11.24.2006
I've Moved! (Update Links and Bookmarks)
This will be the last post here at Stop That Crow! No, I am not quitting blogging altogether. Rather I have moved to a new site at wordpress: Minds, Meaning and Morals. I have transferred all of my posts over to the new site so there will be no need to have this site linked or bookmarked anymore. Nevertheless, I keep Stop That Crow! up, if only because I have so many links to old post embedded within the posts which I transferred. I hope you like that changes and look forward to seeing you at my new home.
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11.20.2006
Ambiguities and Affairs (Updated)
In his paper, Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference, Saul Kripke argues that the distinction between the attributive use and referential use of language does not, contra Donnellan, amount to a refutation of Russell’s account of definite descriptions. The purpose of this paper will be to describe the arguments which Kripke provides in favor of such a conclusion as well as various objections which can be raised against him. It will also be shown how Kripke can adequately respond to such criticisms.
As a thought experiment, suppose that two people at a party, John and Mary, observe a man wearing a wedding ring and being very kind and affectionate to a woman who is also wearing a wedding ring, the very same woman with which he arrived to the party. John remarks to Mary,
(1) “Her husband is very kind to her.”
As far as Mary and John can tell, (1) is true. Suppose, however, that Carl, in contrast to John and Mary, knows that the man who is with the woman at the party is actually not her husband. Instead, she is at the party with her lover into whose arms she was driven precisely due to the cruelty of her actual husband.
The two questions which Carl asks himself are these: Is (1) about the woman’s actual husband or is it about the man whom John and Mary take to be her husband? Is (1) true or false? It is important to notice that these questions are not about the beliefs which John and Mary have. Rather, the first question asks who (1) is actually about. The second question follows from the first in that the truth or falsity of (1) depends not upon what any person believes, but rather upon who (1) is actually about.
Carl’s questions seem like relatively open ones in that our intuitions regarding the reference as well as the truth or falsity of (1) are in conflict with each other. While Donnellan does not himself assert that (1) is itself actually true, he does contend that it is a referential use of language in that (1) is about the lover rather than the actual husband. The utterance of “her husband” is simply helpful material which John uses to pick the woman’s lover out to Mary in order to describe him as being kind to her. Accordingly, contra Russell, (1) “can [and does] refer to the lover and say, of him, that he is kind to her.” (Ostertag, 235) Since Russell held that descriptions do not actually refer, the very openness of Carl’s questions counts as evidence against Russell’s theory, since (1) could never be about the lover under such a theory.
Kripke, however, denies that such cases count as evidence against Russell’s theory of descriptions, for such cases would arise even if the latter’s theory were correct. Consider a hypothetical case in which an entire community speaks a strong Russellian language in that all descriptions must be spelled out in their full Russellian logic; no definite descriptions allowed. Within such a context, at a very similar party, Juan remarks to Maria,
(2) “She has exactly one husband and he (the husband) is kind to her.”
These strong Russellians, however, are no more infallible in their use of language than are John and Mary and thus both Juan and Maria believe (2) to be a true sentence.
The important question, however, is what does Carlos (Carl’s strong Russellian counterpart) judge of (2)? Is there an ambiguity in reference or truth-value in (2)? Carlos, the strong Russellian, must conclude that Juan’s remark to Maria was unequivocally false, for the woman does indeed have exactly one husband, and that husband is certainly not kind to her. There is no ambiguity in reference and hence no conflict in strong Russellian intuitions. Accordingly, the Donnellanian seems to be safe in concluding that the conflict in Carl’s intuitions does count as evidence against Russell’s theory after all. For contrary to Kripke’s claim, the evidence which former sees against latter’s account does not arise within a strong Russellian community.
Kripke rejects such a conclusion, for a number of important details regarding the nature of the strong Russellian community have been left out. For starters, a proper distinction has not been drawn between semantic reference and speaker reference. Briefly, the semantic referent of “her husband” is her actual husband. The speaker’s referent is that which the speaker believes to satisfy the semantic referent, namely the woman’s lover in the case of both (1) and (2). The fallibility of belief, Kripke points out, is what allows the speaker’s reference to come apart from the semantic reference in cases such as these. Nevertheless, we have still seen no conflict in intuitions in the case of (2), and it was this conflict which resulted from an ambiguity in reference that Donnellan took to be evidence against any Russellian account of descriptions.
The openness of Carl’s questions, according to the Kripke, derives from an ambiguity in scope which is inherent in (1). Should the strong Russellian translation of (1) be (2), or should it instead be
(3) “Exactly one man is kind to her and he (the lover) is her husband”?
Carlos’ response in the case of (2) would be, “No he (the husband) isn’t, the man you’re referring to isn’t her husband,” and “He (the lover) is kind to her, but he isn’t her husband,” in the case of (3). (Ostertag, 247) In each case, the response of Carlos would be to point out the difference which existed between semantic reference and speaker’s reference. It is due to this ambiguity in the scope of (1) which makes Carl’s questions appear to be open, when in fact they are not once the ambiguity of scope is removed. Both readings ((2) and (3)) of (1) are clear both as to their semantic content as well as their truth-value (false).
Donnellan, however, may object that these two replies still suggest that some reference is being made after all. Speaker reference is still a form of reference, and the strong Russellians are not supposed to be referring in their use of definite descriptions. To this Kripke replies that speaker reference within the strong Russellian community, is not the same as Donnellan’s concept of referential use. Referential use, for Donnellan, holds that in the case of (1) “her husband” actually refers to the woman’s lover, thereby making (1) (possibly) true since it is about the lover rather than the husband. In the case of speaker reference, however, the lover is simply the individual which both Juan and Maria believe to satisfy the category “her husband.” There is nothing in the Russellian account which precludes the public availability of Juan and Maria’s beliefs by way of gesture, context, etc.
Thus, according to Kripke there are two potential sources of ambiguity, neither of which is due to some difference or ambiguity between attributive and referential language use. First, in the case of (1), there is an ambiguity in scope which does not exist in the case of the strong Russellian community. Second, there is some potential ambiguity in how “clear” the speaker’s reference is communicated in each particular case. This second source of ambiguity still exists within the strong Russellian community. Nevertheless, despite this second source of ambiguity, (1) is unambiguously false in the strong Russellian context.
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As a thought experiment, suppose that two people at a party, John and Mary, observe a man wearing a wedding ring and being very kind and affectionate to a woman who is also wearing a wedding ring, the very same woman with which he arrived to the party. John remarks to Mary,
(1) “Her husband is very kind to her.”
As far as Mary and John can tell, (1) is true. Suppose, however, that Carl, in contrast to John and Mary, knows that the man who is with the woman at the party is actually not her husband. Instead, she is at the party with her lover into whose arms she was driven precisely due to the cruelty of her actual husband.
The two questions which Carl asks himself are these: Is (1) about the woman’s actual husband or is it about the man whom John and Mary take to be her husband? Is (1) true or false? It is important to notice that these questions are not about the beliefs which John and Mary have. Rather, the first question asks who (1) is actually about. The second question follows from the first in that the truth or falsity of (1) depends not upon what any person believes, but rather upon who (1) is actually about.
Carl’s questions seem like relatively open ones in that our intuitions regarding the reference as well as the truth or falsity of (1) are in conflict with each other. While Donnellan does not himself assert that (1) is itself actually true, he does contend that it is a referential use of language in that (1) is about the lover rather than the actual husband. The utterance of “her husband” is simply helpful material which John uses to pick the woman’s lover out to Mary in order to describe him as being kind to her. Accordingly, contra Russell, (1) “can [and does] refer to the lover and say, of him, that he is kind to her.” (Ostertag, 235) Since Russell held that descriptions do not actually refer, the very openness of Carl’s questions counts as evidence against Russell’s theory, since (1) could never be about the lover under such a theory.
Kripke, however, denies that such cases count as evidence against Russell’s theory of descriptions, for such cases would arise even if the latter’s theory were correct. Consider a hypothetical case in which an entire community speaks a strong Russellian language in that all descriptions must be spelled out in their full Russellian logic; no definite descriptions allowed. Within such a context, at a very similar party, Juan remarks to Maria,
(2) “She has exactly one husband and he (the husband) is kind to her.”
These strong Russellians, however, are no more infallible in their use of language than are John and Mary and thus both Juan and Maria believe (2) to be a true sentence.
The important question, however, is what does Carlos (Carl’s strong Russellian counterpart) judge of (2)? Is there an ambiguity in reference or truth-value in (2)? Carlos, the strong Russellian, must conclude that Juan’s remark to Maria was unequivocally false, for the woman does indeed have exactly one husband, and that husband is certainly not kind to her. There is no ambiguity in reference and hence no conflict in strong Russellian intuitions. Accordingly, the Donnellanian seems to be safe in concluding that the conflict in Carl’s intuitions does count as evidence against Russell’s theory after all. For contrary to Kripke’s claim, the evidence which former sees against latter’s account does not arise within a strong Russellian community.
Kripke rejects such a conclusion, for a number of important details regarding the nature of the strong Russellian community have been left out. For starters, a proper distinction has not been drawn between semantic reference and speaker reference. Briefly, the semantic referent of “her husband” is her actual husband. The speaker’s referent is that which the speaker believes to satisfy the semantic referent, namely the woman’s lover in the case of both (1) and (2). The fallibility of belief, Kripke points out, is what allows the speaker’s reference to come apart from the semantic reference in cases such as these. Nevertheless, we have still seen no conflict in intuitions in the case of (2), and it was this conflict which resulted from an ambiguity in reference that Donnellan took to be evidence against any Russellian account of descriptions.
The openness of Carl’s questions, according to the Kripke, derives from an ambiguity in scope which is inherent in (1). Should the strong Russellian translation of (1) be (2), or should it instead be
(3) “Exactly one man is kind to her and he (the lover) is her husband”?
Carlos’ response in the case of (2) would be, “No he (the husband) isn’t, the man you’re referring to isn’t her husband,” and “He (the lover) is kind to her, but he isn’t her husband,” in the case of (3). (Ostertag, 247) In each case, the response of Carlos would be to point out the difference which existed between semantic reference and speaker’s reference. It is due to this ambiguity in the scope of (1) which makes Carl’s questions appear to be open, when in fact they are not once the ambiguity of scope is removed. Both readings ((2) and (3)) of (1) are clear both as to their semantic content as well as their truth-value (false).
Donnellan, however, may object that these two replies still suggest that some reference is being made after all. Speaker reference is still a form of reference, and the strong Russellians are not supposed to be referring in their use of definite descriptions. To this Kripke replies that speaker reference within the strong Russellian community, is not the same as Donnellan’s concept of referential use. Referential use, for Donnellan, holds that in the case of (1) “her husband” actually refers to the woman’s lover, thereby making (1) (possibly) true since it is about the lover rather than the husband. In the case of speaker reference, however, the lover is simply the individual which both Juan and Maria believe to satisfy the category “her husband.” There is nothing in the Russellian account which precludes the public availability of Juan and Maria’s beliefs by way of gesture, context, etc.
Thus, according to Kripke there are two potential sources of ambiguity, neither of which is due to some difference or ambiguity between attributive and referential language use. First, in the case of (1), there is an ambiguity in scope which does not exist in the case of the strong Russellian community. Second, there is some potential ambiguity in how “clear” the speaker’s reference is communicated in each particular case. This second source of ambiguity still exists within the strong Russellian community. Nevertheless, despite this second source of ambiguity, (1) is unambiguously false in the strong Russellian context.
Filed in: language
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11.15.2006
Science as a Map of the World
While the constructionist depiction of science as just one among many crafts which man engages in is clearly extreme and absurd, the principles which underlie such a claim cannot simply be swept under the rug and ignored. Science, as well as scientific knowledge is a largely man made construal of nature rather than some mirror of reality which the scientists “unearth.” Where the constructivists went wrong is in not acknowledging the manner in which reality strongly constrains such construals. Yes, we can only begin to reason about reality once a contingent and corrigible classification scheme and fundamental assumptions is in place, but this does not change the fact that there is an objective reality which such schemes are about. While there may be no one, True, God’s-eye conceptual scheme available from which to view this objective reality, the very fact that there is an objective reality to which all conceptual schemes refer entails that some conceptual schemes are better than others.
But what does “better” mean in this context? By “better” we simply cannot mean “true”, for truth, universality and knowledge are all things that only makes sense within a conceptual scheme. There is no meta-scheme in which one conceptual scheme can be defined as true in any meaningful way. Thus, the problem of scientific knowledge as platonic truth is three-fold:
1. We have no established method for discovering truth.
2. We have no way or recognizing truth when or if we do discover it.
3. Truth is a concept which is constructed rather than discovered.
In other words, we have no way of finding what truth is in the book of nature, we have no way of recognizing truth even if we do happen to find it in the book of nature, and worse still, there is no one, true book of nature at all. The same can also be said for rationality, objectivity, knowledge and science.
This, however, seems to leave the door wide open for an anything-goes chaos in the realm of science. After all, how are we supposed to know what is and is not science if there is no cosmic dictionary or prewritten book of nature which can be consulted? Who gets to decide what is and is not science, and how can we know if they are right? Why is dark matter fair game in the science class room, but intelligent design or even flat out young earth creationism not? These are not easy questions to answer in a definitive manner.
The fact is that whether a theory is scientific or not is decided primarily (exclusively?) by the scientific community itself. This community does not arbitrarily grant the status of science to one theory while withholding it from another equally “good” theory. Rather, they ask questions concerning testability, falsifiability, explanatory power, consistency, scope, etc.
What, in turn, justifies these criteria? Principle underlies the principle of science? The answer is fertility. Does a theory work to control and predict phenomena with greater consistency, accuracy and scope? Does it raise workable problems? Fertility is what justifies the scientific assumption that the natural world is a closed system as well as methodological naturalism in general. Dark matter is considered to be a potentially fertile theory and is thus accepted as a scientific theory, while intelligent design is not.
Fertility, it should be noted, does not overcome the three-fold barrier to truth which science faces, nor does it claim to. Fertility does not establish one conceptual scheme as being true, nor does it make the existence of such a scheme more plausible. Fertility, we have seen, is not a reliable indicator of whether some theory is true or not. Fertility is interpreted as a somewhat reliable path to truth, although it is doubtful that such a metaphor even makes sense given the other two barriers which science faces. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that fertility is seen as a reliable path to fertility.
In this respect Philip Kitcher’s metaphor of science as “mapping” reality is convenient and compelling. A map is about the world, but no map can ever be the one “true” map of the world, for such a map would be the world itself. Thus, road maps, detail maps, oil field maps, topological maps, whether maps, etc. are all different ways of modeling or mapping the world, none of which can be said to be the “true” map. Additionally, truths of the world, indeed, the very world itself can only be encountered and described relative to the assumptions and schematics which structure any given map. How good or how fertile a map is, is determined in large part by what we want to do with it, but even more so by the actual nature of the objective world which the map is supposed to model.
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But what does “better” mean in this context? By “better” we simply cannot mean “true”, for truth, universality and knowledge are all things that only makes sense within a conceptual scheme. There is no meta-scheme in which one conceptual scheme can be defined as true in any meaningful way. Thus, the problem of scientific knowledge as platonic truth is three-fold:
1. We have no established method for discovering truth.
2. We have no way or recognizing truth when or if we do discover it.
3. Truth is a concept which is constructed rather than discovered.
In other words, we have no way of finding what truth is in the book of nature, we have no way of recognizing truth even if we do happen to find it in the book of nature, and worse still, there is no one, true book of nature at all. The same can also be said for rationality, objectivity, knowledge and science.
This, however, seems to leave the door wide open for an anything-goes chaos in the realm of science. After all, how are we supposed to know what is and is not science if there is no cosmic dictionary or prewritten book of nature which can be consulted? Who gets to decide what is and is not science, and how can we know if they are right? Why is dark matter fair game in the science class room, but intelligent design or even flat out young earth creationism not? These are not easy questions to answer in a definitive manner.
The fact is that whether a theory is scientific or not is decided primarily (exclusively?) by the scientific community itself. This community does not arbitrarily grant the status of science to one theory while withholding it from another equally “good” theory. Rather, they ask questions concerning testability, falsifiability, explanatory power, consistency, scope, etc.
What, in turn, justifies these criteria? Principle underlies the principle of science? The answer is fertility. Does a theory work to control and predict phenomena with greater consistency, accuracy and scope? Does it raise workable problems? Fertility is what justifies the scientific assumption that the natural world is a closed system as well as methodological naturalism in general. Dark matter is considered to be a potentially fertile theory and is thus accepted as a scientific theory, while intelligent design is not.
Fertility, it should be noted, does not overcome the three-fold barrier to truth which science faces, nor does it claim to. Fertility does not establish one conceptual scheme as being true, nor does it make the existence of such a scheme more plausible. Fertility, we have seen, is not a reliable indicator of whether some theory is true or not. Fertility is interpreted as a somewhat reliable path to truth, although it is doubtful that such a metaphor even makes sense given the other two barriers which science faces. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that fertility is seen as a reliable path to fertility.
In this respect Philip Kitcher’s metaphor of science as “mapping” reality is convenient and compelling. A map is about the world, but no map can ever be the one “true” map of the world, for such a map would be the world itself. Thus, road maps, detail maps, oil field maps, topological maps, whether maps, etc. are all different ways of modeling or mapping the world, none of which can be said to be the “true” map. Additionally, truths of the world, indeed, the very world itself can only be encountered and described relative to the assumptions and schematics which structure any given map. How good or how fertile a map is, is determined in large part by what we want to do with it, but even more so by the actual nature of the objective world which the map is supposed to model.
Filed in: science
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Bodily Motion and Human Action
In his book The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle asserts that the basic constitutive rule by which social facts are created is of the form “X counts as Y in C” where X is a brute physical fact, Y is the social fact and C is the conditions in which X counts as Y. In this paper, I will describe the manner in which this rule functions in order to create various human actions (Y) out of one and the same mere bodily movement (X) within different contexts (C).
Consider the bodily movement of lifting one’s right hand in the air. As mere bodily motion, this movement means absolutely nothing; it is pure matter in motion which has no purpose or meaning to it. It is only by the application of collective intentionality (beliefs and desires) that such mere bodily movement comes to count as different human actions across different contexts.
For example, raising one’s right hand in the context of a court room with a left hand placed upon a Bible counts (partially) as swearing an oath. In the context of a heated argument with another person, raising one’s right hand counts as a rather threatening gesture. In the context of a marriage ceremony, raising one’s right hand immediately after the priest asks if anybody objects to the marriage, counts as objecting to the marriage. In some contexts, raising one’s hand counts as voting for or against something. In each of these cases, the same bodily motion (X) constitutes a very different action (Y).
While I have made the differences in the external aspects of context explicit in each of the examples, the essential difference between each action (Y) is due not to any external aspect of the context of each event, but rather to those aspects of the context which are internal to all member of the society which count raising the right-hand as each particular “Y”. It is intentionality which mere bodily movement lacks to become human action and intentionality is always internal to some agent. Without intentionality, the mere raising of the right hand would never amount to any more or less than mere matter in motion.
This is not to say, however, that the external context plays no determining role in the case of each action. While the external environment is not by itself a sufficient condition for a mere bodily movement counting as a human action, it is still a necessary condition for such. The external environment plays a significant role in not only determining whether raising the right hand will be counted by a society of intentional agents as voting, objecting, swearing, threatening, etc., but it also determines whether the raising of the hand will or will not amount to a human action or not. In some external contexts, such as shock therapy, raising the right arm simply is raising the right arm and nothing more. It is precisely due to this role which the external context plays that the interpretation of a single bodily movement in such diverse ways is such an effortless as well as reliable process in our everyday lives.
Indeed, so constrictive is the external environment in the interpretation of such bodily movement that it makes the faking of many human actions logically impossible. One cannot merely pretend to swear on the Bible in court; one either raises the hand or not. Similarly, one cannot pretend to gesture in a threatening way, object at a wedding or pretend to vote for the bodily movement in such external contexts constitutes swearing, threatening, objecting and voting, respectively. One might wonder how acting is possible, but such an objection only furthers my point for the external context (of a play, movie, etc.) determines whether the action is acting or not. It is precisely due to the context that actors are not really swearing, threatening, objecting and voting.
