Ben at (Blog&~Blog) has conclusively demonstrated the error of your perverse ways!
There have been some discussions, starting here and continuing here, about the relationship between certain epistemological worries for modal realism and some other worries for consequentialism. I find the discussion of modal realism puzzling. I certainly don't want to saddle Lewis with outright pragmatism and verificationism, but he did have a certain sympathy with both of those views, and as a result I'm not sure the kind of case that's described makes sense on the Lewis view. Certainly his argument for modal realism is that it's a very useful theory. Lewis doesn't consider any kind of evidence for or against modal realism except evidence of this kind, and it is hard to see how there could be any other evidence for or against it (for the usual causal reasons). It's not clear that it even makes sense to speak of the oracle as knowing there are no other concrete worlds if it isn't based on something like this; the oracle cannot, of course, have causal contact with the other worlds or anything of that sort. Perhaps the oracle doesn't know anything, but only says things that are true. But how do we know what the oracle's statements mean? How do we know the oracle is talking about modal reality? Again, for Lewis, the only evidence concerning modal reality outside the actual world is usefulness; we could understand the oracle as speaking of modal reality if the oracle could be interpreted as talking about useful theories of modality, but we can't, for example, understand the oracle as speaking about modal reality because of any causal contact between the oracle and any modal reality (again, that's metaphysically impossible for Lewis, so we can't even give that power to hypothetical oracles in thought experiments).
Perhaps it would be more useful to put the point by analogy. What should anyone's reaction be if the oracle tells us there are no sets, or that there are some sets, but not others (perhaps there are all other kinds of sets, but no sets contain donkeys as elements, by analogy with Richard's case). How would that affect our beliefs about sets? Would the latter even make sense?
Of course, one obvious response is to reject the analogy on the basis that sets are abstract and the Lewis worlds are supposed to be concrete, but another part of the Lewis argument for modal realism is that the concrete/abstract distinction is too messy to do any serious philosophical work, so anybody who took this line in response to Lewis would need to answer those arguments and provide a convincing account of this concrete/abstract division and why it matters to comparing sets to the Lewis worlds.
There's been a survey of views among philosophers, and apparently there was widespread participation; it produced some interesting results concerning the distribution of views among philosophers. As a Carnapian, I was particularly interested to notice that 2/3 of philosophers believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction; apparently people are no longer as impressed with Quine's argument as they once were (assuming they ever were as impressed as is usually reported; there's no survey from a few decades ago to compare).
Of perhaps more general interest, there has been some discussion of the fact that while around 3/4 of philosophers generally are atheists, the numbers are reversed for philosophers of religion. Trent Dougherty suggests that we should take this as evidence in favor of theism, that the experts lean toward that view. I'm not so sure. It's the only area I can find where there's such a sharp difference between the specialists and other philosophers. Given that the other philosophers are certainly not completely uninformed (it's hard to be completely uninformed on this topic, and certainly anybody who does history of philosophy can't avoid lots of contact with philosophy of religion), it seems unlikely to me that such a big difference could be based solely on the experts having better evidence; their evidence surely isn't that much better. So I tend to think that there's some other explanation for this pattern, though I don't have a firm opinion as to which of the possible explanations apply.In addition to proposing that theism among philosophers of religion may be based on good evidence, Trent proposes a more sociological explanation for widespread naturalism. While there certainly are fashions in philosophy, I actually think philosophers have been more inclined to naturalism than the general public for as long as there has been philosophy. And I would have thought that the reason that the trend has over the course of the modern era become stronger and more entrenched is surely because of the success of science in progressively explaining more and more of the world.
"His disciple cried impetuously 'but I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I still have in my mind against it.'" The Gay Science 106
According to Heidegger, the scientific worldview represents the will to will, the will to power (so he says in the postscript to "What is Metaphysics?"). Of course, I think he's right, apart from not viewing this as a criticism of science. I also think, though I know it's controversial, that Nietzsche must have seen things that way. He's such a passionate seeker of truth, so committed to the cause of knowledge and science, that I can't see how he could possibly be interpreted as really rejecting all that. Rather, it seems clear that his criticisms of science and the pursuit of truth, frequent and harsh though they are, show something else. He thinks the project is just too important to be done wrong, so every tiny misstep must be ruthlessly exposed and obliterated. And really, criticism is essential to science.
