Year: 2008

Valid but not in Virtue of Form?

Richard Brown 1 Comment

Some remarks of the Semantic Terrorist in the post on moral truthmakers got me to thinking. Here is what he said.

consider the following argument which is easily proven to be invalid despite the fact that many analytic philosophers would mistakenly classify it as valid:

1) George Bush is a bachelor.
? George Bush is unmarried.

This argument is in the same logical form as the following:

1) George Bush is a Texan.
? George Bush is unmarried.

As ST points out many analytic philosophers do take that argument to valid. It is standard in logic textbooks to point out that these arguments meet the definition of validity; it is indeed impossible for the premise to be true and the conclusion to be false, but as the point continues, this isn’t because of teh form of the argument. The form, as ST demonstrates, allows for counter-examples, and so the validity must be due to something besides the form of the argument. The reason for the impossibility of the truth of the poremises and the conjunction of the denial of the concusion is said to be due to the definition of ‘bachelor’.

All of this is standard, but why isn’t the argument above seen as having a supressed premise of the form ‘all bachelors are unmarried makes’? Then the argument is formally valid; it is just an instance of a very common categorical syllogism. The same is true of the texan argument, it just happens to have a false suppressed premise ‘all Texans are unmarried males’. I don’t see what the argument against positing the suppressed premise is supposed to be. It is clearly the only way to make the inference legitimate.

Empiricism as the Default Position

Richard Brown 21 Comments

In the comments on the previous post Brandon says

You seem to be assuming that we all start from the empiricist side, and then the question is just: why should we go farther, into rationalist territory? But, of course, most rationalists won’t concede that empiricism is, or even can be, the default position

I was thinking about my response and then I happend to read this review of a new book on Quine. The review portrays the book as an attempt to show that Quine was a systematic philosopher who was trying to give a completely naturalistic account of the world (what the author call naturalism, I would call empiricism but that is probably just terminological).

According to Quine, the fact that the naturalistic outlook of science is the best option at our disposal is itself discovered empirically by means of scientific criteria of evaluation: in fact science has given us the most comprehensive, systematic, successful and intelligible account of the world.

I absolutely agree with this interpretation of Quine and also with the claim that the questionable parts of Quine’s philosophy (like the behavorism) are Quine demonstrating that we could in principle give naturalistic accounts of phenomena that the rationalist claimed only they could do. We have better accounts now, but the Devitt’s adbduction is very much in the spirit of this interpretation of Quine.

Empiricism works, in principle, just as well as rationalism. Anything that can be accounted for by rationalism can be accounted for by the empiricist. The empiricist appeals to entities and processes that are (fairly) well-understood. The rationalist appeals to entities and processes that are completely mysterious. No one has ever even attempted to seriously give an account of what we know and how on a rationalist conception. On top of this empiricism has itself been tested by its own standard and passed. If there were some compelling reason to think that only rationalism could account for some phenomena then I agree that would be good reason to opt for it but when there is an empiricist alternative it should be preferred.

 

The Evolutionary Argument against Rationalism

Richard Brown 13 Comments

In the comments on my post on Armstrong on Naturalism and Empiricism Brandon and JS raised a concern about the evolutionary argument I sketched against rationalism. I have hinted at this kind of argument before but I guess I have never spelled it out. I have sort of thought it was just too obviously an extension of Hume’s kind of argument…but maybe it is worth spelling out.

Suppose that you have a stable environment E. In E there are events (e1, e2,…en) and it so happens that there is a regularity in E such that e2 regularly and reliably follows e1. Now suppose that there are creatures, C,  that live in E. Then evolutionary theory says (roughly)  that C will adapt to E via natural selection (I do not mean to be saying that C will become optimally adapted, that is a hotly contested claim). One obvious source of reproductive advantage would be being able to track the regularities in E. If e2 is such that it is (harmful or) beneficial for C then it would, through the course of natural selection, come to be the case that C  tracked the regularity, R, expressed by ‘e1 then e2’; that is to say C would come to associate e2 with the occurrence of e1. Now assume that R is some basic and (hitherto) extremely reliable regularity (like that when you have one object and you place another object next to it you then have two objects).

Now suppose that, for whatever reason, R continues to be regular and tokens of e1 are immediately followed by tokens of e2. Decedents of C will also track R, but will also have to track other regularities that they discover for themselves. So, decedents of C that have R ‘hardwired’ in will free up cognitive resources. So now suppose that C is a species from which a species evolved from which a species evolved…from which we evolved and that R has continued to be regular and reliable up till now. At this point R would presumably be something for which we are equipped to find intuitively obvious. This is exactly what developmental psychology (like work from Spelke and many others) has shown.

