Procreative Duties

Bryan Caplan:

In 1996, the GSS asked:

If the husband in a family wants children, but the wife decides that she does not want any children, is it all right for the wife to refuse to have children?

and

If the wife in a family wants children, but the husband decides that he does not want any children, is it all right for the husband to refuse to have children?

Survey says: 82% affirmed the wife's right to refuse, but only 61% affirmed the same right for husbands. Other than a simple men's rights story, anyone got an explanation?

In traditional households, the mother shoulders most of the costs of childrearing (not to mention childbearing!). If we can assume this background context, then we have 82% of people affirming one's right to back out of a massive burden, compared to only 61% affirming one's right to back out of a not-quite-so-massive burden.

Further: sexist gender norms mean that women are more likely to be stigmatized for being childless. If we can assume this as background, it means that not only is the alleged "duty" less burdensome for the husband, his reneging would impose greater costs on his spouse (compared to the costs to him if the wife were to back out).

These assumptions won't hold in every particular case, of course. But they seem plausible enough in general, so the asymmetry in the survey results seems perfectly sensible -- certainly not evidence of anti-male bias.

Subtracting Self-Reference

Brandon recently linked his old post on the Propositional Depth Response to the Liar Paradox:

Every meaningful statement must be assumed to have a determinate propositional depth...

L: [L] is false.

This has no determinate propositional depth. If we assume that L has a propositional depth of n, we find that, since L embeds itself, it must have a propositional depth of n+1.

I like this sort of account. (Alex recently suggested that one might arbitrarily choose whether or not to believe the proposition P: I believe [P]. My immediate response was to doubt that there really is any proposition here. The 'depth' account can explain why.)

A standard objection to this sort of view is that there would seem to be some true self-referential propositions. In an old guest post, Rad Geek suggested:
EM: [EM] is true or [EM] is false.

Now, it's not entirely clear to me that the above constitutes a wholly meaningful claim. (What is this '[EM]' it speaks of? I get stuck in an infinite loop if I try to fill it out.) But perhaps we can apply a lesson from Yablo and say that it is partly true. (I doubt his truthmaker account can actually accommodate this, but never mind that for now.)

Subtract out the self-reference, and what remains ("__ is true or __ is false") is true about logical forms, i.e. insofar as it claims that the law of excluded middle holds. The particular application is meaningless, but we can abstract away from that part of what's said.

Another puzzle case:
M: [M] is true and grass is green.

We certainly don't want to say that this is wholly meaningless. It's partly true: grass is green. Again, it seems that the thing to do is simply to subtract away the meaningless self-referential component.

P.S. Towards the end of his post, Brandon worries that the propositional depth solution commits us to the view that "whether the sentence has the same meaning, or any meaning at all, depends on purely contingent facts about the world that we may not be aware of." We should embrace this result, though, as Michael Sprague once pointed out to me:

It's worth noting that all liar sentences are dependent on context. For example, an instance of the liar sentence next to an arrow pointing to another sentence (like, say, "All ravens are orange") may be true. Context determines the sentence to which "this sentence" refers; the truth or falsity of that sentence then determines the truth of the liar.

Overcoming Scientism

I take 'Scientism' to be the view that empirical inquiry is the only form of rational inquiry, perhaps coupled with the even stronger claim that only "scientific"/testable claims are meaningful, or candidates for truth or falsity. In other words, it is to dismiss the entire field of philosophy (and arguably logic and mathematics too, though this is less often acknowledged). Indeed, a primary symptom of scientism is that sufferers are incapable of distinguishing philosophical arguments from religious assertions. They claim not to comprehend any non-empirical claim; it is mere 'gobbledygook' to them.

It's worth noting right away that Scientism is self-defeating, for it is not itself an empirically verifiable thesis. Insofar as its proponents have any reasons at all for advancing the view, they are engaging in (bad) philosophical, not scientific, reasoning. This is the familiar point that one cannot assess philosophy (even negatively) without thereby engaging in philosophy oneself. [For a more positive argument in support of the a priori, see my post on conditionalizing out all empirical evidence.]

