Consciousness Live! with Romina Padró (S4 E11)

0:00 we have started uh joining me today is a very special guest romina padro romina for those who don't know you can you say something about who you are and what you do okay so i work at the graduate center the university of new york i did my phd there and then i stayed working there at the soul prep center and i'm the director of the center so i work with seoul kripke and trying to publish this unpublished work and i also do research

0:34 on epistemology of logic basically that's my main interest and it has been for a while yeah you've been interested at in a while um i remember way back when taking my one of my first logic classes you were a student in that same class with me i learned a lot studying with you during that class so i certainly know you've been interested in this topic for a long time yeah we were there together i remember you see a long time ago it seems like another life yes yeah so your work you say you're mostly interested in the epistemology of logic

1:10 yeah um and you but what's interesting i think about your work is that you want to focus on a uh an issue which is not the sort of typical epistemology of logic type of issue which is the justification of the kinds of basic rules of interest or something like that so can you tell us like what what aspect of the epistemology of logic are you interested in where is your work focused well i would say that in the epistemology of logic the the question of about justifying very basic inferences like most bonus or universal instantiation

1:42 it's true that it's not the subject that people have taken on a lot but that particular problem is a problem that people have been aware for a while and work for a while and my take on it is that we should have a clear grasp before we try to justify these basic principles or rules about the inferential process itself and what is its nature what is for us to make an inference

2:14 what's the connection that has to be established between the premises and the conclusion and then you know when you infer like when you produce the most balancing influence for instance and um i think that it's important that we deal with this problem before because it will happen the way we address it will have an impact on the way we would be able to justify the principles of role themselves and and that's part of what i try to do

2:49 to show that certain accounts of the justification of the principles or the rules are not do not work because their account of the inferential process itself seems not to work i'm sorry so you think we need to focus on what an inference is what it means to make an inference instead of starting from justification yes i think that the inferential process would be a handled first or at least you know be clear about that

3:22 and then because part of the reason why we are interested in justifying basic rules or or basic principles is because we produce them right we use them when we reason according to them right so the question that immediately comes to mind is if we cannot give a justification of these principles because the main problem is that there's a circularity involved when you're trying to argue in favor of them if they are

3:55 really basic you use them and so the question is you know how we are going to justify them given this kind of circularity and and the question that comes immediately to mind is if we are not justified we cannot give a justification what happens with our uses are we are not are they not we are not entitled to them we are not entitled to produce you know so uh

4:29 these two issues sort of come together and the the the the main reason for focusing on justification i think is that but um certain ways about thinking about the inferential process itself may change the way we are approach this relationship that i just established between the entitlement and the justification problems and it's hard to say i mean without getting into the problem it's hard for

5:01 me to say how and the impact well let's get into the problem okay okay so the the the problem is i call it the adoption problem and it's based on an interpretation of luis is carl and knows what the torture said to achilles and the interpretation actually is an unpublished work of soul

5:33 trippy and he uses it for something different and he gave a series of lectures on this and in the 70s and supposedly the first time he gave this it was uh it was meant to be a course on wittgenstein in the bitcoin stand but he never got to it but he never got to it because he started talking about platinum and quantum logic in that paper and i don't remember the name right now but it's logic empirical he has two names

6:07 because i think afterwards he was changed and so he was kind of upset with that paper and he started talking about it and this is one of the arguments perhaps the one that at least now this is the main argument uh against platinum and is based on an interpretation of louis carl so i don't know i mean should i say something about carl's nodes yeah yeah exactly and i guess the standard interpretation of carol is that we need to distinguish between inferences and

6:41 rules of uh inference or something like that yeah and that's something that you you think that's not exactly the most useful lesson to take from them i mean i think that that's part of the lessons that we can draw from it but that's not the whole of the problem and basically the the note is uh it's a very nice note it's very well written it's only three pages and it's a dialogue between achilles and the tortoise and so they are considering an argument

7:14 and the argument is [Music] things that are equal to the same are equal to each other the two sides of this triangle are things that are equal to the same and then the two sides of this triangle are equal to each other right so the torus basically says and let's call each one a b and c the this others basically says that whoever grants a and b need not reach c if they don't ground the hypothetical

7:49 and the hypothetical will be something like if a and b are true c must be true right so she challenged his achilles to force her logically she says to accept the conclusion and ageless makes the mistake of agreeing to this challenge and and he also agrees to the idea that whoever grants the premises and does not run the hypothetical is not under any logical obligation to

8:24 reach the conclusion and so once we agree to that right once we we consent that we give the tortoise that and her request which is basically that the hypothetical be included as an extra premise of the argument sort of makes sense because if we think the hypothetical has to be granted is you can think of it as sort of working as an assumption of the

8:59 argument itself that you are making explicit by introducing it as a premise and okay so you know they are writing in a notebook and achilles includes this hypothetical as an extra premise but then we have another argument that has if a and b and c are true then c must be true and but that's another hypothetical also it always asks again to introduce it as a premise and it goes on and on

9:31 in an infinite regress so that's the the basic structure of the argument and yes the main people have drawn many different morals from this but one of the points that most people agree on is that there's a distinction that needs to be made here between a rule of inference and a premise of an argument and that rule of inferences cannot be included as premises of their own arguments

10:04 and once we separate both supposedly we should uh yeah i mean many times it's also seen as a solution right you want once you keep them separate there are other interpretations some people think that you raise the problem about the justification of emotions in france and other people think i don't know that this is that really it sort of doesn't work because um

10:35 [Music] if you assign to the premises and don't ascend to the conclusion it shows that you do not understand the premises right um so i mean it's so do you do would you before going a little bit further do you think that that distinction is a solution in a sense i mean i know you think there's more to it than that but is that some distinguishing between the rules of implication or inference and premises does that do anything because you might still think this question is still like there why should we how could you

11:09 logically force someone to accept the rules of inference or do you think that's a separate question yeah no i i i think you're right i mean like the toilet school refused at that level too right and if you think of it as a formal system right and you can see she can say well you know why would i accept this as a fear as a rule of influence of the of this system so it could it could be raised at that level as well and i mean i think that

11:43 i i don't i don't think it solves the problem uh keeping the extinction straight having said that i think that is an important distinction to have yeah right and even if it doesn't solve it and but it brings it out and and and i think some people actually do that they stress that this is part of it but then there are other problems and why it's not solved and so's take on it is a bit different because

