Think It Over

The Verificationist Challenge

2008-11-18T17:59:00.001-05:00

Maybe we can think of the verificationist as posing a certain challenge:

Whenever we are in doubt whether a sentence S or expression e is cognitively meaningful, we know that S, and any atomic sentence in which e occurs (transparently), is not observational. Non-observational sentences are cognitively meaningful in a language or theory only if they bear in certain relations to other sentences in the language or the theory. (Just as words become meaningful in virtue of occurring in certain sentential contexts, non-observational sentences become meaningful in virtue of occurring in certain theoretical or linguistic contexts.) The relation of interest is probably something like probabilistic non-independence, although it might turn out to be something slightly different. But it is clear that non-observational sentences do not qualify as cognitively meaningful if they bear in that relation to just any other sentences in just any language or theory. For instance, we might posit a theory, or a language, in which there is a class of observational sentences, and a disjoint class of non-observational sentences. Suppose that the theory or language specifies the probabilistic relationships between each member of the latter class, and that every sentence of the latter class is probabilistically independent of every sentence of the first class. If this our strongest theory containing the sentences of the latter class, or if there are no other facts about the truth- or assertibility-conditions of these sentences in the language, then it is clear that the sentences do not qualify as cognitively meaningful if they bear in the probabilistic relations that they do. But then what sort of sentences does a sentence need to be probabilistically non-independent of, in a theory or language, in order to be cognitively meaningful in that theory or language?

The verificationist answer: the observation sentences. The verificationist challenge: what else could it be?

Dispositional Terms and Religious Language

2008-10-20T23:18:00.014-04:00

In a discussion of Aquinas' account of religious language, Copleston compares describing a dog as intelligent and describing God as intelligent. Following Aquinas, he calls both descriptions "analogical", apparently indicating by this that the amount of intelligence necessary for a thing to be intelligent is somehow relative to what sort of thing it is. (He also seems to think that, since the two descriptions are analogical, neither assigns "intelligent" its ordinary, literal semantic value. That's weird, but needn't detain us.) He notes a further similarity between the dog's intelligence and God's intelligence. Both of these facts are somehow helpfully elucidated by pointing to the material effects they have had - in the former case, on the dog's behavior; in the latter case, on the (putative) goodness and orderliness of Creation. Copleston's attitude seems to be that this elucidation is semantic. By enumerating more and more of (certain of?) the effects of the dog's intelligence or God's intelligence, we characterize with greater and greater precision what "the dog is intelligent" or "God is intelligent" means, or perhaps what people mean when they call the dog or God intelligent.

Still, Copleston holds that, at least in the case of God, this sort of elucidation can't yield an "adequate positive explanation" of (the meaning of) any sentences describing God as intelligent. This called to mind Goodman's work on dispositional terms. Take an uncontroversially dispositional term like "flammable". One of Goodman's ideas (a little roughly) is that "flammable" picks out whatever property a thing has in virtue of which, in certain relevant circumstances, it lights on fire. Importantly, we can call a thing flammable without knowing exactly what that property is, or being able to give an (adequate) positive explanation of what it is in other terms. It would be too harsh, in such a case, to say that we don't know the meaning of "x is flammable", or what people mean when they utter sentences of that form. Discovering that a certain substance contains hydrogen would certainly furnish something we might call an "adequate positive explanation" of its flammability, but that doesn't mean that our flammability-talk, prior to that discovery, was in any sort of semantic error.

There is nothing special about "flammable" here. Roughly, for any set of truths T, and any thing x, we can define a dispositional predicate "F", such that "F(x)" means that x has a certain property F, such that each element of T is an effect of x's having that property. Now, this will raise all sorts of problems if it turns out that the elements of T obtain for reasons that have nothing to do with x. But, in many cases, this way of introducing a dispositional predicate is totally harmless.* I think Copleston should say that God-talk is just such a case. If, like Copleston and Aquinas, we think we know that all sorts of facts about the world are demonstrably effects of God's general nature and particular actions (perhaps logically following from that nature), then, for any class of such facts, we can define a healthy dispositional predicate for God. If, furthermore, we can specify all (or certain interesting subsets) of the effects that elucidate "God is intelligent", then we can give a decent dispositional semantics for that sentence in line with the schema just described. No problems here, as far as I can see.

I think all this has confirmed a suspicion I already had. If God-talk is non-cognitive, it probably isn't because we can't make sense of the predicates we apply to God. The problem, rather, is probably that God is a difficult thing to refer to, or that the predicate "is a god" in particular (at least in modern Judaeo-Christian discourse) doesn't contribute to the truth-conditions of sentences or utterances in any obvious way. It certainly isn't obvious that the name "God" or the predicate "is a god" are susceptible of the same analysis we have given of (certain) theological predicates.
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* - It may turn out that our introduction of F fails to cut nature at the joints. This will be the case when the property of x in virtue of which all of the elements of T obtain is highly disjunctive - if several more fundamental or primitive properties of x are individually responsible for several subsets of T. But F-ness doesn't have to be fundamental in order for "F(x)" to be true.

Two Types of Lexical Ambiguity?

2008-10-07T10:02:00.005-04:00

I'm reading Francois Recanati's "Unarticulated Constituents" and his discussion of the verb "eats" has gotten me thinking. "Eats" can occur both transitively and intransitively. When "eats" occurs transitively, we can represent its extension by eats2 - the set of all ordered pairs of eaters and the food they are eating. When "eats" occurs intransitively, however, Recanati suggests that we represent its extension by eats1 - the set of all eaters. The basis for his suggestion is that context need not provide a particular food that the speaker wishes to state that, e.g., Tim is eating when she utters "Tim eats".

I have my worries about the effectiveness of this case in support of Recanati's larger argument, but I'll assume the analysis for now. The situation is that intransitive "eats" refers to eats1 (or the property whose extension is eats1) and transitive "eats" refers to eats2 (or the relation whose extension is eats2). Is "eats" (lexically) ambiguous? In favor of an ambiguity, note that "eats" can refer to two different relations, and (or which) can have two extensions with fundamentally different structures - one is a class of individuals, the other a class of ordered pairs. The sentence "Eat!" seems to be ambiguous between the two readings, but it is hard to say that this ambiguity is structural - the sentence has no (surface) structure to speak of.

On the other hand, I think we can fix the reference of "eats" generally by a simple rule - if "eats" is intransitive, it refers to (the property whose extension is) eats1, and if "eats" is transitive, it refers to (the property whose extension is) eats2. Notably, sentences with "eats" are ambiguous between an assignment of eats1 or eats2 to "eats" whenever they are structurally ambiguous between a transitive and an intransitive reading.*

I suppose we can say there are two types of lexical ambiguity - referential ambiguity and semantic ambiguity. "Eats" is referentially ambiguous because it can refer to two sets, which are structurally quite different. It might not be semantically ambiguous because there is one simple rule that either fixes the reference of "eats" in a context, or gives the meaning of "eats" - the word has one reference-fixer, or one meaning.
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* - Consider:

(1) If he eats an apple a dollar.

We can imagine a situation in which (1) is ambiguous between "If he eats an apple, it will cost a dollar" and "If he eats, it will cost an apple a dollar". (I have deliberately removed the punctuation, which would give away the intended reading.) Similarly with "Eat!" above. In these cases, any ambiguity in assigning eats1 or eats2 to "eats" can be chalked up to the structural ambiguity in the sentence.

Moore on "Good"

2008-09-16T20:51:00.001-04:00

In Moore’s defense of the primitiveness of “good”, he draws an analogy between the good and the yellow:

“My point is that ‘good’ is a simple notion, just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion; that, just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to any one who does not already know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is.” (PE, 7)

What is interesting is not so much the truth of what Moore says as the questions it raises. One pertinent observation is that you can certainly explain what “yellow” means to someone who doesn’t already know it. One such potential explanation is:

(1) “Yellow” (in English) is synonymous with “amarillo” in Spanish.

Other explanations are not clearly either explanations of the meaning of “yellow” or explanations of what yellow is. Consider:

(2) Yellow is the color of objects such as ripe bananas and “Yield” signs.

Or, to give a different sort of explanation of what yellow is, consider:

(3) An object is (the color) yellow just in case it reflects light at a wavelength of roughly 597-577 nm.

In some sense, we could even “explain” (or, perhaps less controversially, teach) what yellow is to any reasonably intelligent pre-linguistic creature that perceives something like color. We could condition assorted blue (or, if you like, any non-yellow) stimuli with some aversive feedback and condition assorted yellow stimuli with some appetitive feedback. After a while, if the animal chose the yellow stimulus over the blue (or non-yellow) stimulus in every case, it would be clear that the animal could tell the difference between yellow things and non-yellow things. If, as seems reasonable, we take being able to tell the difference between yellow and non-yellow things as sufficient for knowing what yellow is, then we would have taught the animal what yellow is (if it didn’t already know). I once heard Marc Hauser describe such an experiment with bees (the colors were blue and red). Note also that this would be an explanation of what yellow is without being an explanation of what “yellow” means.

But note that, in every case, the explanation of what “yellow” means or what yellow is will require that some prior conditions obtain. In order for (1) to work, the student will have to know what “amarillo” means in Spanish. In order for (2) to work in the ordinary way, the student will have to know the color of ripe bananas and “Yield” signs. In that case, if the explanation works, the student will be able to distinguish yellow from non-yellow objects, as long as nothing weird happens to the lighting or her perceptual apparatus. In order for (2) to work in a less ordinary way, the student will have to know only, roughly, what ripe bananas and “Yield” signs are and what things are the same color as ripe bananas and “Yield” signs. In order for (3) to work, the student will have to know what it is to reflect light at 597-577 nm. In order for the explanation to the pre-linguistic creature to work, they will have to have whatever ability it is that enables them to be conditioned in the manner described. It might be objected against some of these “explanations” that the knowledge they yield of what yellow isn’t substantive enough, since they don’t require something like perceptual acquaintance with yellowness. If we want to say that to know what yellow is is to know what it is like to see yellow objects (which might be what Moore had in mind when he was referring to “yellow” as a “simple notion”), then we will have to admit that only some of these explanations will work, and only on certain conditions. In particular, (1) will work only if, so to speak, the student already knows what it is like to see “amarillo” objects; (2) will work only if the student knows what it is like to see (the colors of) ripe bananas and “Yield” signs; and (3) won’t typically work at all. I agree with Moore that the concept of a “simple notion” is probably best explicated or understood in terms of how it can be explained. If yellow is a simple notion, then if a notion can be explained in just the same ways as yellow, then that notion is simple.

Then the interesting question is, To what extent does the analogy between “good” and “yellow” hold? If the analogy holds all the way – if what goodness is can be explained only in ways precisely parallel to the ways in which what yellow is can be explained – then I think we have to say something like the following.

We can explain what good is or what “good” means to a student in a number of different ways. We can certainly give her a synonym (as in (1) above). Alternatively, we can give her something of the form:

(2`) Goodness is the F of objects such as x, y…

Here, we would have to substitute for “F” some relevant second-order property of goodness (just as color is the relevant second-order property of yellow), and substitute for “x”, “y”, and so forth a sequence of descriptions of sufficiently diverse good objects, actions, or states of affairs. What would make it “sufficiently diverse” would depend on how effective it is in getting the student to understand what goodness is, and also on one’s preferred understanding of knowing what goodness is. Again, we could have some explanation of the form:

(3`) x is good just in case p.

Here we would substitute for p something that holds whenever the substitution instance of x refers to something good.

Obviously, given that the “explanation by synonymy” will only hold in somewhat trivial cases, the difficulty in claiming that the analogy holds in full is in specifying, or at least giving an existence proof, of the relevant values of the variables in (2`) and (3`). For instance, in the explanation of what yellow is in (2), the description of yellow as a color is doing a lot of work. It is not at all clear that there is any second-order property of goodness that could do a similar job in an explanation of the form (2`). And for explanations of the form (3`), it is clear that any substitution-instance for p will be controversial, if at all plausible.

On the other hand, if the analogy fails, we’ll need some good explanation of why it fails. Also, if these explanations of what good is don’t work, then we’ll need some story about how children come to understand what good is, or, failing that, what “good” means, which we do not yet have.

Anselm, Arguments from Analyticity

2008-09-16T10:06:00.005-04:00

Assume that Anselm's argument is valid - that it follows from the definition of "God" that God exists. In that case, couldn't we simply refuse to use the word "God" that Anselm has defined for us? If one of the premises of the argument is a definition, and definitions are constitutive of languages, isn't one rebuttal just not to speak an Anselmian language? If someone defined "phlogiston" so that it necessarily existed, she wouldn't thereby have a knock-down argument against the ontology of modern biology. She would have a linguistic quirk to be corrected or ignored.

A similar objection comes to mind in certain ethical and epistemological discussions, where it is argued that some substantive theory is just analytic. Someone might argue that it follows from the meanings of the words "will" and "good" that the object of ethical judgment is always the will, or that it follows from the meanings of the words "state" and "know" that we should state only what we know to be true. In response to this, can't we always simply refuse to use the relevant words with the meanings they are taken to have? Sometimes philosophers focus so much on the meanings and entailments associated with particular words because we're interested in better understanding the conceptual scheme we actually employ. But at some point, in these sorts of discussions of folk vocabulary, isn't it available to us to make new concepts? If we're clever enough, can't we cook up a "know" or a "good" that is better suited to our purposes than the "know" and "good" we have received from our ancestors?

I've assumed here that, at the crucial point, someone can't make a transcendental argument that we have to keep our folk vocabulary just as it is. But what form could such an argument take?

Two Worries for MacKinnon

2008-08-29T13:07:00.003-04:00

I’ve been reading Catharine MacKinnon’s Feminism Umodified, and had a couple of ideas. One was in response to a bit from the great talk, “Desire and Power”.

“Similarly, to say that not only women experience something – for example, to suggest that because some men are raped rape in not an act of male dominance [over a victim in a female social role?] – only suggests that the status of women is not biological. Men can be feminized, too, and and they know they are when they are raped.’ (56)

MacKinnon seems to be claiming that a man, when raped, is always raped as feminine, i.e. his experience of the rape or the status of the rape is as of woman’s experience or status in society. This just seems to me quite false. Surely, if there are such things as the social role of woman and the social role of man, then there are socially womanly characteristics in a man’s experience of being raped – powerlessness, enforced silence, passiveness, penetrability, perhaps being taken as sexually available regardless of one’s own interests. But there must be distinctly male characteristics of this experience, and I think these are socially, and not (or not just) biologically male characteristics. Men are probably more likely to be believed than women when they report being raped, but they presumably still fail to report some rapes. I think (and MacKinnon should think) that this would typically be for socially male reasons – a desire not to be seen as powerless, not to be treated as a victim. If a man is ashamed of being raped, I imagine it is not typically shame at being ruined, as a woman might be socially pressured to feel. It would typically be shame, again, for distinctly male reasons – failure to overcome one’s rapist, for instance. This is a small point, though.

Another, bigger problem with MacKinnon’s theory is that it seems incapable of explaining that rape, child molestation, incest, prostitution, and pornography (and even in some cases job- and pay- discrimination) are taboo and frowned on. If the dominance of man over woman is best evidenced in society by male-female sexual violence, and feminism is necessary because, among other things, the dominance of man would go unchallenged except by feminism, then why is it that non-feminist forces suppress male-female sexual violence, even to the extent that they do? The equality principle can’t explain these taboos, on her interpretation of how it is accepted in society, since MacKinnon wants to say that the deleterious function of the equality principle is that women and men are often too unlike, especially with respect to their proneness to sexual violence, to be treated as likes. I imagine MacKinnon might say that there aren’t any (or very many) non-feminist forces suppressing male-female sexual violence, but I would disagree. This suppression is preached in church, enshrined in the law (even if the law isn’t systematically enforced), and acknowledged, at least in cases other than pornography, by society’s male-dominated moral discourse (a discourse which MacKinnon apparently believes also to be male in its characteristic social role). The force of this suppression is non-trivial. It is not as if there is a clear explanation of these phenomena that MacKinnon’s theory just can’t countenance; I think these facts really are difficult to explain. What seems to be the case, then, is that there are social forces other than feminism that combat at least some of the more pernicious effects of male dominance. (We might, alternatively, take the above to suggest that male dominance is not, in fact, expressed in those instances of sexual violence which (male) society seems to disapprove of, but I think this would be too severe.) Isolating what these forces are might be of considerable use to feminism. What forces guide the church, the law, and male moral discourse to oppose sexual violence? How, if at all, can feminism put these forces to its own use?

Philosophers' Carnival LXXVI

2008-08-25T15:14:00.003-04:00

Welcome, readers, to the 76th fortnightly Philosophers’ Carnival!

