Philosophy, et cetera

Brute Desires

2008-05-12T18:12:00.003-04:00

We desire things for reasons. Often we want something because we judge it to be good. The desire thus stems from an evaluative belief, which in turn is answerable to reason. In other cases, the reason for our desire is a brute taste, e.g. the fact that we find the taste of chocolate to be pleasant. We desire chocolate for the pleasure it brings us, but this taste (unlike our values) is not further answerable to reason. It is simply given.

Is it possible to have a brute desire? A desire for chocolate, say, not for the pleasure it may bring, nor because there's anything about it you judge to be valuable, but simply because you (inexplicably) want it? I submit that this is not possible. You may be able to program a creature to pursue certain ends for no reason, but it is not really an agent with desires in the fullest sense unless it could make sense of them on reflection.

Consider it from the perspective of the agent in question. You find yourself pursuing some object X, even though you see nothing redeeming about it. You have no taste for X (it does not bring you pleasure). Nor do you judge it to be good or valuable for any other reason. You are, in short, completely indifferent to it. And yet there your hand is reaching out for X. Why is your hand doing that? You can't make sense of it. The behaviour does not stem from your attitudes in any way you can make sense of. It would seem more like your body is possessed, moved by some compulsion outside of your self. Whatever your behavioural outputs, so long as you neither value X nor have a taste for it, there's no way your pursuit of it can be properly characterized as reflecting a "desire" on your part.

The situation seems even more odd when we consider that the alleged "desire" is supposed to govern not just bodily movements, but also internal deliberation. That is, you should find yourself engaging in instrumental reasoning, forming elaborate plans about how best to obtain X. But again: why are you reasoning in such a way? It makes no sense, unless you think that X is worth getting for some reason (hedonistic or otherwise).

If you have a genuine desire that P, then (ceteris paribus) you will accept an offer to make it the case that P even on the condition that this fact is wiped from your memory and so you never get any subjective satisfaction out of it. (If you don't accept this offer, that shows that what you really desire is not P per se, but rather the subjective satisfaction of believing that P.) But, in the above case, can you imagine voluntarily accepting such an offer to secretly bring about X? Such a choice seems incomprehensible (unless you actually valued X, contrary to our stipulated set-up). So brute desires are likewise incomprehensible.

Or am I missing something?

Philosophers' Carnival #69

2008-05-12T11:32:00.002-04:00

... is here! Short and sweet. (I especially liked Tomkow's post on Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics.)

Sider on Semantic and Metaphysical Intuitions

2008-05-11T22:29:00.003-04:00

It is important to separate the two kinds of intuitions. Suppose you are initially inclined to intuit thus: "the property of being a dog is intrinsic". This might well be because you are simply presupposing the worm view [of 4-d objects], and thus presupposing that 'being a dog' refers to the property of being a dog-worm, and metaphysically intuiting that this property is intrinsic. It might well be that, once the question is raised of whether the worm-view or the stage-view is correct, your initial conviction disappears, and is replaced with agnosticism about whether "being a dog is intrinsic", despite your certainty that being a dog-worm is intrinsic and being a dog-stage is extrinsic.

[From his paper on counterpart theory: 'Beyond the Humphrey Objection'.]

Natural Baselines

2008-05-11T15:18:00.006-04:00

After my uncharacteristic espousal of some form of metaphysical realism, I feel a more deflationary argument is in order. In particular, I want to explore the idea that there is no objective basis for talk of the 'natural progression of things', or a default outcome which an agent's actions may interfere with. In other words: is there a natural distinction to be made between 'doing' and 'allowing'?

I've been reading Dan Dennett's 'A route to intelligence: oversimplify and self-monitor', in which he discusses the queer idea of "changing the course of history":

How could you change the course of history? From what to what? If history is simply the sequence of events that actually occur, then of course you can't change history. People say you can't change the past, and that's true enough, but then you can't change the future either...

[O]ne has to be thinking of an anticipated history, the way history is going to go ceteris paribus, the way history is going to go unless someone does something, or until someone does something, or in spite of what someone does. These verbs of agency can have no foothold outside the framework of a projected, aniticpated history, even when they are used to characterize the effects brought about by entirely inanimate objects.

He goes on to describe a scenario whereby a meteor is heading towards the earth, and we're all frantic until an unnoticed second meteor deflects the first one, "narrowly averting the catastrophe, preventing calamity." However, given full information, we could have seen that "there was never going to be a catastrophe. It was merely an anticipated catastrophe -- a mis-anticipated catastrophe." Dennett thus suggests that the sense in which the meteor was 'set' to hit earth is merely epistemic, rather than reflecting any natural disposition or 'default outcome' in the world, from which we were narrowly saved.

I'm not sure that's the full answer, though. There seems a sense in which the meteor really was, quite literally, 'on course' to hit the earth. It was 'deflected', which is precisely to say that its course was changed. This may be reflected in the modal fact (if it is one) that in most close possible worlds, the catastrophe indeed occurs. It's an open question whether this modal fact actually holds of the scenario, however. It might if small changes to the course of the second meteor would cause it to miss the first, while equivalent changes to the first meteor would not have caused it to miss earth. Otherwise - if the course of catastrophe was not modally robust in the first place - my modal account implies that the meteor was not really 'set' to hit the earth in any objective sense at all.