This bias against philosophy is unfortunate for the obvious reason that there are a lot of interesting and important philosophical truths, which the scientismist would never think to look for. (My original 'scientism' post quoted some ignorant dismissals of Nick Bostrom's very interesting 'Simulation argument'. Not that I think his conclusion is true; but it is eye-opening just to consider.) Moreover, as I once wrote:

All your “common sense” beliefs rest on philosophical assumptions. Most people prefer not to examine them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It just means that everything you think and do could be completely misguided and you wouldn’t even realize it.

The scientismist will no doubt have many false philosophical beliefs in addition to their scientism. (We all do.) But if they are unaware of the rational tools that allow us to identify and correct such errors, then they will be stuck with them -- not a situation that any dedicated truth-seeker would consider desirable.

I think it's especially unfortunate that most folk seem unaware that reasoned inquiry into normative questions -- e.g. ethics and political philosophy -- is possible. This is at least part of the explanation why public discourse on these matters is so impoverished and sub-rational. So I think it's very important for more people to appreciate that we can go beyond mere instrumental rationality and also assess one's ultimate ends in terms of rational coherence.

Scientism also leads to more mundane mistakes. For example, in a recent 'Overcoming Bias' thread, one commenter defended the common-sense view that different observers experience the same colour qualia (rather than my 'red' being your 'yellow'), on the grounds that the alternative claim is "purely metaphysical with no implications for reality". But that can't be the right reason, because the same could be said of the eminently reasonable -- and presumably true -- view that he was defending. Whether we experience the same qualia or different, either answer is "purely metaphysical" with no scientific implications. So the right justification for the former view must lie elsewhere (e.g. in philosophical principles of parsimony that count against drawing unmotivated ad hoc distinctions).

Fortunately, this bias is easily overcome. Accept no substitutes: Think!

[See also: The Problem with Non-Philosophers.]

Thought Substitutes

I've recently lamented how logical formalisms and inductive meta-arguments risk being misused as substitutes for careful thought. It's also a major worry I have about (some) "experimental philosophy". Consider, for example, the following:

Does common sense morality assume objectivity? According to a recent study by Goodwin and Darley, most folk actually don't believe that their moral judgments are objectively true.

It's not clear how this fact is any response to the question. The question, recall, is not whether most folk believe in moral objectivism (which is all the survey can tell us). That's quite irrelevant. The real question is whether our moral practices rationally commit us to objectivism, and that is not a purely empirical question. It's a normative question, so there is simply no way to answer it without actually doing philosophy.

I don't mean to bash all attempts at empirically informed philosophy. If we are concerned with analyzing actual moral practices, it's an empirical question just what those are, i.e. what moralizing behaviours people in our society engage in. It's entirely appropriate to use empirical data as a starting point for philosophical inquiry, especially if that data is precisely what we're wanting to analyze. My point is simply that empirical work cannot substitute for philosophical analysis.

Further, it will rarely be worthwhile to ask folk for their theoretical opinions. Surveys like the above merely tell us what pop-philosophical theories are most prevalent in our public culture at present. Many people will profess a belief in relativism, for example, even if further probing would eventually reveal that they don't actually accept the implications of this view. As R.M. Hare once wrote:

If we want to find out what ordinary people mean, it is seldom safe just to ask them. They will come out with a variety of answers, few of which, perhaps, will withstand a philosophical scrutiny or elenchus, conducted in the light of the ordinary people's own linguistic behaviour (for example what they treat as self-contradictory).

So, next time you come across a study reporting the philosophical beliefs of non-philosophers, just remind yourself of the classic Onion study:

Subtracting Presuppositions

Follow-up to: Logical Subtraction and Partial Truth

Yablo proposes that (1) the real content of a statement S is what it says as opposed to presupposes; (2) what it says is what S adds to the presupposition π. That is, the real content R = S - π.

How can we tell what's presupposed? Linguists have developed various tests for this, including the negation test: Denying The # of planets is 8 is not thereby to assert There is no such entity or it is not 8. No, whether we assert or deny the claim, this way of talking presupposes numbers either way. So the real content is merely about how things stand concretely so far as the planets are concerned.