Of course, it wouldn't do to take Nietzsche as an advocate of every cause he criticizes; I think it's easy to do so in the case of science and the pursuit of truth because he also so frequently praises those endeavors, and perhaps more to the point is constantly engaged in the quest for truth. But I wouldn't try to reinterpret his harsh criticism of Christianity as involving secret advocacy, for example, since he hardly ever has a kind word for Christianity and at no point seems to be trying to be a good Christian. On the surface, his attitude toward democracy seems to be closer to his attitude toward Christianity than it is to his attitude toward science. But is it really? He himself seems to see democracy and science as deeply intertwined, and after all he proudly proclaims himself a free spirit and a good European, aligning himself with people whose politics are pretty much exclusively liberal. And criticism is essential to democracy as well (and not to Christianity).
Thoughts inspired by teaching the first part of the Genealogy of Morals yesterday. Nietzsche says that all "higher natures" are a battleground between the master morality and the slave morality; surely he thought his own was a higher nature, but if there was any part of himself that was an advocate of slave morality, I find it much easier to believe that he felt a part of himself believing in democracy than that he had a Christian part.
I ran into my favorite former student today, and the meeting reminded me of a topic I've been thinking about for some time. I have posted numerous pro-Carnap views on this blog, but while one might thus have correctly guessed that I take Carnap's side against Heidegger, I don't think I've explained satisfactorily where I think Heidegger is wrong. Indeed, as with most philosophers, I've come to respect Heidegger more as I've studied this issue; I am increasingly of the opinion that Heidegger really did understand Carnap's position fairly well, and that he understood the problems with his own position (though obviously he didn't consider those problems fatal, and that's where we disagree).
The basic disagreement between Carnap and Heidegger is that Carnap rejects all authority, and Heidegger considers the rejection of all authority to amount to the unacceptable rejection of all value. It certainly is the rejection of objective value as that is usually understood; an objective value would be something that would have authority over us. So Heidegger is allied with many other defenders of objective value.
Still, Heidegger correctly recognizes that he has opposition; the scientific world-view excludes all authority. Science merely discusses "the truth about what-is," it doesn't make decisions for us. In a puzzling but revealing clause, Heidegger says that the scientific method of objectivising what-is "provides itself with the possibility of future advance;" it is in this sense that Heidegger sees the scientific world-view as manifesting the will to will, the will to power (quotes from the postscript to "What is Metaphysics?")
Science "provides itself with the possibility of future advance" because it treats everything as questionable. This is unacceptable to Heidegger; a value which could be questioned, which could be rejected, is no real value at all. If there isn't some authority, something beyond the questions and theories of the scientific, then life is meaningless. And because of Heidegger's belief in the authority of authority, he thinks he has a powerful criticism of science; in denying that there is any such thing as authority, science is admitting that science itself has no authority (a point he probably got from Nietzsche, though Nietzsche of course didn't draw the conclusions from this that Heidegger did). If science has no authority, then how can it tell us not to look for authority elsewhere?
Still, the whole idea of Heideggerian authority is a puzzling one, and Heidegger's method illustrates well why. After all, he investigates and theorizes and raises questions about metaphysics, about his authenticity and about nothing. How can it make sense to raise questions about what can't be questioned? How can he theorize about what is beyond our capacity to theorize, what he himself describes as beyond logic? Heidegger himself says that it's very hard and one is constantly in danger of slipping into nonsense; Carnap's view, that in fact it's impossible and Heidegger is not merely in danger of slipping into nonsense but spends most of his time there, is only a slight step beyond what Heidegger himself confesses.
For my part, I think that whatever we can think about, we can think about. Whatever we can talk about, we can talk about. Whatever we can question, we can question. Note that this is very different from saying that what we can think about now is all we can ever think about. People are forever finding new things to think about, to talk about, to question; science "provides itself with the possibility of future advance," as Heidegger says, or "overcomes itself" as Nietzsche might say, but no worthwhile scientist says otherwise. There are certainly those who misinterpret science as giving final answers and try to use it as an authority, but even Heidegger recognizes that those people don't understand science; Heidegger shows by the nature of his criticism of science that he recognizes what the scientific world-view really involves. But there is only one final answer, and if Nietzsche was right that most philosophers have really been seeking that final answer (death, of course), I also think he was right that it's time to give up on this immature desire for final answers.
