DuckRabbit

Hear, hear

2011-12-04T20:25:00.002-05:00

Brian Leiter likes to pour scorn on the NY Times's philosophy blog The Stone (he really doesn't like Simon Critchley), but this post by Alva Noë is absolutely spot on. I can hardly decide which choice bits to put here in order to incite you to go over there and, as they say, read the whole thing. Let's try this one, which sounds very much like what I always say when this issue comes up (so naturally I like it):

The idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted. You are your brain. Francis Crick once called this “the astonishing hypothesis,” because, as he claimed, it is so remote from the way most people alive today think about themselves. But what is really astonishing about this supposedly astonishing hypothesis is how astonishing it is not! The idea that there is a thing inside us that thinks and feels — and that we are that thing — is an old one. Descartes thought that the thinking thing inside had to be immaterial; he couldn’t conceive how flesh could perform the job. Scientists today suppose that it is the brain that is the thing inside us that thinks and feels. But the basic idea is the same. And this is not an idle point. However surprising it may seem, the fact is we don’t actually have a better understanding how the brain might produce consciousness than Descartes did of how the immaterial soul would accomplish this feat; after all, at the present time we lack even the rudimentary outlines of a neural theory of consciousness.

What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.

We need finally to break with the dogma that you are something inside of you — whether we think of this as the brain or an immaterial soul — and we need finally take seriously the possibility that the conscious mind is achieved by persons and other animals thanks to their dynamic exchange with the world around them (a dynamic exchange that no doubt depends on the brain, among other things). Importantly, to break with the Cartesian dogmas of contemporary neuroscience would not be to cave in and give up on a commitment to understanding ourselves as natural. It would be rather to rethink what a biologically adequate conception of our nature would be.

Well, that would be "what I always say" if I were better at saying it than I actually am. You go, Professor Noë! Woo hoo! There's more, too, so ... you know what to do.

Wait, what about pumpernickel?

2011-11-09T20:20:00.002-05:00

I have just discovered that on February 16, 1962, one C. M. Mullen of G. & C. Merriam Company wrote a letter to my maternal grandfather, informing him that:

We are glad to reply to your letter of February 12 in regard to the word bagel. This word has been entered in the Addenda Section of Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, for the last few years. It is now entered in its regular alphabetical place in our recently published Webster's Third New International Dictionary, the definition reading as follows:
a hard roll shaped like a doughnut that is made of raised dough and cooked by simmering in water and than baked to give it a glazed browned exterior over a firm white interior

Okay then. Carry on.

Click click

2011-09-19T22:13:00.001-04:00

I clicked over today to an interview with Brian Leiter in a post on The Browser today, and in the "Related Articles" sidebar there I noticed a link to my own recent 3QD post on Nietzsche's perspectivism (here), where it is described as "thought-provoking." How about that. You may also reach that same post by going over to the latest Philosophers' Carnival at Minds and Brains. Whichever way you get there is fine with me. (That is, there's no one single, correct way ... never mind.)

In other news, my post on Kant squeaked into the final round of 3QD's 2011 philosophy competition as a wild card (like the Red Sox will if they don't choke). So Patricia Churchland will become acquainted with my views on Kant. I repeat: how about that.

3QD philosophy prize

2011-09-09T00:22:00.002-04:00

The voting round of the 3 Quarks Daily philosophy prize for 2011 is now open. I've got a post there, but don't just go there and vote for it! Take a look at the others too. (Then vote for it.) Deadline: Sunday night.

Bored with the Beguine?

2011-08-24T23:17:00.004-04:00

I don't usually post things like this, but I want to get back into the habit of posting, and you must admit I have been pretty restrained with the "I watered my plants today" sort of blogging. However, I feel obliged to report that for the past few days the Roxy Music song "Do the Strand" has taken up residence in my skull and will not leave for greener pastures no matter what. Even now I hear therein the voice of Bryan Ferry, the thinking man's Freddie Mercury (did someone already say that, or did I just make it up?). I have no idea why this is, as I have not heard that song in, well, years probably. Such is life.

Epistemic luck (intro)

2011-06-30T22:18:00.003-04:00

When I was about 10 years old, I had a philosophical discussion – or disagreement anyway, as we did not get very much farther than simply stating our positions (and then again, more firmly) – concerning the definition of knowledge. My interlocutor claimed that he could know that 2 + 2 = 5, even though that statement is false. I replied, that no, you can't know something unless it's true. You may believe that 2 + 2 = 5, but that's not enough: you can't know it (even though, in stating your belief, that may indeed be what you'll say), because knowledge must be true.

Contemporary philosophical consensus on the subject comes down on the side of my youthful self: knowledge must be belief which is true (so there, D___ O_____!). However, it is also generally accepted that a third condition is also required. And by "generally accepted" I mean "virtually universally simply assumed, on page 3 of just about every Epistemology 101 textbook, where no dissent is ever even imagined, let alone conceded actually to exist, let alone taken seriously." And yet not only are there more than one of us dissenters (for so I am), but we do so in various ways for various reasons. Analytic epistemology can be as dreary a subject as there is in philosophy, but as it turns out this is really, really important to get clear on, for reasons I hope to make clear as we continue.

The proximate stimulus for this current effort was a post (now two actually) on the New York Times's online philosophy blog The Stone. Distinguished Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting there deigns to enlighten the great unwashed about the importance of justifying one's beliefs, as opposed, apparently, to believing any old tosh that enters one's head:

Apart from its entertainment value, Harold Camping’s ill-advised prediction of the rapture last month attracted me as a philosopher for its epistemological interest. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, its nature, scope and limits. Camping claimed to know, with certainty and precision, that on May 21, 2011, a series of huge earthquakes would devastate the Earth and be followed by the taking up (rapture) of the saved into heaven. No sensible person could have thought that he knew this. Knowledge requires justification; that is, some rationally persuasive account of why we know what we claim to know. Camping’s confused efforts at Biblical interpretation provided no justification for his prediction. Even if, by some astonishing fluke, he had turned out to be right, he still would not have known the rapture was coming. [my bold]

True belief, in other words, is not enough for knowledge: we need justified true belief (JTB).

I can already feel my eyelids drooping, so let me say this just the once and I'll be done with it. Since my dissertation (which went into it at some length, to little avail) I have resisted writing about this stuff, because to do so requires what seems to be the sort of academic nitpicking and intuition-mongering that makes so much contemporary philosophy look pointless and arcane. But if we get this right the payoff could be immense (for some of us at least, and part of my point is that you may not yet know who you are), so I hope I can count on the reader's patience as we wade together through the bog.

A relative newcomer to the current epistemological scene, Duncan Pritchard already has a zillion papers (available on his website) and an important book on the subject. As he explains on p. 4 of Epistemic Luck, the idea that true belief does not suffice for knowledge is very widely held indeed, to the point of invisibility:

[A]s befitting its status as a universal intuition—what these days we philosophers tendentiously call a 'platitude'—one finds this thesis both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. That is, whilst this line of thinking is clearly being presupposed in much of contemporary epistemological thought, the thesis itself is rarely drawn up to the surface of discussion, and even then it is left to stand as it is: a pure platitudinous intuition that is in need of no further explication.

As an example Pritchard points us to the SEP article on knowledge by Matthias Steup, who faithfully reflects the consensus of the discipline with only a gesture in the direction of argument:

Why is condition (iii) [i.e., the justification condition on knowledge] necessary? Why not say that knowledge is true belief? The standard answer is that to identify knowledge with true belief would be implausible because a belief that is true just because of luck does not qualify as knowledge. Beliefs that are lacking justification are false more often than not. However, on occasion, such beliefs happen to be true. Suppose William takes a medication that has the following side effect: it causes him to be overcome with irrational fears. One of his fears is that he has cancer. This fear is so powerful that he starts believing it. Suppose further that, by sheer coincidence, he does have cancer. So his belief is true. Clearly, though, his belief does not amount to knowledge. But why not? Most epistemologists would agree that William does not know because his belief's truth is due to luck (bad luck, in this case). Let us refer to a belief's turning out to be true because of mere luck as epistemic luck. It is uncontroversial that knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck. [again, my bold]

Steup continues, naturally enough, given the purpose of mentioning it at all, to discuss the effectiveness of the justification condition for its purpose, that of ruling out lucky guesses ("mere" true beliefs) as cases of knowledge, which leads to the next section of the Gettier problem.

Now Steup does seem to give an argument here, with his cancer example. But when we look at it we see that there is no argument at all. Even though for some unknown reason only "most epistemologists" would agree here (who dissents and why need not concern us here, as we are busy men), our platitude is "clearly" true, and, again, "uncontroversial" for no actually stated reason. I should add that given the actual state of the discussion at this point Steup is entirely justified [!] in telling the story this way for this audience. No reason stretching out an already long SEP article with tracking down every last objection and quashing it.

Okay, let me just close for today with this last quote. Even after a couple of objections to his JTB account in the comments, which we will discuss later on, Gutting came back in his most recent piece with this:

Plato long ago pointed out [aside: I love that rhetorical tic! If he pointed it out, it must be true – so I need not argue for it, right?] that it is not enough just to believe what is true. Suppose [oh good, another example] I believe that there are an odd number of galaxies in the universe and in fact there are. Still, unless I have adequate support for this belief, I cannot be said to know it. It's just an unsupported opinion. Knowing the truth requires not just true belief but also justification for the belief.

Again, no argument at all, just an example. It's just obvious!

All right, so I've established that the consensus view is the consensus view. Next time I'll start distinguishing the various ways one might object to this "universal consensus."

The past is never dead; it's not even past

2011-02-09T17:54:00.003-05:00

I recently had occasion to dine at an establishment with which most people are at least familiar, as it is a fairly large chain. I speak of Applebee's. The food was fine; I am not a connoisseur of steak, but the Asiago Peppercorn [sirloin] steak was very tasty, and small enough to be a) eaten whole at one sitting, and b) probably accurately placed on the 550 Calories menu (served with veggies).

However, it is not the food that made the experience so memorable. It was earlier in the evening (around 6 PM) than most suburbanites dine, so the place was relatively empty, but even so (or perhaps because of this) the music was fairly loud. I went to high school in the 1970s, and as far as this restaurant was concerned, it seems that we have never left. Here, to the best of my memory, is the soundtrack to the meal for your imaginative perusal.

We arrived during Jimmy Page's extended guitar break in Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker", which continued, as is the custom, into "Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)", the next track on Led Zeppelin II. I am leaving a track or two out, including a blues song which might have been Muddy Waters and an album rock track (clearly from that same era) which I did not recognize, but the time matches up about right so this must be about it. Continuing after Zeppelin:

J. Geils Band - Love Stinks
Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon
Heart - Barracuda
Queen - Somebody to Love
Bob Seger - Hollywood Nights
ZZ Top - Gimme All Your Lovin' [hey, this one's from 1983!]
Tom Petty - The Waiting [1981]
The Cars - Bye Bye Love
The Beatles - Something
The Eagles - Hotel California [we left during Joe Walsh's guitar solo, which I even paused at the door to listen to]

While I never listen to this stuff voluntarily (although I do own Eliminator, from which I would have played "Got Me Under Pressure" or "I Need You Tonight"), I enjoyed this set perfectly well (except for Bob Seger, whom I can do without). In a weird time-capsule sort of way. And "Bye Bye Love" has been running through my head constantly since then. Still, I'm not going back there, Asiago Peppercorn steak or no.

Let's not read too much into this

2011-02-08T22:20:00.002-05:00

Abbas just sent me this picture:

The title of his email was "Duckrabbit!", but when I looked at it, all I saw was a duck. I mean, it's a duck – it's got wings, it's swimming in water, the whole duck bit. But then I looked more closely at the head, trying to see it as the rabbit-looking-the-other-way which is the other aspect of the famously ambiguous drawing. I succeeded; but it turned out to be a particularly unpleasant instance of aspect-dawning, as that perception was accompanied by a sickening wave of, let's say, Unheimlichkeit, as perhaps expressed in the utterance "Yikes, that is one seriously deformed rabbit" (what with the wings and all).

Then I looked at it a third time, and I noticed that indeed, it was picture of a duck onto which a rabbit head had been Photoshopped. (No doubt those who are more familiar with these creatures would have noticed that right away, but I rarely see either in the, um, flesh.) Now, having noticed the rabbit head as a rabbit head when looking to see the image as a rabbit, I now see the duck as well (and can hardly believe I failed to do so earlier) only as a seriously effed up specimen of its kind – I mean, look at that soft furry beak!

So, a clever trick; but (to be way too literal about it) I think we lose something in the translation to photography. The duck part is clearly a duck and only a duck; and the rabbit part (once you see it!) is clearly a rabbit and not a duck. So in a way it's really not an ambiguous figure at all, just an impossible one – where the point of the duck-rabbit figure is that it really is a picture-duck, just as much as any other, and a picture-rabbit as well ... but not at the same time. And off to the philosophical races we go.

Baby steps

2011-02-01T16:50:00.005-05:00

Okay, I said I was going to start 'er up again, but not surprisingly that is easier written than done. So let's start out small. I direct your attention to the Amazon widget, which I have restocked with more timely items than were in it previously. I'm up to page 587 or so of Anna Karenina, which means that after reading it for six weeks I am about a third of the way through. Right now (in Part Three) Anna's sister-in-law Darya Alexandrovna Oblonsky (aka Dolly) is talking with Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, a rejected suitor for the hand of Dolly's sister Kitty, at Dolly's summer house. I expect we'll get back to Anna within the next hundred pages or so. (I should mention that the direct link to Amazon provided by the widget is to an edition of the book different from that indicated by the icon, so beware.)

I've already finished the other fictional work, The Half-Made World, which was pretty good but falls short of unconditional recommendation. It was recommended by a couple of people on a thread at Crooked Timber, where I have found they know their stuff, esp. when said stuff is science fiction-y; this book is an example of the subgenre known as "steampunk," if you know what that is. Without going into detail, I really like the set-up here, and the characters are great. I wasn't sure about the ending though, as it remains unclear whether the author is setting up a sequel or just allowing us to imagine for ourselves what happened next. Good stuff.

I've just started the Garry Hagberg book, which looks really good, if a bit intimidating in its thoroughness. The Cartesian subject/object dualism, which still pervades philosophy even after all this time, has two main aspects (duh). I say (duh), but in practice it seems very difficult to see them as related at all, let alone different aspects of the same thing. The Cartesian conception of objectivity is most directly manifested in doctrines of "metaphysical realism" in Putnam's sense (when arguing against it, that is, not when, Kerry-like, he was for it before he was against it). In such contexts we fight against it by trying to show how the Cartesian picture, in its seductive urging that we simply identify it with prephilosophical common sense ("of course there's a real world out there!"), forces incoherence upon us. I guess that's what we do in the other context too (where the bait is instead "of course my mental states are 'inner'!"), but the details end up making the two cases very different in practice. Anyway, in these former contexts we tend to spend all our time arguing about the possible senses in which the world is "real" or "independent" or "objective," and the Cartesian subject figures simply as the supposedly detached observer of the objective world however construed.

However, we can't arrive at a stable position no matter what we say about objectivity, unless we also deal with the Cartesian subject itself (qua Cartesian). Here our target is the Cartesian "inner," as manifested for example in Nagelian qualephilia or more overtly dualistic doctrines in the philosophy of mind (Chalmers, G. Strawson, etc.). But of course in this case the main charge against "dualism" has been led by materialists and other naturalists concerned to make the world safe for empirical science (here, brain science and other sorts of empirical psychology, including but not limited to evolutionary psychology). So what we end up with is a lot of straightforward reductionism/eliminativism and its more discreet heirs, all concerned to emphasize (properly enough as far as it goes) the publicity and non-spookiness of "subjective" phenomena like mental states. However, in its often overt scientism this line tends to leave in place, or at the very least not replace, the very conception of objectivity which is the subjective correlate of their target. This leaves them open to counterattack, although rarely in those very terms.

In any case these two anti-Cartesian projects have not really been brought into line with each other in a satisfactory way. Rorty and to a lesser extent Dennett (in his case you have to dig it out as he is not exactly forthcoming on the matter) have been onto this, but each takes some pretty important missteps by my lights. Davidson and Wittgenstein are more promising guides, even though – or possibly because – neither makes a big deal out of marrying the one criticism to the other, instead simply pursuing a more unified project from the beginning, and only subsequently allowing us to take this or that aspect of it for this or that purpose. (Or maybe we're just slow.)

Hagberg sees himself as promoting a Wittgensteinian view of subjectivity, as manifested in discussions of autobiographical writing, the philosophy of same, autobiography as philosophy, etc. – where the very overlapping of these topics is meant to bring out the Wittgensteinian nature of each, which seems promising. I read an earlier book, Art as Language, in which he argues, along Wittgensteinian lines, that art is not a language, making one wonder if perhaps another title would have been better. This new one, Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness, looks to be written in the same style. I shouldn't complain (especially as I can do no better myself), but I have to say that this style – very, very carefully setting out the position and arguing very, very, carefully for its truth, or at least provisional plausibility, very, very carefully anticipating and defusing every. possible. objection. – makes me crazy. In some cases this is just what we want, but in Wittgensteinian contexts it really seems like one risks getting the words Just Right at the expense of messing the tune up big time. Alice Crary and Oskari Kuusela do it too, which is why I started their books with real anticipation but bogged down, like, right away. Like I said, though, I've just started the book so maybe I'm wrong.

One person who can't be said to do this is Cavell (but of course there are corresponding dangers to this approach too, as anyone who has tried to wade through Stephen Mulhall's books can tell you). His latest, which looks wild but which I have not yet begun, seems to be autobiographical, but only deals with the last few years, and only a particular line of thought/events within that time. I'll say more when and if I get to it (or not).

Lastly we have another book on Wittgenstein, on a topic very close to this blog's heart: aspect perception (and indeed there the d/r is right on the cover, along with the kid from Jarman's Wittgenstein, which I just saw the other day). It's a collection, and one of the editors, William Day, was a very advanced grad student in my program when I was there. This meant of course that I rarely saw him, and in fact I didn't even meet him until several years in, at a conference. Nicest guy you'll ever meet, and very impressive – as articulate on these matters as your humble blogger is stammeringly incoherent. So I very much look forward to reading this.

A note from the management

2011-01-03T13:30:00.002-05:00

My goodness, I haven't been around since July?! Okay, right. Let me do a little dusting, and then let's see if we can't start the engine up.

Too true, alas

2010-07-17T11:51:00.002-04:00

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Not the best model for philosophical writing, to be sure, although I do like him; and he was a philosophy major himself. But there it is.

HT: it's all over the place by now

In lieu of a widget

2010-03-25T22:55:00.003-04:00

... let me just say that I have decided to post some of my ambient mixes on a new streaming audio site, Mixcloud (link). I had held back because some such podcasting seems kind of shady and/or downright illegal. But this site assures us (in the FAQ) that all is taken care of and the artists will be paid. In that case, if ambient/drone is your thing, then go to it! While you're there, check out this guy and this guy.

Our hero contemplates the prospect of attaining the sublime and funky love that he craves

2009-12-04T00:09:00.004-05:00

Michael Bérubé in a pensive moment.

Why Davidson is not Humpty Dumpty

2009-09-05T21:45:00.003-04:00

I promised in the comments to the other post to say something about Davidson's argument in "Nice Derangement," which is of course the Ursprung of all this talk about rejecting the idea of "linguistic norms." (In the context of that discussion everybody is clear on this, except possibly me, but let me just tie up that loose end.) Unlike Bilgrami, Davidson does not direct his argument against Kripke and Burge in particular (and McDowell's somewhat differently focused criticism of same). Instead Davidson simply argues that we should not base our conception of language use, and thus of meaning, on the concept of convention, i.e., as manifested in linguistic rules which pre-exist and thereby determine the meanings of particular utterances on particular occasions, as if they were, in Davidson's dismissive terms, "portable interpreting machines."

Instead, the fundamental idea is that language is used above all to communicate (i.e. rather than to denote or represent, which it does in only a derivative manner). Similar ideas are already present in Davidson (q.v. "Reality Without Reference," and "Communication and Convention," in Inquiries), but here he spells out the implications more provocatively. Indeed, in asserting a primary role for the intentions of the speaker in determining meaning, he provokes suspicions of "internalism" and downright semantic nihilism.

The specific thesis he rejects is that "[t]he systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character." Okay, that's pretty much what I said above. But later on, he elaborates: "[i]n principle communication does not demand that any two people speak the same language. What must be shared is the interpreter's and the speaker's understanding of the speaker's words." [438] Now there are some constraints on this sharing, some of which involve what can count as a possible communicative intention of the speaker in the given situation (here leaning on Grice's analysis of same); and it is these constraints which separate Davidson's account from nihilism and/or internalism.

Here Davidson points to Keith Donellan's previous (albeit somewhat differently focused – Davidson explains but I will skip that part) discussion of similar matters. Alfred MacKay had accused Donellan of Humpty Dumptyism ("When *I* use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean"), and in reply, Donellan "explains that intentions are connected with explanations and that you cannot intend to accomplish something by a certain means unless you believe or expect that the means will, or at least could, lead to the desired outcome. A speaker cannot, therefore, intend to mean something by what he says unless he believes his audience will interpret his words as he intends (the Gricean circle)." As quoted by Davidson, Donellan says:

If I were to end this reply to MacKay with the sentence 'There's glory for you' I would be guilty of arrogance and, no doubt, of overestimating the strength of what I have said, but given the background I do not think I could be accused of saying something unintelligible. I would be understood, and would I not have meant by 'glory' 'a nice knockdown argument'?

Davidson approves of this reply (and then explains a disagreement I have here elided). Okay, let me just quote the money paragraphs and then I'll stop.

Humpty Dumpty is out of it. He cannot mean what he says because he knows that 'There's glory for you' cannot be interpreted by Alice as meaning 'There's a nice knockdown argument for you.' We know he knows this because Alice says 'I don't know what you mean by "glory"', and Humpty Dumpty retorts, 'Of course you don't – til I tell you.' It is Mrs Malaprop and Donellan who interest me; Mrs Malaprop because she gets away with it without even trying or knowing, and Donellan because he gets away with it on purpose.

Here is what I mean by 'getting away with it': the interpreter comes to the occasion of utterance armed with a theory that tells him (or so he believes) what an arbitrary utterance of the speaker means. The speaker then says something with the intention that it will be interpreted in a certain way, and the expectation that it will be so interpreted. In fact this way is not provided for by the interpreter's theory. But the speaker is nevertheless understood; the interpreter adjusts his theory so that it yields the speaker's intended interpretation. The speaker has 'gotten away with it.' The speaker may or may not (Donellan, Mrs Malaprop) know that he has got away with anything; the interpreter may or may not know that the speaker intended to get away with anything. What is common to the cases is that the speaker expects to be, and is, interpreted as the speaker intended although the interpreter did not have a correct theory in advance. [440]

One more thing. I think that what this means is that when Wittgenstein asks us to consider whether I can say "bububu" and mean "if it does not rain I will go for a walk," the answer is yes, I can; but only after what he elsewhere calls "stagesetting." Before that, not so much (and certainly not by a Humpty Dumpty-like act of, say, inner ostention).

Bilgrami's critique of the Platonistic urge (or: why reject the very idea of semantic normativity?)

2009-09-03T22:41:00.003-04:00

The previous post was a bit of a bear, wasn't it. (By the way, if you liked it, you may vote for it here - once they work out the bugs, that is.) Let's back up a bit, and see if we can't get clearer on the various players. The dialectic here is quite complicated, with strange bedfellows all over the place, and a number of distinct yet overlapping positions on the issue(s). (When we get back to vagueness, we'll see that there too the teams have a somewhat unusual alignment, which is what provoked Marinus's remarks about Wittgenstein in the LL post.)

Why would anyone deny that there were linguistic norms? If there were no such norms, it is easy to assume, there would be no constraint on meaning. An agent could mean anything by anything, simply by intending to do so (that is, that whatever "norms" constrained his meanings – if we still want to call them "norms" at all – are merely "internal"). But maybe this is correct. This position is called "internalism" or "individualism," and its Cartesian flavor is undeniable, thus attracting criticism from all across the philosophical spectrum (including from closet or residual Cartesians themselves). Rejecting internalism seems to require that there be external linguistic norms, and thus that I can make errors in meaning as determined by others.

But what is it to make an "error in meaning"? On one view, whenever I refer to an ocelot as a lynx, I make an error in judgment (i.e. get the world wrong/say something false), and in so doing, I misuse the word "lynx," which should only be applied to lynxes, and I thus "use the word wrongly" in this way. What determines that this is the "wrong" use of the word? Answer: linguistic rules ("norms"). Among those who take this view, there is some variation about what constitutes the linguistic norms in question: obviously other English speakers have something to do with it, but there is also some role to be played by ocelots and lynxes themselves (what role this is exactly will depend on how you feel about natural kinds and Kripkean metaphysical realism more generally).

Now we can respond to this conception of meaning errors in a few ways. A natural way is to object to a conflation between two cases: 1) using a word "wrongly" (coming out with the wrong fusebox), and 2) using it correctly to express what happens to be a false belief (I perfectly correctly characterize how things appear to me, but as it happens I am mistaken). In one sense, Davidsonians will be happy to make this distinction, as one of their (our) main concerns here is the holism of belief and meaning: that in attributing the two together, we have some interpretive leeway (or even indeterminacy) in saying what falls under what. This doesn't mean there are *no* constraints on interpretation – that someone's meaning may swing free entirely from what both subject and interpreter see as observable evidence for it; it just means that we have a better sense of how content is attributed in interpretation than do those with non-Davidsonian accounts of meaning.

However, even after distinguishing in this way, the question remains how to characterize the first case (and the sense of "correctly" in the second). We are nowhere near out of the woods. It can be a further Davidsonian point that we fall directly back into the Platonistic soup if in making this distinction we carve out a realm of purely or sui generis semantic normativity, or in other words, those same "linguistic norms." On this view, we need nothing so robust (or theoretically questionable) as linguistic normativity so construed to account for the actual constraints we make on meaning attribution. We can perfectly well, for example, think of such "mistakes" as prudential ones, in which the sound I make is inconveniently chosen to convey my perfectly determinate (and indeed often perfectly intelligible) meaning – a prudential "error," not a contravening of "linguistic norms" in the disputed sense.

This is the point Bilgrami is making in "Norms and Meaning," in which he criticizes Kripke and Burge, not for opposing "internalism" or "individualism" per se, but for not getting at the root of the problem, and thus perpetuating it in a new form. In hurrying to explain my attempted moderation of Bilgrami's rejection of semantic normativity, I kind of skipped over his reasons for rejecting it in the first place. So let me go back and say more about that.