So, when the rationalist appeals to their experience of ‘finding something obvious’ as evidence that we know something in a special way that is revealed to be necessary and universal, it could just be the product of that regular and reliable conjunction of events has, around here and so far been that way. But that, of course, does not guarantee that it must be that way. Now how could the rationalist know which of the two theories better accounted for his experience? Our intuitions are shaped by the world that we happen to find ourselves in. And so if evolution is true rationalism is most likely false.

JS asks,

I’m also not sure evolution precludes intuition as evidence for rationalism. I suppose I just don’t think your reasoning pans out in real life. I don’t see how I can’t both agree with this: “we would expect that there would be certain truths which seem to be self-evident but are really just the product of a long process of natural selection in response to a stable environment”, and not believe in rationalism. Can’t I tell an equally nice just-so story like this: I agree with RB’s quote, but at a certain stage of complexity it’s been found that animals begin to intuit other actually self-evident beliefs, which then survive natural selection in virtue of their fitness. The end. I’m sure you disagree, however.

Well it would depend on what you mean when you say ‘animals begin to intuit self-evident beliefs’. If you don’t mean ‘discover solely by the use of reason necessary and universal facts about reality’ then we do not really disagree on anything. But if you do mean that, then the question is how could those kind of things be selected for or have any fitness at all if they did not causally interact with C or E? Sure there are spandrels and such, but in order for a property P to be reproductively beneficial it would have to play some role for C or in E. Notice that the mathematical truths play a hugely beneficial role for us. It is in fact their usefulness and indispensability to science that Quine and others have taken to show that they are empirical. David Rosenthal has given (in class) a similar argument for logic being empirical. He argued that one reason to think that it is is that it explains inferences that humans find valid and to that extent is hostage to the empirial–and so not analytic.

But maybe we did evolve to track necessary and universal facts about reality discovered by the use of reason. The point is that we couldn’t appeal to our experience of certainly as evidence for that view since we can’t rule out that the experience isn’t due to a very long association between certain events (that are not necessary). We would need some other kind of evidence. But what other evidence is there?

Freedom of Speech Meets Speech Act Theory

Richard Brown 7 Comments

In celebration of my one year in the blogosphere I have decided to start a new (randomly published) series of posts highlighting a post from exactly one year ago that did not recieve much attention. Here is the First.

——————-

If you have been around here lately then you know that I have been working on a paper on the higher-order theory of consciousness, and right now I am supposed to be converting the paper into a PowerPoint presentation, but I was distracted by the following line of thought…ah well…why fight it?

Freedom of speech is a foundational value in American society, and indeed ought to be foundational for any free society. Yet, even so we all recognize that there ought to be some limits set of this freedom. The important question, of course, is just what these limits ought to be. Famously Mill argued for what has come to be know as ‘the Harm Principle,’ which says, as he puts it, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” But what limits does this impose?

Here is a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Mill.

If we accept the argument based on the harm principle we need to ask “what types of speech, if any, cause harm?” Once we can answer this question, we have found the correct limits to free expression. Mill uses the example of speech related to corn dealers; he suggests that it is fine to claim that corn dealers are starvers of the poor if such a view is expressed through the medium of the printed page, but that it is not permissible to express the same view to an angry mob, ready to explode, that has gathered outside the house of the dealer. The difference between the two is that the latter is an expression “such as to constitute…a positive instigation to some mischievous act,” (1978, 53), namely, to place the rights, and possibly the life, of the corn dealer in danger.

This kind of argument is common is the free speech debate. It is akin to the adage ‘you can’t yell “fire!” in a crowded theatre’and the so-called “fighting words” exception to free speech. Recent times have seen an adaptation of this kind of argument (especially in Britten) with respect to inciting terrorism.

It seems to me that what this kind of an argument amounts to is an injunction on certain kinds of speech acts (i.e. an injunction against certain illocutionary forces especially when they have some harmful perlocutionary effect. (I take it for granted that you know some speech act theory (Austin, Grice, etc), if you don’t let me know in the comments and I will give you a brief introduction to the basic ideas)). In fact when one goes back and re-reads Mill with some speech act theory in mind, it becomes clear that he is defending our right to make assertions (read: express beliefs) that are unpopular/believed to be false by others and to express moral sentiments that others may deem immoral but this clearly does not apply to ever kind of act that we can perform with speech.

