Neil Rickert was at it again attempting to ‘explain consciousness’ over at PS at the imperative-phrased invitation of Joshua Swamidass to: “Tell me how you think consciousness evolved.” https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/rickerts-ideas-on-consciousness/3684/
Neil had written this: “What it really boils down to, is that there is no such thing as metaphysical truth. There is only conventional truth. And different social groups will disagree over their social conventions.”
TSZ poster BruceS answered Neil’s challenge and addressed part of its background assumptions: “Another fan of Rorty-style pragmatism… Seems to be a cult among TSZ moderators.” So perhaps this is worth discussing here as well (though obviously the lone religious theist moderator at TSZ Mung was forgotten in BruceS’s comment).
I too reject the notion that “there is only conventional truth,” a view, however, that this site’s founder Elizabeth Liddle also seemed to hold. In the fields I have studied, this is a view held largely by social constructivists, which is often turned into a kind of ‘sociologism’ – the ideology that holds all things can be explained by appeal to societies or groups alone. This view, however, unfortunately comes at the cost of other ‘truths’.
Thus, I respectfully disagree with Neil and believe that the claim “there is no such thing as metaphysical truth” is just his own convenient fiction. It would seem that he has taken a massive detour away from ‘metaphysical truth’ and is now trying to ‘explain’ something that cannot actually be explained. Additionally, it appears that this detour has had to do largely with an attempt to create a ‘religion substitute,’ along the lines of Daniel Dennett’s evolutionistic-atheist worldview.
Rickert tells: “I was a deeply committed Christian for part of my life. But I came to doubt that, long before I started to study human cognition.” https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/rickerts-ideas-on-consciousness/3684/4 It thus seems that it was instead a reaction against YECism that had an important role in Neil leaving whatever Christian community he had been ‘deeply committed’ to, prior to taking up a pastime study of human cognition. If not for YECists, he might still believe in metaphysical truth & a Creator who loves us – all people – even Neil.
Rickert writes about his, “study of consciousness, where I have to look at how people make conscious assessments of what is true.” He admits that he holds “a view which many people – perhaps most people – will see as wrong. That’s why it is difficult to explain consciousness.” Yet, this makes the mistake of suggesting that it is merely other peoples’ fault why he can’t ‘explain consciousness,’ rather than taking responsibility for his inability or lack of success to convince others about how ‘consciousness evolved’ (implied: naturalistically, without need, use or role for a supernatural Creator) on himself. Maybe ‘consciousness’ simply can’t be ‘explained’ and hence there is little value in trying to do so (unless or even if one is trained as a PhD in the field and has made it their life’s passion). Otherwise, I don’t understand the ‘that’s why’ implied in Neil’s assessment of the professed difficulty of ‘explaining consciousness.’
I find the rejection of YECism dilemma fascinating and surely relevant for the TSZ community, most of whom reject YECism. It is not one commonly faced where I grew up, so please excuse if my questions come across as ignorant or insensitive. However, I did personally face and had to grapple with the ideology of YECism as told to me by a person who I highly respect still to this day and who has become a very successful practitioner in his chosen field of study & expertise (non-academic), which has nothing to do with the age of the earth. I even thought YECism had some glimpse of merit for a time, before realising that what had to be ignored and discounted in order to remain a YECist displayed errors too voluminous to seriously entertain.
Does rejection of YECism lead some people into a crisis of faith? How do we face or encounter YECists as still respectable and worthy human beings even though we wholeheartedly disagree with the ideology that they have embraced (as part of their consciousness)? I believe Neil is right to wonder about these things. And I believe it would be wrong to act unjustly towards or to treat people in an inhumane way simply because they hold an ideology that is damaging usually to no one other than themselves and their local religious community, as if I held any power as ultimate judge over the care for their souls by demanding that they turn away from ideological YECism.
