing relationship/personal connection. But why does this make such a difference? One possibility is that we clearly have a weighty and legitimate interest in discriminating between potential sexual partners on the basis of existing personal connections. Impersonation of a personal acquaintance is thus an especially egregious form of fraudulent exploitation. But one's interest in having sex with a stranger who truly satisfies certain conditions may not call for quite the same degree of respect.

Does that sound right? It seems a bit harsh to delegitimize certain preferences like that. But I'm not sure how else to explain the moral difference between the two cases. (Any suggestions?) Also, does this proposal yield the intuitively right results in other cases, or does it need refinement?

Hilzoy on Hardheaded Idealism

After detailing substantive reasons for supporting Obama (see also my old post) Hilzoy concludes:

I sometimes wonder why, exactly, people go on saying all this stuff about Obama lacking substance. Sometimes, I suspect it's just laziness, as in the case of this dKos story in which mcjoan, who is usually much better than this, lists a whole lot of questions she wishes the candidates would answer, apparently unaware that Obama (and, for all I know, Clinton), has already answered most of them. I suspect, though, that part of it might be the assumption that idealism is necessarily woolly and misty-eyed and all about singing Kumbaya, while realism is necessarily cynical and disillusioned.

I have never believed this. There are certainly hard-bitten, cynical people who don't think particularly clearly about the world (Dick Cheney leaps to mind.) More to the point, I can't see any reason why there shouldn't also be people who are both genuinely idealistic and hardheaded at the same time. I suspect Obama is one of them. I do not for a moment imagine that he is perfect. (Cough, clean coal technology, cough cough.) But I do think that he's one of the best candidates I can remember, and that's good enough for me.

Do read the whole thing, though. The details are important, and not the sort of thing that's covered in our dumbed-down mainstream media.

PC #62 + Poll results

Philosophers' Carnival #62 is here, with a great line-up by the looks of things (including some new blogs, which is good to see).

Update: and, for something completely different, the poll has now closed. As expected, most people responded incorrectly. (The question, recall, was Will the most common response to this poll be 'No'?)

Yes - 55
No - 53

So, the 'No's win this unpopularity contest. Congrats to us!

Nuclear Leaks: Did Obama Lie?

At a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa, on Dec 30, Obama reportedly claimed:

I am not a nuclear energy proponent... the only nuclear legislation that I've passed has been to make sure that the nuclear industry has to disclose [radioactive leaks] and share that with local and state communities. I just did that last year.

But the NY Times claims that (i) the legislation was eventually watered down to merely encourage rather than require public disclosure; and (ii) it didn't pass anyway.

Asked why Mr. Obama had cited it as an accomplishment while campaigning for president, the campaign noted that after the senator introduced his bill, nuclear plants started making such reports on a voluntary basis. The campaign did not directly address the question of why Mr. Obama had told Iowa voters that the legislation had passed.

Obama's website disputes the first claim, at least:

NYT never mentions that the revised bill, like the original, required notification of public leaks and that the only change was that requirements would be made through the regulatory process.

Piecing things together, the best I can work out is that the original bill mandated disclosure of even small leaks - any exceeding “allowable limits for normal operation”, whereas the revised bill only mandated disclosure of leaks "exceeding the levels set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA". The NRC would have up to 2 years to decide these limits, and even after that it would remain merely voluntary to disclose smaller leaks. The following section from the NYT article is also relevant:

[Some] say that turning the whole matter over to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as Mr. Obama’s revised bill would have done, played into the hands of the nuclear power industry, which they say has little to fear from the regulators. Mr. Obama seemed to share those concerns when he told a New Hampshire newspaper last year that the commission “is a moribund agency that needs to be revamped and has become a captive of the industry it regulates.”

Conclusions: (i) It's technically true that even the revised bill would mandate disclosure of some leaks. But it's misleading spin for the Obama "fact-checkers" to deny the Times' claims that the revised bill was watered down. They would do better to acknowledge the fact that legislative compromise is sometimes necessary in politics. That's nothing to be ashamed of -- unlike, say, misleading your supporters.

(ii) Nobody disputes that Obama asserted a simple falsehood when he said the legislation "passed". It didn't. But given that this is a one-off mistake made in conversation (in contrast to the Clintons' lies), I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He probably just misspoke: you can see from the context that he was trying to convey his cautious stance on nuclear issues, and this point would have been made just as well had he said "the only nuclear legislation that I've supported", or "introduced", or something along those lines.

N.B. I'd like to get to the bottom of this (if I haven't already), so please correct me if you find any evidence that the above analysis is mistaken.

The Ultimate Question: Kripke or Lewis?

