The Web of Belief

On Propositional Indexing

2009-06-06T12:42:00.002-04:00

I am interested in defending a conception of propositional content that has application to all intentional agents (i.e., agents with beliefs about the world). Since I hold that some non-linguistic animals have beliefs about the world, this requires an account of propositional content that has application to such animals. But how are we to go about attributing propositional content to the beliefs of non-linguistic animals? In answering this question, I draw on John Dilworth’s propositional indexing framework.

In his paper, “Semantics naturalised: propositional indexing plus interactive perception”, Dilworth advocates a propositional indexing view according to which cognitive states (understood as concrete causal occurrences) enjoy an isomorphic correspondence with propositions (understood as abstract truth-value bearing items). Maintaining such an isomorphism requires that we have some method for indexing a given proposition (such as the proposition “X is red”, with respect to some worldy object X) with a corresponding perceptual or cognitive state (such as an agent Z perceiving that X is red). This method, whatever it may be, may be identified with the specific epistemic conditions under which we would accept that the isomorphism in question holds. Moreover, Dilworth maintains that the epistemic conditions must be ones that can be met by individuals without any technical or specialised scientific knowledge. After all, it is part of our folk psychological practice to describe perceptual states in propositional terms. This imposes the constraint that the method for indexing propositions to cognitive states must be one which is available to everyone, including those lacking any specialised philosophical or technical expertise. Dilworth puts the point as follows:

Our understanding of propositional indexing is not intended to be restricted to specialised cognitive science procedure requiring technical expertise and detailed knowledge of such matters as the cognitive structures involved in perceptual functioning. Instead, the idea is that the everyday understanding by people in general, of when a particular proposition, such as “X is red” is true of a particular object X is to be correlated with a related understanding by such people of what kinds of behavioural evidence would justify a claim that the person had indeed correctly perceived the relevant fact. So the predominant epistemic issue is not the theoretical nature of propositional indexing as such, but rather the everyday conditions under which people in general would agree that it had successfully occurred.

Dilworth recommends that propositional indexing be unpacked in terms of what he calls “classification behaviour”:

For example, a paradigm kind of colour-related classification behaviour would be that of a person assigned a task of sorting some miscellaneous objects by their colour, and then putting object X into a box containing only red objects. This classification behaviour would provide evidence that the person P had perceived that object X was red. Consequently, if the person Q observing person P is considering the proposition that X is red, then Q would take person P’s classification as evidence that P had perceived that X is red, and hence that P’s relevant perceptual state S, whatever it may be, is indexed by the proposition ‘X is red’.

Significantly, Dilworth describes propositional indexing in third- rather than first-personal terms. This suggests a view according to which an agent’s cognitive state may be described as propositional just in case it is, in principle, possible for that cognitive state to be correlated with a proposition. However, the act of identifying the correlation need not be performed by the agent that is actually undergoing the cognitive state in order for the cognitive state to count as propositional. One upshot of this view is that the cognitive states of non-linguistic animals, which lack the ability to actually engage in propositional indexing, may nevertheless count as having propositional attitudes.

Dilworth’s observations about colour-related classification behaviour generalises to less overt types of classification behaviour. For example, a dog may be said to perceive a bone is edible just in case it is disposed to ingest the bone. Ingesting the bone, then, amounts to a type of classification behaviour (akin to the act of sorting bones into the set of edible items). Since the heuristic of classification behaviour is understood in dispositional terms, it is not necessary that the ingesting of the bone actually take place for the dog to count as perceiving that the bone is edible. Moreover, since a dog may engage in such classification behaviour without us having to attribute to the dog the concepts of “bone” or “edible”, the present account does not require concept possession as a prerequisite for having an agent’s perceptual state indexed by a proposition.

There is much that I find attractive in Dilworth’s framework. Specifically, I believe it provides the resources for an account of propositional attitudes that allows for such attitudes to be attributed to non-linguistic animals. (Admittedly, Dilworth may be reluctant to speak of propositional attitudes in this way, but that would only be because of his refusal to attribute semantic content to cognitive states in general and not because of any prejudice against such attributions in the case of non-linguistic animals. In short, both Dilworth and I agree in the even-handedness of our treatment of the cognitive states of linguistic and non-linguistic animals.) However, I want to conclude by highlighting a difficulty with Dilworth’s account; one that motivates a way in which my account differs crucially from his own.

Dilworth is committed to what he refers to as an “interactive theory of perception”, the considered version of which he puts as follows:

IP2: An organism Z perceives an item X to have the property of being F just in case X causes some sense-organ zi of Z to cause Z to acquire an X-related disposition D, such that D is an F-classification disposition.

Dilworth defines an F-classification dispositions as “a disposition, the manifestation of which is some F-classification behaviour. For example, on this account, to perceive that an object X is red is to acquire a disposition to classify object X in some red-related way.”

However, it is not clear that IP2 can accommodate cases in which an agent perceives things to be a certain way and yet fails to believe that things are that way. For example, suppose that I am led to believe (erroneously) that a room is equipped with special lighting that makes all the white objects in the room appear red. (However, there is no special lighting and all objects in the room are actually the colour they appear to be.) Due to my misinformation, I am disposed to sort all objects that appear red into the white box. According to IP2, it follows from my having this disposition that I do not perceive that the objects are red. But this gets things wrong. The thing to say is that I perceive the object as red, but I believe it is white. Consequently, IP2 is unable to accommodate cases in which the two—perceiving X is F and believing X is F—come apart.

Instead of IP2 I am committed to the following account of the indexing of propositional content to perceptual states:

(*) An agent has a perceptual appearance of X as having the property F just in case assenting to that appearance would dispose the agent to engage in F-classification behaviour with respect to X.

My account differs from Dilworth’s in two crucial respects. First, I shift from Dilworth’s focus on perceptual experiences of X as F (which Dilworth holds are factive both with respect to the existence of X and with respect to X possessing the property F) to a focus on perceptual appearances of X as F (which I take to be non-factive). Second, I see the propositional content of a perceptual appearance as parasitic upon the propositional content of the perceptual belief it would give rise to (even if it actually never gives rise to such a belief). Thus, I see beliefs as having inherent propositional content (directly indexed by the type of classification behaviour they would dispose an agent to engage in) and perceptual states as having derived propositional content (indexed by the propositional content of the belief they would generate if assented to).

The second point (which admittedly needs further unpacking) allows me to avoid the preceding difficulty facing Dilworth’s account. In the case of an agent who has a perceptual appearance of an object as red, but believes it is white, the agent’s perceptual state is indexed by the propositional content of the belief it would generate if it were assented to. Since assenting to the perceptual appearance would dispose the agent (in the preceding example) to engage in red-classification behaviour, the agent has a perceptual appearance of the object as red. This account of perception is anti-behaviourist (since there may be no behavioural indications of the content of an agent’s perceptual appearance) but still quasi-functionalist (since it sees the contentfulness of a perceptual appearance as partly dependent on the belief-forming function of perceptual appearances).

Littlejohn and Comesana on Epistemic Justification

2009-05-25T15:56:00.001-04:00

Moral Odysseus Cases and McDowell's Theory of Virtue

2008-04-26T20:46:00.003-04:00

Homer’s Odyssey relates the story of Odysseus and the sirens, three Naiads whose beautiful singing would draw sailors towards their island, causing the sailors to shipwreck on the surrounding rocks. Odysseus famously instructs his men to bind him to the mass of the ship so that he cannot go to the sirens when he hears their song. While Odysseus’s actions seem purely prudential, there seems to be moral cases that are analogous (in ways to be spelt out below) to the Odysseus scenario. For example, consider a recovering alcoholic, Mr. Smith, who is invited out for a drink by his co-workers, Mr. Jones. Mr. Smith has a justified belief that if he were to accept Mr. Jones’ invitation to have a drink, he would not be able to resist the temptation to have another drink and then another, and so on. In fact, past experience suggests that even entering the pub would be sufficient to start him down a self-destructive path of alcoholism. Aware of his lack of self-control, Mr. Smith sees that he should turn down his co-worker’s offer in order to avoid what he justifiably believes would be a potentially irresistible temptation.

