…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
Is the initial starting point at the personal level? If so, is it a causal or constitutive explanation (or maybe it has aspects of both)?
The reason I ask is am still trying to understand McDowell’s complete (?) separation of the two types of explanation which you have referenced elsewhere. If the starting point includes personal, constitutive explanations, the above iterative approach seems to integrate them in some respects..
Coincidentally, I came across this 2013 YouTube interview with John McDowell on related topics which may interest you: Avoiding the Myth of the Given and other philosophical thoughts
It assumes more background than I have for me to completely follow, but I suspect my views with be closer to Tyler Burge’s, who McDowell seems to have an ongoing debate with on this and other issues.
Learned of it from this pf discussion which you may want to glance at: Myth of the Given
petrushka,
I quite agree that operational definitions in science make possible a degree of verifiability that isn’t possible in other discursive practices. The verifiability in turn allows sciences to be both fallible and corrigible. (And I’d add that in the process of error-and-revision science attains a degree of cognitive grasp of objective reality that isn’t to be found in other discursive practices.)
The usefulness and value of philosophy doesn’t lie in attaining any cognitive grasp of objective reality. Plato and Aristotle thought so, and so did in their own way the Continental rationalists of the early modern period. The pragmatists, beginning with Peirce and culminating in Dewey, were among the first philosophers to really understand the implications of science for philosophy. (Nietzsche, too, but in a very different way.)
Rather, I think, the value of philosophy for us today lies in helping us clarify our thinking about what “cognitive grasp of objective reality” is and why it is important; in allowing us to experiment with different conceptual frameworks, which hopefully inculcates some degree of epistemic humility and inoculates us against dogmatism; in getting us to see that all of our concepts have a history and aren’t handed down from God or even from Nature; in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of striving for consistency in our worldviews; and for overcoming the narrow-mindedness and petty egoism that allows us to dehumanize those who disagree with us.
These are all praiseworthy intellectual values and virtues that philosophy retains even in an age when the traditional philosophical goal of attaining an adequate cognitive grasp of objective reality has been ceded to empirical science.
Plus, that very ceding itself required — and still requires — philosophical argument and conceptual analysis. It’s easy to take the epistemic authority of science for granted, four hundred years after Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes launched the Scientific Revolution against ossified and intellectually sterile medieval Aristotelianism and the immense technological, medical, and scientific progress we have made since then.
This is the bogus self-defensive argument so often used by philosophers.
It ought to be obvious that when scientists criticize philosophy, they are not criticizing human thought. They are criticizing what comes out of academic departments of philosophy.
“Immaterial soul” as an explanation of subjective consciousness works precisely the same way as “matter” is supposed to explain the body and whatever is in the body. Surely a philosopher should know this.
KN, I will grant that people trained in analysis of ideas contribute usefully to society.
So do lawyers.
But I am not required to like lawyering (even thought I am closely related to a couple of lawyers). And I think philosophizing has some esthetic similarities to politicking and sausage making.
I don’t see how that could ever work. It starts with a solipstic outlook, and adds story telling.
“Matter” doesn’t really explain anything, which is why I avoid calling myself a materialist. Similarly, “immaterial soul” doesn’t explain anything.
In terms of how I am conceiving of the philosophical starting-point, it’s at the personal level and develops a constitutive explanation at that level before establishing the epistemic authority of science which in turn severely qualifies that starting-point.
Yes, exactly. One of the major issues on which I take issue with McDowell is his interest in cordoning off epistemology from cognitive science. He develops that at “Can Cognitive Science Determine Epistemology?“. One way of understanding what I’m trying to do is to see me as trying to broker a compromise between Churchland and McDowell by thinking through a much more complex relationship between constitutive and enabling explanations. (Michael Wheeler in fact does exactly that in his Reconstructing the Cognitive World, but he proceeds through an exegesis of Heidegger. I’d rather avoid that.)
And, for someone like me, reconciling Churchland and McDowell amounts to the same thing as reconciling right-wing and left-wing Sellarsianism. I’m putting the band back together.
What do you call yourself? Non-explanatist?
This, e.g., is a very philosophical post.
Why should I need to be committed to a belief system?
I’m some sort of pragmatist, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with published accounts of pragmatism.
In the sense of resigned to fate.
It is obvious when that is what you actually say. But usually that’s not what you say.