12:19 the way he approaches it changes the structure of the argument and basically the idea is that and that's why i call it the adoption problem and the idea is that we're going to think about the argument itself as a exchange between the daughters and achilles itself not in terms of someone is kind of a skeptical like the torture choice but from the point of view of someone

12:55 that has never inferred according to universal instantiation or most bondings actually the case i use is universal enunciation and but you know words for most parents as well so what is the option problem the the the way i set it up in the beginning is something like this certain basic logical principles cannot be adopted because if someone already infers in accordance with them

13:28 no adoption is needed and a intersection that's not different in accordance to them not adoption is possible so that's the the the setup so i'll never sense what that option is and actually he's kind of annoyed that people use that term all the time and they and he doesn't think that that's something that one could do in terms of the way he's thinking about it the adoption of intuitionistic laws if the adoption of quantum logic and he thinks that

14:02 the way of people assume that that can be done is much more problematic and and he does not he doesn't try to define it or make it more precise and but i do try to do that so i said that the the the case is constructed from the point of view of someone that i call harry that does not infer in accordance in accordance with universal instantiation he never produced

14:34 a in instance of a universal instantiation and he has no notion of the principle or rule itself either so he works at two levels he doesn't know what the universal instantiation is and he never infer in accordance to it and so what do we mean by a lot we we are going to try to get harry to adopt universal instantiation this principle and why what do we mean when we say that

15:06 we want him to adopt it and the idea here is that we want him to pick up and the ui principle in his practice so um that he develops a way of inferring in accordance to universal instantiation in his practice by hypothesis something that he didn't do before and but that has to be that done on the on the basis of the acceptance of the principle itself that we are going to tell him

15:39 okay it's not just picking up the practice that we trained him to pick up the practice no the idea is that we give him we state the principle or rule for him and on the basis of that he would he should be able to develop the practice to infer in accordance to that principle or rule um so so so it's more than that too right i mean don't you end up saying that it has to be encoded in a propositional format in the in his mind or something like that

16:12 right i mean and why why do i set it up like that because the idea is that we want to see what's the work that these rules could or could not do in the context of an inference and a lot of the positions in epistemology of logic and justification of basic principles simply assume that there is something rule-like going on when we infer and

16:46 something that um you know like a rule that we have in our minds that is not uh it may not be something that we are aware of it may be something uh it's not transparent to us but there's a rule nonetheless that accounts for these inferential transitions and you know i mean if you think about it it makes sense because you're trying to to explain a capacity that is potentially infinite right

17:19 and then how do you explain this amazing capacity that we seem to have of actually producing many instances of universal instantiation if you don't appeal to some kind of rule that's guiding that right and uh so it is it's an assumption that makes sense and the idea of the adoption problem is to bring it into question and and for that i use harry's case and so the idea is that look i mean i said before that

17:58 most people don't will not assume that that the rule is present in your mind in a very uh patterned way but that is implicit right and so the idea is what will happen if we give that to someone not in an implicit way but she stayed for him i mean it should work because if it works implicitly why wouldn't it work in the case of where we stated for him because

18:31 here the idea is that even though it's implicit you represent it and apply it in an implicit way right and then so something like that should be able to happen with harry but um it does not and uh and the problem is i think very simple in a way and one of the important things that that i

19:10 am i want to stress about the problem is that i see adoption as having like two phases the third the first one is uh um [Music] harris acceptance of the principle or rule and and the second one is developed in the brain the practice the in virtue of that acceptance and so the the the the case itself goes something like this um

19:47 suppose we want to help him and we tell him look you need to accept the following universal statements implied each of the instances or something like the predication of a property to all members in a domain entails that any particular member has that property as well and so we may give a little bit of an explanation and say you know what we mean is simply that

20:19 some property applies to all the things we are considering it follows logically that the property applies to each particular thing in the group and we tell him not to worry that he the principle is always true and and he'll find it useful and you know he goes along and says okay i i will accept and what you're telling me you seem to know a lot of this so i'll go with it

20:52 and okay so now we want to be sure that he has adopted in the sense that i gave it before and universal instantiation so we we we do a kind of test and the example i give is with a movie madagascar for some reason and so we um we tell him to read a review of the movie and in the review he says

21:26 that all the animals in the movie talk right and and this describes alex the line which is one of the characters in the movie as the most likable one an animal feature in the movie something like that a little description so uh and then we asked him whether alex the lion talks since he read that all the animals in the movie talk we would assume that he knows the answer to that question right but instead of saying yes alex talks he says i have no idea

22:02 i told you i haven't seen the movie so you know we asked him but you know have you noticed that this review says that all the animals in the movie talks and he says yes but you didn't ask me doubt right what you asked me was whether the alex the lion talks and so by now we know that he's not he has not developed the universal instantiation because he cannot make that connection right so suppose we try to insist a bit more

22:37 and we tell him something like come on you know harry we talked about this if you say that you would accept the whole universal statements implied each other instances and you know we think that perhaps he didn't we didn't give him enough information we didn't tell him how a universal statement looks like and maybe he's failed to recognize it as a universal statement so we we say something like all maybe you didn't know this but all

23:12 the animals in the movie madagascar dog is a universal statement they often have the form all like exorcists are peace where the exits in this case are the movie are the animals in the movie madagascar and peace what we are saying of them in this case and talk right and and then we go on and say as you have agreed all universal statements implies each of their instances and this particular universal statement

23:45 all the animals in the movie madagascar talk implies this particular instance alex the lion jones since obviously a man a lion is an animal right but he's not convinced he says something like um i never heard of a lion that is not an animal and i believe you when you say that all universal statements imply of the instances but i don't see the last thing that i should be able to tell

24:18 whether the lion alex don't why is that the review didn't say anything about the lion talking not for harry this is a universal statement this is a particular universal statement and this is a particular instance alex talks you can see clearly that for him to recognize it

24:54 as a universal statement he really needs to instantiate right yeah you were breaking up just uh just a little bit there um because the connection was bad so can you just re-say what you were saying for a second yes that's the tail end of it so what i was saying was that when you set it up like that you you you can see that it's not the problem about lack of information but that to recognize something like all the animals in the movie my ass cartoon as a universal statement he already needs to

