The ‘traditional’ objections to a wholly naturalistic metaphysics, within the modern Western philosophical tradition, involve the vexed notions of freedom and consciousness. But there is, I think, a much deeper and more interesting line of criticism to naturalism, and that involves the notion of intentionality and its closely correlated notion of normativity.
What is involved in my belief that I’m drinking a beer as I type this? Well, my belief is about something — namely, the beer that I’m drinking. But what does this “aboutness” consist of? It requires, among other things, a commitment that I have undertaken — that I am prepared to respond to the appropriate sorts of challenges and criticisms of my belief. I’m willing to play the game of giving and asking for reasons, and my willingness to be so treated is central to how others regard me as their epistemic peer. But there doesn’t seem to be any way that the reason-giving game can be explained entirely in terms of the neurophysiological story of what’s going on inside my cranium. That neurophysiological story is a story of is the case, and the reason-giving story is essentially a normative story — of what ought to be the case.
And if Hume is right — as he certainly seems to be! — in saying that one cannot derive an ought-statement from an is-statement,and if naturalism is an entirely descriptive/explanatory story that has no room for norms, then in light of the central role that norms play in human life (including their role in belief, desire, perception, and action), it is reasonable to conclude that naturalism cannot be right.
(Of course, it does not follow from this that any version of theism or ‘supernaturalism’ must be right, either.)
I would guess you haven’t been following the entire conversation about the supernatural, seeing as the document it/test it/prove it angle has already been covered.
How does gravity push the atoms of one’s brain around?
Speaking as “naturalist”, I would have expected people who advocate an empirical approach to such problems to actually approach it more, how shall we say, empirically. And I’m not speaking just about WJM.
The first possibilities to rule out are a stage magician’s illusion and a good old-fashioned hoax. In other words, I would want to see the phenomenon demonstrated under conditions that are controlled to exclude those very possibilities.
Assuming that hoax and illusion have been eliminated as possible explanations, I would want to gather more data.
For example, I would weigh the lifters and the object they are lifting separately to find a total weight when the alleged phenomenon is not happening. I would then have the lifters lift the object while standing on a large scale and take the total weight. If there is no significant difference between the two totals then we have ruled out the possibility that the object gets lighter in some mysterious way.
Assuming the object doesn’t become lighter, I would then find a way of measuring the upward force each lifter is able to exert it his or her fingertips when lifting the object together and when lifting or pushing something entirely separately. If the measured force was the same in both cases, then we could be looking at some sort of psychological/physiological phenomenon in which, for some reason, the perceived effort is less. If the measured force is greater when lifting the object then we could be looking at a different psychological/physiological phenomenon in which the lifters, for some reason, are able to exert a greater lifting force but without being aware of making an extraordinary effort.
Anyone have any better ideas?
William,
It doesn’t. It pulls them.
OK, I’ve answered your question. Now how about answering mine?
That sounds more like an excuse than anything. Earlier you said:
If I saw a decent quality recording of you with three others lifting a 1000 lb stack of olympic plates one meter off the ground with your fingertips, I would consider that to be compelling evidence for something extraordinary, possibly supernatural. Just as you did when you found you could pick up things much too heavy to lift otherwise.
Same thing goes for the spoons. I’m easy to convince, provided the event is not recorded with a potato.
With cameras ubiquitous, why can’t someone whip out one at a spoon-bending party and record the thing?
I would consider a recording made with a potato to be an unusual occurrence in and of itself.
Good point. William, I retract that qualification. 🙂
socle,
They have:
Penn and Teller
Michael Shermer
keiths,
The same way truths do.
Wow. I guess I’m living under a rock, because I didn’t know this was a thing.
keiths:
walto:
No, because truths influence our decisions only if we know them — that is, if they are physically represented in our brains.
For example, suppose I am walking through a pitch dark and unfamiliar room. It may be true that there is a sofa in my path, but that truth does not cause me to avoid the sofa, because I don’t yet know that the sofa is there.