The implications which the contrast between mere bodily movement and human action has upon behaviorism are significant, for the behaviorist must limit their observation and explanation to mere bodily movement and external environment. Any recourse to intentional content must be either reduced to or defined instrumentally in terms of those two publicly observable components, if not eliminated altogether. Accordingly, the behaviorist denies that swearing, threatening, objecting and voting even exist. Such phenomena must be regarded either as a mere shorthand for extraordinarily complex relations which hold between bodily movement and external context, or as merely useful fictions.
While the behaviorist claim that all intentional content can in principle be defined in terms of publicly observable bodily movement and context, it is not clear that it should be done in practice. It seems prima facie obvious that when the behaviorist speaks of swearing, etc. they do not mean the same thing as what the “normal” person means by such terms. In other words, the social scientist is supposed to be studying the actual process of voting in a society, not the extraordinarily complex relation which holds between bodily motion and the external context. The latter sounds not only hopelessly complex and therefore elusive to the social scientist, but it also seems like an entirely different subject matter altogether.
Even if it can be argued that such a behaviorist approach to social science should be implemented, it can be argued that such an approach is impossible in practice altogether. By limiting herself to mere bodily movement and external context, the strict behaviorist has isolated herself from all communication, including that of colleagues and subjects. After all, speaking and writing can only be viewed as mere bodily motion (or sound-making) within a particular and highly varying external context which does not actually mean anything. The idea that the social scientist should, or even can exclude all intentional content from their subject matter is simply absurd.
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Consider the bodily movement of lifting one’s right hand in the air. As mere bodily motion, this movement means absolutely nothing; it is pure matter in motion which has no purpose or meaning to it. It is only by the application of collective intentionality (beliefs and desires) that such mere bodily movement comes to count as different human actions across different contexts.
For example, raising one’s right hand in the context of a court room with a left hand placed upon a Bible counts (partially) as swearing an oath. In the context of a heated argument with another person, raising one’s right hand counts as a rather threatening gesture. In the context of a marriage ceremony, raising one’s right hand immediately after the priest asks if anybody objects to the marriage, counts as objecting to the marriage. In some contexts, raising one’s hand counts as voting for or against something. In each of these cases, the same bodily motion (X) constitutes a very different action (Y).
While I have made the differences in the external aspects of context explicit in each of the examples, the essential difference between each action (Y) is due not to any external aspect of the context of each event, but rather to those aspects of the context which are internal to all member of the society which count raising the right-hand as each particular “Y”. It is intentionality which mere bodily movement lacks to become human action and intentionality is always internal to some agent. Without intentionality, the mere raising of the right hand would never amount to any more or less than mere matter in motion.
This is not to say, however, that the external context plays no determining role in the case of each action. While the external environment is not by itself a sufficient condition for a mere bodily movement counting as a human action, it is still a necessary condition for such. The external environment plays a significant role in not only determining whether raising the right hand will be counted by a society of intentional agents as voting, objecting, swearing, threatening, etc., but it also determines whether the raising of the hand will or will not amount to a human action or not. In some external contexts, such as shock therapy, raising the right arm simply is raising the right arm and nothing more. It is precisely due to this role which the external context plays that the interpretation of a single bodily movement in such diverse ways is such an effortless as well as reliable process in our everyday lives.
Indeed, so constrictive is the external environment in the interpretation of such bodily movement that it makes the faking of many human actions logically impossible. One cannot merely pretend to swear on the Bible in court; one either raises the hand or not. Similarly, one cannot pretend to gesture in a threatening way, object at a wedding or pretend to vote for the bodily movement in such external contexts constitutes swearing, threatening, objecting and voting, respectively. One might wonder how acting is possible, but such an objection only furthers my point for the external context (of a play, movie, etc.) determines whether the action is acting or not. It is precisely due to the context that actors are not really swearing, threatening, objecting and voting.
The implications which the contrast between mere bodily movement and human action has upon behaviorism are significant, for the behaviorist must limit their observation and explanation to mere bodily movement and external environment. Any recourse to intentional content must be either reduced to or defined instrumentally in terms of those two publicly observable components, if not eliminated altogether. Accordingly, the behaviorist denies that swearing, threatening, objecting and voting even exist. Such phenomena must be regarded either as a mere shorthand for extraordinarily complex relations which hold between bodily movement and external context, or as merely useful fictions.
While the behaviorist claim that all intentional content can in principle be defined in terms of publicly observable bodily movement and context, it is not clear that it should be done in practice. It seems prima facie obvious that when the behaviorist speaks of swearing, etc. they do not mean the same thing as what the “normal” person means by such terms. In other words, the social scientist is supposed to be studying the actual process of voting in a society, not the extraordinarily complex relation which holds between bodily motion and the external context. The latter sounds not only hopelessly complex and therefore elusive to the social scientist, but it also seems like an entirely different subject matter altogether.
Even if it can be argued that such a behaviorist approach to social science should be implemented, it can be argued that such an approach is impossible in practice altogether. By limiting herself to mere bodily movement and external context, the strict behaviorist has isolated herself from all communication, including that of colleagues and subjects. After all, speaking and writing can only be viewed as mere bodily motion (or sound-making) within a particular and highly varying external context which does not actually mean anything. The idea that the social scientist should, or even can exclude all intentional content from their subject matter is simply absurd.
Filed in: socialscience
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11.10.2006
Culture as a Source of Value
With this distinction between interpretationalist and naturalist approaches to social science in mind, I would like to briefly review Lawrence Cahoone’s depiction of culture which I see as largely cohering to an interpretationalist approach:
“Culture is the public repertoire of meaning-establishing and –interpreting processes and products, rooted in socially projected ends. It is the teleologically thickest layer of a society’s hermeneutic horizon. Culture is not a particular social sphere, not a rule-governed context of action. It is the indefinite repertoire in terms of which all such contexts gain their mediate significance, their ‘place.’” (54, emphasis in original)
This post will be dedicated to briefly outlining what this definition actually amounts to.
Cahoone sees culture as being constituted by who’s, what’s and how’s which are all unified under or rather toward common ends or teleologies, for it is ends which “form the fabric that gives finality and shape, which is to say a certain kind of meaning, to human experience.” (45) Accordingly, he distinguishes between proximate and ultimate ends, the former being things which tend to serve as both ends which derive their value from other ends, and thus function as both ends as well as means. Ultimate ends are those which do not derive their meaning and value from any deeper source. While such ends do lend themselves to different interpretations or elaborations, they cannot be explained in terms of any other ends or values. They are, in Cahoone’s language, the tops of the mountain from which the rest of the landscape below can be viewed and comprehended.
Since culture is the social sharing of ultimate ends, it necessarily consists of ways in which the world is engaged, ways which related to the achievement of such ends. The three ways in which such engagement takes place, according to Cahoone, is by way of practices, artifacts and narratives, although he is careful to point out that not all practices, artifacts and narratives are cultural. There are two criteria which distinguish “mere” practice, artifact and narrative from culture. The first is that to be cultural such practices, artifacts and narratives must be social in nature. More importantly, however, such things must be directed to or derive meaning from the ultimate ends which are shared among such a society. Social action “is cultural to the extent that its rules of intelligibility and propriety are connected to, understood in terms of, socially shared ends.” (46)
Cahoone compares his view with Kant’s assertion that rational man and only rational man is an end in itself. The former completely rejects this idea, for such a view entails that man cannot reasonably regard anything as being more important than himself, a view which seems patently false in most traditions.
“Human beings require more guidance in life than can be gotten from the notion that human individuals are the sole ultimate ends. For humans are the kind of ends that must find other ends, ends under which their autonomy, in so far as there is such a thing, gains its value. Kant should have called his system of moral beings the kingdom of choosers of ends. As for the kingdom of ends, that is culture.” (55)
And since culture simply is the realm of ultimate ends, any account of moral obligation must be given, if it can be given at all, in terms of such ultimate ends:
“As to the question of why I ought to commit some social act, rather than answering that I ought to do it because others expect it, it will feel good, will be practically beneficial – perfectly good social reasons – culture amplifies by answering: because it is right, or good, or sacred, or beautiful, or awesome, or true.” (54)
While I worry about the potential lack of commensurability across cultures in terms of determining and comparing values, I must admit that this definition of culture does cohere with many of my meta-ethical positions. I agree with Moore in a rather qualified manner that terms such as “right” and “good” should not be defined in terms of natural states of affairs, as Kane’s approach seems to do. Rather than adopting some form of non-naturalism with regards to moral properties, I favor a constructivist account of norm expressivism, similar to that of Gibbard. I see Cahoone’s account thus far as being very much in line such views.
I also see Cahoone’s views as being more in line with the non-universality of emotional repertoire and experience, a view which seems to seriously undermine much of Kane’s attempt to ground the objectivity and universality of value in our emotional engagements with the world. As noted in my post concerning such a view, we do not experience emotions in the way which Spinoza thought or Kane requires. Emotions are not simply the valuing or disvaluing of objects in the world, but rather consist in a rather intricate complex of judgments, and this complex is refined and determined by cultural upbringing.
Cahoone acknowledges this point quite nicely, for according to him a culture entails
“a configuration salience in perception and feeling, in what we sometimes call taste, which then is a constitutive part of the practical wisdom common among members. The culture must encourage in members a particular distribution of attention across the indefinitely complex array of experience and a corresponding distribution of emotional response, hence various sensibilities, dispositions to weigh certain experiences more than others, to feel some things more than others, to ‘natively’ respond to experiences in certain ways.” (49-50)
While metaphysical realism can be maintained as a way of constraining conceptual and classification schemes, this does not change the fact that conceptual and classification scheme are not universal in nature. Neither are emotional repertoires. The contingent nature of classification schemes and emotional repertoires make emotional valence an unstable ground upon which to build a universal and objective account of value.
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“Culture is the public repertoire of meaning-establishing and –interpreting processes and products, rooted in socially projected ends. It is the teleologically thickest layer of a society’s hermeneutic horizon. Culture is not a particular social sphere, not a rule-governed context of action. It is the indefinite repertoire in terms of which all such contexts gain their mediate significance, their ‘place.’” (54, emphasis in original)
This post will be dedicated to briefly outlining what this definition actually amounts to.
Cahoone sees culture as being constituted by who’s, what’s and how’s which are all unified under or rather toward common ends or teleologies, for it is ends which “form the fabric that gives finality and shape, which is to say a certain kind of meaning, to human experience.” (45) Accordingly, he distinguishes between proximate and ultimate ends, the former being things which tend to serve as both ends which derive their value from other ends, and thus function as both ends as well as means. Ultimate ends are those which do not derive their meaning and value from any deeper source. While such ends do lend themselves to different interpretations or elaborations, they cannot be explained in terms of any other ends or values. They are, in Cahoone’s language, the tops of the mountain from which the rest of the landscape below can be viewed and comprehended.
Since culture is the social sharing of ultimate ends, it necessarily consists of ways in which the world is engaged, ways which related to the achievement of such ends. The three ways in which such engagement takes place, according to Cahoone, is by way of practices, artifacts and narratives, although he is careful to point out that not all practices, artifacts and narratives are cultural. There are two criteria which distinguish “mere” practice, artifact and narrative from culture. The first is that to be cultural such practices, artifacts and narratives must be social in nature. More importantly, however, such things must be directed to or derive meaning from the ultimate ends which are shared among such a society. Social action “is cultural to the extent that its rules of intelligibility and propriety are connected to, understood in terms of, socially shared ends.” (46)
Cahoone compares his view with Kant’s assertion that rational man and only rational man is an end in itself. The former completely rejects this idea, for such a view entails that man cannot reasonably regard anything as being more important than himself, a view which seems patently false in most traditions.
“Human beings require more guidance in life than can be gotten from the notion that human individuals are the sole ultimate ends. For humans are the kind of ends that must find other ends, ends under which their autonomy, in so far as there is such a thing, gains its value. Kant should have called his system of moral beings the kingdom of choosers of ends. As for the kingdom of ends, that is culture.” (55)
And since culture simply is the realm of ultimate ends, any account of moral obligation must be given, if it can be given at all, in terms of such ultimate ends:
“As to the question of why I ought to commit some social act, rather than answering that I ought to do it because others expect it, it will feel good, will be practically beneficial – perfectly good social reasons – culture amplifies by answering: because it is right, or good, or sacred, or beautiful, or awesome, or true.” (54)
While I worry about the potential lack of commensurability across cultures in terms of determining and comparing values, I must admit that this definition of culture does cohere with many of my meta-ethical positions. I agree with Moore in a rather qualified manner that terms such as “right” and “good” should not be defined in terms of natural states of affairs, as Kane’s approach seems to do. Rather than adopting some form of non-naturalism with regards to moral properties, I favor a constructivist account of norm expressivism, similar to that of Gibbard. I see Cahoone’s account thus far as being very much in line such views.
I also see Cahoone’s views as being more in line with the non-universality of emotional repertoire and experience, a view which seems to seriously undermine much of Kane’s attempt to ground the objectivity and universality of value in our emotional engagements with the world. As noted in my post concerning such a view, we do not experience emotions in the way which Spinoza thought or Kane requires. Emotions are not simply the valuing or disvaluing of objects in the world, but rather consist in a rather intricate complex of judgments, and this complex is refined and determined by cultural upbringing.
Cahoone acknowledges this point quite nicely, for according to him a culture entails
“a configuration salience in perception and feeling, in what we sometimes call taste, which then is a constitutive part of the practical wisdom common among members. The culture must encourage in members a particular distribution of attention across the indefinitely complex array of experience and a corresponding distribution of emotional response, hence various sensibilities, dispositions to weigh certain experiences more than others, to feel some things more than others, to ‘natively’ respond to experiences in certain ways.” (49-50)
While metaphysical realism can be maintained as a way of constraining conceptual and classification schemes, this does not change the fact that conceptual and classification scheme are not universal in nature. Neither are emotional repertoires. The contingent nature of classification schemes and emotional repertoires make emotional valence an unstable ground upon which to build a universal and objective account of value.
Filed in: metaethics socialscience mind
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The Role of Beliefs and Desires in Social Phenomena
Perhaps the greatest difference between the naturalist and interpretationalist approaches to social science is what I have called the gulf of intentionality. The naturalist is committed to an entirely non-teleological and non-intentional account of social phenomena, for ends, beliefs and desires simply are not publicly observable entities. As such, the naturalists have appealed, with varying degrees of success to different forms of behaviorism in an attempt to adequately deal with the obvious intentional and teleological nature of social reality.
Perhaps the most promising form of behaviorism in this matter is that of methodological behaviorism. Unlike eliminative behaviorism, wherein beliefs and desires are eliminated from the subject matter all together, and unlike reductive behaviorism, which definitionally equates all beliefs and desires to their corresponding behavior which is publicly observable, methodological behaviorism instead treats beliefs and desires as entities which cannot be observed directly, analogous to electrons. This seems to me to be very similar to Ernst Mach’s instrumentalism, which asserted that electron talk was committed to neither the affirmation nor the denial of the actual existence of electrons. For all we know, electrons might simply be useful fictions or instruments by which we can make pragmatically accurate predictions and explanations of natural phenomena.
The interpretationalist objection to this methodology is, however, rather powerful. The naturalist is implicitly, if not explicitly committed to any scientific explanation being causal in nature. Thus, if the methodological behaviorists use of beliefs and desires is to be of any explanatory use it must be in the form of causes of behavior. For example, “I walked over to the drinking fountain because I desired to drink water and I believed the fountain to be a source of water.” This, according to the interpretationalist, is completely wrong, for desires and beliefs are not merely or even primarily causes of mere behavior, which I will equate with bodily movement.
Rather, beliefs and desires are what distinguish bodily movement from action; they actually constitute meaningful human action. Furthermore, there is a significant difference between the causation of bodily movement which the naturalist deals with and the causation of human action which is the subject matter of social science: beliefs and desires should be seen as reasons for human action rather than causes of bodily motion. A third role which beliefs and desires play is that of making human action, which should still be distinguished from bodily motion, intelligible. These three roles which beliefs and desires play in social behavior are the primary reasons for the name “interpretationalist.”
The obvious objection which the naturalist will bring against such an account is that interpretation is not what science is about. Either beliefs and desires can and must be reduced to non-teleological matter in motion, or we are simply not doing science. I find this objection to fall short on a number of accounts. First of all, beliefs and desires have not and indeed may never be reduced to non-teleological matter in motion, even if it is possible in principle as I believe it to be. Second, why should the social scientist, given that the aforementioned reduction has not yet happened, be committed to the same kind of explanation as the natural sciences? It seems that preserving the quasi-sanctity of the label “science” is playing too great a role in the naturalist camp. Third, the interpretationalist assertion that beliefs and desires can play no part in causal explanations, a la naturalism, seems to have simply been ignored. If the nature of beliefs and desires is as the interpretationalist describes them to be (and I belief that it is), then both reductive as well as methodological behaviorism seem to be working with rather exclusive definitions of beliefs and desires, if not definitions which are entirely misled altogether.
Of course the interpretationalists objections do not address the approaches to cognitive science which see all talk of beliefs and desires as simply being altogether misleading and fundamentally flawed. Such advocates, such as Paul Churchland and Rob Cummins see all talk of beliefs and desires as simply being the products of the false theory of folk psychology. According to such a view, behaviorism, in its reductive and methodological forms, is simply buying into this false theory and will therefore always be limited by such an approach. Until such a theory is in place, however, the most responsible approach to the study of social science is a methodological interpretationalism which does not commit itself either way to the (non)existence of entities such as beliefs and desires as well as the causal roles which such entities may or may not play in such a scientific account.
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Perhaps the most promising form of behaviorism in this matter is that of methodological behaviorism. Unlike eliminative behaviorism, wherein beliefs and desires are eliminated from the subject matter all together, and unlike reductive behaviorism, which definitionally equates all beliefs and desires to their corresponding behavior which is publicly observable, methodological behaviorism instead treats beliefs and desires as entities which cannot be observed directly, analogous to electrons. This seems to me to be very similar to Ernst Mach’s instrumentalism, which asserted that electron talk was committed to neither the affirmation nor the denial of the actual existence of electrons. For all we know, electrons might simply be useful fictions or instruments by which we can make pragmatically accurate predictions and explanations of natural phenomena.
The interpretationalist objection to this methodology is, however, rather powerful. The naturalist is implicitly, if not explicitly committed to any scientific explanation being causal in nature. Thus, if the methodological behaviorists use of beliefs and desires is to be of any explanatory use it must be in the form of causes of behavior. For example, “I walked over to the drinking fountain because I desired to drink water and I believed the fountain to be a source of water.” This, according to the interpretationalist, is completely wrong, for desires and beliefs are not merely or even primarily causes of mere behavior, which I will equate with bodily movement.
Rather, beliefs and desires are what distinguish bodily movement from action; they actually constitute meaningful human action. Furthermore, there is a significant difference between the causation of bodily movement which the naturalist deals with and the causation of human action which is the subject matter of social science: beliefs and desires should be seen as reasons for human action rather than causes of bodily motion. A third role which beliefs and desires play is that of making human action, which should still be distinguished from bodily motion, intelligible. These three roles which beliefs and desires play in social behavior are the primary reasons for the name “interpretationalist.”
The obvious objection which the naturalist will bring against such an account is that interpretation is not what science is about. Either beliefs and desires can and must be reduced to non-teleological matter in motion, or we are simply not doing science. I find this objection to fall short on a number of accounts. First of all, beliefs and desires have not and indeed may never be reduced to non-teleological matter in motion, even if it is possible in principle as I believe it to be. Second, why should the social scientist, given that the aforementioned reduction has not yet happened, be committed to the same kind of explanation as the natural sciences? It seems that preserving the quasi-sanctity of the label “science” is playing too great a role in the naturalist camp. Third, the interpretationalist assertion that beliefs and desires can play no part in causal explanations, a la naturalism, seems to have simply been ignored. If the nature of beliefs and desires is as the interpretationalist describes them to be (and I belief that it is), then both reductive as well as methodological behaviorism seem to be working with rather exclusive definitions of beliefs and desires, if not definitions which are entirely misled altogether.