Perhaps the most interesting question in metaphysics, to my mind, is whether identity facts are among the base facts; whether worlds or their constituent objects are prior; whether de dicto or de re modality is fundamental. (I take these to be different angles on the same core question.) We can illustrate the issue by way of my old example of duplicates Bob1 and Bob2 in the perfectly symmetrical universe. Although this possible world contains two of everything, presumably things could have been different. In particular, there might have been no duplication. But now we ask: how many ways are there for a world to be exactly like the mirror world, minus the duplication?

(A) The Kripkean Answer: Many. At the very least, you might have just Bob1's half of the universe, or just Bob2's half of the universe. So that's two possibilities. We might even mix and match, conceiving of a possibility containing precisely Bob2's world except that Bob1 exists in Bob2's place. To generalize: if there are n independent objects in each half of the symmetrical universe, then there will be 2^n ways to populate a possible world containing just one of each object. (Essentialists may deny that all the objects are independent in this way, though: perhaps Bob1 could not have been born to Bob2's mother. Such details needn't concern us here, though.)

(B) The Lewisian Answer: There is really just one possibility here. There is no difference between the various possibilities mentioned in the Kripkean answer. They are all describing one and the same way for a world to be. What we have imagined is a world which contains but a single Bob counterpart (and similarly for each other object in the mirror world). Whether he is really Bob1 or Bob2 is an empty question. In the strictest sense of identity, he is plainly neither. But as a counterpart, he can play a truthmaking role for counterfactual claims made about either. (E.g. "Bob1 might have existed without Bob2," and vice versa.)

I lean heavily in the Lewisian direction, since the idea that there could be any number of qualitatively identical worlds which nonetheless differ in the identities of their constituents strikes me as completely nutty. (There's nothing there to ground such a difference -- nothing in Bob's metaphysical makeup that could fix whether he is Bob1 or Bob2. Well, unless you care to introduce a 'haecceity' for just this purpose, but haecceities seem mysterious and insufficiently motivated posits.)

"That's nuts" does not, however, seem to convince the Kripkeans of my acquaintance. Can anyone suggest a better way to make progress on this issue? (Or some good papers to read? I'm not at all familiar with the literature.) I think Jack is with me on the specific case of time-points, at least, so maybe I just need a few more compelling examples to form a base from which to generalize...? More seriously, though, it seems like such a central issue that it cannot be settled on its own. Rather, we must do the hard work of exploring the implications for whole systems of Kripkean and Lewisian metaphysics, to see which approach ultimately bears fruit. What do you think?

The Logic of Indeterminacy

Alex's comment to my previous post reminded me that I need to say a bit more about my treatment of indeterminacy. He wonders how the following claims of mine could be consistent:
(1) It is indeterminate whether 'Bob' denotes Bob1 or Bob2.
(2) It is likewise indeterminate whether 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob1 or Bob2.
(3) But it is determinate that 'Bob' and 'Mirror-Bob' do not co-refer.

After all, if you took 1 and 2 to be the fundamental semantic facts in this scenario, then there is nothing to rule out their being coreferential -- it would simply appear to be indeterminate whether that's actually the case. To supervaluate: there are four ways* to resolve the indeterminacy, and on two of them the names co-refer, and on the other two they don't. So we cannot settle the question whether the terms co-refer.

* = Those four ways are:
(a) 'Bob' denotes Bob1, 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob1 [co-refer]
(b) 'Bob' denotes Bob1, 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob2
(c) 'Bob' denotes Bob2, 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob1
(d) 'Bob' denotes Bob2, 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob2 [co-refer]

But that's the wrong way to go about things. While 1 and 2 offer a partial description of the semantic situation, such an atomistic approach cannot capture everything that's going on. It is whole scenarios that are instead fundamental. Compare 1 and 2 with:
# (4) It is indeterminate which of the four semantic scenarios, a-d, obtains.

This is the situation as Alex took it to be. But it is not what I had in mind. And this way of presenting things brings out some alternative possibilities, such as:
# (5) It is indeterminate whether semantic scenario a or d obtains.
(6) It is indeterminate whether semantic scenario b or c obtains.

This is my claim. Crucially, it is 6, not 1 and 2, which provides the fundamental account of the situation I had in mind. (1 and 2 are consistent with any of 4, 5, or 6. That is why they are merely partial descriptions.) To derive more particular claims -- e.g. my 1, 2, and 3 -- from the fundamental account (6), we simply supervaluate. That is, a claim is:
(I) determinately true if it is true in all allowed scenarios;
(II) determinately false if it is false in all allowed scenarios; and
(III) indeterminate if it is true in some allowed scenarios and false in others.

Since my allowed scenarios are b and c only, we obtain the following results:
My claim 1 is true because 'Bob' denotes different people in scenarios b and c.
Likewise for claim 2 and 'Mirror-Bob'.
3 is true because in both b and c, 'Bob' and 'Mirror-Bob' denote different people.

Does that all make sense?

New blog

Gender, Race and Philosophy (via feminist philosophers).

Their first post is about Obama and deliberative democracy. Very cool.