And now we also have the nasty dust-up over Lawrence Kraus’s childish and dismissive response to David Albert’s review of the title of his book. Gary Gutting sensibly asks Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along? (in the NYTimes on May 10), and provides a reasoned discussion of the sources of disagreement, but I think there is a bigger issue.

Perhaps it might be worthwhile for philosophers to ask if there is some good reason for the currently perceived disrespect of philosophy rather than just going into defense mode – and for those who do so ask, I have a suggested partial answer.

To me the value of Philosophy lies not in providing answers but in asking questions, and the problem as I see it is that many in the discipline present themselves as having some special kind of expertise in giving answers or resolving problems. Even when the claim of expertise is made more for the analysis and histories of proposed solutions (as opposed to their actual finding and evaluation) I still think that the emphasis on solutions is problematic.

A couple of my favourite examples of bad philosophising may help to make the point. Although Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ is mere foolishness as a “refutation” of “strong AI”, it may perhaps serve as a useful source of questions to clarify what the proponents of strong AI are actually saying. And similarly the “Gettier Problems” can lead to clarifying questions regarding the intent of those who “define” knowledge as justified true belief. In both cases a question might occasionally lead the hearer to identify something they had actually overlooked, but it remains open to the more likely possibility that the intent of the “folk” was actually much more sophisticated than the philosopher had understood it to be.

And yet even though freedom of expression needs to be protected (especially when that expression brings truth and clarity in place of lies and obfuscation), there may still be some rationale for restriction. It is harder to justify prohibiting the telling of a truth because of what amounts to a blackmail threat of violent reaction than in the cliche’d case of “yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre” but to some extent the situations are parallel.
My instinct is to just tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may, but reason sometimes advises otherwise and then I have a dilemma.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.(1904): “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

Louis Brandeis (1897):  “we may have a democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

One reason for believing the latter was attempted in a much more recent quote.

Abbott Joseph Liebling (1960): “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

But this actually isn’t quite right. The cost of publication was never all that high and now it is negligible. And so it’s not the press but the audience that is hard or costly to obtain.

The reason Brandeis was right is because those with great wealth are better placed to buy or bribe the attention of voters to their message.

And the situation is unstable. Once a small class acquires more than half the wealth, that class has the power to buy more than half of the voters’ attention and with the not unreasonable assumption of total gullibility (ie every viewer is immediately persuaded by the last message heard) that is enough for them to further cement their position. And even without total gullibility it may still be possible to persuade the majority with sufficiently repeated exposure so a high enough domination of the economy may be sufficient to control the politics so as to be self-perpetuating.

An alternative to making predictions, though, is just to declare the opposition in default for failure of postdiction and that is what  actually seems to be the preferred strategy of creationists. As Jennings says, “Being able to describe past observations is just the price to play the game, and with sufficient ingenuity, can usually be done.” Yes, and I am pretty sure that natural selection from random variations can in fact do the job. But given the effectively infinite variety of life, the task of explaining all past observations will never be done. When we have explained the eye that sees, then there’s the eye on the peacock’s tail, and after that the I of conscious experience, and then who knows what. If we don’t want to appeal to magic then the price of this game will never have been paid in full.  Of course finding the price of admission then becomes a game in itself, and we should thank those of little ingenuity whenever they come up with interesting puzzles for us to solve. (Yes, we have usually thought of whatever they suggest long ago, but we should still thank them out of politeness – and then ask them to go out and find us more challenging problems to solve.)

The two essential roles that he reserves for religion are the answering of big questions and the support of community and fellow-feeling. But he seems unconcerned as to whether the purported answers are in fact true, and is blind to the way that faiths which unite their adherents divide them from others.