Enigman asks what philosophical reasons mathematicians have for assuming the axiom of infinity in his post Philosophy of Mathematics. It’s not clear what sorts of reasons he’s looking for; fundamental questions about mathematical truth and the role of axioms seem to be lurking just below the surface here. The comments thread hasn’t grown prohibitively long yet, so hop on over and pitch in your $.02.

Alexander Pruss criticizes several ways of construing the supernaturalness of magic in Magic, science, and the supernatural. I’m not convinced by a lot of what he says, but the discussion is very clear and open-minded. Peruse the other entries while you’re there, if you haven’t visited before – it’s a nice blog.

Avery Archer works on a theory of rational agency in Why Questions and Rational Agents (more about the latter than the former). I like this post, even though I don’t like a lot (of the little) I have read elsewhere on rationality. It’s not clear to me that the appearances of the good (allegedly) involved in desire are reflections of a perspective held by some subsystem of an agent which is involved in producing the agent’s desires, just because I’m not sure that subsystems of agents are the sorts of things that can have perspectives. This might be a quibble. When a person’s reasoned course of action conflicts with her desires, there obviously does seem to be some sub-agential system bearing some interesting relationship to the course of action desired but not taken, or a mental representation of that course of action. It might be useful to spell out what is not quite “perspectival” about that relationship, though. I have more to say about this, but you don’t need to read it.

Over at Possibly Philosophy, Andrew Bacon weighs in on Counterexamples to Modus Ponens. I’m not sure I understand why he thinks that a syntactic characterization of modus ponens won’t work, and I don’t understand accessibility (between possible worlds) well enough to follow the rest of the argument. The McGee counterexample is super-interesting, though, and deserves attention from those of you out there with more logical competence than your humble host.

Thom Brooks of The Brooks Blog lets us in on his Five Secrets to Publishing Success, published on InsideHigherEd.com. Helpful to those looking for, well, publishing success.

Richard Chappell offers a brief but convincing discussion of Fair Shares and Others’ Responsibilities. He argues that, in the interest of fairness, we should pick up the slack for others’ moral failings. I think I agree, although I do not live up to the conclusion in my own life. Also, it’s not clear to me how well this sits with Richard’s views on the “demandingness objection” and the permissibility of living a basically decent life expressed here.

Bryan Norwood presents some objections to epistemological internalism, with an alternative, in Internalist Justification vs. Virtuoso Expertise. There is a lot I don’t understand here – the distinction between subjective and objective blame, the relationships between foundationalism and this distinction, and the relation between internalism and K = JTB. Still, I think there are some good ideas about epistemic blameworthiness brewing here.

Chris Hallq discusses Gettier and the purpose of analyzing “knowledge” in The case against Gettier. Some of the literature on what knowledge is for – the relation between knowledge and assertion, or knowledge and the attribution of other factive mental states – could help here. Still, the basic point, that philosophers interested in a concept need to keep the distinctive intended uses of the concept, is worth reiterating.

Lastly, Gualtiero Piccinini disambiguates “connectionism” for us, and spells out some of the morals of the disambiguation in The Ambiguity of "Connectionism". I was taught that connectionism is the view that the brain does most everything using Parallel Distributed Processing, but these other senses of “connectionism” are useful to distinguish as well.

That wraps up this edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival. If you’re still jonesing for more philosophy after all that, I invite you to check out some of the posts here on Think It Over. And, as always, keep your eye out for the next edition upcoming at Kenny Pearce’s blog.

What to Expect from a Theory of Meaning

2008-08-24T16:36:00.001-04:00

It’s clear that different thinkers want different things from a semantic theory of a language, or a theory of meaning. I want to schematize the different possible desiderata for a theory of meaning. Here is the beginning of a schema, and a comment on one of its problems.

A good semantic theory (where a theory is construed as a class of sentences) of a language L is/expresses:

(a) What we must understand
(b) What we must know
(c) What we must believe
(d) What we must know-true
(e) What we must believe-true
(f) What we must act as if true

in order to

(1) Understand the sentences of L
(2) Know the meanings of the sentences of L.

A conception of the goals of semantic theory comes from picking "is" or expresses in the first clause, one item on the lettered list, and one item on the numbered list.

I include (f) for those who think that semantics is a branch of sociology, not psychology – who think that the meanings of sentences are not mental representations or attitudes towards mental representations, or are not best studied through mental representations of meaning or attitudes towards those representations, or are not determined, in any interesting sense, by mental representations or individuals’ attitudes towards them. But I feel like, to accommodate just these sorts of folks, there should be something corresponding to (f) in the numbered list. “Count as a(n expert) speaker of L” or “Count as a member of the linguistic community centered around L” is too strong, because some phonological or pragmatic know-how or behavior goes into these things, but is not properly semantic. I’m at a loss.

There are also more ways of clarifying what we want from a semantic theory by placing different sorts of restrictions on the values of L – idiolects, dialects, the verbal behavior of maximal sets of mutually intelligible speakers, or whatever.

Explications and Empirical Revision

2008-08-06T11:51:00.002-04:00

In what senses are explications open to empirical revision?

Say you have a term t and an explication of that term t`. For instance, t could be “heat” and t` could be “mean kinetic energy”. Or t could be “volume” and t` could be “amplitude”. Or t could be “more probable than” and t` could be “has a greater limiting relative frequency than”.

One obvious sense in which the explication t` could be empirically revised is that we could have some theory T1 in which t` occurs essentially, and then, in light of new empirical evidence, we replace T1 with some theory T2 in which t` does not occur. For instance, we could have a Newtonian mechanical theory, in which “heat” is explicated with a certain definition of “kinetic energy”, and (loosely speaking) the evidence could suggest that we replace it with a relativistic theory, in which the definition changes. Or the evidence could suggest that some classical theory of statistical mechanics be replaced by a quantum mechanical theory, in which (so I understand) the frequentist explication of "probability" is not appropriate.

Another slightly stronger sense in which t` could be empirically revised would be this. Suppose we have some theory T, containing the term t, then we replace every occurrence of t in T with the explication t`, producing the theory T`. Then, since T is presumably more vague or ambiguous than T`, there is some conclusive evidence against T` which is not conclusive evidence against T. If we discover just this evidence, then we should abandon T`, but we should not necessarily abandon T. I imagine that some would want to say, in this situation, that they had learned that they had chosen the wrong explication. This would be especially tempting if there were another explication t`` of t, such that the theory T``, gotten by replacing every occurrence of t in T with t``, were true, or supported by all of the relevant evidence at hand.

I feel like these senses aren’t strong enough to capture what someone might want to express by saying that explications are open to empirical revision. An explication is empirically revised in this stronger sense not only if the theories in which it occurs are found to be false, and not only if some competing explication better preserves the truth of theories in which the explicandum occurs. But is there such a sense in which explications are open to empirical revision?

Perhaps the idea is that there is some source of empirical evidence that can tell for or against the decision to explicate a term a certain way that is not empirical evidence for or against any particular theory in which the explicatum is used. This seems unlikely to me. What form could this sort of evidence possibly take? If we choose an explication, say, to render the empirical consequences of a theory more transparent, then we might have evidence that the explication fails or succeeds in doing so. We might have evidence, for instance, that “…t`…” is a borderline case but “…t…” isn’t. But would this be empirical evidence? Can’t we tell borderline cases from the armchair, given enough background information? Note that we can supply the necessary background information ourselves, using thought experiments. We might be incapable of telling what the empirical consequences of some explicated or unexplicated theory are if we don’t know what the theory says. So we should be familiar with theories in which explicanda occur in order to make our explications work best. But is this really empirical knowledge, in the relevant sense? What is necessary is not knowledge that any given theory is true, or knowledge of the evidence for or against a theory, but knowledge of what the theory says. (Of course, what makes what one theory says more or less important than what another theory says is the relative likelihood of the truth of the theories, but philosophers qua explicators don’t generally take on the task of empirically assessing the relative likelihoods of theories – generally, I suppose, they assess the importance of a scientific theory on the basis of its prominence in modern scientific discussion.)

Perhaps the idea is that, since no one sentence in which a (non-observational) term occurs is immune to empirical revision, then no sentence we pick out as the explication of a term is immune to empirical revision. This also seems implausible to me. As I understand it, part of what it is to explicate t with t` is to treat “t = t`” (perhaps relative to a given theory) as if it were the definition of t (in that theory). Part of what that amounts to is agreeing to the eliminability of t for t` in all extensional contexts (in a given theory). When we cease to agree to this, we change the subject. In general, as I see it, the explicit adoption of an explication of a term in a theory is an attempt to escape the consequences of various sorts of holism about that theory. We explicate, in part, to make the meanings of terms less diffuse. Of course, if a popular theory containing t is rendered trivially but empirically false by replacing all occurrences of t with t`, then t` is useless as an explication of t in that theory. Nobody would agree to explicate t with t` in such a case, and everyone’s refusal to adopt the explication would be on empirical grounds.

As it stands, this satisfies me that explications are open to empirical revision only in our first two senses. Am I missing something?

Rockwell's Anti-Zombie Argument

2008-07-29T08:45:00.004-04:00

Over at The Splintered Mind, Teed Rockwell has put up a brief defense of an argument that zombies are impossible. The argument is this:

(1) Zombies are possible if and only if subjective experiences are epiphenomenal.
(2) Subjective experiences are epiphenomenal if and only if we have direct awareness of them.
(3) There is no such thing as direct awareness.

Therefore, etc.

My comments:

Ad (1). This is not true. The closest truth in this vicinity is:

(1`) If it is possible that subjective experiences are epiphenomenal, then zombies are possible.

I can't see why subjective experiences would have to be epiphenomenal in the actual world in order for zombies to be exist in some other world. Why couldn't it be the case that qualia have some functional role in our cognitive architecture in the actual world, but the non-qualitative aspects of cognition subserve that functional role in another world? Perhaps the idea is that properties are individuated by the causal powers they grant when instantiated, so that P = Q only if, necessarily, Px causes p iff Qx causes p. Then a property is actually epiphenomenal iff necessarily epiphenomenal. This is implausible to me, though. Surely some property bestows some causal powers in the actual world that it does not in other worlds. But if that is the case, then qualia could be properties of this sort. They could bestow functional cognitive properties on conscious thinkers in the actual world that they do not in other worlds. Anyway, all this is OK for Rockwell's argument so far, since we only need something of the strength of (1`) for the argument to go through, if (2) and (3) are true.

The real problem is with (2). I suppose what would make (2) plausible is an argument to the effect of:

(4) We are either directly aware of a property's being instantiated, or we infer it.
(5) We infer some fact p on the basis of q only if p causes q.
(6) The instantiations of epiphenomenal properties do not cause anything else.
Therefore, (2).

Then, from (3), we get Rockwell's desired conclusion. As things stand, I lean towards saying that epiphenomenalism is actually false, but might have been true. By (1`), this immediately gets us that zombies are possible. But let's assume that epiphenomenalism is true, and even that (1) is true. In this sort of position, my beef has always been with (5). I always thought that, if epiphenomenalism is true, then we brought qualia into our ontology to explain the justification we have for believing self-ascriptions of certain mental states. The qualitative character of the state of, say, seeing an apple from ten feet away in decent, neutral light is supposed to be what explains how I generally know, or am justified in believing, that I see an apple when I do. This is not to say that the instantiation of a certain quale causes me to believe that I see the apple. Rather, the instantiation of the quale (perhaps given some other conditions about my proper mental functioning) is what provides that belief with its positive epistemic status. But it would be strange to say that the conferral of that epistemic status is a causal matter. I want to say that the instantiation of the quale does not causally affect my belief's epistemic status because the epistemic status of a belief is not the sort of thing that can be caused to be one way or another. I do infer the existence of qualia, in general, but not from their causal roles. I infer them to explain the epistemic status that I confer on mental state self-ascriptions. So qualia are a counterexample to (5) because they are an instance in which inference to the best explanation is not inference from cause to effect.

Hebrew School, Philosophy

2008-07-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

Jewish teachers of today cannot, by and large, rely on a religious family culture, nor on an authoritative Jewish community….It is commonly said that education is a reflection of its society. Contemporary Jewish education has the task of creating the very society of which it should be the reflection. Not only must it interpret the received texts, it needs to reinterpret the very conditions of its role, assess the new situation and invent unprecedented methods for meeting it. A repetitive application of traditional approaches will not suffice. There is no substitute for philosophy in this context -- a rethinking of the bases of Jewish life and learning in our times.

- Israel Scheffler, Teachers of My Youth: An American Jewish Experience

Some Thoughts About Intuitions

2008-07-23T09:34:00.003-04:00

Why are intuitions with narrower content so much more evidentially trustworthy or warrant-conferring than intuitions with broader content? Why is it that if many of our narrower intuitions conflict with some of our broader intuitions, we often tend to drop the latter and not the former?

Better to intuit that “water” doesn’t mean the same thing on Earth as on Twin Earth than to intuit semantic externalism. If we intuit the former, this is better evidence against semantic internalism than an intuition that semantic internalism is true would be evidence against it.

Better to intuit that n grains of sand is not a heap and that if n grains of sand is not a heap, then n + 1 grains of sand is not a heap than to intuit that there are no heaps. In this case, I think, our intuition that there are heaps trumps our intuitions of the premises. Perhaps the premises, combined, are “broader” or stronger than the intuition that there are heaps, since they are recursive, and so have an infinite number of instances. Perhaps that is because I already know that there are heaps on the basis, say, of my perceptual evidence and my intuitions that, in this or that case, what I am looking at is a heap.

Better to intuit that I don’t really know that that is the façade of a barn than to intuit that knowledge is not justified true belief. Sometimes I think that my intuition that knowledge is justified true belief trumps my intuition about fake barn country. Perhaps this is because I sometimes think that K = JTB has too many merits to give up so easily. Of course, most of the time, people take the intuition about fake barn country (along with intuitions about other Gettier cases) to trump K = JTB.

I think these examples show that, in general, narrower intuitions are better evidence for their claims than broader intuitions. They don’t show that a narrower intuition always trumps a conflicting broader intuition, since the broader intuition might have more going for it than the conflicting narrower intuition brings against it. They suggest that a narrower intuition trumps a conflicting broader intuition, ceteris paribus.

How do we explain all of this? Part of it is that a narrower claim just, in general, has more warrant or a higher probability, relative to some piece of evidence, than any broader claim (of which the narrower claim is “an instance”), relative to that same evidence. That is, if I see Mike park the car, that is better evidence that Mike knows how to park a car than it is evidence that everyone named “Mike” knows how to park a car, or that everyone Mike’s age knows how to park a car. So, my intuition that p is, in general, better evidence that p than it is evidence that (a stronger claim) p & q, and better evidence that p & q than it is evidence that (an even stronger claim) p & q & r, and so on. If my intuition is that all bachelors are unmarried men, that is better evidence that all bachelors are unmarried men than it is evidence that, say, all men are unmarried men, or that all bachelors are unmarried men and all male college students are unmarried men.

Part of it is that we get more disagreement with intuitions on broader claims. Since much of the time the conflicting intuitions of two individuals will carry just as much evidential weight, these sorts of disagreements don’t affect the evidential standing of the claims of interest one way or another. Intuitions about semantic internalism and semantic externalism won’t get us very far, because people’s intuitions differ and carry equal evidential weight.

But I think the biggest part of the explanation is this. The trustworthiness or warrant-conferring-ness of intuitions is often, if not always, grounded in linguistic competence. If one assents to a sentence in a certain context strictly because one knows how to use a language, then, I think, we generally treat that assent as (prima facie, defeasibly) warranted. The idea might be that if pure knowledge of a language alone prompts assent, then that sentence must command assent in that context purely in virtue of linguistic rules or conventions; and whatever rules or conventions philosophers have to obey, the linguistic rules or conventions of the language of inquiry are surely among them. Whether or not this meta-explanation is right, I think we do, in fact, generally treat such assent as warranted.

But how does one know that the assent is grounded in linguistic competence alone, and not some other feature of the assenter’s cognitive make-up? One test is whether other speakers of the assenter’s language behave similarly. This will yield some false positives, though, since speakers of the assenter’s language have more in common with her, cognitively, than the language alone. This could be what grounds the assent, not linguistic competence, and there is no very compelling reason to think that just any shared cognitive trait will issue warranted pronouncements or steer us towards the true and away from the false.

