A Tale of Two T’s

Richard Brown 29 Comments

A while ago over at the Brain Hammer Pete asked the question ‘What are you conscious of when you have conscious experiences?‘ (I think he asked the same question over at Brains a little later). His basic idea was to solicit peoples intuitions about Transitivity and Transparancy, which he defined as follows.

“The Transparency Thesis”: When one has a conscious experience all that one is conscious of is what the experience is an experience of.

“The Transitivity Thesis”:When one has a conscious experience one must be conscious of the experience itself.

Given these two claims he was in particular interested to ask

Since each of these claims is alleged to be obvious, and since they are in opposition, I’d be interested in hearing what others think of the matter: Which is more obvious than the other?

These two claims both seem obvious to me and so I am interested in finding out why people seem to think, as Pete clearly does, that they are in opposition. Part of theproblem is the way inwhich Pete define Transitivity. He claims that it claims that we must be conscious of the experience itself, but this is actually wrong. What Transitivity claims is that we must be conscious of ourselves as having the experience (or conscious of ouselves as being in a certain state). Once we see that this is the right way to construe transitivity it is no longer the case that these two claims are in opposition. When I have a conscious experience (say, as Pete does, of a leafy tree) then it will be the case that I am conscious of myself as having a leafy tree experience (transitivity) and because of that it will also be true that it seems to me that all that I am conscious of is the leafy tree.  So where is the opposition?

There is No Santa Claus

Richard Brown 21 Comments

Philosophers often speak about Santa Claus in the context of discussing the problem of names without reference. Since ‘Santa Claus’ does not refer (that is, there is no Santa Claus) what are we to say about sentences that have the name. Is ‘Santa Claus is Jolly’ true? False? Neither true nor false? Nonsense? There are those who defend each of these positions. Yet there is a more pressing issue that has received almost no attention from philosophers. I speak of the moral issue of lying to our children about the existence of Santa. It is commonly recognized that we have a duty to be truthful and yet millions of Americans engage in the most elaborate deceit imaginable all aimed at duping their children. Is this a moral action on their part? It is my position that it is not. Let me now make the case.

What then is it to lie? Common sense dictates that one lies when one utters a falsehood with the intent to deceive. Thus, our common sense idea of a lie focuses on the speaker and his intentions not on the hearer and their expectations. Perhaps more reasonable is our common sense feeling that it is sometimes OK to lie when the consequences of telling the truth are dire. So, if someone asks where you mother is and clearly has the intention of finding her and commit murder most foul, few of us would feel that we violate our moral duty to tell the truth by lying to this person. So is it the case that telling the truth about Santa would cause more harm to our children? Hardly! In fact the opposite seems to be the case. We actually cause more harm by perpetuating this falsehood. In the first instance what we do is to teach our children that they cannot trust us. They then lack any reason to believe what the parent says about other, more important things. For instance, the child might equate what the parent says about God with what they say about Santa. In the second place what we do is to teach our children that it is OK to lie for no good reason. What the child learns is that the truth is not valuable. So, far from being a harmless ‘white lie’ this is quite a damaging tradition

The most common defense for this behavior appeals to a sense of the mystery of child-hood or ‘child-like innocence’. What is wrong, it is often asked, with having a little magic in ones childhood? Isn’t it just like a child believing in Red Riding Hood or Hobbit’s End? The difference between these kinds of cases should be obvious. In one case we tell the child that it is a fable, or a fairy tale. In the other case we go out of our way to deceive the child. I mean, no one leaves things out for the Big Bad Wolf. Santa Claus is portrayed as real, not only in the story but also by the parents. No parents pretend that Darth Vader is real but when I was on a plane on Christmas Eve the PILOT announced over the intercom that he had spotted Santa on the radar!!!!  And, while it may be Ok to omit certain information in order to protect a child it is absolutely immoral to actively perpetuate a lie.

Thus, according to both deontological and utilitarian moral theories it is immoral to lie to ones kid about the existence of Santa Claus. It causes more harm than good and we violate our duty to tell the truth. I think it hardly worth mentioning that it is also vicious and so would be ruled out by any virtue ethics. There is no moral theory that condones this behavior. We do our children, and ourselves, a great disservice by prolonging this nonsense.

Freedom and Evil

Richard Brown 19 Comments

The existence of evil in the world poses a serious challenge to the claim that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving being (henceforth ‘God’).  Perhaps the most common response to the problem of evil is the free will defense. According to this defense the reason that there is evil is because God gave us free will and some people make the choice to be (or to do) evil. This is captured in the story of Adam and Eve. God told them not to eat the fruit and they freely chose to disobey. Even Satan is portrayed as exercising free will when he rebels against God. Thus God is still all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving and evil exists.