After I run into it, I now have knowledge that the sofa is there, and that knowledge can affect my future behavior. But the knowledge didn’t get into my brain via some mysterious interaction with a nonphysical truth — it got there because I ran into the sofa, a purely physical interaction that resulted in changes to my brain state.
How does knowledge of an objective, nonphysical value get inserted into the brain? There is no equivalent of running into the sofa as far as values are concerned.
And no, the consequences of your moral decisions do not count as the equivalent of running into the sofa, because the consequences, whether you like them or not, do not tell you whether your actions were objectively right or wrong — not even if you are a consequentialist — because there is no necessary correlation between actions you like/dislike and actions that are morally right/wrong.
Oh, the relief! I agree with Keith. 🙂
Now this is a very clear example which absolutely gels with how I think our consciousness, intellect and understanding develop as interactions with the external world.
Though it would be abhorrent to conduct the experiment, a human raised from birth with no sensory inputs…do I need to finish the sentence? I can hardly contemplate the irrevocable damage to development that would result. Even isolating criminals from human contact as a way of reforming them had the unfortunate result of sending a good number of them mad.
Keith:
I think all I am really doing here is restating Hume’s ought/is gap. I understand it to say that the only way you can get rid of ought in conclusions is by including some kind of ought somewhere in explicit or suppressed premises. Since almost every philosopher accepts the ought/is, I am taking it as given, as did KN.
Please note that I am not arguing against physicalism. I believe norms supervene on the physical. Norms affect the real world by supervening on it. If you want to change the evaluation of any norm-based situation — moral, epistemic, aesthetic, etc, — then you have to change something physical.
But the norm is a rule that somehow selected certain arrangements of the physical world as good. And it is not clear to me that the nature of good arrangements can be expressed in the language of science.
I don’t agree with either keith or Alan about this matter, but I realize my one line answer to keith’s question was glib. The thing is it’s not a simple question. My guy, Hall, wrote two books addressing it, _What is Value?_ and _Our Knowledge of Fact and Value_. For more recent lit, there’s a good book by Amie Thomasson called _Ordinary Objects_ that I recommend very highly. It doesn’t discuss values, but it’s a very detailed and cogent response to the view, that seems to be motivating many posts by keith, that the end of science will be a description/explanation of everything in the world. She argues that as the scientific image (as Sellars called it) doesn’t use the same sortals/categories as our everyday image, the view that they are rivals, that science is attempting to explain everything, that everything in the world is even relevant to science is confused. It’s an important book, I think, but I don’t want to try to summarize it here. There are probably some excerpts on Amazon. If you have JSTOR (or my book!) you can read her excellent paper on non-reductive causation. I think she also wrote the SEP article on categories, which I haven’t looked at myself, but I’m guessing is very good.
But I readily concede both that her take is controversial and that I’m not going to be able to answer lots of deep questions about what there is or how this influences that. Somebody (Fodor?) once pointed out even if you could put all the particles together right you couldn’t fashion a savings bank. I think that’s right.
BruceS,
I agree with that, Bruce (and it’s much more succinct than what I wrote.).
Alan Fox,
Alan, I do agree that sensory inputs are required for knowledge. But as every frustrated epistemologist will tell you, that doesn’t mean that the inputs ARE the knowledge. Knowledge can have requirements that are not expressible in physical terms, regardless of how one must obtain it.
keiths,
One other point I wanted to make was that I don’t actually need to know some truth in order for it to affect my behavior as keith states in the above post. I could simply believe it, fear it, or desire it, etc.
I was only making the narrow point that we can’t be socially human without interacting with the external world, most importantly in learning to communicate – a common language.
Incidentally I have been trying to clarify in my head what a norm is, as generally understood. I look at the wiki link “normative ethics”, see there’s “pragmatic ethics” and find John Dewey who, I’m a little ashamed to say, I had not previously been more than slightly aware of – if at all. Apologies to anyone who has previously mentioned him.
