http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
And here are the response curves (though I only see 13 in the plot — perhaps the remaining three are above 700nm?):
More trolling of philosophers?
keiths,
What do you mean by basic?
And what does this have to do with intelligence, other than perhaps KN thinks he is so clever because he has nose like a pig?
Yes, but they can smell almost as good as pigs.
Part unsupported philosophical claim, part psychological self-description, from which nothing follows but a fact about Neil.
No, it really is stupid. It shows a profound lack of knowledge, experience, judgment, and critical reflection.
If Phoodoo had thought about what he was saying for a few minutes, I would like to believe that it would have occurred to him that
(a) hunter-gatherer tribes, past and present, typically have a vast wealth of culturally transmitted knowledge about the plants and animals that inhabit the ecological milieu in which that group of humans lives, meaning that it is patently false that human beings generally are ecologically illiterate (though this may be true of most contemporary urban dwellers)
(b) it is patently false that animals will eat whatever is placed in front of them and show no preferences, however much this may seem to be true of a domesticated cat, dog, pig, sheep, goat, cow, or horse. In the wild, both herbivores and carnivores have highly specialized diets that often involve foods that are hard to obtain.
Phoodoo assumed that his intuitions and categories are fully adequate to the explanatory task at hand, never doubted that his rough caricatures of contemporary WEIRD people is sufficient as anthropology and that his rough knowledge of domesticated and farm animals is sufficient as biology, and what whatever can’t be explained in those terms must be explained in terms of his preferred brand of sky-daddy magic.
If Phoodoo had thought for just a few minutes about his assumptions, he could perhaps have avoided these errors. But he didn’t bother, because at bottom I do not believe that Phoodoo takes himself seriously as a thinker. If he took himself seriously, he’d have better arguments. And as long as he doesn’t take himself seriously, I don’t see why I should take him seriously, either.
phoodoo:
keiths:
phoodoo:
Not what you mean by it, that’s for sure. You think that an ability isn’t basic unless it is possessed by humans. I use the word the way English speakers do.
You were the one who came here asking about senses, dipshit. If you don’t want your questions answered, don’t ask them.
Neil:
Bruce:
It’s inadvertent self-trolling. The reason Neil can’t make sense of philosophical arguments is that they aren’t written in Neilspeak and they don’t make use of Neil-logic. Why would they, when English and standard logic are perfectly serviceable?
keiths,
Actually I wasn’t talking about senses, I was talking about intelligence. You made the argument that intelligence was a necessary arrival for such things as being able to detect what to eat. That was your argument for an increase in the need for knowledge amongst so many animals. But now we can see that their is no relation to intelligence levels of animals and their ability to know what foods are poisonous and which aren’t. basically it is only humans that can’t make that distinction without a book (even pig nose agrees the tribes need a book to keep it all straight) .
So why were you trying to tie intelligence into animals knowing what foods are safe? Its a bizarre correlation to make.
Is this innate or learned? And how do they know it and identify the safe from the unsafe? Smell? Taste? Vision? Do they really “know” it, or are they maybe just instinctively attracted to some smells and features, while repulsed by others?
Could human beings be working primarily through the same methods and have secondarily added cultural and learned knowledge to basic instinctive reactions to certain foods?
Have any of these questions ever run through your head?
Surely you don’t think that some “book or corporation” told the hunter-gatherers of 10,000 years ago what was safe to eat and what wasn’t! They had to figure it out by trial and error.
I don’t know about pigs, but in many social, intelligent mammals — wolves, lions, and apes — the young learn what is safe to eat, and how to eat it. by watching their mothers. It’s not innate. Sure, there are instinctive aversions due to millennia of natural selection. But those are highly specific to the niche occupied by the kind of animal.
The reason why humans aren’t instinctive averse to poisonous mushrooms is because we didn’t evolve in an environment where nutritious mushrooms comprised a good portion of the diet and there were also poisonous mushrooms competing with the nutritious ones. (Evolution by natural selection actually does explain stuff!)
Of course it is true that humans can learn much more by trial and error than other animals can, and can pass on that knowledge to future generations. Explicit teaching and deliberate instruction are universal among human cultures but very rare in other species. There are some examples of teaching in chimpanzees but they are not very good at it. In humans, because of deliberate instruction, what is discovered in one generation becomes taken-for-granted in the next. This allows knowledge to accumulate. That does not happen in any other species that we know of.