Of course the interpretationalists objections do not address the approaches to cognitive science which see all talk of beliefs and desires as simply being altogether misleading and fundamentally flawed. Such advocates, such as Paul Churchland and Rob Cummins see all talk of beliefs and desires as simply being the products of the false theory of folk psychology. According to such a view, behaviorism, in its reductive and methodological forms, is simply buying into this false theory and will therefore always be limited by such an approach. Until such a theory is in place, however, the most responsible approach to the study of social science is a methodological interpretationalism which does not commit itself either way to the (non)existence of entities such as beliefs and desires as well as the causal roles which such entities may or may not play in such a scientific account.
Filed in: socialscience science mind
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11.08.2006
In Search of Objectivity in Value
In the last post I argued that the values and assumption which prevent our reaching objective certainty are nonetheless greatly constrained by factors which are external to any particular individual. This post will focus upon the ways in which our values are constrained by non-subjective factors making moral subjectivism implausible at best, contrary to both logical positivist as well as existentialist traditions.
In his book Through the Moral Maze, Robert Kane argues that there are four dimensions of levels of value, with each dimension moving away from subjectivism to moral realism. It is my position that while Kane’s arguments against subjectivism are compelling, as will be seen in our treatment of the first three dimensions of value, his arguments in favor of moral realism, the fourth level, is unconvincing.
The first and least robust dimension of value is what Kane calls experiential. He sees this dimension as being equivalent, broadly speaking, with the basic value and disvalue experiences which Spinoza spoke of. Value experiences (joy, pleasure, etc.) and disvalue experiences (fear, anger, pain, etc.) are prima facie good or bad in that we define good and bad, at least initially, in terms of such experiences unless such judgments are overridden by a higher dimension of value.
While Kane is correct in claiming that there is an objective fact of the matter whether a person is actually having one of these experiences or not, I see little if any difference between this kind of objectivity and that allowed for by logical positivism. Indeed, the situation seems even worse since this dimension suggests that we define good and bad according to that which we experience ourselves and is thereby intensely ego-centric. What is also significant, however, is that such initial value and disvalue judgments are primarily the product of our unrefined and biologically innate emotional repertoires, thereby making them relatively universal to humans. It is at this dimension of value that I see the claims of the evolutionary psychologists to be relevant.
I also worry that Kane is working with a rather inadequate conception of emotional valence. Is joy good, or is joy simply our way of experiencing or expressing intimacy judgments toward the intentional object of the emotion? Furthermore, there is a subtle difference here between the experience of emotional judgments and the judgments which we have of emotional experiences; between valuing food by way of joy and valuing the joy which food produces. Is food or joy itself the formal or intentional object of our emotion? Is the latter simply the emotional judgment about other, or even the same emotion, a meta-judgment of sorts? Are such meta-judgments morally superior or inferior to our emotional judgment of the former? Such questions will have to be postponed for the time being.
The second dimension of value, according to Kane, is purposive activity wherein temporary disvalue experience are endured, sought, etc. in order to achieve some purpose, goal or desire. If we could compare the existence and nature of minds to the existence and nature of value, the first dimension would be the axial equivalent to solipsism of the moment while the second dimension would simply be solipsism. In other words, I am sure that I value things and that some things are sufficiently valuable so as to merit the temporary endurance of some amount of disvalue experiences in order to achieve them in the future. Accordingly, there is an objective fact of the matter as to whether or not my purposes or goals are satisfied or not.
But is this really so? I simply do not see goal attainment as being as objective as Kane hopes it to be. Goals and purposes are not attained in any objective sense, but are rather seen or taken by some agents to have been attained. This follows naturally from a strong form of naturalism, for according to such goals and purposes simply do not exist independent of any mind. Rather, goals and teleology in general are something which minds project onto the world in an ontologically subjective manner. The attainment of such goals can never move beyond such an ontologically subjective state. A certain degree of epistemic objectivity can be achieved, however, due to the fact that the felicity standards of goal attainment are not whole or even mostly invented arbitrarily or individually. Instead, such judgments are constrained both by the natural facts of the world as well as by the values and standards which are inherited by way of culture.
Even if the second dimension can give us some amount of objectivity, non-universal though it may be, we are still left with a strong sense of subjectivism and ego-centrism in the second dimension of value. We still have absolutely no account of how our personal goals, purposes and ends relate to or interact with those which other agents may or may not have. Indeed, the goals, etc. of other agents still mean absolutely nothing to us and as far as we are concerned or can tell do not exist at all. We are still moral solipsists as this point.
The third dimension of value, according to Kane, builds upon many of the sources of epistemic objectivity which I mention above. Whereas we can experientially value food in the first dimension, and purposively hunt in the second dimension in ordering the relevant value/disvalue experiences, in the third dimension we become more than somebody who hunts; we become hunters. Thus, the third dimension is about the meaning and significance can be found in how we define our lives.
Kane sees this dimension as being a significant source of objectivity in value. For example, when a man not only hunts and fathers children from time to time, but rather sees himself as a hunter and a father such a view of life and the roles which this man plays are determined almost exclusively by external factors. In other words, a man does not get to freely invent what does and does not constitute being a good hunter or father. Such standards of excellence, as Kane calls them, are determined largely, but not entirely by the natural environment in which the man finds himself.
More important, is that not only are such standards of excellence determined by external factors, but that such standards are not relative to any particular individual’s feelings, beliefs or desires. The external world determines the standards of excellence not for an individual but for a particular way of life which an indefinite number of people can hold.
Unfortunately, however, such an account is still not robust enough, for we have no criterion by which we can choose one way of life over another. The standards of excellence for being a con-man are just as objective as are the standards for being a doctor. Indeed, given the ego-centrism of the first two dimensions from which the third dimension is an extension, it would seem that the way of life of a con-man actually is more valuable than is that of the doctor.
It may be protested that this question is simply that of why we should be moral rather than what determines the objectivity of values. Nevertheless, I do not see how these two questions can be fully disentangled from each other, for it seems a contradiction to claim that we can have values which we do not value. Is not this simply to claim that we disvalue something? In other words, while the third dimension of value may not be as subjective as the previous two, it is still equally ego-centric. In Kane’s attempt to bridge the is-ought gap, he has led us to a point far removed from our intended goal.
The fourth dimension, the dimension of universal value is where this worry is supposed to be overcome. This is the point were we are supposed to be able to move beyond “X is good for Y” to “X is good, period.” While Kane’s attempt to move to this fourth dimension will be considered in a future post, there are problems with his very depiction of the jump from the third to fourth dimension which I take issue with.
I see this final jump as being far too large, for I simply do not see the third dimension to have gotten us very far. While I can see how the values associated with being a hunter or father are entailed by the nature of hunting and fathering, it is not at all clear to me what it means to be a good American or a good person. While it may be possible to give an account of the former by an appeal to civic duties and the like, it seems to me that such duties are the product rather than the source of value in the American way of life. Furthermore, such duties seem to be constrained very little by the natural environment in which each American finds him or herself, thus undermining much of the objectivity which Kane sought.
I also do not see how Kane’s account of each dimension ultimately emerging from the experiences of the individual could ever give us a non-relational or non-perspectival account of value. Perhaps Kane hopes to establish epistemic universality while allowing to ontological perspectives, but I do not see how absolute epistemic objectivity could ever be achieved of an ontologically subjective object. The hope of a fourth dimension seems especially doomed if one takes seriously the possibility of interaction among non-human or even non-biological entities. It seems that any account of value must be of the form “X is valued by Y” where Y is some individual or non-universal set of individuals.
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In his book Through the Moral Maze, Robert Kane argues that there are four dimensions of levels of value, with each dimension moving away from subjectivism to moral realism. It is my position that while Kane’s arguments against subjectivism are compelling, as will be seen in our treatment of the first three dimensions of value, his arguments in favor of moral realism, the fourth level, is unconvincing.
The first and least robust dimension of value is what Kane calls experiential. He sees this dimension as being equivalent, broadly speaking, with the basic value and disvalue experiences which Spinoza spoke of. Value experiences (joy, pleasure, etc.) and disvalue experiences (fear, anger, pain, etc.) are prima facie good or bad in that we define good and bad, at least initially, in terms of such experiences unless such judgments are overridden by a higher dimension of value.
While Kane is correct in claiming that there is an objective fact of the matter whether a person is actually having one of these experiences or not, I see little if any difference between this kind of objectivity and that allowed for by logical positivism. Indeed, the situation seems even worse since this dimension suggests that we define good and bad according to that which we experience ourselves and is thereby intensely ego-centric. What is also significant, however, is that such initial value and disvalue judgments are primarily the product of our unrefined and biologically innate emotional repertoires, thereby making them relatively universal to humans. It is at this dimension of value that I see the claims of the evolutionary psychologists to be relevant.
I also worry that Kane is working with a rather inadequate conception of emotional valence. Is joy good, or is joy simply our way of experiencing or expressing intimacy judgments toward the intentional object of the emotion? Furthermore, there is a subtle difference here between the experience of emotional judgments and the judgments which we have of emotional experiences; between valuing food by way of joy and valuing the joy which food produces. Is food or joy itself the formal or intentional object of our emotion? Is the latter simply the emotional judgment about other, or even the same emotion, a meta-judgment of sorts? Are such meta-judgments morally superior or inferior to our emotional judgment of the former? Such questions will have to be postponed for the time being.
The second dimension of value, according to Kane, is purposive activity wherein temporary disvalue experience are endured, sought, etc. in order to achieve some purpose, goal or desire. If we could compare the existence and nature of minds to the existence and nature of value, the first dimension would be the axial equivalent to solipsism of the moment while the second dimension would simply be solipsism. In other words, I am sure that I value things and that some things are sufficiently valuable so as to merit the temporary endurance of some amount of disvalue experiences in order to achieve them in the future. Accordingly, there is an objective fact of the matter as to whether or not my purposes or goals are satisfied or not.
But is this really so? I simply do not see goal attainment as being as objective as Kane hopes it to be. Goals and purposes are not attained in any objective sense, but are rather seen or taken by some agents to have been attained. This follows naturally from a strong form of naturalism, for according to such goals and purposes simply do not exist independent of any mind. Rather, goals and teleology in general are something which minds project onto the world in an ontologically subjective manner. The attainment of such goals can never move beyond such an ontologically subjective state. A certain degree of epistemic objectivity can be achieved, however, due to the fact that the felicity standards of goal attainment are not whole or even mostly invented arbitrarily or individually. Instead, such judgments are constrained both by the natural facts of the world as well as by the values and standards which are inherited by way of culture.
Even if the second dimension can give us some amount of objectivity, non-universal though it may be, we are still left with a strong sense of subjectivism and ego-centrism in the second dimension of value. We still have absolutely no account of how our personal goals, purposes and ends relate to or interact with those which other agents may or may not have. Indeed, the goals, etc. of other agents still mean absolutely nothing to us and as far as we are concerned or can tell do not exist at all. We are still moral solipsists as this point.
The third dimension of value, according to Kane, builds upon many of the sources of epistemic objectivity which I mention above. Whereas we can experientially value food in the first dimension, and purposively hunt in the second dimension in ordering the relevant value/disvalue experiences, in the third dimension we become more than somebody who hunts; we become hunters. Thus, the third dimension is about the meaning and significance can be found in how we define our lives.
Kane sees this dimension as being a significant source of objectivity in value. For example, when a man not only hunts and fathers children from time to time, but rather sees himself as a hunter and a father such a view of life and the roles which this man plays are determined almost exclusively by external factors. In other words, a man does not get to freely invent what does and does not constitute being a good hunter or father. Such standards of excellence, as Kane calls them, are determined largely, but not entirely by the natural environment in which the man finds himself.
More important, is that not only are such standards of excellence determined by external factors, but that such standards are not relative to any particular individual’s feelings, beliefs or desires. The external world determines the standards of excellence not for an individual but for a particular way of life which an indefinite number of people can hold.
Unfortunately, however, such an account is still not robust enough, for we have no criterion by which we can choose one way of life over another. The standards of excellence for being a con-man are just as objective as are the standards for being a doctor. Indeed, given the ego-centrism of the first two dimensions from which the third dimension is an extension, it would seem that the way of life of a con-man actually is more valuable than is that of the doctor.
It may be protested that this question is simply that of why we should be moral rather than what determines the objectivity of values. Nevertheless, I do not see how these two questions can be fully disentangled from each other, for it seems a contradiction to claim that we can have values which we do not value. Is not this simply to claim that we disvalue something? In other words, while the third dimension of value may not be as subjective as the previous two, it is still equally ego-centric. In Kane’s attempt to bridge the is-ought gap, he has led us to a point far removed from our intended goal.
The fourth dimension, the dimension of universal value is where this worry is supposed to be overcome. This is the point were we are supposed to be able to move beyond “X is good for Y” to “X is good, period.” While Kane’s attempt to move to this fourth dimension will be considered in a future post, there are problems with his very depiction of the jump from the third to fourth dimension which I take issue with.
I see this final jump as being far too large, for I simply do not see the third dimension to have gotten us very far. While I can see how the values associated with being a hunter or father are entailed by the nature of hunting and fathering, it is not at all clear to me what it means to be a good American or a good person. While it may be possible to give an account of the former by an appeal to civic duties and the like, it seems to me that such duties are the product rather than the source of value in the American way of life. Furthermore, such duties seem to be constrained very little by the natural environment in which each American finds him or herself, thus undermining much of the objectivity which Kane sought.
I also do not see how Kane’s account of each dimension ultimately emerging from the experiences of the individual could ever give us a non-relational or non-perspectival account of value. Perhaps Kane hopes to establish epistemic universality while allowing to ontological perspectives, but I do not see how absolute epistemic objectivity could ever be achieved of an ontologically subjective object. The hope of a fourth dimension seems especially doomed if one takes seriously the possibility of interaction among non-human or even non-biological entities. It seems that any account of value must be of the form “X is valued by Y” where Y is some individual or non-universal set of individuals.
Filed in: axiology
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11.06.2006
Science as a Social Construct
Perhaps the greatest insult that could be paid to the scientific endeavor came in the form of the theory of scientific knowledge as a social construct. According to such a view, science is but one among many social practices or crafts which was only special or unique in that it had become associated with political and social power. This view follows very much in line with Derrida’s assertion that claims to objectivity were but rhetorical ploys aimed at the usurpation of power and control over others. But surely science is more than just one among the many social crafts which mankind engages in, is it not?
Before giving my reasons for rejecting such a claim, we should first do justice to what strengths can be found in the constructivist’s position. As the moderate Kuhn and Ludwik Fleck had convincingly argued, science is indeed a social practice involving the internalization of largely unexamined values, assumptions, methodologies and classification schemes. Even if there is such a thing as an objective reality beyond experience, given such criticisms it seems impossible that science could ever align itself with such a reality or even know if it had aligned itself with it at any given point. Man has simply never discovered, nor does it seem capable of finding a criterion of truth which can ever move beyond the claim that a particular theory “works” to one degree or another.
As an intrinsically social endeavor, science is inescapably done within and influenced by a particular context. This context determines, or at very least constrains the nature and scope of the problems which science attempts to address. In other words, different people see different problems in nature and solutions or theories only come in response to such problems. The question which the constructivists raise is whether such problems are selectively discovered in nature or are instead created by people living within a particular intellectual context? How can the social niche which we call “science” be anything other than the latter?
The constructivist claim is stronger than this, however. The challenge which they level against the objectivists is to name a single element or aspect of science which is not socially constructed. Laboratories, instruments, methods, experiments, bodies of data, theories, questions, publications, criticisms, endorsements and especially funding, as well as all the assumptions and values which underlie each of these are all contingent social constructions. If scientific knowledge is nothing more than the final product of such ingredients, and it is not clear that scientific knowledge is more than this, then how can it be anything other than a social construct as well?
The first problem with such a view of science is the all-or-nothing mentality which it lends itself to. “Either scientific knowledge is utterly objective and true in the strongest platonic sense of the word, or we are left with anything-goes-relativism or even subjectivism.” Just because the latter is not true, or even possible in practice (perhaps even in principle!) we are by no means left with utter anarchy as the only other option.
An unbridled notion of relativism or subjectivism can be resisted on a number of accounts. First, the values and assumptions which scientists bring to their “craft” are created almost entirely by factors external to the individual. Thus, while the author to any text may be dead, the language of the text is an instance of totally unconstrained individuality. Second, even if the interpretation of the text is constructed by a particular community or collective, this does not entail that the text does not exist in strongest, observer-neutrality possible. Thus, the objectivity of nature which can be said to transcend experience does constrain science in a significant manner by way of empirical data. Third, while the axioms which entail any mathematical system are constructed by a community, the entailments of such a system are indeed objective in nature. Thus, science as the mathematical expansion and extension of the most widely shared basic categories can hardly be seen as an unconstrained approach to the world.
In other words, while we have no criterion for truth, we do have criteria for “working” which are significantly constrained. The technology derived from science “works” and objectively so, and such a claim cannot be made by any other social craft. While we can never entirely externalize all the values and assumptions which underlie our experience in order to establish something as true in the platonic sense, the claim that something cannot be true if it does not at least work seems relatively untouched by post-modern criticisms. Of course, the post-modern response is to point out that the values and assumptions which underlie and constitute our concept of “working” are still contingent in nature. Nevertheless, as we saw in the above paragraph, such contingencies are significantly constrained by non-subjective factors.
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Before giving my reasons for rejecting such a claim, we should first do justice to what strengths can be found in the constructivist’s position. As the moderate Kuhn and Ludwik Fleck had convincingly argued, science is indeed a social practice involving the internalization of largely unexamined values, assumptions, methodologies and classification schemes. Even if there is such a thing as an objective reality beyond experience, given such criticisms it seems impossible that science could ever align itself with such a reality or even know if it had aligned itself with it at any given point. Man has simply never discovered, nor does it seem capable of finding a criterion of truth which can ever move beyond the claim that a particular theory “works” to one degree or another.
As an intrinsically social endeavor, science is inescapably done within and influenced by a particular context. This context determines, or at very least constrains the nature and scope of the problems which science attempts to address. In other words, different people see different problems in nature and solutions or theories only come in response to such problems. The question which the constructivists raise is whether such problems are selectively discovered in nature or are instead created by people living within a particular intellectual context? How can the social niche which we call “science” be anything other than the latter?
The constructivist claim is stronger than this, however. The challenge which they level against the objectivists is to name a single element or aspect of science which is not socially constructed. Laboratories, instruments, methods, experiments, bodies of data, theories, questions, publications, criticisms, endorsements and especially funding, as well as all the assumptions and values which underlie each of these are all contingent social constructions. If scientific knowledge is nothing more than the final product of such ingredients, and it is not clear that scientific knowledge is more than this, then how can it be anything other than a social construct as well?
The first problem with such a view of science is the all-or-nothing mentality which it lends itself to. “Either scientific knowledge is utterly objective and true in the strongest platonic sense of the word, or we are left with anything-goes-relativism or even subjectivism.” Just because the latter is not true, or even possible in practice (perhaps even in principle!) we are by no means left with utter anarchy as the only other option.
An unbridled notion of relativism or subjectivism can be resisted on a number of accounts. First, the values and assumptions which scientists bring to their “craft” are created almost entirely by factors external to the individual. Thus, while the author to any text may be dead, the language of the text is an instance of totally unconstrained individuality. Second, even if the interpretation of the text is constructed by a particular community or collective, this does not entail that the text does not exist in strongest, observer-neutrality possible. Thus, the objectivity of nature which can be said to transcend experience does constrain science in a significant manner by way of empirical data. Third, while the axioms which entail any mathematical system are constructed by a community, the entailments of such a system are indeed objective in nature. Thus, science as the mathematical expansion and extension of the most widely shared basic categories can hardly be seen as an unconstrained approach to the world.
In other words, while we have no criterion for truth, we do have criteria for “working” which are significantly constrained. The technology derived from science “works” and objectively so, and such a claim cannot be made by any other social craft. While we can never entirely externalize all the values and assumptions which underlie our experience in order to establish something as true in the platonic sense, the claim that something cannot be true if it does not at least work seems relatively untouched by post-modern criticisms. Of course, the post-modern response is to point out that the values and assumptions which underlie and constitute our concept of “working” are still contingent in nature. Nevertheless, as we saw in the above paragraph, such contingencies are significantly constrained by non-subjective factors.