The next natural question is ‘if our having free will is the reason that there is evil, then why did God give it to us?’ The answer to this question is that it is better to have free will. A world where there is free will and, unfortunately, some evil is better than a world of pure automatons where there is no evil. Some have even held that we can know this to be true from that fact that we have free will in the first place. From the premise that God could have created any world he wanted to, and the observation that he created this world, it would seem to follow that this is the best of all possible worlds, evil and all!

J.L.Mackie, inhis famous article “Evil and Omnipotence” makes a very interesting response to this kind of argument, which I think has been under appreciated. His argument is actually pretty simple. It is perfectly obvious that I sometimes freely choose to do the right thing, so it is not logically impossible that God should have made me so that I always freely choose to do the right thing. What this shows is that the world we live in is not the best of all possible worlds that God could have created. He could have made a better world where people always freely chose to do the right thing; a world where people were free but in which the Holocaust could not happen. So again, either he is not all-loving or not all-powerful. Another way of making Mackie’s point is by asking ‘why it is that our being free requires that we be allowed to do evil?’ This seems to me to be a very powerful response. If God could have made us so that we always freely choose to do good then the Free Will defense, which I take to be the only response to the problem of evil that had a chance of answering the argument, fails to do so.

It has been my experience that people do not like this argument. The most common objection I hear is that to really be free all options must be on the table, including the evil ones. Mackie objects to this because it assumes that “choices and actions can be ‘free’ only if they are not determined by [the] characters [of those that choose or act]”. This response is rather obviously biased towards some kind of compatibilism, but I do not think that we need to endores a view like that to make Makie’s argument work.  

On a very common sense view about what it means to have free will it turns out to be perfectly reasonable to claim that God could have made us so that we always freely chose to do good. Though there are those who would disagree, a useful way to characterize freedom of the will is in terms of being able to have done other than what we actually did do. This is often summed up in the slogan ‘could of done otherwise’. So, for example, this morning when I got up I had a cup of coffee, but it seems to me that I could have been able to have had tea instead. I did not have to have coffee this morning. Now the next thing we have to talk about is what does it mean to have been able to do otherwise?   It is certainly the case that as I am falling to my death from the Empire
State building, I could have done otherwise in the sense that I might have avoided falling off in the first place, but now that I am falling it is out of my control. Does this mean that I am not free? NO! As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out, even a jailed man is free. His actions are limited but his will is free.

So why couldn’t God have made it the case that I always freely choose good? If it is to be freedom then in any given case I must have been able to do other than what I actually did do, but all this requires is that I have options, not that some of those options be evil! I am not free to fly, or to be the Queen of England, and yet I am free, so why couldn’t God have made doing evil like flying? Putting things this way let’s us be neutral about theories of free will and keep the insight of Mackie’s argument.

What Kripke Really Thinks

Richard Brown 1 Comment

In an earlier post I introduced a distinction between rigidity, a semantic property that some words have and that others lack, and frigidity, a pragmatic property whereby reference is determined by how a word is used. In this post, I argue that frigidity actually better captures what Kripke is talking about. Upon looking at what Kripke says it seems undeniable that what he is concerned about is the truth conditions of utterances that express singular thoughts. Thus our intuitions about the truth of sentences like 1. and 2. are really intuitions about the thoughts that these sentences are taken to be used to express.

1. The first great analytic philosopher might not have been the first great analytic philosopher
2. Bertrand Russell might not have been Bertrand Russell

That is, our intuitions are about particular uses of sentences and Kripke is talking about token utterances. This means that who these sentences depend on for their truth can vary depending on how they are used, and hence that frigidity better captures Kripke’s idea.

This becomes much clearer when we look at Kripke’s later article, “Speaker Reference and Semantic Reference,” (Kripke 1977/1991) where he is much more explicit about what the jobs of semantics and pragmatics are.  He begins, following Grice, by distinguishing between speaker and semantic meaning.

The notion of what words can mean in a language is semantical: it is given by the conventions of our language. What they mean on a given occasion is determined, on a given occasion, by these conventions, together with the intentions of the speaker and various contextual features. Finally what the speaker meant, on a given occasion, in saying certain words, derives from various further special intentions, taken together with various general principles applicable to all human languages regardless of their special conventions (Cf. Grice’s maxims) (SR p 84)

So, in effect we have three kinds of meaning. We have the general meaning of the words as given by the conventions of the language (what Grice called timeless meaning (Grice 1957/1994)), we have the meaning of the words on a given occasion which is determined by the conventions of the language and the intentions of the speaker and ‘various contextual features’. This allows us to resolve any ambiguities, figure out what any indexical or demonstrative elements are being used for and in general determine what proposition the sentence expresses. Finally we have what the speaker meant on a given occasion in saying what they did, which may diverge from what the sentence that they said means on that occasion.