(But seriously: do you really not think that chimpanzees can learn from trial and error what plants are edible and which ones are poisonous, and that young chimps learn which are which from observing their mothers and older siblings?)
The question here is whether there’s a good naturalistic explanation that links the kind of learning, intelligence, and reasoning that we see in great apes to the kind of learning, intelligence, and reasoning that we see in human beings.
Firstly, I actually disagree that all urban dwellers are bad at it, or equally bad it. Food labeling is important for heavily processed foods, which are pretty new in the history of food. Maybe a generation or two? Secondly, it all depends on where one grows up. There are safe edible foods in many regions, only the knowledge has been lost as indigenous communities were destroyed (see Stalking the Wild Asparagus and related books). Thirdly, while it is certainly true that many urban people live in “food deserts“, this is not relevant to what I thought we were talking about, which is the differences between human animal minds and non-human animal minds.
I think it is false that all animals just instinctively know what is safe to eat and what isn’t. In social, intelligent mammals, the young have to learn from their mothers and older siblings what is safe and how to get it. Lion cubs and wolf pups learn how to hunt, chimpanzee young learn how to fish for termites and crack open nuts, and so on. And it’s just not the case that humans are the worst at identifying safe and poisonous foods — to get that point requires the destruction of ecological literacy which has been built up over millennia of experimentation and education.
So I maintain that you just didn’t think this through — you didn’t think about how social, intelligent non-human mammals transmit to their offspring information about how to function in the relevant ecosystems in which they evolved, and you didn’t think about the role of experimentation and education in building up ecological literacy in hunter-gather societies and indigenous peoples.
Rumraket,
Would you know which mushrooms are poisonous and which aren’t, by smelling them?
I think there could be any numbers of ways that animals do this, but wouldn’t you agree (and thus disagree with keiths) that being able to decide which foods an animals should eat has very little to do with higher intelligence?
Moved a comment to Guano. Address the post, not the poster.
First of all, the claim is simply false. Poisons would not work if animals knew what is safe.
Rats are a good example of learning about unsafe foods. If a food(perhaps containing poison) makes the rat sick, similar foods will not be eaten again. Rats seem to learn how to identify poisons.
Warfarin seems to be an exception. It does not make the rat feel any symptoms of sickness, and the first symptom is death from internal bleeding.
This phenomenon is not completely confined to rats. Monarch butterflies eat milkweed, which makes them taste bad. If you are a predator, you have to try one before you know this.
Not quite. Neil has a long-standing objection to Putnam’s basic methodology — an objection I happen to agree with.
Putnam’s argument against metaphysical realism depends on his use of the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. (This is most evident in Reason, Truth, and History.) There’s also a nice argument in Putnam against metaphysical realism that turns on comparing the ontology of Polish mereologists with classical logicians.
But these arguments all turn on Putnam’s acceptance of this deeply Quinean commitment: that we can do philosophy in formal logic. That might or might not be true, but what is true is that
(1) Quine insisted on first order logic as the paradigm of philosophical analysis;
(2) first order logic is an extensional language;
(3) philosophical problems involve the convolutions of an intensional language — a language in which there are meanings as well as references.
Quinean eliminativism about meanings is actually a deeply anti-philosophical philosophy. (This is why, in the wake of Quine and his heirs taking over analytic philosophy departments in the US, all the philosophy that actually matters — Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Habermas — goes over to departments of literature or sociology.)
If one thinks that philosophy (and indeed science as well) require an intensional language, and not the austere extensionalism of Quine (and Putnam, and Davidson) — in effect siding with the later Carnap and the later Wittgenstein against their own earlier selves — then one will not be taken in by the argument that an important result from logical theory has any implications for ontology, one way or the other.
Almost all birds have to learn what is “food” from their parents and, more importantly, how to get it. For the past five years or so, I’ve had the pleasure of getting this displayed this time of year in my yard: we’ve had a couple of nesting pairs of red-bellied woodpeckers in our neighborhood, and being one of the few places with a reliable food source (I keep a peanut feeder filled), like clockwork the male shows up with at least one baby and spends about two weeks teaching “Junior” how to get peanuts out of the feeder and then break them apart in the crook of a tree limb. Really cool to watch. It usually takes a couple dozen tries for “Junior” to get it down right.