Filed in: science
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11.05.2006
Reason and Culture
In the introduction to his book Cultural Revolutions, Lawrence Cahoone makes a number of arguments and claims regarding the relationship between reason and culture which I find fascinating. Since first of all, philosophy of culture is the area which I eventually plan to specialize in, and second, it fits in well with the topics of post-modernism and social science which I have been discussing on the blog lately, I thought it would be appropriate to repeat some of these arguments and claims.
Cahoone makes two claims which I take to be significant. First is that the very idea of culture found its origin in the original rise of modernity. Indeed, modernity itself can be seen as the establishment of a new relationship in the Western mind between reason and culture. Whereas the pre-modern world had taken authority and tradition to be guides to truth and value, the Western exposure to, and creation of radically diverse and competing authorities and traditions had drastically undermined such a view. There simply seemed to be no neutral standard by which competing traditions could be measured; no way to establish in any way which was acceptable to all involved parties which tradition should be taken as the “true” one.
Thus, with pluralism and uncertainty arresting the attention of Western Europe, a path to objectivity was blazed, primarily by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. In fact, it might be argued that the modern concept of objectivity was invented at this point (or perhaps reinvented) as a manner of resolving disputes without coercive violence. In was with the rise of modernity that tradition and authority came to be associated with superstition and ignorance and reason and experience came to be the primary or even exclusive guides to truth and value. The new relationship which then established between culture and reason was that of the former being an obstacle to the latter, for while reason was the source of universal truth and progress, culture was the embodiment of myth, superstition and conservative religion.
The second claim which Cahoone makes is that just as the transition from the pre-modern West to the Enlightenment was marked by a new relationship between culture and reason, so too is the transition from modernity to post-modernity marked by such a change. This post-modern relationship, however, is not one of culture being an obstacle to reason, but rather is one of culture being the source of reason itself. This is what Cahoone calls “the cultural turn” in Western philosophy.
“Recent attacks on realism, the claim that our knowledge is made true by its relation to objective facts, have invoked the cognitive role of culture, proposing “solidarity” rather than “objectivity” as the court of last resort for the legitimation of belief. The retreat from transcendental and foundationalist theories of meaning, common to both Anglo-American and European philosophy in the middle of the last century, has in effect opened epistemology to culture. In Anglo-American philosophy the early twentieth-century dominance of logical positivism had been eclipsed in mid-century by Wittgenstein’s ordinary-language philosophy, which made meaning emergent from social practice… Meanwhile, in European thought a parallel development took place. The early and mid-twentieth century “philosophies of the subject” – phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and “Western” Marxism – … were eclipsed in the century’s second half by hermeneutics, structuralism, and eventually poststructuralism, for which historicized networks of signs form the background from which meaning and self emerge. On both sides of the North Atlantic, language, understood now as social, contingent, and practical, became the dominant topic of twentieth-century philosophy and, through a remarkable inversion, came to be understood as the source of logical, truth and the self, rather than their products.” (6,7)
What I find so remarkable, is that as we have seen in many of the recent posts regarding the nature of scientific knowledge, the claim that complete objectivity is largely a farce was by no means the novel invention of the twentieth century. Knowledge can only be gained and reasoning can only be done in terms of a classification scheme, and classification schemes are the somewhat arbitrary creations of man, tradition and culture. Furthermore, objective and assumption-free observation of the world is equally impossible for very similar reasons. It was only the intense fears which were described by Scheffler and the longing for Platonic truth which kept the West from recognizing this for so long.
Read more!
Cahoone makes two claims which I take to be significant. First is that the very idea of culture found its origin in the original rise of modernity. Indeed, modernity itself can be seen as the establishment of a new relationship in the Western mind between reason and culture. Whereas the pre-modern world had taken authority and tradition to be guides to truth and value, the Western exposure to, and creation of radically diverse and competing authorities and traditions had drastically undermined such a view. There simply seemed to be no neutral standard by which competing traditions could be measured; no way to establish in any way which was acceptable to all involved parties which tradition should be taken as the “true” one.
Thus, with pluralism and uncertainty arresting the attention of Western Europe, a path to objectivity was blazed, primarily by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. In fact, it might be argued that the modern concept of objectivity was invented at this point (or perhaps reinvented) as a manner of resolving disputes without coercive violence. In was with the rise of modernity that tradition and authority came to be associated with superstition and ignorance and reason and experience came to be the primary or even exclusive guides to truth and value. The new relationship which then established between culture and reason was that of the former being an obstacle to the latter, for while reason was the source of universal truth and progress, culture was the embodiment of myth, superstition and conservative religion.
The second claim which Cahoone makes is that just as the transition from the pre-modern West to the Enlightenment was marked by a new relationship between culture and reason, so too is the transition from modernity to post-modernity marked by such a change. This post-modern relationship, however, is not one of culture being an obstacle to reason, but rather is one of culture being the source of reason itself. This is what Cahoone calls “the cultural turn” in Western philosophy.
“Recent attacks on realism, the claim that our knowledge is made true by its relation to objective facts, have invoked the cognitive role of culture, proposing “solidarity” rather than “objectivity” as the court of last resort for the legitimation of belief. The retreat from transcendental and foundationalist theories of meaning, common to both Anglo-American and European philosophy in the middle of the last century, has in effect opened epistemology to culture. In Anglo-American philosophy the early twentieth-century dominance of logical positivism had been eclipsed in mid-century by Wittgenstein’s ordinary-language philosophy, which made meaning emergent from social practice… Meanwhile, in European thought a parallel development took place. The early and mid-twentieth century “philosophies of the subject” – phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and “Western” Marxism – … were eclipsed in the century’s second half by hermeneutics, structuralism, and eventually poststructuralism, for which historicized networks of signs form the background from which meaning and self emerge. On both sides of the North Atlantic, language, understood now as social, contingent, and practical, became the dominant topic of twentieth-century philosophy and, through a remarkable inversion, came to be understood as the source of logical, truth and the self, rather than their products.” (6,7)
What I find so remarkable, is that as we have seen in many of the recent posts regarding the nature of scientific knowledge, the claim that complete objectivity is largely a farce was by no means the novel invention of the twentieth century. Knowledge can only be gained and reasoning can only be done in terms of a classification scheme, and classification schemes are the somewhat arbitrary creations of man, tradition and culture. Furthermore, objective and assumption-free observation of the world is equally impossible for very similar reasons. It was only the intense fears which were described by Scheffler and the longing for Platonic truth which kept the West from recognizing this for so long.
Filed in: socialscience epistemology
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11.04.2006
The Loss of Objectivity
Thomas Kuhn was not the only person in the post-WWII intellectual community which was responsible for undermining the Logical Positivist project. Consider for instance the claim put forth by Michael Polanyi that scientific knowledge was the production of a community and that this community required the internalization of a significant amount of value judgments and tacit knowledge by its neophytes. Similarly, Russell Hanson argued that objective observation free of all theory ladenness and value judgment was absolutely impossible due to the fact that people rather than eyes made observations. These ideas are all very much in line with those of Kuhn and for this reason it makes sense to speak of the Kuhn-Polanyi-Hanson critique of scientific knowledge.
The purported overthrow of the objectivity of scientific knowledge was not welcomed, not surprisingly, with open arms. The thrust behind this resistance can be seen in the views of Israel Scheffler who argued that such an overthrow would so much more than the scientist’s claim to platonic truth. What was at stake was rationality itself, the Enlightenment tool which had come to serve as the only effective antidote to dogmatism, factionalism and subjective belief in general. It was by means of rationality and science that the West had come to resolve disagreements without blood and violence. If objectivity does not exist, there seemed to be no non-coercive way to compel the assent of others. For Scheffler, it was as if Kuhn, Polanyi and Hanson were literally attempting to destroy mankind’s greatest hope for peace and unity.
While the choice which Scheffler described between platonic knowledge/rationality and medieval anarchy seems exaggerated from our perspective, if one considers the claims of “radical” Kuhn, one sees the source of his seeming hysteria. The idea that two scientific paradigms were utterly incommensurable as well as mutually incorrigible along with the idea that a scientist could only switch by means of a purely non-rational gestalt shift does seem to entail many of the consequences which Scheffler warns against.
Nevertheless, even a more moderate version of Kuhn does not leave much room for hope that platonic knowledge/rationality will ever be held as an attainable goal again. Indeed, Scheffler’s arguments simply seem to ignore the claims of the moderate Kuhn. This is unfortunate, for even if Kuhn’s ideas concerning paradigms or incommensurability are not clear or convincing, his criticisms of the view of science which Scheffler advocates are very compelling.
Scheffler’s fear that objectivity was being undermined found its greatest realizations in the thinking of individuals other than Kuhn. In the mid 1970’s Paul Feyerabend argued that not only does science not proceed rationally, as Kuhn and others had argued, but that rationality was not the last and only word in terms of knowledge. Rather, science involved irrational moves both in terms of discovery as well as justification. Thus, even if there was an objective truth to be found by science, there was simply no objective path to it nor was there an objective way to establish when or if it had been found.
Nevertheless, Feyerabend’s ideas were not as radical as some might have thought, for just because there is no one true and final rationality does not mean, as Scheffler might have thought, that anything goes. We would do well to remember Poincare’s distinction between science as a merely conventional description of reality and science as a convenient description of reality. What Feyerabend rejected was the rationality of classical philosophy by arguing that rationality could only be judged relative to a particular context. An absolute point of reference, framework or God’s-eye point of view, even if it did exist, was not the point of reference within which the scientist or philosopher worked. Consequently, what we mean by “Truth”, or platonic truth as I have called it, simply does not exist out in the world. Additionally, Feyerabend saw ambiguity and contradiction as inescapable features of human reasoning and rationality and even went as far as arguing that the law of non-contradiction was an assumption rather than a law in human reasoning. But again, this conception of truth and science does not at all entail the anarchy which Scheffler feared.
Rather, this fear was realized in the form of the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault’s attack on objectivity came in the form of a genealogical description of objectivity. Similar to Fleck, he argued that the classifications schemes by which we organize experience, reasoning and knowledge are not universal and timeless. Rather, Foucault argued, there is a cultural rootedness to such classification schemes, and as such, they change over time. Thus, the very notion of objectivity is simply a concept which only exists relative to our contingent cultural classification schemes. Foucault, however, was equally critical of the idea that such schemes were utterly subjective as well. While there was no universal dictionary which one could appeal to in order to define “objectivity” objectively, such definitions can and are indexed to a shared context and shared classification scheme.
Derrida’s critique of objectivity came at an even more fundamental level. Derrida took de Saussure’s theory of language as a closed system of differences and not argued that language was thus intrinsically and inescapably equivocal, but also went further in generalizing this claim to all meaning. Since meaning is constructed by an ever changing process of interpretation and reinterpretation, fixity in meaning is an unattainable ideal for the reader or even the author of a text. Thus we see the famous phrase “the author is dead.”
Derrida then extended the concept of text to include everything, bridges, building, automobiles, etc. The entire world became text which could only be interpreted according to our continually evolving experience and just as two interpretations of a book cannot be held up against any objective standards, so too, two interpretations of the natural world cannot be held up against any objective standards of truth, objectivity, rationality, etc.
This attack at objectivity in science goes far beyond anything imagined by even the radical Kuhn. The necessary response, it seems clear to me, is not to attempt to salvage Platonic rationality and truth, but rather to attempt to defend a modified form of objectivity which does not lend itself so easily to the criticisms which were brought against the former. In a future post we will see how many attempted to do this very thing.
Read more!
The purported overthrow of the objectivity of scientific knowledge was not welcomed, not surprisingly, with open arms. The thrust behind this resistance can be seen in the views of Israel Scheffler who argued that such an overthrow would so much more than the scientist’s claim to platonic truth. What was at stake was rationality itself, the Enlightenment tool which had come to serve as the only effective antidote to dogmatism, factionalism and subjective belief in general. It was by means of rationality and science that the West had come to resolve disagreements without blood and violence. If objectivity does not exist, there seemed to be no non-coercive way to compel the assent of others. For Scheffler, it was as if Kuhn, Polanyi and Hanson were literally attempting to destroy mankind’s greatest hope for peace and unity.
While the choice which Scheffler described between platonic knowledge/rationality and medieval anarchy seems exaggerated from our perspective, if one considers the claims of “radical” Kuhn, one sees the source of his seeming hysteria. The idea that two scientific paradigms were utterly incommensurable as well as mutually incorrigible along with the idea that a scientist could only switch by means of a purely non-rational gestalt shift does seem to entail many of the consequences which Scheffler warns against.
Nevertheless, even a more moderate version of Kuhn does not leave much room for hope that platonic knowledge/rationality will ever be held as an attainable goal again. Indeed, Scheffler’s arguments simply seem to ignore the claims of the moderate Kuhn. This is unfortunate, for even if Kuhn’s ideas concerning paradigms or incommensurability are not clear or convincing, his criticisms of the view of science which Scheffler advocates are very compelling.
Scheffler’s fear that objectivity was being undermined found its greatest realizations in the thinking of individuals other than Kuhn. In the mid 1970’s Paul Feyerabend argued that not only does science not proceed rationally, as Kuhn and others had argued, but that rationality was not the last and only word in terms of knowledge. Rather, science involved irrational moves both in terms of discovery as well as justification. Thus, even if there was an objective truth to be found by science, there was simply no objective path to it nor was there an objective way to establish when or if it had been found.
Nevertheless, Feyerabend’s ideas were not as radical as some might have thought, for just because there is no one true and final rationality does not mean, as Scheffler might have thought, that anything goes. We would do well to remember Poincare’s distinction between science as a merely conventional description of reality and science as a convenient description of reality. What Feyerabend rejected was the rationality of classical philosophy by arguing that rationality could only be judged relative to a particular context. An absolute point of reference, framework or God’s-eye point of view, even if it did exist, was not the point of reference within which the scientist or philosopher worked. Consequently, what we mean by “Truth”, or platonic truth as I have called it, simply does not exist out in the world. Additionally, Feyerabend saw ambiguity and contradiction as inescapable features of human reasoning and rationality and even went as far as arguing that the law of non-contradiction was an assumption rather than a law in human reasoning. But again, this conception of truth and science does not at all entail the anarchy which Scheffler feared.
Rather, this fear was realized in the form of the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault’s attack on objectivity came in the form of a genealogical description of objectivity. Similar to Fleck, he argued that the classifications schemes by which we organize experience, reasoning and knowledge are not universal and timeless. Rather, Foucault argued, there is a cultural rootedness to such classification schemes, and as such, they change over time. Thus, the very notion of objectivity is simply a concept which only exists relative to our contingent cultural classification schemes. Foucault, however, was equally critical of the idea that such schemes were utterly subjective as well. While there was no universal dictionary which one could appeal to in order to define “objectivity” objectively, such definitions can and are indexed to a shared context and shared classification scheme.
Derrida’s critique of objectivity came at an even more fundamental level. Derrida took de Saussure’s theory of language as a closed system of differences and not argued that language was thus intrinsically and inescapably equivocal, but also went further in generalizing this claim to all meaning. Since meaning is constructed by an ever changing process of interpretation and reinterpretation, fixity in meaning is an unattainable ideal for the reader or even the author of a text. Thus we see the famous phrase “the author is dead.”
Derrida then extended the concept of text to include everything, bridges, building, automobiles, etc. The entire world became text which could only be interpreted according to our continually evolving experience and just as two interpretations of a book cannot be held up against any objective standards, so too, two interpretations of the natural world cannot be held up against any objective standards of truth, objectivity, rationality, etc.
This attack at objectivity in science goes far beyond anything imagined by even the radical Kuhn. The necessary response, it seems clear to me, is not to attempt to salvage Platonic rationality and truth, but rather to attempt to defend a modified form of objectivity which does not lend itself so easily to the criticisms which were brought against the former. In a future post we will see how many attempted to do this very thing.
Filed in: science epistemology
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11.01.2006
Logical Positivism, Existentialism and Axiology
Values may be, hypothetically speaking, subjective, relative or objective, meaning that they can apply to particular individuals, people within particular situations or contexts, or to everybody everywhere. It is my contention that absolute objectivity in value is in contradiction with any naturalistic worldview, for there is no such thing as intrinsic value, but only relational, or even self-relational value. The purpose of this post will be to illustrate how the philosophical movements of logical positivism and existentialism both lead to a rejection of objective value. It will also be argued, however, that the subjectivism which each movement concludes with is almost, if not just as implausible.
Using John Searle’s distinctions between ontological/epistemic objectivity/subjectivity we can more easily illustrate the path by which logical positivism (LP) and existentialism (EX) reach their different forms of ethical subjectivism. LP took science to the quintessence of knowledge, going so far as to suggest that anything which was not science, at least in principle, was mere metaphysics, and accordingly not worth all that much. Thus, in their zeal to limit themselves to epistemic objectivity with regards to ontologically objective entities, they found moral claims to be literally meaningless, having no truth conditions or values in the world.
This can be seen explicitly in the philosophies of both Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer. According to both men, since science says nothing at all about value, value claims are nothing but the expression of preference. In other words, since the epistemic objectivity which is necessary to make truth claims could only be achieved by defining them in terms of ontologically objective facts, and since ontologically objective facts tell or entail nothing with regards to value, we are left with subjectivism as the only option. Thus, value claims are epistemically subjective judgments which can be neither true nor false of ontologically objective states of affairs. Accordingly, moral judgments are utterly incorrigible even in principle, for while we can express our preferences about other people’s preferences, there is no normativity which transcends the individual subject in such expressions.
EX took a very different path to truth and value which led them to the same conclusion. While LP denied that the epistemically objective description of ontologically objective reality could ever tell us anything about value, EX denied that when it comes to human nature there is no ontological objectivity. Instead, each person makes their own nature by way of the choices which they freely make in life, for “existence precedes essence.” At this point, natural law, which is certainly the most promising source of objectivity in value among mankind, actually tends toward epistemic subjectivity. In this we see Kierkegaard’s notion of “subjective truth,” which maintains that when it comes to value, the most we can say is that some value is “true for me.”
Thus on the one hand we see that while LP held that there was such a thing as a universal human nature which we can, in principle, have epistemic objectivity about, they denied that epistemic objectivity could be had in the case of values since even a complete description of what our human nature “is” would not entail a single “ought.” On the other hand, however, EX denied that epistemic objectivity could be had of an ontologically objective human nature for the simple reason that there was no such thing as a universal, ontologically objective human nature. We create ourselves and well as the values which we hold, thus building a bridge from “is” to “ought” by sacrificing ontological objectivity, as well as any chance at epistemic objectivity, altogether. (This, of course, seems to be a very different notion of “is” from that of LP, as Heidegger points out.)
Thus we see that LP’s concern for epistemic objectivity in claims regarding ontologically objective facts led them to see value judgments as epistemically subjective judgment of ontologically objective states of affairs, human nature in particular. On the other hand, EX’s emphasis upon the ontological subjectivity of human nature entailed that value judgments regarding each individual and their relation to the world be epistemically subjective in nature. The former denies that human nature can tell us anything about value, whereas the latter denies that there is such a thing as human nature at all.
In the end, however, I think that both of these lines of thought are fundamentally flawed. First of all, I agree with the LP’s in that no amount of knowledge from the natural sciences can ever entail any amount or set of values. Thus, I see moral realism as being in direct contradiction with a naturalistic worldview. Furthermore, I see no way in which a universal set of values could ever be established without the ontological objectivity of values in the universe. I do not, however, see this as conclusion which merits fear or distaste, as will be defended in a later post.
I strongly disagree, however, that any account of ontologically objective facts can provide us with anything but the most barren account of what human nature is. (See here) In this, I side with the EX’s, however I think that they take the way in which human nature is constructed to be far too individualistic. It’s true that our biological inheritance does not fully determine human nature, but it does constrain it. Furthermore, many of the non-biological factor which do constrain (or even determine!) human nature, such as language and culture, are external to the individual. Accordingly, there seems to be no reason why the inter-subjective values which arise from the non-subjective interaction between culture and biology cannot serve not only as a tether to personal value, but also act as a corrective to it.
Thus, I reject the accounts of value of both the LP’s as well as the EX’s which hold such judgments to be utterly subjective, epistemically speaking, with regards to facts which are ontologically objective or subjective, respectively. Rather I see values as being inter-subjective or rather relative judgments which are social constructed and constrained by a common biological nature and physical/cultural environment. I see a shared common nature, as properly understood, as being a powerful source of quasi-objectivity in value. The problem, of course, is that the type of human nature which I am now working with is not uniform across different cultures.