Apparently, in The Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey wrote:
I’ll forgive his use of the N word as he wouldn’t have known how abused that word was going to become.
Oh sure! But then my head develops a semantic maëlstrom starting with what does it mean to “know”, running on to “qualia”, “alieving” and ending with the need to lie down in a darkened room for a minute.
THE METAETHICS OF “WELL-WRITTEN” SOURCE CODE
Suppose we have a program which is correct in the sense that it produces the required output for all inputs and does something reasonable in the case of unforeseen input.
Suppose also that we consider the programming language to be fixed.
Programmers looking at the source code will often say: “that is well written code”. Or “poorly written code”.
What is the nature of such statements? Here is how various meta-ethical theories might answer that question about the metaphysics of source code norms.
SOURCE CODE COGNITIVISTS
Naturalists: This is a statement about a real-world property of source code that can be true or false. For example, for a non-object oriented procedural language factors like use of GoTos, length of procedures, and nesting depth of loops and if-else’s within a procedure. There are properties of source code that make them well–written, and these apply to any program written anywhere. Such properties can be determined by science.
Cultural Relativists: This is a statement about a real-world property of source code that can be true or false. To be well-written, it must follow the coding standards of the company for which it was written. All corporate programming standards are equally valid.
Individual Relativists: This is a statement about a real-world property of source code that can be true or false. To be well-written, it must follow the coding standards of the person for which it was written. All personal programming standards are equally valid.
Error Theorists: This is a statement about a property of source code that can be true or false. But there are no such properties. That is, there are no properties in the real world that make source code well written. Hence there is no knowledge about well written source code.
SOURCE CODE NON-COGNITIVISTS
Statements about “well-written source code” are NOT statements about the properties of the source code. They are statements about the attitude of the person commenting on the source code. They might simply emotions: this code feels well-written to me. Or they might be commands: we should always write source code with short procedures that do one thing.
SOURCE CODE CONSTRUCTIVISTS
Statements about “well-written source code” are statements about properties of source code. But they are not objective properties of the real world independent of people. Rather they are universal properties that any informed group programmers would have arrived at after rational discussion with due consideration to the limitations of human cognition and perception.
ETA: KITCHER PRAGMATIC SOURCE CODE NATURALISM
Statement about ‘well-written” source code refer to the success of groups of programmers in increasing the effectiveness of programming organizations. “Well-written” can only be discovered by an ongoing process of social experimentation, but progress is possible, and organizations improve over their pasts and with respect to other organizations.
(I am still working through Kitcher’s book but I thought I’d add this, although it may be a poor translation of his ideas, which hinge on ethics as an ongoing social project to increase human altruism and thereby improve human lives).
BruceS,
You forgot pragmatists:
This works; we’ll use it. This doesn’t work; scrap it.
Using a scientific analogy, I would agree if you mean the inputs are data and how we process the data, form and test hypotheses, is how we arrive at our model of the external world. Knowledge doesn’t end with data but it must start with data.
Kitcher is of that view. I added something to reflect his latest as I currently (incompletely) understand it.
Should I take this as an indication you are not a Rorty fan?
Kitcher seems an interesting guy (someone else who AF was previously unaware of) who I see is building on Dewey’s work. My reading list gets longer. Worryingly, no mention of Rorty.
Almost a metaphor for Darwinian evolution. 🙂
I disagree with that.
Knowledge starts before there is data.
Obviously, you are an idealist, not a realist.
That (including what I didn’t quote) was very interesting. I guess I come closest to the pragmatist view, though I would not completely agree with that, either.
Not really. (Maybe too infuenced by Susan Haack’s hatchet jobs on him?) I did include an (early) paper by him in my Hall book though.
Neil Rickert,
I wonder if we mean the same by “knowledge”.
Bruce,
That’s true only of objective, free-floating oughts. The is/ought gap applies to them exclusively.