Once we see speech as a kind of action then it becomes obvious that we ought to prohibit some kinds of speech, in just the same way that we prohibit certain kinds of actions (this, I take it, is similar to Stanley Fish’s views and why he says that no speech is ‘free’ though he does not appeal to speech act theory). In particular it becomes obvious that some kinds of speech acts that fall under ‘hate speech’ ought to be prohibited. We would not allow someone to poke a random person on the subway with a stick repeatedly, just to annoy the person. Why, then, should we allow someone to psychologically jab at someone with a racial slur, just to annoy the person?

Let us invent a racial slur for discussion’s sake. Let us say that there is a group of people for whom to be called a ‘bagger’ is as hurtful to them as our English “n” word.  Now suppose that someone said “Baggers are less intelligent than Asians, and it is a waste of time to try to educate them.” On the view that I am advocating it would be allowable for someone to say that in the course of asserting that baggers are less intelligent than Asians, as that is the expression of a belief which is an allowable speech act no matter how repugnant the belief is, and also no matter how much it pains me to hear you express it. This is because the perlocutionary goal of assertion is to get someone to believe something and not to cause harm to that person. Any harm produced is “collateral damage.” 

But it would not be allowable, on my view, to say the same thing in the course of performing some other kind of speech act that had as its perlocutionary goal inflicting some kind of psychological damage on the person, or of inciting them to do violence. Thus what matters is not what is said, but what one is doing in and by saying it.

Armstrong on Naturalism and Empiricism

Richard Brown 12 Comments

I was reading the NPDR reviewof a recent book on the philosophy of David Armstrong. I found this review very interesting as I have been very influenced by David Armstrong myself (and have even had the privilege of auditing his course on truthmakers at the Graduate Center) though I can’t say I agree with all of his views. At anyrate, in light of all of the zombie stuff lately this got me to thinking.

Naturalismis a metaphysical thesis that claims that everything that exists does so entirely in one single space-time system. Both idealists and materialists/physicalists can be naturalists in this sense.  This is to be distinguished from empiricism which is the epistemological thesis that claims that the only way to acquire knowledge is the empirical a posterori way used by science. Armstrong’s main argument for naturalism relies on what he calls the  Eleatic principle. This principle says that we ought NOT to posit the existence of entities that have no causal powers. So, if empiricism is correct then the Eleatic principle offers strong support for naturalism and from naturalism to materialism/physicalism.

Why should we adopt empiricism? The best argument I have seen is Devitt’s abduction. He argues that when we have two competing theoretical explanations we should opt for the one that is better understood. I think there are other, related reasons for adopting empiricism. In the first case we have never had to appeal to non-natural entities in any succesful explanation. Each time we have appealed to some non-natural entity we have eventually discovered a plausible candidate for a natural explanation. I have also argued that if anything like evolution turns out to be true then we cannot appeal to intuition as evidence for rationalism (and against empiricism). This is because, given that the our experience of the world has been regular and uniform up until now, we would expect that there would be certain truths which seem to be self-evident but are really just the product of a long process of natural selection in response to a stable environment. If this were the case we would have the very same intuitions that the rationalist appeals to and so the rationalist must have another argument. But none that I know of have been given.

The Eleatic principle also is wielded as an argument from naturalism to materialism. If a non-material entity has no causal powers then according to empiricism we cannot know about it and so would never have any reason to posit its existence. If it does have causal efficacy then it is of a type that is completely mysterious and unlike anything that we have hitherto encountered. So materialism is itself an empirical hypothesis.

 So, if one were to ask ‘but why is it matter rather than something else?’ The answer would be ‘because we discovered that waht it is’. If one wanted more than this, and insisted on asking ‘but what is the reason that it was that way to be discovered?’ The answer would be that it happens to be the case that the actual world is one where there is causation and you need material for that.

A Short Argument that Utilitarians Ought Not to Promote Atheism

Richard Brown 13 Comments

It has been commonplace in the history of moral theory to argue that having an obligation and being motivated to fulfill that obligation come apart. I have argued that this was the conception that Hobbes and Locke had. Each of the philosophers thought that we could have obligations (even in the state of nature) but that we needed, in addition to the obligation itself, some other motivating reason to fulfil the obligation.  This can be seen as partly what a Kantian moral theory denies, in that they claim that the having of the obligation (or the recognition that one has it) is the only (legitimate) motivation to fulfil the obligation. So, if one has an anti-Kantian view of this sort one will have to appeal to some strong authority as an enforcer of the moral rules. Hobbes himself says that if there were a God then he would be the one to punish and reward those who break or follow the rules, but in his absence we need a strong Earthly authority.