So far this all looks like standard the Gricean picture. Kripke then goes on to distinguish the semantic referent of a term from the speaker’s referent, which he says are special cases of semantic and speaker meaning. 

…the semantic referent of a designator is given by a general intention of the speaker to refer to a certain object whenever the designator is used. The speaker’s referent is given by a specific intention, on a given occasion, to refer to a certain object (p 84)

The semantic referent is given by a general intention which means that I have a general intention to refer to Kripke by using ‘Kripke’.  This means that I have something like a standing intention; I generally use tokens of ‘Kripke’ as a way of referring to Kripke. As he says,

…he uses ‘Jones’ as a name of Jones-elaborate this according to your favorite theory of proper names-and, on this occasion, simply whishes to use ‘Jones’ to refer to Jones,” (ibid).

The reason that I am able to do this is elaborated by his favorite theory of names, which is a causal theory. So, who it is that I have in mind is determined by the causal link that the name (token) has to an individual. This determines who the thought is about.The picture he is developing seems to be like this. When things go right, the speaker has someone in mind, that is, has a singular thought about a particular person, has a word that he (generally) uses as a name for that person (this person is the semantic referent of the term) and on this occasion he intends to refer to that person by using the name (this is the speaker reference).

Now let us return to the question at hand. When we evaluate sentences like 1. and 2. what is it that we are evaluating? I have suggested that Kripke thinks we are evaluating sentences that are taken to express singular thoughts. That is, thoughts about a particular individual. It is in this way that we can understand why Kripke thinks that the test for rigidity is a metaphysical one. This emerges clearly when Kripke says,

In practice it is usual to suppose that what is meant in a particular use of a sentence is understood from the context. In the present instance, that context made it clear that it was the conventional use of ‘Aristotle’ for the great philosopher that was in question. Then, given this fixed understanding of [Aristotle was fond of dogs], the question of rigidity is this: Is the correctness of [Aristotle was fond of dogs], thus understood, determined with respect to each counter-factual situation by whether a certain single person would have liked dogs (had that situation obtained)? …this question is entirely unaffected by the presence or absence in the language of other readings [of the sentence]. For each such particular reading separately, we can ask whether what is expressed would be true of a counter-factual situation if and only if some fixed individual has the appropriate property. (NN P.9)

Kripke means to be talking about sentences as used on a particular occasion. What he is concerned with is particular uses of sentences, and their meaning and reference are determined by who the speaker has in mind and his intentions. So the big picture is that we express a singular thought about something and we want to know the truth conditions for it. The way we determine the truth conditions of the thought is by looking at the token utterance that we take as expressing it and as we have seen this is done partly by the speaker’s intentions (since ‘Aristotle’ names more than one object), and partly due to the context of utterance. This is called semantics because we are talking about truth-conditions, but it is important to see that on this view it is token sentences that get evaluated and that these token sentences are taken as expressing singular thoughts.

Introduing Frigidity

Richard Brown 4 Comments

Recently there has been a lot of talk, here at this blog (Kripke, Consciousness and the ‘Corn, and Two Concepts of Transitive Consciousness)  and over at the Brain Hammer (Me So ‘Corny, Kripkenite, and Crushing Puppies, Superman) about kripke and causal theories of reference. I have been arguing that a causal theory of reference is independently motivated and if we happen to like higher-order theories of consciousness it gives us a very nice answer to several objections that seem wide spread and in fact gives us an implementation of the higher-order strategy and saves very many of the Cartesian intuitions that people have about consciousness.

But even though I think that all of this is true, I do not think that there is any such thing as rigidity. That is I do not think that there is a semantic property that names have and that definite descriptions lack. Following Kent Bach, I deny that there are any rigid designators in natural languages. I addressed this in my PMS WIPS  Kripke, Devitt, Bach where I introduce ‘Frigidity’ and ‘frigid stipulation’ as a contrast to rigidity and rigid designation but I thought I would bring it up again…

The semantic thesis of rigidity is that the meaning of a name is its reference and since the meaning of our terms stay the same when we evaluate modal scenarios then the individual that is relevant to determining the truth of the sentence in question stays the same, whereas for descriptions the meanings of the terms stay the same and the individual that is relevant to determining the truth of the sentence can vary. So consider the following pair of sentences.