“We can, of course, sit back smugly knowing that we are right and that the YECs are wrong. But, at the same time, the YECs can sit back smugly knowing that they are right and that we are wrong.” … “People do not like explanations of what they already take for granted. They don’t believe that an explanation is needed, since they already take it for granted. And, if pointing out that what they take for granted depends, in part, on social conventions, then they are likely to see that as questioning what they take for granted. / This is why it is hard to explain consciousness.” – Neil Rickert https://nwrickert.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/
My concern with the social constructivist and ‘social convention’ approach to ‘truth’ is that it places the utmost difficulty on the doorsteps of other people, rather than accepting responsibility on one’s own doorstep by insisting that one *can* ‘explain consciousness.’ It is surely unfortunate, however, because Neil may not have had to face this dilemma in a different Christian community, given that YECists constitute a rather large minority view among Christians worldwide (despite what R. Byers says). Indeed, most Christians don’t get upset with each other about ‘evolution’ or ‘consciousness’ as they go about their regular lives of prayer and worship and aren’t upset by it in their beliefs or relationships with others at their local churches.
Another option, one that Rickert might like to consider, is that consciousness is something that can’t actually be explained, certainly not ‘scientifically’. It may even be a God-given reflection of human beings as ‘ensouled’ creatures. Consciousness may thus simply be always something greater than what can be grasped by highly limited, finite human minds, rather than a temptation toward trying to become god-like in our self-understanding; a topic not meant for full comprehension. At some point, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Bahai’s and others must simply admit we don’t have all of the answers and consciousness, as well as some ‘metaphysical truths,’ are surely strong candidates for such an admission.
Leaving the Church because one can’t understand/explain why YECists couldn’t change their minds when faced with a huge amount of ‘strictly scientific’ evidence for an ‘old earth’ may indeed be felt by some as a very difficult but necessary situation to face. It is not one that perplexes me and I have never faced any pressure from a religious person inside a ‘house of worship’ to adopt their hypothesis about the age of the Earth. I have been calmly told about their views, but never with insistence. There is help, however, for those who have experienced pressure or insistence. Indeed, this is precisely what the BioLogos Foundation was built to encounter, as it is made up largely of former YECists who didn’t turn away from religious faith but found a way to embrace theology without accepting YECism, i.e. while rejecting YECist ideology.
Please consider this as an attempt at understanding and simply offering an answer to Rickert’s dilemma, rather than at dictating any particular solution to the problem. As it involves his own personal history that he has volunteered on the internet on this extremely sensitive topic, I certainly do not wish to put any words in Neil’s mouth or to misrepresent him or his view. I do not wish to ‘out’ his thoughts or character about anything he wishes to keep private. Please do forgive my inability to ‘explain’ these things more clearly, as I’m just trying to understand what if any link there might be between rejecting ‘metaphysical truth,’ trying to ‘explain consciousness’ and leaving a church due to what might appear as YECist fanaticism and refusal to accept scientific knowledge about the Earth, creatures and people on it.
Knock yourself out. I’m not trying to be cute.
walto:
Alan:
We’ve been discussing the correspondence theory for days, Alan.
My mama? Astro Boy?
(Seriously, like keiths, I have no idea what the point of your question was. It reminded me of “But why is there air?”)
Yeah, but he was agin it then.
Was I? Quote me.
😯😯😯😯😯😯😯😯
My main worry about a pure correspondence theory (in Millikan’s sense) or a formal correspondence theory (my term above) is that it’s difficult to see what the truthmakers are going to be. If the truths are assertions and the truthmakers are objects, states of affairs, or (God forbid) possible worlds. I find that impossible to reconcile with the sort of modest, liberal naturalism that I think is the most promising metaphysics. Our understanding of the world may be linguistic in form, but the world itself is not.
Put otherwise, the correspondence theory of truth is about the correspondence relation between thoughts and things.
But how can there be a correspondence between thoughts and things?
The more we tend to attribute a thought-like structure to things, the more we’re going to be tempted by some version of idealism — not in Berkeley’s sense but rather that of Kant or Hegel. (Some version of theism may also be attractive here.)
But, I really don’t see how idealism of any variety is compatible with any naturalism worth defending. And a naturalism of some variety worth defending is going to result from scientific realism. (If there’s a way to block the inference from scientific realism to metaphysical naturalism, I’d be interested to see what it is!)
Exactly!
KN:
Our understanding of the world isn’t limited to linguistic representations. When I imagine the operation of a flip-flop circuit, for instance, the representation is visual, not linguistic.
I don’t see why this is supposed to be a problem for naturalism. Could you elaborate?
