Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: The ends in the world as we know it

Gah, I replied to this before but it doesn't seem ...

2005-12-15T06:52:15.420-05:00

Gah, I replied to this before but it doesn't seem to have worked. Not really in the mood to type it all out again, so I'll write it in short and hope you get my point.

1) Your objection to my original criterion is that it doesn't work in human cases. But couldn't I drop the human-interference condition in the case of humans? Therefore "Humans live in houses" is true, "Pigs live in pens" is false. (That might sound a little ad hoc, but I don't think its unreasonable to say that our language is anthropocentric)

2) Isn't "The mayfly breeds before dying" better understood as "the mayfly, if it breeds, dies shortly after"? That doesn't seem either unreasonable or untenable.

3) (Probably the most demanding problem). Is biting the bullet here untenable? Maybe "the domestic cat has fur and legs" /is not/ implied by "the domestic cat has fur" and "the domestic cat has legs", but is simply known independently and language tricks us into thinking that there's a genuine entailment here.

As I say, sorry if thats a bit short but typing it all out again would be really quite tiresome, and I'm meant to be writing an essay!

Thanks,
Alex

Here's another stab and replying through the comme...

2005-12-08T00:04:05.816-05:00

Here's another stab and replying through the comment box; let's see if it works this time.

The best place for you to go for a reply is Chapter 4, section 2 of Thompson's essay (pp. 33ff), in which he discusses the irreducibility of natural-historical categoricals to other more familiar kinds of categoricals. I've tried to give some glosses of the reasons, and I'll try to give some more, but of course he has more space and more talent than I do, and it was his idea to begin with. But here's a few of the reasons he suggests to think that your analysis of natural-history categoricals won't actually pan out.

1. Determining what counts as "intervention." First, the attempt to finesse problems by attaching a qualification of "without (serious) human interference" (either inside or outside the scope of the quantifier -- I'm not sure which you meant, but I'm not sure it matters, either). You're right that I doubt whether "interference" can be cashed out in terms that are independent of the sort of natural life-cycle categoricals that you're trying to use the notion of "interference" to explain. Thus Thompson: "[T]he question what counts as ['intervention'] is surely to be answered, in any given case by appeal to the system of natural historical judgments with the relevant kind as subject. And so we cannot simply take such a category for granted and then employ it in an account of our form of thinking. --If the mother bobcat leaves her young alone, they will wither and rot; if she nurses them they will develop thus and so. In whichcase, though, do we find 'intervention', and in which rather 'what happens, ceteris paribus'? No one will insist that the mother's nursing be viewed as the intervention of something alien, from without, into an otherwise inviolate cub-system set to evolve in its own direction. But to deny it is just a more stilted way of expressing the thought that bobcats are not to be compared with caterpillars--they do not strike out alone and set themselves straightaway to munching. No, 'the mother nurses them for several weeks'; I heard about it on a nature documentary."

You might object that my quotation here isn't responsive to your condition, which depends on human intervention specifically (so bobcat intervention might not cause problems). But there are certainly cases in which serious human intervention (if "intervention" means anything other than the sense that transparently depends on the aristotelian categoricals themselves) is precisely what makes aristotelian categoricals true. For example, there are aristotelian categoricals that are true of humans: for example, humans master language at an early age, but this would hardly be so if not for massive efforts on the part of other human beings towards babies and young children (as both the case of feral children, and also the fact that the overwhelming majority of babies would simply die if abandoned, demonstrate). You could try to change it to an "alien species" criterion instead of referring to humans particularly, but there are also aristotelian categoricals that are true of domesticated plants and animals; fig trees reproduce by grafting (which is somethign we do), wheat grows in such-and-such a way and ripens in the fall (thanks to tilled soil), domestic cats like to be touched by humans (but feral cats don't), etc. (And the same could be said of any symbiotic pair of species you cared to pick; for what it's worth, I think you're right that "rats have fleas" is true as an aristotelian categorical -- that's part of the reason rats are such loathsome creatures! But that's because fleas are a permanent and salient feature of the rat's distinctive form of life, not because some percentage of rats do or don't have fleas.)