Compare,
Kantian Naturalist: No, it really is stupid. It shows a profound lack of knowledge, experience, judgment, and critical reflection.
phoodoo: This is so stupid I don’t know how to respond.
KN did it first. Phoodoo replied in kind. Both were, by all signs, addressing the post rather than the poster. Either both go to guano or neither.
I called Phoodoo’s post “stupid”. Phoodoo called me a name (“pignose”). Personally, I don’t care what he calls me. I’ve been called worse by people who like me more.
phoodoo,
No, you were talking about senses.
No, I didn’t.
No, it wasn’t.
I wasn’t, though there is a connection. (Example: blue jays learning to avoid monarch butterflies because eating them makes the jays sick.)
This is why engaging with you is a waste of time, phoodoo. You literally don’t know what, or even who, you are responding to.
Kantian Naturalist,
You’re right, he called you pignose. And it was a personal insult. However, it was a perfectly topical insult, well chosen to adress your laughable analysis. (Not that his is much better, but it’s less bad.)
Anyway, if it were up to me, you would have got a warning first, because to “stupid” you added “profound lack of knowledge, experience, judgment, and critical reflection” which all directly applies to your own post at least equally well. The discussion degraded to a mere exchange of insults at this point, initiated by you.
Luckily for you, things are not up to me here. And exchanges of insults are deemed within rules, except when the usual suspects do it.
keiths:
KN:
KN,
Neil isn’t just talking about Putnam:
It’s a ridiculously sweeping statement, and as walto points out, it says more about Neil than it does about philosophy.
Well,what results does philosophy get?
What grand ideas does everyone agree on?
Tim Button has a very nice youtube presentation on the MTA and how Putnam used it to try to refute MR, how many realists countered, and why their counter-arguments don’t work.
Button goes on to describe why Putnam decided in the 90s that his IR arguments did not work as he thought in the 70s and why Putnam thought a naive realism in philosophy of perception was needed. But Burton does not think that helps either.
I don’t see how claiming that Putnam thought, like Quine, that science was ideally expressed in first order logic helps with the argument as described by Button. (I also think that is not an accurate view of Putnam, at least since his IR days, but that seems not to be relevant).
BTW, Button is one of the few philosophers I’ve seen on YouTube who knows how to present as opposed to simply reading a paper verbatim.
ETA: It is true that Putnam’s argument needs model theory to be a reasonable way to express the claims of metaphysical realists as Putnam thinks those claims should be characterized. Button has a nice overview of this in his book and you can find the first few chapters containing this at his academia page (Limits of Realism).
keiths,
For those just tuning in: somehow, the discussion evolved into a brief argument about theories of perception, with me defending some version of direct realism and keiths defending (I thought) some version of sense-datum theory. Then I started appealing to enactivism in cognitive science to support my version of direct realism: at the subpersonal level of cognitive machinery, there will be action-guiding, dynamic representations that reliably detect, track, and classify the affordances that the animal directly perceives.
Needless to say, the affordances that an animal, including a human being, directly perceives should not be conflated with the causal and modal structure of the world that we model in scientific theories. So vindicating direct realism in perception is still a long way from vindicating scientific realism in the metaphysics of science. Nevertheless I think it is an important component of the account.
The next step, which I consider the really important one, is how a shared language allows two or more embodied/embedded cognitive agents to compare and contrast their perceptual engagements with local affordances, in order to understand what the situation in itself must be like in order for both of them to be right and wrong. The ability of anyone to distinguish between how things appear and how things really are is interdependent with the ability of anyone to distinguish between how things appear to one and how things do or would appear to someone else.
Against this, Phoodoo objected that the function of the senses is to assist reproduction, not represent the world. (Perhaps Phoodoom imagines that the sense are the result of natural selection, whereas intelligence is both unique to humans, was created by God, and can’t be explained in terms of natural selection?) I argued that the senses couldn’t help the animal achieve its goals if they were systematically misrepresenting the features of animal’s niche. Somehow this got Phoodoo arguing that animals don’t need intelligence to find food, whereas humans can only figure out what is edible if they are told. Then the insulting happened, and here we are.
petrushka,
We’re talking about Neil’s statement. Do you agree with it?