Still, people find the absence of authority very hard to cope with, or even to make sense of. Positivists like Carnap are often interpreted as having made sense data and/or logic into authorities, and then condemned because by their own principles they shouldn't have such authorities. The criticism is right that they shouldn't, but I think wrong that they did. Observation is important to the positivists because if a claim is based on observation, people can look for themselves; they don't need to rely on authority. But looking isn't another kind of authority; it makes perfect sense to question what we see, and we do so on many occasions. Observation is the start of questioning, not the end. As for logic, they of course struggled with how to understand that, but the mature Carnap, with his principle of tolerance, was obviously not treating that as beyond question either. "In logic there are no morals!"
Ben at (Blog&~Blog) has conclusively demonstrated the error of your perverse ways!
Most people like to think of themselves as flexible and willing to change their minds in response to new evidence. However, we of course notice that others are very stubborn, and there's some psychological literature suggesting that people in general don't change their minds as much as they'd like to claim to. On the other hand, there are interesting studies in the other direction, suggesting that people mis-remember their past views as being more similar to their present views than they really are, so that surveys on whether people changed their minds will get misleading results if they rely on comparing remembered views to current views. So perhaps people are right to think that they change their minds, despite the fact that tricks of their memories leave them without much evidence to back it up.
Anyway, since I tend to have a hard time thinking of examples of changing my mind on demand, I thought I'd write about a significant change in order to increase the chances that I'll continue to remember it when I need an example. I was originally in favor of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. I expected we'd make a mess of it, especially with Bush directing things, but the Taliban were so awful that I thought the mess we'd make would still be a considerable improvement.
I now think we should probably withdraw from Afghanistan. I do still have some tendency to think that there could be better ways of doing things which would make our intervention helpful, but I can't see any politically realistic path from our current policies to anything which would be significantly more productive. In particular, I think we'd probably have to give up the goal of suppressing opium cultivation in Afghanistan, and I don't see any chance of that. I was aware of this issue in the past, but I apparently underestimated other issues and the results of the various problems interacting; I did not imagine that an Afghanistan with a large U.S. military presence would ever end up with the Taliban again controlling most of the country. Further, the Karzai government is not nearly as much better than the Taliban as I would have hoped; it appears to be quite horribly corrupt, which isn't really a surprise, but it even has some pretty horribly retrogressive policies on women (the big issue where I thought the Taliban were bad enough to make their removal a goal which overrides almost everything else).
Socrates is generally presented in Plato's dialogues as being better at some skills than self-styled experts. He is presented as being superior at rhetoric, for example, and at debate for the sake of debate. There is also indication that these are pseudo-skills, not involving genuine knowledge of anything. Thus, I take it that the implication is that one who knows that he has no knowledge has exactly the right kind of knowledge for these pseudo-skills, and that's why Socrates is even better at these skills than people like Gorgias and Lysias who think it's possible to have real knowledge of such things (and that they themselves possess such knowledge). Perhaps the knowledge of etymology Socrates rather oddly displays in Cratylus is an example of the same phenomenon, if we interpret that dialogue as ultimately favoring the conventionalist view of names (as I have some tendency to think, though I admit I haven't thought about that dialogue a tremendous amount).
I can only think of one case of a dialogue where characters are presented as being completely uncontroversially masters of a completely uncontroversial skill, and where their possession of this skill gets any particular emphasis. The case is Theatetus, where both Theatetus and Theodorus are presented as having great knowledge of mathematics. Theatetus is, of course, even credited with a considerable mathematical discovery when we're first introduced to him. There is no effort to suggest that Socrates could match, much less exceed, the mathematical skill or knowledge of Theatetus or Theodorus; Socrates is shown as having some understanding of mathematics in Meno, but nowhere, in Theatetus, Meno, or anywhere else, is he presented as being on the level of Theatetus, making original mathematical discoveries. This seems to fit well with the previous point; when a skill is real, when it involves real knowledge, long study and effort are required. You can't fake real skills just by knowing your limitations.
So far, I think I haven't said anything particularly uncontroversial. However, there are more interesting cases. It seems to me that Socrates is consistently shown as being more skilled at interpreting poetry (that is, religious tradition) than anyone he talks to. I do think that this fits the pattern of skills like rhetoric; that although he's usually somewhat cautious how he states it, Plato does advocate a fairly thorough skepticism about religious tradition. Of course, in the Laws Plato advocates harsh punishment for atheists, which is a problem for my thesis here. Apart from my usual dodge of saying I think he was getting senile when he wrote that, I would point out that given his explanation of why atheists are bad, it is not unreasonable to interpret him as defining atheism as the rejection of the existence of forms (and indeed of any kind of truth), rather than as involving doubt concerning traditional gods.
