On a side note this is my 200th post!!
At any rate the Society for Philosophy and Psychology has their preliminary programn up at the conference website. It looks like it will be a really interesting conference. I am also happy to say that I will be presenting Language, Thought, Logic, and Existence (as a poster).
It is well known that Berkeley was content to rest his defense of Idealism on one argument; this is the so-called ‘master argument’. This argument roughly goes as follows. If objects are mind independent then it must be possible to think of an unthought of object; for what it means to be mind independent is to exist when no one is thinking about you. But this is not possible for as soon as you try you thereby think of that object and it therefore becomes a thought of object. Poor Hylas makes this mistake when he tries to think of some tree in a forrest where no people are. It is clear that he was thinking of the tree.
The intuitive response to this is that we can think of objects somehow without specifying which particular object we have in mind. But we often do this. If I tell you that I met this guy at the DMV and he said that I needed x, y, and z before I could get my license. You then think of the guy I am talking about in a way that does not specify him in thought and so you are thinking of an unthought of object. If I were to ask you who you were thinking of you could only answer ‘some guy at the DMV’ or ‘whoever your talking about’.
Don’t these kinds of purely quantificational thoughts answer Berkeley’s argument?
OK, so the year isn’t over yet…but these are the most view posts so far…
–Runner up– Reverse Zombies, Dualism, and Reduction
10. Question Begging Thought Experiments
8. The Inconceivability of Zombies
7. There’s Something About Jerry
6. Pain Asymbolia and Higher-Order Theories of consciousness
4. A Short Argument that there is no God
The a priori seems to be on the rise of late, especially with defenders like Richard Chappell championing the cause. According to Chappell an ideallly rational being would have access to all the metaphysical possibilites. Given that we can ideally (or coherently) conceive something we can infer that the thing in question is metaphysically possible. This is, of course, the basis for the zombie argument against materialism. Since we can coherently concieve of a zombie world (a world where there are beings like us in every physical way except that they lack conscious experience) that shows that consciousness cannot be a physical property.
The standard (Kripkean) objection to this line of argument is to try to distinguish between metaphysical and epistemic possibility. Some things that are epistemically possible (i.e. seem coherently conceivable) turn out to be impossible (a classic example is to point out that before you learn that the square root of 1,987,690.000 is 1409.855 (rounded up to the nearest thousandth) it is concievable that it be other than 1409.855 but once we find out what it is it is impossible for it to be otherwise. According to the materialist one of these things is the zombie world. While it seems that we can coherently concieve of such a world, we are actually missing some contradiction, or physical difference between our world and the zombie world and so it is not actually (ideally/coherently) concievable.
Chappell objects to this line of argument for (at least) two reasons. The first has to do with the theoretical extravagance of the materialist’s claim that the identity between (say) H2O and water is necessary. It posits an unexplained strong necessity, wheras the modal rationalist (the one who thinks that it is a metaphysical possibility that water could be other than H2O, not just an epistemic possibility) doesn’t have to posit something like this. All that she needs to posit is a single uniform space of possibilities that we describe in various ways. The materialist has to posit a space of epistemically possible worlds and a seperate space of metaphysically possible worlds. Parsimony and simplicity seem to favore that modal rationalist here.
The second is an attack on the claim that calling something a rigid designator settles the dispute. As Chappell says,
Perhaps our term ‘consciousness’ is, like ‘water’, a rigid designator. But who cares about the words? Twin Earth still contains watery stuff, even if we refuse to call it ‘water’, and the Zombie World still lacks phenomenal stuff (qualia), even if we stipulate that our term ‘consciousness’ refers to some neurophysical property (and so is guaranteed to exist in this physically identical world).
Yes it will, IF we have settled the issue in favor of Chapell’s view and we then think that we are genuinely concieving of a real metaphysical possibility. If there is a question as to whether these kinds of possibility are distinct then Chapell has done nothing more than beg the question.