In Kripke's and Burge's discussions, the "individualist" is pretty much someone with a "private language," someone whose inner intentions determine his meanings no matter what other people say, which is why the issue comes up in Kripke's book on Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. Naturally Wittgenstein rejects this view; and so does Kripke, who takes the RFC (whether or not Wittgenstein himself does so) to require an appeal to a "social theory of meaning" to save us from the meaning-skeptical paradoxes to which "individualism" so construed famously leads. On Kripke's picture, if we are to account for meaning at all, *something* must provide the norms manifested in linguistic rules. In distancing itself from mere linguistic nihilism, individualism promises to locate the source of normativity in the speaker's linguistic dispositions. However, as the paradoxes show, such dispositions cannot do this, as they are compatible with *any* subsequent behavior. Nor, Kripke argues (following Wittgenstein at least this far), can we find the source in Platonistic "rigid rails" or whatnot; so "[w]hat then can the source of the desired normativity be but the social element?" ("Norms and Meaning," p. 126). The result is Kripke's "skeptical solution" to the meaning-skeptical paradox, an appeal to the dispositions of the surrounding linguistic community.

However, Bilgrami rejects this forced choice (dare I say "dualism"?) between anything-goes-if-I-say-so "individualism" on the one hand and external linguistic normativity on the other, such that we must locate a source for it in this way. Bilgrami frequently qualifies his criticism of Kripke and Burge, rejecting normativity "in the sense demanded by" K/B, or "such" normativity. (This is what encourages me to risk re-expansion of the concept into the semantic realm, or that is, recognizing a properly semantic component to our normative commitments.) Yet he is determined to pull the objectionable picture out by the roots, and takes so doing to require a stronger line against "linguistic norms" than has seemed feasible until Davidson's criticism.

Bilgrami's diagnosis goes like this:

[I]n rejecting the abstractions and metaphor of [platonistic] Meanings and 'rails' on the one hand and the internalistic mentalism of inner facts of the matter on the other, one has not yet succeeded in rejecting what in Platonism underlies the search for these things being rejected. Without rejecting this deeper urge, one will no doubt find another such thing to gratify the Platonist urge and indeed one has found it in society. This deeper urge underlying Platonism is precisely the drive to see concepts and terms as governed by such normativity. (p. 127)

John McDowell has of course also criticized Kripke's diagnosis and attempted solution to the paradoxes. In particular, McDowell too criticizes Kripke on his own terms - that his "skeptical solution," locating semantic norms in community practice, fails to do what it promises. And he too wants to dissolve the problem and allay the skeptical anxiety, just as does Bilgrami, only without giving up semantic normativity entirely. It is in trying make sense of McDowell's approach not only to this issue, but to normativity generally (especially in response to Davidson), that I am motivated to moderate Bilgrami's flat rejection of semantic normativity in the way I did the other day.

But let's see what Bilgrami says about McDowell. According to Bilgrami, McDowell says

that the way Kripke brings in the social is just an extension of the normativity-denying position of the dispositionalist because all Kripke does is bring in the dispositions of other members of society to account for an individual's meanings. So if he says something was missing in the individual dispositionalist account in the first place, then it will be missing in the social extension as well. This criticism seems to me to be fair enough, if one accepts the normativity demand as one finds it in Kripke and as one finds it in these others who think that Kripke has himself failed to live up to that demand. But I do not accept the demand in the first place. So mine is a much more fundamental criticism of Kripke. In my view, one should repudiate the 'Platonism' altogether (even in its ersatz forms) and in so doing give notions like meaning and concepts a much lower profile, whereby it does not matter very much that one is not able to say [referring here to the familiar examples in Kripke and Burge] that KWert is making a [properly semantic, or as Bilgrami puts it, "intrinsic lexical"] mistake on January 1st 1990 or that Burge's protagonist has all along made a mistake when he applies the term to a condition in his thigh. [...] [I]t makes no difference to anything at all, which answer we give. His behaviour is equally well explained no matter what we say. There is no problem, skeptical or otherwise. (p. 128)

Because of the holism of belief and meaning, we can attribute either concept, adjusting the belief component accordingly, and equally well explain the agent's behavior, which is after all the constitutive function of interpretation in the first place. This is the sense in which Bilgrami's is a Davidsonian view (and in response to this article, Davidson agrees heartily).

In this sense, again, I have no problem with this view. However, I think that here too (that is, w/r/t this view itself) we have other options in explaining the anti-Platonism we are after, options which leave the concept (or again, *a* concept) of "properly semantic normativity" in place. I was no doubt remiss in the previous post not to stress that it is only after the point has been understood that we safely can go on and try to accommodate McDowell's way of talking, with its characteristic stress on normative rather than (as readers of Mind and World will recognize as the criticism of Davidson there on analogous grounds) "merely causal" (or again, descriptive) relations between mental contents and the world they are about. When we do this we can see how McDowell's criticism can be properly directed. Davidson is not making a "Platonistic" error, as Kripke et. al. are, but in recoiling to a picture devoid of properly semantic normativity (properly construed), he misses a chance to tell a better story about normative commitment generally speaking, and thus recover gracefully from the error he really does make which results in his "coherentism," dismissed by McDowell as "frictionless spinning in a void" (again, see Mind and World, esp. ch. 1-2). I hope that helps place the other post in dialectical space (if not actually vindicate what I say there, and I still have some more fast talking to do on that score as well).

Okay, that's enough for Bilgrami. Next time: Davidson.

Can words be used incorrectly?

2009-08-31T18:29:00.006-04:00

The other day at Language Log there was a post directing us to a philosophically-themed Dinosaur Comic, where T-Rex jubilantly schools philosophers with his deflationary solution to the sorites paradox. I have a number of comments about that, but for now I want to address one aspect of one of the comments there (as you'll see, that will be plenty for today). The commenter, Marinus, after giving an excellent explanation of why the sorites paradox is indeed a real problem in philosophy, suggests that some philosophers, Wittgenstein among them, are committed to the idea that it is impossible for anyone to use a word incorrectly. Marinus does not mention any other such philosophers, and the attribution to Wittgenstein seems like a stretch, or is at least not obvious.

Putting Wittgenstein to one side for now, I can attest that Akeel Bilgrami, following Davidson, has stated explicitly that "normativity is irrelevant to the meaning of words" ("Norms and Meaning"). Here, however, I would like to give some reasons why such talk of using words wrongly is perfectly natural, and, more importantly, can be harmless even by Davidsonian lights. That is, it will seem at first that in helping myself to properly semantic normative considerations, I invite the Platonism which both Davidson and Bilgrami correctly reject. My task will be to show, or at least suggest, that in so doing I issue no such invitation. (Bilgrami actually does qualify his claims somewhat, but not in the way I would prefer. I'll say a bit about this at the end.)

Lynxes and ocelots are members of the cat family. They're bigger and wilder than domestic cats, but smaller than the big cats (tigers, etc.). Other than that I get a little fuzzy on the details. I think ocelots might be a bit smaller than lynxes, and I think lynxes have little tufts on the ends of their ears. As you might expect, though, cat family classification is somewhat more complicated than I make it appear here, and as it turns out, lynxes and ocelots aren't really that similar. I don't think that affects the following argument, as our question is still what to say if someone were to confuse them: is the mistake epistemic, semantic, both, indeterminate, or something else? If the example bothers you, ignore the kitty pictures and think about elms and beeches instead.

With that in mind, let's say I work at a zoo (a real zoo, that is). I've spent the morning admitting an ocelot: having it checked for the standard ocelot parasites, feeding it ocelot food, cleaning out the ocelot cage, etc. At lunch the conversation centers around lynxes and ocelots, and I mention that the lynx I admitted today had some interesting markings. You've seen the animal in question too – maybe you received delivery and glanced in the cage before signing – and you reply: "Lynx? You mean ocelot, don't you?" My response: "Right, the ocelot." In other words, I don't bat an eye, but simply acknowledge what we would call a slip of the lip. My belief is fine: I knew all along it was an ocelot – that's why I did all those ocelot-specific things – but just now I made a semantic error. I simply came out, as does Michael Palin uncontrollably in a certain Python skit, with the wrong fusebox.

In particular, I attempted to express my (true) belief that the cat was an ocelot, but in so doing, I misused the word "lynx," which after all means lynx, not ocelot, and therefore cannot (or so it seems; I consider a qualification below) be used correctly in expressing beliefs – true or false – about ocelots rather than lynxes.

So far, so good. However, I can also make a mistake about the cat, rather than the word. In order to do so, however, I have to use the (mistaken) word correctly in order to express my false belief. Let's say I simply made a cursory examination (before I had my morning caffeine?) and handed the "lynx" over to my assistant for the admission procedures I myself performed in the previous example, only this time it's cleaning out the lynx cage, etc. Again at lunch I speak of the "lynx's" markings, and again your reaction is "Lynx? You mean ocelot, don't you?" Now my response may very well be to frown, and say something like: "My goodness, you're right, it was an ocelot! I better get Terry to clean out the ocelot cage. After he's finished with the lynx cage, anyway."

Again, in referring to the "lynx" as I did, I expressed my mistaken belief that the cat was a lynx; but in order to do that by so speaking, I must have been using the word "lynx" correctly – to refer to lynxes, which the cat in question was not.

Now for some clarifications. My point here is certainly not that we must speak in this way – that the first really is a case of properly semantic error as opposed to the latter, a clear case of properly doxastic error. So already some peace can be made, as I take the Davidsonian point to be mainly that there can be nothing which forces us to speak this way. It's just that the natural way to make that point is to make sure to speak the other way instead, referring in all cases to doxastic error only, rather than semantic error; and I grant in advance that even this example can be spun that way if you like, as again no force was intended. I simply think there's no real reason not to speak of semantic error in particular cases if we so prefer, and that it can in fact be salutary to remind ourselves that that possibility is open to us.

That we can construe each example in either way is further suggested by the qualification I promised above; for there is a sense in which I can indeed refer to ocelots (i.e. successfully), and express beliefs about them, even when using the word "lynx." Suppose I say "This lynx here [patting yon ocelot on the head] has worms, can you give him a deworming pill?" I've expressed a belief, let's say a true one [i.e. that he's got worms] about what is in fact an ocelot, albeit by using the word "lynx." It would be perverse of you to pretend that I haven't said anything about the ocelot at all, simply because I used the "wrong word" to refer to it. Note that this case is intermediate between the two others, at least so far. For all you know, my response to "I think that's an ocelot, not a lynx" could be either "right, an ocelot; can you give him the pill?" or instead "no, it's a lynx; look, he's got the little tufts on his ears"; where the first suggests that I merely misspoke (failed to express my true belief that the cat is an ocelot), and the second sounds more like I have misidentified the cat rather than misused the word.

Yet these are mere suggestions, at least in advance of further investigation. After all, maybe the former of these responses acknowledges a false belief (if one I regard as unimportant and easily corrected), while the latter confusion about lynxes can also be construed as instead concerning the proper referent of "lynx," a semantic matter.

Now for the moral. The trick here, in my view, is to see two things at the same time. First, "using a word properly" ("having the concept") has (at least) two aspects: first, the semantic part: getting the meaning right; and secondly, the epistemic part: getting the world right. Secondly, on the other hand, these two things, while not identical, are very closely related, indeed interconstitutive, rendering interpretation (determination of meaning) more complicated than simply checking the dictionary to see if a speaker has used a word "correctly." It is in this anti-Platonistic sense only that such obligations are, in Bilgrami's not entirely univocal terms, neither "sui generis" nor "intrinisic."

Sometimes we will emphasize one of these two points rather than the other. For example, we sometimes say that knowing the meaning of a word is knowing how to use it correctly, where the paradigmatic example is that of using the word X to correctly identify X's. If someone says "that's a lynx" when and only when in the presence of lynxes, he most likely knows what "lynx" means. Similarly, when we are teaching someone a word, especially children, we test their understanding by seeing if they do the "appropriate" thing, e.g. apply "doggie" to dogs and not to ferrets, or responding "five" when asked to "add three and two."

This can make it seem that what we have here is a single determination – one of the meaning of a subject's utterances – which is determined behaviorally, by seeing if the subject makes correct judgments. The idea is that knowing the word (having the concept) "add" just is to add correctly; and knowing (the meaning of) the word "lynx" just is identifying lynxes correctly. But this leaves no room for going on to claim a distinct notion of semantic normativity over and above that involved in judgments that things are thus and so, a doxastic matter (Bilgrami is correct that McDowell can be careless on this point).

In other words, this conception of the relation between belief and meaning puts them too close together. In response, we point out that while I can indeed express a false belief that that cat is a lynx, I must, in so doing, be using the word "lynx" in its proper meaning – to refer to lynxes. Recognizing the conceptual distinctness of the two components restores the proper flexibility to an interpretive process which requires us, in standard cases, to attribute beliefs and meanings simultaneously. This reflects the internal connection to the learning process, in which, in learning "how to use words," we learn both what they mean and a whole bunch of truths about the world: what "lynx" means and what lynxes are, and what "add" means and how to add, without those two amounting to (exactly) the same thing.

On the other hand, however, we don't want to think of belief and meaning as two different phenomena (or things) entirely, in the sense of being determinable by separate processes (instead of the single complex process of interpretation cum inquiry); instead, again, we need to see them as interconstitutive.

According to Davidson and Bilgrami, we risk doing this when we speak of "linguistic norms" at all – that is, as in any way distinct from the doxastic norm of "getting things right." To do so makes it sound like meaning is determined not in the interpretive process itself but instead by allegedly independent facts about, say, English: given the actual dispositions of English speakers, on this view, if I make the sound /links/ (or inscribe l-y-n-x), then I necessarily thereby refer to those things (i.e., lynxes) – no matter what an engaged interpreter may say – simply because "that's what 'lynx' means in English." This semantic Platonism makes utter hash of the holistic Davidsonian picture, and is what provokes Davidson to declare, famously, in "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," that "there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed."

(Let me just give a bit more from that article. The quote continues: "There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases." Earlier on, he says that to say this means that "we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally"; or, as I would say, between meaning and belief. "Erasing the boundary" in this way, however, sends us back to the first point – that we must not think of these things as identical or simply reducible to the normativity of belief. The two are not dualistically opposed, but distinct.)

My claim is that even loyal Davidsonians can recognize a difference between "linguistic norms" in this deceptive sense, on the one hand, and on the other, the idea that "getting things right" is a norm for meaning just as much as it is for belief. We can have the latter without the former. Consider the Davidsonian triangle, with a subject at one point, an interpreter (or an informant) at another, and our shared but objective world at the apex. Each point can exert normative pressure on what we say (and believe and do): I get the world right when I believe the truth; I get meaning(s) right when I speak properly; and I get myself right when I act in accordance with my most fundamental commitments. Yet in each case talk of "getting right" need not commit us to the existence of some separably characterizable thing. The lack of a language, in the sense in which Davidson rejects it, is analogous in this image to the lack of the Cartesian world-in-itself on the one hand, and the non-existence of my "true self" on the other. Just as with belief and meaning, it is the dualism of norm and norm-follower that is rejected, not the distinction (and the relation). Even if that means we give up the terminology of concrete "norms" for something fuzzier like "normative commitment" (or as above, normative "pressure"), there is still a role for such a relation between meaning and "language" (if not *a* language).

Bilgrami does suggest that "norms" of meaning could be salvaged if construed as the "extrinsic" prudential norm of "speaking as others do" (rather than "speaking rightly"), or the hypothetical imperative of "... if you wish to be understood." But while prudence is indeed a part of the interpretive picture, I think, for the above reasons, that even properly semantic normativity (if not "norms") can be unobjectionable. But there's a lot more to say about that, so I'll leave Bilgrami's views for another time.

Who says philblogging isn't the royal road to riches?

2009-08-25T21:41:00.002-04:00

As Abbas points out in the comments to the previous post, 3 Quarks Daily is now accepting nominations for a prize to be awarded to the best philosophy blog post of the past year. Here's the link. Better hurry though, nominations must be submitted by August 31st. The top prize ("Top Quark," get it?) will net the winner *one thousand* smackers, so choose wisely!

Now that's some strict finitism

2009-07-11T01:49:00.005-04:00

I just ran into this quote from L. Graham and J-M Kantor, Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity:

Alexander Yessenin-Volpin [was] a Russian logician of the ultra-finitist school who was imprisoned in a mental institution in Soviet Russia. Yessenin-Volpin was once asked how far one can take the geometric sequence of powers of 2, say (2e1, 2e2, 2e3, ... , 2e100) [sorry, I don't know how to do superscripts, so for "2e1" read "2 to the first power," and so on]. He replied that the question "should be made more specific." He was then asked if he considered 2e1 to be "real" and he immediately answered yes. He was then asked if 2e2 was "real." Again he replied yes, but with a barely perceptible delay. Then he was asked about 2e3, and yes, but with more delay. These questions continued until it became clear how was going to handle them. He would always answer yes, but he would take 2e100 times as long to answer yes to 2e100 than he would to answering to 2e1. Yessenin-Volpin had developed his own way of handling a paradox of infinity.

2 to the 100th power is well over 10 to the 30th, so if he took a tenth of a second to decide that 2 to the 1st power is real, then once you ask him about 2 to the 100th, you can go get a cup of coffee while you wait. In fact you better get something to eat too, because you won't have to come back for over [performs quick 'n' dirty calculation] 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. I wonder how far they actually got. I should mention that just because it was in Soviet Russia, in which mental institutions were routinely used as de facto prisons for political dissidents, that Comrade Yessenin-Volpin was institutionalized, this need not mean that he wasn't actually insane. In fact this sad tale should be a lesson for us all.

Resistance is futile

2009-06-20T13:18:00.002-04:00

No doubt this one will sweep the ~~geek~~blogosphere. Too bad there aren't more avatars though.

Get Your Cyborg Name

HT: Wilkins

Pitching forty Troy sag is: reports say hello

2009-06-04T00:32:00.002-04:00

Here's the transcript from the ESPN video recap of Tuesday's Red Sox game, as rendered by its state-of-the-art speech-to-text technology, which "may not be 100% accurate":

What are year old rookie Rick -- sell on the bowl forty Troy in search of its seventh win [...] Red Sox sag is drug DE trade Jason Bay -- his hacks against the young reports say hello that's sixteenth jacked up you're the third -- lasting sport. At Byrd gave up three runs on seven hits his counterpart Daisuke Matsuzaka came in -- three -- 8082 ERA. Gets cleats on his with a six k's over five range Magglio Ordonez followed the ERA still over seven but he gets his first win the -- Terry Francona it was 500 victories Red Sox give them.

Okay, what? Here's what I get from the audio of announcer Jim Basquil's drawl:

Twenty-year-old rookie Rick Porcello on the bump for Detroit in search of his seventh win [...] Red Sox and Tigers from Detroit: Jason Bay taking his hacks against the young Rick Porcello, and that's his sixteenth jack of the year in the third, Porcello lasting four and a third; [he] gave up three runs on seven hits. His counterpart Daisuke Matsuzaka came in 0 and 3 [with] an 8.82 ERA; gets Clete Thomas, one of his six K's over five frames; Magglio Ordonez follows. The ERA still over seven but he gets his first win, and helped Terry Francona to his 500th victory as Red Sox skipper.

Interesting how the program has no problem with "Daisuke Matsuzaka," the syllables of which are after all very unlikely to make up any other phrase; but it stumbles all over "Rick Porcello" (nice try with "reports say hello") and "Clete Thomas" ("cleats on his"). It's clearly primed to use words which are common in ESPN videos, which is how "from Detroit" becomes "drug DE trade." I just wish it wouldn't use the word "trade" (or "drug," for that matter) in such close proximity to the phrase "Jason Bay" -- that just about gave me a heart attack.

"Lasting sport. At Byrd" looks funny (for "lasting four and a third"), until you remember that Paul Byrd pitched for the BoSox last year. But if they can get it to use proper names like that, as well as football terms like "DE," you'd think it could learn to use baseball announcer jargon, however ugly ("bump" = pitching mound; "frames" = innings; "jack" = home run). I wonder what it says for "goes yard."

Also re: BoSox, here is Bill Simmons's take on a key issue, led off by an uncaptioned but heart-rending photo of an all-too-typical moment (yikes).

Four quarks for muster mark

2009-05-27T11:39:00.003-04:00

Blog aficionados will want to head over to Three Quarks Daily, a site with which you will want to become familiar in any case, to nominate your favorite posts for one of four annual prizes. Plus you can see which posts everyone else likes; plus a big photo of Head Quark Abbas R. Check it out here!

Hassellmania

2009-05-25T19:01:00.003-04:00

Jon Hassell is one of my fave musicians/recording artists, and his new record Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street is – if I may gush like a fanboy for a moment – like, totally great. Join a discussion about it here. And buy the record!

Williamson interview

2009-05-11T23:43:00.004-04:00

Interview with Timothy Williamson, here. The money quote:

[Vagueness] seemed to present the strongest challenge to the classical, realist picture that has always rung true to me, on which the world is largely independent of us, and the principle of bivalence holds ― every proposition is either true or false (and not both), even if we do not and perhaps cannot know which ― and other standard principles of logic hold too. The problem was that, on an unqualified realist picture, there must be a point at which subtracting just one grain from a heap takes it from being true to being false that there is a heap in front of you, which seems to be incompatible with the vagueness of the concept of a heap, which has no precise definition. For a long time I could see no satisfactory way round that objection. Then, as I was finishing my first book, Identity and Discrimination, I started thinking about the way in which ordinary knowledge requires a margin for error. It dawned on me that the need for a margin for error would explain why, even though ordinary concepts have sharp boundaries, we can’t know where those boundaries are located. That explanation solved the main objection to the logical view that I had always wanted to hold. So the hard part was working out the epistemology; the logic was the easy bit. The larger purpose underlying my book Vagueness was to argue for realism like this: if realism is wrong about anything, it is wrong about vagueness (that premise was generally agreed); but realism is not wrong about vagueness; therefore it is not wrong about anything. [my bold]

Well, that's one view of the matter, anyway. Or we could just marvel at how no nettle can be too sharp for the desperate realist to grasp. I had heard this before, actually – that he was trying to defend realism against what seemed to him to be its toughest challenge – but sometimes it's better to learn to crawl before you try to walk.

HT: Butterflies & Wheels

Man and kitty

2009-03-29T17:04:00.004-04:00

Check out Frank Zappa and his kitty:

My old kitty, name of Karlheinz Stockhausen, liked to climb up on my shoulder like that. He would even, if you leaned over only ever so slightly, jump up directly onto your back and assume the Sphinx position. When this happened you had to scuttle over to a chair or table and tilt to one side to dump him off. (Once – exactly once – I tried to dislodge him by straightening up. The scars are barely visible now. Have I told this story already?) I got this picture from a site featuring lots of stars with their kitties, most of whom (the stars that is) don't seem to know how to hold a kitty properly. You don't just grab him around the middle, or hold him face up like a baby; you support his hind paws with one hand, so he feels like he's standing on something solid. Otherwise he's not a happy kitty. Thus endeth the public service announcement. Back to our irregularly scheduled programming.

Spring is here - let's party

2009-03-24T11:07:00.003-04:00

Sorry, I've been neglecting my duties here (again). But here's another Carnival for you at least. I'd say a bientot but it might be a longtemps for all I know. (Sigh.)

Is this a philosophy blog?

2009-03-03T18:02:00.004-05:00

Over at Leiter Reports, you may vote for the best philosopher of the 20th century, as well as, while you're at it, the best philosopher of the 19th century. However, due to the threat of contamination by the unwashed masses, "non-philosophy blogs" are urged not to link to these polls. So if you think this is one of those, you better not go over there. You have been warned. (Also, re: the first poll, see the (*cough*) lively discussion here.)

UPDATE [3/4]: The madness continues with a runoff pitting the 19th and 20th centuries in a head-to-head battle.

However, everyone is welcome at the Philosophers' Carnival!

Optical delusion?

2009-02-25T16:04:00.006-05:00

Here's today's "Dinette Set" cartoon:

Note the logo on our bearded pedant's shirt ("Fale University"), as well as the text on the wall behind him: ("Optical Delusion Fair: Ignorant Public Welcome"). Hmm, I do believe we pedants are being tweaked. Which is fine, of course, but I can't just let it go without piling on some more pedantry in response.

Naturally we here at DR are all over aspect perception. Still, I had never really paid that much attention to the differences between pure figure/ground cases (like this one) and cases like the duckrabbit. For example, it does indeed seem that at least some of the former cases might be perceived in what we might call a "figure/figure" way ("two weirdos kissing a vase"), while no such option is possible for the duckrabbit. That is, I can imagine, after having had the aspects flip back and forth for a bit, seeing the drawing in an indeterminate way, as neither duck nor rabbit. Even this would probably take a conscious effort, to keep the perception from resolving into one or the other figure.

But it's very hard to imagine seeing it as both a duck and a rabbit at the same time. Wouldn't they be taking up the same space? How would you feed "it"? Where would you aim your hand? Toward its "mouths", which are located at the back of each other's head? I'm sorry, that's trying too hard. (Note: this is of course different from seeing it as a "duckrabbit", on the one hand, or as indeterminate in the above sense, on the other). And even if it were possible to do this, this wouldn't "refute" Wittgenstein's use of the example, as people sometimes try to do (an advantage of the "quietist" reading of Wittgenstein is to bring out how pointless it is to try to do this). Wittgenstein's point, as I see it, is to introduce the notion of aspect, by investigating the experience of "aspect-dawning", i.e. when we suddenly see (what we can't help calling) the "same thing" in a different way (pp. 196-7, in Part II):

The change of aspect. "But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!"
But what is different: my impression? my point of view?—-Can I say? I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes.

"Now I am seeing this", I might say (pointing to another picture, for example). This has the form of a report of a new perception.The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being unchanged.

I suddenly see the solution of a puzzle-picture. Before, there were branches there; now there is a human shape. My visual impression has changed and now I recognize that it has not only shape and colour but also a quite particular 'organization'.—-My visual impression has changed;-—what was it like before and what is it like now?—-If I represent it by means of an exact copy—and isn't that a good representation of it?—-no change is shewn.

And above all do not say "After all my visual impression isn't the drawing; it is this —— which I can't shew to anyone."—-Of course it is not the drawing, but neither is it anything of the same category, which I carry within myself.

The concept of the 'inner picture' is misleading, for this concept uses the 'outer picture' as a model; and yet the uses of the words for these concepts are no more like one another than the uses of 'numeral' and 'number'. (And if one chose to call numbers 'ideal numerals', one might produce a similar confusion.)