Instead, in most cases, you do a bit of philosophy yourself and then you like to append at the end of many of those very posts something like “And that’s why I think philosophy is stupid.” If you really don’t like it, I’m not sure why you’re so fond of engaging in it. I’d say at least half your posts–and maybe 3/4–consist of nothing but philosophical remarks. I take it from this that by “philosophy” you actually mean “philosophy I disagree with.”
The thing is, that’s not a terribly good argument against philosophy.
Of course you don’t have to like philosophy. I just wonder why you’re so fond of doing it at the same time you’re trashing it.
Pragmatism is a school of philosophy. It doesn’t make any difference whether you agree with any published accounts of it.
You too want to have your cake but pretend you don’t eat cake.
FWIW, I think this is perfectly reasonable.
I don’t myself claim that philosophy is either useful or important, I just point out that you often like to do it.
As a historical point, I see quite well what you mean. “Matter” is to the body as “immaterial soul” is to the mind if the question one is asking is, “to what domain of objective reality does this aspect of our embodied subjectivity belong?”
But I simply do not think that that is a good question to ask.
For one thing, “matter” doesn’t do any explanatory work in contemporary fundamental physics. The most basic entities of fundamental physics are fields (in quantum field theory), or perhaps structures. And there are deep doubts, coming from philosophy of science, whether it really makes sense to say that any description of reality has ontological priority over any other.
For another, it is a central thought of the Kantian-phenomenological tradition that subjectivity is not a part of objective reality because it is the perspective on objective reality. That’s what Kant is getting at when he explains (in the Transcendental Deduction) that all consciousness of objects is necessarily correlated with self-consciousness, so self-consciousness can never be collapsed into consciousness of an object.
To that Husserl adds many more modes of self-consciousness than the ones that Kant explores, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty explain that self-consciousness is grounded in a more primitive form of understanding that is practical, world-involving, and (for Merleau-Ponty) necessarily embodied.
Following this dialectic to its end, we are left with what Robert Hanna and Evan Thompson call “the body-body problem”: what is the relationship between the embodied subjectivity elucidated by existential phenomenologists — the body as Leib (not only Merleau-Ponty but also Samuel Todes, Drew Leder, and Tom Sparrow make hugely valuable contributions) and the objectified body of biological and medical knowledge and manipulation, or the body as Koerper?
It is here that I think we cannot go any further except to explore the mutual entanglement of constitutive explanations of agential embodied subjectivity and enabling explanations of subagential biological mechanisms in cognition, development, and evolution.
Existential phenomenology, pragmatist epistemology, enactive cognitive science, and the extended evolutionary synthesis do form a sort of constellation or mutually reinforcing structure in my thinking, but they do not coalesce into a single comprehensive framework.
There seems to be a lot of that going around TSZ these days.
I OTOH, simply want more than my fair share of the cake. I mean….what’s wrong with that?!
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What annoys me is this ‘What I’m doing when I pontificate about knowledge, perception, warrant, obligatoriness, etc. obviously isn’t philosophy because philosophy is bad, silly stuff, and what I’m doing couldn’t be THAT’ biz.
I’ve got some news for you guys that you might find disturbing….
After some discussions I’ve had recently (elsewhere) I’m really not enchanted with the idea that I should – or must – figure out what I “call myself”.
When other people want to pin an “ism” onto me, and when I want to pin another “ism” onto them, not much we can do to stop that process. Seems to be a natural function of being/having human cognition: THIS is separate from THAT. Well, it’s a lot easier to pick up ideas and carry them around if they’re neatly stowed in one or the other box, but I don’t think that’s a good excuse for expecting that we should stick the labels from the boxes onto ourselves.
I think petrushka has been saying something similar.
hotshoe_,
I’ve found that “-isms” and “-ologies” and “[Last Name]isms” are a convenient shorthand for an in-group but really obstruct communication between groups.
When I name-drop and “ism”-drop here, it’s for the benefit of Walto and BruceS and a few others who have some background in academic philosophy. I assume that the rest of you will filter out the extraneous noise.
Yes, exactly.
There’s no reason that we have to be able to fit into somebody else’s labeled compartments.
Neil Rickert,
Spoken like a true dontfencemeinist!
walto:
KN:
And a lot of people with crumbs around their mouths saying “Cake? What cake?”