It sounds like you are arguing for some kind of downward causation. — i.e., that norms have some kind of effect independent of the physical details on which they supervene. Is that what you’re saying?
Sure it can. Hunger is a physiological phenomenon that causes us to regard eating as good. We prefer “arrangements of the physical world” in which we are able to eat. We don’t want to remain hungry.
If we don’t want to remain hungry — and we don’t — then we ought to eat.
We start with facts — the existence of hunger and our desire to avoid prolonging it — and we end up with an ought. It’s even an objective ought. We really, objectively ought to eat if we don’t want to remain hungry. But it’s not a free-floating ought. It depends on the physical details of our biology.
walto,
Even your expanded comment doesn’t answer the question, which was:
What is the mechanism by which an objective, free-floating, nonphysical value modifies the behavior of physical things?
walto,
In those cases it is the belief, fear, or desire that is affecting your behavior, not the truth itself. After all, a belief can influence your behavior even when it is not true.
I would suggest that aesthetics are not the sole province of humans.
Birds, for example, are formidable critics of visual design and dance. Do they have knowledge of beauty?
Probably not, but likely not relevant.
There’s a view that many people have, that data comes for free and we get knowledge from examining the data. I’m saying that data does not come free, and that we have to work at getting it. And I count how we go about getting data as part of our knowledge.
As I said, it’s a hard question, and one that’s been kicking around at least since Plato–not only with respect to values, but with respect to universals generally. I very much doubt it can be answered in a brief internet post, and, even if it could be, I’m probably not the best guy for the job. However, believe I referred you to a couple of thinkers more qualified than either of us to answer it. If you’re really curious, have at it.
Yes, a belief can influence my behavior even when it’s not true. But I am not so “adjectival” as you are. I think what is believed plays a role. That is part and parcel of traditional intentionalism. If believing is intentional then there are objects of beliefs–true and false. If emotions are intentional then there are objects of emotions. I’m not terribly parsimonious: I think there are properties, facts, and who knows what all else, and that these are not reducible (via “mental activities”) to elementary fields and particles. You seem to prefer reductionistic positivism. You are welcome to it.
I should add that I am not sure what you mean by “what works”.
KN’s OP was about the metaphysics of norms: what sorts of things are they? (NOT how do we determine them?).
So if someone says “this is right because it works” I still don’t know if they are making a true/false statement about the world (and if so which of the above cognitive options) or if they are just expressing at attitude (hurrah!) or a command (do it that way).
I added Kitcher’s stuff because I am trying to understand it still and wanted to see if I could extend the software metaphor to what I understand him to be saying. But actually I am not sure what metaphysical position he is taking — I just started that chapter. I would have guessed constructivism but that is not so according to what I have read so far.
Well, it was just a philosophical thought experiment.!
I spent my career doing, managing, or writing standards for IT projects, so I obviously don’t believe any such program exists.
I spent a number of years writing business database programs that met those criteria.
It is difficult to achieve crash-proofness if you rely on packaged objects, but fortunately, most of my programming career preceded Windows and OOP.
keiths,
There’s starting and starting, depending and depending. The starting you’re talking about is causal/temporal as is the depending. But the value objectivist doesn’t deny either of those.
Suppose somebody who really wants food and understands that she “ought” to have some steak (which is all that’s available) if she doesn’t want to remain hungry still believes it’s wrong for her to eat meat. Not that she needs to abstain from meat eating for any other particular purpose (other than trying to do what she thinks is right)–she just believes it’s wrong. Now you may disagree with such a person. I understand that you believe there are no such values out in the world. But you can understand her, right? She’s not just describing a feeling she has that you don’t. She’s claiming–rightly or wrongly–that some action of hers would simply be wrong for her to perform. She doesn’t think that it’s NOT wrong for those who don’t share the feeling she has, but she doesn’t deny she has this feeling either. She simply doesn’t confuse it for the value she’s referring to.