Another test has fewer false positives. Specify all of the relevant facts that do not formally or pragmatically entail the claim of interest. Then, query the subject on the claim. If she intuitively assents or fails to assent, what could explain it? If we’ve specified the facts the right way, and made sure she understands them, then her assent could not be based on failure to believe the right facts. Perhaps she has failed to reason with the facts the right way? That is one explanation of her assent. But if we have no antecedent reason to doubt her reasoning skills, this is implausible. Perhaps her tacit linguistic knowledge disposes her to respond one way, but some consciously held theoretical commitment trumps this more trustworthy disposition. We should try to rule out this possibility somehow, if we want our intuitions to help us decide the claims they are about. If we do successfully rule it out, I can only see one other alternative explanation. This is that the subject's assent (or failure to assent) is grounded in her linguistic competence.

How does this explain that intuitions with narrower content are more trustworthy than intuitions with broader content? First, because it is easier to specify all of the relevant facts for a narrow claim than for a broader claim. It is easier to say everything about fake barn country, a certain heap of sand, or Twin Earth than it is to say everything about justified true belief, heaps (or, for that matter, vagueness in general), and semantic externalism. That is one thing our second test requires we do. Another thing is to make sure that no conscious theory is over-riding what her linguistic competence disposes the subject to do. Narrower claims meet this requirement more easily, since they are less likely to be obviously consistent or inconsistent with a high-level theory than broader claims at the theoretical level. Lastly, the test requires that we make sure that our subject has not failed to reason with the premises correctly. Since it is easier to reason with fewer premises, ceteris paribus, and we need to specify fewer relevant facts for narrower claims, narrower claims are more likely to pass our second test than broader claims.

The Supposed Role of Ontological Expressions

2008-07-22T12:01:00.001-04:00

What is the supposed role of ontological expressions, the role which is supposed to be preserved across alternative languages? Before we can sensibly ask whether different sets of ontological expressions play that role equally well we must be clear on what ontological expressions are supposed to do. “Be used for asking questions about what there is” does not suffice as an answer. (Eklund 2008, 30)

It seems to me that the roles of ontological expressions change considerably across languages. The role of the objectual existential quantifier is (sometimes) to say that a description is true of something without saying what that thing is. The role of the objectual universal quantifier is sometimes to say that a description is true of everything without having to say of each thing individually that the description is true of it. Other times, the role of the objectual universal quantifier is to say that a description is true of everything without having to take a position on what things there are. In the hands of one theorist, the role of the substitutional quantifiers, roughly, is to provide truth-conditions for sentences without saying what (features of) objects make the sentence true. In the hands of another theorist, the role of the substitutional quantifiers is to provide truth-conditions for referentially opaque sentences. The role of the various Meinongian ontological notions surrounding being and objects is, well, to state Meinong’s theory of being and objects.

The uses of ontological expressions differ from language to language and from theorist to theorist. As far as I can tell, the common role for ontological expressions in different languages in the hands of different theorists is just this: to do what they are supposed to do in the language according to the purposes of the theorist. This is not to say that just any expression can be ontological, because just any expression has this sort of role. The category of ontological expressions is not defined by the role its members play. I suggested a way of categorizing existence-like expressions in my last post.

Incidentally, I think what I’ve had to say has been more-or-less in line with Carnap. I don’t think Carnap would say that what ontologists (or, given his antipathy towards ontology so described, he might say “linguistically savvy post-ontological philosopher”) ought to be doing is finding the role that ontological expressions ought to play, and then creating languages in which the ontological expressions best fit that role. He said that theorists choose whole languages according to the uses to which they would like to put them. I think he would have said, if prompted, that there is no one use for language in general. I also think he would have said, if prompted, that, for that reason, there is no one use for the ontological apparatus of language in general.

Existence-Likeness

2008-07-21T10:34:00.006-04:00

I would like to take a stab at defining “existence-like” as characterized in Eklund (2008).

An expression is existence-like if it is translated by “exists” in English.

For starters, this handles the cases of disputes about mereology. If L has some formal mereology, with formal criteria for when things have a fusion, and s is the sentence in L stating that there is no fusion that is a table of a certain number of particles "arranged table-wise", then I think we would translate s in English with something such as "There is no table composed of x, y, z particles." The quantifier in L is translated in English with a "there is" equivalent to "exists".

The definition also handles a number of cases related to deviant logics. Consider a schema with branching quantification such as:

For all w there is an x,
(1) such that F(w, x, y, z).*
for all y there is a z,

This might seem to present a problem, since different theorists will translate (1) different ways. Proponents of branching quantification – and especially proponents of branching quantification as a resource for schematizing the logical form of actual English sentences – will translate sentences of this form more-or-less homophonically (perhaps adding some punctuation or inflection marks). Proponents of classical FOL, such as Quine, will probably translate it with a sentence of the form:

(2) For all x there is an f, and for all y there is a g, such that F(x, f(x), y, g(y).

So a potentially existence-like expression, such as the branched existential quantifier in (1), will be translated multiple ways in English, depending on the syntactic and ontological commitments of the translator. But this does not seem actually to be a problem for our definition of “existence-like”, since both the classical logician and the proponent of branching quantification translate the “there is” of (1) with a “there is”. Where they differ is on the range of values of the existentially quantified variables.

Another problem is the theorist who thinks that “there is” and “exists” are not synonymous or equivalent, or that existential quantifications are not existence claims. This view can manifest itself in a number of ways. The most obvious case would be one in which a theorist uses a language in which the “existential” quantifiers are interpreted substitutionally and are intended to help regiment some fragment of English discourse containing “there is”, but no fragment containing “exists”. Given her preferred regimentation, and the existence of the name “Pegasus” in English, she might consider the following true:

(3) There is at least one winged horse.

The classical logician, who prefers to regiment “there is” discourse with objectual quantification alone, has a few options here. She can translate the substitutionally regimented counterpart of (3), and other sentences of similar logical form, just as (3), but with “there is” interpreted objectually. She can treat the translatum as either true or false depending on her preferred theory and interpretation of fictions and empty names in English. She can also employ semantic ascent, translating the substitutionally regimented counterpart of (3) as:

(4) “There is at least one winged horse” is true.

Again, she can evaluate (4) based on her preferred theory of truth. Perhaps she thinks “true” is implicitly relativized to something more precise than English; perhaps she thinks (3) isn’t truth-apt.

Now, in the case of (3), if the translation is interpreted objectually, then I think it is clear that the existential quantifier in the substitutionally regimented counterpart of (3) satisfies our definition of “existence-like”. Even if (3) is viewed as true, but elliptical (as required by certain theories of fiction or empty names), I can’t see how even the fully explicit interpretation could lack the expression “there is”. And if there is a “there is” in the fully explicit version of (3), I don’t see how we could deny that that “there is” is the translation of the existential quantifier in the substitutionally regimented counterpart of (3), as required by our definition of “existence-like”.

If we take the route of semantic ascent, things get a little weirder. After all “there is” does occur in (4), but it is mentioned, not used. Still, my intuition is that “there is” is the translation in (4) of the substitutionalist’s existential quantifier. One might want to say that “‘there is’”, and not “there is” is the translation, but “‘there is’” does not occur in (4), strictly speaking. (There is no close-quotation mark after the “there is” in (4).) Alternatively, assume that, if a word in a sentence is not treated by a translation as elliptical, or as an auxiliary term in a construction-yielding particle phrase, then part of the translation of the sentence is a translation of the word. Then, since the substitutionalist’s existential quantifier is not being treated as elliptical or auxiliary in the translation (4), there must be a translation in (4) of that quantifier. But that translation obviously has to be “there is”.

(Note that we encounter a similar sort of situation when the classical logician translates second-order quantification. If she doesn’t want to translate second-order quantification objectually into set theory, then she will most likely treat it metalinguistically. For instance, she might translate “There is a P and an x such that P(x)” as “There is a “P” such that ‘There is an x such that P(x)’ is true”. The second-order quantification over P becomes metalinguistic quantification over “P”.)

Recall that our substitutionalist distinguishes between “there is” and “exists” as between substitutional and objectual quantification. What happens when she wants to translate from another substitutional language into English? She will translate existential quantification with “there is”, but not with “exists”. We have seen that, in these cases, the classical logician, who treats “there is” and “exists” as equivalent, can use either of these translations. In this case, then, not only is it unclear what translatum sentence to use (which is not necessarily a problem for our definition of “existence-like”), it is also unclear whether the translatum should contain “exists” as the translation of a given non-English expression. Since the questions about whether and when to use substitutional or objectual quantification are fundamental ontological questions, and we are defining “existence-like” in order to help answer these questions, it would be silly to require that we settle the questions about whether and when to use substitutional or objectual quantification in order to apply our definition correctly. I think we need to modify the definition. The only modification I can think of that works (and is also the simplest) is this:

An expression is existence-like if it is translated either by “exists” or “there is” in English.

This solves our problem, since both the substitutionalist and the classical logician satisfy this definition. This also solves a similar problem, which we haven’t explored, for Meinongian non-English languages.

This solution might create a problem of its own, however. The substitutionalist and the Meinongian have sought to create an interesting distinction between “exists” and “there is”. To some extent, our modified definition erases that distinction. We just observed that we don’t want our definition to trivially settle ontological questions. Has our modified definition done just that?

I think not. The point of a definition of existence-likeness is to enable us to survey what meanings it is theoretically possible to assign to “exists” and “there is” when doing ontology. From a Carnapian point of view, we could say that the point was to find out what terms in what languages have semantic rules that we can use to explicate “exists” and “there is” in English. Our definition indicates that we can use (separately) the Meinongian and the substitutional rules for “there is”, as well as other rules. But surely if these rules determine existence-like uses for expressions, and the rules do not prohibit the use of other rules for distinct expressions (such as the Meinongian or objectual “exists”), then our definition does not prohibit the use of both these sorts of expressions to state an ontology. Simply because we could use the Meinongian rules for “there is” to explicate “exists” does not mean that we could not use distinct rules to explicate “exists” a different way in the same language. So our definition is not problematic for that sort of reason.

* - I'm having trouble writing branching quantifiers on Blogger. The two quantifier strings on the different lines are supposed to be on two different branches.

Eklund on Carnap

2008-07-18T17:45:00.002-04:00

I’m reading Matti Eklund’s really interesting paper “Carnapian Theses in Metaontology and Metaethics”, which raises some of the issues I've addressed recently.

A couple of things. Eklund claims on p. 6 that the internal/external distinction does not require the analytic/synthetic distinction. I disagree because I think a Carnapian should subscribe to something like either of the following arguments.

Suppose that analytic truths are sentences that are true in a language L solely in virtue of L. Every linguistic framework has semantic rules. Linguistic frameworks are languages or language-fragments. If something is true solely in virtue of semantic rules, it is true solely in virtue of language. For some language L, there is at least one sentence that is true in L solely in virtue of L’s semantic rules. Therefore, there is at least one analytic truth in at least one linguistic framework.

Alternatively, suppose that analytic truths are synonyms of logical truths. Every linguistic framework has semantic rules. The semantic rules of a linguistic framework entail all of the synonymy relations between sentences in that framework. For at least one linguistic framework L, at least one logical truth in L has a synonym in L. Therefore, there is at least one analytic truth (which is not just a logical truth) in at least one linguistic framework.

I am presupposing that Carnap is what Eklund calls a “language pluralist”, but I take that to be obvious. I am also presupposing that Carnap thinks true all of the premises of at least one of these arguments, but I think he does. I remember him advocating the view of analyticity in the second argument (Williamson calls it “Frege-analyticity”) somewhere in his correspondence with Quine.

One more thing. Eklund writes: “One less trivial claim would be that ‘there are
numbers’ has different meanings and truth-values in different languages while meaning what it actually means. But this is less trivial at the expense of being committing to some form of relativism, and language pluralism was supposed to be an alternative to relativism.” (11) This isn’t true, since one of the languages might be much more useful than all of the others. If someone can say that there is an objective fact to the effect that we ought to use a language that assigns a certain meaning and value to “there are numbers”, then it seems odd to call her a relativist.

For the Disappointed Theorist

2008-07-18T14:43:00.000-04:00

One of the ways you know you are doing a science is when the data force you to change your theory.

— Daniel Kahneman, APS 2006

Mutatis mutandis, "science" and "philosophy".

Is Anything Wrong With My Ontology of Languages?

2008-07-17T17:05:00.007-04:00

The notion of language I've been using here makes unusually fine-grained distinctions. By what criteria do I individuate languages? This is still not very clear to me, and contains some theoretical presuppositions which I’d like to make more explicit. Maybe the presuppositions are inconsistent or involve factual error. A little help figuring out whether this is the case would be appreciated. Anyway - the presuppositions.

A language has a set of wffs (or perhaps a function that assigns degrees of well-formedness to strings), so that if s is well-formed (to degree n) in L1, and not in L2, then L1 is not the same language as L2.

A language can also have a logic. We might conceive of a logic as a class of "transformation rules" in Carnap's sense. If a sequence of strings proves s in L1, but not in L2, then L1 is not the same language as L2.

A language has a semantics. In some sense, perhaps involving no platonistic ontological commitments, a language assigns meanings to sentences, words, and phrases. If x has some semantic property relative to L1, but not relative to L2, then L1 is not the same language as L2.

The meaning of a word, whatever it is (or however it is to be eliminated in favor of some less committal idiom), is sometimes derived in part from the word’s role in some larger theory. “Electron” derives its meaning, in part, from its occurrence in a central chunk of physical theory. “Phlogiston” derives its meaning, in part, from its occurrence in a central chunk of phlogiston theory. Now, “electron” occurs both in

(E) Every electron has a charge of -1

and in

(E`) Every electron has a charge of -10.

“Phlogiston” occurs both in

(P) When a flammable substance is burned, phlogiston escapes it

and in

(P`) It is not the case that when a flammable substance is burned, phlogiston escapes it.

We might suppose that “electron” derives its meaning, in part, from its occurrence in (E) but not in (E`), and that “phlogiston” derives its meaning, in part, from its occurrence in (P) but not in (P`). So there must be some special property of (any combination of) “electron”, (E), and the languages containing them in virtue of which this is the case; likewise for (P) and “phlogiston”. It can’t just be that (E) is true and (E`) is not, because the same distinction can’t be made between (P) and (P`). I don’t think it can just be that (E) is actually in physical theory, and (P) in phlogiston theory. This is because I think theories are best thought of as classes of sentences. “Electron” occurs in both physical theory and physical` theory, which is the set of sentences gotten by replacing (E) with (E`) in physical theory; likewise for “phlogiston”. If physical theory is well-formed or expressible in a language, then physical` theory is almost certainly well-formed or expressible in that language; likewise for phlogiston theory and phlogiston` theory. There is certainly something special about physical theory and phlogiston theory, and it has to do with the meanings of “electron” and “phlogiston”, but it isn’t yet clear what this special something is.

My guess about how to make it clear is basically to individuate languages more finely. Assume that languages have unique assignments of truth-values to certain of their sentences. These include the sentences from which words derive their meanings. Words can derive their meanings only from sentences which are assigned a truth-value by a language. If L1 assigns a different truth-value to s than L2, and t derives its meaning in part from s, then t has a different meaning in L1 than in L2. The hypothesis is that “electron” actually has the meaning it does in the language of physical theory in part because that language assigns the value “true” to (E) but not to (E`), and “electron” is actually used in the language of physical theory, not the language of physical` theory.* We avoid the problems related to “phlogiston” in the following way. (P`) is not incoherent or analytically false in our language. Rather it is elliptical for a complicated statement about the sub-optimality of the language of phlogiston theory. This is the language which gave and continues to give “phlogiston” its meaning. Fully unpacked, (P`) might be glossed “The language of phlogiston theory is sub-optimal because there is no worthwhile concept to which (P) lends meaning.” “Phlogiston” means what it does, and is to be unpacked this way, because it was introduced in the language of phlogiston theory, and not, for instance, the language of phlogiston` theory.

I guess the idea overall is that theories in which theoretical terms derive their meaning, in part, from their occurrence in other sentences of the theory are, as Ayer might have said, disguised linguistic proposals. Or maybe the idea is that languages are disguised theoretical proposals.

I understand that the apparatus here involves a number of assumptions, but I’m ready to take them on unless they’re controverted by fact or internal inconsistency. Well - are they?

* - I say “language”, but I allow that physical theory – the class of strings assigned certain meanings – could be conducted simultaneously in many different languages. The actual meaning and use of “electron” and other special theoretical terms might not determine a single language for physical theory, in our sense of “language”.
_________________________
Update: At least one thing is wrong with this ontology. I think the epistemology of analyticity for which I have primarily made use of it is no good. Also, I don't like the ellipticality stuff. If semantic representations are mental representations, then this is way implausible.

Maybe history and the news make us seem like assholes...

2008-07-16T23:50:00.001-04:00

...because all the nice things we do aren't worth telling each other about.