This is evidenced when he says,
Kripke himself noticed something along these lines. While we can imagine a world where watery stuff isn’t truly water, it’s incoherent to imagine a world where “painy” stuff isn’t truly pain. To feel painful is to be painful.
Pointing out that Kripke begs the same queston as you are beging is not a way to absolve yourself of beging the question. There is a legitimate case to made that being in pain and feeling pain are in fact two seperate things. The evidence for this comes, not from a priori reflection on the nature of pain, but from evidence from cognitive science.
But suppose that you are not moved by this evidence and you still maintain that a priori analysis reveals that the zombie world is metaphysically (not just epistemically) possible. Is this a coherent position? One objection that immediately pops up is that on this view it seems that we can concieve of various possible worlds that result in contradiction. So, I seem to be able to concieve that God necessarily exists and that God necessarily doesn’t exist (or that numbers do and don’t necessarily exist). Since the claim that conceiveability entails possibility entails that God (or numbers) both necessarily exists and doesn’t exist only one of those possibilities can be a real metaphysical possibility; the other must be an epistemic possibility.
Chappell is of course aware of this objection and tries to deal with it in the post linked to above. Here is what he says,
I agree with Chalmers that the most attractive response for the modal rationalist here is to hold on to their strong position, and instead deny the… conceivability intuitions found, for example,…above. It isn’t at all clear that a necessary being, or a shrunken modal space, is coherently conceivable in the appropriate sense. The modal rationalist will want to hold that their position is not just true, but a priori. They would then expect opposing views to be refutable a priori, and hence not feature in any a priori coherent scenario. Of course, it would beg the question to merely assert: “the thesis is true and hence has no successful counterexamples”. But that is not what’s going on here. Rather, I hope to show that the modal rationalist can explicate their commitments in a way which makes clear exactly why, on their view, the meta-modal cases in question are not taken to be genuinely conceivable. If successful, this should suffice to undermine the charge of internal inconsistency or self-refutation.
The problem with this line of argument is that it commits the very ‘fallacy’ that Chappell accuses the Kripkeans of making. The strategy that he is here proposing is that of trying to show that there is some possible state of affairs that seems conceivable but which, on reflection, is not in fact metaphysically possible (i.e. that there are possibilities that (seem)concievable but are not metaphysically possible). But if there are possibilities that (seem) concievable but not metaphysically possible then we need an independent argument that the zombie world is not one of these worlds. No such argument has been given. Rather what Chappell does is to assume that it is in fact coherently concievable; but this cannot be assumed if there are any possibilities which (seem) concievable and are not metaphysically possible. Chappell’s own view commits him to there being such possibilites, so by his own view the modal argument against materialism is suspect.
I’m back!!
The plane ride there was long and super bumpy (and I hate flying!!) and then I got strep throat and the plane ride back was a red eye that got into JFK at six a.m. (and I REALLY hate flying!!!!)…but other than that California was fantastic! 🙂
The APA was fun, though I got there on the last day of the conference and since I wasn’t feeling well (I was chaining Sucrets one after the other) I left after my talk. But I did see the session before mine, by Hanna Kim, on a proposed compositional semantics for metaphors which was interesting. She sketched an account that borrowed Jason Stanely’s idea of a hidden unarticulated variable that was context sensitive to metaphorical meaning. This would allow one to get the meaning of the metaphor in a way that was completely determined by the meaning of the parts (including the hidden, context sensitive variable). Marga Reimer responded with a couple of objections. One of which was the Gricean kind of objection one would expect. She invoked Grice’s modified Occam’s razor and asked why we need a semantic account of metaphor’s when we have a perfectly good account from Grice that appeals to speaker’s intentions and doesn’t posit all of these weird hidden variables? (Here! Here!) Kim’s answer, in part, was to point out that Grice’s account cannot take care of ‘impossible metaphors”. The basic idea behind impossible metaphors is that there are semantic and syntactic constraints on what kinds of sentences we can make metaphors from. I don’t recall any of her examples and I can’t find the handout…but still, I wonder about this kind of strategy. Why is an objection to Gricean theories to point out that sentence construction is constrained by syntax? A speaker is constrained by what she can reasonably assume will alert a hearer to her communicative intention and thereby fulfil that very intention. The syntax of a language is definitely one thing that would suggest itself as something which would constrain which utterances a speaker can reasonably expect a hearer to successfully infer what one is communicating. No problem.