It seems to me, though I admit that this is ultimately an empirical question, that belief in the existence of God and his willingness to punish and reward people who ignore or follow the dictates of morality is a strong motivator to obey said rules. It also seems to me that if people did not have a belief in God they would be more disposed to breaking the rules of morality when they were confident that they would not be caught by Earthly authorities (I mean, God is always watching, but the city of New York has its lapses). This is of course the problem of Hobbes’ intelligent Knave. Even if one is a Kantian about motivation (like I am), doesn’t one have to admit that fear of consequences has more motivational pull that does the recognition of obligation? Certainly not in all cases, but I mean generally among mankind.

Now, the utilitarian believes that the action (rule, preference, whatever) that promotes the greatest amount of happiness is the right action (rule, whatever) but our motivation for performance doesn’t matter. So, on utilitarian views one can do the right thing for the wrong reasons and still count as performing a moral action (though I sometimes think a Kantian has to say this as well). So, a world populated solely by atheists would be one that was less morally good than a world populated (mostly) by people who feared an all-powerful God. This is because, no matter how good the Earthly government’s enforcement of the moral rules is, it will not be 100% and so will not provide as much motivation to avoid immoral acts as belief that there is an all-powerful being who is always watching and judging you would. Given this it turns out that the utilitarian is obligated not only to avoid promoting belief in atheism, but also to promoting theism of a very strict sort.  

 Well, that wasn’t as short as I thought 🙂

HOT Theories of Consciousness & and Gricean Intentions

Richard Brown Leave a comment

One of the things that I am interested in is the philosophical commitments of the higher-order thought theory. Rosenthal, in my estimation, presents a viable theoretical account of what consciousness might consist in. I do not actually endorse the view; rather what I think is that the view is not obviously false. This is not a popular view, since most people do in fact think that it is obviously false. They therefore dismiss it with strange assuarnce. But it seems to me that we ought to take the theory seriously. When it is properly understood it is capable of giving a very decent account of consciousness.

But no one is perfect and Rosenthal formulates the theory in terms of his background philosophical assumptions. In particular he relies on an anti-Gricean and anti-Kripkean philosophy of language. But I am very attracted to these kinds of view. So, I have taken to recasting the theorythat Rosenthal gives with this kind of view in mind (I have also tried to show that the theory is commited to a claim that all conscious mental states have a qualitative component).

One objection to the Gricean claim that one expresses a mental attitude via a reflexive intention, which is that one’s hearer recognize the very intention to express the attitude in question, is that we often do not consciously experience ourselves as having these kinds of intentions. Maybe we do in some elaborate circumstances, but usually whe one is talking to someone the conversation often doesn’t seem so strategic. But if the any kind of higher-order theory of consciousness turns out to be right then we should expect the kind of Gricean intentions to occur unconsciously. If so it would not seem to us that we had those intentions and so it would then be no objection that we rarely notice them. We notice only the conscious ones.

Rosenthal objects to Gricean theories because, according to him, A Gricean is committed to saying that in the case of insincere speech acts (misleading people) one is expressing a mental attitude that one does not have. So, if I reflexively intend that take me to be expressing the belief that p, even though I know that p is false (or at least believe that it is) and want to purposely manipulate you into believing it (a perlocutionary effect I hope to achieve), then I count as expressing the belief that p even though I do not have that belief.

Now it is true that writiers like Searle and Vendler have said these sorts of things, and so it is the case that Rosenthal has an objection to their theories this is not the only way to go. One can simply define belief expression as occurring if and only if one has the belief that p and one reflexively intends ones utterance as a reason for the hearer to take his utterance as evidence that he does believe p. Then lying or misleading would not strictly speaking count as expressions of belief (even though the hearer would take the utterance as a reason to think that the speaker does have the belief and so, if the speech act were successful, the hearer would take the speaker to be expressing the belief when in fact the speaker were not really expressing the belief. Bach and Harnish define belief expression in this way, though they do not explicitly discuss insincere speech acts. We might say that when one lies one actually express the belief that ones utterance will deceive the hearer into taking me as believing p. Or one could say that when someone lies they pretend to express the belief. It would then be the case that a person who lies pretends to have the right intention to express the belief that p. This is actually the kind of account Rosenthal himself gives of lying. According to him it is pretending to think p, why can’t the Gricean just say what I did? What can’t they be pretending to have the relvant intention rather than to be thinking the relevant thought?