He starts by crowing a bit about the (perhaps surprising) persistence of religion after the 18th century’s enlightenment and after periods of localized attempted suppression in the 20th century. (He cites this as “evidence that intellectuals have systematically misunderstood the nature of religion and religious observance and have constantly been thinking, for the better part of three centuries, that religion was about to disappear” – which is really quite an egregious confounding of separate issues. Of course some “intellectuals” may have been mistaken as to the staying power of religion and others may have been mistaken as to its nature, but they don’t necessarily go together. The appeal and staying power of religion owes at least as much to the nature of its adherents as to the nature of religion itself, and the misunderstanding in some of those cases is more likely to have been regarding the former than the latter.)

Sacks says “Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? We will always ask those three questions because homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, and religion has always been our greatest heritage of meaning. You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and the market economy as four institutions that characterise modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to those questions that humans ask.”  But I have serious problems with this as I think science does give partial answers to the first two and as to the third I find the answers of most religions to be largely wrong. And the claim to be providing a true answer when one does not is, I believe, quite as monstrous an evil as Richard Dawkins and others like to say it is.

Remarkably Sacks acknowledges that “Religion isn’t the only source of answers; there are other spheres that offer them, such as literature”. And he limits his claim to the assertion that “religion remains the main repertoire of those meaning-based questions.” – which would be even better if he said “a” rather than “the”, but even as it is, unless one misdefines secularism as excluding the arts, it seems to leave the secularist with access to sufficient resources for a complete life.

He goes on with a rather simplistic left brain vs right brain analogy which is reminiscent of Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” and can be traced back to Hume’s position that reason alone cannot give value. I do agree with Hume on that (contra Harris who doesn’t understand the difference between giving value and predicting what we will value). But although I agree with Hume that reason and science can’t give value I don’t see any validity in Sacks’ claim that religion is necessary for that purpose (and he actually makes no argument in support of the answers that religions do provide – many of which are manifestly evil and wrong)

When it comes to fostering community, the positive contributions of religion to binding communities together are almost always more than counterbalanced by the wedges it places between them.

Sacks makes much of an alleged statistical correlation between religiosity and community identification – as if it wasn’t something that should be expected from causality in the opposite direction given that religious practice is largely a group activity and so participation in the ambient religion would be at least as likely to be a result from community-orientation as to be a cause of it.

And on the same topic he makes appreciative reference to Robert Putnam who “argued in his book American Grace, that what makes the difference to people, turning them into good citizens and good neighbours, is belonging to a community, rather than what people believe. He wrote that an atheist who goes regularly to synagogue or to church is likely to be a better human being than a religious believer who never joins a community”. But again, even if we accept that the gregarious is inherently a “better human being” than the solitary, the religious participation is a result not a cause of that tendency.

Now I don’t deny that many religions have included ideas of great value and have literature that is still worth mining (albeit with a critical eye), but I don’t agree that any of them is the only path, and indeed the claim that they are is what turns them all to ashes in the mouth. The one true religion, if it ever exists, will make no claim to either uniqueness or truth.

But a statement like this:

“We stand to lose a great deal if we lose religious faith. We will lose our Western sense of human dignity. I think we will lose our Western sense of a free society. I think we will lose our understanding of moral responsibility. I think we will lose the concept of a sacred relationship, particularly that of marriage, and we will lose our concept of a meaningful life. I think that religious belief is fundamental to Western civilisation and we will lose the very heart of it if we lose our faith.”
is just horribly arrogant nonsense.

Less arrogant, but still open to question is the following bit:

“individuals may live good lives without religion — the moral sense is part of what makes us human — but a society never can, and morality is quintessentially a social phenomenon. It is that set of principles, practices and ideals that bind us together in a collective enterprise. The market and the state may be driven by the pursuit of interests but societies are framed by something larger and more expansive, by a shared vision of the common good. Absent this and societies begin to fragment. People start thinking of morality as a matter of personal choice. The sense of being bound together — the root meaning of “religion” — in a larger enterprise starts to atrophy and social cohesion is lost. ”

This may not be true but it is worth considering.