Taste has a lot to do with whether or not animals know if something is poisonous or not. Alkaloids typically taste bitter, and seem to have evolved greatly in angiosperms, presumably along with the ability of mammals to taste them as bitter and distasteful
I think with a lot of animals what is at least somewhat innate is what is good to eat, things like seeds, nuts, etc., and this may be reinforced and honed by learning. Some nuts and seeds might be poisonous, but most that are will be bitter or somehow distasteful in some other manner. Vegetation can be more difficult, but few grasses are poisonous (so grazers like buffalo and wildebeests are fairly safe as long as they’re mostly eating grass), and broadleaves, again, will mostly be distasteful if poisonous.
There do seem to be some good markers for poison, so that poisonous frogs and caterpillars, and the like, will often be brightly colored, often red. After all, evolution doesn’t very well select for the individual being eaten (or possibly damaged and spit out–again, poison often being distasteful) but then the rest of the species being saved (there might be kin you’re saving thereby, so it could pay to be eaten or damaged while reducing your kin’s odds of harm by killing or “teaching” the predator), so it’s good to advertise that you’re poisonous. Venomous snakes seem to sometimes be brightly colored to warn off animals, too, since while a coral snake can easily kill rather larger animals, they’re not hard to damage with a bite or a claw before the venom takes effect. Whether animals innately are warned off by bright colors or learn, or some of both, I’m not sure, but I’d think both are likely in many animals.
Then you get mimics, like the scarlet king snake appearing much like the coral snake, and the Viceroy butterfly looking like the Monarchs.
Some mushrooms may be brightly colored to indicate that they’re poisonous, like Amanita muscaria, although rather white amanitas are much more poisonous, hence there’s no good rule about color for eating mushrooms. Berries seem to have a certain amount of color indications relating to poison, as blue and black berries are rarely poisonous, red ones might go either way, and white ones are generally poisonous.
In practice, though, we tend to see things as either poisonous or non-poisonous, when in fact there’s often a continuum. Monarch butterflies are quite poisonous, or they may be much less so, hence some birds will taste test monarch after monarch, eating the less poisonous ones (the birds may have some tolerance for the poison as well), and discarding the mangled bodies of the more poisonous ones. Howler monkeys eat a great variety of leaves, and typically not too much of any single type, because most leaves in their environment have at least some toxin in them. Livers can detoxify many poisons, but will be overwhelmed if one poison is ingested in too great amounts. So, spit out the really bitter leaves (and avoid whatever has evidently made the monkey sick in the past), and eat a great variety of the rest, and the liver can go ahead and deal with the modest amounts of each toxin.
There’s probably some innate recognition in many animals as to what they should eat, and many learn from their mothers and sometimes other kin. Taste buds winnow out a great many toxic substances (but sometimes even a little taste can kill, like with dogbane). Then there’s learning on their own. And many will eat some animals/plants with limited toxicity, but not too much. Intelligence may certainly help, if it provides for recognition of whatever has tasted bitter or reacted badly with the animal when it ate it.
Glen Davidson
I neither agree nor disagree. I am more sympathetic toward and interested in Neil’s posts than most posts here on philosophy. That shouldn’t be a big surprise.
That’s a good point and made me think of the many well-known situations of a species artificially introduced to a novel environment. For example the poisonous frog introduced to australia to combat some pest insect, ended up becoming a much bigger problem than the pest it was supposed to fight, because the native fauna had no evolutionary history with the frog so they all thought they could eat it.
Simply put, animals don’t innately “know” anything, it is usually some combination of learned and an evolved instinctive response to certain ques (such as a very repulsive smell). Humans are exactly the same way.
In conclusion: another subject phoodoo spectacularly fails to show even a cursory comprehension of.
petrushka,
What’s so interesting about Neil’s comment is that it reveals his bafflement:
He’s dismissing what he doesn’t understand. I see you doing the same thing.
Calling ideas stupid is allowed. Calling other commenters names like “pig nose” is not.
I don’t see that there is anything to understand. If there were, there would be something approaching consensus on some broad principles. There would be something that suggests interesting questions to investigate with the tools of science.
It seems to me that questions of perception, cognition, consciousness, and such are more productively addressed by building robots and trying to make them smarter. It would seem to me that AI has taken that part of philosophy that is actually useful and found empirical ways to study and expand on it.
Phoodoo completely failed to recognize any of the points I was making, let alone address them in anything like a cogent fashion. By all means, do better if you can.