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Using John Searle’s distinctions between ontological/epistemic objectivity/subjectivity we can more easily illustrate the path by which logical positivism (LP) and existentialism (EX) reach their different forms of ethical subjectivism. LP took science to the quintessence of knowledge, going so far as to suggest that anything which was not science, at least in principle, was mere metaphysics, and accordingly not worth all that much. Thus, in their zeal to limit themselves to epistemic objectivity with regards to ontologically objective entities, they found moral claims to be literally meaningless, having no truth conditions or values in the world.
This can be seen explicitly in the philosophies of both Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer. According to both men, since science says nothing at all about value, value claims are nothing but the expression of preference. In other words, since the epistemic objectivity which is necessary to make truth claims could only be achieved by defining them in terms of ontologically objective facts, and since ontologically objective facts tell or entail nothing with regards to value, we are left with subjectivism as the only option. Thus, value claims are epistemically subjective judgments which can be neither true nor false of ontologically objective states of affairs. Accordingly, moral judgments are utterly incorrigible even in principle, for while we can express our preferences about other people’s preferences, there is no normativity which transcends the individual subject in such expressions.
EX took a very different path to truth and value which led them to the same conclusion. While LP denied that the epistemically objective description of ontologically objective reality could ever tell us anything about value, EX denied that when it comes to human nature there is no ontological objectivity. Instead, each person makes their own nature by way of the choices which they freely make in life, for “existence precedes essence.” At this point, natural law, which is certainly the most promising source of objectivity in value among mankind, actually tends toward epistemic subjectivity. In this we see Kierkegaard’s notion of “subjective truth,” which maintains that when it comes to value, the most we can say is that some value is “true for me.”
Thus on the one hand we see that while LP held that there was such a thing as a universal human nature which we can, in principle, have epistemic objectivity about, they denied that epistemic objectivity could be had in the case of values since even a complete description of what our human nature “is” would not entail a single “ought.” On the other hand, however, EX denied that epistemic objectivity could be had of an ontologically objective human nature for the simple reason that there was no such thing as a universal, ontologically objective human nature. We create ourselves and well as the values which we hold, thus building a bridge from “is” to “ought” by sacrificing ontological objectivity, as well as any chance at epistemic objectivity, altogether. (This, of course, seems to be a very different notion of “is” from that of LP, as Heidegger points out.)
Thus we see that LP’s concern for epistemic objectivity in claims regarding ontologically objective facts led them to see value judgments as epistemically subjective judgment of ontologically objective states of affairs, human nature in particular. On the other hand, EX’s emphasis upon the ontological subjectivity of human nature entailed that value judgments regarding each individual and their relation to the world be epistemically subjective in nature. The former denies that human nature can tell us anything about value, whereas the latter denies that there is such a thing as human nature at all.
In the end, however, I think that both of these lines of thought are fundamentally flawed. First of all, I agree with the LP’s in that no amount of knowledge from the natural sciences can ever entail any amount or set of values. Thus, I see moral realism as being in direct contradiction with a naturalistic worldview. Furthermore, I see no way in which a universal set of values could ever be established without the ontological objectivity of values in the universe. I do not, however, see this as conclusion which merits fear or distaste, as will be defended in a later post.
I strongly disagree, however, that any account of ontologically objective facts can provide us with anything but the most barren account of what human nature is. (See here) In this, I side with the EX’s, however I think that they take the way in which human nature is constructed to be far too individualistic. It’s true that our biological inheritance does not fully determine human nature, but it does constrain it. Furthermore, many of the non-biological factor which do constrain (or even determine!) human nature, such as language and culture, are external to the individual. Accordingly, there seems to be no reason why the inter-subjective values which arise from the non-subjective interaction between culture and biology cannot serve not only as a tether to personal value, but also act as a corrective to it.
Thus, I reject the accounts of value of both the LP’s as well as the EX’s which hold such judgments to be utterly subjective, epistemically speaking, with regards to facts which are ontologically objective or subjective, respectively. Rather I see values as being inter-subjective or rather relative judgments which are social constructed and constrained by a common biological nature and physical/cultural environment. I see a shared common nature, as properly understood, as being a powerful source of quasi-objectivity in value. The problem, of course, is that the type of human nature which I am now working with is not uniform across different cultures.
Filed in: axiology
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A Defense of Methodological Anti-Naturalism
The naturalistic approach to social science follows very much in the tradition of logical positivism and its application in the natural sciences. It asserts that a scientific account of social facts must be in terms of purposeless mechanism and reduction, non-teleological laws and publicly observable data. Matters such as meaning, purpose or interpretation are entirely antithetical to the scientific endeavor by such a view, for it was by ridding itself of such things that science made so much progress in the natural sciences. Inasmuch as a school of thought appeals to such entities, it is not a science at all. Consequently, it is argued, social science should isolate itself from such matters.
According to the interpretationalist, however, any account of social facts which does not include meaning, interpretation and purpose will inevitably fall short of describing the essential features which characterize social facts. Such social facts are inevitably constituted, at least in part, by beliefs and desires, and there simply seems to be no way that a naturalistic approach could ever capture or explain such intentional content; such matters can only be approached by way of interpretation. Thus, the very things which naturalism attempts to avoid in explaining social facts are the very things which constitute social facts. As such, I will argue that a naturalistic account of social facts cannot ever be adequate short of the highly unlikely reduction of intentional content to physical fact.
In order to better illustrate the difference between these two approaches let us consider the example of two or more parties agreeing to a contract or covenant. The interpretationalist approach to explaining this fact would include an appeal to the beliefs and desires of all parties which are entering into the agreement. For example, the interpretationalist would want to understand by way of interpretation what each party wants and how they believe they can achieve their goals by way of entering into the agreement in question. The naturalist approach, however, cannot make any such appeals to beliefs, desires or even the meaning of the contract itself. Instead, they are left to behavioristic accounts (i.e. stimulus response) and neurophysiology, neither of which seems plausible or adequate as an explanation of the event in question.
The question may be asked why the naturalist cannot simply read the text of the contract (be this text in written form or not) or ask each of the parties what they are doing and why? After all, each of these is an appeal to publicly available information. There are two problems with such an approach. First, the actual beliefs and desires which are involved in such scenarios may not be transparent to the people involved. Second, and more fundamental, what information is public in each of these cases is not the information which is central to explaining or understanding the matter at hand. Mere behavior cannot be interpreted as meaningful action without taking into account the constitutive beliefs and desires; and such mental events are inevitably private. Indeed, the social scientist cannot even get the essential information by asking the involved parties what they believe and desire, for the response which they will receive by way of noise coming from their mouth is simply another example of mere behavior. There is, even in principle, no way for the social scientist to understand the actions of others without projecting his/her own interpretation upon the situation in question.
What about the naturalist’s accusation that inasmuch as social science involves interpretation, meaning and purpose it ceases to be a science altogether? There is much merit in such an accusation so long as one takes “science” to mean something analogous to the natural sciences as inherited from the logical positivist tradition. What is not at all clear, however, is that all quests for knowledge and understanding, or even all sciences should strive for such a status. While naturalism may be the surest path to predictive abilities and control of a physical system, this should not be confused with understanding that system. In fact, one can argue that not only does the interpretationalist approach to social facts give a deeper understanding of such facts, but for the time being it also gives greater predictive abilities and control over such facts as well.
Indeed, just as the natural sciences advocate a form of methodological naturalism in order to avoid criticism from some quarters, a move which is justified by its pragmatic value (prediction and control), one can similarly argue for a methodological anti-naturalism in the case of the social sciences, a move which is also justified by its pragmatic value (understanding, prediction and control). Thus, the social scientist need not actually be committed to the metaphysical existence of non-reducible and non-mechanistic entities such as beliefs, desires, freewill, etc. Instead, he/she can simply assume the existence of such entities due to their methodological benefits. Until the naturalists do find a way to reduce such entities, however, some form of interpretationalism should be the preferred approach in social science, at least in terms of methodology.
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According to the interpretationalist, however, any account of social facts which does not include meaning, interpretation and purpose will inevitably fall short of describing the essential features which characterize social facts. Such social facts are inevitably constituted, at least in part, by beliefs and desires, and there simply seems to be no way that a naturalistic approach could ever capture or explain such intentional content; such matters can only be approached by way of interpretation. Thus, the very things which naturalism attempts to avoid in explaining social facts are the very things which constitute social facts. As such, I will argue that a naturalistic account of social facts cannot ever be adequate short of the highly unlikely reduction of intentional content to physical fact.
In order to better illustrate the difference between these two approaches let us consider the example of two or more parties agreeing to a contract or covenant. The interpretationalist approach to explaining this fact would include an appeal to the beliefs and desires of all parties which are entering into the agreement. For example, the interpretationalist would want to understand by way of interpretation what each party wants and how they believe they can achieve their goals by way of entering into the agreement in question. The naturalist approach, however, cannot make any such appeals to beliefs, desires or even the meaning of the contract itself. Instead, they are left to behavioristic accounts (i.e. stimulus response) and neurophysiology, neither of which seems plausible or adequate as an explanation of the event in question.
The question may be asked why the naturalist cannot simply read the text of the contract (be this text in written form or not) or ask each of the parties what they are doing and why? After all, each of these is an appeal to publicly available information. There are two problems with such an approach. First, the actual beliefs and desires which are involved in such scenarios may not be transparent to the people involved. Second, and more fundamental, what information is public in each of these cases is not the information which is central to explaining or understanding the matter at hand. Mere behavior cannot be interpreted as meaningful action without taking into account the constitutive beliefs and desires; and such mental events are inevitably private. Indeed, the social scientist cannot even get the essential information by asking the involved parties what they believe and desire, for the response which they will receive by way of noise coming from their mouth is simply another example of mere behavior. There is, even in principle, no way for the social scientist to understand the actions of others without projecting his/her own interpretation upon the situation in question.
What about the naturalist’s accusation that inasmuch as social science involves interpretation, meaning and purpose it ceases to be a science altogether? There is much merit in such an accusation so long as one takes “science” to mean something analogous to the natural sciences as inherited from the logical positivist tradition. What is not at all clear, however, is that all quests for knowledge and understanding, or even all sciences should strive for such a status. While naturalism may be the surest path to predictive abilities and control of a physical system, this should not be confused with understanding that system. In fact, one can argue that not only does the interpretationalist approach to social facts give a deeper understanding of such facts, but for the time being it also gives greater predictive abilities and control over such facts as well.
Indeed, just as the natural sciences advocate a form of methodological naturalism in order to avoid criticism from some quarters, a move which is justified by its pragmatic value (prediction and control), one can similarly argue for a methodological anti-naturalism in the case of the social sciences, a move which is also justified by its pragmatic value (understanding, prediction and control). Thus, the social scientist need not actually be committed to the metaphysical existence of non-reducible and non-mechanistic entities such as beliefs, desires, freewill, etc. Instead, he/she can simply assume the existence of such entities due to their methodological benefits. Until the naturalists do find a way to reduce such entities, however, some form of interpretationalism should be the preferred approach in social science, at least in terms of methodology.
Filed in: socialscience
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10.30.2006
Inference and Justification
The standard model of knowledge is that of justified, true belief, thus entailing, as most other models do as well, that a belief does not amount to knowledge unless it is justified. In this post I will claim that this claim is wrong. Furthermore, in the foundationalist picture of epistemology, a belief can only be as justified (ideally) as much as the beliefs and reason which support it are themselves justified. I will argue that this is wrong as well. In this post I intend to argue that both pictures of belief and justification are fundamentally flawed, especially in light of relatively recent findings in cognitive science.
The problem which I see with such pictures of justification is that they fail to distinguish between the inferential way in which we formulate novel beliefs and reform beliefs which we already have on the one hand and the way in which we justify such inferences after the fact. Inference is something which we do quite unconsciously and with very little volitional control. Justification is an active process by which we attempt to validate these inferences which have already been made after they have actively been called into doubt or question.
The main difference between the two, however, is that justification is something which we very rarely, comparatively speaking, engage in. We simply do not call enough of our beliefs into question in order to even raise the question of justification. Indeed, not only do we not call most of the beliefs which we have into question, but I would further argue that we do not even bring most information which we “accept” or take for granted about the world to the level of belief. There are thousands of questions which we can ask a person as to what they believe about the world and in many cases they will state beliefs which they had only "accepted" up to that point.
Thus, I see justification in a way very similar to Strawson’s use of presupposition in his theory of language. Recall how Strawson asserted that in the case of “The present King of France is bald” the question of whether there actually is a present King of France or not does not even come up. Similarly, I would assert that the question of how or whether our foundational beliefs are justified or not (or even exist!) is simply one which rarely, if ever arises. Our beliefs are the product of inferences which we have made based on that which we already accepted and/or believed about the world, and in most all cases the question of justification simply never arises.
Accordingly, I see the entire foundationalist project to be entirely misguided and far too influenced by a Cartesian view of the mind in which all our beliefs are completely transparent and available for personal inspection. Justification, rather than being something by which we always or even usually reach knowledge, is more like playing the child’s game of “why?” Some belief is called into question, “why do you (or I) believe X?” An answer, Y, is given, followed by “why do you (or I) believe Y?” and so on. What is striking about this “game” is that first of all it is very taxing on one’s patience and second that it can be very difficult. Both of these features go to show how rarely the question of justification actually arises.
Given that the question of justification arises so rarely, we seemingly left with two options. We can either grant that we know very little, or we can abandon justification as a necessary condition for knowledge. Of these two options, I prefer the second, abandoning actual justification in favor of potential or possible justification. Knowledge is not a justified belief, but rather a belief which can be justified. More practically, knowledge is a belief which we cannot plausibly imagine to turn out false. This is a very loose definition, but I think that it squares fairly well with the way in which the concept “knowledge” is actually used.
Unfortunately, however, it is also a very subjective definition, for who (or what) is to decided what can or cannot be plausibly imagined to be false? Indeed, this is very much in the tradition of the sophistic earth-giant who held knowledge to be but mere probable opinion which we were unable or unwilling to call into question. Where, exactly, belief ends and knowledge begins will be a somewhat arbitrary choice upon the spectrum of confidence with which a belief can be held. Of course the main question which this account raises is what determines where we place our lines of demarcation? This is a question which will have to wait until later.
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The problem which I see with such pictures of justification is that they fail to distinguish between the inferential way in which we formulate novel beliefs and reform beliefs which we already have on the one hand and the way in which we justify such inferences after the fact. Inference is something which we do quite unconsciously and with very little volitional control. Justification is an active process by which we attempt to validate these inferences which have already been made after they have actively been called into doubt or question.
The main difference between the two, however, is that justification is something which we very rarely, comparatively speaking, engage in. We simply do not call enough of our beliefs into question in order to even raise the question of justification. Indeed, not only do we not call most of the beliefs which we have into question, but I would further argue that we do not even bring most information which we “accept” or take for granted about the world to the level of belief. There are thousands of questions which we can ask a person as to what they believe about the world and in many cases they will state beliefs which they had only "accepted" up to that point.
Thus, I see justification in a way very similar to Strawson’s use of presupposition in his theory of language. Recall how Strawson asserted that in the case of “The present King of France is bald” the question of whether there actually is a present King of France or not does not even come up. Similarly, I would assert that the question of how or whether our foundational beliefs are justified or not (or even exist!) is simply one which rarely, if ever arises. Our beliefs are the product of inferences which we have made based on that which we already accepted and/or believed about the world, and in most all cases the question of justification simply never arises.
Accordingly, I see the entire foundationalist project to be entirely misguided and far too influenced by a Cartesian view of the mind in which all our beliefs are completely transparent and available for personal inspection. Justification, rather than being something by which we always or even usually reach knowledge, is more like playing the child’s game of “why?” Some belief is called into question, “why do you (or I) believe X?” An answer, Y, is given, followed by “why do you (or I) believe Y?” and so on. What is striking about this “game” is that first of all it is very taxing on one’s patience and second that it can be very difficult. Both of these features go to show how rarely the question of justification actually arises.
Given that the question of justification arises so rarely, we seemingly left with two options. We can either grant that we know very little, or we can abandon justification as a necessary condition for knowledge. Of these two options, I prefer the second, abandoning actual justification in favor of potential or possible justification. Knowledge is not a justified belief, but rather a belief which can be justified. More practically, knowledge is a belief which we cannot plausibly imagine to turn out false. This is a very loose definition, but I think that it squares fairly well with the way in which the concept “knowledge” is actually used.
Unfortunately, however, it is also a very subjective definition, for who (or what) is to decided what can or cannot be plausibly imagined to be false? Indeed, this is very much in the tradition of the sophistic earth-giant who held knowledge to be but mere probable opinion which we were unable or unwilling to call into question. Where, exactly, belief ends and knowledge begins will be a somewhat arbitrary choice upon the spectrum of confidence with which a belief can be held. Of course the main question which this account raises is what determines where we place our lines of demarcation? This is a question which will have to wait until later.
Filed in: epistemology
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Delving Deeper Into Externalism
The purpose of this post will be primarily expositive in nature. It will be concerned with describing the Standard Model of knowledge (SM) as well as the primary criticism brought against it by Gettier. Having done that, it will then turn to the task of describing two of the attempts which have been made to salvage this standard model in the modified forms of the No Defeaters Theory (NDT) and the No False Grounds Theory (NFG). Finally, we will conclude with an illustration of how these two models differ in what does and does not constitute knowledge as well as the underlying reason for these differences.
According to the SM, knowledge is defined by the necessary and sufficient conditions of justification, truth and belief. If X is true, and if Henry believes X, and if Henry is justified in believing X, then Henry necessarily knows X. In the 1960’s Edmund Gettier called this model into question by arguing that these three conditions (belief, truth and justification) were not sufficient to guarantee knowledge. As an illustration, suppose we have Henry driving along a road which has numerous “barns” lining both sides of it. Suppose further that Henry points to one of the “barns” and claims to know that it is a barn. Well, as it turns out, almost all of the “barns” which Henry sees are in fact decorations set up by the locals in order to look like barns; all of them, in fact, with the sole exception of the one “barn” which Henry happens to point at. (Hence the distinction between barns and mere “barns.”) Coincidentally, the “barn” to which Henry pointed turned out to be the only real barn out of the hundreds which lined the road. Did Henry really know that the “barn” which he pointed at was really a barn?
The SM in its unmodified form would suggest that he did, since he believed the object to be a barn, he had good reason to believe it was a barn and it was in fact a barn. Nevertheless our intuitions rebel at such a prospect due to the coincidental nature of that “barn” actually being a veritable barn. Something has gone wrong either with our intuitions or with the SM of knowledge.
One possible response is to deny that Henry’s belief amounted to knowledge because he was not absolutely certain in it; he could have been wrong as can be seen in the likely case of him pointing to one of the other “barns” along the road. This, however, seems a little extreme to the defender of the SM. The problem, while indeed lying with Henry’s justification, is not that it did not amount to absolute certainty, but rather that given the context (his being surrounded by objects which looked like barns) his justification (that the barn simply looked like one) was not enough to pick the one true barn from the myriad of “barns” which surrounded him. In such Gettier cases, true belief is reached, but by the wrong path. Knowledge, in such cases, is the result of luck, and intuition rebels at the idea that knowledge can simply be the result of luck. Thus, the defender of the SM sets about to qualify the way in which truth is reached rather than holding out for absolute certainty.
Enter the No Defeaters Theory. According to NDT, Henry knows X under conditions of justified, true belief and the additional fourth condition that “there is no true proposition t such that, if [Henry] were justified in believing t, then S would not be justified in believing [X.]” (Feldman, 34) In other words, Henry knows X when there is no defeater t such that if he knew t (in terms of justified, true belief) it would undermine his justification for his belief X. Thus, in our example, the defeater that, if Henry had believed it and justifiably so, would have undermined his claim to knowledge was that almost all of the “barns” along the road were fake.
There are problems which arise in this model however, some more pressing than others. The first objection is that of the internalist who holds that whether a belief amounts to knowledge or not must be fully determined by factors internal to Henry. According to the internalist, truth, which is external to Henry, cannot play any determining role in any account of knowledge, contrary to the SM. The internalist simply sees the NDT as making a bad theory worse by appealing to factors which are more and more external to the individual in their appeal to the possible existence of some proposition t out in the external world which could be hypothetically known by Henry. To treat such an objection, however, would take us beyond the scope of this post.