Commenter ‘Shane’ suggests that  ”perhaps faith is incidental to positive social and moral effects associated with church attendance. The religions have long established social networks and institutions that these foster positive effects by bring people together, hopefully over time we can reestablish these networks in such a way as to bring in those who find their meaning without religious faith.”

Sacks concludes with “I once defined faith as the redemption of solitude. It sanctifies relationships, builds communities, and turns our gaze outward from self to other, giving emotional resonance to altruism and energising the better angels of our nature. These are some of the gifts of our encounter with transcendence, and whether it is love of humanity that leads to the love of God or the other way round, it remains the necessary gravitational force that keeps us, each, from spinning off into independent orbits, binding us instead into the myriad forms of collective beatitude. A society without faith is like one without art, music, beauty or grace, and no society without faith can endure for long. ”

But for now my secular faith remains that we can indeed maintain share and extend our human values without either the trappings or the leadership figures of traditional religion and that we would be better off to free ourselves and our fellow humans from their authority.

In particular, his main point appears to be based on a misunderstanding, for he says:

What I do assert is that with respect to a single demand — the demand that the methodological procedures of an enterprise be tethered to the world of fact in a manner unmediated by assumptions — science and religion are in the same condition of not being able to meet it (as are history, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology and all the rest).

When a scientist expresses the criteria of an experimental test in terms of the theory being tested, that is only a shorthand for those familiar with the theoretical context and the true test can always be expressed in terms that require no theory-specific assumptions. For example the prediction that “this collision will produce an output of that particle” is just shorthand for something that could be expressed (though at much greater length) in terms of statements like “if you set those dials this way then that needle will point to this mark”.

For any statement that deserves to be called scientific there is a clear path through the literature to a testable consequence that can be described in terms of everyday objects. This may be what Richard Dawkins meant by his recent gaffe joke about citing “chapter and verse” – which, in the scientific context, refers not to the source of authority but to the first step towards finding a recipe for a test (but which Fish once again managed to take the wrong way!).

Ever since reading Ayer’s ‘Problem of Knowledge’ in the late ’60s I have felt that he was clearly doing it right in the sense that so many of the problems of philosophy had seemed to me to amount to people arguing at cross-purposes. Perhaps the real task is just to focus attention on understanding what many philosophers condescendingly call “the folk” rather than trying to give universal answers to questions that do not (and maybe cannot) have any universal interpretation.

But I do generally seem to agree with Blackford on most things and no less so this time when he says “I’m coming to think increasingly that all this talk of ‘free will’ isn’t very helpful for understanding our actual situation, partly because we don’t seem to have much clarity or agreement about what it even means”.

I also like Blackford’s apparent suggestion in his second response to Jerry Coyne that determinism is to some extent a *requirement* for free will. If what I actually choose to do or think at any point is not a function of the immediately preceding mental state which I have by previous cogitation brought into being, then that indeterminacy denies rather than grants me the capacity to control my own mental destiny.

This is along the same lines as my own claim that determinism is a requirement for responsibility in that the idea of responsibility is based on the capacity for being influenced by a response to our actions (or by observation of responses applied to others) in such a way as to perhaps modify our future behaviour.

and John S Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts has The Knight’s Song, or What is a Theory?

My own take is that a science is any teachable art of making correct testable predictions. With any restriction as to method or attitude being superfluous to the definition (though not without compelling interest in practice).

And I would say that a theory is just any specific process for making such predictions – including explanatory theories (such as “the butler did it”)as predicting the results of further investigation (such as “you will find the money hidden in his room”), and mathematical theories such as analytic function theory or analytic number theory as being respectively the body of techniques of predicting and proving results a specific area or the possible results from  application of a specific class of methods.

Of course, if one admits a wrong argument expressed in a superficially rational-looking form as a rational argument then one can come to anything through rational argument, but the claim to rationality depends on a willingness to see and acknowledge flaws in one’s argument.