In context, Wittgenstein's proximal target is of course, as it is in other parts of the book as well, the (Cartesian) idea of an "inner picture", as well as the Cartesian subject one would have to be in order to "look at" such a thing.

Yet I can't help thinking of the idea of aspect perception as much more central to the entire book than do most readers – for example, as directly related to the concept of "perspicuous representation" (or "presentation"), which in §122 he describes as "of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things." The way we look at things. Given Wittgenstein's aims throughout the book, how could aspect perception not be central for them?

Philcomix

2009-02-10T12:25:00.003-05:00

Actually, first the Carnival, then the comix. Some interesting-looking stuff this time. And do check out the comix, especially this one, which really cracked me up (the whole page, not just the philosophy one at the top).

Or you can just click through to the comix. It's up to you and your conscience.

[Update [3/29]: Kate Beaton link fixed]

Now that the hoopla is over

2009-01-21T12:21:00.001-05:00

Oh wait, there's another party - in fact, a Carnival! (You know which kind.)

BCNU

2009-01-14T19:17:00.002-05:00

R.I.P.

One last party

2008-12-29T12:03:00.001-05:00

Or Philosophers' Carnival, anyway. Read now, drink later!

Sometimes a tie is just a tie

2008-12-22T22:01:00.002-05:00

I learned something interesting today. In a book on body language, underneath a picture of a man stroking his cheeks (with one hand – you know the gesture), we are informed that one of the meanings of this gesture is that "the person has been successful in an undertaking in the former Yugoslavia." I had no idea that body language could be so specific!

Okay, they probably didn't mean it that way. But the interest of this book is indeed the cross-cultural variety of meanings of various gestures. It certainly isn't the surprising amount of material which is blindingly obvious to anyone who's ever participated in an actual conversation in the USA. "Sadness is generally betrayed by the mouth, which tends to droop at the corners, so emphasizing the generally slack and unanimated appearance of the face. The lips may quiver if you are on the verge of tears." Who is this book for, anyway? Escaped androids from an MIT lab?

There's also a fair amount of what strikes me as dime-store evo-psych just-so stories. "A domineering speaker raises a forefinger and beats it up and down in an action that is symbolic of a stick (or an ape's overarm blows) pummeling an opponent into submission." Beating, okay, but why the ape? Or this one: a female courting signal is that "the woman might [look] at the man over a raised shoulder for longer than people normally look at each other," which does indeed sound seductive (imagine Keira Knightley doing it, for example), but here's the explanation: "Self-mimicry; the shoulder resembles the breast and so is sexually inviting" – which, well, I dunno.

Back to ambiguous cross-cultural gestures. The one in which the head is "jerked sharply backwards" (I think I've seen this one in the movies – "ehh!") is negative in southern Italy, as I would have expected, but it means "yes" in Ethiopia. No wonder those two countries couldn't get along! Also, the authors acknowledge that some gestures are inherently ambiguous. Under "male courtship signals," one such gesture is indicated, followed by a few "possible alternative meanings" in parentheses:

Straightening the tie (nervousness; habit; tie might need straightening).

You think??

Logic time!

2008-12-19T17:14:00.003-05:00

This may be an internut chestnet by now (I mean, an internet chestnut), but it was new to me. There is indeed a unique solution – but in order to get it you have to help yourself to that information, which is something I find mildly annoying in logic puzzles like nurikabe and such, but there it is. Hint: that an answer choice makes the thereby completed statement true is not sufficient reason to regard it as the correct answer (see #19 for an example!). Be careful! A mistake early on means that when you run into trouble you have to start over.

HT: A math teacher blog here (he's not sure what the ultimate source is - probably Lewis Carroll or some other joker). There's an inconclusive thread on the solution here. [Update 12/22: link fixed]

1. The first question whose answer is (B) is —
(A) 1 — (B) 2 — (C) 3 — (D) 4 — (E) 5

2. The only two consecutive questions with identical answers are —
(A) 6 & 7 — (B) 7 & 8 — (C) 8 & 9 — (D) 9 & 10 — (E) 10 & 11

3. The number of questions with answer (E) is —
(A) 0 — (B) 1 — (C) 2 — (D) 3 — (E) — 4

4. The number of questions with answer (A) is —
(A) 4 — (B) 5 — (C) 6 — (D) 7 — (E) 8

5. The answer to this question is the same as the answer to question —
(A) 1 — (B) 2 — (C) 3 — (D) 4 — (E) 5

6. The answer to question 17 is —
(A) C — (B) D — (C) E — (D) none of the above — (E) all of the above

7. Alphabetically, the answer to this question and the answer to the following question are —
(A) 4 apart — (B) 3 apart — (C) 2 apart — (D) 1 apart — (E) the same

8. The number of questions whose answers are vowels is —
(A) 4 — (B) 5 — (C) 6 — (D) 7 — (E) 8

9. The next question with the same answer as this one is question —
(A) 10 — (B) 11 — (C) 12 — (D) 13 — (E) 14

10. The answer to question 16 is —
(A) D — (B) A — (C) E — (D) B — (E) C

11. The number of questions preceding this one with the answer (B) is —
(A) 0 — (B) 1 — (C) 2 — (D) 3 — (E) 4

12. The number of questions whose answer is a consonant is —
(A) an even number — (B) an odd number — (C) a perfect square — (D) a prime — (E) divisible by 5

13. The only odd numbered problem with answer (A) is —
(A) 9 — (B) 11 — (C) 13 — (D) 15 — (E) 17

14. The number of questions with answer (D) is —
(A) 6 — (B) 7 — (C) 8 — (D) 9 — (E) 10

15. The answer to question 12 is —
(A) A — (B) B — (C) C — (D) D — (E) E

16. The answer to question 10 is —
(A) D — (B) C — (C) B — (D) A — (E) E

17. The answer to question 6 is —
(A) C — (B) D — (C) E — (D) none of the above — (E) all of the above

18. The number of questions with answer A equals the number of questions with answer —
(A) B — (B) C — (C) D — (D) E — (E) none of the above

19. The answer to this question is —
(A) A — (B) B — (C) C — (D) D — (E) E

20. Standardized test : intelligence :: barometer : —
(A) temperature (only) — (B) wind velocity (only) — (C) latitude (only) — (D) longitude (only) — (E) temperature, wind velocity, latitude and longitude

Diminishing returns?

2008-12-09T13:31:00.001-05:00

This week's Carnival is another sparse one. End of semester, or are we all carnivaled out?

Buddha post

2008-12-01T20:17:00.003-05:00

Brian B. on the new Buddha Machine:

I don't like the FM3 Buddha Machine, but I kind of like it, too. It's a little Chinese gadget that plays a few ambient loops from a crappy little speaker. You had to make repetitive ambient loops play on a cute gadget for people to be interested in them: they have apparently sold thousands of these little things, way more than most ambient CDs sell, and they are expensive, too. This just proves you have to put something willfully obscure into the shape of something fun and somebody will likely purchase a few of them. I think the Buddha Machine would have been a lot cooler if it were not created by artists as an objet, but instead was some kind of crappy Chinese toy gone horribly wrong. It was supposed to play the love theme from Doctor Zhivago ("Lara's Theme"), but instead the stupid thing broke in transit and just grinds out a few tones until the batteries die. It's like the last few moments of a music box as it winds down, which are, as we all know, the most melancholy moments of music, any music, no matter what music, you will ever hear. I have an old music box that plays "Jingle Bells" and when it gets down to the end, that slow slow "Jingle Bells" is just the saddest thing you've ever heard. It's putting the Christmas tree of thirty-two Christmases out to the curb at the same time, it's like every day becoming December 26th at the stroke of midnight.

Not simply an excellent writer, Brian provides us with glorious ambient mixes as well – check them out here.

Return to the source

2008-11-17T19:54:00.002-05:00

This week the Philosophers' Carnival returns to its origin at Philosophy, Etc. Richard tells us that interest in the Carnival has dropped off somewhat, so we will be returning to a three-week cycle. We who have not submitted posts must hang our heads in shame. Let's do better for the next edition on 12/8!

I believe n = 81

2008-11-05T13:18:00.002-05:00

What is billed as the nth Philosophers' Carnival is mighty sparse, but check it out anyway. When you get time.

An Election Day haiku

2008-11-04T10:51:00.002-05:00

Ahem:

Today's the day: vote!
Please do not forget to vote
Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote!

And now, an Election Day sonnet: ... oh, never mind.

Real goldfinches and robot cats

2008-11-02T14:25:00.003-05:00

Daniel doesn't like what John Haugeland says in "Objective Perception." In the former's words: "The very idea of giving a "constitutive ideal" for "thinghood" strikes me as inadvisable." Yet it seems that we can always try to say what we mean by "thing," such that if (Ex)(x lacks some property p), then x isn't a "thing" after all. After giving some examples, Daniel admits that:

[Everything in this paragraph seems like an overwrought version of Austin's bit about the finches that suddenly explode etc., and what we should say about them. I can't recall where that passage is. I need to read more Austin.]

Well, everyone needs to read more Austin. Here's the quote from "Other Minds". Even in special cases (of deciding "whether it's real"), "two further conditions hold good": first, that it's not true that just "because I sometimes don't know or can't discover [e.g. because it flies away], I never can." The second is that "'Being sure it's real' is no more proof against miracles or outrages of nature than anything else is or, sub specie humanitatis, can be. If we have made sure it's a goldfinch, and then in the future it does something outrageous (explodes, quotes Mrs. Woolf, or what not), we don't say we were wrong to say it was a goldfinch, we don't know what to say." [Philosophical Papers, p. 88]

However, he also goes on to say that "It seems a serious mistake to suppose that language (or most language, language about real things) is 'predictive' in such a way that the future can always prove it wrong. What the future can always do, is to make us revise our ideas about goldfinches or real goldfinches or anything else." [88-89]

This is almost right, but it makes it sound like the case is asymmetrical: that the future can't always prove our beliefs false (rather than our "ideas"), but that our "ideas" are always vulnerable to (forced?) revision. What I would rather say is that both our beliefs and our meanings are corrigible, which nicely combines the ideas that a) beliefs are corrigible in the light of further experience, and b) the interconstitutive nature of belief and meaning implies that the same is true of meaning. While it may be natural in any one case to do one rather than the other, ultimately the choice is up to us. Neither "the world" on the one hand nor "language" on the other (as it seems some want to say) can determine our choice unilaterally.

I've always taken this to be the moral of Putnam's robot cat example. If those things turn out to be robots, then we have two choices: we can say either that a) the supposedly analytic and thus unrevisable sentence "cats are animals" has, mirabile dictu, turned out to be revisable after all, as cats have turned out not to be animals after all, but are in fact robots; or b) that "cats are animals" remains analytic, but that, mirabile dictu, it seems that there are no cats among us after all, as those things we thought were cats have turned out to be robots instead. I don't remember, but I think Putnam himself may have claimed that we must say (a) here, but it sounds better to say instead that we are not forced to say (b) (i.e. due to the incorrigible qua non-empirical analyticity of "cats are animals"), but can say what we like.

In general, my motto in such cases is that when something unutterably weird happens, it may be that whatever we say will sound unutterably weird, which means that examples like Swampman (or Twin Earth, or grue, or whatever) are nearly always not worth it – if there's really a point there (beyond what I just said), you can make it better some other way.

Passing the time

2008-10-20T22:37:00.001-04:00

Seeing as there isn't any more baseball until Wednesday, now would probably be a good time to check out the latest Philosophers' Carnival.

Not necessarily

2008-10-06T14:24:00.001-04:00

The 79th Philosophers' Carnival might be here, or possibly not. Better go check!

Manny being Manny, alas

2008-10-05T15:07:00.002-04:00

With Jason Bay poised (knock wood) to pick up ALDS MVP honors, most of Red Sox Nation may be feeling pretty good about now re: the Manny Ramirez trade. But while I can hardly knock Bay – nor regret the removal of Craig Hansen from anywhere near the pitching mound, with Sox in the field anyway – I never thought that trade was a good idea.

Neither does ESPN writer Bill Simmons, a Red Sox fan who lives in L.A. He's got a long article at espn.com about the resulting turmoil in his soul:

On the day the deal happened, I e-mailed my friend Tony, a die-hard Dodgers fan, and guaranteed him Manny would crush baseballs for six solid weeks. There was no doubt. I saw everything coming before it happened: the "Mah-knee! Mah-knee!" chants, the palpable buzz at Chavez Ravine, the steady stream of line drives and the bombs, amused smiles from teammates, the giddy hop in his step, the "Thanks again for trading Manny!" e-mails from my Yankee friends, the playful joshing with teammates, everything. Now the Dodgers are gunning for their first World Series in 20 years, led by the supposedly washed-up slugger who's only hitting .396 with 17 homers, 53 RBI, a .489 OBP and .743 slugging percentage in Dodger blue. [...] He's back in my life, only not the way I hoped.

The whole article, complete with Fosteresque footnotes and a further dire prediction (take a guess), here.

PC #78

2008-09-22T20:37:00.002-04:00

This week's Philosophers' Carnival is at Practical Ethics. Not much for LEMMings, but check it out just the same!

That was close

2008-09-09T11:47:00.002-04:00

Thanks to my post yesterday, I have avoided the unprecedented situation of putting up *four* consecutive posts linking to Philosophers' Carnivals. Now that that danger has passed ... here's the latest Philosophers' Carnival.

Ironies abound

2008-09-08T16:58:00.003-04:00

Richard Rorty famously defines an "ironist" as "the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p. xv). Rorty has his own story about what this means, and what it is to "face up" to it, a story which most interpreters, myself included, aren't particularly happy with. On that account, it remains unclear how one can regard one's beliefs as "contingent" without thereby simply giving them up. The resulting skepticism, perversely unacknowledged as such, is precisely not what the doctor ordered. Or so I claim.

On p. 96-7 of CIS, Rorty comes very close to spelling out an explicitly Pyrrhonist position: "The goal of ironist theory is to understand the metaphysical urge, the urge to theorize, so well that one becomes entirely free of it. Ironist theory is thus a ladder which is to be thrown away as soon as one has figured out what it was that drove one's predecessors to theorize." Remarkably, given the use of that familiar image, the accompanying footnote cites neither the ancient Skeptics nor even the early Wittgenstein (TLP 6.54), but instead the later Heidegger's "motto of ironist theorizing": "A regard to metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics. Therefore our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself" (Time and Being, 1962).

I don't know about Heidegger, but in Rorty the thought seems to be this. Traditional metaphysics is a mug's game; but if philosophers proceed in the usual fashion to try to show this once and for all, all we'll get is a philosophical theory, or doctrine, to that effect. But philosophical theorizing just is "metaphysics" in the controversial sense – that is, it succumbs to the same questionable urge (to escape finitude, or whatever). Instead of the traditional doctrines, then, we must target the urge which made them, or even their negations, seem necessary. If "overcoming" requires refutation, and refutation indulges the suspect urge, then we must abandon "overcoming" as well. We might not be happy about having to "leave metaphysics to itself," where anyone can still trip over it if they're not careful, but it can't be helped. We'll just have to develop other ways to help each other avoid that pitfall. Rorty's conception of pragmatism as "anti-authoritarianism," for example, exhorts us to spurn the siren song of metaphysical transcendence, with its chimerical promise of ideal grounding for our beliefs and values, in favor of more homespun methods of coping with our problems.

In chapter 5 ("Self-creation and affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger"), Rorty explains why literature of a certain kind is better than philosophy for doing what needs to be done:

So the lesson I draw from Proust's example is that novels are a safer medium than theory for expressing one's recognition of the relativity and contingency of authority figures. For novels are usually about people – things which are, unlike general ideas and final vocabularies, quite evidently time-bound, embedded in a web of contingencies. [...] By contrast, books which are about ideas, even when written by historicists like Hegel and Nietzsche, look like descriptions of eternal relations between eternal objects, rather than genealogical accounts of the filiation of final vocabularies, showing how these vocabularites were engendered by haphazard matings, by who happened to bump into whom. [107-8]

I'll get back to raking Rorty over the coals some other time, but let me get to my point here. To that last quotation is appended its own footnote, which reads: "There are, of course, novels like Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus in which the characters are simply dressed-up generalities. The novel form cannot by itself insure a perception of contingency. It only makes it a bit harder to avoid this perception."

I like Mann a lot, but that's definitely a fair criticism (q.v. The Magic Mountain, or anything else for that matter). However, the impetus for this post is that I'm just now (very slowly) reading Doctor Faustus, and on p. 45 our narrator Dr. Zeitblom is telling us about the early years of his friend Leverkühn, the subject of the book:

In those years school life is life itself, it stands for all that life is, school interests bound the horizon that every life needs in order to develop values, through which, however relative they are, the character and the capacities are sustained. They can, however, do that, humanly speaking, only if the relativeness remains unrecognized. Belief in absolute values, illusory as it always is, seems to me a condition of life. But my friend's gifts [i.e., Leverkühn's] measured themselves against values the relative character of which seemed to lie open to him, without any visible possibility of any other relation which would have detracted from them as values. Bad pupils there are in plenty. But Adrian presented the singular phenomenon of a bad pupil as the head of the class. I say that it distressed me, but how impressive, how fascinating, I found it too! How it strengthened my devotion to him, mingling with it – can one understand why? – something like pain, like hopelessness! [Lowe-Porter translation, altered slightly]

So described, the young composer sounds quite a bit like Rorty's "ironist," and indeed, the next paragraph discusses "one exception [i.e., mathematics] to [Leverkühn's] uniform ironic contempt." Here, though, the skepticism is explicit. Belief in absolute values, however necessary "as a condition of life," is always illusory. The only alternative to "absolute" is "relative," and regarding some value as (merely) "relative" is equivalent to rejecting any claims it may have to validity. Where Leverkühn differs from Zeitblom is that the former did not let the recognized illusoriness of absolute value stop him from acting as if he accepted it. He even excelled at what others took seriously, while he himself saw it as merely a game – one he was good at, but a game nonetheless.

No doubt Rorty takes his own position to differ, not simply from Zeitblom's, but also from that of Leverkühn. (He might, for example, have mentioned this passage as anticipating his own views, rather than simply knocking the book for not being sufficiently Proustian.) As I read him, I think Rorty would say that in allowing a norm or value to structure one's actions – to be seen as "playing the game" at all – is, in that context, to accept it as fully as it makes sense to do so. To demand a further "metaphysical" commitment to its truth (pardon me, Truth) is to fall into unintelligibility, or at least disutility. That's why recognizing "contingency" isn't the same as skepticism or nihilism.

Now, this is indeed a more attractive thing to say. It's just that I don't think Rorty can do so consistently. For example, Rorty tells us repeatedly that his pragmatism points us past the "stale dichotomy of realism and anti-realism"; but he just as consistently endorses anti-realist doctrine when it suits him, as in the continuation of the very definition of "ironism" with which I began. Ironists, he says, are that way because they are "sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance." Naturally going "beyond realism" will involve rejecting realist doctrines like this one. Still, when overt appeals to anti-realism are qualified, in the definition of the central concept of one's view, only by words like "sufficiently," it's hard to see how that itself is sufficient for us to avoid the one as well as the other.

I see I already have a post called "Summer's almost gone," so this one will have to have a different title

2008-08-26T00:56:00.003-04:00

Hope everyone's had a good summer, but it's back-to-school time now. Get into the spirit here, with yet another Philosophers' Carnival!

P.S. Yes, I do hope to post again, sometime.

"Keep it alive

2008-08-11T15:43:00.003-04:00

in '75" was the Official Slogan of the Oakland A's that year, after they won it all in 1972 (against the Reds), '73 (Mets), and '74 (Dodgers). However, as anyone who remembers Carlton Fisk's famous Game 6 home run that year will know, "it" was not, in fact, kept alive. The next year they traded Reggie Jackson (against my better judgment, as I recall), and "it" was officially dead and buried.

Perhaps "it" lives on, however, in Philosophers' Carnival #75. Go check!

Seventy-four

2008-07-27T15:12:00.001-04:00

... is the number of the latest Philosophers' Carnival. So since nothing seems to be happening here, you better go over there.

Manfred Frank makes an important distinction

2008-07-16T22:13:00.001-04:00

In The Subject and the Text, currently available only in a shamefully expensive hardcover edition from Cambridge, Manfred Frank tries to show how well Friedrich Schleiermacher "lends himself to getting the dialogue moving" between certain contemporary philosophical movements.

[In a few countries] there have been fruitful discussions between positions of analytical philosophy and of phenomenological hermeneutics. But the few, timorous attempts to initiate a discussion between representatives of these two movements and French post-structuralist semiologists have met with almost no response. [p. 1]

I'm not sure I would characterize What is Neo-structuralism? as "timorous", exactly. Maybe he's referring to attempts other than his own. In any case, a footnote insists on an important distinction to be made here.

My respect for the representatives of this direction of thought calls for a distinction to be made between them and those befuddled opponents of enlightenment (allegedly) following in Foucault's footsteps and above all the intellectual Calibans of the 'Anti-Oedipus', whose garbled 'discourses' one can hardly study without experiencing the sort of pleasure that Schopenhauer felt when reading Hegel.

From my brief perusal of that volume some time ago, I don't remember What is Neo-structuralism? being so harsh on Deleuze. "Intellectual Calibans," phew! I wonder what exactly set him off.

And unfortunately Google Books allows only brief glimpses of The Subject and the Text. So we'll have to leave it at that for now.

Sway

2008-07-14T22:09:00.002-04:00

This started out as another microreview, but it became both macro, on the one hand, and not so much a review of the book as another philosophical rant. Too bad, I should do more of the latter anyway.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori and Rom Brafman, is another pop-psych book, like Blink and The Tipping Point. It spends its time going over some things which may already be familiar, like the dollar auction (here, due to inflation, a twenty-dollar auction), group conformity experiments, the money-splitting experiment, etc. It's short, and these things are neat, so you might want to check it out. (That's the microreview part. On to the rant.)

Here are the authors on diagnosis bias. After relating how student evaluations of a visiting lecturer can depend to a surprising degree on whether the students are told in advance that he is regarded by others as "very warm" vs. "rather cold", they claim that this phenomenon extends as well to such things as dating, where we really might have thought we were reacting not to short descriptions we had heard in advance, but what we had experienced for ourselves over an entire evening:

[A] single word has the power to alter our whole perception of another person—and possibly sour the relationship before it even begins. When we hear a description of someone, no matter how brief, it inevitably shapes our experience of that person.

Fair enough, and of course this result is congenial to anyone suspicious of, say, the neutral Given. Here's their example (pp. 73-4):

Think how often we diagnose a person based on a casual description. Imagine you're set up on a blind date with a friend of a friend. When the big night arrives, you meet your date at a restaurant and make small talk while you wait for the appetizer to arrive. "So," you say, "what do you have planned for this weekend?" "Oh, probably what I do every weekend: stay home and read Hegel," your date responds with a straight face. Because your mutual friend described your date as "smart, funny, and interesting," you laugh, thinking to yourself that your friend was right, this person's deadpan sense of humor is right up your alley. And just like that, the date is off to a promising start. But what if the friend had described your date as "smart, serious, and interesting"? In that light, you might interpret the comment as genuine and instead think "How much Hegel can one person read?" Your entire perception of your date would be clouded; you'd spend the rest of dinner wracking your brain over the difference between Heidegger and Hegel and leave without ordering dessert.

Because of course no one who's smart, funny, and interesting could ever spend his or her weekends reading Hegel. That'd be crazy!

Seriously, though, the authors oversimplify. They make it sound like once you have preconceptions (which everyone does), you're irrevocably committed to a certain interpretation of your experience. This strikes me as a facile recoil from a naïve commitment to an impossible "objectivity" (in this sense, an ideal detachment from our subjective perceptions) to an implausible determinism, analogous to the relevant sense of "historicism," i.e., the sort of thing of which Gadamer is often accused by his realist critics.

As I read him, however, it is instead this recoil itself which is Gadamer's target (as well as Davidson's, mutatis mutandis). I'll put the point in Davidsonian terms, but if this isn't what Horizontverschmelzung is all about, then I'm not getting Gadamer at all (which is of course a possibility). The process of interpretation isn't simply one of gathering all your data as "objectively" as possible and (thus) only then engaging our subjective faculties to arrive at a possible meaning. It's interactive, in that we interact not only with other speakers, but also with the world. That is, interpretation (into meaning) and inquiry (into fact) are two aspects of the same process. We attribute belief and meaning to our interlocutor at the same time as confirming or modifying our own beliefs and meanings, and in conveying our interpretation to others (or simply manifesting it in our actions), we express our own beliefs and meanings simultaneously as well, for further interpreters to unpack, and so on.

This means that while our initial reactions may indeed depend (surprisingly) sensitively on our preconceptions – or "prejudices" (Vorurteile) as Gadamer provocatively calls them – we may find that modifying them will be necessary if we are to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation. In fact, again, since interpretation just is inquiry (and, crucially, vice versa), we can purposely tailor our interaction to subject our preconceptions, and (what Quine calls) our "analytical [semantic] hypotheses," to test.

Let's say I've been told my date is "serious." She deadpans that her weekends are dedicated to Hegel studies. Maybe I am indeed less likely to regard that comment as a joke than if she's been described to me as "funny." But that doesn't mean it's not a joke. In particular, I don't have to spend the rest of the date worrying about how I got stuck with such a geek (or, more likely in my case, about whether I should wait until the next date to propose marriage, or can I pop the question over dessert). Nor should I necessarily feel safe in laughing ironically, acknowledging her humor, if I've been told she's "funny." Maybe, although indeed funny, she's also a Hegel scholar, and to laugh at how she spends her weekends will be an insulting gaffe.

If there's any doubt – and why shouldn't there be some, as we've just met – I can just ask: "Really?" As with the original remark, here the right intonation can render this rejoinder perfectly noncommittal between acknowledging and continuing the joke, or taking it seriously and allowing an elaboration. Maybe I'll get

Yes, I'm currently rereading Glauben und Wissen – usually translated Faith and Knowledge, but "Glauben" means "belief" as well as "faith" – because I really think Hegel's conception of skepticism, especially early on, before the Phenomenology, is key to any really useful contemporary appropriation of his views.

Now I've learned something: she's probably serious (be still, my heart!). It could still be a joke; but even if so, I've learned that a) she knows something about Hegel, so she can't think it would be crazy to spend one's weekends on him; and b) her sense of humor is such as to try to squeeze every last drop of irony from one's facetious suggestions.