Philosophy is another vexed case, especially given the difficulty in separating it from sophistry. I admit to having a tendency to think that for Plato sophistry is for the most part incompetent philosophy, and not some entirely separate thing, despite what's said in Sophist. I particularly recall hearing M. M. McCabe explain fairly convincingly that Euthydemus and Dionysodorus were metaphysical theorists, who produced bad arguments because their metaphysical theories were bad, not because they weren't trying to produce good arguments. If she's right, if that's true of even those two, then I think nearly anyone Plato presents as a self-styled philosopher, sophist, or teacher of virtue is probably to some extent a philosopher. There may be hope even for Gorgias.
So, how does the philosophical skill of Socrates rank? And what does that tell us? I'm unsure of the first, and even more so of the second. But let's look at examples. He certainly is vastly superior in this respect to the brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. He also appears to be the superior of Thrasymachus, though Thrasymachus certainly shows signs of being able to do philosophy (even if he doesn't seem to emphasize the value of doing so); the idea of distinguishing between strict and loose senses of skill or expertise comes entirely from Thrasymachus, without even the tiniest bit of help from Socrates, and he explains the distinction very clearly, though Socrates ends up being able to make more effective use of the distinction once it is in play. Clitophon also seems to suggest that we are supposed to think of Thrasymachus as some kind of philosopher, though I would not go so far as some of the Straussians who think Thrasymachus in Republic is closer to the views of Plato than Socrates is.
Protagoras also makes some quite impressive arguments in the dialogue named for him, though overall he has trouble keeping up with Socrates. Still, I have to say that my impression is that Protagoras looks worse when you evaluate him on the quality of his rhetoric than when you evaluate him on the quality of his arguments, which if I'm right would have quite interesting implications. Socrates' summary of their argument at the end puts them even, though of course his sincerity in comments like that is especially suspect.
Simmias and Cebes concede defeat in the end, but they both present quite interesting arguments. One also can't help but wonder whether they might be pulling their punches; how hard would a sympathetic person really try when arguing that there may be no afterlife to someone who is about to die? So, again, hard to compare, but at least I think Socrates is not presented as the overwhelmingly superior philosopher.
Finally, old Parmenides is able to completely crush young Socrates. Perhaps this is not a fair fight; perhaps the message is that long practice is extremely important in this area. But surely Socrates outright losing has some great significance. I'm just not sure what the significance is. Maybe we are supposed to take the message of Clitophon seriously, maybe Plato really did think Socrates fell short in not trying harder to develop some positive theory? Not completely crazy, especially as Plato seems to have done more in that direction than Socrates did. Or maybe there's some other significance I'm not getting.
Anyway, I really should stop this practice of not posting for a month and then feeling I have to write a book to try to make up for my slacking.
Evolutionary theory makes it impossible for biological species to be natural kinds (or at the very least, if naturalness comes in degrees, they're very marginal natural kinds). Biological species were, for Aristotle, a central example of forms. Even if there is a good way to make sense of forms of some kind, evolutionary theory again, for the same reasons, makes it clear that there can't be forms corresponding to biological species.
This seems to have profound consequences for many of the hopes of rationalism; many earlier attempts to provide rationalist accounts of human nature seem to have been heavily dependent on there being a form of humanity (and even self-proclaimed critics of rationalism like Kant often make claims which seem to require something very much like such a form). This is especially clear in the case of ethics. On the Aristotelian, form-centered view of human nature, variations in humanity are deviations from the basic form. This made it at least conceivable that undesirable features of humanity could be explained away as merely deviations (if in some cases depressingly frequent ones), leaving open the possibility that the form could serve a normative purpose, that one could derive what humans ought to do from the form of humanity.[1]
Undercutting this is a major change. On the other hand, Newtonian physics already seems to carve up the world along lines very different from those suggested by Aristotle's forms, and as a result skepticism about viewing any aspect of the world in terms of forms was already well established long before Darwin. Certainly there were many critics of Aristotelian natural-law morality before Darwin, including, for example, the whole empiricist tradition, which also rejected forms in general.