I will refer to cases like Mr. Smith’s as Moral Odysseus Cases. Formulaically, Moral Odysseus Cases are ones in which an agent has the justified belief that a certain temptation is so irresistible that the only way he could avoid succumbing to it would be by imposing some environmental constraint (i.e., adopting measures to avoid the temptation altogether) on himself. (In this regard, I see Mr. Smith’s decision to turn down his co-workers invitation, as roughly analogous to Odysseus binding himself to the mass of his ship.)

Let us add the following addendum to the Mr. Smith example: Suppose that Mr. Jones recently earned a promotion and that Mr. Smith promised Mr. Jones that he would celebrate with him. However, at the time Mr. Smith made the promise, he believed that Mr. Jones would be celebrating at a restaurant rather than at a pub. Normally, Mr. Smith is the type of person who would honour his promises. However, now that he has learned that Mr. Jones will be celebrating at a pub, Mr. Smith sees that (given his alcoholism) the right thing to do would be to go against his earlier promise by not going to the pub.

As I have described the case, Mr. Smith seems confronted with two potential oughts:

{OUGHT1}: Go to the pub and thereby fulfil your promise!

{OUGHT2}: Do not go to the pub and risk falling prey to alcoholism!

As I have described the case, Mr. Smith sees {OUGHT2} as silencing {OUGHT1} along with any other competing reasons. Insofar as this describes an actual possibility (and I believe it does) this implies that Mr. Smith has an unclouded perception of {OUGHT2}. Moreover, by saying that Mr. Smith "sees" that he ought not go to the pub I mean to suggest that Mr. Smith is employing the very perceptual sensitivity McDowell attributes to the virtuous agent.

However, by McDowell’s lights, Mr. Smith would fail to constitute a virtuous agent. This is because Mr. Smith perceptual sensitivity is, ex hypothesi, unreliable. If Mr. Smith were to find himself in a pub, his alcoholism would so cloud his moral perception that he would be unable to resist the temptation to over-drink. But according to McDowell, the virtuous agent is one who manifests a reliable perceptual sensitivity. This means that the virtuous agent, if she were in Mr. Smith’s shoes, would not be burdened by alcoholism and would therefore have no reason to break her promise to Mr. Jones. Thus, the virtuous agent is likely to see {OUGHT1} rather than {OUGHT2} as silencing all other competing reasons. The upshot of this is that, with regards to Moral Odysseus Cases, the oughts that are applicable to a non-virtuous agent may differ from the oughts that apply to a virtuous agent.

The significance of the above conclusion should not be underestimated. Recall my previous objection that McDowell’s distinction between the virtuous and continent agent seems to implicate a multivocal account of moral aspirations. I argued that the objection failed on the grounds that it viewed the methodology employed by the non-virtuous agent as prescriptive when by McDowell’s lights it is actually descriptive. However, in the present case we are no longer dealing with differing methodologies but rather with differing oughts. Since oughts are, by definition, prescriptive, a reply that exploits a prescriptive/descriptive distinction is no longer available and the charge of multivocalism goes through.

The upshot of McDowell’s multivocalism is that the difference between the virtuous and non-virtuous agent is not limited to the fact that the latter suffers from a clouded moral perception. In Moral Odysseus Cases, virtuous and non-virtuous agents may actually perceive different moral facts (each relative to the different moral status of the perceiver). This suggests that McDowell’s attempt to differentiate between the virtuous and continent agent simply in terms of clouded perception is insufficient. Put differently, Moral Odysseus Cases show that there are instances in which the moral facts (i.e., what one ought to do) may themselves change depending on whether or not one is virtuous or non-virtuous.

On Transcendental Arguments

2008-04-12T10:29:00.007-04:00

Following Kant, Stroud conceives of transcendental arguments as attempting to refute the sceptic about “the existence of things outside us.”(Stroud [1968], p. 242.) Stroud sees TAs as directed at global scepticism. The global sceptic simultaneously calls into question all our beliefs about the external world by pointing out that all the evidence we have available is compatible with the world being radically different from the way we take it to be. The global sceptic does not only question some particular empirical claim (i.e., that cup is larger than my hand) which we can verify as true or false by a simple observation. Rather, the global sceptic insists that the very methods (i.e., the empirical criteria) we use to verify our empirical claims are no good since they are compatible with there being no cup at all. The global sceptic’s argument may be summarised as follows:

(GS1): Any justification for one’s EW beliefs must be derived from the fulfilment of some empirical criteria.

(GS2): The very best empirical criteria one has available are compatible with the falsity of one’s EW beliefs.

(GS3): If one’s empirical criteria are compatible with the falsity of one’s external world beliefs, then empirical criteria is not adequate to justify one’s EW beliefs.

(GS4): Therefore, one’s EW beliefs are not justified

Carnap points out that traditionally, anti-sceptical arguments have tried to avoid (GS4) by rejecting (GS2). That is to say, they involve raising the standard of the empirical criteria under consideration (e.g., by demanding certainty etc.) so as to rule out the possibility of the standard being met simultaneous with the falsity of one’s EW beliefs. However, he notes that attempting to refute the global sceptic by this means is moribund since it involves trying to establish that one’s empirical criteria is adequate by appeal to evidence that has its status as evidence based on the very empirical criteria that is being called into question. This anti-sceptical strategy involves responding to a challenge from the “outside” from “within”, like arguing that the Bible is the word of God by citing biblical passages. While effective when directed at one who already believes, it is ineffective with the sceptic.

What is supposed to be distinctive about TAs is that they attempt to avoid (GS4), not by rejecting (GS2) but by rejecting (GS1). In this regard, TAs represent a departure from the type of approach Carnap impugns. For Kant, rejecting (GS1) involved the employment of synthetic apriori truths as an alternative to collecting direct empirical evidence. Put negatively, TAs are committed to denying that the only source of justification for our EW beliefs is experience. Put positively, TAs claim that the possibility of experience itself presuppose certain thoughts or concepts which could only be had if there is an external world. It is believed that by appealing to the necessary conditions of experience, rather than to experience itself, we may gain justification for some of our beliefs about the world.

TAs typically take some fact, M, about our mental life (typically one that the sceptic herself would accept), adds that some extra-mental fact, P, as a necessary precondition for the possibility of M, and concludes (on that basis) that the extra-mental fact holds. Thus, we arrive at the following general structure for an anti-sceptical TA:

(T1): M is possible
(T2): P is a necessary precondition for the possibility of M
(T3): Therefore, P

The locus classicus of the TA strategy is Kant’s argument in “The Refutation of Idealism” where he seeks to establish that “the mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me.” (B275) Kant argues that one’s consciousness of oneself as determined in time depends on the application of the concept of alteration to one’s own mental states. But one could only acquire the concept of alteration from having objective alteration exhibited in one’s sensory experiences. Moreover, the objective alteration exhibited in one’s experience cannot be based on regularities in the experience itself since being able to recognise any such regularity requires organising one’s experience in time. Thus, the possibility of organising one’s experiences in time requires relating changes in those experiences to objective alteration. Since we do make judgements about the temporal order of own mental states, then we must have experience objective alteration.

We may reformulate Kant’s argument to fit the (T1)-(T3) format outlined above as follows:

(K1): Judgements about the temporal order of one’s own mental states are possible
(K2): Judgements about the temporal order of one’s own mental states are possible only if one has experienced independent, enduring substances undergoing alteration.
(K3): Therefore, independent enduring substances exist

Thus, Kant seeks to establish the truth of a fact about the EW, by an argument that relies on the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, rather than a direct appeal to experience itself. Moreover, Kant attempts to establish his conclusion by appeal to a starting premise (concerning our mental life) that the sceptic (i.e., the idealist) herself presupposes in formulating her objection. Thus, Kant insists that “the game that idealism plays has with greater justice been turned against it.”[B276]

Reference:

Stroud, B. [1968], “Transcendental Arguments”, The Journal of Philosophy 65, 9: 241-256.