Also, you seem quite comfortable with “a correspondence between thoughts and things” when you write things like the following:
KN,
Just note that scientific realism doesn’t exclude theism or other forms of supernaturalism. Since it doesn’t exclude them, metaphysical naturalism can’t be inferred from it.
walto,
Responding to Putnam’s argument, as expressed on that revolvy.com page:
First, I’ll note that this depends on neither Fredrick nor Frodrick knowing the chemical formula for what they call “water”. If they did, then Fredrick would regard it as H2O, while Frodrick would say that it’s XYZ. That would violate the assumption that Fredrick and Frodrick are physically indistinguishable.
The physical identity criterion means not only that they must be unaware of the chemical makeup of “water” on their respective planets; it means they must be unaware of any characteristics that could distinguish the two substances.
Fredrick and Frodrick can’t be aware of this component of the “meaning vector”, for reasons given above.
Since Fredrick and Frodrick can’t be aware of any characteristics distinguishing the two substances, I would argue that the meaning of “water” is the same for both.
Just as the word “liquid” refers to more than one substance, so does “water” (under Putnam’s conditions). That remains true even though Fredrick and Frodrick both believe that “water” refers to a single substance.
You wrote:
You are, in effect, comparing apples and oranges. That is to say, you are comparing incomparables. So perhaps you are expressing your subjective opinion, but you are not explaining what was compared.
Neil,
I pointed out to you years ago that the Ptolemaic model was falsified by Galileo’s observations of Venus’s phases. Do you still not get it, after all this time?
*checks for response from walto*
Has the thread died?
Keith: I’d have to go back and review those sources on SM and mental representation to be prepared to rehearse those arguments against SM, and I am doing other things right now (moving on from Masik to Maudlin’s just out QM book.)
But briefly. The starting point is norms. I am arguing about acts which involve norms, ie standards of right and wrong. There are two situations: (1) natural language meaning and (2) naturalizing explanations of misrepresentation in neuroscientific explanations of mental representations.
I think we only discussed previously SM and natural language:
As I recall, you said you were an internalist about meaning, but my points assumed externalism: Kripke for proper names, Putnam for natural kinds, Burge for social conventions are some sources I can think of to justify externalism. So assuming externalism about natural language meaning:
How you can one know about facts of the matter on meaning for SM’s initial dispositions, immediately after creation, regarding names like Lassie or natural kinds like water/twater, without knowing causal history ( if you think there is one for SM)?
Take the intentional stance for someone first encountering SM saying words just after his creation: that person and someone from twin earth will differ on the fact of the matter regarding SM’s meaning for SMs vocalization of “water”
As SM interacts with a language community over time, one could argue that becomes the relevant causal history for interpreting him.
The arguments for SM and neuroscientific mental representation differ because they are taken in the context of scientific work and so involve appeal to scientific practice, not ordinary language practice. Those other arguments are the ones in the sources I noted above..
Just for my own peace of mind in keeping the record straight, I am going to retract that statement, having thought more about the matter.
There is one causal set, which we model internally. We improve our model by acts of inquiry.
ETA: For Keith: you are right there could be a separate causal model related to fitness and used for naturalizing the norms related to mental representations. I think those are not modelled by our perception/action representations, but rather by a separate process of scientific theory and representation.
I mentioned Haack only because she is a pragmatist so I wondered if your endorsement of her epistemology extended to a pragmatist theory for truth.
I looked at the summary of Vision’s book. He apparently is defending a notion of correspondence truth and criticizing deflationism. I cannot tell from the summary how much metaphysical baggage his approach carries (eg facts or truthmakers and the correspondence relation itself).
I understood Tarski as a explication of truth for formal languages only. But SEP does talk about how others, eg Field, have extended it to cover a different, non-metaphysical notion of correspondence. Field’s explanation instead calls for a causal connection between representation and represented. Here is the link:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/#CorRev
In this thread, you also supported ordinary language notions of truth. Those go beyond the Tarski truth scheme. The pragmatist view agrees that ordinary usage must be part of the explication of truth, not just Tarksi (bare deflationism, in other words).
The upshot is that the schema
‘snow is white’ is true iff snow is white
is incomplete as a theory of truth. What must be added is our practices in asserting ‘snow is white’. Those practices of inquiry differ by domain of knowledge. In particular, notions of correspondence and causality might differ.