So, how much difference did the additional reasons Darwin provided for being skeptical of biological forms make? And, conversely, did the rejection of forms in the British Empiricist tradition help in any way in making something like an evolutionary theory seem conceivable to Darwin and his contemporaries?
[1] While evolutionary theory does provide some ability to distinguish the normal from the abnormal (as discussed by Millikan), the lines are much murkier, and not revealed by reason, and prospects for plausibly lining up the evolutionarily normal with the morally good are far worse.
One of the reasons I like to cover the philosophical classics when I teach is that they're usually classics for a reason; even after dozens of readings, I often come to new insights about them. One point that has recently been nagging at me is the presentation of Euthyphro in the dialogue named for him. Most readers and interpreters seem to take a fairly dim view of him (as I've also tended to do in the past). However, it has to be admitted that he's committed to the attractive idea that justice should be impartial, and he's willing to stand up for what he believes is right against public opinion.
Furthermore, and this is the point I hadn't really noticed before, he shows what really has to be considered a fairly impressive level of open-mindedness and commitment to the pursuit of truth. It's made clear at the beginning of the dialogue that he knows who Socrates is, and that he apparently has a high opinion of Socrates. Knowing who Socrates is, Euthyphro shows no reluctance to engage in a discussion with him. Further, after he's run into considerable difficulties (and after Socrates has said some at least borderline blasphemous things), Socrates offers him a chance to back out of the discussion (at 9e), but Euthyphro does not hesitate to insist that the investigation should continue. It is only after another long stretch where no progress is made (with Socrates being, as usual, fairly rude, and throwing in a few more borderline blasphemies), that Euthyphro gives up on the discussion and falls back on conventional answers to Socrates' question (at 14b).
Now, perhaps the conventional answer at the end deserves the abuse that Socrates gives it, but it's not only a bad answer, it also seems quite unworthy of Euthyphro, given what we'd seen of him prior to this point (at the outset he was far more concerned with what was right than with popular, conventional notions). So what's going on here? Has talking with Socrates made Euthyphro worse than he started? What was Plato's intention in presenting the story this way?
Whenever it's relevant (when feminism comes up, or materialism) I talk to my students about the studies of sex differences in the brain. The press always reports any difference discovered by researchers as proof of innate differences in cognition. Of course, the biggest problem with that interpretation is that environmental factors affect the brain, so finding something in the brain is not useful for determining where it came from, but I also mention the small sample sizes the studies usually have (a couple of dozen participants at most).
A friend is getting his Ph.D. in neuroscience (incidentally, according to him MRI studies, which are the kind that usually get such press, are all crap) decided to practice his thesis defense presentation on his friends before doing the real thing, so I heard about his research. It had nothing to do with sex differences (it was about some details of how motor control works in the brain), but I learned something about sample sizes. I was somewhat shocked to discover that it involved two experiments with a grand total of three monkeys (two per experiment; one monkey was involved in both). I guess these were hideously expensive cyber-monkeys (they had electronic implants to measure brain activity very precisely during the experiments), so it wasn't practical to use more, but it seems like one could get very deceptive results this way if one were unlucky and got even one atypical monkey.
My skepticism of overly confident neuroscience claims has been further increased.
Leiter's been running a poll, and Brian Weatherson has some commentary. He voted for Lewis, and I voted for Carnap, but his post is about why Russell has been doing so well. I'm actually a little surprised that Lewis is doing so well, though I think he's a perfectly defensible choice.
It seems that part of the reason Weatherson is surprised at Russell's showing is that the project of Principia Mathematica ended in failure. I find that very difficult to evaluate. It made contributions to the state of modern logic, and I guess I tend to think that modern logic is a truly enormous philosophical achievement. However, it's difficult to know how to assign credit for it. It's amazing how much was already set out by Frege; most of what comes afterward could be seen as just clarifying and patching a few mistakes. But clarifying and patching mistakes is perhaps not trivial in this area. How much did Principia move beyond Frege? It did, I suppose, have some mistakes of its own. I'm not sure exactly how to evaluate it, but I am skeptical that the failure of its official stated project is a particularly important criterion.
I suppose there are similar issues with Carnap. I rank him highly both because of his contributions to the unfolding story of modern logic, and because I think his philosophical attitude toward logic was entirely correct. But how much did he really add, as opposed to clarifying? And how much did he clarify, if, as I tend to think, so many of his contemporaries and near successors misunderstood him?