A second objection to the NDT is that its formulation of what constitutes a defeater may actually defeat many cases which we intuitively accept as knowledge. There are possible cases in which we accept that Henry knows X, even though there does exist a true proposition t, such that were Henry to justifiably believe t, his knowing X would be undermined. As an illustration of such, Henry knows that his wife is not in the car with him. However, it is true that his wife at the moment is sleeping, and (for the sake of argument) let us suppose that the only way which Henry could justifiably believe this is if she were with him in the car or he were himself not in the car. Thus, there is a true proposition, t, such that if Henry justifiably believed t, then X could not be known by Henry since X would no longer be true.
A third objection is that there is an ambiguity in the nature of the defeater. Must a defeater include the full context of the proposition t? What about the possible presence of defeater-defeaters, propositions which defeat the justification for the defeaters? In other words, if justified, true belief is not a sufficient set of conditions for knowledge, should it be considered a sufficient set of conditions for a defeater? Perhaps the NDT theory can be modified so as to avoid these criticisms without some appeal to circularity, but no straight forward way of doing so comes to mind.
An alternative path toward salvaging the SM is that of the No False Grounds Theory (NFG). According to NFG, Henry believes X under the set of sufficient conditions of justified, true belief and the fourth condition that all of his grounds for believing X are all true, where a ground is, following Michael Clark, simply any belief or reason which plays a role in the formulation of X. It is important to understand that NFG is not aimed validating the justifications which Henry has for his belief X, but rather is aimed at qualifying or disqualifying the belief X as knowledge. Thus, in Henry’s case his grounds for believing his particular “barn” to be a barn can be described as follows: if an object looks like “that”, it is a barn. This ground is false, since all the other “barns” look just like that object without actually being barns, and accordingly Henry’s does not actually know that his “barn” is a barn.
A number of objections can also be brought against the NFG. First, the objections from the internalist still hold, though we have already considered this in the case of NDT. A second objection is that the requirement that each and every ground for a belief must be true seems overly strict. Suppose that Henry has ten true grounds for believing a true proposition, X, and one false ground for believing it. To claim that Henry does not know X based on that one false ground seems a bit extreme. In considering this objection it is important to remember that how the grounds function in terms of justification is not relevant. Whether a belief, X, is knowledge or not depends upon the truth of the grounds, not the strength of the justification.
It is the extreme requirements of NFG combined with its lack of concern for the strength of justification for a belief which allows for the possibility that one can have knowledge of some proposition, X, under NDT and lack knowledge of the same proposition X under NFG. For instance, suppose I want to know what the final score of last night’s football game was, so I ask ten of my friends who did watch the game last night. All ten friends verbally concur that the final score was 21 to 3. Unbeknownst to me, however, my rather bashful friend, Micah, remembered the score being different, but did not have the nerve to disagree with the other nine people in the room. Thus my grounds for believing that the final score was 21 to 3 is based in a number of grounds, including: each friend saw that final score, that each friend remembered the final score, that each friend is actually saying what they remember to score to have been, etc. In the case of Micah, however, two of my grounds are false (that he remembered the score correctly and that he is telling me what he remembers the score to have been), and thus I cannot know what the final score was last night under NFG. Under NDT, however, even if I come to know about either of these two true propositions (the two false grounds), or some variant on them, I am still justified in believing that the score was 21 to 3 due to the overwhelming number of alternative reasons for my belief. This difference in results is a direct consequence of one theory (NDT) focusing upon the justification for knowledge while the other (NFG) focuses upon knowledge itself.
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According to the SM, knowledge is defined by the necessary and sufficient conditions of justification, truth and belief. If X is true, and if Henry believes X, and if Henry is justified in believing X, then Henry necessarily knows X. In the 1960’s Edmund Gettier called this model into question by arguing that these three conditions (belief, truth and justification) were not sufficient to guarantee knowledge. As an illustration, suppose we have Henry driving along a road which has numerous “barns” lining both sides of it. Suppose further that Henry points to one of the “barns” and claims to know that it is a barn. Well, as it turns out, almost all of the “barns” which Henry sees are in fact decorations set up by the locals in order to look like barns; all of them, in fact, with the sole exception of the one “barn” which Henry happens to point at. (Hence the distinction between barns and mere “barns.”) Coincidentally, the “barn” to which Henry pointed turned out to be the only real barn out of the hundreds which lined the road. Did Henry really know that the “barn” which he pointed at was really a barn?
The SM in its unmodified form would suggest that he did, since he believed the object to be a barn, he had good reason to believe it was a barn and it was in fact a barn. Nevertheless our intuitions rebel at such a prospect due to the coincidental nature of that “barn” actually being a veritable barn. Something has gone wrong either with our intuitions or with the SM of knowledge.
One possible response is to deny that Henry’s belief amounted to knowledge because he was not absolutely certain in it; he could have been wrong as can be seen in the likely case of him pointing to one of the other “barns” along the road. This, however, seems a little extreme to the defender of the SM. The problem, while indeed lying with Henry’s justification, is not that it did not amount to absolute certainty, but rather that given the context (his being surrounded by objects which looked like barns) his justification (that the barn simply looked like one) was not enough to pick the one true barn from the myriad of “barns” which surrounded him. In such Gettier cases, true belief is reached, but by the wrong path. Knowledge, in such cases, is the result of luck, and intuition rebels at the idea that knowledge can simply be the result of luck. Thus, the defender of the SM sets about to qualify the way in which truth is reached rather than holding out for absolute certainty.
Enter the No Defeaters Theory. According to NDT, Henry knows X under conditions of justified, true belief and the additional fourth condition that “there is no true proposition t such that, if [Henry] were justified in believing t, then S would not be justified in believing [X.]” (Feldman, 34) In other words, Henry knows X when there is no defeater t such that if he knew t (in terms of justified, true belief) it would undermine his justification for his belief X. Thus, in our example, the defeater that, if Henry had believed it and justifiably so, would have undermined his claim to knowledge was that almost all of the “barns” along the road were fake.
There are problems which arise in this model however, some more pressing than others. The first objection is that of the internalist who holds that whether a belief amounts to knowledge or not must be fully determined by factors internal to Henry. According to the internalist, truth, which is external to Henry, cannot play any determining role in any account of knowledge, contrary to the SM. The internalist simply sees the NDT as making a bad theory worse by appealing to factors which are more and more external to the individual in their appeal to the possible existence of some proposition t out in the external world which could be hypothetically known by Henry. To treat such an objection, however, would take us beyond the scope of this post.
A second objection to the NDT is that its formulation of what constitutes a defeater may actually defeat many cases which we intuitively accept as knowledge. There are possible cases in which we accept that Henry knows X, even though there does exist a true proposition t, such that were Henry to justifiably believe t, his knowing X would be undermined. As an illustration of such, Henry knows that his wife is not in the car with him. However, it is true that his wife at the moment is sleeping, and (for the sake of argument) let us suppose that the only way which Henry could justifiably believe this is if she were with him in the car or he were himself not in the car. Thus, there is a true proposition, t, such that if Henry justifiably believed t, then X could not be known by Henry since X would no longer be true.
A third objection is that there is an ambiguity in the nature of the defeater. Must a defeater include the full context of the proposition t? What about the possible presence of defeater-defeaters, propositions which defeat the justification for the defeaters? In other words, if justified, true belief is not a sufficient set of conditions for knowledge, should it be considered a sufficient set of conditions for a defeater? Perhaps the NDT theory can be modified so as to avoid these criticisms without some appeal to circularity, but no straight forward way of doing so comes to mind.
An alternative path toward salvaging the SM is that of the No False Grounds Theory (NFG). According to NFG, Henry believes X under the set of sufficient conditions of justified, true belief and the fourth condition that all of his grounds for believing X are all true, where a ground is, following Michael Clark, simply any belief or reason which plays a role in the formulation of X. It is important to understand that NFG is not aimed validating the justifications which Henry has for his belief X, but rather is aimed at qualifying or disqualifying the belief X as knowledge. Thus, in Henry’s case his grounds for believing his particular “barn” to be a barn can be described as follows: if an object looks like “that”, it is a barn. This ground is false, since all the other “barns” look just like that object without actually being barns, and accordingly Henry’s does not actually know that his “barn” is a barn.
A number of objections can also be brought against the NFG. First, the objections from the internalist still hold, though we have already considered this in the case of NDT. A second objection is that the requirement that each and every ground for a belief must be true seems overly strict. Suppose that Henry has ten true grounds for believing a true proposition, X, and one false ground for believing it. To claim that Henry does not know X based on that one false ground seems a bit extreme. In considering this objection it is important to remember that how the grounds function in terms of justification is not relevant. Whether a belief, X, is knowledge or not depends upon the truth of the grounds, not the strength of the justification.
It is the extreme requirements of NFG combined with its lack of concern for the strength of justification for a belief which allows for the possibility that one can have knowledge of some proposition, X, under NDT and lack knowledge of the same proposition X under NFG. For instance, suppose I want to know what the final score of last night’s football game was, so I ask ten of my friends who did watch the game last night. All ten friends verbally concur that the final score was 21 to 3. Unbeknownst to me, however, my rather bashful friend, Micah, remembered the score being different, but did not have the nerve to disagree with the other nine people in the room. Thus my grounds for believing that the final score was 21 to 3 is based in a number of grounds, including: each friend saw that final score, that each friend remembered the final score, that each friend is actually saying what they remember to score to have been, etc. In the case of Micah, however, two of my grounds are false (that he remembered the score correctly and that he is telling me what he remembers the score to have been), and thus I cannot know what the final score was last night under NFG. Under NDT, however, even if I come to know about either of these two true propositions (the two false grounds), or some variant on them, I am still justified in believing that the score was 21 to 3 due to the overwhelming number of alternative reasons for my belief. This difference in results is a direct consequence of one theory (NDT) focusing upon the justification for knowledge while the other (NFG) focuses upon knowledge itself.
Filed in: epistemology
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10.26.2006
Post Cartesian Epistemology
Descartes held that he knew his mind better than he knew anything in the external world, including his own body. Thanks largely in part to Sigmund Freud, this belief has come under devastating criticism. Not only are we not privy to the minds of other people, but we are not fully or even largely privy to the contents of our own minds. This post will be dedicated to a rather undisciplined (like that’s unusual!) exploration of what implications this might have upon epistemology in general.
Know-How vs. Know-That
The difference between these two is intuitively obvious to me. There is simply no amount of arm chair instruction which I would sufficient by itself to train me to walk a tight-rope without a safety net. This example, however, is only meant to establish that know-how cannot be reduced to know-that. What remains unclear to me, however, is whether all know-that might actually be reducible to know-how, which would seem at first glance to be consistent with the idea of learning as the training of a neural network. If such is the case (as I suspect it is) then this would be a serious blow to the Cartesian view of the mind, for most know-how is un-, sub- or pre-conscious.
Knowing That You Know
Some would argue that in order to know something, you must know that you know it. The question which naturally follows such a claim is how you can know that you know? Do you have to know that you know that you know? And thus we are stuck in an infinite regress. The unconscious mind may provide an escape from such an infinite regress, for we can unconsciously know that we know, and since such meta-knowledge is unconscious we do not and indeed cannot know that we know that we know. Of course this is simply asserting that we do not have to know that we know something to know it.
Knowledge as a Sub-Set of Belief
Closely related to knowing that you know is the question of what qualifies as a belief, at least a belief which could ideally qualify as knowledge? Is it possible to come to realize that we have “always known something”, or do you start to know something only as we become conscious of such a belief? What if we simply take something for granted, is this belief and can such belief possibly qualify as knowledge? Must we be conscious of the assumptions which necessarily underlie what we claim to know? Must we be conscious (or even unconscious) of the ways in which we could possibly be wrong? I view these questions as being the primary weaknesses of my modal model of knowledge.
Holism vs. Atomism
Quine paints our belief system as a web of belief which is holistically modified as the beliefs evolve over time and experience. My modal model, on the other hand, seems to be incredibly atomistic in that each and every claim stands or falls on its own without any investigation into the premises or assumptions which underlie such knowledge. While Quine’s model certainly seems to allow for non-cognitive factors to play a greater role in knowledge claims, I am not convinced that such non-cognitive factors should play such a role. Then again, if the un-,sub-, or pre-consciousness does play a significant role in knowledge claims, then I don’t see how the modal model could adequately deal with such.
Certainty vs. Quantity
If my modal model simply cannot be defended in any significant way, then as an internalist I am left with a choice between the idea that knowledge can be wrong and the idea that we have very little, if any knowledge. The unconscious mind plays an interesting role in the case that our knowledge can be wrong. In such a model (the Sophistic model as I call it) we know something when we are simply unwilling or unable to question some belief or some belief which would fall with it. Unconscious intuition should play a large role, in such a model, in determining what we do or do not “know.” In the case of knowledge as certainty, it seems unlikely that we would be willing to call much of what is unconscious to us “certain.”
Conclusions
Inasmuch as we hold knowledge to be certain, it seems that the unconscious must be either ignored or excluded altogether. The central problem is to what degree such a mental feat is possible. For instance, it seems unlikely that we could ever be certain about something without “knowing that we know” in some strong sense. If know-that does in fact fully reduce to know-how, I do not see how we could ever be certain that our know-how, or any other non-cognitive tasks are sufficiently reliable. On a slightly different point, I doubt that any less than conscious belief could ever be certain. It may be possible, however, that we can bring such beliefs to our conscious attention, and upon examination declare them certain.
Perhaps the most straight forward move in this case would be to abandon the equation of knowledge with absolute certainty. This, however, is to let knowledge possibly be false unless some appeal is made to externalism. Such a move would parallel that of John Dewey when he declared the quest for absolute truth mere religion by a different name.
Read more!
Know-How vs. Know-That
The difference between these two is intuitively obvious to me. There is simply no amount of arm chair instruction which I would sufficient by itself to train me to walk a tight-rope without a safety net. This example, however, is only meant to establish that know-how cannot be reduced to know-that. What remains unclear to me, however, is whether all know-that might actually be reducible to know-how, which would seem at first glance to be consistent with the idea of learning as the training of a neural network. If such is the case (as I suspect it is) then this would be a serious blow to the Cartesian view of the mind, for most know-how is un-, sub- or pre-conscious.
Knowing That You Know
Some would argue that in order to know something, you must know that you know it. The question which naturally follows such a claim is how you can know that you know? Do you have to know that you know that you know? And thus we are stuck in an infinite regress. The unconscious mind may provide an escape from such an infinite regress, for we can unconsciously know that we know, and since such meta-knowledge is unconscious we do not and indeed cannot know that we know that we know. Of course this is simply asserting that we do not have to know that we know something to know it.
Knowledge as a Sub-Set of Belief
Closely related to knowing that you know is the question of what qualifies as a belief, at least a belief which could ideally qualify as knowledge? Is it possible to come to realize that we have “always known something”, or do you start to know something only as we become conscious of such a belief? What if we simply take something for granted, is this belief and can such belief possibly qualify as knowledge? Must we be conscious of the assumptions which necessarily underlie what we claim to know? Must we be conscious (or even unconscious) of the ways in which we could possibly be wrong? I view these questions as being the primary weaknesses of my modal model of knowledge.
Holism vs. Atomism
Quine paints our belief system as a web of belief which is holistically modified as the beliefs evolve over time and experience. My modal model, on the other hand, seems to be incredibly atomistic in that each and every claim stands or falls on its own without any investigation into the premises or assumptions which underlie such knowledge. While Quine’s model certainly seems to allow for non-cognitive factors to play a greater role in knowledge claims, I am not convinced that such non-cognitive factors should play such a role. Then again, if the un-,sub-, or pre-consciousness does play a significant role in knowledge claims, then I don’t see how the modal model could adequately deal with such.
Certainty vs. Quantity
If my modal model simply cannot be defended in any significant way, then as an internalist I am left with a choice between the idea that knowledge can be wrong and the idea that we have very little, if any knowledge. The unconscious mind plays an interesting role in the case that our knowledge can be wrong. In such a model (the Sophistic model as I call it) we know something when we are simply unwilling or unable to question some belief or some belief which would fall with it. Unconscious intuition should play a large role, in such a model, in determining what we do or do not “know.” In the case of knowledge as certainty, it seems unlikely that we would be willing to call much of what is unconscious to us “certain.”
Conclusions
Inasmuch as we hold knowledge to be certain, it seems that the unconscious must be either ignored or excluded altogether. The central problem is to what degree such a mental feat is possible. For instance, it seems unlikely that we could ever be certain about something without “knowing that we know” in some strong sense. If know-that does in fact fully reduce to know-how, I do not see how we could ever be certain that our know-how, or any other non-cognitive tasks are sufficiently reliable. On a slightly different point, I doubt that any less than conscious belief could ever be certain. It may be possible, however, that we can bring such beliefs to our conscious attention, and upon examination declare them certain.
Perhaps the most straight forward move in this case would be to abandon the equation of knowledge with absolute certainty. This, however, is to let knowledge possibly be false unless some appeal is made to externalism. Such a move would parallel that of John Dewey when he declared the quest for absolute truth mere religion by a different name.
Filed in: mind epistemology
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10.25.2006
Property Dualism and Causation
David Hume famously argued that causation cannot ever be observed as some kind of independent event or phenomenon. Rather, the most we could say, empirically speaking, about causation was that it was the constant conjunction of other empirically verifiable events. Thus, when we see a billiard ball move and strike another billiard ball after which the second billiard ball moves we never empirically observe any kind of causation between the two events. Thomas Reid’s reply to this was that such an account lacks what is in fact at the heart of our concept of causation, namely causal powers. Causation is not merely the constant conjunction of phenomena, but rather it is this along with the causal power which we experience ourselves when we “cause” phenomena and therefore project onto other forms of causation. Thus, our interaction with causation involves both a relatively passive observation of the world as well as an active projection onto the world.
The problem which I’m sure Hume would have seen with Reid’s notion of projection is that it is extremely non-empirical, and as such we could never actually know whether such projections were warranted or not. In all fairness, it is not entirely clear to me how metaphysically real this notion of causal power was meant to be by Reid. Perhaps, it can be surmised, causal power is only something which plays a role in our notion of causation. In this post I would like to argue that it may be that we can actually consider causal power to be, in some sense, metaphysically real by an appeal to property dualism.
Metaphysical dualism is no longer tenable, pure and simple. The demise of dualism seemed to leave physicalism as the only viable alternative, an intuition which is still alive and well. However, arguments have been brought against physicalism and these have not been met with entirely convincing responses. While I myself have attempted to meet these objections in relatively recent posts (see here, here and here), I have since come to realize that most all of my responses depended upon a non-physicalist metaphysics. I have thus tentatively abandoned physicalism in favor of property dualism.
Particularly effective at illustrating the difference which I see between the two positions is Jackson’s thought experiment of Mary the color-scientist. My response to Jackson’s argument was that knowing everything that could be known about the color perception of other people could never amount to any degree of personal, experiential knowledge of color and its qualia. The problem with this response is that it suggests that there are at least some properties which are not publicly accessible which contradicts the physicalism which asserts that all properties are physical properties, and physical properties are publicly accessible. Thus, the Jackson the point of the Jackson argument which I was not getting is this: no amount of publicly available physical description can ever amount to or be an adequate substitute for the private and subjective properties which we clearly experience.
A more reasonable approach would be that of property dualism, which asserts that while there is only one kind of metaphysical substance (in opposition to metaphysical dualism), this one substance can have or even necessarily has two types of properties associated with it: the publicly available properties which are the subject matter of physics and the subjective and private properties which cannot be the subject matter of physics. Now what, exactly, the nature of these subjective properties is, I have no clue, but this is not a very good reason to doubt their existence.
At the center of this issue are a number of difficult questions which I am not at this time prepared to address, let alone answer: What is the nature of subjectivity? Can subjectivity emerge from pure objectivity? If not, does each ontologically objective object necessarily have a degree of subjectivity to it? Does it even make sense to speak of a subjectivity/objectivity distinction independent of any mind? For the sake of argument, the rest of this post will assume the answers to these questions to be I don’t know, no, yes and yes, respectively. It will be assumed that there are properties of the one kind of substance which exists which are not public.