25:27 be able to instantiate which is of course what by hypothesis he couldn't do right right and uh so and obviously also recognize alex the lion talks as an instance of the previous universal statement right so basically and now he's in more trouble because he has to uh he has the principle itself that we gave him and he has to recognize an instance of it

25:59 and then he has to recognize an instance of that as alex the lion talks so we have added another an extra step right and which is basically to universal instantiate from the principle itself to the particular case that he wants to apply it or that we want him to apply to so um obviously nothing has been gained by our telling them they're bringing some home and so can i can i jump in and just ask

26:34 you a quick question because um before we go any further i want to ask about harry in particular so you you you don't think there is anybody like harry uh this is a thought experiment right i mean it's a thought experiment and actually it's meant to be sort of a reduction argument right right and that in a way some positions make gas in a way this is how i would put it when you reconstruct certain accounts of

27:06 the justification of the principles you realize that on those accounts something like harry's situation would make sense okay right and the and the problem is that it does not right um so so and give just one more question about the hairy uh particular so even in the case of the human normal human development you don't think this ever happens so i mean i assume a six-month-old doesn't universally instantiate can't do modus ponens

27:39 by the time they're three or so they can so it doesn't isn't there a time when people can't do this or what what is your take on that no i mean obviously we learn to infer right right and we but it's not an adoption process in the way i set up adoption and something that that you go from the principle to the practice right it sort of work out works out the other way around yeah you

28:13 pick it up in the practice and some not all because a lot of people never wonder about these principles and you know they learn them or state them or whatever but it goes from the practice to the theoretical level not the other way around and and i think that the other way around when it comes to very basic ones like universal instantiation or most balance adjunction it's very hard to see how they could possibly be adopted

28:50 in the way i i i mentioned because any statement of the principle would need to use the principle itself for it to be applied and yeah this is so this is a bit of a non-sequitur maybe but and not really something that you focus on but i wonder what if if any connection to the kind of argument that voter gave for conceptual innateness that you can't you can't acquire a concept because in order to acquire the concept you

29:23 already have to have the concept i mean there is a connection and he actually talked about the the connectives and in the paper where he criticizes a peacock and there are certain elements of that that remind me of this problem and i don't i mean i don't think that innateness would really solve it the problem is whether you're representing it or not and applying it it doesn't really matter whether i tell it to you

29:55 or you come with it or you have an intellectual grasp of it like uh i don't know a russian insight some view like that it doesn't really matter as long as it goes from the propositional level let's say to the practice it's very hard to see how that could possibly work so so i know this is we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves i guess but uh so i this is an interesting argument because

30:27 i know that in some places uh saul himself seems pretty attracted to some kind of rational intuition view it's never really clear i guess lately you said that lately he's become more of a platonist um but but your your argument is that even if you were a platonist uh that wouldn't help you because merely seeing that it's true i mean in a way it's harry already sees that it's true once you explain it to him it's just he can't do it because he would have to sort of know how to do it in order to do it right exactly i mean yes that's a soul is inclined to think that you sort of see it and for me

31:04 like a rational intuition view of the inferential process itself and of this justification of the principles also and would not work and mainly because of the following dilemma you can have like two accounts you have a rational insight of the principle rule itself and then because of that in virtue of that rational insight you develop the practice or that guides you in in your practice you

31:38 are applied and it guides you in your practice that would be the similar situation as we telling harry the principle right right instead of rational inside here we have us stating it for him and now in another possible view that i think it doesn't make a lot of sense but uh would be something like um the inside works with each inference and [Music]

32:11 but then i don't see the point of actually appealing to rational insight or you can just say you know this is what we do this is what happens in the practice it seems that uh if you the whole point of appealing to rational insight was that it was going to give you the grasp of the principle that was going to explain all the applications that we do right all the particular inferences that we make that accord to that principle and and if we actually think that it's

32:46 something that is going to work in a particular level we lose that generality and i don't see much of a difference between saying that the that's how the practice goes you know uh-huh so if it's if it's a case-by-case basis then you haven't really given an explanation for the general practice is that's part of the problem and and also you know what work is rational inside doing there you know and it just makes makes it more

33:20 complicated and maybe even implausible that you have an insight with each particular case right and when doesn't really you don't gain much with it it would be just saying well we are disposing from this way yeah i wonder if you so if the um the analogy with seeing is one that you often hear people that like rational intuition or or you know this kind of stuff talk about you just see that is true but there's also a kind of um going back to plato you know i'm not a plato skull or anything but

33:53 you know i dabble occasionally but anyway there's always this uh kind of other metaphor of compulsion um that you're drawing that you can't help it that it kind of forces you to act in a particular way so i wonder if some so if someone framed that the insight was uh not just seeing that it was true but a kind of feeling compelled to affirm the truth of the instance would that do anything to for you or no they said the same problem i mean i think it's the same problem as long as you have to

34:25 sort of grasp the principle and apply it if they come if the compulsion is explained in those terms then you have the same problem and if it's not and it's explained case by case well you know in the first place it's less plausible right yeah and but still you have the same problem of why postulate that there's some kind of rationale inside to explain this compulsion and also you know it's

34:58 true that people are not very good in inference and uh yeah there's a principle that there's a role that is working in a compulsive way well yeah maybe in certain cases but there are a lot of cases where and people are very content violence right and if they don't like the conclusion and the conclusion

35:30 doesn't make sense to them they would just think that the whole thing is invalid right when when it's actually not it's hard i mean thinking about these i and and if you ever thought logic 101 abstracting the form of arguments is not something that comes very natural into people right it takes a while to actually separate the two issues and and seeing the form of the argument through the content

36:03 and people are in general you know drawn to the content and then make the evaluations about on the whole argument and in terms of whether they like the conclusion or not or whether there's a connection between the premises and the conclusion and they do not focus on the form right and that's that's something that's very i mean i teach a lot of intro logic so that's a problem all the time um but even still though they're able to do it i mean you know one of the surprising

36:34 things even to the students themselves if you give them some argument just a natural language and say which ones are good or which ones are bad even before you tell them about validity soundness or any of that stuff for the most part many of them are able to separate the good ones from the bad ones and they they don't know why they just sort of there's something about this one that seems right there's something about this one that seems like it doesn't go through yeah and even you know like when you give a kind of circular explanation of uh most opponents or you say well you state the principle and then you say