Let's see how this modal account applies to the puzzle discussed in my old post on framing thought experiments:

Weatherson notes that "where we set the 'zero-point' or status quo makes a big difference for how we act." But is there really any fact of the matter about what the 'default' outcome is? Kahneman and Tversky's classic example seems to suggest that this is merely a difference in our descriptions, not in reality. Whether you say that 400/600 will die, or that 200/600 will be saved, you describe one and the same fact. But the descriptions differ in their implied baseline, or what they convey as being "the natural progression of things". Could there be a metaphysical fact of the matter regarding where the true baseline lies? What sort of fact could this be, that would tell us whether a survivor was saved from the jaws of death, or whether it was simply a matter of death failing to cut his life tragically short? When faced with branching possibilities, how can we say that one is the "default" path of fate, and the other some kind of unnatural "diversion"? (But if we can't do this, then what is our basis for caring more about "losses" than "forfeited gains"? Doesn't this distinction require a baseline?)

My new suggestion is that the modal facts can provide such a baseline. The baseline is whichever event (dying or being saved) occurs in most close possible worlds. If you are overwhelmingly likely to obtain some benefit, then failure to obtain it in the actual world is properly classified as a loss, and not merely a forfeited gain.

Eh, so much for deflationism. It turns out I'm a "realist" about baselines too! A somewhat revisionary one, though. This certainly doesn't match our common understanding of the doing/allowing distinction, and nor would I expect it to have such (or, perhaps, any) normative significance. What do you think?

The End(s) of Discussion

2008-05-11T13:22:00.010-04:00

Life (especially for bloggers) affords limitless opportunities to engage in disputes. Far, far too many to be able to pursue them all. So I guess we just pursue those few discussions which strike us as particularly interesting and enjoyable. Can we say any more than this? Are there distinctive features of a good or worthwhile discussion? Can you identify any rules of thumb you follow in deciding (i) whether to leave a comment, and (ii) whether to continue or quit an ongoing exchange?

No doubt there are many possible ends an online conversation might serve. For example:
(1) Collaborative inquiry, in pursuit of knowledge and understanding.
(2) Asymmetric teaching, or the imparting of knowledge and understanding to others.
(3) Non-epistemic goals, e.g. creating/reinforcing social ties, "winning" an intellectual competition, etc.

Let's just consider epistemic goals. Discussions between epistemic peers (i.e. #1) tend to be the most interesting and rewarding. It's really wonderful to have the opportunity to improve one's understanding, as when others discern potential flaws in one's initial views. But what about the other case? There are plenty of people out there who are not epistemic peers. Arrogant though this may sound, sometimes you can tell that your disputant is in the grip of a certain confusion, or that they don't really understand the issue, so that there's little you can learn from them.*

The main motivation for continuing, then, will be that niggling itch we feel when "someone is wrong on the internet". They're in a bad state, and so we feel some pull to help make this clear to them, to set them right. Moreover, the act of teaching always has some benefit to the teacher's own understanding, as per my footnote below. So it's not a total waste of time. But if this is time that could have been spent engaging with more insightful interlocutors, this opportunity cost may still be sufficient to deter one whose primary goal is to improve their (own) understanding (or even that of the broader community, if the mistake in question is not widespread).

This relates to my old post, 'engaging persons or ideas?' If we're just interested in ideas for their own sake, then many discussions (i.e. with people who lack sufficient understanding of the relevant ideas) will probably not be worth having. If we think the discussions are worthwhile nonetheless, it must be because we value engaging with the other person.

* = But compare R. Porter:

Almost every new way I have to devise to explain a concept (and sometimes these are pretty simple concepts and thick-headed pupils) makes that concept clearer to me. It's not that the students know something useful that I don't; it's that I need to learn a new facet or explore an uncharted avenue in order to teach them.

Structure and Similarity

2008-05-09T15:28:00.003-04:00

I once thought that all possible ways of categorizing the world were metaphysically on a par. We may find it more useful to talk of tables and chairs, but objectively speaking this way of dividing up the world is not metaphysically privileged over alternatives that seem "gerrymandered" to us, e.g. combining chairs and cockroaches into a single category.

I now realize that my past self was very silly. Though it may at first seem puzzling that there could be privileged categories, or 'structure' to the world, it seems perfectly obvious that some pairings are objectively more similar than others. Two chairs are more alike -- have more natural properties in common -- than a chair and a cockroach, and this is nothing to do with our words and everything to do with how the world is. (A tribe might have a but a single word X that means 'chair or cockroach', but in that case their language would be objectively inferior to ours in this respect, for it fails to carve nature at the joints.)

One way to bring this out is to think about projectability, or what properties you can reason inductively from. All the emeralds I've seen so far have been green, so I expect the first emerald I see after 2020 will also be green. That seems a perfectly reasonable induction. On the other hand: "All emeralds I've seen so far have been grue, so I expect the first emerald I see after 2020 will also be grue" is clearly not good reasoning. This is because green is a more natural property than grue. It is an objectively better way to categorize reality.