Given these assumptions, we can now appreciate the two different aspects of causation which Reid spoke of. Causation is indeed the constant conjunction of objective events, events constituted by objective properties. This constant conjunction of objective properties is necessarily due to the constant conjunction of events at the substantive level. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that simply because the constant conjunction of objective properties is all we can publicly observe that such properties are all that exist. Property dualism, on the contrary, asserts that there are subjective properties at work as well and these properties are not publicly observable. Additionally, we can equate the causal powers which Reid speaks of as being precisely one of these subjective properties.
Such a view has some important, if not radical implications for the natural and social sciences. In the case of the former, such a metaphysical view seriously undermines any strong claim that science can ever give us a complete picture of what reality is really like. The implications for the latter, however, are further reaching. The subject matter of the social sciences is necessarily constituted by ontologically subjective facts, facts which are necessarily part of the intentional content of some mind or another. If the subjective properties of the mind cannot be reduced to objective properties of the brain, then a purely empirical account of social facts is impossible, even in principle. Indeed, if the subjective properties of the mind cannot be reduced to the objective properties of the brain, then it seems dubious at best that any kind of scientific description of the mind in terms of the substances which are responsible for the objective properties of the brain could ever be accomplished in practice due to a total lack of empirical data from which to draw.
Also deserving of greater attention is the implications which property dualism has on Searle’s distinction between ontological and epistemic subjectivity/objectivity. It is difficult to see at first glance whether the former supports or undermines the latter. Also of concern is the fear that allowing for subjective properties might allow in too much. Discussion and treatment of such questions will have to be put off until another time.
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The problem which I’m sure Hume would have seen with Reid’s notion of projection is that it is extremely non-empirical, and as such we could never actually know whether such projections were warranted or not. In all fairness, it is not entirely clear to me how metaphysically real this notion of causal power was meant to be by Reid. Perhaps, it can be surmised, causal power is only something which plays a role in our notion of causation. In this post I would like to argue that it may be that we can actually consider causal power to be, in some sense, metaphysically real by an appeal to property dualism.
Metaphysical dualism is no longer tenable, pure and simple. The demise of dualism seemed to leave physicalism as the only viable alternative, an intuition which is still alive and well. However, arguments have been brought against physicalism and these have not been met with entirely convincing responses. While I myself have attempted to meet these objections in relatively recent posts (see here, here and here), I have since come to realize that most all of my responses depended upon a non-physicalist metaphysics. I have thus tentatively abandoned physicalism in favor of property dualism.
Particularly effective at illustrating the difference which I see between the two positions is Jackson’s thought experiment of Mary the color-scientist. My response to Jackson’s argument was that knowing everything that could be known about the color perception of other people could never amount to any degree of personal, experiential knowledge of color and its qualia. The problem with this response is that it suggests that there are at least some properties which are not publicly accessible which contradicts the physicalism which asserts that all properties are physical properties, and physical properties are publicly accessible. Thus, the Jackson the point of the Jackson argument which I was not getting is this: no amount of publicly available physical description can ever amount to or be an adequate substitute for the private and subjective properties which we clearly experience.
A more reasonable approach would be that of property dualism, which asserts that while there is only one kind of metaphysical substance (in opposition to metaphysical dualism), this one substance can have or even necessarily has two types of properties associated with it: the publicly available properties which are the subject matter of physics and the subjective and private properties which cannot be the subject matter of physics. Now what, exactly, the nature of these subjective properties is, I have no clue, but this is not a very good reason to doubt their existence.
At the center of this issue are a number of difficult questions which I am not at this time prepared to address, let alone answer: What is the nature of subjectivity? Can subjectivity emerge from pure objectivity? If not, does each ontologically objective object necessarily have a degree of subjectivity to it? Does it even make sense to speak of a subjectivity/objectivity distinction independent of any mind? For the sake of argument, the rest of this post will assume the answers to these questions to be I don’t know, no, yes and yes, respectively. It will be assumed that there are properties of the one kind of substance which exists which are not public.
Given these assumptions, we can now appreciate the two different aspects of causation which Reid spoke of. Causation is indeed the constant conjunction of objective events, events constituted by objective properties. This constant conjunction of objective properties is necessarily due to the constant conjunction of events at the substantive level. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that simply because the constant conjunction of objective properties is all we can publicly observe that such properties are all that exist. Property dualism, on the contrary, asserts that there are subjective properties at work as well and these properties are not publicly observable. Additionally, we can equate the causal powers which Reid speaks of as being precisely one of these subjective properties.
Such a view has some important, if not radical implications for the natural and social sciences. In the case of the former, such a metaphysical view seriously undermines any strong claim that science can ever give us a complete picture of what reality is really like. The implications for the latter, however, are further reaching. The subject matter of the social sciences is necessarily constituted by ontologically subjective facts, facts which are necessarily part of the intentional content of some mind or another. If the subjective properties of the mind cannot be reduced to objective properties of the brain, then a purely empirical account of social facts is impossible, even in principle. Indeed, if the subjective properties of the mind cannot be reduced to the objective properties of the brain, then it seems dubious at best that any kind of scientific description of the mind in terms of the substances which are responsible for the objective properties of the brain could ever be accomplished in practice due to a total lack of empirical data from which to draw.
Also deserving of greater attention is the implications which property dualism has on Searle’s distinction between ontological and epistemic subjectivity/objectivity. It is difficult to see at first glance whether the former supports or undermines the latter. Also of concern is the fear that allowing for subjective properties might allow in too much. Discussion and treatment of such questions will have to be put off until another time.
Filed in: causation metaphysics
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Man as the Measure(r) of All Things
The confrontation which has characterized this extended series of posts regarding the nature of scientific knowledge is that of the platonic gods vs. the sophistic earth-giants. As we have also seen throughout this series, the most plausible position has been from the very beginning that of the earth-giants, a position which many have tried very hard, and yet without success to overthrow. While Kuhn’s arguments against platonic knowledge were by no means unique or original to him, it was with the publication of his The Structures of Scientific Revolutions that the prospect of platonic knowledge was permanently(?) snuffed out of existence.
Central to the earth-giant thesis, as developed in the 20th century, is the idea put forth in different forms by Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn that the standards of measure which scientists use are not part of nature. Rather, they are artificial in nature, intellectual creations which the scientists impose upon the world and by which they construe or interpret the experienced world; that such things are natural rather than artificial seems unlikely if not impossible. Even mathematics, which is intuitively “true” of the world, is but a human construct which has also had to be adjusted in order to more accurately map onto the world.
The measures and assumptions which scientist apply to the world are not only deducible from experience, are also change from time to time. Data cannot be collected without some sort of relevance criteria in place, criteria which the scientists necessarily bring to the process of observation. Furthermore, the data which is collected by such a process is inevitably equivocal and therefore lends itself to numerous interpretations as detailed by Whewell’s account of science as arguing by abduction.
Of course these claims were not native to Kuhn, Fleck, Whewell, Kant or even Hobbes. The claim that we can only know, measure or understand reality by the active imposition of structure upon the world as we experience it dates at least back to Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.” While we only have Plato’s caricature of Protagoras’ position on this matter, it seems unlikely that the latter’s position was as crude or naïve as the former depicts. Perhaps a better description would be “man is the measurer of all things,” meaning that we invent the standards by which we measure and interact with the world in our experience.
Plato, on the other hand, held that science, to use a gross anachronism, consisted in man’s carving nature at its joints. This, however, that nature actually has its own joints which are objectively observable, if not universal in nature. Unfortunately for Plato, however, many aspects of nature do not appear to have joints which can be described. For instance, in the case of neo-Darwinian evolution, the point at which one species leaves off and another begins is largely or even purely arbitrary in nature. While there is certainly a wonderful organization to biological taxonomy, the metrics by which we measure such organization is completely artificial. Worse still, it can be argued that the world of subatomic particles (quarks, strings, etc.) is exactly analogous to neo-Darwinian evolution in this respect.
While it has been argued over and over again through out the generations that man is the measure or measurer of all things, the manner in which this is supposed to be significant is not at all uniform. Perhaps the clearest exposition of how we can actively construe experience was that of Bacon’s idols of the mind; although it should be remembered that Bacon, being a platonic god, thought that such idols could and should be eliminated altogether. Mankind imposes measures upon reality by way of their particular biological embodiment (as Lakoff and Johnson suggest), or by way of the language we use (as Fleck pointed out), or through inheriting the impositions which are native to a particular community and/or school of thought (as Kuhn asserted), or we can even impose such measures upon nature out of personal choice and experience (as Whewell described). The point behind all of these claims is that, contrary to the analytic tradition, our humanness is an unavoidable medium in any quest for knowledge of the world.
Given these problems, which seem to be utterly insuperable, it would appear that the platonic gods have little chance of ever establishing science as delivering knowledge of the mind-independent world which is necessary, certain and universal. Such limitations compel the view that science is but the construal by humans of the world as they experience it rather than the uncovering or discovering of laws which exist independent of the human mind. Indeed, perhaps the most we can say about science is that they are uncovering or discovering that the world can be modeled in particular ways by humans.
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Central to the earth-giant thesis, as developed in the 20th century, is the idea put forth in different forms by Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn that the standards of measure which scientists use are not part of nature. Rather, they are artificial in nature, intellectual creations which the scientists impose upon the world and by which they construe or interpret the experienced world; that such things are natural rather than artificial seems unlikely if not impossible. Even mathematics, which is intuitively “true” of the world, is but a human construct which has also had to be adjusted in order to more accurately map onto the world.
The measures and assumptions which scientist apply to the world are not only deducible from experience, are also change from time to time. Data cannot be collected without some sort of relevance criteria in place, criteria which the scientists necessarily bring to the process of observation. Furthermore, the data which is collected by such a process is inevitably equivocal and therefore lends itself to numerous interpretations as detailed by Whewell’s account of science as arguing by abduction.
Of course these claims were not native to Kuhn, Fleck, Whewell, Kant or even Hobbes. The claim that we can only know, measure or understand reality by the active imposition of structure upon the world as we experience it dates at least back to Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.” While we only have Plato’s caricature of Protagoras’ position on this matter, it seems unlikely that the latter’s position was as crude or naïve as the former depicts. Perhaps a better description would be “man is the measurer of all things,” meaning that we invent the standards by which we measure and interact with the world in our experience.
Plato, on the other hand, held that science, to use a gross anachronism, consisted in man’s carving nature at its joints. This, however, that nature actually has its own joints which are objectively observable, if not universal in nature. Unfortunately for Plato, however, many aspects of nature do not appear to have joints which can be described. For instance, in the case of neo-Darwinian evolution, the point at which one species leaves off and another begins is largely or even purely arbitrary in nature. While there is certainly a wonderful organization to biological taxonomy, the metrics by which we measure such organization is completely artificial. Worse still, it can be argued that the world of subatomic particles (quarks, strings, etc.) is exactly analogous to neo-Darwinian evolution in this respect.
While it has been argued over and over again through out the generations that man is the measure or measurer of all things, the manner in which this is supposed to be significant is not at all uniform. Perhaps the clearest exposition of how we can actively construe experience was that of Bacon’s idols of the mind; although it should be remembered that Bacon, being a platonic god, thought that such idols could and should be eliminated altogether. Mankind imposes measures upon reality by way of their particular biological embodiment (as Lakoff and Johnson suggest), or by way of the language we use (as Fleck pointed out), or through inheriting the impositions which are native to a particular community and/or school of thought (as Kuhn asserted), or we can even impose such measures upon nature out of personal choice and experience (as Whewell described). The point behind all of these claims is that, contrary to the analytic tradition, our humanness is an unavoidable medium in any quest for knowledge of the world.
Given these problems, which seem to be utterly insuperable, it would appear that the platonic gods have little chance of ever establishing science as delivering knowledge of the mind-independent world which is necessary, certain and universal. Such limitations compel the view that science is but the construal by humans of the world as they experience it rather than the uncovering or discovering of laws which exist independent of the human mind. Indeed, perhaps the most we can say about science is that they are uncovering or discovering that the world can be modeled in particular ways by humans.
Filed in: science
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10.23.2006
The Unfortunate Flight from Pluralism
In a recent post I have described what I called the Cartesian sundering of fact from value, knowing that such a sundering could not fully be attributed to him. This post will deal with the two main issues which fueled much which can be found in Descartes’ philosophy, namely pluralism and uncertainty. While this post will be about the motivations behind the development of modern philosophy and modern science, both of which can be roughly attributed to Descartes, relatively little mention will be made of him explicitly.
By the early 17th century, a number of discoveries had been made which had seriously called into question Aristotelian Scholasticism, as well as everything which had been previously “known” by it. Copernican astronomy was beginning to flourish and more importantly, an entire new world, complete with “alien” inhabitants, had been discovered. Furthermore, the skeptical arguments of antiquity were beginning to gain a renewed popularity, supported by this new found lack of knowledge concerning the nature of the world as well as its position within the cosmos.
Very closely related to these issues of uncertainty were more questions surrounding the pluralism which had been blossoming in Western consciousness. Were the Catholics or the Protestants right, and by what standards or criteria could a person make such judgments? Or consider the hugely influential book by Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, in which Western culture and Christendom in particular are described from the perspective of Eastern eyes. The obvious conclusion which one is to draw from such accounts is that the Christians had no more right to call themselves “normal” (and consequently right) than the Muslims had.
Particularly influential was the inevitable realization that combination of “certainty” with such pluralism led to highly unfavorable consequences in such disagreements. Consider the way in which the fighting between Christian and Muslim was quickly supplanted by fighting between Catholic and Protestant. This, it would seem, was the prime motivation behind the social contract theories of politics and morality which would become highly influential during the early stages of modernity.
Mutual understanding across cultures and languages also became problematic with the Western “discovery” of the Far East. Did the Neo-Confucists believe in God or were they atheists? It came to be realized that “God,” as understood by the ethical monotheistic tradition, was simply not a concept which could be unambiguously said to exist, or even not-exist for that matter, in the Far Eastern mind. The communicative difficulties which arose both between as well as among the East and West would be a project to which Leibniz would dedicate himself for some time. In fact, this project would eventually lead to the development of modern logic by way of Leibniz’s suggestions for a universal language to aid in such communicative problems.
Perhaps the most penetrating question, a question which would unfortunately be left unanswered, was raised by the Old World confrontation with the New World and its inhabitants. While it seems quaint, if not inhumanly cruel to our ears, the question of whether the Native Americans were fully human or even human at all was seriously debated for some time. While the answer was eventually answered in the affirmative (and rightfully so!) the prospect of confronting a non-human linguistic culture is a very interesting one which certainly merited greater attention than it was given.
Of course this question was not really the one which the Westerners really had in mind. They were more concerned with whether the Native Americans were human in the sense of having souls or not. Were these creatures the sons and daughters of the same Adam and Eve as were the Europeans? Did Christ’s atonement apply to them? Should they be Christianized? It is unfortunate that these were the questions to which most attention was given in intellectual discourse, for not only were such question morally reprehensible but were far less interesting than those which could have been asked in their stead.
Given that so much of or sense of morality and value rests, by most any account, in our human nature, what implications would a confrontation with non-human creatures have upon such appeals to natural law? What if such aliens did not have a word for pain or pleasure as the Neo-Confucists did not have one for God? What if the nature of the alien will had been radically different from that of “us humans”? Would a Utilitarian or Kantian account of morality ever apply to such creatures, respectively? What rights and obligations would we assign such aliens? What rights and obligations would they assign us? What if they simply had no concept of rights or obligations, just as the Neo-Confucists had no concept of God?
These are penetrating questions which the Old World confrontation with the New World could have raised. (Of course, given the way in which the Native Americans actually were treated, we should probably be thankful to some degree that such fundamentals were not called into question.) What these questions highlight is the utter absence of intrinsic value in the world. Value only exists inasmuch as something is value “to” something or someone, and there is no guarantee that this something or someone will see and therefore value things in a similar manner.
While appeals to our common humanity are a very effective path to dissolving moral conflicts between human cultures, it is simply an eventual dead-end if one seeks a universal account of value, if only for the simple fact that humanity is not universal. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what features could, hypothetically, be universalized to all moral beings. Must all moral entities be biological in nature? What about non-biological intelligence? Must all moral entities be conscious, social or linguistic? While I assume so, I must confess that I am not prepared at the moment to defend such a claim very well. Indeed, it is completely unclear to me what concrete or specific values could possibly be based in such (possibly) universal features.
I call this thought experiment, this hypothetical confrontation with an utterly alien culture, the ultimate confrontation with pluralism. Indeed, it is my claim that any universal and ultimately non-question begging account of value should be done with such a confrontation in mind. Indeed, it seems clear to me that the common thought experiment of the alien anthropologist is simply an attempt to do just this very thing. It is my contention that not only ethics and meta-ethics, but indeed all of philosophy should be done from just such a perspective, a perspective in which moral realism (and perhaps even metaphysical realism) is not quite as intuitively obvious. This is the only way in which we can fully confront the problem of pluralism.
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By the early 17th century, a number of discoveries had been made which had seriously called into question Aristotelian Scholasticism, as well as everything which had been previously “known” by it. Copernican astronomy was beginning to flourish and more importantly, an entire new world, complete with “alien” inhabitants, had been discovered. Furthermore, the skeptical arguments of antiquity were beginning to gain a renewed popularity, supported by this new found lack of knowledge concerning the nature of the world as well as its position within the cosmos.
Very closely related to these issues of uncertainty were more questions surrounding the pluralism which had been blossoming in Western consciousness. Were the Catholics or the Protestants right, and by what standards or criteria could a person make such judgments? Or consider the hugely influential book by Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, in which Western culture and Christendom in particular are described from the perspective of Eastern eyes. The obvious conclusion which one is to draw from such accounts is that the Christians had no more right to call themselves “normal” (and consequently right) than the Muslims had.
Particularly influential was the inevitable realization that combination of “certainty” with such pluralism led to highly unfavorable consequences in such disagreements. Consider the way in which the fighting between Christian and Muslim was quickly supplanted by fighting between Catholic and Protestant. This, it would seem, was the prime motivation behind the social contract theories of politics and morality which would become highly influential during the early stages of modernity.
Mutual understanding across cultures and languages also became problematic with the Western “discovery” of the Far East. Did the Neo-Confucists believe in God or were they atheists? It came to be realized that “God,” as understood by the ethical monotheistic tradition, was simply not a concept which could be unambiguously said to exist, or even not-exist for that matter, in the Far Eastern mind. The communicative difficulties which arose both between as well as among the East and West would be a project to which Leibniz would dedicate himself for some time. In fact, this project would eventually lead to the development of modern logic by way of Leibniz’s suggestions for a universal language to aid in such communicative problems.
Perhaps the most penetrating question, a question which would unfortunately be left unanswered, was raised by the Old World confrontation with the New World and its inhabitants. While it seems quaint, if not inhumanly cruel to our ears, the question of whether the Native Americans were fully human or even human at all was seriously debated for some time. While the answer was eventually answered in the affirmative (and rightfully so!) the prospect of confronting a non-human linguistic culture is a very interesting one which certainly merited greater attention than it was given.
Of course this question was not really the one which the Westerners really had in mind. They were more concerned with whether the Native Americans were human in the sense of having souls or not. Were these creatures the sons and daughters of the same Adam and Eve as were the Europeans? Did Christ’s atonement apply to them? Should they be Christianized? It is unfortunate that these were the questions to which most attention was given in intellectual discourse, for not only were such question morally reprehensible but were far less interesting than those which could have been asked in their stead.
Given that so much of or sense of morality and value rests, by most any account, in our human nature, what implications would a confrontation with non-human creatures have upon such appeals to natural law? What if such aliens did not have a word for pain or pleasure as the Neo-Confucists did not have one for God? What if the nature of the alien will had been radically different from that of “us humans”? Would a Utilitarian or Kantian account of morality ever apply to such creatures, respectively? What rights and obligations would we assign such aliens? What rights and obligations would they assign us? What if they simply had no concept of rights or obligations, just as the Neo-Confucists had no concept of God?
These are penetrating questions which the Old World confrontation with the New World could have raised. (Of course, given the way in which the Native Americans actually were treated, we should probably be thankful to some degree that such fundamentals were not called into question.) What these questions highlight is the utter absence of intrinsic value in the world. Value only exists inasmuch as something is value “to” something or someone, and there is no guarantee that this something or someone will see and therefore value things in a similar manner.