My talk went well, I think. We had some interesting discussion. The commentator (Imogen Dickie) posed a dilemma for me. If we can have rigid designation in thought then either the problem of necessary existence reoccurs at that level and we haven’t solved the problem or we can have rigid designation without the problem of necessary existence (in thought) and so we shouldn’t be worried about it in language. This is especially pressing when we think that S5 is attractive because it is supposed to be a logic for thought. I responded that the problem of necessary existence is only a problem when we try to regiment our thoughts into a formal language. There is no problem with having a singular thought about Socrates, the problem is trying to formalize a sentence representing that thought. This is the evidence that we have that we need an separate account of the semantics of language. But S5 is still a logic of modal thought because we can formulate descriptions in it that ‘single out’ the object of thought without rigid designators. The absence of singular terms in our logic is nothing more than an inconvenience. She also mentioned, in passing, that Williamson thinks that necessary existence is not as terrible as one might think. One might argue that I exist in all possible worlds but in some worlds I exist without any properties. This was quite shocking to me, as I can’t really fathom what that would mean. Really, what does that mean? Anyone know?
From the audience I was asked several good questions. One was from Tim Lewis on how I felt about the fact that names on my account would fail the Church translation test. That is, we expect that ‘Richard’ and ‘Ricardo’ to be synonyms but if the really stand for ‘the bearer of “Richard”‘ and ‘The bearer of “Ricardo”‘ then pretty clearly they aren’t synonyms since they each have a separate quoted name in them. I thought that was a pretty nice objection. At the time I said that I would argue that names are not part of a language. So, in a complete dictionary of English there would be no ‘Richard’ or ‘Doug’ (forget about the dictionaries around now, they are half encyclopedia, I am talking about just a list of the words of a language and their conventional meanings, pronunciation guide, and syntactical/grammatical categories. That seems right to me, but then on the plane home, in a half trance, I started to think that maybe we could use Seller’s notion of ‘dot quotes’ to solve the problem if people don’t like the position on names. So instead of ‘the bearer of “Richard”‘ we could have ‘The bearer of *Richard*’ where ‘*P*’ is ‘dot-quote P’ and basically serves to single out all of the functional types that play the role that ‘Richard’ does in English. This would allow one to preserve the intuition that other language cognates of English names are synonyms. Or so it seemed on the plane…and besides I like the bit about names not being part of the language…
The other question that I remember was from Adam Sennet (there were a couple of others that I am forgetting). He echoed Williamson’s point that since we know quite well what a rigid designator is and how one would introduce them into a formal langauage it is then quite odd to say that there aren’t any. I responded that we know what it would be like for there to be all kinds of things that don’t exist. I know what it be like for there to be square circles (it would be for there to be one object that is both square anc circular at the same time), but that doesn’t mean that there are any. This is exactly what one would expect. We know what it would be like for there to be flogisten or tachyons or any other theoretical posit we come up with. It would be like finding the thing that we posited, but someimes we find out that they don’t exist. Interpreting that syntactical category proper noun as a rigid designator is a natural attempt at capturing what it is that we do when we think about some particular thing but when we do model that category that way we get the problems with necessary existence, which means that it is a mistake to model it in that way. I compared it to what happens when we try to mix quantuum theory with relativity theory. When we try to calculate the probabilities for things which we have well worked out answers for we get crazy results (like the probability of some event occuring being infinite). This let’s us know that there is a problem and then you get all of the different answers to solve the problem. Our finding the proofs for necessary existence in S5 are like the infinite probabilities in physics; it is an indicator that something needs to be done.