Authentic Development

2008-05-08T11:49:00.005-04:00

Defining (Gender) Dysfunction

2008-05-07T23:01:00.007-04:00

Helen drew my attention to a fascinating NPR story on transgender children: young boys who desire to wear dresses, and more generally self-identify as girls. One psychologist (Zucker) recommends trying to socialize them out of it -- take away their dolls and dresses, and pressure them to act more like boys. Another (Ehrensaft) is more liberal, suggesting that it's a non-issue, and children should feel free to develop however they're inclined, so long as it isn't causing other - real - problems. The article notes:

This divide is so intense that there is very little common ground. There is little common ground even in the ways that the issue is conceptualized.

Sounds like a call for philosophy! Only, there's not much room for pure (a priori) ethical theory here. It's clear enough that we should prefer whatever will best serve the interests of the child, and help them to grow into a happy, well-adjusted adult. So it's really an empirical issue: what are the consequences of the two approaches likely to be? How burdensome is it to grow up transgendered, and how does this compare to Zucker's coercive therapy? (Might the cure be worse than the "disease"?)

Any remaining philosophical dispute lies more in what we might call the philosophy of psychiatry, concerning what counts as a mental "disorder", in contrast to "normal" human variation. Ehrensaft likens transgenderism to such "natural" variations as homosexuality, whereas Zucker compares it to racial identity disorder:

If a black kid walked into a therapist's office saying he was really white, the goal of pretty much any therapist out there would be to make him try to feel more comfortable being black. They would assume his mistaken beliefs were the product of a dysfunctional environment — a dysfunctional family or a dysfunctional cultural environment that led him or her to engage in this wrongheaded and dangerous fantasy. This is how Zucker sees gender-disordered kids. He sees these behaviors primarily as a product of dysfunction.

This strikes me as badly confused. Presumably a disorder is to be defined as that which tends to impede one's living a flourishing life. But that's an entirely forward-looking dispositional property; it does not matter how it came about, so this talk of "products of dysfunction" seems confused and irrelevant. Indeed, given a sensible forward-looking conception, it's not clear why adopting a different ethnicity must be a "disorder" at all. (It's not like losing a limb.)

Maybe the thought is that the expressed desire is actually just a symptom of some more deep-rooted unhappiness or self-loathing, which would survive the desired change and cause more psychological problems down the road? That would be an intrinsic or internal problem. Alternatively, one might think that the desire is problematic purely for extrinsic, situational reasons, e.g. if one lives in a community of Xs, the desire to be not-X might make it more difficult for you to flourish in this particular context. This appears to be at least part of Zucker's objection:

He explained that unless Carol and her husband helped the child to change his behavior, as Bradley grew older, he likely would be rejected by both peer groups. Boys would find his feminine interests unappealing. Girls would want more boyish boys. Bradley would be an outcast.

But there's nothing inherently wrong with outcasts. ('Misfit' is a relative term, remember!) The problem is with the society which doesn't accept or accommodate them. So it's really just the social stigma we should be worried about. But then I wonder why Zucker rejects the homosexuality analogy?

A final possibility is that he thinks it is a disorder in virtue of resting on false beliefs, or an inaccurate conception of the situation (in some sense). The black child who wants to be white may have internalized false beliefs about the inherent inferiority of blacks which explain (away) his preference. We may hold that preferences based on false beliefs lack normative weight and fail to qualify as 'true values', so it is better to change the misguided preference than to cater to it. But this normative principle isn't obviously true: we cater to poor taste and religious preferences all the time. Sometimes it's a better idea to just go with the flow rather than to insist on improving people.

But the point is moot because it doesn't seem that transgender-inclined children have false beliefs in any case. They don't, so far as I'm aware, believe that their birth sex is objectively "inferior" or anything like that. They just feel more drawn to the gender norms of the opposite sex. They're not making any error. So, again, I think Zucker's stance doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Blog Navigation Tweaks

2008-05-07T12:55:00.003-04:00

You may have noticed I'm still playing around with the blog template a bit.

[Update: I've added a new sidebar list of 'recommended posts' from other blogs, to supplement my 'commenting elsewhere' list.]

(1) I've moved the labels/categories list to the page footer, clearing more room in the sidebar. (The horizontal 'cloud' display is a bit harder to read than a vertical list, unfortunately, but I think it's probably worth the savings in screen space. How often do you use the list anyway?)

I've also made the basic list of 'recent posts' more prominent at the top of the sidebar, since that is probably more useful.

(2) Individual post pages now automatically list "related posts", i.e. recent posts tagged with the same category label. I imagine this could prove useful.

(3) I've upgraded the ratings widget with two new (experimental) features:
- My top rated posts are displayed in a sidebar list.
- By comparing and correlating ratings between posts, the widget automatically generates recommendations. Generic recommendations simply list other posts that were highly rated by the people who liked the present post. But if you have rated several posts yourself, the widget will cleverly offer individually tailored recommendations for you, based on the ratings of "people like you", i.e. who have made similar ratings to you in the past.

The more you (and others) rate, the better the widget will be able to recognize and cater to your 'taste' in posts, so the more useful it will be to you. How cool is that!

Bigoted Moral Intuitions

2008-05-06T20:05:00.009-04:00

Some people judge that homosexuality is immoral, because they find it intuitively repugnant. They must also be aware that a few short decades ago people thought that interracial sex was immoral, on the same basis. This suggests that such intuitions provide a very flimsy basis for discrimination. Indeed, I find it completely baffling that homophobic conservatives fail to realize that they are the modern day equivalent of yesterday's racist conservatives. Why are they not humbled by history? What makes them think that their disgust-based moral intuitions are any more reliable than their grandparents' were?