Maybe that's an argument for Weatherson's choice. There is no question that Lewis clarified many things. But I guess I still think the same is true of Carnap, and of Russell, and that perhaps it is only less obvious for them because what they worked on was so unclear before they got to it that even quite substantial progress still left plenty of murk.
Jaegwon Kim once told me that he thought secondary qualities were intrinsic if anything is. Since that time, he seems to have shifted from being a reluctant defender of reductionist functionalism to a reluctant adherent of something like Chalmers' view (a relatively small shift, since in each case the reluctance consisted of his strong pull toward the other of the two options). As I've alluded to in the past here, and here, I think the view that qualia are intrinsic is important to the debate about qualia.
I shall approach this topic from a distance; at the most abstract level of fundamental metaphysics, it seems to me that staying away from intrinsicness has produced some spectacular results. Buddhism teaches that there is no self with any intrinsic nature; the self is just a placeholder in a network of relations. To put it somewhat tendentiously (as the Buddhists themselves sometimes did), the self is an illusion. This view did not, of course, maintain that the self was an illusion in the midst of a world of non-illusionary things; the world experienced by the self is also an illusion on this view. There's just a network of relations, with things being only placeholders for positions in the network.
I suspect that this is why it was Indian mathematicians who invented the concept of zero; to the ancient European mathematicians, numbers were things, and so an absence couldn't be a number. This is also why the Pythagoreans got so stressed out by irrational numbers; they could make sense of a ratio between countable collections of things, but how could something that wasn't either a count of things or even a ratio between such counts exist? To the Indians, on the other hand, numbers as placeholders in a network of relations no doubt seemed natural (since they were used to thinking in that way anyway), and it's obvious that idenfying the zero spot in the network of relations is useful. This view of mathematics as being about such relations is of course orthodoxy in modern times, and has been very good for mathematics.
I think it's not just good for mathematics. Intrinsic properties just cause trouble; structures and relations are where all of the answers are to be found. I think we shouldn't believe in intrinsic properties anywhere. This is somewhat of a paradoxical position, admittedly, and of course there are some, such as Rae Langton, and if her plausible account is right, Kant, who think that while we can't know anything intrinsic, there must nonetheless be intrinsic properties. I find such views even more puzzling than a complete rejection of intrinsic properties; we can know there are these specific things we can't know about? But Kant scholars have been debating that sort of thing endlessly since his own time. I shall leave it aside for now, as the topic I'm most interested in involves qualia, and qualia are not supposed to be uknowable. So take just the place where extremists like myself agree with Langton and Kant and other moderates; we can't know anything intrinsic.
This is enormously relevant to the issue of qualia. Phenomenal character appears to be an intrinsic property of experiences. This, it seems to me, is the main intuitive obstacle to a functionalist account of phenomenal qualities: functional properties are quite obviously non-intrinsic. But if the intrinsic can't be known, then apparent intrinsicality is always an illusion. And if such appearances are always misleading, then they're misleading in this case, so the intuitive obstacle can be swiftly dismissed.
This also strikes me as being the real heart of a lot of the arguments surrounding anti-materialist theories of qualia. Lewis, for example, in "What Experience Teaches," goes through a very lengthy discussion of what knowledge of phenomenal qualities can't be like. It seems to me that a good short summary of the argument is that if phenomenal qualities are to serve the role they are supposed to serve in Jackson's knowledge argument, they must be intrinsic, but looking at all of the things we know about our experience, it turns out that we can't find any role for anything intrinsic; looking for knowledge always turns up extrinsic things.
To take another example, it seems to me that Chalmers' zombie argument works by asking us to separate out the intrinsic properties of experience, and imagine that they're absent in the zombie world. Obviously, if experience has no intrinsic properties, this procedure is impossible; either all worlds are zombie worlds, or (more reasonably) there's some account of phenomenal experience in terms of relational properties, and any world with the right relational properties has phenomal experiences.