It is irrational to persist in believing arguments which have been shown to be incorrect, and it is only slightly less irrational to repeatedly fall for false arguments in favour of a proposition just because you want to have a “reason” to believe it.

Frankly, the only faith for which I have any respect is that which admits it is *not* supported by reason. If the existence of God were provable by reason then there would be no reason for faith and so to claim to have made an act of willful faith would itself be unreasonable. (Except perhaps if belief in god were attributed to faith in reason, which then sets reason above God – which may well be a greater sin than not believing in “him” at all.)

P.S. While it is not “irrational” to make a logical error it is arguably stupid to do so – and since (at least in my experience) we all make stupid mistakes quite frequently, I suspect that those who are offended by the charge of stupidity are displaying a higher level of arrogance than that of which they accuse their accusers.

So do I. I am offended by the view that religions should have privileged treatment under the law and I disagree strongly with many of their other views on how society should be run. So I am happy to see any move towards defeating those views.

But I am not so keen on the wording which suggests that people are prepared to say that churches should not express those views.

I am happy to see that Blackford, too, is not actually opposed to the churches expressing views on political matters, but I don’t understand why he thinks their expressed views should not be based on theological considerations. Shouldn’t they have the same right as any other group to express views that are ill-founded and wrong?

And as to the question of how “we” won, I am still inclined to speculate that there’s some kind of tie in between our capacity to learn from and cooperate with peers, a willingness to take direction from others (sometimes “blindly” so), and the tendency towards art and decoration – especially that of our own bodies to help identify “team” members in conflict situations. But now it looks as if the competitive team spirit and blind obedience to authority that won us the world may be about to become our undoing.  It would be ironic if some admixture from the Neanderthals were to be what we need in order not to destroy ourselves in religious conflict.

Here’s the link:

Should kids be told that multiplication is repeated addition? | LinkedIn.

First the good.

The question posed is a real paedagogical question to which I don’t think we know the answer, and the discussion led to some interesting examples of ways that the scaling interpretation of real number multiplication might be conveyed to small children . I don’t think it’s yet clear how early they can truly identify and compare different geometric magnitudes  (viz experiments comparing volumes for example) but this is certainly a worthwhile area for research.

But now the bad.

Part of what turns people against mathematics is the certainty of its results which means that one’s mistakes are hard to hide.  But what’s even worse than being found indisputably wrong when wrong is being told with a claimed mathematical level of authority that one is wrong when one cannot understand the argument.  And I think Devlin’s campaign against “repeated addition” makes it more likely for children to be exposed to that kind of dogmatic smackdown.

My objection to Devlin is that he claims as mathematical fact positions which are essentially philosophical. He makes no attempt to show any inconsistency in the  definition of multiplication of natural numbers by a recursive algorithm of repeated addition, but just claims in his first piece that this doesn’t capture what might be called the “essence” or “real meaning” of the corresponding operation on the reals and in his most recent effort he makes the claim that recursion is not a case of repetition.  While not mathematically provable, either of these may indeed be a reasonable philosophical position (though I don’t subscribe to either of them). And they may have valid paedagogical implications (which I might agree with despite not agreeing with his philosophy).  But I have always suspected that the way he said it would encourage people to dogmatically insist that repeated addition is  ”not multiplication. Not in any sense; not even on the naturals”. And unfortunately there was an instance demonstrating just that in the course of the LinkedIn discussion.

My fear is that teachers who are a bit insecure about their understanding of mathematics will be led by such attitudes to undermine rather than support the understanding of a child who, on being introduced to multiplication says “Hey, I get it. This is just repeated addition!”

When that happens, I have no doubt that the teacher’s response should be an enthusiastic “Yes!”,  and it should come with no anxious look or subsequent undermining “but…”

It is perfectly fine to follow the “Yes!” with some thing like “and here are some things we can use it for..”  (see the wonderful poster by Maria Droujkova for some nice examples) . And of course these may include, as Maria does, examples which help to prime the student for seeing things another way. But it is up to the student to eventually see the next step, not for the teacher to immediately suggest that she has somehow fallen short.