If I maintain my noncommittal tone, the ball begins to shift (if I may so abuse this metaphor) over to her court. If she's joking, she will probably eventually need some overt acknowledgment from me that I have so understood her. She may escalate the facetious scenario to more and more outrageous heights, to provoke an actual laugh. Maybe she'll tell me that she reads Kierkegaard in the shower, and puts Adorno's Negative Dialectics under her pillow at night in lieu of actually reading it. It would be a good idea for me to laugh at this point, if only to curtail a line of conversation which is providing diminishing humorous returns (or to confirm that she is in fact joking rather than very unusual indeed, and perhaps not as marriageable as all that). Or she'll laugh herself and acknowledge the joke, perhaps continuing in an overtly humorous rather than ironic vein. ("No, I'm kidding, I was a philosophy major, but now I'm all dialectic-ed out; actually I just use the Phenomenology to prop up the air conditioner.") And of course I might have gotten that last one as an immediate response to my initial "Really?"

My point is not that our interpretive preconceptions can be overcome with careful inquiry. Maybe they can, in particular cases, or even most; but a general claim to that effect would simply be a re-recoil back to a dogmatic commitment to ideal objectivity – a one-sided assimilation of interpretation to ("objective") inquiry, rather than a recognition of their interconstitutive nature. We hardly need chaos theory to tell us that the course of a conversation may well be significantly constrained by how it begins – we all know the experience of getting off on the wrong foot (i.e., and never regaining our footing). But significant constraint falls well short of determination. More to the point, our interpretive practices, qua doxastic as well as semantic, are designed precisely so that we may use the third point of the interpretive triangle, our shared yet objective world, as leverage.

This would also be a good time to note that Gadamer's ideal of Horizontverschmelzung is just that: a fusion of horizons, not anything more drastic. When we have so fused our horizons, we're still a) two different people; b) with (some) divergent beliefs; and c) (some) divergent linguistic dispositions. We have simply come to understand each other, to the degree appropriate to that judgment in the context. We've overcome what are interpretable in retrospect as obstacles; yet while we can now see ourselves as occupying the same space, we may still be standing as far away from each other as we started out. Which is why hermeneutic philosophy may not be so opposed to Wittgensteinian "quietism" as people think: in the former case as well as the latter, the idea is not so much to go somewhere as to find out where we are, even while allowing that doing so need not require that we stand stock-still in order to find our bearings. Of course, Wittgenstein himself could be clearer on this point ...

Allons enfants

2008-07-14T11:18:00.003-04:00

Allons, c'est à dire, à la Bastille Day edition de la Carnivale des Philosophes. D'accord?

Existential generalization

2008-07-03T20:25:00.004-04:00

The latest issue of Newsweek (billed as The (mostly) Big Thoughts Edition) features a Quiz whereby one may test one's knowledge of important matters. As usual, some of the questions are easy if one has, over the past decade, been avoiding Mars ["Which of the following [alcohol, carbohydrates, protein, fat] contains the most calories?"], and some of them only purport to test one's knowledge, as opposed to one's ability to guess ["Between 1980 and 2006, how many weather-related disasters caused more than $1 billion in damages at the time of the event?"].

One question, though, was neither of these. "How many presidents," the Quiz demands to know, "achieved the rank of general or higher?" Our options: 2, 3, 5, 7. First off, "higher"? I don't suppose they mean Commander-in-Chief, because then the answer would, I imagine, be 43 (or 42, if we only count Cleveland once). And the only reason that we know that it is Presidents of the U.S.A. whom we are looking for (so Charles De Gaulle doesn't count) is a big picture (not the one above), of our 18th President. Now of course once we've established what we're talking about, anyone over the age of 30 should be able to get two more of these guys right away, as we went to grade school back in the days when such facts were impressed upon us as the branding iron is impressed upon the helpless calf. But I digress.

And this indeed is Newsweek's own answer: the guy pictured, that guy, and that guy. No more. But there are more, aren't there?

As it happens, Wikipedia is a bit coy w/r/t a couple of them, and I'm not so motivated as to, like, get out biographies from the library. But the other guys were certainly generals. I await the outraged cries, in next week's letters section, of the editors of X's collected correspondence, and the curator of the Y estate.

Party pooper

2008-07-01T14:54:00.003-04:00

Professor Brooks seems ambivalent about readers' suggestions for the latest Philosophers' Carnival:

Unfortunately, while not all will appear, a great many do.

This is a job for Language Log!

[Thanx to Daniel for the LL tip!]

Microreviews born of stinginess

2008-06-26T02:38:00.003-04:00

I have to take these books back to the library, so I better say something about them now or hold my peace at least until I can get them out again. Ten cents a day may not sound like much, but ... okay, well, it isn't much, but I'm cheap.

First we have The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, by Austin Dacey, who (the blurb tells us) has a doctorate in applied ethics and social philosophy. This is a fine entry into the religio-cultural wars, much better than those of either the Four Horsemen (Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris) or what Dawkins calls their "fleas" (A. McGrath, J. Haught, etc.). I have been particularly disappointed by the latter crew. When your opponents lob softballs in your direction, making a point of their ignorance (comparing theology to "fairy-ology" and bemoaning the expenditure of university resources on such inanities), you're supposed to take your time and hit them out of the park. But so far all I've seen is nonsense on the order of "science can't account for love." My word, I think we should be able to do better than that.

Dr. Dacey is a member of the secularist camp (The Secular Conscience is published by Prometheus Books). His main point is that secularists are wrong to demand the removal of religion from public life on the grounds that it is "a private matter." Such a demand not only alienates religious believers, denying them (as they rightly point out) the right to full participation in public life, but also shields religiously motivated claims from the (presumably) reasoned criticism of secular (and other religious) critics. Dacey explains this view in terms of the concept of conscience, which is an essentially public phenomenon: one's conscience is what tells one what to do, what moral stance to take in public matters. As a secularist, he presents this refreshingly anti-dualist argument in explicitly naturalistic terms, which bothers me slightly for reasons we need not go into here (basically, naturalists have a bit of work to do in order to be entitled to such arguments qua naturalistic; a minor point in this context, I suppose). On the other hand, if naturalists start to see a public/private dualism as something to avoid, then I'm all for it, and we can work the kinks out later. The book is very clearly written, and maybe I'll get it out again for a closer look later on.

Our second book is What is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology by Ed Regis. Dr. Regis is also a philosopher, and this small volume is a look back at Schrödinger's famous essay of the same name, from the perspective of recent attempts to create "living" cells in the laboratory. What, one might very well ask, are we even talking about here? Regis is also a very clear writer (see, analytic philosophy training is good for something), and the book combines a brief history, a provocative discussion of the central issues, and a peek into the contemporary laboratory.

Some of the history is devoted to giving forgotten innovators proper recognition, allowing the reader to drop the names (should one remember them with cocktail in hand) of Johann Friedrich Miescher (who first isolated what turned out to be DNA in 1869), Marshall Nirenberg (who discovered in 1961 that mRNA coded for proteins), and Santorio Santorio (a pioneer in the study of metabolism, whose 1614 treatise Ars de statica medicina was "arguably the first diet-craze book in history"). This last gentleman is introduced in a most interesting chapter called "ATP and the Meaning of Life," which will make you look at the Krebs cycle in a whole new way (that is, if you have an old one at all).

Metabolism, in fact, turns out, in Regis's view, to be the key factor in any workable definition of life. He rejects the pessimistic attitude which masquerades as a virtuous anti-essentialism, which would have us abandon the attempt to choose among "a wretched excess of competing definitions." In general, I agree that such virtue need not require that we throw up our hands in futility, and Regis makes a good case for metabolism, arguing against the "dormant spore" objection, the "candle flame" objection, and the "automobile" objection (use your imaginations). Yet at the end he admits that "this [definition] might have a rather short half-life" [heh heh].

Our third book returns us to the religio-cultural wars. You may have heard about this one, about which there has been a raging controversy. Antony Flew is yet another philosopher, and the purported author of There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. The book's cover matches the subtlety of its subtitle: over an inverted photograph of the man in question appear in red block capitals the words THERE IS NO GOD, with the NO scratched out and replaced with a handwritten "A". Then follows the subtitle, with the middle three words in bold. Directly underneath, nestled in Flew's hair, we have Francis S. Collins's blurb: "Towering and courageous.... Flew's colleagues in the church of fundamentalist atheism will be scandalized." Take that, you, you, ... atheists!

The controversy I mentioned concerns, as you might expect, the question of whether or to what extent Professor Flew is the author of this book at all. It's credited (in big letters) to Flew "with" (in smaller type) one Roy Abraham Varghese, about whom I know little, but he's apparently either an evangelist himself or closely associated with same. Not that that disqualifies him from co-writing this book, of course, given its purported content, but you can see how it might be troublesome if there's any question about Flew's competence. For that is indeed what critics assert: that unscrupulous fundies have exploited the man's supposedly diminished faculties for their own propagandistic ends, putting into his mouth all sorts of things he has never believed (see, e.g., here, and here, and here).

I'm not going to worry about all that, as I have no interest in Flew's reputation. (I do find it interesting that someone I have barely heard of is hailed by enthusiastic blurbers (i.e., the usual suspects) as "one of the leading analytical philosophers of the twentieth century", a "major thinker," and "a stellar philosophical mind" – now, at least, that he has come over to their way of thinking. But let's let that pass.) Surely Flew suffers from at least some deficit; what philosopher allows a work which purports to signal a major shift in doctrine – or anything else for that matter – to be written by someone else? Whether or not the views expressed here are actually his, it would beg the question to appeal to Flew's apparently diminished cognitive powers as showing that the arguments presented in this text are lame. For that we need to take a look at the text itself.

As it happens, that's all we need to do. Whoever its author, There is no a God is embarrassingly awful, even by the woeful standards of analytic philosophy of religion. Only two thirds of it (158 large-fonted pages) is Flew's text; there are two appendices, one a bilious attack on the "New Atheism" by Varghese, the other an earnest apology (billed as a "dialogue" with theologian N. T. Wright, but Wright does virtually all of the talking) for the divinity of Jesus, based on the compelling evidence of ... the empty tomb. The first half of Flew's contribution is biographical (then I had a debate with so-and-so, in which I argued in such-and-such a manner), followed by brief and bizarrely quotation-ridden outlines of the usual familiar theistic talking points, complete with chatty, pointlessly long-winded apologetic parables ("Imagine entering a hotel room on your next vacation. [...] You glance into the bathroom, where personal care and grooming products are lined up on the counter, each one as if it was chosen specifically for you [etc., etc.]"), and innumerable self-righteous affirmations that he, unlike some people, is committed to following the evidence wherever it may lead.

Not all of this material is jaw-droppingly stupid, but there's certainly nothing new here. I won't go over it all (use your imagination), but I did want to share one bit that quite literally left me agape (no pun intended). In 2004, Flew tells us, he announced at the beginning of what was to have been a debate on the matter, that he "now accepted the existence of a God," agreeing with another symposiast that "recent work on the origin of life pointed to the activity of a creative Intelligence." (No, that's not the stupid part. Hold on, it's coming.)

I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeder's point-by-point refutation of what I call the "monkey theorem." This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet.

Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys.

I can't even write all this out; it's too gruesome. Many entirely pointless mathematical-sounding calculations later:

After hearing Schroeder's presentation, I told him that he had very satisfactorily and decisively established that the "monkey theorem" was a load of rubbish, and that is was particularly good to do it with just a sonnet [...]. If the theorem won't work for a single sonnet, then of course it's simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.

Yikes. I think that's the worst of it, but if you do choose to read this book: you have been warned.

Alaaf to you too

2008-06-16T19:21:00.001-04:00

Travel to The Ends of Thought and behold the marvels of the Philosophers' Karneval!

Threescore and ten

2008-06-02T19:50:00.001-04:00

-th Philosophers' Carnival, that is. Check out the photo of Kripke and Fodor (plus two other guys)!

Davidson and Gadamer

2008-05-28T21:38:00.003-04:00

Recently a few friends stopped by to discuss Davidson, and Clark brought up Derrida's criticism of Gadamer, which he thought might be similar to Dummett's criticism of Davidson (i.e., as committed to something unpleasant or other, I didn't really get it). We ended up talking past each other – I don't get Derrida at all – but I did want to say a few things about the comparison on the one end between Davidson and Gadamer.

I imagine that some of our trouble came from the fact, as I did mention in that discussion, that Derrida's criticism is directed at Gadamer, not Davidson, so it's not really appropriate to speak Davidsonian in response, as I was doing. The similarities between the two are undeniable, but of course that doesn't make the two positions identical. In his article in Gadamer's Century, McDowell defends the two against charges of relativism, of which he takes them both to be innocent for pretty much the same reasons, and so in that context it's easy to elide the differences and just regard Gadamer as one of the good guys. I shouldn't do that.

But as Clark was describing it, Derrida's charge seems not to be one of relativism, but instead of dogmatism. Where we assume that communication is successful (such that our task is to explain how such a thing is possible), it may yet be that there is instead a "radical rupture" of some (necessarily) mysterious kind. This claim sounds to me like the ontological cum semantic equivalent of Cartesian radical epistemological doubt: offended by our seeming complacency concerning the apparent smoothness of typical conversation, the skeptical soixante-huitard imp hops in with dire warnings of ruptures and fissures and cracks, oh my!

Naturally Davidson comes in for a version of these charges as well (if not from Dummett; cf. Stroud and C. McGinn, who reject, on Cartesian grounds, the anti-skeptical consequences of Davidson's account of interpretation and belief), but Gadamer's case is a bit different. From Habermas, as one might expect, the charge against Gadamer took a characteristic form: if our conception of an objective world is limited by our cultural/linguistic horizons, then we won't have the detachment necessary to perform Critique. We dogmatically assume the world is as we have traditionally construed it, and even when we open our horizons up to achieve Horizontverschmelzung (I love that word) with the Other, we still don't acknowledge the absolute otherness of the objective world: now we both "could be wrong" about it. (Or something like that; I can go look.) Incidentally, people have been known to say the same thing about Wittgenstein, or at least "Winchgenstein."

But now two things occur to me about that. First, that accusation does indeed sound like Stroud's criticism of Davidson. And second, this criticism is pretty similar to that directed at Gadamer's supposed relativism (think, for example, of the various definitions – that is, by opponents – of "historicism"): Gadamer is held to claim that our beliefs are culturally determined (dogmatism), so the denizens of the various cultures never reach out to an objective world, rendering them equal in their futility (relativism). This makes sense, in that that Janus-faced flaw is absent from Davidson and (as I've been able to read him so far) Gadamer as well, and telling the proper story about interpretation can bring both of these things out at the same time (as in McDowell's article). I mean, seriously, if Gadamer were really interested simply in retreating from realism to relativism, Truth and Method wouldn't need to be 600 pages long. The tough part is drawing the proper consequences from a) the linguistic structure of cultural tradition and b) the plurality of same in a single objective world. The optimistic thought of Davidsonian Gadamerians is that T & M contains a helpful post-Heideggerian analogue to Davidson's rejection of the scheme-content dualism. But I haven't even read it, so I wouldn't know. (Maybe Malpas's article in Gadamer's Century can tell us.)

Still, if Derrida's criticism were similar to Habermas's, then maybe Gadamer would have said so (and thus not respond, as Daniel paraphrases him in comments, with "Huh?"). But I've never read that exchange, as I've heard before that it was a total train wreck.

More brain food (Davidson and Deleuze)

2008-05-24T20:25:00.002-04:00

John Protevi informs us that his entry on Gilles Deleuze is now up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Better delayed than at no time!

Also, while I was over there at SEP I stopped by the Davidson entry by Jeff Malpas. Nothing new there, except that I followed the link to his website, where he has posted a number of papers (scroll all the way down), including a couple on Davidson and/or Gadamer, as well as (oh, happy day) the complete text of a newly revised edition of his book on Davidson, which is now entitled Davidson's Holism: Epistemology in the Mirror of Meaning. Here's a snip from the intro:

[T]he holism that is the central focus for my account became an increasingly important, if sometimes still under-developed, theme in Davidson’s own writing over the last fifteen years or so. The idea of triangulation, in particular, which can itself be seen as a development out of the notion of charity, and the associated idea of the indispensability of a notion of objectivity in understanding, is particularly significant in this regard. In triangulation, arguably the central idea in Davidson’s later writing, the idea of what I here termed ‘psychological holism’ (which on my account is seen as itself incorporating an externalist commitment) can be seen as being developed through the notion of the interdependence, not only of the attitudes and behavior of individual agents and speakers, but also of the concepts of the subjective, the objective and the intersubjective.

Tell it, brother! I took the original version of this book out of the library once during my early acquaintance with Davidson's work, but (heh heh) never got to it. Again, better delayed, &c.

Three Shadows

2008-05-22T22:28:00.004-04:00

First Second (:01) is a primo arty comix imprint that just gets better and better. Recently I've read and enjoyed the cleverly meta The Fate of the Artist, the utterly charming The Professor's Daughter, Malaysian cartoonist Lat's Kampung Boy, a peek into another world (I see the second one is out now), and the almost unbearably moving Laika. Now comes Cyril Pedrosa's exquisite Three Shadows, featuring richly detailed and expressive line drawings and a thrilling, poignant tale of magic and loss. Check 'em all out!

Free food (brain variety)

2008-05-19T11:46:00.002-04:00

In case you missed it (as I did, although I think someone may have mentioned it at some point), the April 2008 issue of the European Journal of Philosophy is free online. Some interesting stuff!

Davidson and Dummett

2008-05-15T00:01:00.003-04:00

In Davidson's response ("The Social Aspect of Language") to Michael Dummett's criticism of Davidson's 1986 article "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," he says that "what bothers Michael is [...] my failure to appreciate that the concept of a speaker meaning something by what he says depends on the notion of a shared language and not the other way around" (Truth, Language, and History, p. 111). Naturally I agree with Davidson here; but I do have a few concerns about some of the sub-morals to be drawn. I intend to talk about those concerns eventually, but first let me deal with a broader issue, which is that Dummett doesn't seem to have any idea what Davidson is talking about, something which (as you can imagine) renders his criticism somewhat ineffective.

Apparently Dummett thinks that in speaking this way Davidson violates Wittgensteinian strictures against "private languages". But an idiolect isn't the same thing as a "private language" at all. Wittgenstein's target in those famous sections of PI is the Cartesian idea that one can fix the meaning of one's own words by a form of "inner ostension" – that I can as it were "point" to some "inner" mental item and say "when I say X I mean that." This is a fairly specific manifestation of the more general Cartesian picture which has been Wittgenstein's target from the beginning of the book.

As an aside: this can help explain a strange phenomenon in contemporary attitudes toward Philosophical Investigations. Most analytic philosophers who deal with Wittgenstein at all regard the first quarter or so of the book as nothing more than throat-clearing and hand-waving. That's why Kripke's book had such an impact. It said: when most people think of PI, they think of the Private Language Argument. But there's some stuff before that (i.e., the rule-following considerations), of which the PLA is just a specific instance! Well, yes (duh); but with that in mind, perhaps we might keep going back before §142 (imagine that) to find the real core of the book. On this latter reading, the PLA, while interesting, in one sense doesn't really tell us anything we couldn't already have guessed. The book's real subject is the more general (and deep-seated, so much so as to be virtually invisible) Cartesian attitude, and what it takes to render it both visible and treatable at the same time (which turns out not to be as easy as it sounds, as the two tend to get in each other's way).

Now Davidson doesn't make as big a deal about his anti-Cartesianism as Rorty does (his own or Davidson's), which is ironic as Davidson's is the more effective version. But in any case, it would surely be odd for Davidson to set up his entire interpretive system as he does specifically to avoid the Cartesian "inner" – and then fail to notice that he falls into what by that point in PI is a fairly straightforward manifestation of that idea.

But of course he doesn't do this. "Idiolect" is Davidson's term for that structured set of linguistic dispositions attributed by an interpreter to a particular person at a particular time and place. The basis for these attributions, in Davidson's account, is of course the interpreter's observations of, and interactions with, the interlocutor in question, over a period of time. It is not new to "Nice Derangement," but goes back to "Radical Interpretation" and other mid-70's papers, that such attributions of a person's meanings cannot be delivered independently of attributing beliefs to him at the same time – and this requires shared interactions with an objective world. There is no question of meaning's dependence on a purely subjective "inner."

The worry about "inner" ostension of meanings was the typically Cartesian one that for all we know from the "outside," someone might mean something entirely different from the meaning we attribute to him on the basis of his verbal and physical behavior (and our own understanding of our shared environment). Dummett's criticism amounts to the charge that in making the idea of a "shared language" dependent on attributions of meaning achievable without previous agreement (i.e. "linguistic conventions"), Davidson leaves open a very real possibility of attributing to a speaker some meanings he had not "agreed to" and might therefore have his own ("internal"?) ideas about. Or something – I don't even see room for such criticism here, but it must be something like that or the PLA couldn't come up at all.

For this is exactly wrong. The whole point of "Nice Derangement" is to account for the manifest success of communication and understanding, even in cases, such as malapropisms, where such success cannot be accounted for by the traditional model (of previously established linguistic conventions). Of course, in any particular case, you may simply deny that understanding has indeed occurred – just as you may feel obliged to say of any of my beliefs that they "might be false"; but part of Davidson's point is that such skepticism about meaning would manifest exactly the sort of theoretically-driven perversity as does Cartesian skepticism about belief.

In any case an "idiolect" is precisely not a "private language." In attributing meanings to a speaker, I thereby indicate that they are shared: we have used his language to communicate. In this sense, defining a "sociolect" such as English or Flemish is, as Davidson elaborates Dummett's complaint, "the philosophically rather unimportant task of grouping idiolects". Naturally languages of this sort are "shared"; but at the more fundamental level, the sharing in question is not at all dependent on the sort of "linguistic conventions" one uses to make the broader, relatively (conceptually!) straightforwardly empirical charaterizations of languages made by linguists.

Now it may seem as if idealism or instrumentalism threatens here, as if I have denied the very possibility of "getting someone wrong." You might think this if, like Dummett, you thought that only (pre-existing) shared rules can provide objective grounding for attributions of meaning. But this is false. Naturally, again, you may dispute my attribution of certain meanings to our informant's utterances; but that just means that you are not satisfied that communication has occurred, i.e., you feel that we interpreters need to continue the process of interpretation further – that I have jumped the gun. And again, just as in the other skeptical case, what you may not do is allow that communication has occurred, but that (due to the lack of previously established agreement about meaning), my attributions are somehow still suspect. It's like saying "yes, we should believe that P; but is it really true?" Compare: "yes, you two succeeded in communicating; but is that what he really meant?" In either case, to ask this is to grant something in one breath and take it back in the next (not good).

Of course people say that first thing too. And this last bit (about the parallel) is my line, not Davidson's. Davidson doesn't say much about epistemology, which leads him into some trouble by my lights, but we'll leave that for another time.

There'll always be an England

2008-05-13T21:09:00.001-04:00

A right clever quip from the BBC:

A man who allegedly photographed more than 3,000 women's bottoms as they toured Venice has been arrested.

The man was stopped after police became suspicious of a large bag he was carrying as he followed women through St Mark's Square.

He has been charged with infringement of privacy. It is a cheeky crime, which could earn this 38-year-old Italian from six months to four years in jail.

I say! Quite! This reminds me of an interview with Brian Eno, in which the interviewer brings up Eno's self-documented fondness for what the interviewer (a Yank, no doubt) referred to as "women's bums" – to which a horrified Eno replied, "'bottoms'! Please!"

Stop me before I descend into talk of Sinn and Bedeutung...

Open sesame

2008-04-28T11:55:00.002-04:00

The 68th Philosophers' Carnival has an Open Source theme. If you don't know what that means, then click you must.

The relevance of Wittgenstein to ... well, never mind what

2008-04-25T16:21:00.004-04:00

Earlier today, Brian Leiter linked to this blistering salvo, which would be of little interest to those of us who do not care whether what Andrew Sullivan says about William Kristol reveal the former to be an anti-semite, except that all of a sudden, an impassioned debate broke out in the comments about ... Wittgenstein's influence on contemporary analytic philosophy. Much of this is familiar (Jason Stanley drops by to disparage Hegel), but some of us (I include myself) can't get enough. Check it out!

UPDATE [4/28]: Phew. N interlocutors, N + 1 opinions about Wittgenstein. See also here (not sure if it's a propos or just timely).

The real place to go for idealism (PC LXVII)

2008-04-14T22:40:00.001-04:00

Here, that is.

Library book sale, pt. 2: the anticlimax

2008-04-12T20:46:00.004-04:00

After the excitement narrated in my previous post, in which much fun was had in the Religion section of the book sale, we turn to the remainder of the current haul. The next port of call was the Literature section, where I found this:

Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation and other essays (1966)

Most of these essays are on stuff that was hip at the time. e.g., Godard, Bresson, Camus, Lukács, Weil, Ionesco, Resnais, Artaud, and Norman O. Brown. The title essay was supposed to be controversial, but what she seems actually to be arguing against looks pretty lame, making her thesis relatively commonsensical:

Of course, I don't mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, "There are no facts, only interpretations." By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain "rules" of interpretation.

Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don't you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C? [...] The modern style of interpretation [as in Marx and Freud] excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs "behind" the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.

Sounds nasty, all right. Note the offhand "(rightly)" in the first paragraph. Somehow I don't trust Ms. Sontag to be able to tell us what sense that is, in which N. is right, especially as she gets the quote wrong: it's not "there are no facts," (as of course there are facts), but "there are no 'facts'", where I take the scare quotes, in the spare and artificial context of The Will to Power, to indict, not the objectivity of the real world, but instead the hyperobjectivity of Platonism. FWIW; I wouldn't put too much emphasis on that overanalyzed little snippet either way.

Next we have:

Italo Calvino – The Uses of Literature: Essays (1986)

I like Calvino's fiction (Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveler); maybe if I read this one I'll stop mixing him up with Umberto Eco. One of the essays is called "Philosophy and Literature." After starting off with just those two, he continues:

What I have described in terms of a twin-bed marriage must be seen as a ménage à trois: philosophy, literature, and science. Science is faced with problems not too dissimilar from those of literature. It makes patterns of the world that are immediately called in question, it swings between the inductive and the deductive methods, and it must always be on its guard lest it mistake its own linguistic conventions for objective laws. We will not have a culture equal to the challenge until we compare against one another the basic problematics of science, philosophy, and literature, in order to call them all into question.

A three-way, eh? (Those Europeans!)