You can certainly say that my post lacks all those things, but when I said that about Phoodoo’s post, I also gave reasons for my evaluation. I took the time to point out the very real flaws in his understanding of anthropology and biology. You have not given any reasons here for why my analysis is “laughable” or anything else. Without giving reasons, there’s no motivation for anyone here to take you any more seriously than I take Phoodoo. Perhaps you don’t care about being taken seriously — but if not, then why bother posting here at all in the first place?
I really can see very little to learn from AI about perception, cognition, and consciousness. So far it has been pretty much the other way around, after people thought that making computers deal with language and perception would be rather easy and simple (and trying out simple programs based on that idea), the true complexity of language and perception by humans had to be teased out to see how we do it so effortlessly. Even so, translating this knowledge into computers doesn’t necessarily tell us much about brains.
To be sure, I’m not especially keen on philosophy’s ability to deal with perception, cognition, and consciousness either, being on the continental side of the philosophy divide (but analytic philosophy goes further with logic and its possibilities, IMO). I think that philosophy is more relegated to understanding how language is used to discuss phenomena (and continental philosophy does badly enough with that all too often, too), with not much insight into the phenomena themselves. That’s up to science, but then science could sometimes benefit from understanding a bit more philosophy, too, especially the fact that science explanations normally involve abstractions, while much of “mind” isn’t dealing in abstraction at all.
In the end, though, I think science is the great discipline of today. I just don’t think that AI touches much on what our brains do at all, and where it does, it’s AI that is largely derivative of cognitive science and neuroscience.
Glen Davidson
BruceS,
Thanks for the Button link. I listened to about 25 minutes of it, but I think he goes too fast and gobbles up too much territory with each sentence. Have you seen his book?
BTW, I again think KN’s discussion of Quine is bad.
I tried that tack in a mathematical logic class when I was an undergraduate.
Didn’t work.
Does literature approach consensus on broad principles? If not, does that mean that literature doesn’t involve understanding?
The really interesting work in cognitive science — for example in the theory of sensorimotor contingencies and the predictive processing model of cognition — takes place when people are not so narrow-minded and arrogant as to think that either philosophy or science can proceed without the other.
Thing is, we’ve had philosopher-scientists for hundreds of years. Descartes made important contributions to optics. Kant used Newton’s equations to explain how planets form (the Kant-Laplace hypothesis). Helmholz used Kant and psychophysics to anticipate the predictive processing model. James was a psychologist. Dewey made the organism-environment evolving transaction the heart of his theory of knowledge, meaning, education, and democracy. Carnap wrote a dissertation that was too philosophical for the physicists and too scientific for the philosophers.
The Churchlands and Dennett insisted that one can’t do philosophy of mind without knowing the relevant sciences, and that tradition is kept going by philosophers like Evan Thompson, Alva Noe, Andy Clark, Michael Wheeler, Anthony Chemero, and Bryce Huebner.
We have work in robotics inspired by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and work in philosophy that reflects on what robotics and machine learning can tell us — and also what they can’t — in conjunction with cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Now, if one isn’t familiar with any of this stuff, that’s fine — we all have limited time in which to read and think — but please remember that one’s ignorance of what philosophers are doing is not evidence for an opinion about what philosophers should be doing.
I have only skimmed the first 24 pages or so of the book as available on his academia site.
At about the 36 minutes point, Button does stand back a bit to summarize the structure of Putnam’s argument. Then he explains why Putnam thought naive realism would help. If you can take what he says starting at 36 minutes or so on faith, the rest is less abstract, I thought (you may have to go back a few minutes to hear the difference between Cartesian and Kantian skepticism).
I’d previously worked my way through the Anderson 1992 paper on IR, which explains how the MTA and BIV arguments are part of Putnam’s attempt to show that MRs have a dilemma holding both skepticism (our best theories might be wrong) and causal reference (for CT). So I had some understanding of where Button was going, although his approach is different in detail from Anderson’s.
Now I would hardly claim to have a deep understanding of Putnam’s points, but I pretty confident that Neil’s and KN’s concerns do not address the argument Putnam is making.
On Quine: My understanding is that Quine thinks that physics is a first-order theory that does not need intentionality. Also, that although the non-natural sciences are still respectable science, their need for intentionality makes them secondary compared to physics. On the other hand, Putnam’s pluralism sees all as of equal validity; further he does not think any science can be done without involving intentionality.