Less Wrong comes down on the wrong side  of the “Sleeping Beauty” problem.

Sleeping Beauty volunteers to undergo the following experiment and is told all of the following details. On Sunday she is put to sleep. Afair coin is then tossed to determine which experimental procedure is undertaken. If the coin comes up heads, Beauty is awakened and interviewed on Monday, and then the experiment ends. If the coin comes up tails, she is awakened and interviewed on Monday and Tuesday. But when she is put to sleep again on Monday, she is given a dose of an amnesia-inducing drug that ensures she cannot remember her previous awakening. In this case, the experiment ends after she is interviewed on Tuesday.

Any time Sleeping beauty is awakened and interviewed, she is asked, “What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?”

The intent of the problem is presumably that she NOT know what day it is until after giving her answer and since in a sequence of repetitions of the experiment there are twice as many expected wakeups for tails as for heads the probability of head on any given wakeup is 1/3.
(If she’s told what day it is the problem is not interesting. On Monday it’s just a normal coin toss with P(H)=.5,and on Tuesday it’s a coin toss where all the heads were discarded so P(H)=0.)

LessWrong refers to a couple of other arguments for p=1/3 including a gambling argument from Richard Neal and Nick Bostrom’s argument from the extreme case but ends coming down as a “halfer” on the basis of the following:

A probability tree can help with the intuition (this is a probability tree corresponding to an arbitrary wake up day):

If Beauty was told the coin came up heads, then she’d know it was Monday. If she was told the coin came up tails, then she’d think there is a 50% chance it’s Monday and a 50% chance it’s Tuesday. Of course, when Beauty is woken up she is not told the result of the flip, but she can calculate the probability of each.

When she is woken up, she’s somewhere on the second set of branches. We have the following joint probabilities: P(heads, Monday)=1/2; P(heads, not Monday)=0; P(tails, Monday)=1/4; P(tails, Tuesday)=1/4; P(tails, not Monday or Tuesday)=0. Thus, P(heads)=1/2.

The problem with that tree diagram is that it really just amounts to giving a long calculation to prove what she already knows (or at least has been told) – namely that the coin is fair.
If so then of course the P(H)=.5 but that question is even less interesting than the cases in which she is told what day it is.

The actual question we are asked is what credence she should attach to the statement that when she wakes up she will be shown a head, and both Richard Neal’s gambling approach and Nick Bostrom’s extreme case should make it clear that the answer is 1/3.

Or, if you really like tree diagrams, think of it this way:

                               p=(1/2) Heads
       p=(2/3) – it’s Monday <
       /                       p=(1/2) Tails
Wakeup<
       \                       p=0 Heads
       p=(1/3) – it's Tuesday <
                               p=1 Tails

This gives p(H)=(2/3)*(1/2)+(1/3)*0=1/3

and               p(T)=(2/3)*(1/2)+(1/3)*1=2/3

Part of the difficulty in all this is that what we mean by asking for the “probability” of something is not well defined without a clear specification of the “game” or “experiment” involved. The 1/3 solution is the answer to the question “When you get woken up like this, in what fraction of the cases do you expect to see a head?” – which to my mind is the correct interpretation of  ”when you get woken up like this what will you take as the probability of seeing a head?”

That is very different from the question “when you get woken up like this what will you think was the probability of getting a head when the coin was tossed?”

Examples like this are why I have little trust in people who discuss probability but toss aside questions like “What is the actual game or experiment in terms of which you are saying that the probability of event E is p?”

As one who often finds claims of offense offensive, it feels odd to be objecting to an argument that the feeling of offense can be morally wrong, but that does seem to be where I have to come down on this.  Even more than usual, my thinking here is only half baked and I expect to come back and re-think and re-edit this a number of times before it becomes clear to me (let alone anyone else!)