That is at the base of the hodgepodge of Misak and Blackburn’s view of Peirce that I have posted in various TSZ threads.
I agree with you about scientific realism.
Loosely related: The success of MN in our scientific practices is used as an argument for the truth of physicalism. Here is the relevant quote from SEP on physicalism (FWIW, the author is not a physicalist):
[start of quote]
The second argument for physicalism is (what I will call) The Argument from Methodological Naturalism. The first premise of this argument is that it is rational to be guided in one’s metaphysical commitments by the methods of natural science. Lying behind this premise are the arguments of Quine and others that metaphysics should not be approached in a way that is distinct from the sciences but should rather be thought of as continuous with it. The second premise of the argument is that, as a matter of fact, the metaphysical picture of the world that one is led to by the methods of natural science is physicalism. The conclusion is that it is rational to believe physicalism, or, more briefly that physicalism is true.
I read that as the extreme form of Kuhnian incommenurability. Here is Horgan’s latest on Morris’s book on Kuhn and incommensurability:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/was-thomas-kuhn-evil/
And Kitcher’s assessment of the book’s treatment of Kuhn’s ideas:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ashtray-has-landed-the-case-of-morris-v-kuhn/
That’s internalism about meaning. But your last paragraph in that post might mean that you are partial to a two-dimensional account of meaning
These two SEP links provide standard concerns with descriptivsm/internalism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/#DesInt
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/names/#2.4
ETA: BTW, underlying this debate is the basic assumption that we use language to refer to the world.
Interesting. I don’t want to think about it at present, but it it’s initially plausible.
Kantian Naturalist,
BruceS,
Don’t really want to get into any of this, but I don’t think it’s possible to go much beyond Tarski wrt truth. If his theory is ‘incomplete,’ it can’t be completed a la Field or the pragmatists. To the extent this can be explained, it’s in the Tractatus, but (I know it sounds mystical) it can’t really be explained without semantic error at all.
Anyhow, you’ll have to carry on without me, I have the Zapple doctrine to write about today. But fear not, Alan will set you straight if you go wrong.
That’s all well and good, but here’s my lingering concern: Tarski works this out with regard to formal languages, and it took Davidson to apply “Convention T” to natural languages. But the implication of doing so — which I believe only Rorty was bold enough to realize — is that “truth” becomes only a semantic concept. All there is to say about the concept of truth is what there is to say about the semantics of “is true”. But that’s not going to give us a correspondence theory of truth, because it’s not even taking truth to have any epistemic role at all.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t think truth has an epistemic role or that a correspondence theory requires that it does.
There’s an ambiguity there, and I’m not sure which way to take it. But, never mind.
Well, thanks for that. It’s an interesting read.
I’m left wondering whether Morris was any relation of keiths.
I would tend to say that Morris is thinking like a theist — the same kind of comment that I make about keiths. And there’s a huge communication barrier between Morris and Kuhn.
I have my own disagreements with Kuhn. But my view would be far closer to that of Kuhn than to that of Morris.
Yes, thanks for that, too. Kitcher seems to give a pretty fair assessment.
I’ll add my own comments.
We live in two worlds. There is a world of our perceptual experience. And there is a world described by language.
What I mean by the world of perceptual experience is what we might consider the world of us as animals. And that is not unlike the world of other non-linguistic animals.
The world of language is, in some ways, largely self-contained. But it is a solipsistic world, separate from the perceptual world.
Morris and keiths see the perceptual world and the linguistic world as rigidly bolted to one another. They are, in effect, the identical world. And that way of looking at things is what I am describing as theistic.
Kuhn sees the perceptual world and the linguistic world as two separate independent worlds. And he sees science as engaged in building connections between them. A Kuhnian paradigm is, in effect, a way of connecting the two. But there can be different ways of connecting the two, and a paradigm shift is a move to a different way of connecting them.
For myself, I see human cognition and consciousness engaged in structuring that perceptual world. And that structuring is prerequisite to being able to connect them.
How is it theistic? Just sounds like linguistic idealism to me.
It is consistent with the theistic view that God created language, meaning and truth.
It implies that language has properties outside the realm of behavior.
I think language co-evolved with magic.