Even More Comments on The Philosophy of Philosophy

2008-07-16T16:02:00.004-04:00

I see something wrong with my previous response to Williamson. The main point of Williamson’s (and our own) discussion of the possible varieties of epistemological analyticity is to explain how we can legitimately do philosophy from the armchair. To avoid one of Williamson’s objections to certain forms of epistemological analyticity, I suggested that understanding and truth should be relativized to languages in such a way that the discarded theoretical terms of discarded theories are not in the language of an up-to-date theorist. There might be analytic truths about phlogiston, and we might have to assent to or know their truth in order for us to understand (some) sentences containing “phlogiston”, but the relevant sort of truth and understanding in play here should be relativized to a language not used in up-to-date theory.

But aren’t philosophers sometimes concerned to know from the armchair the propositional contents of non-metalinguistic sentences, rather than their metalinguistic counterparts? That is, aren’t philosophers sometimes concerned to know, say, that every vixen is a female fox, not just that “Every vixen is a female fox” is true in the language of modern zoology? Knowing that a sentence is true in some language certainly isn’t sufficient for knowing its content, otherwise we would know, for instance, that phlogiston has a real functional role in combustion, and that the sun will rise tomorrow tonk the sun is purple.* Perhaps we might say that we know the content of “Every vixen is a female fox” if we know that it is analytic in our own zoological language and that we ought to be using our own zoological language. Or, to be a little more cautious, we might say that we know the content of "Every vixen is a female fox" if we know that it is analytic in every zoological language L such that (a) we know that L is maximally useful for us and (b) we know that the translation of "Every vixen is a female fox" in L is analytic. But certainly we don’t know what sort of zoological language we ought to be using from the armchair. For instance, we don’t know from the armchair whether the terms “vixen” or “fox” mark useful distinctions.

Still, as long as we understand a chunk of modern zoological theory in its customary linguistic guise, then we are in a position to know from the armchair what language that chunk of zoological theory does use, or what (slightly formalized) language or languages it can be taken to be using, or what language or languages it can be rationally reconstructed as using. This knowledge is a priori in the sense that it is guaranteed by our linguistic competence alone. And, for each of those languages, we are in a position to know from the armchair what the analytic truths are, construed epistemologically. At any rate, if I’m right about how to relativize truth and understanding to languages, then Williamson hasn’t shown that we aren’t in a position to know from the armchair what the analytic truths are, construed epistemologically. If philosophers are sometimes concerned to know from the armchair the propositional contents of non-metalinguistic analytic sentences, then they’re in for a disappointment. But maybe they'll do just fine if they set their sights a little bit lower.

This was Michael Friedman’s idea with the “relativized a priori”, right? Or, if Friedman was right, then this was all Carnap’s idea.
_____________________
* - Williamson makes roughly this point himself.

I understand “Every vixen is a female fox” and it has some positive epistemic status for me. How does it get that status? … The lazy theorist may try to dismiss the question, saying that it is simply part of our linguistic practice that “Every vixen is a female fox” has positive epistemic status for whoever understands it. But the examples of defective practices [surrounding “phlogiston”, “tonk”, racial pejoratives, and so on] show that it is not simply up to linguistic practices to distribute positive epistemic status as they please. That the practice is to treat some given sentence as having positive epistemic status for competent speakers of the language does not imply that it really has that epistemic status for them. (The Philosophy of Philosophy, 84)

Papers

2008-07-14T14:06:00.002-04:00

I've started posting my papers on the Google Docs website.

The first paper, "Playing Characters: Towards a Theory of Video Game Role-Playing", is my would-be contribution to the upcoming Final Fantasy and Philosophy anthology. I argue, for a non-professional audience, that role-playing a character in a video game requires a sort of psychological connection of which certain forms of empathy are instances. I also speculate about the general aesthetic characteristics of role-playing video games and the relation between role-playing and real life. It was rejected because it was submitted late and other papers in the anthology address similar questions. It is easily the silliest paper I have ever written.

The second paper, "The Concept of Cognitive Meaningfulness", was my undergraduate thesis in Philosophy at Bard College. I discuss the origins of the concept and criticize various ways of explicating it. It's the only paper I know of just about the concept of cognitive meaningfulness since Part II of Israel Scheffler's Anatomy of Inquiry. It's not perfect, but I still like it.

How to Approach a Linguistic Item

2008-07-14T11:59:00.003-04:00

When I encounter a word, phrase, or grammatical construction in need of philosophical explanation or clarification, what do I do? Sometimes the item derives its interest from its relation to something I already find interesting, but sometimes the interest is somehow intrinsic to the item itself. I’m more interested in what I do when the latter happens. What are the questions I have to bear in mind on my first encounter, as a philosopher, with a linguistic item of self-luminescent interest?

First, I think of examples. I look for seemingly typical or non-distinctive instances of the item. I try to situate it in a handful of different sentential and pragmatic contexts.

The next question I ask is: What is useful about this item? I think there are two ways of approaching this from the armchair. The first is to ask how things change after a sentence containing the item of interest is uttered in the intuitively typical or non-distinctive pragmatic contexts. What do I imagine would happen after the utterance? How might an interlocutor respond? What is true now of speaker and listener that was not true before?

The second approach is to ask what we would lose if we were not to allow this (or any heteronymous substitute) into our speech. On this approach, what I imagine is more a whole linguistic and theoretical world than a set of particular speech situations. For instance, would we fail to mark an important distinction? Would we lose some pragmatic tool, some ability (very broadly speaking) to change the social status of people or things? Would we not be able to express an interesting theory?

The first approach to the question of usefulness tells us what actual linguistic facts there are for an analysis or explication of the item to capture. The second approach tells us why it is worth capturing it. Both of these approaches are profitably initiated and conducted from the armchair, but both are also susceptible to experimental and observational test.

Is this it? What am I missing?

The Second Maxim

2008-07-14T11:53:00.000-04:00

I feel as if, when philosophers attempt to rationally reconstruct or formalize or explicate some fragment of discourse, we should construe things so that as few (kinds of) sentences are truth-apt as possible. If the first maxim of scientific philosophizing is always to replace undefined primitives with logical constructs, the second maxim is to construe as few utterances as truth-apt assertions as possible. If we are concerned to reconstruct the most parsimonious theory of the world from some corpus of verbal behavior (and natural knowledge), then as little of the behavior should constitute endorsement of part of a theory as possible. Suppose the expressivist meta-ethical theory provides us with a range of terms and constructions (that do not yield truth-apt, assertive sentences) with which we might replace the rationally defensible bits of our current ethical discourse. The non-reductive realist meta-ethical theory provides us with a range of terms and constructions (that do yield truth-apt, assertive sentences) with which we might do the same. If both theories account equally well for the verbal behavior, don’t we have to endorse the expressivist theory? Isn’t the second maxim the reason why?

More Comments on The Philosophy of Philosophy

2008-07-13T19:44:00.003-04:00

In Chapter 4 of The Philosophy of Philosophy, “Epistemological Conceptions of Analyticity”, Williamson argues against epistemologies of analytic truths based on epistemological conceptions of analytic truths, which, in turn, are based on “understanding-assent” links. An understanding-assent link is a sentence like:

(1) Necessarily, whoever understands “All bachelors are unmarried” will assent to it.

I think the idea is that understanding links hold between object-level sentences corresponding to metalinguistic semantic facts, on the one hand, and assent to the content of the object-level sentences, on the other. If an understanding-assent link like (1) is supposed to provide the basis on which I know that “All bachelors are unmarried” is true, then this could be on the basis of a corresponding understanding-knowledge link:

(2) Necessarily, whoever understands “All bachelors are unmarried” knows that it is true.

Knowledge is factive. So, (2) entails:

(3) Necessarily, someone understands “All bachelors are unmarried” only if it is true.

But then, Williamson observes, it is unclear how to proceed with understanding-assent links related to several sorts of terms. I’ll just deal with “phlogiston” and other special theoretical terms from discredited theories, although what I have to say applies to the other sorts of terms he talks about.

It seems that fans of understanding-assent links will have to say that there are some even for “phlogiston”. Intuitively, part of the meaning of "phlogiston" is captured by its role in phlogiston theory. This commits us to:

(4) Necessarily, whoever understands “Phlogiston has the role R” will assent to it.

But phlogiston does not have the role R, because nothing plays the role that phlogiston plays in phlogiston theory. However, it follows from (4) that whoever does not assent to “Phlogiston has the role R” doesn’t understand it. Then it follows that people who think that nothing has role R don’t understand “Phlogiston has the role R”. Intuitively, this is not the case. So fans of understanding-assent links will have to accept something that is intuitively not the case.

I’m sure there are all sorts of ways around the problem Williamson is trying to set up for epistemologies of analytic truths based on understanding-assent links, but I’d like to propose just one.

First, excluding bizarre cases involving private codes, we understand sentences only relative to languages (or, if you like, idiolects). Second, sentences have their truth-values relative to languages (or idiolects). Assume, contrary to Williamson, that assent is generally metalinguistic – to assent to “All bachelors are unmarried” is, generally, to assent to the metalinguistic fact that “All bachelors are unmarried” is true, not to assent the corresponding object-level fact that all bachelors are unmarried. So, fully unpacked, (4) means something like:

(4`) Necessarily, whoever understands “Phlogiston has the role R” in L will assent to the metalinguistic fact that “Phlogiston has the role R” is true in L.

In a theoretically important sense, phlogiston theory is stated in a different language from our current chemical theory. (I think this is the sense in which languages classically do not contain their own truth predicate, and probably the sense in which sentences of a language have determinate logical forms.) When doing chemical theory today, we do not speak the L mentioned in (4`). We are not speaking L even when we say that phlogiston theory is false, or that nothing has the role R. If a fully-spelled out description of R invokes other special theoretical terms of phlogiston theory, perhaps a good interpretation of “Nothing has the role R” is “We should not speak a language in which a sentence of the form ‘x has the role R’ is true, for some name substituted for ‘x’.”

The problem with words like “phlogiston” and “tonk” (and, an eliminativist might say, “believes”) is that it is a bad idea to use them at all (except, perhaps, to say something like that phlogiston doesn’t exist). It is a bad idea to use them because it is a bad idea to use languages that countenance them - languages which commit us to parts of phlogiston theory, or in which everything is true or nothing is true. Still, I think we can endorse understanding-assent links for even these sorts of words by relativizing the understanding and the assent in question to languages that we do not use.

File under: Applied Carnap.
________________

Update: This is a pretty bad objection, now that I look at it again. That's because (4`) is false. If people don't know what language L is - and most people don't, on the ontology of languages necessary to make this work - then they won't (or shouldn't) assent to statements mentioning it, including (4`). And the business about the ellipticality of "Nothing has the role R" seems pretty implausible.

Blegs

2008-07-11T10:12:00.002-04:00

In ordinary second-order logics, is the first-order fragment of the logic complete? That is, are all propositions that are true in all models and expressible strictly in terms of first-order quantification also provable?

Also, intuitively, when one plays a role-playing video game such as Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, or Dragon Warrior, does one pretend to be the character(s) one plays?

Comments on The Philosophy of Philosophy

2008-07-09T11:17:00.003-04:00

In Chapter 2 of The Philosophy of Philosophy, “Taking Philosophical Questions at Face Value”, Timothy Williamson argues that a certain philosophical or “proto-philosophical” question is not, explicitly or implicitly, about language. This, what he calls the original question, is: “Was Mars always either dry or not dry?” He shows how a number of ways of answering the original question, through the consideration of intuitionistic, three-valued, and fuzzy logics, still don’t make it a linguistic question, since the answers are not about (i.e. don’t refer to) linguistic items. The answers are “Mars was always either dry or not dry”, “Mars was not always either dry or not dry”, and “It is indefinite whether Mars was always either dry or not dry.” Since none of these answers is about language, the question is not a question about language.

Let’s focus on yes-no questions for now. Say that A is a straightforward answer to a yes-no question Q, stated in language L, iff A is stated in L and expresses what “yes” would express or expresses what “no” would express. Clearly, not every non-straightforward answer to a question is about language. If Susan asks “You ate lunch at Vinny’s last night?”, and Tim responds “Actually, I went to Aunt Suzie’s”, Tim does not give a straightforward answer, but neither does he give a linguistic answer. Nor is every linguistic answer non-straightforward. If Tim responded “True” – as in “What you just said is true, stated indicatively” – I think the answer is both straightforward, because equivalent to “yes”, and linguistic, because about a sentence. Still, most linguistic answers are non-straightforward. If Tim responded “Depends on what you mean by ‘lunch’”, because, say, he ate a borderline meal of salad and an omelet at 11:45, that would be a typical non-straightforward, linguistic answer.

Note also that linguistic questions – questions about language – admit of non-straightforward and perhaps also straightforward non-linguistic answers.

Tim: “… but then I had to jet to the supermarket.”
Susan: “What does ‘jet’ mean?”
Tim: “Somebody jets somewhere whenever they try to get there very quickly.”
Or
Tim: “I had to get there very quickly.”

Tim’s first answer might be straightforward. His second answer is non-straightforward. Neither answer is about language.

The point is that questions that are about language admit of non-linguistic answers, and questions that aren’t about language admit of linguistic answers.

One way for a question to be implicitly, but not explicitly, about language, relative to a kind of answer K, is for all of the members of K to be explicitly about language. Williamson has shown that the original question is not in this way implicitly about language, relative to its philosophical answers, since the philosophical answers are not explicitly about language. But might the question be implicitly about language because the philosophical answers are implicitly about language? I kinda think so, for the following reasons.

1) The original question is stated in English.

2) Languages are partially constituted by their logics. Two things with different logics cannot be the same language.

3) The language of each answer has some formal logic – three-valued, fuzzy, intuitionistic, classical, etc.

4) English has no formal logic – neither three-valued, nor fuzzy, nor intuitionistic, nor classical, etc.

5) Therefore, English does not have the same logic as the language of any of the answers.

6) Therefore, the language of each of the answers is not the same as the language of the original question.

(1) and (3) are obvious. Although I’m not sure Quine would agree with me on (2), I think Williamson would. (4) is probably the most controversial, but I take it that Williamson should agree with me on that as well, judging by what he has to say about Vann McGee in his paper “Understanding and Inference.” But (6) straightforwardly follows from (1)-(4).

Now, once we get to (6), it’s not obvious that every answer in L1 to a question in some other language L2 is thereby a linguistic answer. After all, if a bilingual speaker asks me how the weather is in English, and I answer “Hace fresco”, I have not thereby given a linguistic answer. But, I want to say, that is because it was merely a manner of speaking for me to answer in Spanish. The philosopher who answers in a three-valued language, or a fuzzy language, or an intuitionistic language, or a classical language thinks she has to answer in that language, because that is the right language in which to answer the question, or the only (kind of) language in which to state her theory of vagueness, then the answer is not merely a manner of speaking. The step of translation from the logical language to natural English is a necessary step for the philosopher to give the sort of answer she wants to give. I want to say that it is in virtue of this necessity that the original question is linguistic, at least relative to these sorts of answers grounded in logical metareflection.

I think it is reasonable to say that there is a sense in which a question is implicitly about language, relative to a kind of answer K, iff every member of K is in another language because it must, for the speaker’s most cherished purposes, be in another language. So it is, apparently, with the original question and its philosophical-type answers – or at least the original question and the philosophical-type answers that Williamson has on offer. I guess that if the deconstructionist wants to say (in English) that Mars was always both dry and not dry, because binary distinctions are always unstable and every inscription of both “Mars has always been dry” and “Mars has always not been dry” is internally contradictory, then we have a philosophical English-language answer to our English-language question. But that’s not the kind of philosophy we were talking about, right? Weren’t we looking for the right philosophy of analytic philosophy?

What Grammatical Structures Say and the Linguistic Theory of Logical Truth

2008-06-30T14:57:00.002-04:00

In the last chapter of Philosophy of Logic, Quine discusses the “linguistic theory of logical truth.” This is the theory that “[a] sentence is logically true if true by virtue purely of its grammatical structure. […] It is language that makes logical truths true – purely language, and nothing to do with the nature of the world.” (2nd ed., 95) Quine offers a few different reasons not to buy into this doctrine, most of them familiar from “Two Dogmas” and “Truth by Convention”. The freshest argument, I think, is the one he offers in the paragraph immediately following the previous quote. Here it is, in full:

Granted, grammatical structure is linguistic; but so is lexicon. The lexicon is used in talking about the world; but so is grammatical structure. A logical truth, staying true as it does under all lexical substitutions, admittedly depends upon none of those features of the world that are reflected in lexical distinctions; but may it not depend on other features of the world, features that our language reflects in grammatical constructions rather than its lexicon? It would be pointless to protest that grammar varies from language to language, for so does lexicon. Perhaps the logical truths owe their truth to certain traits of reality which are reflected in one way by the grammar of our language, in another way by the grammar of another language, and in a third way by the combined grammar and lexicon of a third language. (ibid., my italics)

Logical truths are about the world, or are true because they “reflect” features of the world, because their grammatical structures are about the world or reflect features of the world. In what sense could a grammatical structure possibly be about the world, say anything about the world, or “reflect” features of the world? First, we should note that grammatical structures are not about the world in the same way that sentences, names, or predicates are. Grammatical structures as such aren’t true or false like (truth-apt) sentences. By all appearances, grammatical structures don’t refer to anything in the world; Tarski’s definition of truth gets along just fine without assigning semantic values to grammatical structures. Nor do they have (Fregean) senses on any theory that I know of. Nor, intuitively, are they meaningful. If a person were to speak or write down a grammatical structure – say, by speaking or writing a sequence of particles and schematic variables for grammatical categories – I can’t see why anyone would want to say that she, or her utterance or inscription, meant anything.