37:09 well if the premises are true and then you have the conditions the first premise then you have the antecedent of the conditional and then you have that then you have it and you are reasoning using most money itself right but even in that case you see you seem to be saying something that they can make sense of you know but uh the point is that obviously in their case they are not in harry situation right they have reason according to

37:42 these principles and one of the things that actually so points out and i think is true is that maybe studying the principle or the rule for someone that is an inconsistent inferior will help maybe because they will have some there will be a chance of them grasping the principle and applying it right and but not for someone that is in the absolute darkness like heart right now yeah yeah so and harry um do you would you i mean so i don't know

38:17 how many of the other basic inferences harry is or isn't able to make so has harry ever reasoned according to modus ponens or i actually i actually when when when i think about a particular case i i grant the other principles and so yeah i assume that the problem is with universal instantiation most of the time and uh think of him as kind of propositional guy looks at the propositional level but you

38:52 know i mean if you think about this and this is something that relates to what saul calls the formal system fallacy yeah you have a propositional system right so you don't have any rule like universal instantiation that doesn't mean that if we think about it as an axiomatic system you won't have to perform universal instantiations to be able to work with the axiomatic system okay

39:27 all the rules and the principles they are going to be formulated in a general way so you obviously will have to apply universal instantiation even if not if it's not an explicit part of the system and part of what the soul says and not strictly in relation with this but is that um there's this kind of illusion that once we have the system

39:59 which has run with it right but actually that's not the case we need to reason about the system itself to be able to do anything with it right and then that's something that he calls intuitive reasoning or something like that and then that he sees as a kind of fiction the idea that you know you just adopt this axiomatic system and run with it

40:30 and because there will always be something that you need to presuppose your reasoning which our everyday reasoning to be able to do anything with it right so so that's that that's i mean i don't i'm getting out of uh getting a little worked up here there's a lot of interesting issues and what you were just saying so um is the idea supposed to be that what we so this is what part of what i was going to ask about harry was if harry's not able to make these kind

41:03 of inferences then is harry not rational i mean he can't reason or at least he's not fully rational so is the idea supposed to be that there's a kind of intuitive notion of rationality and reasoning and then formal systems are attempts to theorize or capture that or what and well those are like two separate issues i mean that's someone like harry even makes sense you know and well i couldn't talk to him [Laughter]

41:39 can he understand something like alex is a lion something as simple as that without having universal instantiation and you know i'm not sure what the answer to that question is and that connects to a problem without understanding right because i said that one of the the points of the one of the issues that some people have seen in the current note is that um that's all the dollars really doesn't understand the premises if she refuses

42:13 to accept the conclusion and here we can say something like well if he doesn't have universal instantiation he doesn't he's not going to understand your statement of the rule or principle either right and in there i would i would agree to that but you sort of push back because then then what i'm gonna say is okay so but then the meaning of universal instantiation cannot be given in that way

42:46 either right you know yeah and uh there has to be something that precedes it in a way and you're gonna be able to acquire it in that way and that actually i think it works against another very popular way of thinking about the justification of uh basic principles which is in terms of uh rules for the introduction and elimination of the connectives and here the idea is that what explains our disposition to reason

43:22 according to these basic principles is that there's a kind of acceptance of the rule itself and that explains these dispositions and the acceptance doesn't need to be something is implicit right but it's working anyway and we encode these rules in an implicit way and apply them and so if you think if you think of the meaning considering

43:56 for many of these views i should say this uh that that's what is to have the connective the concept of the or or to acquire the meaning to to know what it means or to acquire the concept of the connectives is to having have accepted those introduction and elimination rules at some level right okay so here the problem would be that is the same right it's based in an act of acceptance that explains the dispositions

44:31 to reason in that way and i mean i think that meaning considering accounts have been not very explicit about how they work in terms of the disposition and rule relation but think about that if you don't think that the rules explain the dispositions account for the dispositions but that the rules merely describe the dispositions you take it then they're not really explaining these positions

45:04 themselves that is what we started wanting to do right and uh and again you know i mean like it isn't much more than saying well we have this position and these rules are just description of them and but it doesn't get to the core of the issue that was why do we have this ability and what explains his position to reason in this way so you know i started saying that i thought that the inferential problem that i pronoun

45:36 what's the nature of our influential moves and when it comes to very basic rules has an impact on how we see and think about the justification problem and i meant this kind of issue right that um if we think that a mere acceptance of a rule is not going to be it's not going to give you a a good account of the influential transitions

46:10 then positions like meaning considering accounts or the rational insight start not to make a lot of sense and even the connection between what i call the entitlement problem you know the idea that we are worried about justifying the principles or rules because we reason and we apparently reason in accordance to them so are we entitled to those uses and these inferential moves if we cannot justify them but

46:45 here if you start questioning that the rules themselves have a leading role to play to explain the influential transitions then the connection between the justification and the entitlement problem loses force right and because part of the issue was you know i'm using this rule when i infer right but if that's not the situation uh maybe the situation is something like

47:19 the rule states or describes the practice then the the the connection is not as firm and it wouldn't seem that is expressing an issue to try to justify the rules themselves to account for our practice because what we are leaning towards is that the practice is more basic right yeah and that the practice needs to be granted already for any statement of the principles to be

47:50 of any use to anybody and that's and yeah so then we have less of a reason to ask for justification because we've already started with the the point that we use them all the time and then we can state them yes i mean at least the entitlement problem right and because you know the question itself about what warrants what entitled us to perform those inferences and we start losing weight right they need the

48:25 practice needs to be granted for us to already so does it make sense to think whether we are entitled to it or not yeah and then so that's part of the issue and you know i mean even though i i i tried to think about different positions and on epistemology of logic what the what really started this for saw in in

49:01 the original seminars and was the quinion account right and which he takes to be the background epistemology of the patent paper that he's attacking on phantom logic the idea here is that if you think of the quantum picture and he thinks that the logical laws have further statements in the system and you know they are the core of the web

49:34 but there's no in principle any difference between that and very theoretical statements in physics or hypotheses and but but saul's point here is that if you think of the principles as near hypotheses or statements that are in the system and they have work in pretty much the same way a scientific hypothesis then you would be in a hurry like situation a hurry-like situation should