Either way though, Rosenthal’s objection to Gricean theories isn’t fatal and the higher-order theory actually helps to make sense of some first person data. This is problematic for Rosenthal since he bases one of his major argument for the higher-order thought theory itself on his causal theory of attitude expression.

So it Comes to This

Richard Brown Leave a comment

Over at RC’s quick poll Genius says

Well – Given this thread and given a week has passed – I suppose we can consider my curiosity satiated.

To which RC responds

Well, we were interested in the conditional question how others would respond if they were to carefully read all those exchanges. Since nobody bothered to do so (understandably enough), we’re simply left with our own judgments. That’s good enough for me — (though securing a widespread consensus would have been even nicer, naturally) — so I guess it’s time to close this thread and move on. Here’s hoping I do a better job of avoiding online interactions with idiots in future.

I agree that we were interested in responses from people who had followed the debate, though I am less sure that people did not do this. The couple of people who did respond seemed to agree with my point, and this seems to have been enough for RC to dismiss these people as idiots. Also I tracked a lot of hits on the posts in question and there was not the wide-spread condemnation of my position as idiotic that RC clearly expected. This in itself seems to suggest something about the nature of RC accusations against me (he of course appeals to his reader’s politeness, please! Politeness didn’t stop people from voicing criticism of Genius’ comments (this post seems to have been deleted for some reason) in a stern yet polite way).

 

Did Quine Change his Mind?

Richard Brown 2 Comments

It is well-known that Quine argued that the axioms of logic are revisable. The law of the excluded middle, for instance, while at the center of our ‘web of beliefs’ could, if we had compelling evidence, be revised or even abandoned. But it is commonly thought that Quine changed his mind by the time that he wrote his Philosophy of Logic in 1970. But is this right?

What people seem to have in mind is the passage in chapter 6 on deviant logics where he says, in considering the debate between someone who denies the law of non-contradiction and someone who rejects this denial,

My view of this dialogue us that neither party knows what he is talking about. They think they are talking about negation, ‘~’, ‘not’; but surely the notation ceased to be recognizable as negation when they took to regarding some conjunctions of the form ‘p & ~p’ as true, and stopped regarding such sentences as implying all others. Here, evidently, is the deviant logician’s predicament: when he tries to deny the doctrine he only changes the subject. (p 81)

The idea here is supposed to be that it is impossible to really reject the law of non-contradiction as opposed to simply changing the subject. But this doesn’t mean that the law of non-contradiction isn’t revisable, it simply means that arguments between those who are pro-revision and those who are Conservatives will very often be question begging. Quine goes on to say as much when discussing the law of the excluded middle,

 By the reasoning of a couple of pages back, whoever denies the law of the excluded middle changes the subject. This is not to say that he is wrong in doing so. In repudiating ‘p or ~p’ he is indeed giving up classical negation, or perhaps alteration, or both; and he may have his reasons. (p 83)

He then goes on to canvass the reasons that have been given, which range “from bad to better”. But ultimately Quine rejects them as sufficient to motivate us to abandon classical logic. He appeals to something he calls the ‘maxim of minimal mutilation’, as he says,

The classical logic of truth functions and quantification is free of paradox, and incidentally is a paragon of clarity, elegance, and efficiency. The paradoxes emerge only with set theory and semantics. Let us try to resolve them within set theory and semantics, and not lay fairer fields to waste. (p 85)

He goes on to cite it again in response to the challenge from quantum mechanics,

But in any event let us not underestimate the price of deviant logic. There is a serious loss of simplicity, especially when the new logic is not even a many-valued truth functional logic. And there is a loss, still more serious, on the score of familiarity. Consider again the case, a page or so back, of begging the question in an attempt to defend classical negation. This only begins to illustrate the handicap of having to think within deviant logic. The price is perhaps not prohibitive, but the returns had better be good. (p 86)

It seems clear from this that Quine is not retracting his claim that classical logic is revisable but is instead canvassing the reasons that one may have for such a revision and arguing that we, as of yet, do not have enough reason to abandon classical logic. This is entirely consistent with his views and so we can conclude that he did not change his mind about the revisability of logic.