Kathleen Coburn, ed. – Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays (1967)

I think I've already snagged the Sartre and Emerson volumes in this series (Twentieth Century Views), which must have come out later, as they're not listed on the back cover with the earlier ones, which are more traditionally literary, albeit wideranging (Jonson to Beckett). In the final essay in this one, Dorothy M. Emmet discusses Coleridge's interest in Kant et al:

My own view is that this philosophy [German Idealism] gave [Coleridge] a general intellectual apparatus with the help of which he tried to say what he had to say and to give a more systematic appearance to his empirical discoveries, but that he was not concerned to make himself into a post-Kantian idealist on the German model. True, in the collection of extracts from the notebooks called Anima Poetae, he says "In the preface of my metaphysical works, I should say: 'Once for all, read Kant, Fichte, etc., and then you will trace, or, if you are on the hunt, track me.'" But here he is answering charges of plagiarism, and seeking to make a kind of omnibus acknowledgment while saying at the same time that the thoughts had been his own before he had heard of these writers. in any cas the track of Coleridge is more complex than Kant and Fichte: among other paths it leads along the road to Xanadu.

Wild woodcut-ish drawing of the Ancient Mariner on the cover. Here's another take, by Hunt Emerson:

Moving right along, next I moved myself right along to the Sociology section, where I found:

Raymond Aron – Main Currents in Sociological Thought II: Durkheim, Pareto, Weber (1970)

Volume I, just for the record, features Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, and "the Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848". From the preface of vol. II:

I must force myself to recognize the merits, however splendid, of Durkheim, whereas Max Weber never irritates me even when I feel most remote from him. As for Pareto, he no longer provokes me to any strong reaction one way or the other.

I think we can all relate to that. Right next to the Sociology section was the Science section (usually slim pickings there, mostly way out of date), where I picked up:

David Bodanis – The Secret Family: Twenty-four Hours Inside the Mysterious World of Our Minds and Bodies (1997)

Our author knowing a good thing when he sees it, this book is a sequel to The Secret House and The Secret Garden. These books all feature a wealth of bizarre tidbits of information, usually about what's going on at the microlevel of whatever he's talking about. This provides an excuse for lots of colorful thermograms and photomicrographs and whatnot. For example, the back cover shows sweat droplets, the hottest and coolest areas of a woman's body, the liquid glue on the back of a yellow post-it note, and "monolithic slabs of vitamin C." If any of our family had basal cell carcinoma, on the other hand, we'd probably see this one (courtesy of the Loyola University Medical Education Network:

I was ready to go at this point, but the next one happened to catch my eye on the way out.

Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections (2001)

This guy was in my class at college (I think; I never met him). I borrowed this book once, but never got to it. Could be a while, but at least now I have it.

And just for good measure, while checking out I grabbed one more:

Samantha Ettus, ed. – The Experts' Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do (2004)

I'm not convinced that all of these things are such that everyone needs to know how to do them (swing a golf club?), but some of them look useful, and there are some amusing celebrity cameos. Here's Tucker Carlson on how to tie a bow tie. After the complicated technical stuff, there's this:

5. Tighten by pulling on the opposite folded ends. Adjust by fiddling. This is the subjective, artistic phase of the process. You may opt for the loose, floppy glass-of-cognac-in-the-morning Churchill look; the precision-perfect Fruit of Islam, Farrakhan-bodyguard look; or somewhere in between. As in life, somewhere in between is probably best.

6. Admire handicraft in mirror.

7. Consider whether you really want to do this. Keep in mind that when you wear a bow tie, people will make assumptions about you, and probably should. The good news is, you'll never commit adultery when you wear a bow tie; you won't have the opportunity. The bad news is, strangers will snicker at you in airports. Is it worth it? Only you can be the judge.

Or your wife, I imagine.

That's all, folks! See you in October!

Library book sale!

2008-04-09T20:46:00.005-04:00

It's that time of year again! (Actually they do it twice a year, April and October.) Let's see if I can remember the order in which I picked them up.

Right off the bat I headed to the Religion section – because that's where the philosophy books would be if there are any this time. The first book I snagged was not one of these.

Martin Marty – Martin Luther (2004)

This is from the Penguin Lives series of biographies. I read the Proust one, which was pretty good. I look forward to learning from Professor Marty where exactly "here" is, where Luther was standing (metaphorically speaking). And of course I'm always up for a good Diet of Worms joke (yuk!)

Ralph Walker – Kant (1999)
Roger Scruton – Spinoza (1999)

These are from the Routledge series "The Great Philosophers". Even at six bucks (list price; I paid 15 cents), they're kind of a rip (50+ short pages), but some of them are interesting. I've got the Schopenhauer, Derrida, and Collingwood ones already (never gotten to them in fact, but the Collingwood one looks good, by Aaron Ridley I think). Walker's essay is on the moral philosophy, while Scruton's is a general intro to his guy.

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila By Herself (1562, trans. 1957)

Another Penguin book, this time a Penguin Classic, with the Bernini sculpture on the cover. Check out the typically off-the-wall episode on that work in Simon Schama's series Power of Art. (I haven't seen the Van Gogh episode, with Andy Serkis; that ought to be good – "the crowses, they wants us, gollum!").

Right, St. Teresa. The famous sculpture depicts her recumbent; but as you may know, that wasn't always the case, as editor J. M. Cohen recounts in his introduction:

There are several descriptions by her fellow nuns of moments when they saw her with glowing features, writing as if at a heavenly dictation. But not all the supernatural states that possessed Teresa were equally welcome to her. She herself tells how, in prayer, she would be lifted into the air, to her own consternation and to the alarm of those sisters who were praying beside her in the choir.

These mysterious levitations were matched after her death by the equally mysterious incorruptibility of her body. Both are well-known phenomena which occur in the histories of many saints and that can only be accounted for by some actual change in the physical structure that takes place at the same time as spiritual transformation. In Teresa's case the fragrance that surrounded her uncorrupted body led to most disgraceful results. In the wild rush to acquire sacred relics, various of her limbs were torn from her corpse. Her old friend Father Gracián, who had only lately so disappointed her by failing to accompany her on a journey, inaugurated her dismemberment by cutting off one of her hands.

Eww. The next book I espied was a nondescript-looking volume with a plain brown cover:

Swami Vivekananda – Jnana-Yoga (1961)

This is from the Advaita Ashrama imprint out of Calcutta (price: Rs. 3/4). According to Wikipedia, Vivekananda lived from 1863 to 1902 (an anti-Yankee Doodle Dandy, died on the Fourth of July), and introduced Yoga to America at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. Here are the last two stanzas of the opening selection, "The Song of the Sannyasin":

Few only know the truth. The rest will hate
And laugh at thee, great one; but pay no heed.
Go thou, the free, from place to place and help
Them out of darkness, Maya's veil. Without
The fear of pain or search for pleasure, go
Beyond them both, Sannyasin bold! Say––
"Om Tat Sat, Om!"

Thus, day by day, till Karma's powers spent
Release the soul for ever. No more is birth,
Nor I, nor thou, nor God, nor man. The "I"
Has All become, the All is "I" and Bliss.
Know thou art That, Sannyasin bold! Say––
"Om Tat Sat, Om!"

I assume "Om Tat Sat" means something like "Tat Tvam Asi" (thou art that; though apparently on one interpretation it means "thou art not that". Go figure.).

Michelle Goldberg – Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2007)

The cover blurbs on this one use phrases like "civil liberties under siege by holy rollers," "take over America," "potent wake-up call," and "terrifying," as well as a lot of other heavy breathing. I dunno. I guess I'll read it though. It's pretty short.

Mark Epstein, M. D. – Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness; Lessons from Meditation and Psychotherapy (1998)

I think one subtitle is plenty here. Anyway, it seems that "the Western notion of self is deeply flawed [...] Happiness comes from letting go." This looks to be breezy personal reflections rather than a learned tome.

Robert Linssen – Living Zen (trans. 1958 (from French))

This one, on the other hand, seems to be more in the learned tome mode. From the Introductory Note:

If Zen is approached with the usual mental attitude, it will seem quite incomprehensible. Our average Western intellectuality would consider its paradoxical language simply as a play upon words. Its full significance is revealed only when we approach it in a different manner, making our minds available to the new processes of inner perception which it suggests. [following sentence underscored by previous owner] A certain flexibility of thought is necessary so that the study of a new subject may be fruitful and revealing.

Later on [p. 81]:

Reality Transcends the Duality of 'Mobile and Immobile'

A clarification of our views on the problem of movement is desirable. Without this there might seem to be a number of contradictions.

It may be said with good reason, that movement is a function of time. As Kant expressed it: 'We create time ourselves as a function of our receptive apparatus.'

This is obvious.

Therefore we must make it clear that in the preceeding lines we have considered movement as the essence of phenomenal reality.

The complete Reality of the universe includes the phenomenon and the noumenon. It is neither movement, as we know it in the manifested universe, nor immobility, as suggested by the mind (that is to say the notion of immobility in opposition to our idea of movement).

It is obvious that Reality Itself, in its entirety, is beyond the traditional oppositions of mobility and immobility.

Moreover these divisions are arbitrary. The experience of Satori is a result of emancipation from the arbitrary practice of partitioning our mind.

It is absolutely useless and vain to try and imagine or think of a reality that includes and dominates at the same time the two aspects of mobile and immobile. All discussion in this field leads us astray.

Got that? Write that down. (As John A. Davison would say.)

Nice Zen garden on the cover. (Not this one though.)

Mortimer Adler – Six Great Ideas (Special TV Issue, 1981)

That part about this being a TV Issue refers to the genesis of this book in interviews with Bill Moyers (fun fact: Moyers was LBJ's press secretary for two and a half years). Check out the back-cover picture of Adler with Moyers in Aspen, both perched on what I can only assume is the latter's motorcycle. Holy frijoles, what a time capsule. The hair, the leisure suit, the goofy grin – Bill, Bill. The eighty-ish Adler looks comparatively distinguished in his frumpy suit pants (no jacket or tie; it's probably hot out), gesturing forward past Moyers's unheeding rightward-facing pose, as if to say, get us out of here, you freak.

As for the text, I think last time I picked up Adler's Ten Philosophical Mistakes, believing that one to have more entertainment value. But I'm sure that since one of the G. I.s here is "Truth", this one will have its, uh, moments as well. At least this one doesn't bill Adler, as I believe the other one does, as "America's Foremost Philosopher." Dear God, could that ever have been true?? The mind reels.

Basil Willey – The English Moralists (1964, paperback ed. 1967)

The title phrase appears on the cover of this book no fewer than five times, as if someone is practicing calligraphy or something. Whatever. It actually begins with Plato and Aristotle (who were not English at all), but by chapter 9 the author feels that we are sufficiently prepared to encounter Bacon, followed by Hobbes, the Cambridge Platonists, Sir Thomas Browne (a mere "note" for this guy), Locke, Shaftesbury, Addison, Hume, Chesterfield, Burke, and Coleridge.

Whew, that's enough for now. That was just the Religion section. Tune in next week (or whenever I get to it) for the rest.

Route 66

2008-03-31T19:12:00.000-04:00

The route to Philosophers' Carnival #66 begins here.

Axis of rotation

2008-03-30T21:22:00.002-04:00

In an attempt to avoid an unprecendented situation in which three successive posts linked to Philosophers' Carnivals, I have determined to post today. The reason I haven't been posting is (naturally) not that I have too few ideas, but that I have too many (plus philosophical, or at least bloggy, or maybe even honest-to-goodness, ADD). I've also been reading books, of the dead-tree variety. I just finished Axis, the second in (what will be) Robert Charles Wilson's Spin trilogy. As Amazon reviewers point out, it suffers a bit from second-in-a-trilogy syndrome, in which you have to move the arc along (on the one hand) while leaving something for the bang-up finish (on the other), while still telling a coherent, relatively stand-alone story on the third hand. (Remember, The Lord of the Rings isn't a trilogy, but one long book broken into three volumes by the publisher.)

I won't go into the plot, except vaguely, but if you liked Spin, you will want to read this one too. (If you haven't, stop reading this now and read that instead.) We don't find out that much about the mysterious Hypotheticals (and something tells me he's not exactly going to spill all in the finale either), but of course since the whole business revolves around them, everything weird that happens is related to them in some way. The events take place on the far side of the Arch which our heroes pass through at the end of the first book, but some time has passed since then, and the novelty of the Spin, and that of the colonization of the new planet, has worn off somewhat. In fact, a lot of the new generation doesn't seem particularly interested in all that stuff, as their entire lives have taken place post-Spin. The two main characters in Axis are typical damaged souls in the Wilson mold (q.v. Blind Lake and The Chronoliths as well as Spin itself), but there are other new faces as well, and our heroes from the first book are not forgotten (I better stop there).

I've also been reading some uncharacteristic material as well, which I don't want to blog about until I have something I know I want to say. Definitely thought-provoking though!

Erin go bragh

2008-03-16T23:23:00.003-04:00

Philosophers' Carnival, St. Patrick's Day edition. G'wan with ye now, and check it out!

Number 64

2008-03-03T01:03:00.002-05:00

Philosophers' Carnival #64, that is. And the Great Title award this time goes to [rustle rustle] ... Practical Ethics, for "Come Mr Branson Mon, Tally me Biofuel". Nice one!

All hail teh internets

2008-02-28T18:25:00.002-05:00

I was reading this thread at Leiter's about the nature of philosophy (glad to see people thinking about that, but I wasn't too jazzed about any of the answers there), and a mention of David Lewis reminded me that I had always thought there was an interesting comparison between Lewis's modal realism and Deleuze's conception of the virtual (unfortunately, I'm not well-versed enough in either to make anything of that myself). So I thought, huh, let's see what Google has to say about "Deleuze virtual David Lewis". First result = a pdf of the fifth paper on this page, entitled "Deleuze and Lewis on the real, the virtual, and the possible". Bingo! Not only that, this paper turns out to be a chapter from this book, the full text of which is available in pdf form at that second link, along with a lot of related material. Now if I just had time to read it ...

Also, random link-following has revealed that another discussion of the a priori is taking place here. Check it out!

Aspect blindness as ominous portent of Great Cthulhu's imminent return

2008-02-23T20:38:00.004-05:00

I see the page 123 meme has come around again. (See here for last time. Which reminds me, I should finish labeling my archived posts.) Daniel (my tagger) has a good one (as in relevant to the blog's content), but (in that respect) it will be hard to beat this one – yikes, that's creepy.

Speaking of creepy, check this out. I don't want to obey the rules this time, since I haven't moved the books from the last book sale off of my desk, and we've already heard something (something more entertaining than p. 123, I can assure you) from The Golden Bough. So this is 123/5 from another book I'm currently reading:

If someone had come then to lead me away to a place of execution I would have gone meekly, without a word, without so much as opening my eyes, just as people who suffer from violent seasickness, if they are crossing the Caspian Sea on a steamer, for instance, will not offer the slightest resistance should someone tell them that they are about to be thrown overboard.

No, it's not H. P. Lovecraft, though this whole passage does sound pretty overheated out of context (that's some simile, isn't it?). I actually prefer the rules of the previous go-round, which told you simply to give the one sentence, letting us guess the context. This time we are told to provide three more sentences, which is a bit less fun; but let's go ahead anyway, and see if we can't give Tom (above) a run for his money.

The cause of our man's malaise, it turns out, is writer's block:

Whatever was going on within me, said Austerlitz, the panic I felt on facing the start of any sentence that must be written, not knowing how I could begin it or indeed any other sentence, soon extended to what is in itself the simpler business of reading, until if I attempted to read a whole page I inevitably fell into a state of the greatest confusion. If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog.

Whew! Glad I wasn't reading Proust. But let's go on – he's just getting warmed up:

I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past—perhaps I could understand that least of all. All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us. The very thing which may usually convey a sense of purposeful intelligence—the exposition of an idea by means of a certain stylistic facility—now seemed to me nothing but an entirely arbitrary or deluded enterprise. I could see no connections anymore, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-gray trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame.

Wow. Bet you didn't see that coming! (Great book, btw.)

I don't feel like tagging anyone, but if anyone wants to join in, go ahead.

Hacker on Quine

2008-02-22T23:12:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned in my last post, this one is about Hacker's paper "Passing By the Naturalistic Turn: On Quine's Cul-de-sac" (which is, again, available on his website). In this paper, unlike (say) Grice & Strawson's defenses of analyticity, Hacker's criticism of Quine takes a particularly broad form. As the title indicates, his subject is "the naturalistic turn," as pointedly opposed to "the a priori methods of traditional philosophy". The paper discusses three aspects of Quinean naturalism: naturalized epistemology, "ontological" naturalism, and, most broadly, "philosophical" naturalism. Hacker defines this last as

the view that [in Quine's words] philosophy is 'not ... an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but [is] ... continuous with science' [...] In the USA it is widely held that with Quine's rejection of 'the' analytic/synthetic distinction, the possibility of philosophical or conceptual analysis collapses, the possibility of resolving philosophical questions by a priori argument and elucidation is foreclosed, and all good philosophers turn out to be closet scientists. (MS p. 2)

For the record, Hacker believes that regardless of what Quine's arguments show about "the" analytic/synthetic distinction, the philosophical project of "conceptual analysis" is not threatened:

The thought that if there is no distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, then philosophy must be 'continuous' with science rests on the false supposition that what was thought to distinguish philosophical propositions from scientific ones was their analyticity. That supposition can be challenged in two ways. First, by showing that characteristic propositions that philosophers have advanced are neither analytic nor empirical [but still a priori]. Secondly, by denying that there are any philosophical propositions at all.

Strikingly, the Manifesto of the Vienna Circle, of which Carnap was both an author and signatory, pronounced that ‘the essence of the new scientific world-conception in contrast with traditional philosophy [is that] no special “philosophic assertions” are established, assertions are merely clarified’. [The Scientific Conception of the World: the Vienna Circle (Reidel, Dordrecht, 1973), p. 18] According to this view, the result of good philosophizing is not the production of analytic propositions peculiar to philosophy. Rather it is the clarification of conceptually problematic propositions and the elimination of pseudo-propositions. (p. 3)

[So instead of being "continuous" with science, Hacker claims, philosophy is] categorially distinct from science, both in its methods and its results. The a priori methods of respectable philosophy are wholly distinct from the experimental and hypothetico-deductive methods of the natural sciences, and the results of philosophy logically antecede the empirical discoveries of science. They cannot licitly conflict with the truth of scientific theories – but they may, and sometimes should, demonstrate their lack of sense. (p. 4)

Myself, I never thought that the point about "continuity," about which naturalists make so very much, was that helpful. "Continuity" is cheap. Sure philosophy is "continuous" with science; but it's also "continuous" with art, literature, religion, law, politics, and, I don't know, sports. But I am being perverse here. Let me try instead to be not-perverse.

As previous posts (not just recently but going back to distant 2005) may or may not have made clear, I want 1) to follow Wittgenstein in not only distinguishing philosophy from empirical inquiry (scientific or not), but also seeing it (in some contexts, for certain purposes) as an activity of provoking us into seeing differently what we already knew, by means of (among other things) carefully chosen reminders of same; but at the same time 2) to follow Davidson in pressing Quine to extend and (significantly!) modify the line of thought begun in "Two Dogmas," one which recasts empiricism in a linguistic light and purges it of certain dualisms left over from the positivistic era.

What we've seen so far is that Hacker and Quine are in firm agreement that I can't have it both ways. Either there's a solid "categorical" wall between philosophy and empirical inquiry, or we level that distinction to the ground. It's true that I couldn't have it both of those ways; but I don't want either of 'em. My concern here, as always, is to overcome whatever dualisms are causing confusion; and overcoming a dualism isn't the same thing as obliterating a distinction. In fact, in my terminology, we overcome the dualism only when we can see how the corresponding distinction is still available for use in particular cases (of course, I can reject distinctions as well if I want, for philosophically uncontroversial reasons). So, for example, when Grice & Strawson object to Quine by claiming that the concept of analyticity still has a coherent use, I don't think I need to object. If you want to use the concept to distinguish between "that bachelor is unmarried" and "that bachelor is six feet tall," go right ahead. I just don't think that distinction has the philosophical significance that other people do. In particular, I don't need to use it, or the a priori/a posteriori or necessary/contingent distinctions either, in explaining my own idiosyncratic take on "therapeutic" philosophy. In fact, I find that explanation works better when we follow Davidson in stripping the empiricist platitude (what McDowell calls "minimal empiricism," that it is only through the senses that we obtain knowledge of contingent matters of fact) of its dualistic residue, and meet up again with Wittgenstein on the other side of Quine. (And yes, I used the word "contingent" there – anyone have a problem with that?)

On the other hand, it also seems to me that after the smoke clears and everyone (*cough*) realizes that I am right, each side can make a case that I had been agreeing with that side all along: Hacker can point to the sense in which philosophy on my conception is still a matter of (what he will continue to call) clarifying our concepts, with an eye to dissolving the confusions underlying "metaphysical" questions; while Quine can point to (what he will continue to call) a characteristically "naturalistic" concern (if that naturalism is perhaps more Deweyan than his own) with the overcoming of the conceptual dualisms left over from our Platonic and Cartesian heritage – e.g., those between the related pairs of opposed concepts we have been discussing. Yet it seems to me that neither side can make the sale without giving something up (something important) and thereby approaching what seemed to be its polar opposite.

We've already seen the shape of this idea. On the one side, Hacker's insistence that, as he puts it, "[t]he problems [here, skeptical ones] are purely conceptual ones, and they are to be answered by purely conceptual means" [p. 9, my emphasis]" sabotages the anti-dualist content of the anti-skeptical critique with a dualistic emphasis on the "purity" of its form (itself held in place by a corresponding dualism of form and content). On the other, Quine recoils from the dualism of pure abstract a priori and good old-fashioned getting-your-hands-dirty empirical inquiry by eliminating the former entirely in favor of the latter. This insufficient response to one dualism leads inevitably to another: in Quine's case, this means (as Davidson argues) a dualism between conceptual scheme and empirical content, which ultimately (or even proximately!) proves to be pretty much the same as the dualisms (analytic/synthetic, observational/theoretical) Quine was supposed to be showing us how to discard.

We'll leave Davidson for another time (the interpretation business might take a while, though it does come up below), but as my subject here is the Hacker article, let me continue by discussing an area of agreement with Hacker: his dismissal of Quine's naturalized epistemology. (Yet of course even here I do not draw Hacker's moral, exactly.) No one disputes that there is such a thing as empirical psychology, so in one sense the focus of "naturalized epistemology" on resolutely third-person description of the processes of information acquisition by biological organisms is unobjectionable. The problem comes when this project is taken to amount to or replace philosophical investigation (however conceived) of knowledge and related topics.

I'll just mention two points. First (although Hacker doesn't put quite it this way), Quine's naturalistic aversion to "mentalistic" concepts leads him to assimilate the theoretically dangerous (in this sense) first-person case to the more scientifically tractable third-person case – after all, I'm a human being too, so what works for any arbitrary biological organism should work for me too. This makes the "external world" which is the object of our knowledge something no longer opposed (as in the (overtly) Cartesian case) to something mental, but instead to the world outside our (equally physical) sensory receptors. But now Hacker wonders about the status of our knowledge of our bodies; or of ourselves, for that matter. Quine is left in a dilemma: "Either I posit my own existence, or I know that I exist without positing or assuming it." As a result (see the article for the details) "[i]ncoherence lurks in these Cartesian shadows, and it is not evident how to extricate Quine from them." [p. 6]

This is (given the difference I've already mentioned) remarkably similar to Davidson's criticism of Quine in "Meaning, Truth, and Evidence":

In general, [Quine] contended, ‘It is our understanding, such as it is, of what lies beyond our surfaces, that shows our evidence for that understanding to be limited to our surfaces’ [The Ways of Paradox, p. 216]. But this is mistaken. The stimulation of sensory receptors is not evidence that a person employs in his judgements concerning his extra-somatic environment, let alone in his scientific judgements. My evidence that there was bread on the table is that there are crumbs left there. That there are crumbs on the table is something I see to be so. But that I see the crumbs is not my evidence that there are crumbs there. Since I can see them, I need no evidence for their presence – it is evident to my senses. That the cones and rods of my retinae fired in a certain pattern is not my evidence for anything – neither for my seeing what I see, nor for what I see, since it is not something of which I normally have any knowledge. For that something is so can be someone’s evidence for something else only if he knows it.

No, wait, that's Hacker again, from later in the paper (p. 13). Here's Davidson, criticizing as "Cartesian" Quine's "proximal" theory of meaning and evidence:

The only perspicuous concept of evidence is the concept of a relation between sentences or beliefs—the concept of evidential support. Unless some beliefs can be chosen on purely subjective grounds as somehow basic, a concept of evidence as the foundation of meaning or knowledge is therefore not available. [...] The causal relations between the world and our beliefs are crucial to meaning not because they supply a special sort of evidence for the speaker who holds the beliefs, but because they are often apparent to others and so form the basis for communication. [p. 58-9]

The relevant stimulus is thus not "the irritation of our sensory surfaces" but instead the rabbit whose appearance prompts the utterance of "gavagai." (See the rest of this key article; it's reprinted in the fifth volume of Davidson's papers, Truth, Language, and History, which I think is now available cheap.) Again, though, this is for reasons concerning the conceptually interconstitutive nature of meaning and belief, not a simple recoil from naturalized epistemology to conceptual analysis. That is, while considering these matters conceptually, as Hacker does, Davidson's argument presents a specific conceptual analysis (if that's what we want to call it) which in its content may be just as fatal to the "purely a priori" as is Quine.

Jumping ahead a bit, we can see on the horizon, even here, a cloud the size of a man's hand. For Davidson's contextually healthy insistence that (as he puts it elsewhere) "only a belief [here, as opposed to sensory stimulations] can be a reason for another belief" can, in other circumstances, manifest itself as a content-threatening coherentism. In "Scheme-content dualism and empiricism" (which I hope we can get to later), McDowell registers puzzlement that Davidson's criticism of Quine is that the latter's conception of empirical content as sensory stimulation (i.e., in its conceptual distance from the "external" world) leads merely to skepticism (not that that's not bad enough!) rather than an even more disastrous loss of the right to be called "content" at all. (At another level, this same consideration tells against Hacker's insistence that "conceptual analysis" are simply matters of language as opposed to matters of fact, i.e., about their referents in the world.)