There was some discussion of this on the Missouri philosophy blog a while back. I suggested that actions are "permissible by default", and that constructing a positive argument for the permissibility of homosexual acts is as superfluous as arguing for the permissibility of eating icecream. The onus is on the moral scold. Andrew Moon responded that we may be justified in believing something to be wrong even if we can't immediately produce an argument to support this belief. I clarified my point as follows:

Andrew - I meant the ‘permissible by default’ thesis to be fundamentally metaphysical in nature. That is, an act is permissible unless there is in fact some reason why it’s wrong.

The methodological implication is that we shouldn’t expect any explanation to be given of why permissible acts are permissible (except for the trite “it harms no-one”, etc. — cf. the ice cream case). If we are to engage the moral question philosophically, the only way to do this is to see if there are any arguments for impermissibility that stand up to scrutiny.

As an epistemic point, of course, people don’t always need to do moral philosophy before having justified moral beliefs. But it’s also obviously true that your mere intuition isn’t enough — just look at all the past bigots to whom it “seemed” that interracial marriage was wrong. I’d guess the epistemic question must be settled by factors external to the immediate phenomenology, e.g. whether your moral intuitions are actually reliable, or something along those lines.

That still doesn’t speak to the practical point, of what subjective guidance one can give an agent here. How about this: if it seems to you that X is wrong, then you may tentatively suppose this to be so, BUT if other epistemically responsible agents call this into question, you ought to put aside your mere intuition and see whether there is any actual reason that can ground it. (If, at the end of inquiry, you can find no good arguments for the impermissibility of X, this would seem pretty strong evidence that in fact you are in the same position as the racists of yesterday.)

Unfortunately, no-one ever responded to these suggestions, so I reproduce them here instead. Any thoughts?

Reducing Unnecessary Offense

2008-05-05T12:50:00.000-04:00

Infinite Injury writes:

It isn’t racist now because it doesn’t suggest any prejudice or dislike and the last thing we would ever want to do is widen the class of comments that we decide express prejudice. We want to reduce the potential for accidental offense not increase it.

Hypersensitivity is a bad thing, and we'd all be better off without it. If you insist on turning yourself into a victim, perceiving slights at every turn, the world will offer ample opportunities to feed your paranoia. But why on Earth would you want to? Chances are: most people do not, in fact, hate you. But it's unnecessarily burdensome to expect them to constantly reassure you of this. Things would be much better if everyone could simply assume the best by default, and only take offense if someone was very clearly intending to insult them.

(Granted, it's perfectly understandable why someone who has suffered from others' malice in the past might be over-sensitized to it in future. I've had similar experiences myself. But it's still unfortunate, so we should want to help people to overcome their hypersensitivity, rather than encouraging it.)

Compare my response to Paul Gowder's suggestion that levelling down may be justified in cases where tolerating an inequality would express disrespect:

I agree that one shouldn't express disrespect. But we should increase freedom. Hence, to avoid unnecessary conflict here, it would be most inadvisable for us to adopt conventions of social meaning according to which increasing freedoms for some was understood as expressing disrespect for others. If such conventions are already present, we should do what we can to undermine and change them.

In Defence of Impractical Philosophy

2008-05-04T21:19:00.007-04:00

A friend passed along the link to this vituperative rant against (a certain kind of) academic philosophy:

What possible use or relevance to human life can a discussion like this have? ... What a terrible waste of brainpower... How selfish. The author apparently feels no obligation towards others on behalf of his abilities. There is a longstanding tradition in several religions and many moral systems that to whom much is given much is expected: people of ability... who nonetheless spend it playing intellectual games are depriving others of what those abilities might be able to accomplish. They are indulging their own narrow and selfish desires, and perhaps flattering their own vanity: but they are allowing their abilities to bear no fruit for others.

The blogger, 'Protagoras', elaborates in comments:

I think that one central justification for theory in the sciences is that it can--and indeed has--proved itself to bear on practical concerns at some point, even if we don't know now how that will come about. My beef with this article, as with much, though not all, of academic philosophy today is that it has no similar justification going for it.

This strikes me as incredibly misguided, for several reasons:

(1) History teaches us that it's very difficult to predict in advance which areas of theoretical inquiry will ultimately yield practical payoffs. Who would've guessed that philosophical theorizing about the limits of formal logic and mathematics would eventually bring us the personal computer? Not every academic can be an Alan Turing, admittedly, but the sophisticated consequentialist will keep in mind the big picture. We should design our academic institutions so as to have the overall effect of producing important knowledge (even if that means that many individual academics end up doing "pointless" work, considered in isolation). This is the basic argument for academic freedom: we can expect the best results if we give academics free reign to inquire as their intellectual curiosity sees fit, rather than limiting them to socially "approved" avenues of inquiry.

I trust that most academics are the best judges of what intellectual endeavours are worth their time and effort. (Cf. J.S. Mill's arguments for liberty.) But even if not, the few exceptions -- the Turings of the world, whose theoretical passions lead to invaluable insights -- are arguably so momentous as to justify the whole system that enables them.

(2) For this reason, among others, it is not generally 'selfish' or otherwise immoral to pursue your personal passions. On the contrary, I think it is to be encouraged. See my post 'Value, Alienation and Choice' for more detail.