Grice On Meaning

2008-02-29T19:34:00.003-05:00

Grice’s paper, “Meaning”, represents a significant shift from approaches to the meaning of utterances that look to the meaning of the words used to one which looks, instead, to the content of the mental or psychological states of speakers. Grice begins by drawing a distinction between two senses of ‘mean’ as it occurs in sentences of the form:

(*) x means that p.

Where x ranges over objects which have meaning and p over declarative sentences. Grice illustrates the two senses of ‘mean’, which he calls “natural” (N) and non-natural (NN), with the following two examples:

(N): Those spots mean measles

(NN): Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full.

Grice maintains that sentences like (N) are factive, while sentences like (NN) are not. For example, Grice notes that it would be contradictory to say:

(N*): Those spots mean measles, but he hasn’t got measles

This is because in the case of natural meaning, sentences which have the form ‘x means that p’ entail ‘p’. It should be noted that strictly speaking the schema ‘x means that p’ entails ‘p’ does not apply to (N*) since the left conjunct does not contain an appropriate substitution instance for ‘that p’. Thus, (N*) should be rewritten as follows:

(N**): Those spots mean that he has measles, but he doesn’t have measles

The same holds true for (N). This minor incongruity in his example aside, I take Grice’s general point regarding the factivity of natural meaning to be well placed.

By contrast, the non-natural sense of ‘mean’ is non-factive, so that the schema ‘x means that p’ does not entail ‘p’. This is easily seen when one considers that from the fact that the conductor rings the bell three times it does not follow that the bus is full. At best, it only follows that the conductor thinks that the bus is full. Generalising from the examples given above, the difference between natural meaning (henceforth ‘meaningN’) and non-natural meaning (henceforth ‘meaningNN’) is this: it is not consistent with something’s having a meaningN that what it meansN is false; but it is consistent with something’s having a meaningNN that what it meansNN is false. (Grice discusses additional differences between the two cases, but I take this to be the main one).

Grice distinguishes between natural and non-natural meaning in order to avoid confusion. However, it is the latter that he is primarily concerned with since examples of meaning that involve language (Grice’s main focus) are typically cases of meaningNN. Grice attempts to show that ultimate source of an utterance’s meaningNN is the mental content of the speaker. He attempts to do this in two steps:

(Step 1) Occasion meaning: give a definition of single utterances couched entirely in terms of the speakers’ intention to produce certain effects in their audience.

(Step 2) Timeless meaning: give a definition of expression meaning couched entirely in terms of the definition of idiolect meaning given in (Step 1).

If Grice’s overall project is successful, then we could eliminate the semantic notion of timeless expression meaningNN in favour of the psychological notion, thereby showing that it is the mental states of speakers, rather than the meaningNN of expressions, that are the ultimate source of an utterance’s meaningNN. After consider two alternative definitions, which he rejects as insufficient, Grice settles on the following definition of idiolect meaningNN:

(IM): A specific utterance φ meansNN that p, if and only if, in performing it, the utterer intends:
(a) that an audience will come to believe that p, and
(b) that this audience will recognise intention (a), and
(c) that the recognition in (b) will cause belief in (a)

The timeless meaningNN of an expression, in turn, is defined as follows:

(TM): An expression θ meansNN that p within a certain linguistic community if and only if most utterances of θ by members of that community meanNN that p.

One difficulty with the above definitions, (IM) and (TM), is that they say nothing about word meaningNN. Even if we grant that Grice is right to claim that a sentence means what it does because of regularity in the meaning of utterances using it, it is not clear that the meaning of words can also be defined in terms of such regularities. After all, we often do use words in novel combinations, and the meaning of each individual word may change slightly given where it appears in the sentence and the other words around it. Moreover, it is not clear how, give Grice’s claim that the meaning of a sentence has to do with how it is regularly used, it is not clear how I can utter a completely novel sentence, “She was erratic like a lunatic chimpanzee on a merry-go-round!”, and it still be meaningful. Of course, if we did have a theory of word meaning, we would simply need to show how the meaning of the novel sentence arises from the meaning of each of the words. However, the above objection may not be as serious as it first appears. While not explicitly a theory of word-meaning, word-meaning can be seamlessly integrated into Grice’s account of timeless meanings. On this picture, word-meaning is simply a function of how words, as opposed to sentences, are commonly used by a particular linguistic community.

Burge on Perceptual Systems and Veridicality (Part 2)

2007-11-03T11:01:00.000-04:00

In my previous post, I attributed to Burge the thesis that that the perceptual system, though a product of evolution by natural selection, has a representational function that is apriori connected to normative notion of veridicality. However, this prima facie seems like a problematic claim since natural selection is not itself concerned with normative notions, such as veridicality, and so one may wonder how our perceputal systems come to acquire such a normative concern. In this post, I will attempt to articulate one way this objection may be further unpacked.

According to Darwinian assumption, we have the particular perceptual systems that we do because they promoted the biological fitness of our ancestors. However, this seems to present a problem for Burge’s account. If we accept his insistence that a system which is unreliable may still promote biological fitness, then we seem faced with the following question: what reason do we have to think that our perceptual systems are reliable? In other words, there appears to be a mismatch between the practical mechanism (i.e., natural selection) that produced the perceptual system and the normative role the system is supposed to play. This seems to open up a lacuna between what the perceptual system has been “designed” for—namely, to promote biological fitness—and its representational function—namely, to arrive at true beliefs.

The above objection may be seen as a challenge to Burge’s claim that there is an apriori connection between the representational function of the perceptual system and verdicality. Given that these representational systems were produced by natural selection, it is plausible that they should be apriori connected to biological fitness. However, since natural selection is not apriori concerned with normative concerns, such as veridicality, it remains unclear why we should think that something natural selection has produced would be so concerned. The claim that the perceptual system may be apriori connected to veridicality presupposes that a bodily system may be apriori connected to a goal or function for which it was not “designed”. But why should we accept such an assumption?

Given Burge’s teleological framework, it would seem at least plausible that there is an apriori connection between the cardiac system and pumping blood or the respiratory system and respiration. After all, in both cases, the goals of the systems coincide perfectly with what the systems were designed for by natural selection. But since our perceptual systems were not designed by natural selection to represent veridically (given CIT), then why should we think that there is an apriori connection between the perceptual system and veridicality. Burge’s teleological framework does not seem to offer us a clear answer.

In response to the objection limned above, it may be argued that it is simply part of our concept of what it means for something to be a representational system that it aim at veridicality. But that simply pushes the present line of questioning one step back. The question now becomes, what reason do we have to think that the perceptual system is a representational system in the above (strong) sense? As we noted earlier, natural selection did not design it to be such a system. So what grounds do we have for taking it as such? Whereas before it was suggested that there is a lacuna between a system being a representational system and it aiming to represent veridically, the lacuna is now located between a system being a perceptual system and it being a representational system, in the robust sense just described.

Burge may respond by pointing out that (1) we regularly presuppose that our perceptual system is a representational system and (2) that psychologist often make this very assumption in the course of their theorising. However, it is not immediately clear why (1) or (2) should make any difference. Since we (including psychologists) did not design our own perceptual systems or those of other creatures, we hardly seem entitled to decide what type of system the perceptual system is by definitional fiat. To do so, without supporting argumentation, would be like simply stipulating that in addition to its circulatory function, the cardiovascular system fulfils some other function for which it was not designed. Such a stipulation would hardly seem warranted, even if it would allow us to fulfil particular philosophical desiderata. At the very least, the point would require substantive argumentation. But stipulation is a far cry from argumentation and it is not clear that Burge has offered any cogent argument in defence of the aforementioned proposal.

Burge on Perceptual Systems and Veridicality

2007-10-23T21:16:00.000-04:00

Often when a philosopher says that something is obviously true or true apriori, it is a good idea to pause and pay careful attention. Frequently, such claims conceal many weighty assumptions; assumptions one would do well to make explicit. In his essay “Perceptual Entitlement”, Tyler Burge takes as one of his fundamental tenets the claim that there is an apriori connection between the representational function of an organism’s perceptual system and verdicality:

I take it as obvious that it is known apriori that the central representational function of a perceptual system is to perceive. This function is apriori associated with a representational function (to represent veridically).