Hacker too finds Quine's own response to skeptical worries to be nonchalant. In Quine's view, he says, since we are concerned with knowledge acquisition as a scientific question, "we are free to appeal to scientifically established fact (agreed empirical knowledge) without circularity." (Hacker's comment: "That is mistaken.") The philosophical problem of skepticism is not concerned simply with deciding whether or not we have any knowledge, so that it may be dismissed in deciding that, in fact, we do. As Hacker points out, one form of skepticism arises

from the thought that we have no criterion of truth to judge between sensible appearances. Citing a further appearance, even one apparently ratified by ‘science’, i.e. common experience, will not resolve the puzzlement. Similarly, we have no criterion to judge whether we are awake or asleep, since anything we may come up with as a criterion may itself be part of the content of a dream. So the true sceptic holds that we cannot know whether we are awake or asleep. We are called upon to show that he is wrong and where he has gone wrong. To this enterprise neither common sense nor the sciences can contribute anything. [Again, as cited above, Hacker's conclusion, now in context, is that] [t]he problems [skepticism] raises are purely conceptual ones, and they are to be answered by purely conceptual means – by clarification of the relevant elements of our conceptual scheme. This will show what is awry with the sceptical challenge itself. (p. 8-9)

There's more in this vein, attacking Quine's offhandedly deflationary conceptions of knowledge ("the best we can do is give up the notion of knowledge as a bad job") and belief (beliefs are "dispositions to behave, and these are physiological states"), and "the so-called identity theory of the mind: mental states are states of the body." Hacker's comment on this last is typical ("This too is mistaken"), and here too I agree. (Nor, since you ask, am I happy with Davidson's early approach to the mind-body problem, i.e., anomalous monism. But let's not talk about that today.)

Still, I can't see that Hacker's more extreme conclusions about the relation of science to philosophy are warranted. It's true that we can maintain that firm boundary by definitional fiat. But it's just not true that "the empirical sciences," if that means empirical scientists doing empirical science, cannot possibly contribute to our understanding of (the concept of) knowledge, or even provide a crucial piece of information which allows us to see things in a new way. After all, that's what the philosopher's "reminders" were trying to do too. And if a philosopher's "invention" of an "intermediate case" (for example) can provide the desired understanding (PI §122), then so too might a scientific discovery. All we need here, to avoid the "scientism" Hacker fears, is the idea that even the latter does not solve problems qua discovery, even if it is one – and that just because the philosopher's reminder might have done the same thing even if invented and not discovered.

Mea culpa, mea methodologica culpa

2008-02-21T02:13:00.003-05:00

In my post the other day, I made an interesting slip (if that's how you want to think of it): I suggested that Putnam's claim that analyticity and a priority come apart (so that the first four sections of "Two Dogmas" can be detached from the last two) might be of some use to defenders of analyticity. They might want to argue, I thought, that if your target (qua "metaphysics") is really the a priori/a posteriori distinction, then it might be better not to identify it with the analytic/synthetic one (and get rid of them at the same time), but to distinguish the two, so that we might not simply keep around the presumably now unoffensive (qua non-metaphysical, once so distinguished) notion of analyticity, but also employ it (for the project of linguistic analysis) to combat more metaphysical notions (like the a priori).

But (as I noted in a subsequent comment) that just assumes that the defenders of analyticity might see the a priori as unacceptably metaphysical where analyticity is not. As it turns out, Hacker at least does not. I'll get to all that in a minute. Let me first give a quick and dirty characterization of four similar concepts, not worrying for the moment about whether any one of them can be collapsed into any of the others, or whether there really are any such things.

1. Tautologies are "truths of logic": P or not-P (in classical logic).

2. Analytic sentences are "truths (by virtue) of meaning": That bachelor over there is unmarried.

3. Truths are known a priori when we don't have to go out and look, but can confirm them from the proverbial armchair.

4. Truths are necessary when it is impossible for them to be false (they're "true in all possible worlds").

If you like these concepts, you can supply your own examples for the last two. (The SEP article on "A Priori Justification and Knowledge" has as an example of a necessary proposition this one: "all brothers are male," which is not one I would have chosen if I were trying to distinguish necessity from analyticity). Anyways, my point is that however the categories do or do not overlap, the characterization of each has its own typical angle: tautologies have to do with logic, analyticity with meaning, a priority with knowledge (and justification), necessity with ontology (or modality, or in any case metaphysics).

A lot of us want, in some sense or other, to rule out "metaphysics" as nonsense, e.g. a) Ryle, Hacker, etc.; b) Wittgenstein (early and late, on most interpretations); and c) some but not all naturalists. So necessity (or, redundantly, "metaphysical necessity") looks fishy to us. But (as I started to talk about before) in order to combat metaphysics (including but not limited to "necessity"), some of us think we need to hold on to analyticity – a concept which deals, the thought goes, not with the world (i.e., on the other side, qua the object of a "metaphysical" statement, of the "bounds of sense"), but with meaning (which is safely on "this" side). Or so I read Grice & Strawson (I'm trying not to make a straw man here!). For G & S, then, analyticity is both unobjectionable and ~~necessary~~ uh, required for the project of finally exorcising our metaphysical demons. (I assume, if perhaps I shouldn't, that no one has a problem with (the very idea of) tautologies.)

Where does that leave the a priori? If we assimilate it to necessity (on the one side), then it's a metaphysical notion, worthy of dismissal; and if analyticity is the "least metaphysical" of the three (on this quick and dirty characterization), then if Quine's attack on analyticity goes through, it seems that a fortiori (so to speak) the others go as well. But for "analysis" to be possible, G & S believe, there need to be such things as "analytic" truths. So again, my off-the-cuff suggestion was that if we drew the line between analyticity (needed for the method of "analysis") and the a priori, we could use the former to dismiss the latter (along with the more overtly metaphysical notion of necessity).

But Hacker at least is clear that he does not want to do this. For Hacker, the a priori is the central concept he wants to defend: not as a possibly unacceptably metaphysical subject (i.e. object) of philosophical speculation, but as its constitutive method. It is this and this alone which distinguishes philosophy from empirical inquiry. I should have realized this, as the notion is (as in the SEP article) characteristically applied to the manner in which knowledge is acquired rather than its (semantic) form or (ontological) object, and the main contention of the "conceptual analysis" folks is that, again, philosophy is a matter of the clarification of our concepts as specifically opposed to empirical inquiry; so of course they want to defend the a priori as well as analyticity. (My excuse is that I didn't want to assume the naturalist characterization of the a priori (i.e. as hopelessly unempirical) from the beginning, even, or perhaps especially, because I too am not too keen on the notion, if for somewhat different reasons.)

For a interesting account of Hacker's attitude toward Quine, I recommend his paper "Passing By the Naturalistic Turn: On Quine's Cul-de-sac" (available on his website). The main target is Quine's "naturalized epistemology" (so some of what Hacker says is perfectly congenial), and in attacking it Hacker commits himself ~~hook, line, and sinker~~ wholeheartedly to a full-on Manichean dualism of pure a priori conceptual analysis, on the one hand, and not-at-all-philosophical empirical inquiry on the other. Picking up Quine's gauntlet, he begins:

There has been a naturalistic turn away from the a priori methods of traditional philosophy to a conception of philosophy as continuous with natural science.

and ends:

This imaginary science [naturalized epistemology] is no substitute for epistemology – it is a philosophical cul-de-sac. It could shed no light on the nature of knowledge, its possible extent, its categorially distinct kinds, its relation to belief and justification, and its forms of certainty. [...] For philosophy is neither continuous with existing science, nor continuous with an imaginary future science. Whatever the post-Quinean status of analyticity may be, the status of philosophy as an a priori conceptual discipline concerned with the elucidation of our conceptual scheme and the resolution of conceptual confusions is in no way affected by Quine's philosophy.

Snap! That last sentence answers our (my) question about priorities (no pun intended) pretty clearly, I'd say. Let's come back to this article; it's got a nice mix of ~~right and wrong~~, uh, agreement and disagreement between Hacker and me (and Quine with both of us).

Laugh riot

2008-02-18T14:51:00.001-05:00

The latest edition of the Philosophers' Carnival focuses on comedy. It'll be there all week; try the fish.

Not John Gielgud

2008-02-17T13:46:00.003-05:00

I was preparing a post on the analytic/synthetic business we have been discussing (okay, so far it's other people, here, here, and here), and (curious as ever) I followed a trail of links to Wikipedia's article on "Two Dogmas," which I basically just glanced at (looks okay), but there's an interesting bit at the end which no-one has said anything about yet:

In his book Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1 : The Dawn of Analysis Scott Soames (pp 360-361) has pointed out that Quine's circularity argument needs two of the logical positivists' central theses to be effective:
All necessary (and all a priori) truths are analytic.

Analyticity is needed to explain and legitimate necessity.
It is only when these two theses are accepted that Quine's argument holds. It is not a problem that the notion of necessity is presupposed by the notion of analyticity if necessity can be explained without analyticity. According to Soames, both theses were accepted by most philosophers when Quine published Two Dogmas. Today however, Soames holds both statements to be antiquated.

Upon reading this, I had two thoughts in quick succession, and wouldn't you know, they're in tension with each other. The first one was: I hardly think the defenders of analyticity (that is, those who, like our friend N. N., see Quine's attack as threatening the philosophical project of conceptual analysis, whether or not they see the latter as constitutive of philosophy itself), or anyone else unimpressed by Kripke for that matter, should welcome criticism of Quine's argument along these lines. I can't see any such philosopher saying: "see, you can too have analyticity – all you have to do is explain it in terms of an independently established notion of metaphysical necessity!" Surely the whole point of "conceptual analysis" was to put "metaphysics" out of business. So, no help there, right?

The second thought I had was this. Of course the contemporary naturalist/empiricist line of thought, in which "Two Dogmas" was an important early move, is also determined to put metaphysics out of business. But in so doing, it seems to assimilate philosophy into the empirical sciences, not as itself an empirical discipline, but as concerned solely with making sure that science dots the i's and crosses the t's in the proper way (once out of the lab and writing up the results). So if you put all of your anti-metaphysical eggs into the naturalist basket, by rejecting the distinction underlying the competing strategy of conceptual analysis, that means that when the naturalists (if not the empiricists) then turn around and reinstate metaphysics, you have no recourse.

Naturally they'll put a doily on that monstrosity by calling it a "scientific" metaphysics (whatever that means); but when it's accompanied, even justified, by a swipe at "linguistic philosophy" for neglecting metaphysics – well, that's going to be pretty galling. The reason my two thoughts are in (mild) tension with each other is that while the first implies that Soames's criticism of the argument of "Two Dogmas" is of no help to the linguistic analyst, the second thought leads to a different conclusion. For now that philosopher can resist the naturalistic line of thought right at the beginning: if the point of "Two Dogmas" was to deprive metaphysical pseudo-inquiry of the purely non-empirical conceptual space in which it was supposed to operate, well then the naturalistic revival of metaphysics shows that it failed to follow through on its promises. This means that (given the original choice between naturalism and conceptual analysis) as far as unmasking metaphysics as nonsense is concerned, the linguistic strategy is the only game in town after all.

These (quick) thoughts, you will notice, elided two complications, which I should at least mention. First, I exempted properly empiricist naturalism from the accusation of reversion to metaphysics. But it's not clear to me that they will be able to fend off such accusations when coming from fellow naturalists. (My own objections to these positions are of another order entirely, so when naturalists trade accusations of "reversion to/neglect of metaphysics," I don't need to take sides.) For the second elision, let's return to Wikipedia's article:

In "'Two Dogmas' revisited", Hilary Putnam argues that Quine is attacking two different notions. Analytic truth defined as a true statement derivable from a tautology by putting synonyms for synonyms [is] near Kant's account of analytic truth as a truth whose negation is a contradistinction. Analytic truth defined as a truth confirmed no matter what[,] however, is closer to one of the traditional accounts of a prioricity. While the first four sections of Quine's paper concern analyticity, the last two concern a priority. Putnam considers the argument in the two last sections as independent of the first four, and at the same time as Putnam criticizes Quine, he also emphasizes his historical importance as the first top rank philosopher to both reject the notion of apriority and sketch a methodology without it.

It does seem that the a priori, rather than analyticity, is the key notion here, and perhaps the defenders of Grice and Strawson would like to argue that the way to debunk the former (as I think we may construe their project) is to keep the latter rather than running the two together and discarding both.

imdb widget updated

2008-02-16T14:24:00.002-05:00

The widget label is self-explanatory; for the first 15 see here. A few brief comments on these films, most of which were good enough to make the other list if there had been room:

1. Ballad of a Soldier

An excellent companion to The Cranes are Flying from the other list. Let's all lobby Criterion to bring out more Russian stuff.

2. Cafe Lumiere

Hou Hsiao-Hsien in Japan. Nice.

3. Triad Election.

Hard-boiled HK mob film from Johnny To. This is actually the second one (the first one's just called Election) but it stands on its own. Might as well start with the first one, though, which is also good.

4. Offside

Sly social commentary, Iran-style. (And you thought they didn't allow such things over there.) Interesting interview with director Jafar Panahi on the DVD.

5. Black Book

Just missed the last cut. Carice van Houten is spellbinding as a Dutch resistance fighter in WWII. (I saw a lot of WWII films last year!)

6. Army of Shadows

Here's another one, from France this time. Very different tone though (as one might expect from Melville). Strange poster on the widget!

7. Stray Dog

This one's about a WWII veteran. Early Kurosawa, with Toshiro Mifune.

8. Leaves From Satan's Book

Dreyer's answer to Intolerance.

9. Aura

Falls down on a key plot point, but it's got a nice noirish mood and Ricardo Darin's incandescent star power.

10. The Science of Sleep

Gael Garcia Bernal as a shy nerd with an active fantasy life. Quirky and charming (but don't let that scare you off).

11. Volver

I never liked Almodovar's early films, but recently he's been very consistent. Someone at one of the local libraries likes Penelope Cruz a lot!

12. Tarnation

A son's video tribute to his dying mother. Some reviewers revile this film for its self-indulgent narcissism, but that's what the film is about: a self-indulgent narcissist's inability to keep from moving the subject back to himself, even when he's supposedly making a film about his mother. Very creative, if also fracked up.

13. The Fallen Idol

Possibly annoying if you let the kid get to you, but Ralph Richardson is great. Oblique spoiler: someone gets Gettiered but good.

14. Richard III

Olivier as the not-that-misshapen anti-hero. Some textual liberties are taken; I swear I heard Richard say something early on about "murd'rous Machiavel," which would be somewhat anachronistic (not to Shakespeare, but to Richard at least). Richardson's in this one too (stealing every scene he's in).

15. Rebels of the Neon God

Early Tsai Ming-Liang.

Postmodern captain

2008-02-15T17:57:00.011-05:00

Recent visitors to this site will notice the lack of activity here, but I haven't been entirely absent from the 'sphere, as we have been having a rousing conversation about Philosophical Investigations §122, among other things, at other locales (see here, here, here, here, and here). In general, if you drop by here looking for me, if I'm not here I may be over at these or a few other places (virtually speaking). Still, even so, I am remiss in not contributing anything more substantive than a few comments from the virtual peanut gallery. We'll get to those things soon enough, I hope, but for now here's an interesting tidbit from a book I read recently which was made up (almost?) entirely of untruths.

Post Captain is the second book in Patrick O'Brian's series of naval historical novels set in the Napoleonic wars era (thanks to the Crooked Timber crew for the recommendation). Toward the end, Dr. Stephen Maturin is at the opera, but he finds it "poor thin pompous overblown stuff" and cannot enjoy it:

A charming harp came up through the strings, two harps running up and down, an amiable warbling. Signifying nothing, sure; but how pleasant to hear them. Pleasant, oh certainly it was pleasant [...]; so why was his heart oppressed, filled with an anxious foreboding, a dread of something imminent that he could not define? That arch girl posturing upon the stage had a sweet, true little voice; she was as pretty as God and art could make her; and he took no pleasure in it. His hands were sweating.

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thought flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations – admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.

[Suddenly, from his box Stephen espies, in the crowd below, the woman whom he has been chasing for more than four hundred pages, with little success – only just enough, in fact, to maximize his frustration.]

Stephen watched with no particular emotion but with extreme accuracy. He had noted the great leap of his heart at the first moment and the disorder in his breathing, and he noted too that this had no effect upon his powers of observation. He must in fact have been aware of her presence from the first: it was her scent that was running in his mind before the curtain fell; it was in connection with her that he had reflected upon these harps.

I find this (like a lot of things in good literature, now that I think of it) phenomenologically astute but philosophically naive. Certainly the idea of "thinking [only] in words" suggests a crude picture indeed, of the sort (rightly or wrongly) attributed to artificial intelligence types – and which provokes phenomenologically-motivated accusations of a "myth of the mental" (e.g. in Dreyfus) and calls for recognition of "non-conceptual [mental] content" (not, as I understand it, to be confused with "qualia" – but maybe I'm the one who is confused).

Surely, we feel, our minds – and our experiences – contain more than words. That our hearts leap and our breaths catch, or that our (verbal) thoughts are affected, subtly or otherwise, by bodily phenomena and multifarious subconscious associations cannot be denied. The faculty of language – the "speaking mind" – is only one of many contributors to the experiential makeup of our conscious selves. It is natural to reach, as we all do at times, for an image of trying, and often failing, to "put into words" something which must perforce exist "outside" language but which is still part of our experience. Still, I would resist the idea that there are "thoughts" antecedent to their linguistic manifestations, or that music and other arts are "parallel languages" which can communicate thoughts which (what we would have to call, now non-redundantly) "verbal language" cannot. (Or as my undergrad professor put it, when I spoke of the sort of experiences Stephen here discusses: "why do you want to call these things 'thoughts'"?)

Let's look first at the idea that words are (language is) "inadequate because common to disparate situations." This has been a common refrain in philosophy from the Greeks through Derrida. Here's another German on the matter, writing some seventy years after Stephen's night at the opera, but one hundred years before the real-life author of Stephen's ruminations:

Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates in our equating what is unequal. No leaf every wholly equals another, and the concept "leaf" is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be "leaf"—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form. ("On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", The Portable Nietzsche, p. 46)

Nietzsche scholars like Clark hurry to point out that Nietzsche later abandoned his youthful skepticism about truth (the oft-quoted subsequent paragraph in "Truth and Lie" tells us that "truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are"), reminding us that this essay was a) published only posthumously, and b) written some 15 years earlier than his most mature writings (an eternity in Nietzsche-time). Still, even here the point is not to accept but to reject the idea that the origin of our concepts means that there is some more perfect reality which (due to their humble origins) they necessarily fail to capture. This is an anti-skeptical point, one which Nietzsche retained throughout his career.

But let's turn back to the properly skeptical point with which this anti-skeptical point is easily conflated (one which later Nietzsche does reject). Even if the Platonic Leaf is an illusion, what about those "unique and wholly individualized original experiences" from which our concept of "leaf" is abstracted? If our concepts necessarily fail to capture (not the pure abstraction, but instead) these individual differences, then it seems that here too our language is inadequate. Yet it is only so if one has a distorted conception of what it is that language is supposed to do, which is not to duplicate individual experiences but instead to express beliefs (and other "mental states" like emotions) and communicate truths about the world (often, which may be the source of some of the confusion here, both at once). Even when the problem is not that language fails (in its necessary finitude) to achieve pure generality, but the seemingly opposite point that it fails (in its necessary generality) to achieve pure specificity, the result is a fatal temptation toward Platonic (or Cartesian) abstraction and reification, and a corresponding anxiety (or conviction!) that language necessarily conceals rather than reveals (or communicates).

Here's a leaf. Is it not a leaf? We just agreed that it is. So "this is a leaf" is true, and not an "illusion." But this other leaf is also a leaf; so "this is a leaf" fails to capture the specific "leafiness" of either of them. True enough, much has been left out. But so what? (What should we say, "this is a leaf, but it's an illusion to believe that it is"? Hogwash.) So say more: this particular leaf is green, small, smooth, wet. These too are merely words, generalized from many greens and smalls and wets. Even the precise hue (say, 7CFC00), the size in microns, the precise amount of water on its surface, everything I can possibly "put into words," will not get us across that metaphysical gap (once so construed) between universal predicates and irreducibly individual thing. You cannot describe to me – language cannot capture – the leaf-in-itself.

Okay, but this wasn't really our problem. Your concern in speaking to me was not after all with a posited leaf-beyond-experience (whether an ideal Platonic Leaf or a specific Cartesian leaf-in-itself) but instead your own experience, communication of which need not require such fictions as leaves-in-themselves. Here too, though, the same problem seems to arise. You had some experience which you want to communicate to me. Of course I can't be you, so I can't have your experience. Yet it still can seem as if even though I cannot be you, there is some thing, a (specific) "experience" of yours (distinct from you, that you are "having", such that that identical experiencer – you – then go on to "have" another such, etc.) which your words necessarily (alas) fail to communicate to me. That such things cannot be transferred whole from your inner theater to mine isn't the fault of language. Even if you handed me the very leaf in question, to look at and touch for myself, I still wouldn't have your experience, even the one I did have was thereby very much more "like yours" than the one I had merely listening to you describe it. This "failure" just doesn't have the philosophical significance it can seem to have: that there is, like the leaf-in-itself, an experience-in-itself which can be conceptually detached from your having it, and which I may thereby "fail" to have due to imperfections in the medium of transmission. In my view, once we've established that I can't be you (or, again, that words aren't "the same as" the things which they denote or describe), that turns out to be the only metaphysically relevant consideration – which as a triviality cannot support the philosophical weight put on it by the sort of realism which results in the sort of skepticism in question, which sees language as "cutting us off from reality" (or each other) rather than opening it up to us.

It is of course true (another triviality) that music or painting can evoke experiences which language cannot – that there are qualitative differences which, as subjects, we automatically project back onto their "objects" qua experience. We naturally speak here too of "expression"; yet there is no reason to think of these arts as "parallel languages," or languages at all. I liked Garry Hagberg's book Art as Language, which goes into these matters very clearly indeed (as the Amazon reviewer rightly notes), so I won't go into them here. I would just suggest that "expression" (whether artistic or linguistic) has connotations not simply of communication, but also of manifestation or even creation, which can help suppress the urge to posit some distinct entity which it can fail to copy adequately – while yet leaving in place the triviality that there are plenty of ways in which an "expression" (of something) can indeed fail (and corresponding locutions, such as Mozart's musical "thought").

For more on the idea of "thinking in terms of scent," I imagine there would be a lot about that in this book, the movie version of which I just saw last week. Interestingly, while I imagine some people reacted to the story's move, toward the end, from highly implausible (even in cinematic terms) to completely impossible, with an annoyed "oh, come on," I found that the move actually relieved that pressure rather than increasing it to intolerable levels – as now it became easier to see the story as purely allegorical fantasy (which of course it always was) rather than an attempt to make (still fanciful) sense on the literal level. (I speak abstractly in order to avoid spoilage.) The film (by Tom Tykwer of Lola rennt fame) renders the experience of scent in visual terms very well (although there were a few too many shots of sniffing noses), and I imagine the book's appeal depends on its success in the corresponding rendering in verbal terms.

More meaning

2008-02-04T22:53:00.000-05:00

At Meaning More, Philosophers' Carnival #62!

Plummeting doves and other disasters

2008-01-25T15:42:00.000-05:00

Currence likes Kant's famous comment in the Introduction
to the first Critique (A5/B8):

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would still be easier in empty space.

Currence comments: "Talk about frictionless spinning in the void." This is of course a reference to McDowell's criticism of Davidson's "coherentism" in Mind and World. Interesting connection, and the image is certainly similar in the obvious way, but I'm actually put in mind of two other images which I think are more closely related than McDowell's to the point Kant is making here. (McDowell is accusing Davidson of succumbing to a dualism of reason and nature, but I don't think he takes him to do so because of this particular bird-brained inference, even if we can describe in similar terms the unfortunate dualistic result. For further thoughts on this matter see Daniel's post here, which just appeared while I was writing this.)

The first image is from Wittgenstein. The line of thought extends back several sections, so to see what he's after let's join in at §94 (I've altered the translation slightly):

"A proposition is a remarkable thing!" Here we have in a nutshell the subliming of our whole account of logic. The tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts. Or even to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves. [...]

The first quarter or so of Philosophical Investigations is often regarded as preliminary throat-clearing, in which the mature Wittgenstein criticizes his former self, clearing the rubble away before getting on to his real arguments, about rule-following, "private" language, aspect-seeing, and other topics in mind and language. But "clearing the rubble" (as in §118) is how Wittgenstein describes his entire project, not just its unavoidable preliminaries. These earlier sections are not mere preliminaries, but are instead the beating heart of the book. The later sections, while important, are where Wittgenstein unpacks what he has already said and applies it to particular cases (which are themselves carefully chosen to reinforce the earlier points about language – that is, they're not merely applications of a supposedly already established general principle).

In fact, Wittgenstein mentions his former self only rarely. Yet it is true that that philosopher comes in for some pointed criticism here. Putting aside, if we can, the vexed question of whether the rejected view is a) false or b) nonsensical (and the equally vexed question of how exactly the criticized author of the Tractatus would himself regard these words!), let's look at how Wittgenstein characterizes the "illusion" which tempts us here (§97):

[Thought's] essence, logic, presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it.——It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete, as it were the hardest thing there is (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus No. 5.5563).

Just so you don't have to look it up, 5.5563 reads:

In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.—That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety.
(Our problems are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are.)

Note that the first sentence there is something that the later Wittgenstein as well is concerned to stress [e.g. PI §98] – but he draws from it a quite different moral: not that in order to account for this everyday order we must posit [what he later calls, farther on in PI §97] a single ideal "super-order," but instead that when we are "dazzled by the ideal" in this way, we "therefore fail to see the actual [i.e. varied] use of the word [e.g.] "game" correctly." (§100).

This sets up (as I've bolded below) the famous image I wanted to mention as an interesting comparison to Kant's, in §107:

The more narrowly we examine actual language [searching for the elusive ideal order], the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement [impressed upon us, Wittgenstein believes, by our having "predicate[d] of the thing what lies in the method of representation" (§104)].) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty.—We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

(We've all seen that last injunction many times, but rarely, I think, with its proper force.) In any case, we might just as well say "We want to fly: so we need wind resistance. Back to the dense air!"

What I find particularly interesting here is that Wittgenstein and Kant strike upon such similar images in talking about what might seem to be rather different things. What this means, I take it, is that the error, the temptation, which they both aim to combat is so ingrained in our ways of talking and thinking that it manifests itself whenever we look to obtain a reflective perspective on them.

The second image returns us to a context which is (in one way anyway) more like Kant's than Wittgensein's. We find it in the "'Reason' in Philosophy" section of Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche has just condemned everybody from the Eleatics through (what was then) last Tuesday for rejecting the testimony of the senses as an unreliable guide to really real reality, and he's still not finished with his denunciations. His ultimate target here is the First Cause, but in context the particular gripe looks to me the same as Kant's and Wittgenstein's: he laments our instinctive urge to prioritize, reify, and detach the abstract and general and necessary from the concrete and specific and contingent. (Of course, on most interpretations we find some inconsistency in Kant on this point; but in his comments immediately following the line about the poor dove, Kant explicitly mentions that this is what happens when "Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding").