Plugging into the formula:
R = S - π
    = 'The # of planets is 8' - 'There are numbers'.

This remainder, the real content of what's said, is true even if the literal statement S isn't (due to the false presupposition). S is merely partly true, but it's true in the part that we care about.

Here's a vital question for metaphysicians concerned with ontological commitment: Are we committed to the truth of our presuppositions, or merely to what we say (i.e. what our assertions add to what's presupposed)? Ordinary talk presupposes all sorts of ontological extravagance: composite objects, numbers, propositions, properties, tensed reality (past/future), mere possibilia, etc. Such talk helps us to convey important truths, some of which may not even be possible to express in less ontologically loaded terms. So it would be nice if we could maintain this talk in good conscience, without thereby committing ourselves to the ontological presuppositions. Can we?

Sometimes, at least, we can knowingly adopt a false presupposition. Yablo mentions talk of 'the King' to denote Harold the usurper. Harold is not really the King, we all know -- the King is locked away in the dungeon. But nonetheless we may use 'The King is coming!' to warn of Harold's approach. This does not commit one to thinking that Harold truly is the King rather than a mere usurper. The false presupposition is adopted merely for sake of communication, and can be safely subtracted to get at the real content of our assertions. Similarly, we may think, for ontological presuppositions. We presuppose that there are numbers in order to more easily describe how things stand in concrete reality. But we may do this while remaining neutral on the question whether the presupposition is really true.

Yablo also briefly mentioned the popular meta-ontological view that various ontological disputes (e.g. whether numbers really exist) are 'empty' or meaningless. He suggests that we have this intuition in cases where the presupposition that X really exists is perfectly extricable from the ordinary claims which rest upon it. We have no trouble simply subtracting away the disputed metaphysical claims, and assessing the concrete remainder. So it seems like the metaphysics isn't really doing anything. That seems to describe my intuitions pretty well, I must admit. But what are the implications for meta-ontology? Can the subtraction method vindicate our deflationary intuitions? Or does it debunk them, suggesting that there is a further question there -- just not one we're typically concerned with in everyday life? Or must we look elsewhere to adjudicate this issue?

Fascinating questions, I reckon. Now if only I could find some answers...

Logical Subtraction and Partial Truth

Stephen Yablo gave a very impressive series of lectures here last week. His core insight was that often we can communicate important truths by way of assertions that are literally false. The rough explanation for this is that the assertion, though false, may be "partly true", or "true insofar as it concerns a certain subject matter." For example, 'the number of dragons is zero' may be literally false if numbers do not exist. But it is partly true, i.e. true in what it says about dragons (namely, that there aren't any). If you take the literal meaning, and subtract the claim that there are numbers, the remaining content is wholly true.

Sometimes logical subtraction seems unproblematic, as the subtracted element is "perfectly extricable" from what's being said. Other cases, however, are more problematic. When you subtract the redness from scarlet, what's left? 'Tom [the tomato] is scarlet - Tom is red' does not leave any remainder that we can make sense of. It seems perfectly inextricable. Then there may be inbetween cases, such as Wittgenstein's famous question: "what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" We have some grasp of this, but as Jaeger has pointed out, "it is not the case that there is exactly one statement R such that 'R & my arm goes up' is logically equivalent to 'I raise my arm'."

Yablo's solution is to say that "P-Q always exists, but it doesn't always project very far out of the Q-region [of logical space]. Inextricability simply means that it is hard [or impossible] to evaluate P-Q in worlds where Q fails."

Intuitively, we can say that:
(i) P-Q is false iff P adds falsity to Q.
(ii) P-Q is true iff not-P adds falsity to Q.
(iii) If neither P nor its negation adds falsity to Q, then P-Q is undefined (lacks a truth value).

Yablo systematizes our intuitive judgments here by appeal to truthmakers, or the reasons why a proposition is true/false. P "adds falsity" to Q if it is false for a Q-compatible reason, i.e. there is a Q-compatible falsity-maker for P.