This is, by the way, why I disagree with Chappell’s charge that logic is over rated and that, in particular, my
employed logical apparatus merely serves to build in misunderstandings. The formal steps of the argument may be flawless, but that’s all for naught if the entire argument is based on a mistake — due to failing to understand precisely what all those formalisms really mean.
I understand what the formalisms mean and I am using them to apply pressure to a person who holds a certain kind of view. The proofs count as evidence that some assumptions don’t work. This is exactly what formal logic is good for…though I do agree that one needs to also make the argument in prose as well as symbols.
OK, well that’s enough for now, I gotta get to work on my Tucson presentation and grade some exams!!!!!!!
Well, I’m off to go present my paper at the APA! I’ll be back on Monday. I guess I have Philosophy Sucks! to thank, since I was noticing that the paper grew out of some interesting discussion I had here last year. Thanks to everyone who participated!!
You can enjoy the virtual version here (and on the sidebar with the other virtual presentations), which is a recording of a rehersal I did today (It may take a second to open since I recorded it in stereo, which I haven’t before).
I was watching this commercial recently that depicted a family playing scrabble and the young daughter and hip Grandmother are spelling out ‘rofl’ and ‘lol’ and the like. The mother is exasperated and protests that ‘rofl’ is not an English word.
This was sunrising to me. I had never thought about it before but I found myself disagreeing with this mother (I know it’s supposed to be a joke to sell phones, but you know philosophers!). Apparently I had been implicitly assuming that they were English words. I mean, aren’t acronyms words? ‘FBI’ is a word in English, right? I think so, though I guess we could debate this. But ‘laser’ is an English word and it is an acronym so there is nothing fundamentally at odds with ‘lol’ being a word.
So does anyone have any reason for thinking that ‘lol’ isn’t an English word?
Here is the (rough draft) of the second chapter of the dissertation. Again, comments are welcome!
Emotive Realism Ch. 2 –Language and Metaethics
A propos of all the recent discussion of Berkeley, here is an excerpt
It had been long recognized that language can be used to do more than to merely describe the world. This is explicit in Berkeley, especially in Section 20 of the Introduction to his Principles (Berkeley 1710/1998). He there says,
Besides, the communicating of ideas marked by words is not the chief and only end of language, as is commonly supposed. There are other ends, as the raising of some passion, the exciting to, or deterring from an action, the putting the mind in some particular disposition…I entreat the reader to reflect with himself, and see if it doth not often happen either in hearing or reading a discourse, that the passions of fear, love, hatred, admiration, disdain, and the like arise, immediately in his mind upon the perception of certain words, without any ideas coming between (p 99)
He even suggests that ‘good’ and ‘danger’ are examples of words that do not stand for ideas but rather serve to excite passions or exhort to action. This is mentioned in Warnock’s Ethics since 1900 (Warnock 1960, p 64) but what she does not point out is that Berkeley is much more radical than this. He goes on in Section 20 to argue that even proper names “do not seem always spoken, with a design to bring into our view the Ideas of those individuals that are supposed to be marked by them.” Sometimes they are used “to dispose me to embrace his opinion,” as when I say that Aristotle held some view simply as a way of getting you to accept it. So, it had been a long standing view in the empiricist tradition that language could be used in ways that went contrary to their meanings and for more subtle purposes than to describe the world.
There are broadly speaking two conceptions of how we perfrom speech act. One, the Austinian one, is that speech acts are purely conventional. So to promise is simly to utter the words ‘I promise…’ because there is a convention in English that says that saying ‘I promise…’ counts as making a promise. The other view is that (at least some) speech acts are performed via a kind of Gricean intention. This is the view that Strawson defended in his famous paper ‘Intention and Convention in Speech Acts’. On this view what makes something a promise is the intention that the speaker has in uttering it. In other words if I intend to be making a promise (and other conditions are met) then I count as making a promise.