Anyway, here's Nietzsche:

The other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in confusing the last and the first. They place that which comes at the end—unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!—namely, the "highest concepts," which means the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning. This again is nothing but their way of showing reverence: the higher may not grow out of the lower, may not have grown at all. [...]

When we are concerned to grasp (only) the purest essence of concepts, we do not simply fail to do so (as if it simply eluded our clumsy grasp, like the "torn spider web" Wittgenstein has us trying to repair with our fingers in PI §106); indeed, even "success" in this endeavor, were we able to make sense of it at all, would merely capture, not reality at its highest, but its exact opposite: "the last smoke of evaporating reality." Here again, as in the other images, we see the (if you'll pardon the expression) essential perversity of the platonistic and/or Cartesian ideal – which is of course a theme on which Nietzsche plays many variations throughout his writings.

Inconsistent but timely

2008-01-21T11:41:00.000-05:00

New Philosophers' Carnival at Inconsistent Thoughts. I should warn you that if you're bored by contemporary analytic philosophy, you won't find much of interest there. (You could always just get back to work, you know.) But don't let me stop you – go, go!

Format tweakage

2008-01-12T13:43:00.000-05:00

As you can see, I got tired of the old look and am fooling around with a new one, so pardon the mess. Or make suggestions, if you want to help.

Bring out your dead

2008-01-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

Philosophers, that is! The morbidly themed Philosophers' Carnival #60 is under way, so don't delay!

Among the non-morbid posts is this one, which addresses the Bennett and Hacker vs. cog-sci debate we were having earlier. Lots of comments there too!

How do you say "Hidledy-ho, neighborino?" in French?

2008-01-06T20:13:00.000-05:00

First movie seen in 2008: The Simpsons Movie
Second movie: Flanders

Now that's synchronicity! (BTW, the first one is funnier.)

Is Rorty a "textualist"? And if so, is that bad?

2008-01-02T00:28:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year to all. I'd like to begin this year's blogging (which may be sparser this year, as I have resolved to ~~waste~~ spend less time online) with one more post on Rorty, who as you know passed away in 2007.

As I have often complained, most of Rorty's early critics just weren't getting him at all. (This made it hard to see where he really does go wrong, and what to do instead.) Ernest Sosa's 1987 Journal of Philosophy article "Serious Philosophy and Freedom of Spirit" is a case in point. It's not directed against Rorty in particular, but against relativistic "free spirits" as a group and their attacks on realistic "serious" philosophy. Here's Sosa on Rorty's "textualism":

In the book of some free spirits [in Sosa's sense of "subjectivists" et al], the Word was not only in the beginning, but is even—incredibly—said to be everything.

[footnote:] According to Derrida, "there is nothing outside the text," and "there has never been anything but writing" [Of Grammatology, p. 158-9]. Derrida's pronouncements find an echo in Rorty's introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism [p. xxxvii]: "The intuitive realist thinks that there is such a thing as Philosophical truth because he thinks that, deep down beneath all the texts, there is something which is not just one more text but that to which various texts are trying to be 'adequate.' The pragmatist does not think that there is anything like that."

[continuing in the text:] Free spirits are often textualists, readers and authors who live for the conversation, the only point of which, insofar as it has any extrinsic point at all, is to go on and on without end. [p. 710]

So: what Rorty's work shows is that some wackos—incredibly!—think there's no real world out there. Yet of course there's a real world! (Sosa points us later to William Alston's "lucid defense" of "strong realism" in the appropriately titled "Yes, Virginia, There is a Real World." I should point out that those capital letters are in the title only. I think.) No wonder "textualists" don't want to find anything out about the world – they don't think it exists. Instead of such "serious" (and boring) literalism, "playful" free spirits, like the childish and imprudent grasshopper as opposed to the mature and industrious ant, want the meaningless "language game" to go on forever. Sosa makes the customary qualifications (that "seriousness" and "freedom" are on a continuum, and that most people are in the middle rather than one extreme, where only the most hardcore Platonism seems to count as "extreme seriousness"), but he makes no bones about where his sympathies lie. Resisting realism in any significant way is equivalent to failing to realize that "dog" refers to dogs, rendering one a candidate for the lunatic asylum.

Speaking of "language games," Wittgenstein doesn't come in for especial abuse here, but at one point Sosa refers us to Kripke for further reflection on the dangers of relativism in Wittgenstein's "familiar theme" that "reasons inevitably give out." Putting Kripkenstein well to one side, together with his relativist demons, let's look again at that Rorty quote, this time without the distracting parallel to Derrida:

The intuitive realist thinks that there is such a thing as Philosophical truth because he thinks that, deep down beneath all the ______, there is something which is not just one more _______ but that to which various _______ are trying to be "adequate." The pragmatist does not think that there is anything like that.

Rorty's point about "texts" might just as well be put in terms of "interpretations" (and indeed, he sometimes brings in Nietzsche's famous but cryptic remark (about there being no "facts" but only interpretations, itself often interpreted as a skeptical point) here for this very purpose). This suggests a construal in terms of the Wittgensteinian image: reasons, like interpretations, give out (i.e. without ever reaching a transcendentally sanctioned stopping point). Now of course, as this formulation suggests, Wittgenstein's own suggestion is not that "everything is an interpretation" (let alone a "text") but that there is a way of following a rule which is not an interpretation. This wording seems to put Rorty and Wittgenstein at odds. (Not to mention Wittgenstein and Derrida: see Martin Stone's take on this matter in "Wittgenstein and Deconstruction" in Crary and Read, The New Wittgenstein and "On the old saw, 'every reading of a text is an interpretation': some remarks" in Gibson and Huemer, The Literary Wittgenstein, where the target is not so much Derrida as Fish; see also Sonia Sedivy's contribution to the latter volume.)

But forget the wording for a minute and look at the image. Following a chain of reasons or interpretations is likened to digging down for foundations. Some of us think that at some point we must strike upon a final, self-justifying reason, or a final interpretation which, unlike the others, represents the real independently of our interpretive conventions, simply in virtue of how things are. At the end of the chain of similar things, there is a final thing which is different in kind from the others ("not just one more ________"), such that we can bring the process to a definitive conclusion. Others believe that such a thing is impossible, yet the demand is still coherent (indeed, constitutive of inquiry in its essential orientation toward truth).

Here Rorty and Wittgenstein are in agreement. There is nothing like what Wittgenstein calls "rigid rails," which determine the ultimate correctness of our procedures from "outside" them. Nor, however, is there any need for any such thing. That is, we need not, as in Kripke or Crispin Wright, see ourselves as depending on such frail reeds as community agreement to substitute for what we thought we needed "rigid rails" to do. (So it is more toward these two than to Rorty, let alone Wittgenstein, that Sosa's realist bile should be directed.) Instead of this qualitatively distinct regress-stopper (or, again, a lame stand-in for same), we have only more of the same.

But that's only half the story. Even if there is no qualitatively different thing at the end of the chain of reasons (and thus no metaphysical gap to be bridged), there may be what we might as well call a quantitative difference in the successive iterations. In particular, the shared assumption of both skeptic and dogmatist that we cannot stop (i.e., until we reach the "end" so construed), is making me more and more frustrated with this pointless demand. Finally I've had enough. I can't think of anything more to say to you. I can't make it any more obvious than it already is. I'm going home. No, there isn't any shining transcendental justification here – it's just another reason. But if I had known that (the former) was the only thing that would satisfy you, I wouldn't have bothered talking to you in the first place. Yet your early demands for justification were innocent enough.

When, as Wittgenstein puts it, we "hit bedrock" ("when my spade is turned"), it is not, as on some interpretations, that, although I wanted to keep digging in search of ultimate validation, I must throw my hands up in despair that I cannot get it, and that I am forced to accept a substitute. There never was any such thing to be had, and the demand for it is incoherent. Again, contrary to Sosa's assumptions, this is not a (characteristically) skeptical or relativist point, but in fact is aimed in both directions. Just as the skeptic rejects each successive reason as not definitive (because not self-justifying), as part of his argument that maybe things aren't as we think they are after all, the dogmatist takes that bet and digs farther down in search of something that he hopes will really clinch the case. He agrees that without such a thing, we won't have shown that things really are as we think they are. In other words, the skeptic is just a frustrated dogmatist – and a dogmatist is a self-deluded skeptic (as other skeptics will be happy to point out). A pox on both!

"Hitting bedrock," then, on this construal, is not after all an absolute prohibition on continuing to dig. After all, different people have different levels of patience in dealing with increasing obviously poorly (i.e. theoretically, rather than practically) motivated demands for even firmer (say, ideally firm) foundations. Some would have stopped as soon as they see the skeptical/dogmatist pattern; some go on until they really can't think of anything else to say. What Wittgenstein wants us to do is not so much to keep going until "bedrock" is reached – which is after all what happens only when things go wrong in this way – but not to keep going, or try to, even after it's reached – which makes no sense. [Note: last sentence updated (1/6) to restore missing "not"]

But now what about that verbal difference between Rorty (or the textualist) and Wittgenstein? After all, what Wittgenstein says in making what I have suggested may be the same point is not that "interpretation goes all the way down" but that "there is a way of following a rule which is not an interpretation." When we juxtapose these two slogans, it does seem (as it does to Stone) that the two are irrevocably opposed. But Wittgenstein is using the term in a significantly different way. The former slogan, as I explained it, emphasizes the qualitative continuity of the series of reasons, such that no endpoint of the demanded form can be reached. That none is needed is a separate claim, which is what makes this locution look skeptical (and which may be why Wittgenstein tells us not to make it look like "there's something we can't do").

Wittgenstein's locution, on the other hand, emphasizes a discontinuity in the series, one which is meant to explain why I (may) now leave off digging. But he needs the relevant continuity as well in order for the point to go through. This is what is supplied in his case by the fact that everything in the series is an instance of rule-following, of being directed by reasons. That the final one is "not an interpretation" does not invalidate Rorty's (or even Derrida's) "textualist" way of making the point (that is, the point about continuity, i.e. the lack of the particular sort of transcendent or metaphysical discontinuity demanded by both dogmatist and skeptic). For Rorty, the "ubiquity of interpretation" is the Davidsonian point that each context of inquiry (fixation of belief) is one of interpretation as well (attribution of meaning), such that we can never come to the end of interpretation and read a bare fact off of the world, to serve in our ideally objective representation of same. (Indeed, in the Davidsonian context, that "interpretation is ubiquitous" is virtually trivial; yet there is no reason to deny that I may consider my translation manual to be essentially finished, if not, per impossibile, guaranteed to be error-free.)

For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the non-ubiquity of "interpretation" means instead that a series of reasons, or instances of rule-following, should not be thought of as one of successive "substitution[s] of one expression of the rule for another", such that "each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it" (§201) – and this because "any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support" (§198). That sort of series really would go on forever; and the remark about rule-following without "interpretation" (in this sense) is meant to show how we can break it off.

Even if Rorty's "textualist" point can be squared with Wittgenstein's in this way, though, it does perhaps suffer from an insufficiently compelling characterization (compared with Wittgenstein's) of how the series of "interpretations" is actually broken off. I described it above as the point where one simply loses patience with the skeptic's perverse demands (and the dogmatist's equally perverse submission to them). There's not a whole lot to say about such an occurrence – except to argue that the demands really are perverse, which removes us from the scenario of the unending series of reasons, without seeming to resolve it at any particular point. This makes it sound like the point about the "ubiquity of interpretations" really is a skeptical one, and that its consequence is that we must indeed continue the process without hope of resolution.

This of course fits in with Sosa's characterization of the textualist (and with many other critiques of Rorty) as more concerned with "continuing the conversation" – now removed, qua (supposedly) skeptical concern, from determining the truth about anything (Sosa: "the only point ... is to go on and on, without end"). I've already suggested how we can see this as the opposite of Rorty's point. Let me finish by saying how I think this misinterpretation leads to another, concerning Rorty's insistence that "the only constraints on inquiry are conversational ones" – that is, as opposed to ones coming from the alleged intrinsic nature of reality, demanding to be mirrored in an ideally objective manner. This is of course closely related to Rorty's endorsement of Davidson's "coherentism," where "only a belief [i.e. and not the world] can be a reason for another belief." (I won't go into why Davidson himself need not be held to the idealistic consequences of this doctrine, but I do think even he may have to give something up.)

Here again it looks as if we're not trying to get reality right (whereupon we can stop conversing, having reached agreement both with each other and with the world), but simply to have a good time at the dinner party (which we hope will never end). After all, do we ever decide anything during such conversations? And do we mind that we do not? But here again Rorty is making what is at bottom a potentially useful point in a characteristically lopsided way (threatening its utility, ironically enough). For what are "conversational constraints on inquiry"? There are several, but the relevant one here might be one according to which we are not perversely to ignore the obvious in order to press a purely theoretical point about the nature of knowledge – or, in Peirce's words, to "pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts" ("Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," in The Essential Peirce, p. 29; right before this, he claims that "a person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim [i.e to begin with universal doubt and build only on ideally secure foundations]"). This perverse dissembling is exactly what the skeptic does in demanding to "dig below bedrock"; and that is exactly what keeps the conversation stuck in a rut rather than continuing in a natural way (e.g. deciding the consequences of what we have just agreed on).

Thus, following "conversational" constraints rather than illusory metaphysical ones coming from the world (in) itself can be perfectly compatible with agreeing that something is the case and considering that question settled for now. And I think Rorty really did see this, and at least sometimes meant it that way; but of course I also believe he sometimes let his aversion to realism overcome his better judgment, and, yes, lead him to recoil into relativism and/or skepticism. Still, Sosa's snark rubs me the wrong way, and I hope we never see any more blanket dismissals of a philosopher whom history may yet judge to have been not significantly more wrong than any other great philosopher.

Another semi-cool widget

2007-12-20T23:23:00.000-05:00

You will notice a new widget I have added in the sidebar, between the archives and the blogroll. It's kind of cool, but it'll get boring if it doesn't get updated for a long time (I'll try not to let that happen). I have started it off with a list of 15 fine films I saw this year. (I didn't limit it to 2007 releases because I didn't see, well, even 15 of them at all, let alone 15 worth mentioning.) 2004 seems to have been a reasonably good year, with four entries out of 15.

On a film's individual page at imdb, the title is always listed in the original language (which means that sometimes you can't recognize it: did you know that #57 on the imdb top 250 list, as voted by you the viewers, is Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi?); but even on this list the title can be misleading. For instance ... oh heck, I'll just list them again here, as I don't have to link to them again, and I have a few comments anyway. This post will be far away down the page soon enough, I imagine. Click on the plus sign next to each title (in the widget) for more info! (Tell your browser to allow popups for this page in order to go to the corresponding imdb page.)

1. The Lives of Others

This is that East German movie about the Stasi. Sebastian Koch is excellent as the dissident playwright caught up in tragic circumstances, but the film really belongs to Ulrich Mühe as the Stasi agent with wavering loyalties. Koch is also good in Black Book, which just missed the cut (maybe later).

2. Kill!

Awesome samurai flick. Tatsuya Nakadai is the man. 'nuff said.

3. Downfall

Bruno Ganz was a fixture in German cinema during the 70's and 80's (e.g. Wings of Desire, Messer im Kopf, etc.) Here he plays Hitler. This film is monumental and I can't imagine what it must have been like to see it if you lived in Germany during those terrible days (kind of like The Lives of Others in that respect, but more so). I can't judge the accuracy of Ganz's Hitler impression, but he's totally convincing in any case. Fun fact: if you saw The Ninth Day, you'll remember Ulrich Matthes as the heroic priest; well, here he plays Goebbels. Yikes!

4. Together

This is a hilarious and moving film from Sweden (I laughed, I ... well, I was moved) about communal living (hey, the 70's happened in Sweden too, y'know) – portrayed with all its lumps, but lovingly all the same. Great comment at the imdb page ("the aesthetics of porridge").

5. Head-On

This starts out as what I guess is a culture-clash comedy, about Germans of Turkish descent, but then veers into deeper waters, with surprising impact (thus the title?). It takes a while to get where it's going, but it's definitely different. I don't know what else to say here so I'll leave it at that.

6. Sansho the Bailiff

I don't know how they get The Bailiff out of "Sansho dayu", but there it is. At least the DVD cover gets it right. This is a classic of Japanese cinema, newly out on DVD (thank you Criterion!!). More melodramatic than I expected (and the director himself was apparently a bit dismissive of it later on), but still jawdropping (e.g. the abduction scene – whew!).

7. The Taste of Tea

One of those quirky Japanese films about a quirky family. Yeah, sounds boring, but give it a chance and its weird rhythms will beguile you.

8. House of Fools

Another film that works better than its description: a lunatic asylum in Chechnya caught up in the madness of war. Look out for the bizarre, gutsy cameo by Bryan Adams the rock star.

9. F for Fake

That's what it says on the box; not sure where the listed title comes from (and the imdb page has "Verités et mensonges"). Orson Welles giving us a lesson in art fakery. This one is totally out there.

10. 49th Parallel

Again, that's what it says on the box (in huge letters). Much better title than "The Invaders." One of the lesser-known Powell & Pressburger efforts, but if you like them (or if you are Canadian) you will definitely enjoy this unusual yet very entertaining film (w/Anton Walbrook!). Look out for Laurence Olivier in what is, well, not his best-known role. Another clutch Criterion release (so was Kill!, btw).

11. Mysterious Skin

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is riveting in this Gregg Araki film (warning: hard to watch at times). The big revelation is no surprise, but that doesn't matter as much as you'd think. Great cameo: Mary Lynn Rajskub (Chloe on 24) as ... what Chloe on 24 would be like if she were a UFO abductee instead of a CTU agent.

12. Pan's Labyrinth

Never got to it in the theater, but I finally caught up with it on DVD. Eye-popping fantasy (set during the Spanish Civil War this time) from Guillermo del Toro (director of Hellboy).

13. Prince of the City

Cop corruption drama in the Serpico vein, from ... the director of Serpico. The big breakthrough – and AFAICT the only big role – for Treat Williams, who is in virtually every scene. Cool time capsule.

14. Take My Eyes

Surprisingly involving Spanish drama about an abusive relationship.

15. The Cranes Are Flying

Just saw this one last night (thanks are once again due to Criterion for a marvelous transfer). Wow. Yet another war movie, this time from the Soviet angle. And once again, I cannot imagine what a Soviet audience must have thought, not only having lived through that time themselves, but also seeing it so freely portrayed on the screen (thanks to the "thaw" after Stalin's death). There's a scene in which two bright-eyed factory girls are about to regale the young hero's father with the customary patriotic bromides and he just cuts them off with a mocking laugh – the audience must just have gasped. Breathtaking cinematography throughout. See this one first.

All in all a good year at this end. Check back in 2009 for some 2007 releases!

A minor point about Dennett

2007-12-17T21:11:00.000-05:00

I know I have other obligations (in the works), but here's one thing I had intended to get back to. And now my intention has been realized.

The other day, in comments, Daniel linked to some criticism Ben W. made of Dennett's explanation (in "Real Patterns") of the utility (indeed, inescapability) of the "intentional stance" using his beloved Life-plane example. I'll assume familiarity with the example (clink the link for Ben's setup), but the general idea is that if we are presented with a Life-plane computer chess player, we will do much better in predicting its behavior, Dennett claims, by taking the intentional stance (i.e. taking into account what the best move is), rather than making a ridonkulous number of Life-rule calculations (i.e. in predicting the entire bitmap down to the last cell for X generations).

There are two issues here, which we need to keep straight. First, how are we supposed to translate an intentional-stance prediction ("K x Q") "back into Game of Life terms," as Dennett claims is possible? Second, how do we know enough, given the impossibly vast bitmap, to make the intentional-stance predition in the first place?

With respect to the first issue, the problem here, as I see it, is that there's an ambiguity in the idea of "translating that description back into Life terms". Of course you can't translate "he'll play K x Q" "back into" a bitmap. There are innumerable bitmaps which include (let's say) the stream of gliders that translates into "K x Q." (Consider for example that the move is so obvious that even the worst-playing chess programs will make it.) But there may be only one (suitably described) glider stream that corresponds to "K x Q". It's that description which is made in "Life terms" ("glider stream" is a Life term, right?).

Here's how Ben poses the second question:

You can't adopt the intentional stance towards [the Life-chessplayer] until you have some idea what it's doing beyond just playing Life. I don't see any real reason to grant this, but even if you grant that someone comes along and tells you "oh, that implements a universal Turing machine and it's playing chess with itself", you still can't do anything with that information to predict what the move will be until you know the state of the board.

Well, of course. But remember, the intentional stance is an interpretive stance; and we don't ask (say) Davidson's radical interpreter for his/her interpretation (ascription of beliefs and meanings) until a whole lot of observations and interactions have occurred. Pointing this out is not the same as locating a theoretical difficulty with the very idea of ascribing beliefs and meanings on the basis of observations which might very well have perfectly good descriptions in radically non-intentional terms. Nor does it show a problem with making predictions of events which can be described in some way at any number of levels (to wit: a long (!) list of particles and their momenta, a hand moving in this direction at that velocity, a man moving his hand, a man pulling a lever, a man voting, a man making a mistake – a bad mistake). That is, it doesn't mean interpretative strategies aren't worth it in predictive/explanatory terms. What choice do we have?

Now go back to the first question (or both together):

Even if someone came along and told the observer not only that it's playing chess with itself, and then also told h/h what the current state of the board is (in which case it's hard to see what the program itself has to do with anything anymore), he's still not in much of a position to predict future configurations of the Life board—not even those extremely few that do nothing but represent the state of play immediately after the move.

Again, when we "re-translate" our intentional-stance prediction "back into Life terms," we don't get 1) entire bitmaps; and we didn't get the intentional-stance predition, and the "re-translation", 2) from nothing but a gander at the massive bitmap. We get 1) particular abstractions (say, a glider stream of such and such a description from that gun there) 2) after we already know, however we know it, that a chess game is in progress, the position, which glider streams are doing what, etc. That may sound very limited compared to what Ben is demanding. But why should we expect the miracle he's discussing? or hold it against an interpretive procedure that fails to provide it? I don't predict the exact state of your neurons when I predict you'll say (i.e., make a token of one of the insanely large number of sound types corresponding to the English words) "Boise, why?" when prompted by (...) "What's the capital of Idaho?" This is true even if your "mental state" does indeed supervene on your neural state. And of course my predictions depend on a whole lot of assumptions not available to (say) an newly materialized alien being trying for prediction/explanation in its own terms – assumptions like that you speak English, and know the state capitals, and are in a question-answering (yet suspicious) mood, etc., etc., all of which are corrigible if my predictions keep failing (and all of which, for Davidsonian reasons, even such a very radical interpreter may eventually be able to make for itself).

Also, what we actually do get isn't chopped liver – unless you'd really rather crank out those trillions of calculations. And even if you did, your result wouldn't be in the right form for our purposes. It would have both (way) too much information and not enough. Too much, because I don't need to know the massive amount of information which distinguishes that particular bitmap from every other one in the set of bitmaps each of which instantiates a Turing machine chessplayer running a chess program good enough to make the move I predict (or not good enough not to make the mistake I also make). All I need – all I want – is the move (or, in Life terms, the glider stream).

But there's also not enough information there, because (as Ben points out) you could do the bitmap numbercrunching and still not know there was a chess game being played – which leaves you without an explanation for why I can predict the glider stream (qua glider stream) just as well as you; and of course you too have to know something about Life (more than the rules) to go from bitmap to glider stream. I think Nozick says something like this in Philosophical Explanations (without the Life part).

And of course "it's hard to see what the program itself has to do with anything anymore." Just as it's hard to see what your neurons have to do with the capital of Idaho. Once we take up the proper stance for the type of interpretation we're interested in, we can ignore the underlying one. In each case, though, we keep in mind that if things get messed up at the lower level (a puffer train from the edge of the plane is about to crash into our Turing machine, or (in the Boise case) someone clocks you with a shovel), all intentional-level bets are off. (But that doesn't mean we aren't also interested in an explanation of how exactly the bitmap-plus-Life-rules instantiates a chessplayer, or of how exactly neurons relate to cognition; those are just different questions than "what move?" or "what answer?").

So I disagree with Ben that (in this sense, anyway) "this stance stuff [seems not to] reap big benefits." I don't know what Daniel means by Ben's criticism's making the stances "look a whole lot more naturalistic." As opposed to what?

Knee-deep thoughts

2007-12-17T10:59:00.000-05:00

What effect do lakes have on thought? Find out at the new Philosophers' Carnival!

Like, wow

2007-12-14T17:21:00.000-05:00

I don't post about my dreams here (usually I forget them right away), but this one was amusing. Rorty had just given his last lecture before retiring, and he asks Habermas if he'll be teaching during the summer. No, Habermas replies, he has to work on his autobiography: "I'm only up to my Cosmic Hippie period." I don't know about you, but I find it hard to imagine ol' Jürgen grooving to Brüder des Schattens, Söhne des Lichts. On the other hand, the cover of my edition (1979) of Communication and the Evolution of Society is pretty psychedelic...

One man's twaddle

2007-12-13T19:31:00.000-05:00

National Review commenter George Leef spends 90% of his posts on the high cost of college, but the other 10% are on ... why it's not worth it anyway. Here he is the other day on academic "scholarship":

Professors at most colleges and universities these days have to publish their research in order to win tenure and impress fellow academics who might some day offer them a better job. Often that research is of extremely dubious value and only gets published by university presses. Mal Kline of Accuracy in Academia writes here about some examples.

I didn't include the link to AiA (use your imagination, or click through if you must). I draw your attention to the phrase I have embolded. You can tell, you see, that Professor Davidson's "research" is of dubious value because he could only get it published by Oxford U. Press, where it can hardly be expected to sell very many copies, instead of a real publisher – like, say, Regnery. They probably didn't even get him on Larry King, to promote that – what was it again? – "radical interpretation" business. Nobody's buying your radicalism, Dr. Smartypants!

What a tool. Oh, but we're not done:

In his recent book Education's End, Professor Anthony Kronman of Yale laments the damage that has been done by the "research ideal" that has come to dominate higher education. He writes, "In the natural and social sciences, the goal of an ever-closer approximation to the truth seems entirely reasonable....In the humanities, this is less clear." Kronman is too polite to blurt out the truth — a lot of academic research is just twaddle.