While appeals to our common humanity are a very effective path to dissolving moral conflicts between human cultures, it is simply an eventual dead-end if one seeks a universal account of value, if only for the simple fact that humanity is not universal. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what features could, hypothetically, be universalized to all moral beings. Must all moral entities be biological in nature? What about non-biological intelligence? Must all moral entities be conscious, social or linguistic? While I assume so, I must confess that I am not prepared at the moment to defend such a claim very well. Indeed, it is completely unclear to me what concrete or specific values could possibly be based in such (possibly) universal features.
I call this thought experiment, this hypothetical confrontation with an utterly alien culture, the ultimate confrontation with pluralism. Indeed, it is my claim that any universal and ultimately non-question begging account of value should be done with such a confrontation in mind. Indeed, it seems clear to me that the common thought experiment of the alien anthropologist is simply an attempt to do just this very thing. It is my contention that not only ethics and meta-ethics, but indeed all of philosophy should be done from just such a perspective, a perspective in which moral realism (and perhaps even metaphysical realism) is not quite as intuitively obvious. This is the only way in which we can fully confront the problem of pluralism.
Filed in: axiology metaethics
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10.21.2006
Moderate Kuhn and Radical Kuhn
We have seen in a number of posts that dating back even to Thomas Hobbes, the communal, historical and non-logical process of scientific discovery has been seen as a threat to scientific realism which I will define as the claim that science gives us necessary, certain and universal truth regarding the natural world. Indeed, if one looks at moderate ideas of Thomas Kuhn (rather than the radical ideas of Kuhn having to do with incommensurability), they are hard pressed to find a single, unanticipated idea. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the intellectually tumultuous environment of Kuhn was more responsible for his works success than were his actual ideas.
At the time of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, logical positivism, despite its numerous and significant shortcomings, was fully entrenched as being, in one form or another, a standard for what is and is not science. It thus followed that since there was such a thing as science, that logical positivism necessarily described what some people were doing in the world. This model endorsed, if not fueled the naïve scientific realism which was so prevalent in the 1950’s, for the standards of logical positivism were taken not only as criteria for science, but also as criteria for truth. Science was not the mere functionalist interpretation of experience as had been advocated by Fleck, Whewell and others, but was instead a revelation of reality as it actually is.
Out of such a conception of science rose the history of science as a legitimate school of thought. This discipline was dedicated, more or less, to chronicling the linear progress which necessarily characterized scientific progress as falsified ideas are replaced with accurate or at least more accurate ones. Notice how this conception of science follows directly from the conception of science advocated by the logical positivists. According to such a view, science is constituted by observation conditions, logic and mathematics, and once a theory was logically falsified by experience, it was either replaced by a better one, or tentatively not replaced at all. Thus, science either stayed still or went forward, never backward due to its logical structure.
Thus, as the historians of science were busy figuring out who was right and who was wrong over time (but according to what standards?), Kuhn stepped on the scene and asserted that the wrong questions were being asked altogether. The question which Kuhn asked was what the nature of scientific discovery was? The view endorsed by logical positivism was one of the scientists discovering or uncovering logical relationship which were simply waiting to be found. To this, Kuhn strongly objected. Science was not an impersonal process of logical discovery, but rather a process of non-logically construing and interpreting our experience of the world.
Kuhn noticed that scientific experiments were necessarily equivocal, in that different people took the exact same data as evidence for mutually contradictory conclusions, and that such differing interpretations were not due to one being more or less logical than the other as the logical positivist would have us believe. It will be remembered how the structure of science, according to the logical positivist, was one of hypothesis, prediction and observation; the rest was logic. Kuhn simply pointed out that such a picture was incomplete and utterly misleading. Instead, the structure of how science is actually practiced is one of hypothesis, prediction, assumption (one of which being that all relevant assumptions have been identified) and then observation. The role which such assumptions play in science precludes a purely logical structure; for disconfirmation can be avoided all too easily by simply modifying the assumptions at work in any given case. Thus, science is a process of interpretation more than it is one of discovery according to Kuhn, and interpretation should not be characterized a one of necessary progress.
The account which Kuhn offers to replace that of the logical positivists can be divided into two forms which I shall call moderate Kuhn and radical Kuhn. Moderate Kuhn is constituted primarily by the criticisms which he brought against the logical positivists with the important idea of a paradigm. While identifying what, exactly a paradigm is has been problematic it is not difficult to have a rough grasp of the idea at hand. A paradigm is basically a worldview which is native to a scientific community, a worldview which embodies the various assumptions and relevance criteria which underlie a scientific explanation which is taken by the community as being satisfactory. A paradigm is roughly the way in which relevant problems as well as solution are defined to a scientific community.
Radical Kuhn takes the idea of a paradigm and runs with it as far as he possibly can. According to such a view, paradigms not only define what is accepted as fact, but a paradigm actually determines what facts actually are. Furthermore, since there is no paradigm-independent point of view, there is no way in which we can possibly compare one paradigm to another. Even more outrageous in the minds of many, is the claim that due to the nature in which the meaning of terms is determined holistically by use within a particular paradigm, two different paradigms are completely different and incommensurable languages. Thus, not only is the changing of scientific paradigms not a logical one, as the moderate Kuhn held, but it is not even a rational one since any reason for change must be limited to one paradigm or the other.
I think that it is relatively safe to say that radical Kuhn is radically wrong, although it has been difficult to point out where, exactly, he goes wrong. Personally, I think that his mistake is in his over-expanding science to encompass far more of our cultural worldview than it actually does. It is my claim that we do in fact have a meta-paradigm of sorts in the form of the language and culture which is common across scientific paradigms, and this meta-paradigm determines most of the felicity conditions as well as defined most of the scientific terms which are used within the relatively limited scientific paradigms. We do not define mass primarily in terms of F=ma or E=mc2. Rather, we define mass primarily in terms of the way in which we interact with it upon a day to day basis. Given that the more abstract and theoretical entities of science, such as electrons and quarks, are defined in terms of these basic level categories any strong notion of incommensurability seems implausible.
As to felicity conditions and progress, the same relationship can be said to hold between science and culture/language. While Kuhn’s criticism of the idea that change within science is necessarily progressive in nature, it is possible to hold that we change scientific theories because we interpret them as progress in terms of criteria which are determined by our cultural meta-paradigm. Scientific change does not necessarily entail an increase in scope, predictive success or control, but rather we rationally (but still not logically!) adopt new scientific theories in response to our recognition that the new theory is a change for the better in some way. Notice, however, that such a view is not at all in line with the idea of science as the description, discovery or revelation of what nature is really like. Instead, science is simply the interpretation of our experience of reality.
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At the time of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, logical positivism, despite its numerous and significant shortcomings, was fully entrenched as being, in one form or another, a standard for what is and is not science. It thus followed that since there was such a thing as science, that logical positivism necessarily described what some people were doing in the world. This model endorsed, if not fueled the naïve scientific realism which was so prevalent in the 1950’s, for the standards of logical positivism were taken not only as criteria for science, but also as criteria for truth. Science was not the mere functionalist interpretation of experience as had been advocated by Fleck, Whewell and others, but was instead a revelation of reality as it actually is.
Out of such a conception of science rose the history of science as a legitimate school of thought. This discipline was dedicated, more or less, to chronicling the linear progress which necessarily characterized scientific progress as falsified ideas are replaced with accurate or at least more accurate ones. Notice how this conception of science follows directly from the conception of science advocated by the logical positivists. According to such a view, science is constituted by observation conditions, logic and mathematics, and once a theory was logically falsified by experience, it was either replaced by a better one, or tentatively not replaced at all. Thus, science either stayed still or went forward, never backward due to its logical structure.
Thus, as the historians of science were busy figuring out who was right and who was wrong over time (but according to what standards?), Kuhn stepped on the scene and asserted that the wrong questions were being asked altogether. The question which Kuhn asked was what the nature of scientific discovery was? The view endorsed by logical positivism was one of the scientists discovering or uncovering logical relationship which were simply waiting to be found. To this, Kuhn strongly objected. Science was not an impersonal process of logical discovery, but rather a process of non-logically construing and interpreting our experience of the world.
Kuhn noticed that scientific experiments were necessarily equivocal, in that different people took the exact same data as evidence for mutually contradictory conclusions, and that such differing interpretations were not due to one being more or less logical than the other as the logical positivist would have us believe. It will be remembered how the structure of science, according to the logical positivist, was one of hypothesis, prediction and observation; the rest was logic. Kuhn simply pointed out that such a picture was incomplete and utterly misleading. Instead, the structure of how science is actually practiced is one of hypothesis, prediction, assumption (one of which being that all relevant assumptions have been identified) and then observation. The role which such assumptions play in science precludes a purely logical structure; for disconfirmation can be avoided all too easily by simply modifying the assumptions at work in any given case. Thus, science is a process of interpretation more than it is one of discovery according to Kuhn, and interpretation should not be characterized a one of necessary progress.
The account which Kuhn offers to replace that of the logical positivists can be divided into two forms which I shall call moderate Kuhn and radical Kuhn. Moderate Kuhn is constituted primarily by the criticisms which he brought against the logical positivists with the important idea of a paradigm. While identifying what, exactly a paradigm is has been problematic it is not difficult to have a rough grasp of the idea at hand. A paradigm is basically a worldview which is native to a scientific community, a worldview which embodies the various assumptions and relevance criteria which underlie a scientific explanation which is taken by the community as being satisfactory. A paradigm is roughly the way in which relevant problems as well as solution are defined to a scientific community.
Radical Kuhn takes the idea of a paradigm and runs with it as far as he possibly can. According to such a view, paradigms not only define what is accepted as fact, but a paradigm actually determines what facts actually are. Furthermore, since there is no paradigm-independent point of view, there is no way in which we can possibly compare one paradigm to another. Even more outrageous in the minds of many, is the claim that due to the nature in which the meaning of terms is determined holistically by use within a particular paradigm, two different paradigms are completely different and incommensurable languages. Thus, not only is the changing of scientific paradigms not a logical one, as the moderate Kuhn held, but it is not even a rational one since any reason for change must be limited to one paradigm or the other.
I think that it is relatively safe to say that radical Kuhn is radically wrong, although it has been difficult to point out where, exactly, he goes wrong. Personally, I think that his mistake is in his over-expanding science to encompass far more of our cultural worldview than it actually does. It is my claim that we do in fact have a meta-paradigm of sorts in the form of the language and culture which is common across scientific paradigms, and this meta-paradigm determines most of the felicity conditions as well as defined most of the scientific terms which are used within the relatively limited scientific paradigms. We do not define mass primarily in terms of F=ma or E=mc2. Rather, we define mass primarily in terms of the way in which we interact with it upon a day to day basis. Given that the more abstract and theoretical entities of science, such as electrons and quarks, are defined in terms of these basic level categories any strong notion of incommensurability seems implausible.
As to felicity conditions and progress, the same relationship can be said to hold between science and culture/language. While Kuhn’s criticism of the idea that change within science is necessarily progressive in nature, it is possible to hold that we change scientific theories because we interpret them as progress in terms of criteria which are determined by our cultural meta-paradigm. Scientific change does not necessarily entail an increase in scope, predictive success or control, but rather we rationally (but still not logically!) adopt new scientific theories in response to our recognition that the new theory is a change for the better in some way. Notice, however, that such a view is not at all in line with the idea of science as the description, discovery or revelation of what nature is really like. Instead, science is simply the interpretation of our experience of reality.
Filed in: science
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10.19.2006
A Modal Model of Knowledge
In two recent posts I have been highly critical of the standard view of knowledge (see here and here). While what I have called the Platonic and Sophistic models of knowledge do have their own problems, I see the externalism of the standard model as being absolutely unacceptable. The difference between mere belief and knowledge, according to my strong intuitions, is one of degree or quality of justification, period. Furthermore, I see attempts at rescuing the standard model from Gettier’s criticism, such as in the No False Grounds theory or the No Defeaters theory as only compounding the problem at hand. Whether there happens to be a false ground or a defeater which I am not aware of should not play any determining role in whether a particular belief actually amounts to knowledge or not. (I will be putting up a post on Gettier’s cases as well as these two responses in the near future.)
Thus we are left with a tension between two other intuitions regarding knowledge. Either we can only have knowledge of true things by way of certainty, which would seem to leave us with very little knowledge indeed, or we have quite a bit of knowledge and some of it is actually false. The appeal to externalism was to allow us to have lots of knowledge of thing which were all true, though at the price of sacrificing the intuition that knowledge is determined solely by internal factors. Thus, limiting ourselves to internal factors, as I think we must, forces us to choose which intuition we must sacrifice, that all knowledge is of truth or that we have lots of knowledge.
I think that there is a way of saving all three intuitions, however. There are two ways in which we can greatly expand the realm of knowledge without compromising necessary truth or internalism. The first way was originally advocated, as far as I can tell, by Hume. Hume held that while knowledge of the external world was impossible due to a number of factors, knowledge of mathematics was entirely legit. The reason for this is because mathematics is something which we construct ourselves. We did not discover mathematics, but rather invented it and the rules by which it functions. Thus, we can have absolute certainty that, given the axioms of based-ten arithmetic, two plus two equals four.
Kant attempted to generalize this in his Copernican revolution of the mind, by asserting that we construct our entire experience of the world according to universal and timeless principles which allow us to have deductive certainty regarding the world. Kant’s attempt failed on a number of levels, but Hume’s point remains, namely that those things which we construct, including mathematics, logic, games, languages and perhaps even all social facts in general can be known with certainty. The only problem is that such knowledge is qualified in that we can only know such social facts by taking the assumptions, axioms and rules by which they work for granted. Thus, such knowledge is qualified: Given the rules of chess, I know with certainty that X is a legal move.
The second way in which we can greatly expand our knowledge without compromising internalism or necessary truth is by way of conditional statements. It will be noted that the differences between this and the previous move are minimal, though I believe them to be significant. According to this theory, I can know with certainty that if my eyes are reasonably reliable sources of information about the world, that there is a computer in front of me right now. Notice that I can know this whether or not my eyes actually are reasonably reliable sources of information about the world or not. Thus, we can know A LOT of things so long as we assume that all of the possible ways in which we could be wrong are not. In this second way we are pretty much boot-strapping ourselves to knowledge.
Of course there is something very fishy about such “knowledge.” What, for example, is it knowledge of? The best way of answering this question is by way of possible world talk. My claim is that in every single possible world, without exception, in which my eyes are reasonably reliable sources of information about the world, there will be computer in front of me right now. Whether that assumption holds in the actual world is not known, but this does not mean that I do not know what I do.
As should be fairly obvious, externalism does play a role in such an account of knowledge. The role which it plays, however, is very different from that which it plays in the standard model. Remember, in the standard model externalism actually determined whether a belief amounted to knowledge or not. On the contrary, in this model externalism determines whether knowledge is of this world or not, not whether a belief actually amounts to knowledge or not.
Interestingly enough, I see this model of knowledge, which I will call modal knowledge, as matching up quite well with Sophistic intuitions. According to the Sophistic model, we claim that we know lots of things about the world which turn out to be false and therefore knowledge is probable opinion at best. Under the modal model, however, we do know lots of things which simply turn out to not apply to the actual world. Nevertheless, the assumptions upon which we base most knowledge claims, for the most part, do turn out to hold in the actual world, and thus we do have knowledge of the actual world.
It should also be noticed how anti-foundationalist such an approach is. Something can be known without investigating the truthfulness of the premises. Thus, knowledge is more a matter of validity than it is a matter of soundness. If a claim is valid, then it is known with certainty; it just isn’t clear whether it is actually knowledge of the world or not. In other words, each claim stands or falls on its own, regardless of the assumptions which underlie it.
A potential problem with such a modal model is that it is unclear how large of a role is played by the cognition and articulation of all of the possible ways in which my claim could be wrong. Thus we see that while we have firmed up a definition of justification (that it must be certain) as well as truth (by way of possible worlds talk) we are now left wondering what we mean by “belief.” Must a belief be fully conscious? Must all of the proper conditionals be held in mind as well? This is a question which I am not prepared to answer at this time. Nevertheless, I do feel much more comfortable addressing this question than that of how external factors can distinguish belief from knowledge.
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Thus we are left with a tension between two other intuitions regarding knowledge. Either we can only have knowledge of true things by way of certainty, which would seem to leave us with very little knowledge indeed, or we have quite a bit of knowledge and some of it is actually false. The appeal to externalism was to allow us to have lots of knowledge of thing which were all true, though at the price of sacrificing the intuition that knowledge is determined solely by internal factors. Thus, limiting ourselves to internal factors, as I think we must, forces us to choose which intuition we must sacrifice, that all knowledge is of truth or that we have lots of knowledge.
I think that there is a way of saving all three intuitions, however. There are two ways in which we can greatly expand the realm of knowledge without compromising necessary truth or internalism. The first way was originally advocated, as far as I can tell, by Hume. Hume held that while knowledge of the external world was impossible due to a number of factors, knowledge of mathematics was entirely legit. The reason for this is because mathematics is something which we construct ourselves. We did not discover mathematics, but rather invented it and the rules by which it functions. Thus, we can have absolute certainty that, given the axioms of based-ten arithmetic, two plus two equals four.
Kant attempted to generalize this in his Copernican revolution of the mind, by asserting that we construct our entire experience of the world according to universal and timeless principles which allow us to have deductive certainty regarding the world. Kant’s attempt failed on a number of levels, but Hume’s point remains, namely that those things which we construct, including mathematics, logic, games, languages and perhaps even all social facts in general can be known with certainty. The only problem is that such knowledge is qualified in that we can only know such social facts by taking the assumptions, axioms and rules by which they work for granted. Thus, such knowledge is qualified: Given the rules of chess, I know with certainty that X is a legal move.
The second way in which we can greatly expand our knowledge without compromising internalism or necessary truth is by way of conditional statements. It will be noted that the differences between this and the previous move are minimal, though I believe them to be significant. According to this theory, I can know with certainty that if my eyes are reasonably reliable sources of information about the world, that there is a computer in front of me right now. Notice that I can know this whether or not my eyes actually are reasonably reliable sources of information about the world or not. Thus, we can know A LOT of things so long as we assume that all of the possible ways in which we could be wrong are not. In this second way we are pretty much boot-strapping ourselves to knowledge.
Of course there is something very fishy about such “knowledge.” What, for example, is it knowledge of? The best way of answering this question is by way of possible world talk. My claim is that in every single possible world, without exception, in which my eyes are reasonably reliable sources of information about the world, there will be computer in front of me right now. Whether that assumption holds in the actual world is not known, but this does not mean that I do not know what I do.
As should be fairly obvious, externalism does play a role in such an account of knowledge. The role which it plays, however, is very different from that which it plays in the standard model. Remember, in the standard model externalism actually determined whether a belief amounted to knowledge or not. On the contrary, in this model externalism determines whether knowledge is of this world or not, not whether a belief actually amounts to knowledge or not.
Interestingly enough, I see this model of knowledge, which I will call modal knowledge, as matching up quite well with Sophistic intuitions. According to the Sophistic model, we claim that we know lots of things about the world which turn out to be false and therefore knowledge is probable opinion at best. Under the modal model, however, we do know lots of things which simply turn out to not apply to the actual world. Nevertheless, the assumptions upon which we base most knowledge claims, for the most part, do turn out to hold in the actual world, and thus we do have knowledge of the actual world.
It should also be noticed how anti-foundationalist such an approach is. Something can be known without investigating the truthfulness of the premises. Thus, knowledge is more a matter of validity than it is a matter of soundness. If a claim is valid, then it is known with certainty; it just isn’t clear whether it is actually knowledge of the world or not. In other words, each claim stands or falls on its own, regardless of the assumptions which underlie it.
A potential problem with such a modal model is that it is unclear how large of a role is played by the cognition and articulation of all of the possible ways in which my claim could be wrong. Thus we see that while we have firmed up a definition of justification (that it must be certain) as well as truth (by way of possible worlds talk) we are now left wondering what we mean by “belief.” Must a belief be fully conscious? Must all of the proper conditionals be held in mind as well? This is a question which I am not prepared to answer at this time. Nevertheless, I do feel much more comfortable addressing this question than that of how external factors can distinguish belief from knowledge.
Filed in: epistemology
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