Now, one thing I have noticed, is that when communicating via email it is easy to misinterpret what someone has ‘said’ (hence emoticons), which can lead to a quick escalation of tensions. How is this possible? It seems that the only way that this is possible is if the Strawsonian conception of speech acts is right. If performing a speech act is a purely convention act then there should be no question of whether a certain token, say of ‘I promise…’, is a promise, or a threat, or a guarentee, or what.
One may think, ‘ah, but there are different conventions governing that sentence type’ then one still needs to know what convention the ‘speaker’ intends to be conforming to. Either way the purely conventional nature of speech acts is brought into question.
OK, so I have been distracted the last few days with thoughts about Berkely and the relationship of God to quantum mechanics, but today I have to get back to work on my consciousness stuff…April will be here before you know it, and I have still got to turn this into a powerpoint presentaion!
So, before my ADD kicked in I was addressing Josh and Rosenthal’s response to my question about the difference between conscious pains and conscious thoughts that resukts in one being qualitative while the other isn’t. Their response is that the difference between the two cases is the result of the difference between the kind of property that one attributes to onself. I argued that they still haven’t told me why one isn’t like anything at all for the creature and that it is inconsistent with Rosenthal’s view about the emotions.
However, even if one is not moved by the above considerations, a closer look at Rosenthal’s account of thought and its relation to speech reveals something which closely resembles his homomorphism theory of the sensory qualities. He may be right that we cannot give a hommorphism theory for the content of beliefs, but we may be able to give one for the mental attitudes themselves.
On Rosenthal’s view there is a tight connection between thought and language. So for him thoughts consist in taking some mental attitude towards some propositional content. These thoughts are expressed in speech acts that (most often) have the same propositional content and an illocutionary force that matches the mental attitude of the thought. So, for example, if I think ‘it’s snowing’ (that is, if I believe that it is snowing) I can express that by saying ‘it’s snowing’ and my speech act has assertive illocutionary force that matches the mental attitude of the thought. This is in general true for him. As he says,
When a speech act expresses an intentional state, not only are the contents of both the state and the speech act the same; the speech act and the thought also have the same force. Both, that is, will involve suspecting, denying, wondering, affirming, doubting, and the like. Whenever a speech act expresses an intentional state, the illocutionary force of the speech act corresponds to the mental attitude of that intentional state. (p. 286)
So there are families of mental attitude among which similarities and differences will hold. So believing will be more like suspecting than it will be like wondering.
What are we to say about the actual homomorphism to perceptible properties? Is there any set of properties that the mental attitudes are homomorphic to? That is, is there a set of properties that have similarities and differences which resemble and differ in a way that preserves the similarities and differences between the mental attitudes? This is important since we need a way to specify the attitudes apart from their qualitative component. As I have suggested beofe we can hypothesize that the homomorphic properties are the illocutionary forces of speech acts.
So the differences between beliefs that p and desires that p are homomorphic to the differences between the illocutionary force of the utterance of some linguistic item in the process of expressing the belief or desire. Rosenthal’s overall view even suggests this. For instance he says,
It is arguable that speech acts inherit their intentionality from mental states by being a part of an overall causal network that involves those mental states…If so, then not only is the intentionality of speech acts due to their causal connections with thoughts; the intentionality of mental states themselves consists, in part, in the causal relations those states bear to speech acts. (p97)
Thus there are no relevant difference between these kinds of states. We are left wanting an explanation for why it is that one kind of thought results in there being something that it is like for me to have the conscious experience while in the case of the other kind of thought this is denied. Now perhaps there is an another worked out theory of the qualitative properties that could be able to supply a satisfying answer to this question; but I have not seen it. I am doubtful that one can be given.
Richard Brown 