50:10 make sense and she should be able to listen because think about how it works in the case of science you know you have high policies you accept it you bring it into the way of belief and you make inferences on that based on that so here is that it should make sense the idea that you can include a very basic principle of logic as a core principle and then infer in accordance with it right right but um yeah i mean here's some funny passages

50:48 about this in the seminars that i hope will be published at some point and because he says like you know i mean part of the the the the point also in wine is that you you can give them up right right and then so you say something like all curls are black this grows black and let's suppose you want to give something like you see a white one okay

51:23 and you have or a bunch of white ones and and and you want to change that so the idea here is that you have two options you can give up the biological principle of the cross being blocked or you can give up universal instantaneous like does it even really people think that you have that option because but in principle it should make sense obviously equine has uh ways of avoiding minimum mutilation and

51:59 it will be much more disruptive but in principle it should make sense and the whole account of the logic and loss being just further statements in the system and resembles the situation with with harry you know where you just give someone a hypothesis and they should be able to infer in accordance to it one point that actually quinn does not emphasize

52:30 but it's pretty obvious is that there's already a pretty striking difference between the statements and in the scientific ones because they not only are at the core of the web they also make the web right together right they hold it together and they so they have this dual role and then and for the thing to make sense you know

53:04 and the idea of revision to make sense once you drop the principle at the core all the inferential transitions that it backed should go as well you know right and then so yeah basically the idea is that you include it and as long as you have it in fair you can infer according with it and once you take it you cannot and and that is consistent with a picture like harris

53:39 where you know you just simply accept a statement of the principle yeah so basically you know people ask because so used it to attack this particular way of revising logic right and people always ask me about the revision question and this is not an issue that i like to talk a lot about the first in the first place because i don't think that we understand

54:13 the influential process itself so we i mean we're trying to revise something that we don't even understand right exactly yeah so uh but what i would say is these i don't know so maybe some has a harder line on this probably but the way i think of this as being an argument against revision is not by attacking the revision per se right but by attacking the background epistemology

54:48 on which you support your arguments for the revision and you build your arguments for the revision you know and so that's um that's how i see that's sort of i indirect and and but you know i mean if you think about people arguing for a revision they tend to go quiet and now there are people talking about anti-exceptionalism and which is quite rebranded basically yeah but here you know i mean like i'm

55:25 not saying the the way they they construct the idea of being exceptional logic being exceptional it's not exactly the same way i am saying here that there's something special about these principles because what they stress is that it's a priority all that and really it doesn't matter for the argument whether you're having a prior insight or not as i

55:58 already said and it's not a matter of there being a priority or not it's a matter about the role that these principles can play in the influential transitions and so the way it's special will be different there's a question about what else would have this similar character you know and i think that that's something that you could think of separate in the case of logic from the case of math right because um if you state the

56:33 principles for addition whatever there's implicible no reason why someone been able to adopt that in the sense given and there might be other cases i don't know i don't know i can ask you just not to interrupt you but can i ask you about that so you you think that if you give someone you know i don't know take a simple example um like the piano axioms or something some some formalized version of arithmetic uh that they should just be able to adopt that

57:04 in a way that's not problematic uh but they would have to understand the successor relation for instance well that that's that's my question actually whether they would be able to count and understand the success or relation right for something like addition so that that would be that's a question i i'm not sure what the answer to that is um but when they need to understand that in order to adopt the uh the practice yeah the rule if you grant that that they can count and you set the function you know

57:41 i don't see why not and the the problem with counting you know i there are a lot of issues there going on and people's ability to grasp groups economicity and um so i'm not i'm i tend to think that counting is something that we will have trouble uh teaching someone right in a very

58:16 propositional way not you know like we do with kids like separating objects and like trying to do it resemble the practice as much as possible to teach them and once they grasp have a grasp of that maybe you can state the principles but stating the successor operation and someone being able to grasp that my inclination to think that maybe not maybe that wouldn't work and so so i mean because that was my intuition as well i was i to me it seems like in

58:49 order to adopt a certain kind of arithmetic um you would have to grasp the successor function but that already seems to sort of presuppose that you're able to add to understand what the success or relationship is unless you're just reciting a sequence yeah you get to the next one without saying it's adding one to it well it depends in a way about how you account for the counting relation i don't know like for instance for brower [Music] you needed time to be able to grasp

59:24 that's about two oneness like the two almost be more more important than the one because it's the passage from one to the other where you actually see that separation and then you are able to build the whole of the series and but um so i don't know do we need an experience of time what do we need to be able to count is hard to say i it's not something that i really have worked on and but my intuition is with you

59:58 that um maybe not maybe stating the principles wouldn't be sufficient so in that way then the logic the problem the adoption problem wouldn't be unique to logic yeah well you know i mean like other there are other cases that i actually think that maybe we will have in our room like acquiring the first person pronoun and um it seems that any statement of the principle would presuppose it

1:00:32 and that someone could not acquire you know like the eye and from a statement but uh yeah those are i don't know identity is another case that i think may be uh problematic to explain to someone merely propositional from a merely propositional point of view and but what i'm i was trying to say in relation to the math case

1:01:05 is that the issue here why would be special why this one would be special the case of logic that it presupposes exactly the same principle itself right because that's what is important and is that it's not the issue of their priority what will be separating it or not from others from other cases right and in that way that will make

1:01:41 the case of logic something separate from the case of math in terms of that and i'm not not treating them all together as they are priority cases right and um yeah but even though but so i what uh i agree with that and i like the separation of the a priori i think that's an important point but i i still think that in the addition case you still have to presuppose addition in order to be able to do it if that's bound up in the successor function of understanding that yeah so i mean i i actually consider the case of addition but i presuppose that

1:02:14 the person [Music] has the success operation right yeah and so i don't know can you come without having any notion of addition i don't know i don't know i would have to think more about that and to say whether you really need to pre so it wouldn't work for addiction either i don't know i have to think about that okay but uh the the with the case of counting i think my intuition needs to lean

1:02:47 towards yeah that that's not something that that's something that has to be learned from the practice that can be learned right yeah so yeah then can i so can i ask you about the intuitive notion of reasoning and that's in the background of all this because i mean take this correct me if i run but it seems like part of the problem or not the problem part of the target um uh here is not just adopting i mean that is the the problem