We might want to say that grammatical structures say something about the world in a different sense – viz., in the sense that sentences with the same non-logical constants but different grammatical structures have different truth-conditions. “(Ax)(Cat(x))” says something different from “~(Ax)(Cat(x))” because of the difference in grammatical structure between the two. We might say that a negation symbol says that the negated sentence is false, a universal quantifier over a variable says that the sentence in the scope of the quantifier is true for all values of the bound variable, and so on.* In this way, by specifying what all of the particles or logical constants say, we can state more or less precisely what an entire grammatical structure, paired with a particular sentence instantiating it, says about the world. But two observations are in order. First, it is not clear how we should construe what the grammatical structures of atomic sentences say.** Second, and more importantly, the worldliness of a grammatical structure, in this sense, is dependent on the worldliness of the non-logical constants in the sentence instantiating it. For instance, the grammatical structure of “~(Cat(Dora))” says something about the world because “(Cat(Dora))” says something about the world – it is either true or false depending on the actual features of the thing called “Dora”. The grammatical structures of uninterpreted schemata say nothing about the world, because the talk of truth, falsity, and values of variables in our sketchy specification of what the particles say presupposes an interpretation of the lexical items in the sentence. When we admit, with Quine, that a logical truth “admittedly depends upon none of those features of the world that are reflected in lexical distinctions”, then the grammatical structure of a logical truth cannot derive its worldliness from the worldliness of the “lexical distinctions” marked by the non-logical constants in a sentence instantiating the structure. Briefly, since the worldliness of grammatical structures derives from the worldliness of the terms in the sentences instantiating them, and since the putative worldliness of logical truths does not depend on the worldliness of these terms, the grammatical structures of logical truths have nothing from which to derive their putative worldliness.

There might be some way of being about the world or reflecting features of the world that I haven’t grasped yet. Perhaps we should understand Quine as saying that we might as well postulate a sui generis mode of being about the world specific to grammatical structures. I can only say in response to this that we might as well not, both for the sake of not multiplying features of the world beyond necessity and for the sake of keeping “about the world” intelligible. Lastly, someone might say that the grammatical structure of logical truths such as “it is raining or it isn’t raining” is about the world because it reflects the fact about the world that things, in general, are or aren’t the case. But this begs the question against the proponent of the linguistic theory of logical truth. What is at issue is whether this fact is about the world.

* - It is much easier to fill in the “and so on” for a formalized language than for a natural language. What does a particle like “if” say? It seems we need a worked-out semantics for conditionals to fill out a proposal like this. If you aren’t satisfied by my hand-waving here, then that probably goes to show that it is even more difficult to make Quine’s argument come out sound.
** - This probably isn’t such a big deal, since the only atomic sentence that is a logical truth is “x = x”, and Quine seems to reckon “=” a particle.

The latest Philosophers' Carnival...

2008-06-30T13:06:00.001-04:00

... is here.

My post, On What There Is and What We Can Perceive, is included under epistemology.

And now...

2008-06-29T17:03:00.008-04:00

Immanuel Kant

and my girlfriend's old roommate's dog, Sally Monster.

Quantifiers and the Grammatical Definition of Logical Truth

2008-06-28T10:43:00.004-04:00

The grammatical definition of logical truth, discussed here, is probably inadequate for all sorts of interesting languages, including English. The definition, from Quine's Philosophy of Logic, is this:

"a logical truth is a truth that cannot be turned false by substituting for lexicon. When for its lexical elements we substitute any other strings belonging to the same grammatical categories, the sentence is true." (2nd ed., 58)

For Quine - and I think he's right on this count - we treat a class of words as a grammatical category, as opposed to a class of particles yielding new grammatical constructions, just in case the category is big enough. For instance, in a language with lots of intransitive verbs, we treat those as comprising a grammatical category. If an L-structure has an infinite stock of variables, we treat variables (or argument-terms, more generally) as a grammatical category; if it has three variables, we might do well to treat each as a particle.

I take it that English has an infinite - or at least a very large - stock of quantifiers. This is because I think that, in English, the quantifiers translated by "(E_)" and "(A_)" in first-order logic belong to the same grammatical category as expressions such as "There are many", "There are ten", "There are one million", and "There are innumerable". If the literature on quantifiers in natural language says otherwise, please correct me. Also, there are usually an infinite number of quantifier-expressions in languages that support generalized quantification, right? Anyway, if quantifiers all belong to the same grammatical category, and we assume the grammatical definition of logical truth, then I can't think of a single logical truth containing a quantifier. For instance, "If Steve and Janice are cats, then there are some cats" would fail to be a logical truth, since "If Steve and Janice are cats, then there are innumerable cats" - gotten by "substituting for lexicon" - is false.

I imagine the Quinean response to all of this would be to say that, given a prior commitment to standard FOL, we should translate "There are n Fs" as "The class of all Fs has cardinality n." But it seems obvious to me that the average English speaker does not, as a matter of linguistic anthropology, commit herself to the existence of the class of all Fs in uttering "There are n Fs." The nominalist cannot properly respond, "No, there is no such thing as the set of all Fs." And besides, what if we substitute "self-member" for "F"?

Quine on Grammatical Structure and Logical Truth

2008-06-23T18:20:00.005-04:00

In Philosophy of Logic, Quine offers the following definition of "logical truth": "a logical truth is a truth that cannot be turned false by substituting for lexicon. When for its lexical elements we substitute any other strings belonging to the same grammatical categories, the sentence is true." (2nd ed., 58)

Later on, considering whether to strengthen FOL to allow for adverbial modification of predicates, Quine claims that, on the definition of "logical truth" lately quoted:

the sentence

(5) ~(Ex)(x walks rapidly . ~(x walks)),

or 'Whatever walks rapidly walks', would qualify as logically true. (76)

This is interesting. The grammatical definition of logical truth is both epistemologically interesting and clears up a lot of confusions I have about the relationship between formal logic and natural language. I still don't know whether it adequately captures all of the intuitive cases of logical truth.

Really, my only observation here is that it seems that the grammatical definition does not make (5) a logical truth. This is because adverbs can sometimes alienate the predicates they modify. An adverb A alienates a predicate F in a sentence token S iff removal of A from S would change the truth-value of the clause of which F is a part. Briefly, A alienates F (in a certain context) if something can be F A'ly without being F simpliciter. Consider the following cases of adverbial alienation:

(1) Tim indirectly told John about Sally.
(2) Paul is coming home shortly.
(3) Sue allegedly stole the watch.
(4) Esther nearly won the tennis match.

We can imagine cases in which (1), (2), (3), and (4) are true, but their non-adverbialized counterparts aren't. There doesn't seem to be anything syntactically unusual about these adverbs. By all appearances, (1), (2), (3), and (4) have the same grammatical structure, respectively, as the following:

(1`) Tim excitedly told John about Sally.
(2`) Paul is coming home currently.
(3`) Sue actually stole the watch.
(4`) Esther barely won the tennis match.

But if (1), (2), (3), and (4) can be turned from truth to falsehood by transformation into (1`), (2`), (3`), and (4`) then, by the grammatical definition, none of these are logically true.

Poem

2008-06-16T22:33:00.001-04:00

“For example, imagine the plight of the autophenomenologist who sets out to study the intentional objects that accompanied his engagement in wildly abandoned sex; he would end up studying the intentional objects of someone engaged in sex while simultaneously performing epoche – hardly the same experience at all.” Daniel Dennett, “Two Approaches to Mental Images.” Brainstorms, 185.

Preamble
Speedy Onan
(Blessed in his age)
Spills his delicate seed
Beside his wife’s behind,
But out of sight.

Ha! El-Shaddai takes note;
In time, Gehinnom’s guestbook’s listless pages, catalyzed,
flip and crack with age.
Which is funny, since
the whole thing was not to give birth.

Father Onan, give us tension,
Give us strength.

Let us create.

I.
Let me see past the walls,
Through the houses, possibilities
Rows on rows apart,
Through your blouse, skirt, pants,
And past the place where I am not,

Or back past the evening,
Through the steps I took,
Past where we were alone, a bit,
Through the outrageous veil of tame actuality,

Or through all time and laws of space –
In short, past all the physical supports –
Locks on our bodies, nothing more –
Past anything other than suggestions of motion,

Also, past your faults of height,
Your too-much hair,
Past here and there a bit more or less of this or that,
Past where you were wholly there –
Accidents all, accidents all –:

Past the fact that once nothing’s in the way of you and me,
then that’s in the way,
you alone
my thoughts’ mundane, gnomish fixture.

Then… then, perhaps what I really like
Is the way that
What I have stripped the scene to
Rests on my clear, glowing, pulsing eyelids;
Through the wall-less, naked, possible, timeless, spaceless, barely suggestive mental act,
I can still see those in back.
Still I can see my eyelids.

II.
My better half sends half-flaccid, unfathomable tendrils,
Dredged up from old-time psychology,
Jerking – explode, collapse, explode, collapse –
Through tensed muscles,
Out into the mental-lexical silk
of semantic space:

humey, human, predicament, boobs, david,
david, uriah, you, rapist,
ending,
reference, inscrutable reference.

Oh, uhu, awa, t-t, my God.
What was that twitch in my leg?
Huh – what did that amount to?
{Khaw-khem.} Yet is there a place on earth,
For all the things to which our dreams give birth?

On What There Is and What We Can Perceive

2008-06-16T16:01:00.004-04:00

Our knowledge of the physical world depends on our perceptual faculties being just about as sensitive as they are. Consider an ideally rational animal, or ideally rational community of inquirers, with only, say, our auditory and proprioceptive faculties. Call it A. It is hard to imagine how A could develop anything we should consider a complete physics. Perhaps I’m wrong – I’m only going on conceivability here – but it sure seems as if the ontology of the theory A would possess at the end of inquiry just could not be the same as any ontology human beings will reach at the end of inquiry.*

A’s theory and ontology would be, in some sense, inadequate. This is because we have all of the evidence A has and more, and A’s theory is inadequate to account for all of our evidence. My intuition is that this inadequacy has some sort of normative force; that is, in some sense, A should adopt a theory that is able to account for our evidence as well as our own completed physics.

Here’s my question: What reason do we have, if any, not to believe that, for all we know, we are in A’s position? More precisely, what reason do we have, if any, not to believe that, for all we know, there is some (perhaps uninstantiated) perceptual faculty, such that our theories should account for the evidence this faculty would furnish for us, were we to have it, in the same sense that A’s theory should account for the evidence furnished by our visual faculties? To be sure, we have pretty good evidence to suspect that none of the animals on Earth have such a perceptual faculty. The question is whether, for all we know, something could have such a faculty, with the world and its contents remaining otherwise entirely as they are.

The only reason I can think of – if it is true – would be furnished by a certain sort of “instrumentalist” meta-ontology. I take instrumentalism to be the view that ontology O is to be preferred over ontology P just in case O is better suited to our purposes than P. Once we have all the evidence in hand, we answer these sorts of “big picture” ontological questions (Carnap might have called them external questions) by recourse to our purposes in theorizing. Suppose our purposes are just to develop a theory with all of the virtues of descriptive adequacy, explanatory power, and simplicity that accounts as well as possible for all of the way things appear to us.** In that case, it is clear that no such troublesome perceptual faculty could exist, because no perceptual faculties other than our own can have any normative bearing on our choice of ontology. Note that this sort of meta-ontology makes it difficult to hold on to the initial intuition I had about A’s epistemic situation – namely, that A should adopt a theory that is able to account for evidence outside of her own perceptual purview. If we think that ontologies are beholden, at last, only to the way things appear to the community of inquiry, then the percepts of outsiders, real or imagined, can have no rational bearing on what exists, in our language.

It’s not clear which I like more – this version of instrumentalism or the offending intuition. Is there some adjudicating evidence that I’ve left out of court? Can anyone point me in the direction of some relevant literature?
____________________
* - I’m assuming here that neither we nor A ever experience any sort of divine revelation or anything like that.
** - This description of “our” purposes is really unsatisfactory to me, but I can’t do any better yet. For what it’s worth, it probably beats Carnap in ESO, where he suggests that the purpose for which he uses the language of serious theory is “the purpose of communicating factual knowledge.”

"Single-horned 'Unicorn' deer is found in Italy"

2008-06-11T12:36:00.001-04:00

So much for unicorns being essentially fictional.

Poetic Acts

2008-06-03T23:00:00.000-04:00

Poetic acts are acts with potentially limitless reference. Interpretations of poetic acts are legitimated by the recognition of some thoroughgoing mapping between the act and its scene, on the one hand, and some other domain. Poetic acts refer to whatever it is that they map onto in these other domains, or whatever those things refer to. The legitimation of an interpretation is both epistemic and ontic. That is, we learn of these interpretations just as they come into existence – by grasping them mentally. An interpretation can become legitimate, even though the domain might not have had a configuration appropriate for the interpretation at the time of the act; as the world changes, as our concepts and knowledge change, so do the possible interpretations of poetic acts. The reference of a poetic act is potentially limitless because there is no (obvious) limit to the mappings that might be grasped by human minds, or the domains into which these mappings might be projected.

I think that the aesthetic evaluation of poetic acts is, in large part, a matter of aesthetically evaluating their referents, with extra weight given to more detailed mappings and mappings with greater salience. If we take a sports game, religious ritual, or dance performance to be a poetic act, then, whatever the other aesthetic characteristics of the game or performance, it seems that it grows more beautiful the more beautiful its referents, or more profound the more profound its referents, or more tasteless the more tasteless its referents. One explanation of what is sometimes unsettling (to me) about competitive sports when I have war or human conflict on my mind is that there is such a clear analogy between the sport and these domains.

There is something more to say about the attractiveness of poetic acts and the attractiveness of the religious life. Stay tuned.

Reductions as Explanations?

2008-05-25T10:10:00.002-04:00

In the SEP article on “Definitions,” Anil Gupta formulates the idea of “reduction” in the traditional account of definitions: “the use of a formula Z containing the defined term is explained by reducing Z to a formula in the ground language.” This struck me as strange, and got me thinking about the role of explanation in motivating and comparing between proposed reductions of a term.

Do we reduce a term to a base in order to explain the use of the term? I always thought that the main three reasons to reduce a term t were: (1) to increase the simplicity of the theories in which t occurs; (2) to demonstrate that (at least some well-formed) sentences containing t are contentful (or have a certain sort of content); and (3) to demonstrate that (at least some well-formed) sentences containing t do not lead to contradiction or paradox. I might have also have included (4) to demonstrate that a set of presuppositions (preferably minimal) are sufficient to make uses of t contentful (or contentful in a certain way, e.g., “cognitively”). There is no explicit mention here of explanation. Still, there is something like an explanatory bonus when a reduction satisfies (2)-(4). When a reduction demonstrates that sentences containing t are contentful, it also explains, or can later be used to explain, that same fact. Similarly for (3) and (4). Note that this really is a bonus, not the main purpose of the reduction. This is because we don’t, in general, try to explain some alleged state of affairs when we have real doubts whether it obtains, and (2)-(4) are good motivators only if we do have real doubts about the contentfulness, consistency, and theoretical baggage of uses of a term. So, in order to be strongly motivated, the sort of explanatory function of reductions that I have already described must be secondary.

I’m not sure what Gupta means when he talks about explaining the “use” of a sentence or formula. I thought that when we wanted to explain why a word (or a sentence containing it) has one use rather than another, we do etymology. Maybe we do some psycholinguistics to find out whether the word is an onomatopoeia, or why certain concepts are lexicalized and others aren’t. Reduction seems to be besides the point here.

Do reductions have some other explanatory role? Am I missing something?