Example: Let P = 'The King of France is bald' and Q = 'France has a King'. Then P-Q is false, because of the following Q-compatible falsity-maker for P: the list of all the bald people, none of whom is a King of France. This falsity-maker could exist, and so make P false, even if Q were true and France did have a King. This shows that P is false for reasons over and above the falsity of its presupposition Q.

Here is a bit more technical detail. Let R be a potential candidate for P-Q. Yablo suggests that R is a successful candidate, i.e. R extrapolates P beyond Q, iff the following three conditions are satisfied:
- "Equivalence: within Q, R is true (false) in a world iff P is true (false)." That is, if R = P-Q, then it had better be the case that R&Q = P.
- "Reasons: within Q, a world is R (~R) for the same reasons it is P&Q rather than ~P&Q (...)" This is equivalence as applied to subject matter, rather than just truth conditions.
- "Orthogonality: outside Q, R is true (false) for the same reasons as within." This is the key principle, which really gets at the intuitive notion that we are genuinely extrapolating P rather than simply gerrymandering a proposition that happens to overlap with P in the Q-region (and then becomes wildly different beyond that point).

Example: The material conditional 'if Q then P' fails the orthogonality condition. Outside the Q region, it is true for the simple reason that Q is false, regardless of P. Compare the visual aid below: 'if Q then P' has truth conditions 'P or ~Q', so would include all the white region in R. The gerrymandering is visible in the fact that the R region would then turn a sharp 'corner' once it left the P & Q region. It should instead extrapolate cleanly as shown.

Links

- Philosophers' Carnival #66.

- Paul Bloom and Josh Knobe discuss moral psychology on bloggingheads.tv

- This discussion thread (on dualism) is more than a little frustrating, for all the reasons previously noted here. It's curious: you have one side offering arguments, and the other mere ridicule and sloganeering, and yet somehow the latter group thinks of themselves as 'rationalists' in contrast to the so-called "religionist stance" of those of us who were actually offering arguments. Extraordinary. (See: scientism.)

Derivative Objections

[I'm adding a new sidebar category on 'methodology', for posts where I assess certain forms of reasoning, or what I take to be common mistakes in philosophical methodology.]

Suppose I propose an analysis of X (welfare, say) in terms of some more basic phenomenon Y (e.g. desire satisfaction). One might try to object to this by pointing to various paradoxes that result. But it is important to check whether the analysis is really contributing to the alleged problem here. Often, I find, it is not. The problem derives from the underlying phenomena, and is nothing to do with the proposed analysis. The analysis merely enables us to redescribe an old problem in new terms. It doesn't really introduce any new problems. So it is unobjectionable (at least in this respect).

Here's a test: If we can replace all instances of 'X' with the proposed reduction basis 'Y', and the paradox still remains, then there's no objection to the analysis here. What's problematic is the underlying phenomenon Y, but that's going to be a problem for everyone who accepts the existence of Y, regardless of whether they believe that Y can ground X or not.

Examples of this fallacy in action:
(1) Claims that the desire paradox is a special problem for preferentist analyses of wellbeing. "I desire to be poorly off", if we accept preferentism, is just a redescription of the more basic paradox, "I desire that most of my desires be thwarted." It's clearly no objection to a view that it allows old paradoxes to be restated in new terms. It's only objectionable if a view introduces new paradoxes!

(2) All those objections to consequentialism that really derive from the difficulty of evaluating certain states of affairs (see, e.g., infinite spheres of utility, the population paradox, etc.). The consequentialist claim that right action maximizes the good does not add any further paradoxicality to our theorizing about the good. As R.M. Hare once wrote:

It is worth saying right at the beginning that this is not a problem peculiarly for utilitarians... The fact, if it is one, that there are other independent virtues and duties as well [as beneficence] makes no difference to this requirement. Only a theory which allowed no place at all to beneficence... could escape this demand. Anybody, therefore, who is tempted to bring up this objection against utilitarians should ask himself whether he is himself attracted by a theory which leaves out such considerations entirely.

So here's a handy methodological principle: when faced with an objection to a theory that relates X to Y, first check - via my above test - whether it isn't really just a "derivative objection" to Y itself. The theory of X may be a red herring, distracting the discussants from what's really at issue.