I have some other worries about this criterion, but they're mostly more trifling, so let's move on to...

2. Semantic problems with the statistical quantifier. One of the first problems with an attempt at a statistical reading of the quantifier, even with the sort of qualifications you've suggested, is that any particular value you pick for the statistical level needed to satisfy the quantified formula is likely to be wrong in some cases. Examples (1)-(5) might plausibly be thought to imply that most, or the overwhelming majority of domestic cats, coyotes, humans, male and female emperor penguins, etc. etc. But that's not true of all true aristotelian categoricals. For example, the mayfly breeds shortly before dying. I know this is true; I saw it in a nature documentary. However, as a matter of statistical fact, most mayflies die long before breeding at all. (Similarly leatherback sea turtles, to take a nearer cousin of ours.) You could try to patch this up by adding the qualification, "most S's that reach the appropriate stage of their life exhibit trait T," but of course this obviously does nothing more than relocate the problem to "appropriate stage of their life." (And of course you cannot define it as "the stage in their life at which the overwhelming majority of them exhibit trait T," since that is as tightly circular an analysis as you could hope for.)

3. Logical problems with the statistical quantifier. There are also some straightforward, if technical, logical reasons not to read "The cat has four legs" as "Most cats," "The overwhelming majority of cats have four legs (... when such-and-such defeaters aren't operative ...)." As Thompson points out, aristotelian categoricals support inferences that statistical generalizations don't; in this respect they are more like universal than statistical generalizations. For example, just as "All Greeks are European" and "All Greeks are mortal" jointy entail "All Greeks are both European and mortal," so also "The domestic cat has four legs" and "The domestic cat has a tail" jointly entail "The domestic cat has both four legs and a tail." But if you tried to do the same thing with a statistical generalization you would be committing a fallacy; "most Americans are white" and "most Americans are female" don't jointly entail "most Americans are both white and female." (The same is true for "overwhelming majority;" due to the size of the majorities that are usually required to be "overwhelming," concrete examples might take several conjunctions before they fail to preserve overwhelmingness, but the important thing is that they can fail to preserve it eventually. Whereas with universal generalizations and aristotelian categoricals you can preserve the same level of generality no matter how high you stack the conjunctions.)

Can you relink,half the text is not on the page.

2005-12-07T19:33:48.686-05:00

Can you relink,
half the text is not on the page.

Ok, a mini-reply:You suggest that sentences such a...

2005-12-07T03:41:00.393-05:00

Ok, a mini-reply:
You suggest that sentences such as "the domestic cat has four legs" can't be simply a statement of statistics - I'd like to maintain that it is.

Why do you think its not? well:
"it won’t be semantically serious [...] some cats are blind, many cats are tabbies, either most cats are male or most cats are female — I don’t know which — and the overwhelming majority of cats are vaccinated against common diseases. But “The domestic cat is blind,” “the domestic cat is a tabby,” “the domestic cat is male,” “the domestic cat is female,” “the domestic cat is vaccinated against common diseases” are all quite obviously false."

But, if we take "all cats have four legs" to mean "the vast majority of cats who have not been interfered with in any serious way have four legs" then your first three examples fail to meet the "vast majority" condition (only some are blind, some are tabbies, and only a slight majority will be of one gender). Your last example (vaccination) fails to meet the "not been interfered with in any serious way" condition: vaccinating cats involves intefering with them.

Now, I think you'll reply that "interfered with in a serious way" will need to be analysed in terms of teleology, otherwise it will be hard to distinguish cases where the cat does 'natural' things like feed itself, and other cases where we vacinate our cats. But can't this distinction be made not by appeal to teleology, but simple counter-factuals about human non-interference? In other words, a "cat" is what the vast majority of cats would be like without any human intervention.

I should note that what I've said here means that a natural virus which causes all cats to lose their hair might mean that "the domestic cat has hair" would become false (if the loss were permanent and carried across generations, otherwise statistical work will do). But my intuitions go the other way on this: "rats have fleas" looks to me to be true (assuming that most rats do indeed have fleas, which is probably false, but you get my point).

And, I think, after all that, we have a notion of "the domestic cat" that meets your requirements and relies solely on non-teleological facts.