   1. The greatest living philosopher likes tea
   2. Saul Kripke likes tea

The meanings of all the words in (1) stay the same but its truth will vary depending on when you say it. It is true now because it (arguably) picks out Kripke (and he does like tea), but it might have been false if said in 362 BCE, and true again in 1905 because its truth depends on different people at different times (Aristotle and Russell respectively). (1) also behaves this way when we evaluate it with respect to modal scenarios. So we can imagine that Kripke never became a philosopher (maybe he became a shoe salesman) (1) would then designate someone else (perhaps Putnam).  The name ‘Saul Kripke’ on the other hand names the same person in all modal contexts where the actual Saul Kripke exists (hence it wouldn’t name him before his birth, or in fact before his initial baptism). The truth of (2) depends on just one individual for its truth if it depends on anybody; the truth of (1) can depend on many individuals.

The pragmatic thesis of frigidity, on the other hand, separates meaning from reference. The meaning of a name is one thing, how it is used to refer another. The meaning of a name contributes to determining the truth-conditions of the sentence in which it occurs but the sentence can only be true when it is used to perform some speech act or other.  So in order to evaluate the following sentences for truth we must first take them to be particular utterances, said by someone.

3. The first great analytic philosopher taught Wittgenstein
4. Betrand Russell taught Wittgenstein

(3) and (4) by themselves are not true or false; they have conditions which specify when they would be true, but it is only the sentence as used that actually has a truth value. Who is relevant to determining the truth of an utterance is a property of how language is used, so whether (3) and (4) depend on the same individual or not depends on how someone uses them rather than on the meaning of the words.

The obvious fact that the truth conditions for sentences like (4) and (2) vary depending on who the speaker means to be referring to is an argument against rigidity and for frigidity. But again, this is all a clam about sentences, not about thoughts. On this view, the causal theory of reference is a theory that tells us how it is that we can have singular thoughts.

Kripke, Consciousness, and the ‘Corn

Richard Brown 7 Comments

Most of you guys probably know Pete Mandik as the bassist and/or singer for the world’s premier Zombies Blues Band, NC/DC and the Devastating Objections

He has also been hammering out an argument against higher-order theories of consciousness that he calls The Unicorn, which tries to show that theories that implement the higher-order strategy via a higher-order thought theory, as Rosenthal does, can’t be right. This is because, Pete argues, these kinds of theories claim that conscious states are states that come to have the property of being represented by a higher-order thought. This would be fine, but there is no such property, for if there were that would mean that unicorns could have it, since we represent them in thought. Closely related to the unicorn argument is the objection to higher-order theories from the possibility of the occurrence of the higher-order state in the absence of the first-order state. What state is it that has the property of being conscious?
 
I ave argued that this argument does not threaten Rosenthal’s version of higher-order theory because for him the higher-order thought does not ‘transfer’ or ‘confer’ the property of consciousness to the first order state. For him the property of being a conscious state consists solely in my representing myself as being in a certain state. The first-order state is not changed in any way by the higher-order thought. The only thing that has changed is that the creature is now aware of itself as being in the states. In the last post I relied on this in making my argument that the higher-order strategy commits people like Rosenthal to the claim that thoughts are qualitative. Now, if one wants to, one can say that the creature has gained a new property, that of being aware of itself as being in a certain state, but he certainly wouldn’t say that a state’s being conscious was a matter of it acquiring a property that it did not have before.

Now, though Rosenthal says this, and it is an answer to the unicorn argument, it is held by most to be puzzling. Intuitively what most people think when they think of the higher-order strategy is that the higher-order state makes the first-order state a conscious state. But now we are told that that is not the case. The higher-order thought makes us conscious of ourselves as being in a certain state, but the first-order state plays no role in determining what it is like for us to have the state in question.

But there is another way of thinking about the relationship between the first-order state and the higher-order thought that represents it. Rosenthal thinks of this relationship as descriptive. The higher-order state describes the person as being in a certain first-order state which is located at such and such a place in some quality space in the case of sensory experiences. In the case of beliefs and desires the higher-order thought describes the person as having a belief or desire with such and such a content. I call these kinds of higher-order thoughts Q-HOT’s. The other way of thinking about this relationship is along the lines of the causal theory of reference. On this way of construing the higher-order thought theory a first-order state is a conscious state if and only if it causes, in the right sort of way,  a higher-order state to the effect that one is in that state.  I call these K-HOT’s.

Now, I don’t really know if the higher-order thought theory of consciousness is true or not, but it seems to me that it has got a good shot at being true. It is not obviously false. But I think that if one is going to have a higher-order thought theory then it is better to cast it in terms of K-HOT’s. It solves the problem of the unicorn as well as the problem of the non-existent state. We will never have K-HOT’s about non-existent states. Every K-higher-order thought is caused by some first-order state and if all we mean by ‘has the property of being represented’ is this causal reference relation then the first-order state will have the property of being represented. There are other advantages that recommend this modification to higher-order thought theory, but I have to go grade papers and so I will come back to them.