The problem as I see it is partly with the conflation of subtle differences of language which so often underlies the conflicts of philosophers. There are context-dependent differences between finding something offensive, being offended, and taking offense and the kind of blanket rules they seem to so deeply love do not really apply.

Finding a bad smell or taste offensive is not something we have conscious control over and so can hardly be judged morally wrong. Perhaps  Finke would consider that a silly objection because he was “clearly” referring to something completely different. But how different really is the feeling of visceral disgust that we may have towards something we “all” consider morally despicable? Of course Finke admits (and demands of others) that we share his offense at what he considers reprehensible. It is only the feeling of offense that he doesn’t share which he considers morally wrong. But we all have the sensibilities that we have been born with or trained to and the unbidden feelings of offense, even if “wrongly” directed cannot be judged themselves to be morally wrong. What can be judged (and this may be what Finke really means though he makes no attempt to say so) is the conscious welcoming of the feeling of offense without regard to proper consideration of whether or not it is appropriate. Such taking of offense is much more than feeling offense or being offended and that is what does offend me (and though I think I should try to avoid actually taking offense, at it I often slip into my own sense of righteous indignation when I see too much of it).

The real backdrop for all this is of course the converse question of whether and how hard we should try to avoid giving offense to those who are inclined to take it (with the “should” here referring to a possible moral obligation rather than to any consideration of fear regarding possible consequences). I actually am inclined to find some expressions of humour or opinion morally wrong if they appear to be made without any purpose to compensate for feelings they may hurt even if those feelings are irrational. There are cases where exposing the irrationality of the offense taken may be of sufficient value to justify the pain of that offense but often I suspect the motive is more like the excitement of bear baiting than a sincere effort to enlighten.

I also have more detailed complaints and quibbles with Daniel’s post which will have to wait until another time.

In addition to agreeing with commenter Alex Heyworth that “logical consistency is not a necessary condition for moral codes, nor even a common one”, I would also claim that logic, even when it does apply, does not require that the marker used to separate what is legal from what is illegal should correspond to anything other than agreement by the majority (or by whoever has the deciding power in a given culture).

With regard to the legal question, there may well be agreement on many cases. But in the continuum between what certainly should always be allowed and what certainly should always be forbidden there is a range of cases on which people may disagree. In the absence of any universal agreement on the moral issue, what the law does is attempt to strike a balance between competing moral positions. Often this means that it just draws one or more lines of convenience without actually claiming that they separate the moral from the immoral. So a legal distinction at twelve weeks of gestation, or twenty, or whenever, does not need to imply that any particular state of the fetus changes at any of those times.

Even for the purpose of an individual moral decision, there may well be competing values at stake and I have never seen a good argument for the existence of a common scale on which such competing values can be compared. We each decide on what seems right at the time. In many cases we have no qualms about the choice, and the vast majority agree. But there is no guarantee that all cases will be this simple, and we are often faced with situations where a choice we have made in good conscience may later be felt to be wrong (and maybe later right again). Sometimes we do fall into indecisive mental “churning”. But even if we do make a choice, that does not imply the existence of a truly “best” moral decision. What tips the balance towards our actual judgement at any given time may depend on past experience and current neuro-chemistry rather than any absolute prioritization of competing values. However, despite the fears and fear-mongering of some, this does not deny the possibility of *any* absolute moral principles. There are lots of cases where we do have essentially universal agreement on what is right, and even more where careful consideration leads always to the same answer even among those who might initially disagree with it. But I suspect that any project to find a *complete* set of absolute moral principles will fail.

With regard to the personhood of a fetus I doubt that anyone believes in a magical discrete change of status at any particular time. But many people see the progression from fertilized ovum to conscious infant as a gradual process where the attitude towards killing should range from negligible concern at the start to absolutely abhorrence at the end. And although I don’t *require* logic in morality, I see no lack of it in such a position.