(3) The particular article in question tackles deeply interesting issues at the intersection of epistemology and philosophy of mind, arguing that:

the best bet for defending an internalist epistemology against Williamson's attack is to take there to be a tight, intimate connection between (to take one example) our experiences and our beliefs upon reflection about the obtaining of those experiences, or between (to take another example) the rationality of our beliefs and our beliefs upon reflection about the rationality of those beliefs.

As an anonymous commenter explained, [edited lightly:] the nature of rationality and our ability to know our own minds are topics 'relevant to human life.' Indeed, they concern our basic condition as humans. One suspects that Protagoras' incredulous response to the paper ("You have to be kidding me") is simply due to his not actually understanding what it says.

(4) There's something incoherent about the crassly 'utilitarian' (in the non-philosophical sense) stance according to which things must be 'useful' to be of value. Note that useful things must be instrumental to some end or ultimate value. The ultimate ends, on the other hand, need not serve any other purpose, for they are valuable in themselves. They are that for which we do the instrumental act. But the confused instrumentalist is blind to non-instrumental values, and thus the point of the whole endeavour. He will thus criticize the direct realization of the ultimate good because it is not instrumental to something else. How backward!

Now, intellectual inquiry, truth and understanding are arguably among the intrinsic goods (i.e. the things we should value non-instrumentally). It would seem to me base and ignoble to deny this. But if this is so, it is backwards to demand that philosophy serve other purposes. (It happens that it does, as per my #1 above, but one shouldn't demand it.) To end on a provocative note: Depending on how it balances against other values, I think it entirely possible that society ought to be set up to serve philosophy!

What say you?

Review: Amazon Kindle

2008-05-04T15:51:00.004-04:00

I finally gave into temptation and bought myself a Kindle e-book reader, which I'm so far very impressed with.

I immediately went to manybooks.net and downloaded a couple dozen literary classics (Candide, Metamorphosis, Ulysses, etc.), all free. I also transferred a couple dozen philosophy PDFs that I've been meaning to read.

Unfortunately, one of these was a scanned-image pdf (JSTOR style), which didn't transfer at all well. The Kindle shrinks images to fit, so I could barely make out the words. So much for JSTOR. But I was relieved to find that the others (including ordinary text-based PDFs) convert and display ~~perfectly~~ reasonably well. I think the only other downside to bear in mind here is that you lose page numbering. Kindle includes a replacement measure called "location", but that won't be much help if you're trying to sync with other people who are reading non-Kindle versions of the text. Oh, and logical symbols get mangled -- '$' in place of the existential quantifier, etc.

Other than that, I have no serious complaints. I find the Kindle very pleasant and comfortable to read from -- the main selling point is, after all, its ink-based display technology -- there's no glare, so it feels like reading a book, unlike backlit computer screens. (Minor aesthetic complaint: the background is a newspaperish gray rather than pure white.) It's small, light, and easy to hold. Some people complain that it's too easy to accidentally bump the 'next page' button, but I haven't found this a problem myself, so long as I put it to sleep when carrying rather than reading it.

I like the navigation a lot. It's actually quicker and easier than turning a page in a regular book. Granted, you can't flick through multiple pages nearly so well, but there is a 'search' feature which more than compensates for this. Other options allow you to 'highlight' text, 'add notes', or 'bookmark' pages for future reference. And you don't need to worry about losing your place, since whenever you open a document, it picks up from wherever you previously left off. (I should note that the tiny keyboard is made for thumbing, not typing, so you won't be writing treatises in the margins. But it's handy enough for jotting down quick thoughts as you read.)

Aside from comfortably reading e-books and online papers, the other great feature of the Kindle is free mobile internet. The display is a bit awkward, and - combined with the clunky little keyboard - you certainly wouldn't want to use it as your primary form of internet access. But it's nice to have access to email on the go, and my feed reader (bloglines) works tolerably well on it, too. (I'm sure the iPhone is much better in these respects, but I'm deterred by the price tag.)

Other features are fun but superficial. There's an mp3 player, but the sound quality isn't great. There's a (black-and-white) picture viewer, and it's nice to be able to carry around photos of loved ones, but the resolution is far from photo-quality. I hear you can even play Minesweeper, but I fortunately haven't gotten that bored of reading yet!

Is it worth $399? It is for me, though it may not be for everybody. There's a lot of free digital content out there that I can now take full advantage of. In particular, my main reason for buying the Kindle was to read online philosophy papers, which it's great for. But now that I've got it, I find that I'm also appreciating the opportunity to read all those old literary classics that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten around to. I don't expect to buy much paid content from the Kindle store, since I don't tend to buy much of anything, but you might want to compare prices if you're into that kind of thing. (I gather the Kindle versions tend to be slightly cheaper than hardcopies, and they're conveniently "delivered" to your device in minutes.) At present, selection seems to be limited mostly to new bestsellers and old public domain works. So be warned: anything in between may not be available.

Full disclosure: Amazon will give me a 10% referral fee if you buy it via this link!

Ontological Reduction

2008-05-04T14:09:00.003-04:00

Is consciousness ontologically irreducible? Richard Brown thinks that the question is incoherent:

What [the identity theorist] says is that there is only ONE thing there, the brain and its various states, and you cannot reduce something to itself!

