[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?)
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Engaging persons or ideas
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?
Friday, February 08, 2008
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.
Friday, February 01, 2008
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?
Monday, April 17, 2006
The Conceptual Development of 'Rights'
Thomas Pogge's 'How Should Human Rights Be Conceived?' traces the interesting development from "natural law" through "natural rights" to the modern notion of "human rights" -- a development that largely consists in narrowing the content of morality.
The idea of a "natural moral law" doesn't come with any obvious restrictions on content built in. (So it is a favourite of religious homophobes and others with arbitrary ethical views.) But as Pogge explains:Expressing moral demands in the natural-rights rather than natural-law idiom involves a significant narrowing of content possibilities by introducing the idea that the relevant moral demands are based on moral concern for certain subjects: rightholders.
This undermines the notion of religious duties, since God surely has no need of rights. More generally, it excludes all the arbitrary concerns that have nothing to do with any individual's interests, or harms and benefits. So that's progress of sorts. But it already excludes too much. For instance, the non-identity problem shows that one can harm humanity (or "people in general") without harming any particular person. And we might also reasonably hold that individuals have a moral duty to develop their talents, etc., whereas there's little sense to be made of the notion of a "right" against oneself.
The notion of 'human rights' is even more restricted. It is an essentially political notion, whereby the violators "must be in some sense official". Victims of theft aren't said to have had their "human rights" violated; not unless this arbitrary confiscation of property was undertaken by government agents acting in an official capacity, or some such. Human rights thus offer protection "only against violations from certain sources". (Though Pogge goes on to argue that the relevant sort of "official disrespect" may be manifested in a wider range of situations than we might at first expect -- including, for example, official inaction when protection is needed, etc.)
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