This, of course, does not amount to the implausible claim that an organism’s perceptual system is always successful in carrying out its representational function—i.e., that perceptual experiences are always veridical. Rather, Burge is making the highly plausible claim that it is a conceptual truth that an organism’s representational system aims at veridicality. However, as plausible as this claim is, I believe more needs to be said in its defence. In this post I will summarise Burge's views and in my next post on this topic I will present one objection to Burge's account.

The claim that representational systems aim at veridicality is central to Burge’s account, which is unapologetically teleological:

I assume that there are certain functions, ends, and commitments, which bring with them goods for animals and their subsystems….Many ends, goals, and functions can be established as such on biological grounds. I take it that survival, at least long enough to have offspring or to fulfil some other biologically basic functions, is an end for all animals—an end that can be established biologically.

I will refer to the practical and/or biological functions of a particular system, such as promoting survival and the ability to pass on one’s genes, as biological fitness. It is widely agreed that animals and their subsystems were all “designed” by natural selection. I will refer to this claim as the Darwinian assumption.

Burge points out that biological fitness is not the only type of end an organism or subsystem may have. Specifically, when it comes to the perceptual subsystems of higher animals, Burge distinguishes between the practical function of the system and its epistemic function. The former has to do with the perceptual system’s contribution to the overall goal of the organism—namely, biological fitness. However, the latter has to do with the perceptual system’s representational function—namely, to represent veridically—and the role this function plays in achieving the supreme epistemic end of forming true beliefs.

Burge impugns attempts to reduce the epistemic and representational function of the perceptual system to the practical or biological: There are those who ignore or attempt to explain away the representational functions of perceptual and belief forming systems. They see biological or practical functions as the only relevant ones. The good of belief is judged purely relative to such functions. I think such views are clearly mistaken. Burge acknowledges that there may be a “non-accidental” connection between a system’s practical and representational functions.” Typically, a system that represents the world veridically (i.e., the epistemic function) also promotes biological fitness (i.e., the practical function). However, Burge points out that “being true is not in general being useful.” Moreover, it is at least conceivable that a system that regularly gave rise to false beliefs may nevertheless promote biological fitness. Burge cites the example of rabbits, whose representation of “danger” he describes as highly unreliable “because of a dominance of false positives.” In the rabbit case, it prima facie seems as though natural selection has favoured representational systems that are unreliable.

If Burge’s assessment of the representation of danger in rabbits is correct, then we have good empirical evidence to suggest that a creature with an unreliable perceptual system may nevertheless be biologically fit. While I agree with the empirical claim, about which I will have more to say later, for the time being I wish to make a weaker claim. I wish to suggest that it is at least possible that a system may promote biological fitness even though it is not reliable (in the sense of representing veridically). In other words, even if it were to turn out that no creatures on earth were biologically fit despite being unreliable, there is certainly some possible world in which this is the case. Thus, at the very least we should be able to endorse the claim that there is no necessary connection between a system promoting biological fitness and aiming after veridicality. I will refer to this claim as the conceptual independence thesis (or CIT). Since all actualities are necessarily possibilities, but not all possibilities are necessarily actualities, CIT is significantly weaker than the position Burge himself seems to defend, the latter relying as it does on actual real-life examples. Consequently, CIT is a fortiori a claim Burge would endorse.

In my next post, I will attempt to show that CIT, when combined other claims Burge makes, presents a challenge to Burge's claim that there is an apriori connection between the representational function of an organism's perceptual system and veridicality.

A Priori Self-Knowledge: A Real Pain...In the Head?

2007-07-20T07:52:00.001-04:00

Here is a question that has recently been giving me a headache, and I'd really appreciate getting your feedback on it. One major criticism of content externalism is that it undermines a priori self-knowledge. When such critics say that self-knowledge is a priori I take them to mean that self-knowledge is independent of experience (i.e., not based on empirical observation). However, it is not clear to me that self-knowledge is essentially a priori. (This is a point that I believe has been made by Crispin Wright.) Suppose, for example, that I were suffering from a migraine. Presumably, my knowledge that I am currently suffering from a migraine is a type of self-knowledge. However, is my knowledge that I am currently suffering a migraine independent of experience? The answer seems to be ‘no’. I can only know that I am currently suffering from a migraine if I am currently experiencing the migraine. Thus, my knowledge that I am suffering from a migraine is a posteriori.

Am I missing something here? Could there be an alternative definition of a priori according to which my knowledge that I am suffering a migraine counts as a priori? Or am I mistaken in claiming that my knowledge that I am currently suffering from a migraine is a type of self-knowledge? Or perhaps I am missing the point of the critics of content externalism altogether? I should add that the issue of a priori self-knowledge is separate from the issue of infallible self-knowledge and authoritative self-knowledge, so that even if I am right, this does not mean that the content externalist is out of the woods just yet. But presently, I am only concerned with whether a priori self-knowledge is a type of self-knowledge with which the content externalist needs to be concerned.

Tips for Comps

2007-07-13T11:07:00.000-04:00

Hi folks! Hope you're all having great summers.

I took the liberty of writing up my strategy for the comps. Hopefully that (along with the guides I've been compiling) will help make them less painful for some. Please let me know if you have additional tips (or, especially, if you think I'm wrong about something)!

Probable But Still Unjustifiable

2007-05-09T09:03:00.000-04:00

I am attempting to construct an argument against the widely accepted thesis that one may justifiably believe that p based on evidence that makes p probable but which does not guarantee that p. In short, I wish to argue that any belief based on evidence that makes p probable, but with a probability less than 1, is unjustified. My argument utilises a lottery-type analysis†. Imagine a lottery composed of n tickets in which n is large enough to make the following claim putatively true, according to the standard probabilistic analysis, of some particular ticket, t1: S may justifiably believe that her ticket, t1, will lose. For example, most probability theorists would hold that in a lottery of 1,000,000 tickets in which one ticket must win but only one ticket can win, S may justifiably believe that her ticket, t1, will lose. (Of course, S does not know that her ticket will lose, but on the view I wish to impugn she may still justifiably believe that her ticket will lose. You may make n as large as necessary to motivate the relevant intuitions.)

I take it as a truism that a subject may not justifiably believe a set of inconsistent propositions which she recognises to be inconsistent. My argument will take the form of a reductio beginning with the assumption, “S may justifiably believe that her ticket, t1, will lose”, and concluding with the negation of the aforementioned truism. Assuming that the first premise is the least plausible of all the premises in my argument, then my argument should establish that my first premise ought to be rejected. I would greatly appreciate any feedback concerning the structure, validity or soundness of my argument, or questions regarding any of my assumptions or steps. My reductio runs as follows:

(1) S may justifiably believe that her ticket, t1, will lose.

(2) If S may justifiably believe that t1 will lose, then she may also justifiably believe that t2 will lose, she may justifiably believe that t3 will lose ... she may justifiably believe that ticket tn will lose.

(3) S may justifiably believe that tickets t1, t2 ... tn will lose. [from (1) and (2)]

(4) S may justifiably believe that either t1 will not lose or t2 will not lose ... or tn will not lose.

(5) Propositions of the following form comprise an inconsistent set: (a) p1, p2 ... pn, either not-p1 or not-p2 ... or not-pn.

(6) S recognises that propositions of the following form comprise an inconsistent set: (a*) t1 will lose ... tn will lose, either t1 will not lose ... or tn will not lose.

(7) S may justifiably believe a set of inconsistent propositions that she recognises to be inconsistent. [from (3), (4), (5), and (6)]

Prima facie, (1)-(7) only shows that a subject is not justified in believing something she recognises to be inconsistent. Such cases fall under the umbrella of what Jonathan Sutton has dubbed, "known unknowns"—namely, instances in which the subject is aware that she does not have the knowledge in question. But this argument seems ineffective against certain types of "unknown unknowns"—i.e., cases in which the subject does not know that she does not know. Specifically, (1)-(7) does not seem to apply to cases in which the subject fails to recognise that a certain set of her beliefs are inconsistent. In such cases (6) would fail to apply. Thus, for all that has been shown, (1) may be true in cases in which the subject does not recognise her beliefs to be inconsistent. (Moreover, once we have dispatched with the tendentious Cartesian notion of the transparency of the mental, a subject's failure to recognise such an inconsistency in her beliefs becomes a live possibility.)