He goes on to contrast this with linguistic, theoretical reductions, and explains how those are irrelevant to the debate between physicalists and dualists. I agree with that part. But I think he's wrong to think that linguistic reductions are the only coherent form of reduction.

We can see this because, as I've been saying all along, the question is whether qualia are reducible in the same sense that tables and chairs are, whatever that may be. Now, it's an open question whether our talk of tables and chairs could be replaced by (perhaps complicated and long-winded) talk purely in the language of microphysical theory. But we don't care about talk. What matters is that the facts about tables are obviously settled by the microphysical facts. If you have a coarse-grained conception of 'facts', maybe they are even one and the same fact. Even so, we can get to a metaphysical notion of reduction by appeal to the truthmakers for our sentences. Regardless of whether table talk is linguistically replaceable by particle talk, there's no question that the microphysical facts are what make our table statements true (if they are true).

Once you've included the microphysical facts in your base facts, you do not need to add any further 'table facts' in addition. Those are already covered. It is in this sense that table facts are reducible to physical facts. And it is in this sense that the question of physicalism comes down to the question whether qualia are reducible. It is simply the question whether we need to add phenomenal facts to our fundamental base facts, or whether they "come along for free" (like tables do) given the physical facts P.

(I find it convenient to use the term 'reducible' to invoke this idea, but you're of course free to pick another word if you prefer. What's not helpful is to simply insist, "the debate between the dualist and the materialist is in no way a debate about reduction", and so ignore my underlying idea concerning what the debate is about. RB wanted to focus on what counts as 'physical' or 'non-physical', but that soon degrades into semantics. The substantive issue, as I see things, is whether we must include qualia as an additional primitive among the base facts. This understanding makes it clear why RB's "non-physical zombie" parody argument falls flat (to put it mildly). See my 'Zombie Review' for more detail.)

What Clinton Fights For

2008-05-04T11:51:00.006-04:00

Hilzoy offers some lessons from the Great Gas Tax Pander:

Clinton is presently making a big deal about the fact that she is "a fighter". After this primary season, I don't think there can be any doubt about her willingness to fight. What Clinton's gas tax proposal tells me is what she's willing to fight for. She is not willing to fight for what she thinks is right in the face of public pressure. She's not even willing to restrict her compromises to cases in which public pressure to do something stupid already exists. She will sacrifice principle and the public good when it's expedient for her to do so.

Which is to say: she's a fighter, all right, but what she fights for is her own interest, not what she thinks is right...

If there's anything we should have learned from George W. Bush, it's that generalized combativeness is not a good thing in a President. We need not just someone who's willing to fight in general, but someone who's willing to fight for the right things. If you think that the right things just are the things that advance Hillary Clinton's political interests, then there's no problem. But if you want someone who is willing to fight for good policies that are in our national interest, that actually address serious problems, then it's worth recognizing that while she is more than willing to fight, she is not willing to fight for that.

Post Ratings and Template Changes

2008-05-01T15:00:00.011-04:00

I've just added this cool widget to my blog and RSS feed, which lets you rate each post (out of 5 stars). It looks like a fun and convenient way to get more reader feedback...

Update: I just realized this won't function properly with my custom template, since the sidebar navigation lets you read posts other than the original page that the widget thinks you're still reading (rating). So, only those who read my blog via a feed reader will get to use this.

P.S. Perhaps I should revert to a more conventional template? I know that many readers were displeased by the change last year. Now that you've gotten used to it, what do you think?

Update II: Okay, I've fixed my template and reinstated the widget -- rate away!

I've also (1) added fade-in expandable posts, with thanks to Ramani; (2) restored author comment highlighting, as before; and (3) made various cosmetic tweaks (colours, borders, etc.). Do you like the new style?

Comments and Quality Control

2008-05-01T11:32:00.005-04:00

I've written before about the value of filtering out abusive or otherwise unconstructive comments for the sake of promoting reasoned discussion. It's an easy decision to delete comments that don't contribute to the conversation at all. I'm less sure what to do about relevant but low-quality comments. At present I tend to just leave them there but ignore them. (Of course, sometimes I fail to respond to good comments for other reasons, e.g. lack of time.)

But this liberal policy has some unfortunate consequences. The inclusion of low-quality comments may bring down the quality of discussion overall. As Tyler Cowen observes, "the best comments come in the first fifteen or so, after which quality declines precipitously and often exponentially." Short comments are no problem, I think, but long rambling ones are a disincentive for later readers. (One may feel obligated to read the earlier comments before responding, or even feel less comfortable responding to the original post after the conversation has apparently "moved on" to the rambler's choice of tangent.)

The ideal solution would be to have graded levels of comment prominence. I like blog templates which highlight the blogger's own comments relative to the norm. It would also be helpful to be able to make some particular comments less prominent than the norm. The text might be 'greyed out', for example, paled or even completely hidden by default unless readers select to 'click here to display this comment', or some such. Most readers could thus easily ignore the comment, reducing the risk that it will derail the thread, without resorting to heavy-handed deletion (which risks provoking [misguided] complaints of "censorship").

[I've posted this feature suggestion to the Blogger help group, and anyone who likes it is also encouraged to tell Blogger, since they will be more likely to implement a feature for which there is more demand.]