And a lot of pointing at pie and proclaiming “That is obviously a cake.”
petrushka,
My impression is that you prejudge and dismiss philosophy even when you could potentially learn from it.
Two examples involving morality come to mind:
1. You’ve said more than once that “morality is about consequences”, or words to that effect. While consequentialism is important, it is only one of three major branches of moral philosophy. Deontology and virtue ethics are the other two. Why not learn about them?
2. You’ve expressed impatience with certain moral thought experiments on the grounds that they aren’t useful, since similar scenarios don’t arise in real life. But that completely misses the point of the thought experiments. They aren’t supposed to be realistic– they’re designed to reveal something about how moral reasoning works.
For example, suppose that God, Satan, or some other evil being gives you an ultimatum: you must either kill the person you love most in the world, or he will destroy the entire universe. You are convinced that the evil being is serious, and that you really must choose one or the other. Which do you pick?
This is not a realistic scenario, needless to say, and none of us are likely to face it. But the answer you choose reveals something important about your moral reasoning, and it’s worth pondering for that reason alone.
I agree with the anti-ismism, I have no idea ‘what I am’ anyhow. The most interesting questions are generally too hard for me. And even if I COULD answer any of them, who says there’d be a name handy for me?
None of that has anything to do with philosophizing at the same time one is trashing philosophy, though. There actually IS a name for that.
FMM:
Also a lot of,
Q: Do you like strawberry ice cream?
A: Yes. That’s my favorite. Until something better comes along.
Q: “Do you like chocolate cake?”
A: “You’ll have to define every term in that sentence before I can answer that question.”
Q: “That’s not necessary. It’s a simple question. I just want to know if you like dark, glistening chocolate cake.”
A: “If you are going to ridicule me for being fat, that says more about you than about me.”
Q: “No, I didn’t say anything about anyone being fat. I just want to know if you like chocolate cake.”
A: “Yes, confections are often found satisfying by those who consume them.”
Q: “That’s true, but doesn’t really answer my question. Do you enjoy eating cakes flavored with chocolate?
A: “If by chocolate cake you mean the physical and chemical constituents of a sugary confection containing cacao butter, I can’t answer that question until science explains how the interaction of those substances with the human palate gives rise to the subjective flavor of chocolate.”
Q: “Suppose you were offered a choice between vanilla cake and chocolate cake. Which would you choose?”
A: “I’ve answered your question four times now. Yes. Confections are often selected by those who consume them. I don’t know how I can be more clear.”
Q: Well, you could say either, “Yes, I like chocolate cake,” or “No, I don’t like chocolate cake.”
(crickets)
ETA: Ice cream.
I don’t know what you mean, but this flourless chocolate espresso torte is divine!
(And I do make a really good flourless chocolate espresso torte. It’s my Passover specialty.)
Reciprocating Bill wins the Internet for today!
Keiths: I thought I had revealed a great deal about my moral reasoning. I think morality is grounded in feelings. We don’t moralize about bricks or machines or objects that don’t have emotions. We frequently moralize about animals.
I do not have a list of things that are moral or immoral. I have no axioms from which to derive syllogisms. I have rules of thumb, and I suspect they are not far from the norm.
But I think your thought experiments chase their tail. If I think about difficult moral choices, I think about how the situation could have been avoided. It doesn’t require deep thought to arrive at the conclusion that pain hurts. Moral thinking, in my opinion, is proactive. How do you minimize hurtful situations.
There are so many avoidable hurts in life. Do I really want to spend my time worrying about Nazis or Satan? I would rather spend it on equally futile ideas for improving child rearing, education, and criminal justice. Just me.
petrushka,
That seems right. I myself do not share walto’s confidence that thought-experiments help elucidate of moral reasoning.
In fact, I think that your skepticism about the usefulness of thought-experimebts is entailed by your view about what morality is.
petrushka,
You’re proving my point. Look how strongly you resist the idea that philosophy might have something to teach you about morality and moral reasoning.
How so? They get people to think about their moral reasoning, which is good, and they reveal some of what goes on under the hood when people reason morally, which is also good.
And you should. But that hardly precludes thinking about the choice you would make, and how you would go about choosing, were you to find yourself in such a situation.
Indeed, it doesn’t. And does that bit of commonplace knowledge somehow resolve all moral dilemmas? No, of course not.