You have already seen me perform. For me, your epistemology is a thoroughly covered area.
The post you called stupid was badly articulated so there are probably many ways to read it. My reading is that phoodoo was looking to illustrate his own views, not trying to address yours. So it’s a case of talking past each other, which is stupid on both sides, never on one.
In the pignose post he did too, most vividly. And even though insulting, he seems to have been serious. Prior to that he was more concerned with elaborating his own view, so you shouldn’t blame him for doing badly something he was not trying to do in the first place.
Walto got it right. It was intended to be about me (about my reaction to philosophy).
Erik,
I believe that phoodoo was also called a “dipshit” on this thread–but again, the prevailing theory with patrick that as the recipient was phoodoo, that was not actually ad hom: those have to be against people.
“Knows how” meaning he uses presentation slides? This is hardly overly special, but yes, more lecturers should do it these days.
Simply slow down the video or pause it if your brain gets outpaced. Happens to me too and that’s the method I use to catch up.
What in particular?
For the record, here’s my current evaluation of Quine.
The very heart of Quine’s philosophy is the idea that the criteria of ontological commitment are semantic.
As he sees it, we need to regiment our sentences into first-order logic because only in an extensional language can we read the ontology off of the sentences, because we can see with total perspicuity when sets are identical.
When it comes to attributes, properties, and meanings — the whole discourse of metaphysics before the rise of modern symbolic logic — we don’t get the requisite clarity because the criteria of identity — when are two things the same? — are much murkier. And without identity, you don’t have entities, and so no ontology to speak of.
That much gives us Quine’s extensionalism, which he then transmits to Putnam, David Lewis, and Davidson. That gives us Putnam’s model theoretic argument against metaphysical realism, Lewis’s realism about possible worlds as an ontological commitment that falls out of attempting to regiment modal discourse, and Davidson’s behavioristic radical interpretation.
Of course I admire and share Quine’s fallibiism and anti-foundationalism. But he inherits that from C. I. Lewis. Really, there is much in Mind and the World Order that sounds just like Quine. Philosophers just forgot where Quine got it all from. The real innovation that belongs to Quine is his extensionalism. And that drives a lot of everything else that happens here. Lewis himself is perfectly clear — at one point (this is a response to a critic in the Library of Living Philosophers volume) Lewis says “if we give up on intensionalism in semantics because of a misguided belief that mathematical logic is sufficient to capture human reasoning, we’ll be forced to give up on the analytic/synthetic distinction, and then we’ll be forced to give up on the distinction between philosophy and science”. And that’s exactly what happens in Quine.
The alternative to Quine (and to Lewis) is Sellars, because Sellars does recognize that there is something to intensional semantics, that we can’t give up on the distinction between meanings and references (and between concepts and objects), and that the criteria of ontological commitment are not semantic but epistemic. Whereas Quine followed Carnap and the logical positivists in conflating semantics and epistemology, Sellars was never tempted.
Sellars knew, because of his extensive grounding in the history of philosophy but above all Kant that it was essential to keep distinct semantics and epistemology, because it’s only if you understand that they are distinct does it make any sense to ask if there are synthetic a priori judgments (assertions that are not justified by sensory evidence but also not true by meaning alone).
Though Sellars was not attracted to Kant’s psychologism, he understand that the way forward lay through Wittgenstein’s way of treating rulesof language as categorically distinct from the assertions that the rules allow. The regress-of-rules paradox, which Wittgenstein resolves in a theory of practices, becomes in Sellars a theory of how behavior is shaped into rule-governed practices and how behavior evolved into rule-governed practices. The account of rule-governed practices that Sellars began sketching has become a very rich theory with Brandom, Kukla, and Lance — and now cognitive scientists and evolutionary theorists are starting to talk with the heirs of Sellars and Brandom, too.
Another important strand of Sellars’s thinking is the idea that ontological commitment should be done via epistemic criteria, not semantic ones — which puts contemporary scientific metaphysics in a Sellarsian tradition, as distinct from the more a priori modal metaphysics of Frank Jackson and Ted Sider that is, ironically, much more Quinean.
Quine doesn’t think that physics needs intentionality because he thinks that physics can be done entirely in mathematics, and Quine thinks (rightly or wrongly) that mathematics is purely extensional (since it is reducible to set theory). We can eliminate intentions because we can eliminate intensions.