At least two points should be noted in reply. For starters, we may widen the domain of known unknowns to include beliefs that a subject is in a position to know (say, via reflection alone). Since S is in a position to recognise that the propositions are inconsistent, assuming she is rationally competent, (6) still applies. Alternatively, we may simply note that the failure on S's part is a rational one, which (on even the narrowest J-internalist reading) would ex hypothesi render her belief unjustifiable. Given these considerations, the conclusion of the argument seems generalisable to all cases of belief based on evidence that renders the belief likely with a probability of <1.

† See Dana Nelkin's paper “The Lottery Paradox, Knowledge and Rationality” for a discussion of the lottery paradox regarding knowledge and justifiably held belief.

Higher Order Truths about Chmess

2007-04-23T03:05:00.000-04:00

Note: This post represents Daniel Dennett's submission to the 46th Issue of the Philosopher's Carnival.

Philosophy is an a priori discipline, like mathematics, or at least it has an a priori methodology at its core, and this fact cuts two ways. On the one hand, it excuses philosophers from spending tedious hours in the lab or the field, and from learning data-gathering techniques, statistical methods, geography, history, foreign languages. . . . ., empirical science, so they have plenty of time for honing their philosophical skills. On the other hand, as is often noted, you can make philosophy out of just about anything, and this is not always a blessing. The point of this little essay is to alert graduate students entering the field to a way in which the very freedom and abstractness of philosophy can be a weakness.

Consider, as a paradigm of a priori truths, the truths of chess. It is an empirical fact that people play chess, and there are mountains of other empirical facts about chess, about how people have been playing it for centuries, often use handsomely carved pieces on inlaid boards, and so forth. No knowledge of these empirical facts plays an indispensable role in the activity of working out the a priori truths of chess, which also exist in abundance. All you need to know are the rules of the game. There are exactly twenty legal opening moves for white (sixteen pawn moves and four knight moves); a king and lone bishop cannot achieve checkmate, and neither can a king and lone knight, and so forth. Working out these a priori truths about chess is not child’s play. Proving just what is and is not possible within the rules of chess is an intricate task, and mistakes can be made that get perpetuated. For instance, a few years ago, a computer chess program discovered a mating net–a guaranteed win–consisting of over two hundred moves without a capture. This disproved a long-standing ‘theorem’ of chess and has forced a change in the rules of the game. It used to be that fifty moves without a capture by either side constituted a draw (stalemate), but since this lengthy mating net is unbreakable, and leads to a win, it is unreasonable to maintain the fifty-move stalemate. (Before computers began playing chess, nobody imagined that there could be a guaranteed win of anywhere near this length.) All this can be pretty interesting, and many highly intelligent people have devoted their minds to investigating this system of a priori truths of chess.

Some philosophical research projects–or problematics, to speak with the more literary types–are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed–and seldom discussed–and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it–though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names. I didn’t bother investigating these questions because although they have true answers, they just aren’t worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover. And that means that if people actually did get involved in investigating the truths of chmess, they would make mistakes, which would need to be corrected, and this opens up a whole new field of a priori investigation, the higher order truths of chmess, such as the following:

1. Jones’s (1989) proof that p is a truth of chmess is flawed: he overlooks the following possibility . . . .

2. Smith’s (2002) claim that Jones’s (1989) proof is flawed presupposes the truth of Brown’s lemma (1975), which has recently been challenged by Garfinkle (2002). . . .

Now none of this is child’s play. In fact, one might be able to demonstrate considerable brilliance in the group activity of working out the higher order truths of chmess. Here is where Donald Hebb’s dictum comes in handy:

If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.

Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy whose participants would be out of work if Hebb’s dictum were ruthlessly applied, but we no doubt disagree on just which cottage industries should be shut down. Probably there is no investigation in our capacious discipline that is not believed by some school of thought to be wasted effort, brilliance squandered on taking in each other’s laundry. Voting would not yield results worth heeding, and dictatorship would be even worse, so let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. But just remember: if you let a thousand flowers bloom, count on 995 of them to wilt. The alert I want to offer you is just this: try to avoid committing your precious formative years to a research agenda with a short shelf life. Philosophical fads quickly go extinct and there may be some truth to the rule of thumb: the hotter the topic, the sooner it will burn out.

One good test to make sure you’re not just exploring the higher order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game. Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you’re right about whether Jones’s counterexample works against Smith’s principle? Another such test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don’t “get it,” you really should consider the hypothesis that you’re following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap.

Here is one way the trap works. Philosophy is to some extent an unnatural act, and the more intelligent you are, the more qualms and reservations you are likely to have about whether you get it, whether you’re “doing it right,” whether you have any talent for this discipline and even on whether the discipline is worth entering in the first place. So bright student Jones is appropriately insecure about going into philosophy. Intrigued by Professor Brown’s discussion, Jones takes a stab at it, writing a paper on hot topic H that is given an “A” by Professor Brown. “You’ve got real talent, Jones,” says Brown, and Jones has just discovered something that might make suitable life work. Jones begins to invest in learning the rules of this particular game, and playing it ferociously with the other young aspirants. “Hey, we’re good at this!” they say, egging each other on. Doubts about the enabling assumptions of the enterprise tend to be muffled or squelched “for the sake of argument.” Publications follow.

So don’t count on the validation of your fellow graduate students or your favorite professors to settle the issue. They all have a vested interest in keeping the enterprise going. It’s what they know how to do; it’s what they are good at. (This is a problem in other fields too, of course, and it can be even harder to break out of. Experimentalists who master a technique and equip an expensive lab for pursuing it often get stuck filling in the blanks of data matrices that nobody cares about any longer. What are they supposed to do? Throw away all that expensive apparatus? It can be a nasty problem.) It is actually easier and cheaper for philosophers to re-tool. After all, our “training” is not, in general, high-tech. It’s mainly a matter of learning our way around in various literatures, learning the moves that have been tried and tested. And here the trap to avoid is simply this: you see that somebody eminent has asserted something untenable or dubious in print; Professor Goofmaker’s clever but flawed piece is a sitting duck, just the right target for an eye-catching debut publication. Go for it. You weigh in, along with a dozen others, and now you must watch your step, because by the time you’ve all cited each other and responded to the responses, you’re a budding expert on How to Deal with How to Deal with Responses to Goofmaker’s minor overstatement. (And remember, too, that if Goofmaker hadn’t made his thesis a little too bold, he never would have attracted all the attention in the first place; the temptation to be provocative is not restricted to graduate students on the lookout for a splashy entrance into the field.)

Of course some people are quite content to find a congenial group of smart people with whom to share “the fun of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.” as John Austin once put it, without worrying about whether the joint task is worth doing. And if enough people do it, it eventually becomes a phenomenon in its own right, worth studying. As Burton Dreben used to say to the graduate students at Harvard, “Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship.” Some garbage is more important than other garbage, however, and it’s hard to decide which of it is worthy of scholarship. In another lecture published in the same book, Austin gave us the following snide masterpiece:

It is not unusual for an audience at a lecture to include some who prefer things to be important, and to them now, in case there are any such present, there is owed a peroration. (“Ifs and Cans,” p179).

Austin was a brilliant philosopher, but most of the very promising philosophers who orbited around him, no doubt chuckling at this remark, have vanished without a trace, their oh-so-clever work in ordinary language philosophy duly published and then utterly and deservedly ignored within a few years of publication. It has happened many times.

So what should you do? The tests I have mentioned–seeing if folks outside philosophy, or bright undergraduates, can be made to care–are only warning signs, not definitive. Certainly there have been, and will be, forbiddingly abstruse and difficult topics of philosophical investigation well worth pursuing, in spite of the fact that the uninitiated remain unimpressed. I certainly don’t want to discourage explorations that defy the ambient presumptions about what is interesting and important. On the contrary, the best bold strokes in the field will almost always be met by stony incredulity or ridicule at first, and these should not deter you. My point is just that you should not settle complacently into a seat on the bandwagon just because you have found some brilliant fellow travelers who find your work on the issue as unignorable as you find theirs. You may all be taking each other for a ride.

Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University

Tis the Season

2007-02-09T12:16:00.000-05:00

I know at least a few of you are, like me, spending most days in anticipation of any word from PhD programs. I'm of the opinion that any news, including the good-for-someone-else-but-bad-for-me, is better than no news at all, so I propose we use this space to post significant application news. I personally expect lots of rejections, so I'm not hesitant at all to share my own info if others do the same. If everyone feels the same, include the list of schools/programs you applied to in the comments below.

Another useful resource might be the Grad Cafe Forum, where people are reporting admissions decisions for grad programs of all sorts. Obviously it's not terribly complete, but it does seem like it will be of some help (for example, I see that two people have received acceptance phone calls from Chapel Hill).

"Internalising" McDowell

2007-01-29T06:05:00.000-05:00

In my post, "Selling Out" McDowell, I addressed the main methodological objection to my claim that McDowell is a J-internalist. In this post, I will attempt to address what I take to be the primary theoretical objection to this proposal.

But first, what textual evidence do I have for holding that McDowell is a J-internalist? Two of the more suggestive passages are as follows:

I agree…that we lose the point of invoking the space of reasons if we allow someone to possess a justification even if it is outside his reflective reach. [McDowell 1998b, p. 418]

And:

[O]ne’s epistemic standing on some question cannot intelligibly be constituted, even in part, by matters blankly external to how it is with one subjectively. For how could such matters be other than beyond one’s ken? And how could matters beyond one’s ken make any difference to one’s epistemic standing? ([McDowell 1998a] p. 390)

I interpret the locution ‘how it is with one subjectively’, as an umbrella term for the sorts of things that are typically taken to be internally available to one, such as one’s thoughts, beliefs etc. By McDowell’s lights the circle delineating what is subjectively available to one exhausts that which may serve as a justifier for one’s beliefs. When this idea is restated in the argot of possible worlds, we arrive at McDowellian J-internalism, (M-Int):

(M-Int) For all agents S1 and S2 and worlds W1 and W2, if S1 in W1 and S2 in W2 are identical in terms of how things are with them subjectively, then S1 and S2 are identical in all respects relevant to the justification of their beliefs.

Now the main theoretical objection to my proposal can be put as follows: McDowell could not possibly be a J-internalist since he subscribes to a type of content externalism (henceforth, C-externalism) and C-externalism entails the falsehood of J-internalism. This objection hardly seems surprising when we juxtapose the popular construal of J-internalism and C-externalism:

(J-Int) For all subjects S1 and S2 and worlds W1 and W2, if S1 in W1 and S2 in W2 are identical in the intrinsic properties on which their thoughts supervene, then S1 and S2 are identical in all respects relevant to the justification of their beliefs.

(C-Ext) There are subjects S1 and S2 and worlds W1 and W2, such that S1 in W1 and S2 in W2 have the same intrinsic properties but differ in the content of their thoughts.

There is a conflict between (J-Int) and (C-Ext) since the former requires all subjects who are identical in terms of their intrinsic properties to have the same justificatory properties, while the latter allows subjects with identical intrinsic properties to differ with regards to the justificatory properties of their beliefs. For example, consider two subjects, S1 and S2, who are identical in terms of their intrinsic properties, but occupy different external environments, W1 and W2, respectively. Suppose S1 and S2 both performed the following valid deduction:

(A) Water is a liquid.
(B) Water is potable.
(C) Therefore, water is a potable liquid.

According to (C-Ext), the thoughts expressed by sentences (A)—(C) are different for S1 and S2. This is because S1’s thoughts are individuated in terms of water while S2’s thoughts are individuated in terms of twater. The distinct pairs of thought that S1 and S2 express by (A) and (B) are relevant to the justification of the pair of beliefs they respectively express by (C). Consequently, S1 and S2 satisfy the antecedent of (J-Int), since ex hypothesi they are identical in terms of their intrinsic properties, but fail to satisfy the consequent—to wit, they differ in some respects relevant to the justification of their beliefs. Thus, if (C-Ext) is true, then (J-Int) must be false.

There is a strong temptation to assume that this line of argument also impugns (M-Int). But if we take seriously McDowell’s notion of object-dependent thought there is no obvious inconsistency between (M-Int) and (C-Ext). According to McDowell, how it is with one subjectively is in part constituted by objects in one’s environment. For instance, in the Twin Earth examples generated by (C-Ext), the object-dependent thoughts expressed by (A) and (B) in the foregoing deductive inference are different for S1 and S2. Hence, by McDowell’s lights, S1 and S2 fail to satisfy the antecedent of (M-Int) since S1 and S2 are not identical with regards to how things are with them subjectively. Thus, McDowell can, without contradiction, continue to hold to (M-Int) while subscribing to (C-Ext).

References:

McDowell, J. (1998a), ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 369-94, London: Harvard University Press.

McDowell, J. (1998), ‘Knowledge By Hearsay’, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 414-43, London: Harvard University Press.

To Gettier or Not to Gettier

2007-01-05T05:05:00.000-05:00

I recently constructed a Gettier case (described below), designed to show that Justification-reliabilism is insufficient as a reply to Gettier. (For a full discussion of the application of this Gettier case, check out my blog post 'Un-discriminating Reliabilism'.) However, some have questioned whether the Gettier case I constructed is really a Gettier case at all (see comments in aforementioned link). Specifically, one reader felt that the subject described actually does have knowledge. I would like to get other folks intuitions on this question. Do you think the following represents a genuine Gettier case:

Suppose S has strong perceptual evidence for, and comes to believe, the proposition:

(a) There is a red cube in the box on the table.

Now, it so happens that there is in fact a red cube in the box on the table, though the cube is being obscured from S’s visual field by some sort of barrier. Furthermore, the box is rigged up to a computer which projects a visual hologram of a red cube in the box. However, the computer is programmed to only project the hologram of the red cube in the box when there is a real red cube in the box. Moreover, S lacks any of this background information, and forms her belief that (a) purely on the basis of the hologram of the red cube. All of the following seem true in the above case:

(i) (a) is true

(ii) S believes (a) is true

(iii) S’s belief that (a) is justified (i.e., formed via a reliable process)

Ex hypothesi, (iii) is true since the computer is programmed to only project the hologram of a red cube when there is an actual red cube present (one may build in whatever stipulations one likes, such as that the computer is eternal and infallible in its operation etc.). Thus, S’s belief that there is a red cube in the box is reliable (and, according to justification-reliabilism, therefore justified) since the process by which the belief was formed would, given the computer’s programming, tend to produce true beliefs. However, I believe this represents a bona fide Gettier case since, though S has a justified (i.e., reliably formed) true belief, we wouldn’t say that she has knowledge.

It may also be interesting to get a non-philosopher's intuition on this question, so you may consider trying it out on a roommate or friend and letting me know what you come up with. Cheers.

are we not horses

2006-12-15T01:40:00.000-05:00

a new album by a mess of canadians going by ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL:
"a song cycle about mechanical horses programmed to think they're real horses, the implication being that their artificial minds and souls still act like real ones. AND they're caught in the middle of an epic war between good and evil."

check it.

Partial Apathy and Relativism

2006-09-08T06:05:00.000-04:00

I've started to think about moral relativism again, so I dug out the paper I wrote on the general subject last semester. There, I argued that the psychological source of some forms of relativism is a sort of partial apathy. The position seemed plausible to me when applied to relativism involving predicates of personal taste (cf. Peter Lasersohn). It may account for relativism involving vague predicates (cf. Mark Richard). Partial apathy clearly is not the motivating factor for relativism involving future contingents (cf. John MacFarlane) or epistemic modals (cf. Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson). I'm trying to determine if I think the idea can apply to moral relativism. I give more explanation of this on my blog....

The Purpose of Philosophy

2006-06-04T22:15:00.000-04:00

At the beginning of the year, Dustin (see previous post) challenged me to say what the purpose of doing philosophy is. Now that the year is over, I realize that I never answered his question.