In the meantime, I'm tempted by the following policy: if a comment is both lengthy (i.e. more than a couple of sentences) and unproductive (by my lights), I may delete it and invite the commenter to instead repost the comment on their own blog -- they are then welcome to post the link in my comment thread, since that is far less obtrusive and distracting. (I'm happy to email the person their deleted comment, of course, so they needn't worry about having to rewrite it from scratch.)

Feedback welcome: Is this a good policy -- would it serve to increase the quality of discussions on this blog (which I think is generally quite high to begin with)? Does it seem reasonable? All things considered, do you think I should implement it?

Clay Shirky on Participatory Media

2008-04-30T23:01:00.002-04:00

Watch the video, or read the transcript. First, the depressing:

Wikipedia... represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought...

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Then, the hopeful:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

See also my review of Clay Shirky's book.

Meta-Coherence vs. Humble Convictions

2008-04-28T21:42:00.009-04:00

G.A. Cohen points out that Oxford-trained philosophers tend to believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction, whereas Harvard-trained philosophers tend not to. As an Oxfordian himself, he believes in the distinction. But he could have gone to Harvard instead, and so ended up a Quinean. Should this fact undermine his belief?

More detail is required. Here are two possibilities:
(1) The reasons upon which the Harvardians' beliefs rest are, impartially considered, no less weighty than the reasons behind the Oxfordian view. (The difference in their beliefs is merely explained by the fact that each side is more familiar with their own reasons.) If you think this is the situation, then this should immediately undermine your belief. It's [meta-]incoherent to believe that P whilst also believing that the weight of evidence fails to support P, since this is just to judge both [on the lower level] that P is true and [on the higher level] that P is probably not true after all.

(2) Alternatively, you might judge that, all things considered, the weight of reasons really does support the Oxfordian view here. So you're lucky you didn't go to Harvard, in much the same way that it's lucky you weren't born into a society of Flat Earthers (or a religious cult). If you'd been raised and trained differently, you would have been less sensitive to where the weight of reasons truly lies.

As a reflective agent, to truly believe something you must consider it to be epistemically superior to its negation. You must therefore hold that anyone who believes otherwise is ipso facto your epistemic inferior in this respect. (They are failing to believe what is best supported by reasons.)

Conversely: humility + metacoherence = agnosticism.

One might initially be tempted to retain one's convictions even whilst modestly admitting that others' views are equally well supported (all things considered). Cohen thinks this is a fairly common stance (e.g. between Protestant and Catholic friends). But you cannot coherently maintain this combination of first-order belief and higher-order humility. Which you should give up will of course depend on the details of the case.

For example, it seems plausible to me that a proper appreciation of religious pluralism should undermine common grounds for religious belief (e.g. 'religious experience' -- why think that yours is any more reliable than Akbar's?). But this is arguably just because there are independent grounds for skepticism, which actual pluralism makes more salient. The existence of geocentrist cults, by contrast, does nothing whatsoever to undermine heliocentrism.

Culture is Biological

2008-04-28T20:14:00.003-04:00

Ed Morrisey writes:

One of the stranger aspects of Jeremiah Wright’s speech came in the supposed neurological explanation of the differences between whites and blacks. Wright claims that the very structure of the brains of Africans differ from that of European-descent brains, which creates differences rooted in physiology and not culture...

Hilzoy responds by pointing out that Wright said no such thing. But this seems to me to miss the more fundamental error (which Hilzoy actually repeats in her post) of thinking that cultural and biological explanations are somehow alternative, competing, mutually exclusive explanations of behaviour.

Clearly, that's just plain mistaken. If culture influences our thoughts and behaviour, it must therefore affect our brains (that's where the thinking occurs, after all). All behavioural and psychological differences have a neuro-/biological explanation. The only question is whether this biological difference is in turn best explained by environmental or genetic differences.

Even this latter question of 'nature or nurture' is often confused. As I explain in my essay 'Native Empiricists', both inevitably play a role: we are equipped with innate capabilities to learn effectively from experience, and - on the other hand - one need only to deprive a plant of sunlight to see how a nourishing environment is essential for the expression of genetic potentials (e.g. height).

But, if we are careful, we can find coherent questions in this vicinity. For example, faced with a difference between A and B, we might wonder whether a genetic clone of A raised in B's environment would have ended up in a condition more like A's or B's in the relevant respects. Unfortunately, people are rarely so careful.

Philosophers' Carnival #68

2008-04-28T11:01:00.000-04:00

... is here!

Metaethics Diavlog

2008-04-27T16:16:00.007-04:00

Wow. This bloggingheads.tv interview between Will Wilkinson and UNC's Geoff Sayre-McCord is incredibly good. Sayre-McCord is a wonderfully clear and careful thinker, and Will asks him excellent, probing questions. (Can you imagine seeing such a philosophically astute discussion on regular TV? It's times like these that I really love the internet!)

One recurring issue concerns the extent to which moral statements are simply redescriptions of natural facts. Does 'Hitler was evil' say anything over and above the fact that he had a callous disregard for others' welfare, etc.? Does the goodness of our social institutions consist in anything more than the descriptive fact that they are conducive to [such-and-such specification of] human flourishing?

The problem with the negative (reductionist) answer is that it risks turning normative disputes into mere semantic disputes. Suppose one were to say: "I grant that Western freedoms are more conducive to personal development, happiness, and all that jazz, but nonetheless they are bad, because it is more important to promote obedience, piety, etc." We don't want to say they've contradicted themselves, as we must if 'good' just means 'conducive to [...]'. Their error is not linguistic. It seems there's a substantive moral question at stake here, viz. how we should organize society, or what is of ultimate value, or some such.