A Test for Ambiguity... Tewtally Pwned

2008-05-17T08:30:00.006-04:00

I’m reading Zwicky and Sadock’s (1973) paper on “Ambiguity Tests and How to Fail Them” for a paper on the ontology of senses (of linguistic expressions) that I’m working on.* They discuss different types of arguments for or against a sentence (or a crucial expression in the sentence) being ambiguous. One type, called “inconstancy under substitution” caught my eye. Fully spelled out, I think inconstancy under substitution arguments work something like this:

1. F is synonymous with G / F is a hypernym of G / G is a hypernym of F.
2. “… F …” has distinct understandings p and q.
3. “… G …” has p, but not q / “… G …” has an understanding that is acceptable if p, but no understanding that is acceptable if q / “… G …” has an understanding that is acceptable only if p, but none that is acceptable only if q.
4. Therefore, “… F …” is ambiguous between p and q.

Some comments: as it stands, the conclusion doesn’t logically follow from the premises. It’s hard to say what the implicit premise is that makes the conclusion seem warranted. At any rate, I don’t want to question the validity of this line of argument here. The big problem is antecedently establishing the first premise. Intuitively, the fact that substitution of G for F does not transform the possible understandings in the appropriate way** is evidence for the semantic relation not obtaining between F and G. To take one of the relations, it seems that we come to call F and G synonyms because of their intersubstitutability across diverse sentential and conversational contexts. Granted, of course, that intersubstitutability can fail in certain sorts of contexts without telling against the synonymy of the two terms; the argument from inconstancy of substitution (which does not involve reference to conversational contexts) works precisely when the sentential context is of such a sort. But we need to be able to identify those contexts prior to making the judgment that F and G are synonymous. But this entails that we can already recognize that, in the context quoted in the argument, F is ambiguous between the reading with which G is synonymous and some more idiomatic reading. So it seems that in order for us to establish the soundness of the premises of an argument from inconstancy of substitution, we must already be in a position to know that the conclusion is true.
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* - The first paper I’ve started to work on since graduating from Bard. Kind of exciting.
** - The appropriate way when F and G are synonymous would be that “… F …” can be understood precisely in all the ways that “… G …” can. The appropriate way when F is a hypernym of G would be that there is a certain one-to-one correspondence between the understandings of “… F …” and the understandings of “… G …”, such that an understanding of the latter is acceptable only when the corresponding understanding of the former is acceptable, or something like that.

Happy Birthday!

2008-05-08T11:32:00.004-04:00

Yom huledet sameach, Israel!

Today, in the Jewish calendar, is the 60th anniversary of the birth of the modern Jewish state of Israel. It is a very happy day in Israel, immediately following Yom Hazikaron, Israel's Memorial Day. It is a very happy day, as well, for Jews the world over who think that the state of Israel should exist.

Did anybody else find it strange that, on Yom Hazikaron and Yom Haatzmaut, the New York Times should be airing this video? Israel's treatment of its own Arab citizens is troubling in many respects, and the Times' video is nuanced and, as far as I can tell, not inaccurate. But wouldn't it be outrageous if the Times covered the Fourth of July with, say, a story about our shabby treatment of the Native Americans, or the history of our government's indifference to the intimidation of non-white voters? Isn't that exactly what's going on here? For everything a season, guys.

The Particularity of Love

2008-05-07T13:43:00.003-04:00

Now and again I hear or read something saying that we should or do love what we love “in its particularity.” This sometimes gets the implicitly metaphysical gloss that we should love people, especially, just for “who they are” and sometimes gets the explicitly metaphysical gloss that the reason why we love whom and what we love is that it possesses its own haecceity
. Since I don’t believe in haecceities yet, and since I don’t know what to do with “who they are” in this context, I never put much stock in this particularity idea.

Harry Frankfurt has cleared it up for me:

“The significance to the lover of what he loves is not that his beloved is an instance or exemplar… For a person who wants simply to help the sick or the poor, it would make perfectly good sense to choose his beneficiaries randomly from among those who are sick or poor enough to qualify. It does not matter who in particular the needy persons are. Since he does not really care about any of them as such, they are entirely acceptable substitutes for each other. The situation of a lover is very different. There can be no equivalent substitute for his beloved… It cannot possibly be all the same to the lover whether he is devoting himself disinterestedly to what he actually does love or – no matter how similar it might be – to something else instead.” (The Reasons of Love, 44)

I’m still not sure whether the particularity idea is true, but now I know roughly what would count as a counterexample to it.

My question here is: How does the particularity idea sit with the fact that there are such things as what we love about individuals? It sure seems that, if I love certain things about an individual, then, if the individual were not to have those things I love about it (or if I were to come to believe that the individual did not have those things), I would not love the individual. When I tell my girlfriend what I love about her – how funny she is, how affectionate she is – part of what I am telling her is why, in part, I have come to love her. My beloved’s having what I love about it, or my believing that it has what I love about it, is a necessary condition for my having come to love it, if not also for my continuing to love it.

But while this is a necessary condition, a consequence of the particularity idea is that it can’t be sufficient. What we love about an individual is not alone what makes us love it, either in fact or as a matter of duty. For what we love about individuals are properties, and properties are typically things that numerically distinct individuals can share. But if I need not, either in fact or as a matter of duty, love a numerically distinct qualitative duplicate of my beloved, then what I love about my beloved – certain properties of the sort shared by its doppelganger – is neither what causes me nor what obligates me to love it.

Vonnegut Pro Dancing, Contra Blogging

2008-04-30T11:31:00.004-04:00

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, 62

Confucius, Music, Character

2008-04-21T12:12:00.001-04:00

Therefore, the superior man tries to create harmony in the human heart, by a rediscovery of human nature, and tries to promote music as a means to the perfection of human culture. When such music prevails, and the people’s minds are led towards the right ideals and aspirations, we may see the appearance of a great nation. Character is the backbone of our human nature, and music is the flowering of character.

- Confucius (? - Can't find the source)

Is Existence a First-Order Property?

2008-04-19T15:19:00.003-04:00

I think I’ve found a not-so-bad argument for construing existence as a first-order property. Here goes:

Begin with the principle that first-order properties are those things in virtue of which a sentence of the form “x is not identical to y” is true, for some substitution of individual-symbols for “x” and “y”. So existence is a first-order property if some such statement is true solely in virtue of the truth of a corresponding sentence of the form “x exists” or “x does not exist” – or, if you like, corresponding sentences of the form “there is a z, such that x = z” and “there is no z, such that x = z.” Let c1 =def the bottom tennis ball in a certain canister that can contain as many as three tennis balls; let c2 =def the middle tennis ball in that same canister; let c3 =def the ball immediately above c1 in the canister. Now suppose that there are actually only two balls in the canister. Then c3 is above c1, but c2 is not, since c2 does not exist. It seems that ~(c2 = c3).

I would suggest that this is the case just because c2 does not exist. Supporting this contention is the apparent fact that if c2 did exist (i.e. if there were some ball, such that that ball is the middle ball in the canister; if there were some ball, such that that ball is c2), then it would be the case that c2 = c3. But if ~(c2 = c3) just because c2 does not exist, then by our initial principle about first-order properties, existence is a first-order property.

Does this work? Am I missing something? I don’t really understand the necessity of identity. Is some abuse of that principle at work here? Or is my beginning principle about first-order properties false? Or is it actually not the case that ~(c2 = c3) – say, because “~(c2 = c3)” lacks a truth-value?
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Update:

In a comment at the Maverick's, Ockham, writes: "You cannot say 'c2 =def the middle tennis ball in that same canister' and then say 'but c2 does not exist'" Here's my response, which is too long and too irrelevant to the discussion of the Maverick's post to leave on his blog.

I suppose that, in classic FOL, you can't introduce a term through a definite description that doesn't refer. FOL aside, though, do you mean to say that this is incoherent in natural English? "The middle ball in that same canister doesn't exist" does sound strange to me. Admittedly, it sounds more natural to say "There is no middle ball in the canister," which we might formalize "~(Ex)(Middle ball in the canister(x))." It doesn’t sound unnatural to introduce a proper name through that definite description, however. Nor does it sound unnatural to me to say “c2 doesn’t exist” (even though “the middle ball in the canister” is the definition of “c2”), just the same way it doesn’t sound unnatural to say that “Pegasus doesn’t exist.” The big difference between “c2” and “Pegasus” seems to be that “c2” was obviously introduced by a definite description, whereas “Pegasus” was not obviously so introduced. I’m not sure that this difference is enough to make “c2 doesn’t exist” incoherent and “Pegasus doesn’t exist” coherent. Still, we might imagine situations in which a term like "c2" is introduced – say, by a group of people who believe, incorrectly, that there are three balls in the canister – otherwise than by the definite description “the middle ball in the canister.” (Briefly: maybe the group could use a function from canisters to the middle ball in the canister. Maybe they could just start using “c2” to (try to) refer to what they believe to be the middle ball by stating facts that would be true of such a ball, were it to exist.) In any event, I’m not sure that “c2 doesn’t exist” is incoherent, and if it is, we can use other stories about how something like “c2” comes to have a certain meaning, and then tell a story similar to the one I tell about ~(c2 = c3).

Davidson, Belief

2008-04-16T14:58:00.002-04:00

I think there might be something like an inconsistency in Davidson’s theories of meaning and belief. Consider the following set of claims, all of which, I think, Davidson has to accept:

1. Intentional indeterminism: the apparatus of folk-psychology always underdetermines the total set of beliefs and desires that we attribute to an intentional system. The non-psychological facts and the commitments of psychology as such (i.e. the common commitments of any psychological theory in virtue of which the theory is psychological) underdetermine – inductively, deductively, and abductively – what beliefs and desires an intentional system has.
2. General agreement: in general, folk that are equally well-informed about an intentional system in non-psychological terms agree, in the individual cases, both on what beliefs and desires the system has, and how to determine further what beliefs and desires the system has.
3. We must explain (2) in terms of the commonly-held beliefs of the folk.
4. These beliefs are not among the basic commitments of psychology as such. (From (1) and (2).)
5. Facts about commonly-held beliefs that determine the evidential procedures governing the proper application of a word (like “believes) are among the facts that constitute, in part, the meaning of that word. (I take this to be one of the reasons that Davidson says that meaning and belief are so closely related. I also take it to be a consequence of most varieties of semantic holism.)
6. Facts about the meaning of “believes” are among the basic commitments of psychology as such.

But then, from (3), (5), and (6), it seems we can derive the conclusion that the facts that explain (2) are facts about the meaning of “believes,” and so among the basic commitments of psychology as such. This is immediately contrary to (4).

I think Davidson might get out of this by denying (3), but it still seems that the sort of meta-semantics underlying (5) is going to make it difficult to say that the commonality that explains (2) is not, in part, constitutive of the meaning of “believes.”

Confirmation and Relative Frequency

2008-03-26T18:02:00.004-04:00

In “Two Concepts of Probability,” Carnap writes: “It is clear that from a probability1 statement [i.e. a statement about degree of confirmation] a statement on frequency can never be inferred, because the former is purely logical while the latter is factual.” (526) For instance, consider the probability1 statement that the hypothesis that any given throw of a die will be a six has a 1/6 probability on the evidence that the die is symmetrical, or P1(h|e) = 1/6. Carnap says that, from this probability1 statement, we cannot infer that the limit of the relative frequency of the six-event is 1/6, or P2(h) = 1/6. My intuition is that this is, strictly speaking, true, but that given both e and P1(h|e) in an adequate inductive logic, the proposition that P2(h) ≈ 1/6 is thereby confirmed to an acceptable degree. If we take an “inference” in inductive logic to be the premises’ conferral of an acceptable degree of confirmation on the conclusion, then, given e and P1(h|e) in an adequate inductive logic, we can infer P2(h) ≈ 1/6. This is not a deductive inference of P2(h) from P1(h|e), but it is enough to suggest that Carnap might have been a little bit confused about the relation between confirmation and relative frequency.

Nevermind, for now, how to extend the basic moral here to cases in which the “≈” won’t work. Am I missing something?

"Grue" and "Third Child" Are Sometimes Projectible

2008-03-26T16:46:00.000-04:00

The observation that some batch of emeralds is green is evidence for the hypothesis (K) that all emeralds are green, and is not evidence for the hypothesis (H) that all emeralds are grue. But this need not be the case. Suppose we lived in a world in which the spectral reflectance curve of everything that comes into existence, after a certain length of time n, shifts some specified amount. In particular, the shift is such that, after a duration of n, everything that comes into existence as a green object becomes blue. Suppose, further, that no emeralds naturally form in this world. Then, at time t – n, Jack synthesizes the first batch of emeralds ever to come into being in this world. Jack observes that the emeralds are green.

Isn’t it the case, here, that Jack’s observation is evidence for H, but not for K? Isn’t it the case, here, that “grue” is projectible over objects created at t – n?

A similar and perhaps slightly less ridiculous imaginary case would be a nearby possible world in which birth order strongly impacted the way we form friendships, so that people with the same number of older siblings were much more likely to be friends. Then if friends are more likely to be amongst one another than with others, then the observation that five people in a room of thirty are third children is evidence for the hypothesis that (at least most of) the other twenty five are also third children.

What are the consequences of this? Well, if “grue” and “third child” are projectible when we have certain background information or given certain background conditions* and unprojectible when our information or conditions are otherwise, then we sometimes need certain information about our own information or the condition of the world in order to determine whether a hypothesis or predicate is projectible. If we want to maintain that claims about the projectibility of a hypothesis or predicate are a priori, then we will have to relativize “projectible” to a specification of the condition of the world or our own information (and even that might not work). Otherwise, we will have to say that claims about the projectibility of a hypothesis or predicate are a posteriori, and that the information about our own background information or about the condition of the world is somehow evidence for the projectibility claim. Either way, the most important consequence is that the best theories of projectibility cannot distinguish the projectible from the unprojectible solely on the basis of necessary or irreducibly monadic features of given hypotheses or predicates.

Note also that, in Jack’s world, in populations of objects existing for a duration of n or longer, then we can only project normal color predicates (e.g. “green”/“blue” – not “grue”/“bleen”) from samples. So, in this case, even within a given world, sometimes “green” will be projectible and sometimes “grue” will be projectible. This seems to have nothing to do with how entrenched “green” and “grue” are in the world.
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* - I say “background information or given certain background conditions” because it is not clear what is making “grue” and “third child” projectible in these scenarios – that they have certain weird features or that we know they have the weird features.

An Unnecessary Criterion of Adequacy for a Definition of "Confirmation?"

2008-03-09T15:46:00.005-04:00

One of Carl Hempel's criteria of adequacy for a general definition of "confirmation" in his "Studies in the Logic of Confirmation" (1945) is that it must apply to sentences of any logical form. According to Hempel, a general definition of "confirmation" cannot state only what sorts of sentences confirm, say, universally quantified sentences with a single variable.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think this is not a good criterion. As far as I can tell, as long as we define “confirmation” for, say, universally quantified sentences of single variable (with negation), then, if we accept Hempel’s “equivalence condition”*, we have a general definition of “confirmation.”

Can’t we eliminate any existential quantifier in terms of a universal quantifier and negation by means of the logical equivalence (Ex)(Fx) <=> ~(Ax)~(Fx)?

Isn’t it true that, for any n-adic predicate R, for any place pi in the predicate, for any ordered set of objects {x1, x2, …, xi-1, xi+1, …, xn} occupying the other places in the predicate, we can define a monadic predicate R`, such that R`xi <=> Rx1,x2,…xi-1,xi,xi+1,…xn?

And, at least in languages without empty names, isn’t it true that Fa <=> (Ex)(x = a & Fa)?

So, if we allow ourselves to define somewhat contrived predicates and help ourselves to languages non-free logics, isn’t every sentence logically equivalent to some sentence in universal form with one variable? This is not, of course, to say that we could actually get by in science or daily life without sentences of more complex logical forms; this is a claim only about what a definition of “confirmation” needs to be truly general. As usual, I reserve the possibility that I’m totally mistaken about the logic here.
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* - The equivalence condition states that "If an observation report confirms a hypothesis H, then it also confirms every hypothesis which is logically equivalent with H."

Does the Possibility of Discovering Novel Experiences Have Serious Meta-Ontological Consequences?

2008-03-08T15:11:00.003-05:00

It sure seems to me as if we can discover new sui generis properties, and that this has some important consequences for the approach to ontology, which I am very sympathetic to, outlined in Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” Some examples of discoveries of new sui generis properties: that feeling I had when I was writing the verses of Sophie thinking about Alyssa; Dennett's example (from “Quining Qualia”) of discovering that the sound of the open E on a guitar is, in part, composed of the sound of the E harmonic at the 12th fret might also work (especially if "sounds like open E" was a sui generis property before, and so the structure of my linguistic framework is more severely changed around by the introduction of "sounds like the E harmonic at the 12th fret"); also, the first time one tries any really distinctive kind of food, esp. a raw ingredient. Really, any time we use demonstratives like “this experience” because other words just wouldn’t do the trick. (One thing: how do I know the properties are sui generis right off the bat? Well, I don't, especially since I take calling them "sui generis" to amount to a claim about the place of the predicate for the property in the L-structure [i.e., undefined and probably also undefinable]. But I discover them and add them at least to the model at once [even if I only pick out the properties demonstratively], and I can try to reassure myself that they are sui generis later.)