Document Freedom Day

Googleblog notes that today is Document Freedom Day. This reminds me that I should stop locking up my work and other information in Microsoft's .doc format, and instead use the standardized open document formats (.odt), which are universal rather than vendor-specific.

Imagine if we all wrote in invisible ink that could only be read by wearing special Microsoft-designed glasses. That would seem unwise, at least if there were better alternatives available (i.e. 'open inks' that anyone's glasses could read). What if not everyone has the special glasses? (Do you really want to make being a Microsoft customer a precondition for communicating with you?) Further: how can we be sure that these special glasses will continue to be made in future? We would be needlessly exposing ourselves to the risk of being unable to read our own words a few decades down the line.

Do yourself and your non-Microsoft-using friends a favour, and download an open document application today. (I personally recommend Open Office, a free and high-powered alternative to Microsoft's entire office suite.)

Arguing with Eliezer: Part II

[My promised concluding thoughts...]

Clearly our disagreements run too deep to do full justice to them in a mere blog post. But I at least hope I've succeeded in indicating where one might reasonably depart from Eliezer's reductionist line. There are also a couple of ad hominem points which struck me as noteworthy. (See my previous post for real arguments; this is mere commentary.)

One is that our beliefs are shaped in reaction to others. Intelligent non-philosophers typically only come across stupid, woolly-headed non-reductionists. The most prominent public intellectuals are typically scientists of a reductionist bent, like Dawkins, whose most prominent opposition is from anti-intellectual rubes and intellectually bankrupt religious apologists. From a purely sociological perspective, it's no surprise that intelligent people might initially be drawn to the former camp. (I know I was.) But that's no substitute for assessing the strongest arguments -- the ones you've probably never even come across unless you've spent a few years doing academic philosophy, or associate with others who have -- on their merits.

Since Eliezer's posts are mostly directed at a general audience - most of whom have not carefully reflected on their beliefs - I agree with 99% of his criticisms. Folks often commit the mind-projection fallacy, are fooled by an empty dispute that 'feels' substantive, and can be irrationally resistant to perfectly legitimate scientific reductions. These are all important insights (though hardly news to philosophers). But he overgeneralizes -- just as to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I think the core problem here is methodological. Eliezer assumes that a debunking explanation of a belief is enough to refute it. Rather than doing the hard work of philosophy -- assessing the arguments for and against P -- he shifts to cognitive science, explaining why I might offer such arguments even if P is false. But this is to commit the genetic fallacy. Any reflective non-reductionist will grant that you can explain all the physical facts (incl. their brain states and vocalizations) without reference to any non-physical facts. Of course. But that doesn't imply anything about whether their belief is justified. Explanation and justification are two completely different things.

Reductionists make this error because they assume that all that stands in need of explanation is the third-personal data of science. Hence (they assume), if you can explain all the empirical data - including the vocalizations of your critics - then there's nothing left for said critics to base their arguments on. This type of genetic fallacy is no fallacy, on this view, because a full empirical explanation exhausts all possible justification.

But this is clearly question-begging, or worse. It assumes an indefensible scientism from the start. Non-reductionists take it as given that there is more than just third-personal empirical data that calls out for explanation. There is the manifest fact of first-personal conscious experience, and the normative facts about what we ought to believe and do, etc. A debunking explanation of why we believe in these phenomena is not sufficient unless one has also successfully debunked the phenomena itself. But that requires actually engaging with non-reductionists and the arguments we offer, rather than simply psychologizing us.

Reductionists, when short on real arguments, like to appeal to meta-arguments, e.g. induction on the historical successes of science. 'There have always been nay-sayers, who questioned the ability of science to explain phenomenon X, and every time they've been proven wrong!' It's a familiar sentiment. But it's also pretty weak. If you bother to look more closely, there are principled reasons to think these cases different. All those examples they point to are instances of third-personal empirical phenomena. I grant that science is supreme in that domain. But, to turn the tables, it's never had any success outside of it. So there's no general reason to think that normativity or first-personal subjective experience are susceptible to purely scientific explanation. So, again, these simplistic meta-arguments are no substitute for the real thing.