Granted, the tricky thing is to say what this further element of disagreement amounts to. I'm inclined to think it is the question of what moral viewpoint is most reasonable, or what all ideally rational agents would ultimately converge on at the end of inquiry. Depending on our theory of rationality, this might be further reduced to the question of what set of desires/evaluative beliefs is the most internally coherent, unified, and so forth. I think this is some sort of progress. At least it is difficult to re-raise the Open Question Argument at this level: "I grant that X is approved by the maximally coherent evaluative system, and indeed I would endorse it if I were more rational, but nonetheless I think X is wrong!" sounds pretty self-contradictory to me. But in some sense I've just passed the buck from meta-ethics to meta-epistemology, so this picture is still not entirely satisfactory.

Excuses and Responsibility

2008-04-26T21:17:00.002-04:00

John Gardner gave an interesting talk yesterday, arguing that excuses are not merely a means of avoiding responsibility (for an act), but also a way to claim responsibility (as a moral agent).

Compare other cases, e.g. insanity pleas, where one abdicates responsibility entirely. We hold each other to normative standards only insofar as we see each other as moral agents, capable of responding appropriately to reasons. But the insane are not even within the space of reasons. They are no longer considered persons at all. They thus escape legal responsibility, because it makes no more sense to hold them accountable than to hold a wild animal to account.

It is deeply shameful to be regarded as a non-agent, however. Some defendants have therefore sought to portray themselves as reasonable people, even though they admit they acted unjustifiably. This may at first seem paradoxical. Instead of offering either justifications or an abdication of agential responsibility, they try a third way: a reasonable excuse. A provocation defence, for example, might seek to establish that the defendant's emotional response (rage/anger) was a reasonable reaction to the situation. This reasonable anger then led them to act unreasonably -- killing the victim, say. But it is not as though their actions here are totally incomprehensible, such that we must regard them as a non-person, a mere force of nature. Rather, it is the response any reasonable person would have had to the situation. It is a kind of rational irrationality, or blameless wrongdoing.

I agree with Gardner that this 'third way' makes conceptual sense. (It's a further question whether the law should allow it, of course.) Indeed, it's a familiar point for consequentialists that a good character might on occasion lead one to perform bad actions. So we can make sense of the intransitivity of reasonableness if we say that a reasonable emotional response (or disposition) is one that will tend, in general, to lead to better (more reasonable) actions. This is clearly compatible with the disposition leading one astray in particular circumstances.

(I should note that Gardner wasn't entirely satisfied by this suggestion; he thinks there are some cases where it won't suffice. But I'm not sure what those cases are.)

A practical upshot: we may be able to determine what excuses should be allowed as legal defences, depending on which dispositions we wish to encourage in the general population. For example, there is nothing to be said for encouraging jealousy, so finding your lover in bed with another should not be considered a legitimate 'provocation' to murder. But perhaps it is good to feel righteous anger in response to domestic violence. So a battered spouse might have a legitimate excuse for perpetrating their revenge (even in cases where they lack the full-blown justification of self-defence). Food for thought.

Philosophical Journeys and Destinations

2008-04-26T14:21:00.006-04:00

Andrew raised some interesting questions in this week's PhilSoc discussion: why do we care about truth? Is there a risk of 'truthaholism', taking a good thing too far (to the detriment of other values)? Is it perhaps the process of inquiry, the journey rather than the destination, that we find most valuable in philosophy?

Of course, the truth will sometimes have great instrumental importance, as in medical science. But it's less clear what really hangs on the outcome of certain abstract philosophical debates. It may be that the truth here doesn't really matter for any other purpose at all. The question then is whether it matters for its own sake.

Jack suggests a helpful thought experiment. Suppose you had a magic 8-ball that would tell you the true answer to any philosophical question. Would this be a good thing? Bracket any instrumental benefits that the truth might yield. Just so far as the intrinsic value of philosophy is concerned, would it be a good thing for philosophy to come to an end in this way? Intuitively, there seems something deeply appalling about this scenario. This suggests that it's really the process of philosophical inquiry, rather than the end-point of truth, that we most value.

But I wonder. Perhaps the thought experiment has the wrong end in mind. There does seem something cheap and superficial about the "truths" delivered by a magic 8-ball. But this is not all that we usually have at the end of inquiry. Our best philosophy does not culminate in a mere 'yes' or 'no' answer. Rather, it gives rise to a deeper level of understanding; an appreciation of why the answer is what it is. (Or perhaps not even that -- just a deeper understanding of the question, and the various possible answers, may be plenty valuable in itself.)

So suppose you could get a brain implant that would provide you with a full understanding of a philosophical topic, without the investment of time and effort that is usually required to obtain such learning. Is that a good thing?

I don't think the answer is entirely obvious. But I lean towards thinking that it would be good. I think it really is the end-point of understanding which I most value, and not the struggle of getting there. What do you think?

World Malaria Day

2008-04-25T18:57:00.002-04:00

Go here, click 'skip the game and send net', and sign up to have a sponsor send a malaria net (worth $10) to Africa on your behalf. You can also donate money yourself, of course.