Partly this is because, at the time, I could think of no justification. The purpose of philosophy, I said, was to make one's beliefs consistent in areas in which it's not clear what to believe. Given two sides of a philosophical problem (say, the problem of free will versus determinism), you're presented with a paradox. The paradox--at least, if you're a philosopher, or are in the right mindset--is frustrating, and you want to know what to believe. Philosophizing ensues. The question I felt unable to address at the time was: Why is this important?

It's possible that it isn't. If you never see philosophical problems as frustrating, because they are below your radar, or because you think they can be dissolved in an obvious way, it isn't important to decide what you believe about philosophical problems.

But if you do see them as problems, deciding what you believe with regard to them is important. To use an old accusation, one would be a misologist (Phaedo), a hater of rational accounts, if one refused to hear them. One could just live as if philosophical problems don't exist; but I don't think that's a good solution. Philosophy is one of the only areas in which we have all the tools to decide for ourselves about the issues in question. Some input from science (and to guide science) is useful; but the problems are conceptual, so their solutions (I propose) will be conceptual as well, and so at least in theory within the reach of all who approach the problems.

There is another reason: I think philosophical problems are important in themselves. They embody important features of our situation as humans, about the way our world is structured; about what it means to know something, or another person, to be free, whether there are any criteria for sense and nonsense at all. These are significant aspects of the lives of both philosophers and non-philosophers, and they are aspects of our lives which produce philosophical puzzlement. I cannot but think there must be some benefit from trying to get things straight with regard to them.

The Meaning of Philosophy

2005-09-11T14:53:00.000-04:00

Hi Everybody, Perhaps it's time for a not-so-frivolous post to kick off the year. I will try to answer the question, what is the Meaning of Philosophy? Difficult, yes, but if I just throw out an answer, perhaps it will get some discussion going.

So, Philosophy is "Love of Knowledge", right? Not exactly... It's "Love of Wisdom." What is the difference between Wisdom and Knowledge, one might ask? Well, Knowledge is knowing things, knowing facts, or having an accurate understanding of things as they are. Of course, there are different definitions and criteria for truth, but those don't really change the fact that we know things. The epistemic question of "how" we know is different from the question of if we have knowledge. Science, for example, is one methodology, or "how," which helps us know facts about the physical world, and which has been quite successful. These facts are not, however, intrinsically valuable. Knowledge as a whole is not intrinsically valuable. Since value is only a result of attitudes we take toward the world--our valuations--then knowledge has only the value that it has for us. Yes, we can place a value on knowing the specific location and energy of an atom in a chair on which we are sitting, but why would we? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge (truth for the sake of truth) is misguided.

What, then, is Wisdom, and how is it not misguided in the way that a drive to Knowledge for Knowledge's sake is misguided? Wisdom, it seems, is having the ability to value appropriately, which then leads us to appropriate action ("appropriate" meaning in a manner conducive to life, health, and happiness.... oh, and ignoring our fellow beings--like Bush does--results in an emotional desensitization and disturbance antithetical to these natural, human goals). Wisdom is having the ability to discern between Knowledge that is useful and knowledge that is not, or is even destructive. Knowledge, being merely a tool to be used for the fulfillment of our natural goals, is definitely one component of wisdom, but only when properly tempered and understood within the context of it's uses. We can see quite plainly, then, that the central field of philosophy, or "first philosophy" cannot be Epistemology, Logic, or Metaphysics, but must be located within experience and is, if anything, a field such as Ethics or Aesthetics, which orient our values such that Epistemology, Logic, Metaphysics, and even Science do not drift off into meaninglessness or even become destroyers of meaning. For, after all, what each of us truly wants--deep down--is a life full of value and meaning, and the happiness which accompanies such a life even in the face of deepest suffering.

Summer Vacation!

2005-07-12T12:41:00.000-04:00

We're scattered all over the country, many of us probably sunbathing, about now. The Web of Belief, therefore, declares a Summer blogging hiatus. This doesn't mean that there won't be any new posts, or that new posts aren't encouraged--simply that there aren't likely to be any. Visitors are invited to look into any of our personal blogs in the "Our Blogs" section of the sidebar, where there may be more activity, and return to The Web of Belief in the Fall.

On the edge

2005-05-10T01:46:00.000-04:00

On www.edge.org, a while ago, a very interesting question was suggested for its contributors: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Well, what do you think?

McDowell

2005-05-08T20:07:00.000-04:00

These are some thoughts on McDowell prompted by the lecture on Friday at MIT. They represent at attempt to bring together an understanding of that talk with the other things of his I've read--Mind & World and a handful of essays.
The McDowell talk at MIT on Friday was very interesting. Several of my questions were asked, and his responses were often those I hoped or expected him to give. Not that the talk entirely made sense. The first part was about modest & immodest transcendental arguments, and he claimed to be offering a transcendental argument that was neither. I still don't understand how, though. The main point seemed to be that the skeptic can accept that our experience is either veridical or it isn't: that, for any particular perception, we're either hallucinating, or we're not. (That's the "disjunctivism.") But 1) I don't think the sort of perceptual experience we make claims about is exhausted by that disjunction, and 2) I certainly don't think experience is exhausted by that disjunction. This is the difficulty with Mind & World: he makes it sound as if we're always in the business of making claims about the world that we must justify. And this goes against the Wittgensteinian insight (and to some extent the parallel Austinian insight) that we only need to justify our claims when a question--an ordinary question--of justification arises; and that we only make claims at all for certain purposes and in certain circumstances.

Anyway, it isn't clear what the point of the disjunction is. Unless we say that it doesn't matter which side of it you're on. And that would be similar to what McDowell says (seems to say) in "Values & Secondary Qualities": that, with regard to perception, there is, on one level, no question about whether what I'm perceiving is real or not. After all, I'm really perceiving it. Ultimately, what I would want to accomplish, were I McDowell, would be a "softening" of the facts demanded by the skeptic when he or she demands that we justify our perceptual claims. The degree of softening necessary would depend on the situation: certain sorts of facts are not rightly demanded in certain situations. And one way to accomplish this softening would be to make it clear that we only need to justify a perceptual claim when there's some real question about it's rightness.

Towards the end of the talk, McDowell seemed to be championing ordinary methods of justification (I can "tell a zebra when I see one")...but it wasn't clear whether he meant to challenge the "internal" skeptic (whose skepticism arises and is settled within ordinary notions of justification) or the "external" or "global" skeptic (whose skeptical questions about justification know no bounds). He talked mainly as if he was addressing the "external" skeptic. This, at least, is the way it sounded given his disjunction. The disjunction, "Either I'm seeing a red cube, or I'm having an experience as-of seeing a red cube" assumes that it's responding to an "external" skeptic. (When else would such a statement suggest itself to us?) I think he intends this rather unnatural disjunction to respond to the "external" skeptic by saying that it's only because we have experiences we're willing to call "(veridically) seeing a red cube" that can we make sense of the possibility of "hallucinating a red cube." The response gestures towards particular contexts without actually describing them.

Perhaps that's what produced the impression in me that the upshot of what he was saying was rather like Austin. Granted, Austin (say, in "Other Minds") does describe in more detail ordinary ways of justifying knowledge claims. But to hold those up against the question of the "external" skeptic leaves "external" skepticism unscathed. It's like saying "it's because of this (what we call "telling a zebra") that you can ask your skeptical question." Ordinary methods of justification are a precondition for extraordinary ones. But that doesn't mean the extraordinary questions are always (should always be) in play.

This is a concern for me because, in McDowell's essays on rule-following, he supports the Wittgensteinian line that justifications come to an end--that at some point we reach "bedrock" in a given activity. His criticism of the anti-realist about meaning (Crispin Wright) is that he looks for "bedrock" "lower than it is" in demanding that we characterize our--for lack of better term I'll say "semantic"--agreement in terms that don't demand an insider's view of the language. This criticism seems right to me, albeit overly general. It's this over-generality--also present in the way he addresses the skeptic in the talk on Friday--that I'm trying to put my finger on.

Why is suicide avoidance a perfect duty?