What exactly do I mean by "discover"? I discover a property when I acquire a concept of or else actually refer to a property that was not previously in my ontology, in the model of the language I was using. This property is introduced all at once, not after subtle reflection and meta-reflection on previous experience and theory. It is precisely because it is all at once that I do not know that the property is sui generis, though I think I have my suspicions from the get-go.

What exactly are the consequences? Well, that the changes to an L-structure that we can effect are sometimes completely determined by what seem to be universally adopted methodological norms. It seems like, just in the face of these novel experiences, I have to add the new property to the model of my linguistic framework. There is no room for conceptual engineering at this point (though that can come later - perhaps "sounds like E-12th fret harmonic" later becomes a defined term). Also, a sort of realism about properties - not that we need to quantify over predicate symbols, but that (at least some sui generis) properties are in some sense "out there". They are not necessarily "out there" in that our norms should be such that the property should have been in the model all along; this is not a claim about the inadequacy of our norms, but about the sensitivity of linguistic change to extra-linguistic forces.

At least that’s what I want to say the consequences are, but maybe I’m wrong. In ESO, Carnap says only that in a “linguistic framework” the use of existential quantifiers must be rule-governed. But my discovery of these new properties of my experience (if it was as I describe it) was quite rule-governed, in the sense that I did not violate or change any rules of English semantics in pronouncing it. Perhaps adding a property to a model does not change the rules of a language. It seems to depend on what counts as a “linguistic framework.” If numerically identical frameworks can have different universes of discourse (perhaps relative to a single context) or words (say, predicates coined ad hoc to pick out newly discovered property), then I do not necessarily adopt a new linguistic framework whenever I denote new sui generis properties. I have been thinking of linguistic frameworks as interpreted L-structures, but perhaps this is too rigid. Perhaps we might conceive of linguistic frameworks in such a way that they might be constituted, in whole or in part, by rules for introducing new terms, or even new “kinds” of terms.

I guess I still don’t really have an answer to the question, at first a bit inchoate, that motivated this post: Does the apparent fact that, in our linguistic framework – scientific English? –, we can denote (what we sometimes correctly take to be) entirely new sui generis properties somehow entail that ontology is not guided by the convenient choice of a linguistic framework?

In other words: sometimes we introduce altogether new (sometimes sui generis) properties into our ontology by a process that apparently does not necessitate commitment to any sort of heavy background theory. The introduction, and the need for the introduction, presses on us with a feeling of utter immediacy. Clearly, we are following some norm here – both in feeling the need for the introduction, and in actually executing it (an act perhaps beyond our control). This norm, whatever it is, is meta-ontological. It dictates how and when to introduce new kinds of terms and objects. The question is: can this norm be stated within or somehow compassed by the meta-ontology of ESO, say as a peculiar fact about the rules that constitute the linguistic framework of present-day scientific English? It seems hard to square the utter non-verbalness of the need to follow the norm and ESO’s (perhaps deceptive) appearance of making all ontological norms essentially semantical rules, and meta-ontological norms reasons for changing semantical rules. It all seems to depend on the nature of linguistic rules and linguistic frameworks.

A Little Cicero, and Why Even Bad Friendships Might Be a Little Good

2008-03-06T13:05:00.003-05:00

But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle - friendship can only exist between good men. I do not, however, press this too closely, like the philosophers who push their definitions to a superfluous accuracy. They have truth on their side, perhaps, but it is of no practical advantage. Those, I mean, who say that no one but the "wise" is "good." Granted, by all means. But the "wisdom" they mean is one to which no mortal ever yet attained. We must concern ourselves with the facts of everyday life as we find it - not imaginary and ideal perfections. Even Gaius Fannius, Manius Curius, and Tiberius Coruncanius, whom our ancestors decided to be "wise," I could never declare to be so according to their standard. Let them, then, keep this word "wisdom" to themselves. Everybody is irritated by it; no one understands what it means. Let them but grant that the men I mentioned were "good." No, they won't do that either. No one but the "wise" can be allowed that title, say they. Well, then, let us dismiss them and manage as best we may with our own poor mother wit, as the phrase is.
- Cicero, De Amicitiae, I.5

The principle here is that only good people can be friends. Strictly speaking, this must be false. If Hitler spends a lot of time together with Joe, if they enjoy one other’s company, if each readily sees the good qualities of the other, if they are prepared to defend one another at some risk to their own personal comfort or well-being, then Hitler and Joe must be friends, no matter how terrible a person Hitler is in other respects. Bad people can be friends.

Maybe Cicero’s (really, the speaker Laelius’) statement of his principle is an imprecise formulation of the view that friendship necessarily consists, at least in part, in treating one’s friends as good people treat one another. Even if it is bad of Joe to treat Hitler as a friend, Joe does treat Hitler, in many respects, as a good person treats another good person. In many instances, it is good, if difficult, to defend somebody else at risk to oneself. In many instances, it is good, if difficult, to be ready to see the good qualities in another person. In many instances, it is good, if difficult, to be happy to be with other people. Even if one picks one’s friends poorly, friendship would seem to be a sort of training ground for treating or dealing with non-friends in these difficult but good ways. This is an empirical proposition – I guess I should look through the social psych literature to see whether it’s true. But if it is, it’s one reason to think that friendship of any sort is, in at least one respect, instrumentally good.

Goodman on Relevant Conditions

2008-03-01T14:25:00.003-05:00

Counterfactual conditionals aren’t truth-functions of their antecedents and consequents. If the consequent counterfactually follows from the antecedent, in general, it would not be because there is an entailment from A to C, but because there is a sort of entailment from A conjoined with other propositions that are, in some sense, implicitly assumed along with A. In “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals” (in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed.) Goodman calls these other propositions the “relevant conditions” of the counterfactual, and says that one of the main philosophical problems with counterfactuals is the explicit specification of relevant conditions. I think I agree thus far.

Goodman also says, however, that the sense in which the relevant conditions are implicitly assumed is that they are taken to be true in the actual world. In Goodman’s words: “in asserting the counterfactual, we commit ourselves to the actual truth of the statements describing the requisite relevant conditions” (8). This part I’m not sure about. My worry is that this stand on speakers’ attitudes towards relevant conditions cannot account for certain counterfactuals related to utterly non-actual states of affairs. Take Irish Jim, who occupies a world in which the Irish can fly. In this world, the Irish are unlike other human beings in this respect, and they can fly strictly in virtue of their Irishness. Now consider:

(1) If Jim weren’t Irish, he couldn’t fly.

This counterfactual seems as true to me as any other counterfactual, and it sure looks to me like one of its relevant conditions is that:

(2) All Irish people can fly.

But, of course, I don’t believe (2). Since it seems that my beliefs about (1) and the powers of the Irish don’t seem to be inconsistent, it seems that the sense in which (1) implicitly assumes (2) is not that it assumes that (2) is actually true.

But perhaps (2) is not a relevant condition of (1), and (1) doesn’t implicitly assume (2) in any sense at all. Perhaps the relevant condition that I wanted to capture by (2) is something more like:

(3) In Jim’s world, all Irish people can fly.

Now, (3) I actually do believe (to the extent that I believe in facts about non-actual worlds), and (3) seems to do all the work that (2) can do in making (1) come out true. And, strictly speaking, I guess that (3) is true just in case (3) is true in the actual world – i.e., just in case, in the actual world, it is true that, in Jim’s world, all Irish people can fly. Furthermore, in general, I suppose, one believes that (3) is true just in case one believes that (3) is true in the actual world. So, if (3) is a relevant condition of (1), it looks like a speaker of (1) assumes (3) to be actually true. So, strictly speaking, maybe Goodman is right about speakers’ attitudes towards relevant conditions – they assume that relevant conditions are actually true. But if, as Goodman suggests at a certain point (6f), we want the relevant conditions to be non-modal, then (3) won’t do. In that case, I am convinced that we would do better to say that (2) is a relevant condition of (1), and rethink the nature of speakers’ attitudes towards the relevant conditions of counterfactuals that they utter.

I want to say that the attitude of the speaker towards the relevant conditions is one of something like provisional acceptance, or acceptance for the sake of argument. I can’t think of a good reason not to endorse this view, and I think it clearly has important consequences (different from those of Goodman’s view) for how we should approach both the problem of specifying relevant conditions and the problem of understanding the illocutionary force of utterances of counterfactual conditionals.

Two things

2008-01-30T22:41:00.000-05:00

First, new pilot data are in. They seem to be telling me that the folk are not all substance dualists. If the first people I've tested are like everybody else, folk beliefs about the metaphysics of mental properties are all over the place in every respect. So far, the only wider theoretical relevance I've been able to cook up for this apparent finding is that Paul Bloom's explanations of folk beliefs about the afterlife, moral worth, and personal identity in Descartes' Baby are probably unsound. After I get comments back from my professor, I think I'm going to send the write-up of the pilot out to PMS WIPS, although I get the strong sense that I need to discuss the philosophical relevance of the findings in some way that hasn't occurred to me yet.

Second, if you, like me, want to get your feet wet in the philosophy of information, I recommend that you read any of the good-sounding articles by Luciano Floridi except "What is the Philosophy of Information?" Or, if you do read that one, skip straight to section 4. I say this only because it's the fourth item on a google search of "philosophy of information," and the first one that looks relevant.

Hypothetical Substitution and Representational States

2008-01-09T14:54:00.000-05:00

At least as important as developing a philosophical theory of what to count as a mental representation is a theory of what to count as a representational state – a state expressed in English by a relation between an individual and a proposition, that is best explained in terms of (or just is) a relation between an individual and something like a mental representation of (the meaning of) the proposition. Lillard (1993) notes that, simply in virtue of using a pen to stir my coffee, I do not necessarily represent my pen as a spoon, so using a pen to stir my coffee is not a representational state. Following Josef Perner, she calls using a pen as if it were a spoon an instance of hypothetical (as opposed to symbolic) substitution. The difference between the clearer cases of hypothetical (as opposed to symbolic) substitution are reflected in facts such as that “I am using a pen as if it were a spoon” is not, surface-grammatically, a relation between an individual and a proposition – an independent clause does not follow “as if.” But English could have been different here. We could have said “I am using a pen that it is a spoon;” perhaps that is roughly how locutions of this sort work in other languages. And maybe English does have a relation between an individual and a proposition in the deep structure of sentences reporting hypothetical substitutions.

I guess we could just say that hypothetical substitutions aren’t relations to mental representations because they are extensional, and relations to mental representations aren’t. For example, my intuition is that, if I am not pretending, then I am acting as if I am Clark Kent iff I am acting as if I am Superman iff I am acting as if I am the fictional male lead portrayed as having grown up in Smallville in such television shows as Lois and Clark. But that intuition is kind of weak, and I suspect that I would give it up in the face of a good argument. Do other people share this intuition?

Concepts and the Idiosyncrasy of Mental Representations

2008-01-02T11:27:00.000-05:00

I was reading Margolis and Lawrence’s introduction to their anthology Concepts a couple of weeks ago. I got the impression that (perhaps for limitations of space) they didn’t do justice to the view that concepts are best thought of as abstracta, and especially the argument from what they call “the idiosyncrasy of mental representations” to that view. I want to do justice to that argument here, and maybe also air out my thoughts about the metaphysics of concepts in the process.

Consider two speech situations, S1 and S2. The utterances and contexts in S1 and S2 are entirely identical, except for the identity of the speaker – A in S1 and B in S2. Let’s assume that their utterances contain no first person pronouns or other self-referential indexical elements, such as “Some dogs have no hair” or “Would you like more hot pepper?” We have an inconsistent tetrad of propositions:

(1) A’s utterance in S1 means the same as B’s utterance in S2.
(2) A’s mental representation of the meaning of at least one sub-sentential expression in her utterance (“dogs,” “hair,” “hot pepper”) differs greatly in type from B’s mental representation of the meaning of that same expression.
(3) For any two sentential utterance-tokens U1 and U2, ceteris paribus, if U1 and U2 contain one expression-type e, such that the token of e in U1 and the token of e in U2 do not express significantly type-identical concepts, then U1 does not mean the same as U2.
(4) Concepts are (types of) mental representations of the meanings of sub-sentential expressions.

Another slightly different version of the tetrad, corresponding to another slightly different version of the view that concepts are mental representations replaces (2) and (4) with, respectively:

(2`) A’s mental representation of what A believes to be the extension of at least one sub-sentential expression in her utterance (“dogs,” “hair,” “hot pepper”) differs greatly in type from B’s mental representation of what B believes to be the extension of that same expression.
(4`) Concepts of referential expressions are (types of) mental representations of the presumed extensions of referential expressions.

We could generate different “prime” versions of the basic tetrad for all sorts of different views of concepts and mental representation. (I’ll limit the discussion here to the first version, assuming that everything I have to say holds, mutatis mutandis, for the other versions.) Despite the vagueness of “significant difference,” I take it that all of these different versions are inconsistent; we have to deny at least one premise in order to avoid inconsistency. I also take it, however, that one ends up thinking about mental representations, (2) is supposed to be true by hypothesis. The question, then, is whether to drop (1), (3), or (4). Here is how I see the scene, now:

> I probably won’t give up (1). My intuitions – about utterance-meaning, anyway – are semantic-externalist enough at this point that (1) is, to me, pre-theoretically obvious. As far as theory goes, I think that linguistic conventions fix the semantic properties of utterances, and that whatever determines linguistic conventions, whatever those ultimately turn out to be, cannot tap so deeply into our minds as to draw distinctions in utterance meaning solely on the basis of differences like those between A’s mental representations and B’s mental representations. That said, I bet that all sorts of psycholinguists would prefer to drop (1).

> I would give up (3) if I thought that theories of concepts weren’t supposed to explain the semantic properties of utterances. Sometimes I think that is the case; sometimes I think that theories of concepts, as developed by psychologists, are just designed to explain typicality effects and related, more-or-less overt behavioral facts and dispositions. To the extent that the facts about typicality effects are not also facts about the meanings of words, this should lead me to drop (3). But I get the sense that I am really deeply confused about what theories of concepts are supposed to explain, and that my confusion obscures the role of concepts in semantic theory. That’s why I’m inclined not to give up (3).

> That leaves me with (4). I am motivated to reject (4) both because of the tetrad and because I don’t see a natural, sensible way to preserve locutions of the form “the concept of x” if we think of concepts as mental representations. I am motivated not to reject (4) by what I take to be the fact that most psychologists think of concepts as mental representations of one sort or another. On the plausible meta-philosophical view that what we philosophers are trying to do with our discussions of concepts and mental representations is to shed light on these terms as they are used by psychologists, it tells against an explication of “concept” if it does not also come with a truth- or plausibility-preserving interpretation of psychologists’ mental-representational talk of concepts. But what tells against an explication is not always what ultimately defeats it, and theories of concepts might be one of those areas in philosophy in which merely scrutinizing accepted scientific terminology ought to lead to broad change in the way scientists construct their theories. (How different would this be from the sort of verificationist thinking that motivated Einstein to develop the relativistic conception of simultaneity?) To what extent treating concepts as abstracta would lead to such a change is not clear to me, though, since there might be a simple, painless translation of most psychological, mental-representational talk about concepts into the “abstracta” idiom. (Perhaps the mental representations psychologists call “concepts” are best construed as mental representations of the abstracta that are called “concepts” in expressions of the form “the concept of x.”) Anyway, I lean towards giving up (4) because I like (1)-(3).

A New Version of the Identity Theory?

2007-12-11T14:18:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Schiffer's Remnants of Meaning and its gotten me thinking about most (all?) physicalists' demand that mentalistic talk, and especially mentalistic ontology, needs to be reduced to physical talk and ontology somehow or other. My intuition is that most* mentalistic talk and ontology is itself physical in nature, and not because type-type or token-token or any such identity theory is true. I think my intuition is to accept the two premises of the following argument. I've never seen this before, but it's reminiscent of some of the discussion in Stoljar's "Two Conceptions of the Physical."

(1) For all x, if x is introduced to explain the overt physical behavior of paradigmatically physical objects, then x is a physical object.

(2) The special ontological commitments of cognitive science (mental representations, information processing mechanisms, etc.) are introduced to explain the overt physical behavior** of animals' bodies.