That’s part of it, but certainly not all of it. Hurtful situations can’t always be avoided, even by the most intelligent, careful, and disciplined of planners. From some of the stories you’ve told here, I gather that you are no stranger to hurtful situations.
Morality also involves the choices we make in dealing with unpleasant and undesirable situations that we don’t anticipate or cannot prevent.
If you have the time to dick around with us at TSZ, I think you can spare a few minutes pondering a thought experiment. 🙂 It’s not like you’re spending every waking moment thinking about how to avoid hurtful situations.
For an illustration of just how revealing moral thought experiments can be, see this famous paper:
The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t remember posting anything on that subject, actually.
Keiths, I have trouble with your article because I don’t see a. moral issue in the example. Perhaps it would be useful to say that I zeroed the judgemental scale on a famous personality inventory.
I do avoid people who seem inclined to hurt other people. That’s a form of judgementalism, I suppose. But I don’t feel inclined to punish people or lecture them.
Perhaps it would be best to say I like philosophy and engage in it, but am bored by problems other people find interesting.
I am more intrigued by the little problems I encounter frequently. And by social policy problems that come up in elections. The latter, more for entertainment, because I have no power.
Let me give an example. Last year the sister of my daughter’s best friend died suddenly, leaving four children. She wasn’t married, and the father had his own family. We are friends with the maternal grandparents. They were all set to fight for custody of the children.
The problem from my perspective was not deciding the custody. The father had de facto custody, and there was no compelling reason to change that. The problem for us was how to talk to the grandparents, who were beside themselves with rage.
petrushka,
That’s because you see it in consequentialist terms. So do I. But aren’t you curious about the majority of our fellow humans who don’t see it that way? Isn’t their moral reasoning a worthy subject of investigation?
As the paper points out:\
You should join my Trollope group!
Everybody follows their moral intuitions or the moral intuitions of some charismatic leader. The possibility of disastrous consequences can be addressed by examining the consequences.
In pre-secular societies, laws were called the laws of god. In secular societies, they are simply laws. Both kinds of laws evolve, but secular laws evolve more quickly. Some think this is good, and some think it is disastrous. Both opinions are based on perceived consequences.
I suppose where I part company with the majority is that I see little or no value in tradition. I want to look at consequences the way public health practitioners look at immunization and sanitation.
The thing that most frustrates me is the absence of any discussion of the role of invention. I call it proactive morality. I do not see moral dilemmas as choices. i see them as opportunities for inventions. Your thought experiments present false dichotomies. They ignore the possibility of changing the terms of the problem.
Sophie’s Choices are rare in life. The need to invent responses is with us all the time.
Does anyone remember Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru problem? It was a no win situation. Captain Kirk defeated the problem by cheating. I like that attitude. You can’t always cheat no-win situations, but I think it is useful to consider the possibility. More importantly, it is useful to anticipate dilemmas and invent ways avoid them.
OK, I have a problem I’d like help on.
Please complete one or more of the following:
I think I can do the first one (….the other one is a fucking measle.) but the other two have me stumped.
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
I couldn’t agree more! Time to go back to the view from nowhere.
Too bad there isn’t one.
petrushka,
You are still misunderstanding the purpose of the thought experiments. They are not supposed to be realistic. They are not training devices. They are not practice exercises. Their purpose is to get people thinking about their process of moral reasoning (a purpose you seem determined to resist), and to reveal some of what goes on “under the hood” during that process.
Whence the resistance? Surely you don’t think that your moral reasoning is perfect, with no prospect of improvement. Learning about how a faculty works — and how it fails — can be extremely useful. It’s true of cognition, so why shouldn’t it be true of moral reasoning as well?
What about analogies keiths? Are analogies supposed to be realistic?
Keiths, I’ve lost track of the thought experiments. Perhaps you could provide one, or a link.
Mung,
Not necessarily, but they’re supposed to be analogous. You keep claiming that the Meshuga scenario isn’t analogous to Matthew’s mass resurrection story, but it clearly is, as I’ve explained.
And even if it weren’t, you should still be able to explain why you would reject Meshuga’s account but not Matthew’s. It’s obvious that you’re trying really hard to avoid that question.
I can’t believe that not a single one of you rat bastards was willing to help me out on this! X>{