1:03:19 obviously but but at least part of the problem is not just adopting a logic at will but it's also trying to put pressure on the claim that maybe our sense of intuitive reasoning is non-classical so sometimes when you i read people like priests and i talk to you know or you know jc bill or these other kinds of guys that are um uh arguing for non-classical version logic it seems like part of what they're trying to say is reason itself is non-classical not just that we need a formal system to blocks explosion or something like that

1:03:52 but that it's wrong to assume that reason is is a classical kind of thing expecting the law of non-contradiction and um modus ponens is invalid in certain systems or whatever but uh so it sounds like part of what you and what maybe saw two are arguing is that reason is a classic there's no way to avoid the intuitive reason itself being classical or is that the wrong way of thinking about it well i don't know if i would put it in terms of classical logic or because really we're talking about

1:04:22 separate principles here right and not the whole classical logic we are talking about well i meant in this in the center yeah prediction and modus ponens well non-contradiction is is a case where this would apply right and the adoption would apply but sort of in a different way okay because um let's say you state the principle of non-contradiction to someone that is not bound for by

1:04:56 non-contradiction because he has never inferring importance to it right and has no notion of the principle prior to our challenge to him so because that person is not bounded by non-contradiction the principle itself that you're stating to him he could interpret it as holding and not holding right yeah this is the argument against descartes right uh right exactly exactly and then yeah so it's um

1:05:32 it works in a different way and because the principle itself you make it not hold and then you cannot infer or according to it i mean and so i don't know i mean in that case maybe it will be it would make more sense to think that the that it works again revision in a more direct way but even graham uses a sort of

1:06:09 coinan background to support his views on revision so even if it didn't apply directly i think it would be problematic it's true what you're saying i mean like uh i i said i try not to talk about revision and i sort of had a militant attitude talks about different ways that you could go with a revision right and he says well look i mean

1:06:44 there are cases where if you want to be so composed to call that a religion you do like a case of aristotelian logic because they overlook um the case where it was empty from all ace acerbs to some asrbs and um so if you think about that particular case and you can say well you know i mean like it's not it's not that

1:07:16 you maybe you will revise your logic maybe this is rare but there will be cases right where um it may happen like in this case right but the whole point of what he's trying to say here is look this is not the case like the pandam case where you should say look there are some problems in quantum mechanics so we drop these prints to point out this other and everything is going to be fine

1:07:48 and you don't understand any more than you did before why you have to drop one right you move to the other here in the case of very strangely in the resilient case you have an intuitive argument about why in that particular case you overlooked something right and why it doesn't hold and the overlooking of empty names although i would just say that some people dispute that i mean some people claim that aristotle knew about the empty name case it talks about chimeras or whatever

1:08:20 um but that he restricted the all implies some kind of thing to just ones that do actually succeed in names yeah yeah but i mean yeah independently of that here the point is you know if you want to be inclusive and include the the empty case you can see clearly why that principle will be that move will be problematic right right and but if you read the pandan paper what he was trying to do is question the the

1:08:57 notion of self evidence itself he builds on the analogy with geometry and unlikely this geometries and like look what happened in the case of not only the geometry obviously those principles seem self-evident to us and they turn out to not to be the case who says that we can the same cannot happen in the case of logic right and uh so basically what he's trying to do is

1:09:28 attack the very notion of self evidence right and then make it more plausible that we would switch for no particular reason yeah other than well it would be more convenient to accommodate some facts about quantum mechanics and well this is a position that upon later on give up and i don't think a lot of people you know try to i don't think a lot of people try to give an account of

1:10:02 quantum mechanics and through logic anymore maybe yeah quantum logic is interesting for other reasons but not in the way we thought then and um i mean one of the things that that i wonder about with putnam and you know uh this is not a genuine question not as an objection or anything but i wonder to one extent the difference is uh so sometimes you hear logic talked about in two different ways i mean so for instance going back to aristotle aristotle seems to suggest that logic is kind of a theory about reality that the non-contradiction is on

1:10:35 one second so what was i gone for a second yeah am i back yes you are back okay repeat what you said uh so sometimes you know for aristotle seems to talk about the law of non-contradiction as a principle that describes the way the reality the way things are it's a metaphysical principle that you know in reality something cannot both be and not be the same way in the same way blah blah but then other times it talks about as a psychological theory the way which is the way we've been talking about it in terms of guiding inferential practices of human beings or animals um and sometimes i think the the quantum

1:11:09 mechanics debate although i think you're right that has been superseded but sometimes i think what the debate there is is reality like the way the non-contradiction says so forget about the way we infer or the practices that humans have what's the way metaphysically the structure of reality as does that reflect uh is not is non-contradiction a good description of things out there yeah i don't know what i would think is that i don't see how we can think without it

1:11:45 you know and that's what i would say i mean like any kind of intuitive reasoning seems to and usage or presuppose it or so um i don't know i mean i don't know if we could think of reality in any other terms and i just i mean you can have a formal system that

1:12:17 [Music] drops non-contradiction or assess that some contradictions are true but from there to giving an interpretation of a system that actually makes sense to us i think that there's a gap it's kind of problematic and um you know i mean think about for instance the case of the intuitionists right it wasn't that you had first

1:12:52 the formal system and then you gave it an interpretation right it was sort of the other way around right yeah and then they thought that some ways of thinking about mathematics and should be thought in terms of probability and had an intuitive sort of meaning attached to the connectives and in the way they proceed in mathematics and

1:13:24 from there a formal system that tried to account for that was built right and and maybe maybe more precise maybe meanings more precise and but there was a there was already something there that was uh like kind of account of what we were trying to do of the meaning of the connectives right in terms of probability and the same with relevance

1:13:57 logic as well would you say um or it's different there because there's a dissatisfaction with the truth conditions for like material implication or something so they try to build a system that accounts for that yeah there's an intuitive i mean if you me any undergraduate in the universe would say there's an intuitive yes you know these definitely make sense yeah yeah yeah yeah but in the case of um something that like you know drop some contradiction or a

1:14:29 size contradiction that are true i don't know i mean i think it seems to me that it's problematic to reason that it would be subject to sort of the formal financing system simply to assume that we don't have to do any reasoning about the system right that you can just plan with it and you know all this connects because this is funny uh all this connects a lot with the beat einstein