Therefore, (3) The special ontological commitments of cognitive science are physical objects.

I think the argument is also sound if we replace both occurrences of "special ontological commitments" with "novel linguistic forms (e.g. relations to mental representations)" and "physical objects" with something like "physicalistic linguistic form."

I want to call this an identity theory (maybe a bit cheekily) because (3) is, as far as I can tell, just what all identity theories have in common. It would be a new version because it is an identity theory no matter whether or how the posits and theorems of cognitive science are identical to various paradigmatic objects and theorems in and about the body.

Perhaps some won't like (3) because the posits of cognitive science lack spatial location, and aren't physical for that reason. I myself am willing to give up the intuition that something has to have a spatial location in order to be a physical object. If I weren't so willing, I would note that, as far as I can tell, nothing is lost by stipulating that these posits are located diffusely throughout the body.

Seriously, is this totally undefensible for reasons I can't see?
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* - I tend to think phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally different. Let's restrict "mentalistic talk" and "mentalistic ontology" to the theory and ontology of cognitive science, narrowly construed.
** - Where "overt physical behavior" is taken to include some number of physiological states.

A Problem for Frequentists?

2007-12-10T21:27:00.000-05:00

I don’t know much about the philosophy of probability yet, but I wanted to throw an objection to the frequentist interpretation out there and see whether it sticks. Consider a pair of propositions p and q. From the dawn of time until 10,000 C.E., p is true 99 out of every 100 times q is true. Subsequently, p is true 1 out of every 100 times q is true. Suppose that q turns out to be true only some finite number of times into the future, but on many occasions for many trillions of years after 10,000 C.E. Let m be the number of times q turns out to be true in the whole history of the universe before 10,000 C.E., and n be the number of times q is true after 10,000 C.E. On the frequentist interpretation, I think P(p | q) = .99*[m / (m + n)] + .01*[n / (m + n)]. This number will, evidently, be quite lower than .99; if n is great enough, the frequentist’s value for P(p | q) will approach .01. But wouldn’t it be extremely counterintuitive, long before 10,000 C.E., to say that P(p | q) is far below .99, even approaching .01? After all, p follows on q nearly all the time and will for another 7,993 or so years. So it seems that the frequentist interpretation yields the wrong results in this case.

Perhaps my intuition here is that statements like this about the probability of untensed propositions are themselves tensed. If this intuition is commonly shared, then a frequentist interpretation of "P(p | q)" should refer to something like the number of times at which p is true divided by the number of times q is true for some length of time before and after the present moment. But then the frequentist needs to say something about why this length of time should be of any particular size. I have some ideas about what she can say, but I'm having trouble expressing them precisely, so I'll save them for another post.

Dealing with Death

2007-12-07T18:54:00.001-05:00

I am sympathetic to the view that appreciation for the heroic or noble or dignified quality in simultaneously confronting one’s own death and embracing life is a good motivator for dealing with death. But it occurred to me last night that what it is, according to this view, I am supposed to appreciate is not as clear as I would like. I would like to clarify this view here.

Embracing life is clear enough. One embraces life if one values the ephemeral people, experiences, objects, and states of affairs that constitute life. I think, in this sense, most people who do not firmly believe in an afterlife do embrace life. I think, in this sense, I embrace life.

Embracing life is not, on its own, a way of confronting or dealing with mortality, however. By “dealing with mortality,” I do not mean merely not encountering one’s fear of one’s own or others’ death, nor do I mean preparing for the material well-being of others after one’s own or others’ death. I can’t deal with mortality by never thinking of what is terrifying in death, and I can’t deal with mortality by buying life insurance. The metaphor of “looking into the abyss” is helpful. Whether there is little or nothing to “see” in the prospect of imminent death, one who looks into the abyss can, at will, “look at” all there is to see in its every facet. You can deal with death to the extent that you can contemplate all aspects of death: the phenomenology of the various ways of dying – the feeling of drowning, the physical helplessness of being murdered, the mental helplessness of the progression of dementia or Alzheimer’s; the misfortune of others in your absence; the annihilation of the memories and experience you continue to accumulate; the abortion of your life’s ongoing projects. One can deal with mortality (one’s own or others’) when there is nothing about death that one cannot, at will, look at – i.e., bring to mind, reason with, meditate on, believe – indefinitely. On this view, belief in an afterlife is a way of dealing with mortality, if it is, because the believer in the afterlife can think of every aspect of death, as long as she accompanies it with the thought of eternal reward. One way of not dealing with death is to busy oneself with other thoughts or activities when any particularly unsavory thought of death occurs.

Why deal with death, and not simply avoid it? I think there actually aren’t too many reasons, which makes it important to weigh those we have as carefully as we can. If one’s failure to deal with death is of a certain sort, perhaps it will lead you to make irrationally those decisions that aspects of mortality have a rational bearing on. These might be decisions about how to reach your goals, whether to purchase life insurance, or whether to take the interesting-looking drugs in front of you. The value of honesty with oneself is a loftier big reason to deal with death. The other lofty one, I think, is the view that we began this post with. If dealing with death – or, better, “confronting” death in the sense of actually, at a single moment surveying what apparent facts there are to survey in regards to one’s own death – and embracing life at the same time strikes you as a heroic, noble, or exceptionally dignified thing to do, then this itself is a reason to deal with or confront death. I am probably not the only person who sometimes finds the prospects of heroism, nobility, or extreme dignity more motivating than the prospect of heightened honesty with oneself or more rational decision-making.

The Horizontal-Vertical Illusion

2007-10-09T13:22:00.000-04:00

If I wasn't convinced before - really, I can't remember - Eric Schwitzgebel has convinced me here, here, and (to a lesser extent) here that naive introspective reports are not a reliable indicator of the contents of subjects' experiences. He has a number of good examples to show this. I want to point out one example which might not be so good, and why I think it probably isn't.

This figure is meant to induce the so-called "horizontal-vertical illusion." Look at the figure closely. Does either line seem longer than the other?

Well, it's not clear. I have a slight tendency to judge that the vertical line seems longer. But since I learned that the vertical line is supposed to appear longer than the horizontal line when I was first shown the figure, that tendency is a little suspect. Does it sort of "seem" that way in the sense that, or because, the suggestion that the vertical line is supposed to seem longer sort of influenced me? Or does it sort of "seem" that way in the sense that, or because, my introspecting on the experience of viewing the figure and assessing the length of the two lines sort of worked?

Two things. First, I think that introspection yields a great wealth of reliable results in this situation. It seems quite clear to me that the vertical line does not seem two millimeters or more longer than the horizontal. Now, it would be interesting if the vertical line did seem longer than the horizontal line - even just a little bit. And if that is the case, I think we would need some highly trained introspectors to reveal that phact (= phenomenal fact) to us. But, if there is a phact of the matter as to whether or not one line seems longer than the other, that is seemingly the only phact in the case of looking at this figure that we can't reliably apprehend via introspection. So, if there is this phact of the matter - yes, one line might seem longer than the other without our being able to tell that it does. But if the point of the example is to show that there are gross features of our experience that are unavailable to naive introspection, I think it fails.

Second is a suspicion of mine. I don't think we should be all that sure that "the vertical line seems longer than the horizontal line to me" really attributes a phenomenal property to me (or some of my mental states). I have this doubt, not because I think "seems" should be understood strictly in terms of some non-phenomenal feature of our mental make-up (e.g. our credence or tendency to believe that the vertical line seems longer than the horizontal), but because I think it is likely that "x seems longer than y to z" does not pick out a real phenomenal property for all values of "x", "y", and "z". Sometimes I think there is a tendency among philosophers to think that for any property of physical objects P, if P is observable to the naked eye, then sentences of the form "it seems to x that P(y)" attribute a real phenomenal property to "x" (or one of x's mental states, if you like). This thought, together with the thought that "is longer than" picks out an observable property, might be behind the presumption (not necessarily Schwitzgebel's) that "the vertical line seems longer than the horizontal line to me" attributes a phenomenal property to me. But (a) I'm not sure why we should believe this general claim about "seems" and observable properties, and (b) even if we should, it's not clear that "is longer than" picks out an observable property. After all, how often are we actually called on to judge, with the unaided eye, that two lines are exactly the same length, or (what is almost the same) that one or the other is even just the smallest bit longer? And, I should add, if "the vertical line seems longer than the horizontal line to me" does not attribute a real phenomenal property to me, then that would seem to explain why using introspection to determine whether that sentence is true doesn't work and leaves me confused.

Shut Up, Already

2007-10-04T21:13:00.001-04:00

For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility; and I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself; and let thy principles be brief and fundamental, which, as soon as thou shalt recur to them, will be sufficient to cleanse the soul completely, and to send thee back free from all discontent with the things to which thou returnest. For with what art thou discontented? With the badness of men? Recall to thy mind this conclusion, that rational animals exist for one another, and that to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily; and consider how many already, after mutual enmity, suspicion, hatred, and fighting, have been stretched dead, reduced to ashes; and be quiet at last.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. Book IV

Bingo

2007-10-03T13:10:00.000-04:00

It would be one thing to self-consciously explore/explicate the “uncrystallized” theological ideas that are so integral to Jewish religious life, bringing to bear one’s favored philosophical outlook. One could appeal to aid from the neo-Kantians, or Wittgenstein, or Levinas, or for that matter Aristotle. One would then need to face a crucial question: how much and in what ways one’s favored way of thinking maps on to that of the Rabbis. It’s quite another to claim, as is the thrust of much medieval philosophical theology, that Biblical and Rabbinic theological ideas are captured, virtually without remainder, by some favored philosophical explication.

Howard Wettstein, "Against Theology"

Jewish Hereticism, Take 1

2007-10-01T09:18:00.000-04:00

This was inspired by a recent, very interesting, very reasonable sermon given by Tom Gardner.

There is a sort of intrinsic (if, so to speak, defeasible) beauty in persistence in the face of adversity. An otherwise ugly fruit that stays firmly to a tree after a hurricane is beautiful. If people ridicule a silly hat again and again, the hat (or the wearing of the hat) takes on a certain beautiful quality. The persistence of the Rwandan genocide in the face of mounting public condemnation was not beautiful, but only because a genocide is not the sort of thing that can be beautiful.

Jewish practice has weathered more than a little ridicule and persecution, both from without and within. I think what is not despicable in it grows more and more beautiful in the face of this ridicule and persecution. The greater the adversity, the greater the beauty of its persistence in the face of the adversity. But what greater adversity can a religious practice face than rejection of the belief that has always provided the basic rationale for the practice? And then: what greater beauty (of this certain sort) can a religious practice take on than that furnished by persistence in the absence of belief? Only if there is something more powerfully ugly or despicable in the religious practice without the religious belief would the practice be ugly even then. But what could be more powerfully ugly or despicable even about our seemingly most innocuous religious practices? Not a rhetorical question.

Sensitive Speech and Assertion

2007-10-01T09:08:00.000-04:00

Suppose that insensitive statements have the same assertoric content as their insensitive counterparts. That is, suppose that “Skirts tend to use landmarks to locate unfamiliar places” has the same assertoric content as “Women tend to... [etc.];” and that “Colored people occupy 90% of the jail cells in the US” has the same content as “Black people occupy… [etc.].” Now, when we mean to speak sensitively, we speak with the belief that, were we to rephrase what we had said insensitively, we would open ourselves up to censure. To the extent that this belief is evident in some features our sensitive utterances, sensitive speech is self-evidently sensitive. And to the extent that, in virtue of its self-evident character, sensitive speech implicates endorsement of the rule according to which one should speak sensitively in contexts like the present context of utterance, sensitive speech amounts to an endorsement of a certain (not universally adopted) illocutionary convention - the convention according to which one is to be held responsible for the insensitivity of one’s own remarks (in contexts like the present context of utterance). Call conventions of this sort sensitivity conventions.

I wonder: if the argument in the last paragraph works, would the persistent use of sensitive speech across many sorts of contexts make it impossible to use a sentence (in a standard way*) to assert its content? If enough of us endorse enough sensitivity conventions, then the sensitivity conventions become some of the rules that associate sentences with the speech acts that they are (standardly) used to perform. If these are the standard rules, though, sentences would never be (standardly) used to make assertions, but to make something different - what we might call sensitive assertions. Maybe this has already taken place.

I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing or neither - really, I’m not sure if it has any interesting consequences - but it seems kind of interesting to me. Maybe I also find it interesting that, as far as I can tell, a speech act being sensitive or not is an illocutionary, not a perlocutionary affair.
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* - I include this and other similar qualifiers to exclude wacky cases where, for instance, we establish a private code with our friends to according to which sentences are used to make bare assertions.

Praying What You Don't Believe

2007-10-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

Is it wrong to pray (or, if you like, act as if praying) what you don’t believe? For the sake of brevity and relevance to my own practice, I’ll restrict my attention to participation in a public worship service. If to say a certain sentence in prayer is (inter alia) to assert the sentence or its propositional content, then praying what you don’t believe seems to entail either lying, bullshitting, or some form of public self-misrepresentation. (It might only entail lying or bullshitting if we take the alleged assertive force of a prayer to be directed to the people around us, on the plausible principle that, simply by asserting a proposition one doesn’t believe, one can only lie or bullshit to other creatures.) I take it that lying or bullshitting (to your fellows in temple or church) through prayer is wrong. And even if we don’t lie or bullshit by praying what we don’t believe, it is still wrong to publicly misrepresent ourselves in the way I have in mind, that is, by knowingly inviting other people to believe something untrue about ourselves (namely, that we believe what we are saying). So if prayer entails assertion of the content of the prayer, then it is wrong to pray what you don’t believe. And if prayer is taken by the community in which one prays to involve assertion of a certain content, then even if one does not take oneself to be asserting this, one is still knowingly inviting other people to adopt false (and, I take it, important) beliefs. So prayer of what one doesn’t believe is wrong even if one is merely taken to assert the content of the prayer.

I like public prayer, but I do not believe a great deal of the propositional content of most prayer services, so this is an unsettling conclusion for me. Perhaps it should also be an unsettling conclusion for Pascal, who famously recommended that one make one’s way to faith by (at first faithlessly) performing rituals such as public prayer. Now, perhaps Pascal should be unsettled - I, for one, think faith (understood as firm belief in the conscious absence of any known epistemic reasons) in religious propositions (if any there be) is wrong. But I don’t want to be unsettled. Public prayer feels good, it connects me to a kind and serious community, it renews my appreciation for what I do believe in the prayer service, and, I think, it probably causes me to act, on average, a little bit better. It would be a shame if it were wrong for me to pray in spite of all this. I also imagine that there are a number of others like me, especially in liberal religious movements like Reform Judaism.

Happily, I believe that it need not be wrong to pray what one does not believe. It is not clear to me that saying a prayer involves the assertion of its content (if it has any); it’s hard to say exactly how one might go about finding out whether that is the case. But even if prayer, as it stands right now, involves assertion of the prayer’s content at least some of the time, it seems that it is in the power of church- and temple-goers to change this. This follows from the widely adopted view that some sort of convention is needed to give an utterance (in a context) its illocutionary force. It is in the power of the relevant linguistic community to renounce the convention according to which prayer is assertoric. It is always within the power of human beings to give up any one of their conventions; this is, I take it, a conceptual truth. Of course, there is some question in what linguistic community the convention of the assertive force of (my own) prayer resides. The members of my temple? Temple- and church-goers everywhere? Every competent English speaker? There is also the question how one changes a linguistic convention of this type. My intuition, though, is that if everyone I regularly pray with agrees that I am not asserting the content of my prayers when I utter them, I couldn’t possibly be asserting their content when I pray with them and them alone. We can take “agrees that I am not asserting the content of my prayers” in a sense suggested by William Alston in Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning; if everyone I regularly pray with is not entitled to subject me to some form of censure if (the content of) my prayers turn out to be false, they agree that I am not asserting their content. Perhaps we should also add that everyone must not be entitled to censure me if I even contradict the content of my prayers in another, assertoric context - say, by publicly declaring atheism or agnosticism (assuming these declarations have assertoric content). So, intuitively, my answers to the two questions I just posed are (1) that the linguistic community governing the illocutionary force of prayer is the part of a congregation that prays together regularly, and (2) that we convince this linguistic community not to warrant censure of non-believing participants in public prayer. Given the size of most prayer groups - in Reform Judaism, at least - this second aim, if not already achieved, can be achieved without difficulty.

Still, there remains the question whether we somehow defang prayer by stripping it of assertive force. I think we needn’t, but that’s a topic for another post.

I Was Wrong, and I Just Can't Live Without You

2007-10-01T08:51:00.000-04:00

It's hard for me to say it, 'sphere.