It is true that Quine recognizes that intentional discourse is intensional and ineliminable, but it’s second-rate because it doesn’t have the crisp, clear clarity of ontological commitment that you get with extensional semantics. I don’t believe that Quine recognizes that even biology is not really reducible to physics. He accepts a version of the positivist’s unity of science thesis.
I find Putnam interesting and attractive in many ways. I was a passionate defender of “why reason can’t be naturalized” for many years until I eventually came to see that it relies on a far too simplistic conception of naturalism.
Kantian Naturalist,
For one thing, I don’t see the bright line between epistemic determinations of ontology and semantic ones. Between “On What There Is” and a “Existence and Quantification” Quine moved from the view that one can read off what a theory is committed to by finding the quantifiers and seeing what they are allowed to range over to the view that, as I’d put it, to find out what a philosophical theory is committed to, one must ask the philosopher pushing it. In any case, there’s no longer any formal or “machine manner” of determining such commitments. If someone uses epistemic criteria to determine what she thinks there is, fine. Whether she is right or not will, in his view eventually be determined by a scientific consensus.
Also, as he said over and over he had nothing against meanings, he just thought synonymy was a bogus way of telling when you had a single one. He doesn’t replace meanings with referents. He replaces synonymy with “stimulus synonymy” and propositions with “eternal sentences.” And, as I recently learned, he seems to be able to capture all of the cute Kripke/Plantinga modal intuitions with those alone. He also argues forcefully that the determination of what words mean is a function of what sentences mean. His view seems similar to the later Witt’s in that regard.
Anyhow, while I wouldn’t call myself a Quinean, I don’t think your quick discard is quite fair.
Erik,
Hahaha. I didn’t mean he talks too fast.
FWIW, Putnam’s late papers on perception say positive things about Noe, sensorimotor perception, and Gibson affordances, although their ideas are only part of the story according to Putnam.
Which still amounts to replacing intensional semantics with an extensional theory of linguistic behavior, assuming that a theory of stimulus-response behavior could be treated in a purely extensional fashion (e.g. eliminating the need for non-extensional concepts like “function”).
Well, I’m not a huge fan of those “intuitions”, because I think that our intuitions are themselves just the accumulated cognitive biases of our evolutionary and cultural history, and aren’t reliable guides to any metaphysics at all. But I’ll admit that being able to accommodate those intuitions is a cool little result.
Well, Quine’s semantic holism is inherited directly from Lewis, and it’s also there in the Aufbau, I believe. Russell and Moore were semantic atomists but that was part of their rejection of the semantic holism that was central to British Idealism. Lewis, for his part, figured out how to retain semantic holism without idealism, and that was his legacy to Quine, Sellars, Goodman, and Morton White.
When Brandom presents inferential semantics in the 1990s, he’s returning to a tradition of semantic holism that runs from Kant and Hegel (if not before then, in Leibniz and arguably even Aristotelianism) through Royce and Lewis to Sellars. By contrast, it’s always been the empiricists from Epicurus through Locke to Russell who were semantic atomists. But like Wittgenstein and Sellars, and unlike Quine, Brandom was never tempted by the idea of a purely extensional semantics for natural language.
I do think that he’s onto a central point in philosophy when he discusses how (the disjunctivist version of) naive realism is inconsistent with the structural realism on which Putnam’s model-theoretic argument seems to depend.
I just like philosophers to take one baby step at a time.Nearly every argument (if not EVERY argument) that actually deals with important matters is bad. (That realization may well be fueling the Neil-petrushka disdain toward the field.) But it’s very hard to see where they’ve gone wrong when philosophers go quickly. The biggest occupational hazard of the field is to hear something that seems impressive and right on its face and so be convinced–only to realize later that there’s an equivocation or an unsupported premise or something. Button is just flying in that talk: to be fair, he says right at the outset that he has to move fast, since he’s trying to summarize the argument of his book.
I agree that that’s hopeless, myself.
Going by memory: He seems to speak extemporaneously rather simply reading a paper, he uses hand gestures and body language, he avoids a monotone, he looks at the audience not a podium, his slides are not just text from his paper. Of course, I don’t go to philosophical conferences nor have a watched a large number of philosophers speak so I am only comparing him within my limited exposure.