Much, if not most, magic involves manipulating reality through words.
Harry Potter is light fiction, but it reflects the history and the world of magic. Spells, hexes, curses, charms: mostly involving words.
In the “real” world, we have laws, contracts, instructions, advice, signals, explanations; all of which have power. Most people think “reality based” words work, and magic words do not.
So walto is suggesting my remark
is somehow in conflict with
I wonder what percentage of utterances correspond with reality? It strikes me that science is the first organized human activity to address that question.
Answer number five will astonish you.
walto:
Neil:
By Neil’s logic, the belief that WetWipes clean better than WetOnes is theistic, because it is consistent with the view that God created language, meaning, and truth.
Um, Neil…
So is gardening.
keiths,
Ach. Ninja’d. 😣
There’s a conflict just in case you think (as I believe you do) that no statement is true and no statement is false.
If Neil is a behaviorist he should say so himself.
I accept that there’s a crucial distinction to be made between perception and language. A good deal of philosophy (past and present) gets this badly wrong by assimilating one to the other. (I once called this “discursive intentionality” and “somatic intentionality” but I’m no longer happy with putting the distinction that way.)
And I do agree with Neil that semantic concepts — truth, meaning, and reference — do not involve a relation between language and the world. That is one of the most crucial moves that Sellars innovates and Brandom builds upon.
The difference between Neil and myself may be that as a scientific realist, I am happy to use cognitive science to describe the mind-world relationship in realist terms — but not by using any semantic concepts.
Even this is not quite precise enough, to be sure –since I am willing to use the term “representation” to describe the mind-world relation, and now I seem to be on the brink of committing myself to “non-semantic representations” — which would seem to be quite absurd.
The solution I would like to make here involves showing, first, that our understanding of semantic concepts has its ‘home base’ in reflections on human language, or (to use Brandom’s preferred term) discourse. And as Wittgenstein and Brandom emphasize, discourse essentially involves practices: semantic and syntactical rules are constituted by patterns of linguistic behavior.
And we can, at the same time, take careful note of recent cognitive science work by Alva Noe, Evan Thompson, Susan Hurley, Shaun Gallagher, and others (all building on Gibson’s ecological psychology) that emphasizes the intimate relation between perception and action. Thus some philosophers talk about “sensorimotor contingencies.
This move allows us to pose the question as follows: what is the relation between sensorimotor contingencies and discursive practices?
While I think vast swaths of the tradition get this all badly wrong, it’s also not clear that it makes any sense to think of perception and language as isolated “worlds” either.
I think I said (or intended to say) that there is a reality that is possibly discoverable (to some extent) on enquiry and statements about reality may be more or less accurate. The spectrum means that a statement might be accurate enough to be described informally as true or inaccurate enough to be informally described as false.
You are treading on sacred ground there.
Neil,
I certainly don’t. If that were true, then perceptually-related meanings couldn’t shift and evolve. But of course they do.
Definitely not.
I don’t hold that view, and in any case it isn’t theistic. See this comment.
I accept confirmability as sufficient for making decisions, but I don’t think the concept of fact is the same as the concept of truth.
OK, could you elaborate? I haven’t seen anything to suggest “truth” is not synonymous with reality in informal language (except when theists get involved).
Oops missed a “not”
I’m pretty sure I have said so in the past. But I’m not a Skinner style of behaviorist.
I live my life as if statements of fact are true or false. I have no problem with statements like Joe was born in 1948.
I begin to twitch at “factual” statements about consciousness, morality, and yes, even color. Much of what people say is twaddle in a tuxedo.
petrushka,
OK; I tend to think we are hard-wired to think in terms of dichotomies, light, dark, hot, cold etc when reality is not inherently dichotomous. That’s why I think “truth” and “falsity” are not very useful as explanatory concepts.
You must go down a storm at parties! 😉
What style are you?
Why does truth have to be an explanatory concept (whatever they are, exactly?)
“POSSIBLY discoverable” “MAY be more or less accurate enough to be described INFORMALLY as true.” What would it mean to actually (“formally”?) be true, in your opinion?
Probably a style of my own.
In particular, I see perceptual behavior and cognitive behavior as very important.
Too many people see perception as passive, which would imply that there is no such thing as perceptual behavior.