Given the continuing poor state of philosophy when it comes to feminist issues, it seems necessary to watch out for this sort of thing. I just picked up The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, and happened to glance through the bibliography. There turned out to be a surprising gap. By most accounts, Susan Haack's 1977 paper on Kantian elements in Carnap's Aufbau was one of the more important early studies contributing to the current Carnap revival, and the current Carnap revival is the topic of the book. But Haack is absent from the lengthy bibliography. It may be an innocent accident, it may mean nothing, but with philosophy's depressing history of ignoring the contributions of women, one can't help but worry when it seems like there might be yet another instance of the problem. Haack is even around, and I thought pretty well respected; usually the historical pattern has been that women in philosophy have sometimes been able to get recognition among their contemporaries but have almost always been been ignored by later generations.
One way of characterizing the difference between traditional empiricism and traditional rationalism is that traditional rationalists have been dazzled by the impressive certainty of our a priori knowledge. Logic and mathematics are so remarkable that many rationalists have literally accorded them the status of magic, attributing them to some mystical contact with the divine. It is likely not a mere rhetorical device when Parmenides presents his logical arguments as having been given to him by a goddess. Plato accords his forms a kind of divine status, and says we know them from previous exposure to them when our souls were in a higher realm of existence; Descartes says what may amount to the same thing, that mathematical knowledge and a few other items were implanted in our souls by God.
Those in the rationalist tradition have also almost always classified ethics as a priori. Of course, lots of specific reasons for that could be given, but there are also very general motivations from the rationalist tradition which push that way. First, of course, rationalists have generally been imperialists when it comes to the application of reason; since a priori knowledge is the really good knowledge, the rationalists have sought to reduce everything, or at least as much as possible, to the a priori, to have the best possible knowledge of everything. Further, ethics specifically is about what's valuable, important, and good, and when it comes to knowledge the a priori is, according to the rationalist, the most valuable, important, and good, so while this does not itself amount to a rational argument, there seems to be some affinity between ethics and the a priori. This further connection is no doubt enhanced by the tradition of connecting moral good to the divine; since the rationalists also connected the a priori to the divine, this would further encourage bundling the two together.
Of course, the mainstream of the empiricist tradition has long maintained that the reason logic and mathematics have their apparent infallibility is that they are not actually giving us information about the world; since they don't tell us how things stand with the world, the world cannot refute them. But the empiricists insist that real truth is about the world, so these a priori matters the rationalists regard with such enthusiasm are at best some kind of honorary truth. A priori claims embody useful tools, ways of thinking about the world, but don't report facts. The rationalist project of relying only on the a priori is, from the empiricist perspective, a project of ignoring the real world, of casting aside the only truth worth looking for.
Empiricists have thus traditionally sought to reduce the scope of the a priori, rejecting for example the a priori approaches to science championed by some of the rationalists. It is perhaps for this reason that some empiricists have tried to argue against a priori ethics as well, saying that we need to be more naturalistic in our approach to ethical matters.
However, there seems to be another possible reaction, which I'm surprised hasn't been more common. Many empiricists have also been meta-ethical subjectivists (Hume being probably the most famous example). Such empiricists should find it quite congenial to categorize ethical claims as honorary truths, useful tools which don't reports facts about the world. So why is it so rare for empiricists to treat ethics as a priori, just like logic and mathematics? A good reason does not occur to me. I can think of some bad reasons; perhaps even empiricists are partly under the spell of the apparent certainty of logic and mathematics. Thus, perhaps they ignore the historical controversies in logic and mathematics, and think that the controversies in ethics show that ethics must be something entirely different from our stable logic and mathematics.
Actually, on one interpretation Kant might be an example of the sort of philosophy I think should be more common. Of course, Kant claims to chart a third way, neither empiricist nor rationalist, but it has been very common to be skeptical of this. Many interpreters take him to have simply been either a sneaky rationalist or, less commonly, a sneaky empiricist. If he was a sneaky empiricist, he was an empiricist of the rare kind I've been puzzling about. I wonder if the fact that people generally don't connect a priori ethics to empiricism has contributed to the empiricist interpretation of Kant being the less common reading.
Most people don't know about the lab work we have to do in our profession. Fortunately, I've never been zapped by a malfunctioning enknowledgetron; sadly, despite what you read in the comics, in real life such a thing is usually lethal and never grants super-powers.
Apparently there's some monstrous new survey up. I am suspicious of web surveys as a methodology, because of the obvious dangers of bias in the sample, but of course methodological perfection is generally unobtainable, and research which falls short can be very valuable in suggesting new theories to test; it just shouldn't be taken too seriously as proving anything. So I'm going to take it, and recommend it to others.