1:15:01 book on rules and private language and i we began saying that the course was supposed to be on wittgenstein right and never got to be on beat einstein but soul never establishes the connection because the people there attending the course had never heard the the big gangster and uh the lectures on on bitcoins time right that would be a problem they were they were actually given completely

1:15:36 a couple of years later and so he could not really say what the connection was from the this problem to the bitcoin stein problem and because his take on it you know people didn't know and um but you know a lot of this connects with the criticisms about machines in the british time book right there also interesting differences and points of connection between

1:16:10 adoption and and the problem in the wittenstein book because if you think about it problem there is about specifying the content of the room what is what the rule is you know you don't know if it's plans or tasks and um right and so here the rule is completely specified but you are unable to do something with

1:16:42 it anything with it right because i mean something that we also brought up and i didn't come back to we said that um one of the most popular interpretations of the luis carl problem and is the separation between rules of inferences and premises and environments and here and what we have is that uh even if you give the stated as a rule for hurray that

1:17:15 wouldn't make any difference because he still will have to instantiate i mean for any rule like thing that we could say to him he will have to identify the conditions in which he would be able to apply the rule right so he will come to find an antecedent right and that's already presupposes universal instantiation so he wouldn't be able to follow the rule and

1:17:49 because he can't identify where he has to apply it at all really and and obviously also there's a promise um most opponents there and but um so here what i was trying to say is you see that actually stating it as a rule does not make a difference even if you think of it as an imperative right that he gives himself and and the difference with with the case in

1:18:25 the bit einstein book yes it's basically that here the content is completely specified we are not presupposing that that he cannot have access to account the idea is even if he did he wouldn't know and how to apply it and there's a an interesting thing going on there because there are some formulations of what so calls the paradox like in paragraph three of

1:19:00 the foundations of mathematica mathematics between science relations mathematics and there he well i mean he he goes through the his example which is not thought's example is example of adding two and changing and suddenly changing or something like that 2002 2008 yes something like that and then and then he says but even if you knew how the

1:19:36 uh if you knew the the rule itself how do you know how to apply it now you know even if you have this whole series how do you know how to apply it now and this is something that the christian writing and proposing make a lot of as the paradox being not just about the content of the rule but the very application of the rule and in a particular case and actually probation brings it up in

1:20:10 connection with the inferential problem the idea would be that any account of inferences will need to be given in terms of rule following right and [Music] but the rule following presupposes inference so you got a circularity going on there and they said like their point is like so missed that the problem is not just about the content of the rule but

1:20:45 the application of the rule itself that requires identifying conditions and being able to perform opponents and i don't they see this as the central problem and i i think that look i mean bitkenstein himself runs them together and i think in seoul too i see them more as different ways of bringing the same issue and the idea would be that the rule doesn't apply itself doesn't just run itself right you need

1:21:18 to give it an interpretation that you need to identify the conditions in which you will apply and [Music] and there may be different ways of getting there but they reach sort of the same point so yeah when i thought about the connection between all this and the wittgenstein uh book in the first place i i was focused more on the differences and um but then i started seeing also points of

1:21:50 connection between the two and and i think yeah that maybe there are different ways of reaching the same point actually if saul has a footnote in in the wittgenstein book like he says look i mean i don't know why he puts in your food now because it's an important point a very important point and because he says something like well if the whole series has been given to you you still have a problem about when to

1:22:27 pick the particular case right and he said something about them we presuppose that that i don't remember exactly how it goes but we presuppose something about the infinite situation but uh even even if we grant someone that has all the steps all the all the answers given there will still be a problem we can kick the ladder away that we use to build the

1:23:00 problem something like that that's the footnote and so i think he's raising exactly this issue and that he is aware of it but he just thinks that there are two ways of getting this in place yeah i think that's interesting so part of the so in the you know saul's alter ego um part of what's going on there are uh at least part of what's going on there is seemingly um the denial that we are machines

1:23:34 so would you say that's a fair way to characterize saul's view that uh that humans so i wonder if so there's no formal system it seems like on his view which is going to capture what we do um when we reason intuitively because all formal systems are basically machines and that's and we aren't machines and you could object to that obviously but i is that in the background of his thinking do you think i mean you know a lot of the big einstein book is not him right and i don't think he would agree

1:24:09 with the solution himself and [Music] and i think that probably if he had to go some uh to to go for some of the resistant positions right to the paradox he would go for blood plagiarism even though this is a position he dismisses very quickly in the book right because i think he thinks bitkenstein does right and but i think that there is a lot of uh

1:24:44 agreement with wittgenstein on the criticism of dispositionalism and i think that that that would be a point of you know agreement to a lot of what he says and you see some kind of connection you see the connection here between his arguments against the machine account right of the dispositions and um his criticisms of formal systems

1:25:20 because the idea would be that yeah we can't you can't step out right and just pick it up and run make it run because the thing the formal system the machine doesn't interpret itself you will need someone doing the reasoning about the system or the builder of the machine you know all the arguments that he gives

1:25:52 in connection to that now well einstein himself you know like you know i mean there's there's some there's something that we are going on i don't know where but um that i don't like domino because uh i mean you can take the practice as primitive and that seems to be something that we are

1:26:24 leaning towards if we actually swallow the adoption problem right but what do we say once we agree to it and we agree that it's an argument against all these positions that we were considering before and um one of the things that comes to mind is well you know you have to think more as kind of know how right right and and that also connects it with ryle

1:26:59 and because he uses this example of the luis carl at least in i think in the book or in the paper then he drops it but um the point the point here with the big einstein account is that in a way it is i don't know if we don't end up in that accounting sort of machine like because you just react

1:27:33 and you see what i mean yeah yeah and then it becomes automatic and that's the machine like this yeah yes yes and maybe that's why it was appealing to behavior it's like you know and uh but um yeah i mean i don't know if in the end he doesn't make us look more machine like than we want it to be and if we follow other arguments about the hardness of the

1:28:07 machine and you know so that's a problem and he says that you shouldn't talk about what is grounding that right and but it ends up being like reactions right which then you can say well that's what you call thinking that's what you call inferring and and give an explanation of it but the base there's just these impulses that remain unexplained