2005-04-25T18:11:00.000-04:00

I've been grading undergraduate papers on Kant and euthanasia for the last few days, and in making comments, I've come to realize that there's something that I don't get about Kant's argument for the immorality of suicide. I'm far from a Kant scholar, so I might just be misunderstanding Kant's view. (Luckily, my concern hasn't gotten in the way of my grading at all.)

In the Groundwork, Kant argues that suicide is immoral because it rests on the following maxim, which cannot be universalized without contradiction: "From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction."

Something that genuinely loves itself, Kant tells us, cannot desire its own destruction; thus, the maxim results in contradiction. Now, I think it's debatable whether something that loves itself cannot desire its own destruction, but that's not the issue I want to raise. Kant says that suicide avoidance is a perfect duty, which would mean that this maxim results in a contradiction in conception. I think it looks more like a contradiction in the will, which would render suicide avoidance an imperfect duty.

I can see why the contradiction looks like a contradiction in conception. One cannot attempt to kill oneself if one is acting out of desire to preserve oneself. There is a clear contradiction there. But what makes this issue tricky is that it looks like someone who acts out of self-love could not will their own death. Isn't Kant's prohibition on suicide from self-love a case of an imperfect duty then? One can imagine the consequence of everyone killing themselves. That's not inherently contradictory. The problem stems from the willing.

One might try to make the following counterargument: imperfect duties are those that generate fully consistent perverted worlds when their maxims are universalized, but that have maxims that cannot be willed because the perverted world results in one's ends not being met. In other words, imperfect duties come about when there's a breach in a hypothetical imperative. The contradiction in the self-love maxim does not necessarily come about from a person's ends not being satisfied. But I think this is wrong. Self-love, Kant tells us, impels the improvement of life. It looks like the contradiction occurs because death ceases all improvement in life, thus one's ends are not being met.

Moreover, if we don't interpret "from self-love" as making a claim about hypothetical ends, then the maxim Kant offers does not correspond to the traditional "In situation X, I will do Y in order to achieve Z" template. Normally, if a maxim is contradictory simply in virtue of the "in situation X, I will do Y" portion (as maxims condoning lying or promise-breaking are), then it forms a perfect duty. If this is not the case, but the maxim becomes contradictory when Z is taken into account (in other words, the perverted world is consistent but does not achieve the ends of the hypothetical imperative), then the maxim forms the basis of an imperfect duty. "From self-love" seems to fit squarely into variable slot Z. If we insist that it does not but that it still generates the contradiction, then we give up on the standard maxim template, and we have to tell some sort of story about what sort of work "from self-love" is doing and why it's permissible to include in our maxim.

There is one other unique aspect of this maxim that may be relevant. It results in contradiction whether universalized or not. However, I don't know if this influences the perfection or imperfection of our duty, nor do I know why it should.

Cleanliness

2005-04-23T03:05:00.001-04:00

This page now supports expanded entries, thanks to Richard and No Fancy Name. This means you can hide portions of your posts behind a link. This allows more posts to appear on the front page. All you have to do is type a special tag at the beginning and end of the lengthy part of your post. The tags are in the penultimate box (a blue one) on the No Fancy Name page.

Also, commenting is no longer restricted to blog members.

2 suggested paths from mechanism to consciousness

2005-04-23T01:37:00.000-04:00

Irrationality is a necessary (and perhaps sufficient) condition for consciousness?? Think about it this way. You have a system like Drescher's which compiles statistics to direct its actions in a "world." For consciousness, the most important aspect of such a system is that which

"is defined not so much by its particular set of primitives as by its ways of combining structures to form larger ones, and by its means of abstraction -- its means of forming new units of representation that allows the details of their implementation to be ignored." (Drescher, Made Up Minds, p10)

As I read it, what this means is we get a system which combines its primitive processes into higher-level ones so that you get a "commanding" program with any number of functions, or sub-routines. For non-programmers, this means you could have the lower level processes carrying out the detailed statistical analyses to determine actions, while the so-called commanding program is "unaware" of of those activities. All it needs to operate is a "Yes" or "No" from the sub-routine based on its detailed statistical analysis.

What you end up with is a system, if it is indeed ignoring the primitive functions, that is unaware of its own internal processes and how its actions are determined. If it receives a command, say, to stack 3 blocks that are in its world, the primitive statistical processes are going to run in order to determine the locations of said blocks and make the parts move to execute the command. The higher order process of the system, though, undergoes only the "experience" of receiving the command, finding the blocks, and doing it. If you could ask what it is doing, it would say it was following the order, not that it was carrying out statistical analysis. I believe this is the first step towards conscious machines. There is nothing it is like to be a mechanism which merely compiles statistics and uses it to push buttons on and off. And maybe there is nothing it is like to be a higher-level program which "sees" only the results of such compiling and uses the "Yes" or "No" to push other buttons on and off. But maybe there is something it is like to be a higher-higher-higher ... -level program which pulls vast amounts of different types of input together in one orderly mechanism and is ignorant of the extraordinarily complex underworkings.

Why could this be true? Because it could be true that we are such systems. The complex set of processes that go into pouring myself a bowl of cereal feels simpler by orders of magnitude.

Women in Philosophy

2005-04-19T17:20:00.000-04:00

To continue with the "topical" posts:

Some of us on occasion remark on the differences in tone of philosophical exchanges between men and those between women. I confess that I sometimes fail to see what's going on in exchanges between men, and I'm sure the reverse happens, as well. And I often find myself blaming gender for frustrations with philosophical discourse. Yet I also tend to think that gender is not what I ought to be blaming--if I ought to be blaming anything at all--, but something like cognitive styles, which vary along lines that correlate with, without being equivalent to, those of gender. Whether gender itself is a social construction or contains natural kinds is not terribly interesting to me; I would prefer to avoid positing anything external as far as possible. It may, of course, turn out that there is no other option if we want to make progress with respect to specific gender issues; but since I'm concerned with philosophy, and philosophy consists of conversation and thinking, I'm under the illusion that certain differences that fall within that domain don't need to be blamed but owned up to.

Earlier this semester, wondering if others had wondered about differences in philosophical method that tend to correllate strongly (but not exclusively) with gender lines, I found this post at Sappho's Breathing, which suggests that philosophical subfields are "gendered." Hence the title, "Real Men Do Metaphysics." It's a suggestive post, but the correlations don't match up with my experience. What might match up with my experience is a difference in method, regardless of subject matter.

What I mean by "method" must be combination of things, temperamental and cognitive. It's not clear where to draw the line between the two, or which can be rightly given "external" explanations and which cannot. For instance, women talking philosophy tend to be less careful of each other's pride; the interaction tends to be less tense, whereas men often tend towards combativeness. This difference is hard to internalize; it's difficult to think of it as anything more than "beyond one's control."

But combativeness often goes hand in hand with analytic method. Previously, I have referred to this as the "hunt-and-kill" method of philosophy and contrasted it with (what else?) the "gathering" method. Clearly, analytic thinking cannot be dispensed with in analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, I confess to having a preference for getting all the details onto the table before one starts analyzing things; and I prefer that analysis make the problem messier, not cleaner. To what extent these preferences are "gender-based" I don't know. But they are preferences that seem to be more "within one's control" than broader temperamental differences.

About the analytic approach combined with combativeness, Cleis had this to say: "I'm concerned that a primarily adversarial approach to philosophical argument alienates many smart women, who then turn their attention to other fields of study. That is philosophy's loss. I'm also concerned that philosophical talent is recognized most often when it's delivered in an aggressive package" , "The Brights and the adversary method" (no, one has nothing to do with the other).

The broad question I want to ask is, To what degree can the differences between the ways women and men approach to philosophy be ascribed to gender? Will the line be drawn at differences in aggressiveness and social hierarchy issues, or will cognitive differences also come into play? And if cognitive differences do come into play, should we think of them as gender differences? My worry regarding the last issue is that, as intellectuals with responsibilities to understand and make ourselves intelligible to others, there may be very good reasons why we shouldn't blame cognitive differences on (or for) anything.

It's possible, too, that my division of gender differences in philosophy into those that are "beyond one's control" and those that are "within one's control" is just an attempt to knock against the former with the latter, which may or may not be helpful.