You want to have your cake and eat it too. Oh yes, you say, there are values, just not free floating ones. But what you call values AREN’T values at all, they’re just feelings. You want to maintain your fave naturalism, and I believe you can. But the only appropriate way to do this is to deny there are values (i.e., what everybody else means by this term) not badly translate value talke into what nobody means by the expressions containing value terms. IMHO, you should give Moore another read.
walto,
I understand that, and I was hoping you would support that thesis with an argument.
What happened instead was that when I asked you for evidence that objective values exist, you replied:
…and when I asked how nonphysical values and truths alter the behavior of the physical brain, you effectively replied “some other people have written about that.”
Keith:
I am not sure what you mean by “free floating”.
If it means “not supervening on physical world” then I agree there are no such oughts.
But if it means “not the practical means of accomplishing some specified end” then that is where I disagree. I have not re-read to check all of them, but I think a lot of your examples of not free floating are of the form: “if you want to accomplish this, then you should do this”. So I am claiming that there is an ought, possibly suppressed, in the antecedent.
No, they accomplish their effects though their physical realization. Just like thoughts and brain states.
But the tough question for me is this one: “Bruce, you say we have knowledge of norms. And you also say they supervene on the physical. So you say that even though they are realized by physical configurations, and we have knowledge of them, we cannot gain that knowledge by science. So, Bruce, how can we gain knowledge?”
For now I’ll retreat to the answer I posted earlier: I don’t know, but as a manager, not a philosopher, and knowing this is an open philosophical problem, I am happy to have someone smarter then me figure it out and explain it me.
I see this as an example of the above. Why wouldn’t we want to remain hungry? Maybe we are on a diet. Or maybe it is a religious fast day. But then what if it is a fast day but out doctor told us to eat due to diabetes, etc, etc,,,
Interesting discussion of related issues here:
Humes Guillotine and Moral Reasoning
Massimo P’s Response
keiths,
It’s a controversial topic, and there’s a ton of literature on this starting from Hume v. Reid and extending to last week. What evidence can I give you for my ontological preferences that would be better than directing you to some of the stuff that’s convinced me? You prefer reductive positivism, and you’re not alone–lots of very smart people agree with your picture and disagree with mine. I take that to mean that maybe you’re right and I’m wrong. I don’t happen to think so, but I’m often mistaken about lots of things You can ask my family. Anyhow, to convince me, which is clearly something you’d like to do, you’d likely have to refute a number of arguments in Thomasson’s book. I don’t think you can do this, and I don’t see it as my responsibility to help you try by abridging them for you.
BruceS,
Right. And if there isn’t, they aren’t value statements at all. That’s the tollens/ponens thing.
I agree that we are different in degree, not in kind, to other sentient beings such as corvids. A family in a nearby village found a baby jackdaw in the street (it had probably fallen from a nest) and raised it. Though completely unrestrained it still sought the company of people. Some friends in the same village invited us to supper (they have an old village house with the top floor converted to a roof terrace) and the young jackdaw flew in assuming the role of court jester, behaving much like an unruly child, investigating women’s earrings and jewelry, handbags and hair.
ETA
Just noticed I wrote magpie instead of jackdaw. I have photos, I’ll look one out.
I remain an unrepentant evilutionist. Not much of anything makes sense except in the light of evolution, including questions of ethics, aesthetics, values, knowledge, consciousness, and so forth.
I readily acknowledge that invoking evolution does not explain everything, but I believe there is no better path to explanation.
All I hear on threads like this is enumeration of angels. Lots of words, but nothing clarified.
petrushka,
I’m searching for a diplomatic response here.
I’m even more puzzled by your earlier remark because I totally agree with your reply quoted above.
I mean it in the sense “does what it says on the tin”. I mean it in the sense of let’s test this and see if it does what we want, whoever “we” is and without prejudice to whether such a want is objective or justifiable. “Suck it and see” RM and NS.