Damn humanities – they'll ruin it for everybody. (Yet I agree that some people would be better off not publishing ... )

'Tis the season, again

2007-12-12T20:44:00.000-05:00

My two fave ambient mix purveyors have selected the best of 2007 (here and here. Thanks guys! Check 'em out!

Breaking news: Stockhausen RIP

2007-12-07T13:33:00.000-05:00

Obituary here. Not to get into the metaphysics of naming or anything, but I happen to know that Karlheinz Stockhausen had already died some years ago, after being hit by a car. I wasn't present on that occasion, so I'm not sure whether he was wearing his leash at the time. He had spent most of his life as an indoor cat, so he probably never really developed the sort of road-awareness that outdoor cats have.

Anyway, this other Karlheinz Stockhausen will live forever, thanks to Gesang der Jünglinge, Stimmung (get the Hyperion recording, not the original DG version), Hymnen, Kontakte, and a few other things. Or perhaps he lives in his massive influence on others. The obituary names Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, and Bjørk; but I'm surprised not to see any German names there, like Klaus Schulze, Edgar Froese, Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Conny Plank, Peter Michael Hamel, or, well, anybody. (Or maybe I'm not surprised.)

Monk in the land of churches

2007-12-06T19:55:00.000-05:00

At Brain Scam, H. A. Monk takes on Paul Churchland. (For some reason, as I write this, anyway, the post is dated 11/14, but it appeared on my reader on 12/6; plus the post mentions its being two months since the last one, which was on 10/6, so it looks like Blogger is on drugs or something.) He deals effectively with Churchland's latest argument for the identity of color qualia (the "subjective aspects" of color experience) with something called "cone cell coding triplets". I don't know whether the latter is a brain structure or some abstraction about the behavior of some cells in the visual cortex, but it hardly matters as far as I can tell.

This is because the problem is with the "identity theory" itself, not what exactly the "material" relatum amounts to, with which the "qualia" are supposed to be identical. As Monk rightly sums up:

One might say: qualia are a suspect kind of entity anyway, so why should I need a theory to account for them? Fine, but what you can't say is: these qualia you talk about, they just are these coding vectors, and then act like you've explained qualia [...] Similarly [i.e. to a deleted example, which doesn't seem quite right], one can say: I can explain everything there is to explain about sensation without reference to "qualia", so why should I be obliged to give you a separate explanation of them? But that is not what is being offered. Rather, we are told, color qualia exist; they are cone cell coding vectors.

Okay, but I think Monk actually lets Churchland off the hook. I would rather he had stayed with the promising line that explaining sensory experience isn't a matter of either

a) a complete neurophysical explanation, such as the materialist gives us; or

b) (a), corresponding to the "objective" part of the phenomenon in question, plus an explanation of "qualia," or the "subjective" part, where this latter part may simply be ineffable, but in any case necessary, such that without it we have an "explanatory gap".

But instead, he goes into Ned Block mode, telling us essentially that Churchland's proposal leaves something out.

When is Churchland going to wake up and smell the coffee? I'm not sure, but I don't think we should test it by asking him whether he's awake or not; better check his brain scan and let him know. Then do an EEG and see if he's smelling the coffee. With sufficient training he could be taught to look at the EEG and say, "Why, I was smelling coffee!" (This is the flip side of Churchland's utopia, in which we are all so well-informed about cognitive facts that introspection itself becomes a recognition of coding vectors and the like.) Now for the tricky part: turn off the switch in his brain that produces the coffee-smelling qual, and tell him that every morning, rather than having that phenomenological version of the sensation, he will recognize the coffee smell intellectually and be shown a copy of his EEG. And similarly, one by one, for all his other qualia.

This is the same thing everybody says about the Churchlands. (Not the same, but it reminds me of the joke about the behaviorists in the bedroom: "It was good for you; was it good for me too?") It wasn't to the point then, and it's not to the point now. It's true that the materialist answer "leaves something out" conceptually; but the reply cannot be that we can bring this out by separating the third-personal and first-personal aspects of coffee-smelling, and then (by "turn[ing] off a switch in his brain") give him only the former and see if he notices anything missing. That the two are separable in this way just is the Cartesian assumption common to both parties. (Why, for example, should we expect that if he simply "recognize[s] the coffee smell intellectually" his EEG wouldn't be completely different from, well, actually smelling it?) I think we should instead resist the idea that registering the "coffee smell" is one thing (say, happening over here in the brain) and "having [a] phenomenological version of the sensation" is a distinct thing, one that might happen somewhere else, such that I could "turn off the switch" that allows the latter, without thereby affecting the former. That sounds like the "Cartesian Theater" model I would have thought we were trying to get away from.

But rejecting this suspect idea is not at all to return to saying, with the materialist, that (what I called) "registering" the smell and "subjectively experiencing" it are identical, such that we only need the former (so construed). Sensory experience (like cognition and every other "mental" phenomenon) has multiple aspects, of which the "purely" first-person and "purely" third-person aspects are merely the ones most ripe for illegitimate philosophical reification. Better far to tell a story such that these are more easily seen as useful abstractions from a more unitary phenomenon. (On the other hand, go too far in this direction, and you get a big monistic mess, in which subject and object disappear entirely. Opinions differ about Dewey, but Experience and Nature at least threatens to have this result. Subject talk and object talk are indispensable, and we need not render them inaccessible simply in order to block their dualistic reification. But that's another story for another day.)

Monk continues:

Don't say: well, he doesn't deny these qualia exist, after all; he just thinks they are identical to blah-blah-blah... If he thinks they are identical to blah-blah-blah then he should not object in the least if we can produce blah-blah-blah without those illusory folk-psychological phenomena we think are the essence of the matter.

Interestingly, I was at a talk one time where Churchland said just that very thing ("I love qualia!") to Block's predictable objection. (He and Block went back and forth a few times, neither understanding the other, until everybody else started fidgeting.) I'm not defending his answer, except to the extent that I agree that Block's objection is not the right response. Churchland will just say that you can't produce one without the other, because (as I also agree) there's no distinct "experiencer" in the brain; and we shouldn't let him get away with that. After all, we're after the conceptual issue, not the empirical one; and all the proposed experiment would get Churchland to do (if it "worked" at all) is to abandon his empirical proposal that that particular neural candidate was the correct one. All you will have shown is that that neural candidate wasn't sufficient for smelling, when it's the very idea of "identifying" subjective and objective aspects of experience which is incoherent.

Look also at how easy it is, even while saying something basically right, to slip into misleading ways of talking. Monk is rejecting the idea that Churchland's claimed ability to use his neural theory of sensory experience to make "phenomenological prediction from neurological facts" provides any support for it (i.e. for the idea that "the qualia-coding vector relationship is not a mere correlation but an actual identity"). We can do that already, without needing to posit a tendentious "identity" to account for it. Here's Monk's example:

We know that the lens of the eye delivers an inverted image, which is subsequently righted by the brain. This suggests that our brains, without our conscious effort, favor a perspective that places our heads above our feet. (It is also possible that it is simply hard-wired to invert the image 180 degrees, but for various reasons that theory does not hold water.) Prediction: make someone wear inverting glasses, and they will see [an] upside down image at first (the brain inverts it out of habit), but eventually the brain will turn it right side up. It works!

Again, I agree with the general point: we don't need any "identity" here. But the wording seems to leave some of the generating assumptions in place. The lens of the eye does indeed "deliver an inverted image" to the retina (we can even see it, back there). But why say that that image "is subsequently righted by the brain"? Does it need to be "righted" ... in order for us to see it? Again we have an incipient Cartesian Theater. Surely what we see is not the image, but the objects in front of us. Inverting glasses make it seem as if everything is upside down; but after a while we get better at (re-)coordinating our various sensory inputs (primarily vision, touch, and proprioception), and that impression fades (not that one image is replaced by another). There: I told the story "without giving a separate explanation" of the visual anomaly; isn't that what we were supposed to do, rather than demanding a distinct something lacking from the materialist account? It's not a detailed story, as the solely neural one would be; but so what? We can give details on request, depending on the point of the question, and maybe this will require one sort of abstraction from our unified picture, and maybe it'll require a different one. That doesn't mean they're separable (as the qualophile demands).

Churchland also claims, Monk tells us, that "trained musicians 'hear' a piece differently than average audiences." I don't see how this was supposed to help Churchland's case, but Monk objects to the very idea:

That is also a predictable phenomenological fact, but it involves a change in the mental software, through accustomization and training, and does not obviously involve any sensual change. To see a new color or to have fewer distinct sounds reach the brain from the cochlea are sensual changes; to hear more deeply those sounds that do reach the ear, to organize them more efficiently and recognize more relationships between is not a sensual change but an intellectual one that we might metaphorically characterize as "hearing more than others". In fact musicians hear the same thing others hear but understand what they hear in a more lucid way. The sensual phenomena I have mentioned are actual changes in what reaches the brain for processing or in processing at a subliminal level, and do not depend on how we train ourselves to organize the information we receive.

Again, I don't see why we need a dualism between "sensual changes" (i.e. in the sound that reaches the ear) and "hearing [these sounds] more deeply". (Isn't that the fallacy behind the philosophical chestnut "if a tree falls and no-one hears it, does it make any sound?"). I don't see any reason that we are required to say that "musicians hear the same thing others hear," simply because there's a sense (the "objective" one?) in which it's trivially true. As an English speaker, I find it perfectly straightforward (i.e. not necessarily metaphorical) to say that musicians "hear more than others." Nor do I feel obliged to characterize the difference as "intellectual" rather than "sensual," even if the latter sort of change is due to one of the former sort.

So what's the moral? Maybe it's this. In situations like this, it will always seem like there's a natural way to bring out "what's missing" from a reductive account of some phenomenon. We grant the conceptual possibility of separating out (the referent of) the reducing account from (that of) the (supposedly) reduced phenomenon; but then rub in the reducer's face the manifest inability of such an account to encompass what we feel is "missing." But to do this we have presented the latter as a conceptually distinct thing (so the issue is not substance dualism, which Block rejects as well) – and this is the very assumption we should be protesting. On the other hand, what we should say – the place we should end up – seems in contrast to be less pointed, and thus less satisfying, than the "explanatory gap" rhetoric we use to make the point clear to sophomores, who may very well miss the subtler point and take the well-deserved smackdown of materialism to constitute an implicit (or explicit!) acceptance of the dualistic picture.

Surely there's a way to make this point in the Wittgensteinian language of aspect-seeing, but I haven't got it just right yet. How about this: that I see the picture-duck only in seeing the drawing – that the former doesn't ontologically "transcend" the latter, if you like – doesn't mean I have to say they're identical (as the materialist-analogue would have it). If I do that, then I have to tell the same story about the picture-rabbit. But the picture-duck isn't "identical" with the picture-rabbit, which it would have to be if both were identical with the drawing.

But now the solution to this is not to say instead that the picture-duck is different (i.e. a distinct thing) from the drawing, while yet being careful to say (now as the Block-analogue would have it) that the former doesn't after all "transcend" the latter in a metaphysically unpleasant way. In a sense it was right to say that the picture-duck "is" the drawing; the problem was with the nature of that "is". (It depends on what the meaning of "is" is (heh heh).) It's not the "is" of "objective" metaphysical identity; it's the "is" of aspect recognition ("that drawing? It's a duck").

Try it with a different "is" still. The drawing is a picture-duck. Now we have the "is" of predication. It's also a picture-rabbit; but in each case we have the same drawing. That sounds okay at first; but it leaves us with a scheme-content dualism. The experience of aspect-dawning is one of seeing a different picture, not of seeing the same picture differently. Seeing the "same drawing" is too far in one direction, while seeing distinct entities is too far in the other. Or, to sound a Wittgensteinian note from another context: the difference between the picture-duck and picture-rabbit is "not a something, but not a nothing either." (I blush to admit that I can't remember exactly where this line occurs. My defense is that it applies to so much of what he says that it might occur anywhere. Anyone?)

Yet Wittgenstein himself sometimes seems dogmatically to close off what might, if properly conceived, be possible empirical/scientific investigations. This offends my pragmatist sensibilities (Peirce: thou shalt not put roadblocks on the path of inquiry). Here's an example from PI p. 211e:

The likeness makes a striking impression on me; then the impression fades.
It only struck me for a few minutes, and then no longer did.
What happened here?—What can I recall? My own facial expression comes to mind; I could reproduce it. If someone who knew me had seen my face he would have said "Something about his face struck you just now."—There further occurs to me what I say on such an occasion, out loud or to myself. And that is all.—And this is what being struck is? No. These are the phenomena of being struck; but they are 'what happens'.

Is being struck looking plus thinking? No. Many of our concepts cross here.

I like that; but right before this he says:

"Just now I looked at the shape rather than at the colour." Do not let such phrases confuse you. [So far so good; but now:] Above all, don't wonder "What can be going on in the eyes or brain?"

In a way this is right too, in the way the first excerpt was right. Don't wonder that if you thought that was going to provide the answer to our conceptual problem. But surely there is something going on in the brain! Would you tell the neuroscientist to stop investigating vision? Or even think of him/her as simply dotting the i's and crossing the t's on a story already written by philosophy? That gets things backwards. Philosophy doesn't provide answers by itself, to conceptual problems or scientific ones. It untangles you when you run into them; but when you're done, you still have neuroscience to do. Neuroscience isn't going to answer free-standing philosophical problems; but that doesn't mean we should react to the attempt by holding those problems up out of reach. Instead, we should get the scientist to tell the story properly, so that the problems don't come up in the first place. (Wittgenstein credits this insight to Hertz, but we will leave that story for someone more qualified than I to tell.)

No fool of a Took

2007-12-05T20:49:00.000-05:00

You may have heard about Robert Pippin's recent exchange with McDowell in the European Journal of Philosophy. Well now Professor P. has put the relevant pdf's on his website, including the Postscript to "Leaving Nature Behind" (his contribution to Reading McDowell) which is his response to McD's response in that book. So it goes

1. P: "Leaving Nature Behind" in Smith 2002
2. M: "Responses" in Smith 2002
3. P: "Postscript"
4. M: "On Pippin's Postscript"
5. P: "McDowell's Germans"
6. M: "Oh yeah? Sez you! (Pbbbbbt!)"

Okay, I made that last one up. Some heady stuff there! You may want to skim the B Deduction first. (There's an oxymoron for you: "skim the B Deduction".)

Here's a taste from #4, where McDowell lays it on the line:

The result of [what he's just been saying] is no longer Kantian in any but the thinnest sense. But that is no threat to anything I think. My proposal — whose shape I took from Pippin — was that we can understand at least some aspects of Hegelian thinking in terms of a radicalization of Kant. The radicalization need not be accessible to someone who would still be recognizably Kant. It is enough if there is a way to arrive at a plausibly Hegelian stance by reflecting on the upshot of the Deduction. It is no problem for this that, as I am suggesting, this reflection undermines the very need for a Transcendental Deduction — provided such a result emerges intelligibly from considering what is promising and what is unsatisfactory in Kant’s effort.

Dear Santa (I been good)

2007-12-03T19:30:00.000-05:00

Brian Leiter announces with pride that his co-edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy is now available. Based on the stellar list of contributors, I have to say it looks terrific. Of course, "available" is a relative term. Amazon has it listed for $153.

[Update (12/26)]: Rats.

It does not! (okay, some does)

2007-12-03T12:37:00.000-05:00

The Philosophers' Carnival seems now to be biweekly; here's the latest edition, at Philosophy Sucks!

D'Souza vs. Dennett (preview)

2007-12-01T23:46:00.000-05:00

I write this before hearing anything about the 11/30/07 debate between these two, but even so let me say a few things (and perhaps get an idea of how it will go at the debate). Besides, in my recent post about D'Souza and his, um, encounter with Kant, I didn't get to Dennett's response. I'll assume familiarity here with what D'Souza says (or see here for a taste).

I'm actually a big Dennett fan. His naturalism bugs me sometimes, but he's been a tiger in the fight against the Cartesian conception of the mind. (I know that sounds funny – his naturalism is central to his thought – but you'd be surprised how often it doesn't come up.) In this context, though, he does have a bit of a tin ear, and I'm not at all sure he'll do well in a debate in which the stated topic is "Is God a Human Invention?"

First of all, he just asks for it with his ridiculous self-labelling as a "bright." He tells us we need a word for "a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view." But we've got one already: it's "naturalist." Yes, there's another sense of the word – that in which John Muir is a "naturalist" – but that sense doesn't entail disbelief in "supernatural" entities, as Dennett wants. So how about "philosophical naturalist"? Anything but "bright," which is monumentally stupid, and does indeed sound, no matter how many times Dennett denies the implication, like "brights" are smarter than you.

Also, in responding to D'Souza (about Kant), Dennett strikes me as remarkably unable, given his committed anti-Cartesianism, to see Kant as an ally rather than an opponent. It's disappointing to see him let D'Souza bait him into dismissing Kant as a deluded mystic desperately trying to prove the existence of another world beyond the veil. I guess that's easy for me to say, having grown up with the "one-world" interpretation of Kant advocated by Henry Allison and Graham Bird, among others (not that that's the only issue by any means; but it sure helps). Still, I would have thought that the scorn Kant pours on traditional metaphysics in the Critique would be hard to miss. In reply to D'Souza's Kant, though, Dennett is all snark:

If Dinesh D'Souza knew just a little bit more philosophy, he would realize how silly he appears when he accuses me of committing what he calls "the Fallacy of the Enlightenment." and challenges me to refute Kant's doctrine of the thing-in-itself. I don't need to refute this; it has been lambasted so often and so well by other philosophers that even self-styled Kantians typically find one way or another of excusing themselves from defending it.

Ah yes, the famous "doctrine of the thing-in-itself." If you want to make Kant look ridiculous, it is indeed helpful to hang around his neck the "transcendental illusion" he explicitly rejects, together with the insinuation that "self-styled Kantians" (like Allison, presumably) have to resort to sophistry in order to wiggle out of their manifest obligation to attribute sheer virtually unadulterated Platonism to him.

But of course D'Souza has no intention of wiggling out of it. As we saw, he embraces it:

So powerful is Kant's argument here that his critics have been able to answer him only with derision. When I challenged Daniel Dennett to debunk Kant's argument, he posted an angry response on his website in which he said several people had already refuted Kant. But he didn't provide any refutations, and he didn't name any names. Basically Dennett was relying on the argumentum ad ignorantium-the argument that relies on the ignorance of the audience. In fact, there are no such refutations.

Now that's chutzpah. Committing the argumentum ad ignorantiam (excuse me, "ignorantium") in the same breath as attributing it to your opponent: priceless. But of course in the context D'Souza has provided, the only thing that would count as a "refutation" is an argument showing not (say) that "noumenalism" (or transcendental realism!) is incoherent, but that the "Enlightenment Fallacy" – that we can know everything – is true. And of course even Hegel (who famously argued against Kant for the possibility of "Absolute Knowledge") didn't believe that. So in that sense D'Souza gets to be right. No such "refutations" exist. But so what.

Let's move on. In his 11/30 post, right before the debate, D'Souza served up some trash-talk for the occasion. He gleefully quotes the late Stephen Jay Gould (who was, as you know, a Prominent Biologist) referring to Dennett as a "Darwinian fundamentalist":

[Gould] suggested that just as religious fundamentalists read Scripture in a literal and pig-headed way, and unimaginatively apply biblical passages to everything, so Dennett has a primitive understanding of evolution and, with the enthusiasm of the fire-breathing acolyte, tries to apply Darwinism to virtually every human social, cultural and religious practice, with disastrous and even comical results.

There is indeed a controversy here, and Dennett is indeed more likely to err on the ambitious side w/r/t evolutionary explanation. But D'Souza is being ridiculous. All he does is quote dismissive rhetoric from Gould (and H. Allen Orr) to make Dennett look bad. But as that New York Review exchange with Gould makes embarrassingly clear, Gould never understood Dennett's response, or at least didn't address it, and in fact resorted to personal attacks and name-calling in a most unprofessional manner. But put that aside (after all, that doesn't make Dennett right). Dollars to doughnuts D'Souza doesn't understand it either, and is just looking for another way to hurl abuse.

Let me try to clear it up a bit. No doubt I too will oversimplify; but we can take a few steps in. The issue concerns Dennett's "adaptationism" – his tendency to try to explain a biological phenomenon in terms of its evolutionary advantages. Gould was right to point out that we cannot simply assume that we can do this for every biological phenomenon. In his famous example, which I will not explain, some things are "spandrels": they arise because other things are evolutionarily advantageous and bring the first thing along with them. The "adaptationist" makes it sound like some evolutionary developments are inevitable – as if nature says, hey, wouldn't feathers be a great idea here! Let's evolve some feathers! (Or intelligence, or – more relevant to Gould's rejection of sociobiology – incest taboos, or matriarchy, or whatever.) Such "explanations" can (and in the case of sociobiology, often did) end up sounding like a bunch of ad hoc Just So Stories. In response, Gould emphasizes the radical contingency of the evolutionary path: re-run the tape 20 times and get 20 different results (think "A Sound of Thunder" here).

Fair enough. But Dennett never denied these things. (Gould's original attack was on earlier "adaptationists," but then Gould turned his guns on Dennett later.) Somehow the debate got turned from an interesting one (about which particular sorts of appeals one can make to evolutionary advantage, and which particular such explanations work and which do not) into one about whether one could ever appeal to evolutionary advantage, or whether there could ever be what Dennett calls a "forced move in design space." But surely, even in the case of evolutionary psychology (where the danger of Just So Stories is very real) no such slam dunk is possible. I, at least, am willing to let the Ev Psychers make their case; as the name change indicates, they seem to have learned at least a bit of humility from the sociobiology debacle. Maybe this or that isn't so just-so a story after all.

But that's not the point. Let's abandon Ev Psych entirely, for the sake of argument, and take "adaptationism" in biology alone. Jerry Fodor recently claimed that the very idea of nature "selecting for" a particular trait is incoherent, because nature doesn't have desires that things be one way or another. We can't say that the polar bear's white fur was "selected for" – that it arose because of its evolutionary advantage, as "adaptationists" claim – because given the polar bear's white surroundings, nature can't distinguish between white fur and fur that matches the environment, so it can't "select" for either. Like a lot of what Fodor says, that sounds crazy to me. For one thing, not only would this render explanations in terms of evolutionary advantage necessarily insufficient, it seems to eviscerate the notion entirely, which is nuts. (Interestingly, for what it's worth, it's also reminiscent of Quine's argument for linguistic holism, which Fodor famously rejects.) For more on Fodor, see here and here.

As is their wont, Fodor and Dennett trade incredulous accusations of the other's not getting it at all (links at the previous link, at the bottom of the page). Granted, Dennett is on firmer ground (in this respect, i.e. that of accusing Fodor of not getting it at all) in the philosophy of mind than in biology; so maybe they're both not getting it. (Or I'm not, or nobody is.) But of course D'Souza is keen to set Dennett straight there too. Back in June he had a four-paragraph zinger which was very similar: he found some other authorities willing to dump on Dennett as a dogmatic ignoramus. (Actually, looking again, I see D'Souza brings up Dennett himself; but so do the authors in question, as I happen to know, so, no foul there.) Briefly, the idea is that Dennett is "committing a conceptual mistake" (as is Francis Crick, the original target) in ascribing intentional properties (believing, etc.) to the brain. According to D'Souza, "[b]rains aren't even conscious; the humans who have brains are conscious." How about that: that's my view as well. (I even go farther: in the sense with which we are concerned (though not in another), my brain isn't even alive.)

But again Dennett is perfectly well aware of the danger here, and is guilty at most of some loose talk and/or as yet uncashed promissory notes. Bennett and Hacker (for these are the authorities in question) claim that all such talk is necessarily loose and all such promissory notes knowable a priori to be uncashable. (I know Anton and N.N. disagree with me here, but I think Bennett and Hacker have been misled by Dennett's triumphally naturalist rhetoric into misconstruing his project, which seems to me to be construable (perhaps, I grant, against Dennett himself, at least to some degree) as perfectly acceptable, even (or even especially, qua anti-Cartesian) on Wittgensteinian grounds. But Hacker's Wittgenstein is not my own, as far as I can tell. I owe more explanation here, but this is not the place. See N.N.'s link for an exchange between Dennett and Bennett/Hacker.)

In any case, if the danger is one of misleading locutions, that charge cuts both ways. Bennett and Hacker are careful to deny dualism, but of course for D'Souza misleading locutions are mother's milk; he continues [I bold for emphasis]:

Crick and Dennett are erroneously ascribing qualities to brains that are actually possessed only by people. True, our thoughts occur because of the brain, and we use our brains to think just as we use our hands and rackets to play tennis. How foolish it would be, though, to say that "my arms are playing tennis," or even more absurdly, "My racket is playing tennis." In reality, I am the one who is playing, and arms and rackets are what I play the game with.

Crick and Dennett are guilty of a fallacy that has become quite common among cognitive scientists. This is the Pathetic Fallacy, the fallacy of giving human attributes to nonhuman objects. This practice is quite harmless if we do it in a whimsical, metaphorical way. I might write that "the stem of the oak raised its arms to the sun, searching for its warm embrace." The problem only arises if I actually start to believe that oak branches have intentions. Brains are very useful objects, but they aren't conscious and they don't know how to feel or think.

It's hard to tell, but I think he really thinks he has established dualism as true (I am not identical with my brain = My brain and I are distinct in the dualist sense). Wow. There's another related DD column I want to discuss (an amazing howler, which you may already have seen), but let's leave it for another time. Now let's hear about how the debate went!

Mistakes were made

2007-11-27T11:42:00.000-05:00

My mom likes the Corrections section of the New York Times. It's interesting to see what they got wrong – sometimes it's a reasonable mistake; sometimes you can tell what happened (e.g., garbled phonemes from the informant), and sometimes they just don't check their "facts," or even, apparently, think about what they're saying. Everybody's got their favorites, apocryphal or not. I like the one (the former, I think, or at least not at the Times) that read:

[band name] compose their music according to Christian principles. They are not, as the article stated, "unrepentant headbangers."

So, repentant headbangers, then? Good name for a band, anyway.

On Sunday they had another good one. I didn't see it, but Powerline reports for us (HT: Roger Kimball):

A headline last Sunday about a Muslim man and an Orthodox Jewish woman who are partners in two Dunkin’ Donuts stores described their religions incorrectly. The two faiths worship the same God — not different ones.

Glad we got that cleared up. Incidentally, both blog citations pour scorn on the Times for presuming to dictate theology to us, but as far as I'm concerned the issue is semantic; the theological issue is orthogonal. We've gone over this before – and of course when I say an issue is "semantic" I mean not, as most people do, that it's not important, but the very opposite. (I'm weird that way.)