1:28:42 and so i'm not sure what to make of it once once you swallow the adoption problem it seems clear that it leaves you in a not very comfortable position because once you think that the practice is what is more primitive questions many questions start coming up like well if we had a different practice would we have different laws and and when it comes to the objectivity

1:29:17 of logic when it comes to the normativity of logic what kind of normativity are we i'll be able to build up from here and um [Music] and it's problematic and yeah i mean because you can say okay you have to think of these basic rules in terms of in the beginning as kind of know how right then you can develop

1:29:52 propositional knowledge about that practice and saying that you know how to infer it's not saying much what are you really saying how are you going to really construct that and there are different ways you can do it you can still at that point appeal to some kind of i don't know mental process that you have that connects i don't let think of a something where you plug in the universal statement in the liver's

1:30:26 instances and but i really don't know if if you try to explain that in terms of boxes that are not represented and applied but let's just work in your mind i don't know how it's still at that point you're not gonna have the problem of actually what what activates that is not recognizing something as an instance of a universal instantiation so you get

1:30:59 roughly the same problem that's what you're saying i yes that's what i i'm saying yes that's what i'm saying i mean i think people would deny that but why does he hate activate what explanation to that can you give why when you confront the universal statement then that goes through a particular case um and we have no idea about what what is in there in those boxes right what connects them if it's something that is

1:31:33 any similar to universal indentation or something completely different and but yeah so i'm inclined to think that that's not very helpful and [Music] and also i mean there will be a kind of description of the disposition itself i don't think that it would really explain it and of what goes on in the mind probably is my my take on it is probably not for us to say

1:32:07 right that this should be the research that in the psychology department or neuroscience department yes um so i mean so it sounds like you're pessimistic about any real solution to the adoption problem i mean i think that a solution is not something that can be solved in a way you know and the the question is what you do with it once you accept it and because the point is fairly simple

1:32:46 if if you think about it of course you can't adopt a universal statement because you will need to use it in any application of it is it's fairly simple and now one point is how you interpret it and and here the idea is well you know it runs much deeper with circularity than people have allowed themselves to think right and

1:33:21 then and it is something that shows up in the justification problem but that it really lies beneath it at the inferential level itself and so once you think in those terms and you start thinking about the inferential moves themselves as something that is not rule guided how do you account for them what's and

1:33:53 what's what's the the role that those rules once they are going to have and kind of what i was trying to think is well trying to think in terms of something like the intuitionistic case that there has to be something in the practice itself already and meaning that maybe it's not completely fully defined but it's going to be made more precise when you

1:34:25 state the rules right and uh but it is already there and that they inferential moves are already there and then once you stated then you can think that there is an interaction between the practice in the theory right that the theory doesn't have just to be a mere description of the practice but that can come back to the practice and have some kind of normative role as well

1:34:56 yeah some reciprocal feedback yes something like that and but you know this obviously is not the same as the original normal activity that we were talking about and you have to deal with this problem of explaining how we said that we react in many many many cases and to universal statements in this way without appealing to a rule and

1:35:30 so yeah i mean that question is still pressing in a way you have to say something about that and um and i'm not sure that just appealing to the practice itself will be sufficient you know to actually give an adequate explanation i so as i was saying to you before we started

1:36:02 uh which is i feel that i've been led to an uncomfortable position but the position i did not want to get to and that yeah which is basically that swallowing that the practice has to be the most primitive thing and that that yeah that we can't think of the inferences in a purely rule regulated way

1:36:35 yeah so i mean and just to sum up the stuff it seems that there's some similarity to the problem of induction um that i mean the idea of hume's problem of induction sometimes is put that you have to rely on induction in order to rely on induction to justify induction you have to rely on induction and so the practice of induction seems in some sense already you can't you can't describe it without already invoking it do you think there's a similarity between hume's problem or

1:37:06 um or do you think they're not that similar i mean at the level of justification i suppose yes at the influential level i don't know i have to think because this case won't even apply to all the laws you know and classical logic so in particular in the phantom case it would apply directly to the distributive law right and so what are you thinking at the influential level what would be

1:37:39 because in the justification it's clear that you have to appeal to it and to justify it but when you are inferring why would it be similar uh i mean so in the case of like you know all swans are white or all crows are black that's an inductive generalization that you reach by inferring from particular cases um so i guess it's it'd be um you know this one is why that's one is why eventually you get to the point uh where you infer that all swans are white

1:38:12 so there's a uh a sense in which building up the inductive generalization requires already the very inference that you're trying to perform namely recognizing that these are you know instances of the generalization hmm but why would that be something that requires induction wouldn't that require like instances of the generalization universal instantiation

1:38:45 or something like that uh right yeah so but um i mean like obviously you need to presuppose something like the principle that of constancy right and sorry go ahead but yeah i mean i think there are similarities between the two cases i'm not sure that it would work in the same way at the influential level but i have to think about it yeah no i think you're

1:39:19 right now that i'm hearing myself say it i think you're probably right about that um uh okay well i can't keep you here forever today although i'm having a great time talking with you but i wonder so if the if there's anything that we haven't talked about yet which uh you would like to bring up oh and the answer can be no no i don't know i mean like well there's they love obviously there are all details and things that i cover very quickly and

1:39:54 but i think that pretty much in terms of the whole structure of how i see the problem and we cover pretty much everything and where i end up and but yeah i mean like obviously there are details when you approach and particular cases of uh rational intuition accounts and then you have to think how they how the argument would work in each particular case or you know you have different accounts of meaning constituting

1:40:26 accounts that maybe are mixed things have are rational inside so you have to adapt to those cases and in in even in the equine case you know i i would say trying to link and decline in epistemology of logic to what the people now call anti-exceptionalism but there are also differences and and obviously they make distinctions like

1:40:59 that one didn't make and that they're very clear between the the principles and the the the rules that connect the web and all that you know you have to adjust and to see how it will work in in each particular case i think in terms of the structure we cover pretty much everything i didn't talk about the cards explicitly because um yeah that's another case that saw actually applies sort of this argument

1:41:33 not exactly in the same way and but i think i pretty much recover everything yeah okay cool well i want to thank you very much for spending this time talking with me i learned a lot as i always do from interacting with your work uh so um i guess uh i'll talk to you later just stay on for a second i'll talk to you afterwards okay thank you thank you thanks very much it was great talking to you