Last night I was talking with an old friend of mine, an atheist Jew, who is now in the best relationship of her life with a devout Roman Catholic. We talked about the fact that she was more surprised than he was about the fact that their connection transcends their difference in metaphysics. He sees himself as a devout Roman Catholic; she sees him as a good human being.
This conversation reminded me of an older thought that’s been swirling around in my head for a few weeks: the disunity of reason.
It is widely held by philosophers (that peculiar sub-species!) that reason is unified: that the ideally rational person is one for whom there are no fissures, breaks, ruptures, or discontinuities anywhere in the inferential relations between semantic contents that comprise his or her cognitive grasp of the world (including himself or herself as part of that world).
This is particularly true when it comes to the distinction between “theoretical reason” and “practical reason”. By “theoretical reason” I mean one’s ability to conceptualize the world-as-experienced as more-or-less systematic, and by “practical reason” I mean one’s ability to act in the world according to judgments that are justified by agent-relative and also agent-indifferent reasons (“prudence” and “morality”, respectively).
The whole philosophical tradition from Plato onward assumes that reason is unified, and especially, that theoretical and practical reason are unified — different exercises of the same basic faculty. Some philosophers think of them as closer together than others — for example, Aristotle distinguishes between episteme (knowledge of general principles in science, mathematics, and metaphysics) and phronesis (knowledge of particular situations in virtuous action). But even Aristotle does not doubt that episteme and phronesis are exercises of a single capacity, reason (nous).
However, as we learn more about how our cognitive system is actually structured, we should consider the possibility that reason is not unified at all. If Horst’s Cognitive Pluralism is right, then we should expect that our minds are more like patchworks of domain-specific modules that can reason quite well within those domains but not so well across them.
To Horst’s model I’d add the further conjecture: that we have pretty good reason to associate our capacity for “theoretical reason” (abstract thinking and long-term planning) with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and also pretty good reason to associate our capacity for “practical reason” (self-control and virtuous conduct) with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (and especially in its dense interconnections with the limbic system).
But if that conjecture is on the right track, then we would expect to find consistency between theoretical reason and practical reason only to the extent that there are reciprocal interconnections between these regions of prefrontal cortex. And of course there are reciprocal interconnections — but (and this is the important point!) to the extent that these regions are also functionally distinct, then to that same extent reason is disunified.
And as a consequence, metaphysics and ethics may have somewhat less to do with each other than previous philosophers have supposed.
I would argue that all behavior is “ultimately” the result of brain structure. And brain structure can be the result of biological evolution or of learning. They are complementary processes.
Interesting and thoughtful post. (I’m a little concerned that it may engender the response “In the beginning was the word” and all that.) But I do think we can’t escape our linguistic (and other) categories, as I just wrote on the tennis thread.
Of course but as far as I can tell only Yahweh is a sufficient ground for reason. If you have another candidate bring him forward and we can examine his or her qualifications.
God is reason
peace
Yes,
The law of non contradiction is just another way to say that God thoughts are perfectly consistent and God is faithful.
quote:
Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to the flesh, ready to say “Yes, yes” and “No, no” at the same time? As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been Yes and No. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.
(2Co 1:17-20)
end quote:
How do you know this? Please answer in a non-circular manor
peace
Useful to who and according to what standard?
peace
It’s called grammar. Grammar is logical, that’s all there is to it. Grammar is inherent to language, not something optional or tacked-on.
The metalanguage of all metalanguages is natural language.
I entirely agree. Did I give the impression that I didn’t?
In fact, I’d go one step further and say that rationality is inherent to language.
I’d put the thought slightly differently and say that every natural language contains its own metalanguage. This is not the case with formal languages, which is one of the reasons I put a sharper distinction between them than you do. (And by “formal languages” I mean logics and mathematics.) But I recognize that this Wittgensteinian point is deeply contested by philosophers like Saussure and Montague.
KN,
Formal languages can contain metalanguages, though not all do. Gödel exploited this in his famous incompleteness theorems.
Thank you, I stand corrected. Any formal system rich enough to express the Peano axioms necessarily will be able to express statements about the system itself.
(Is there a trick for getting umlauts in this text-box?)
It is possibly useful to any organism that can be said to reason. What seems to be the natural way of perceiving a world depends on building a hierarchical organization, roughly a binary tree. And logic is a simple but useful method for searching a binary tree.
For an organism, “useful” would be measured by the standard of supporting the organisms way of life.
I think that something like this is true. I think that reasoning comes into play only when an organism has sufficient cognitive flexibility that it can perceive situations as having “ambiguous affordances”. The idea here is that an organism can sometimes perceive a situation as being unclear as to what it does and doesn’t afford. Reasoning, in the simplest cases, consists of actions that resolve the detectability of affordances. Or, as we might also say, problem-solving.
Reasoning therefore requires sufficient cognitive complexity that an organism can perceive a situation as a problem for it and engage in actions that count as solutions to that problem.
Could you elaborate on this? What do you mean by “way of life”?
Suppose your “way of life” is to foment chaos and entropy on your self and others, would reason be useful in this regard?
peace
KN,
Each umlauted character has its own html code:
Typing
…will give…
If you don’t want to bother with the codes, you can use this trick: just Google the name without the umlaut. The search results will contain the name with the umlaut, so you can copy and paste the whole thing.
For example, Googling ‘Schrodinger’ will give you results containing ‘Schrödinger’, which you can then copy and paste into the combox.
That’s really more a question for Mung than Neil.
Way of life — eating, breathing, drinking, reproducing.
For those commenters who have difficulty admitting mistakes (*looks directly at Alan Fox*), KN has provided a graceful demonstration of how it’s done.
keiths:
KN:
No fuss, no muss, no evasions. Just a simple acknowledgement of the error. The discussion can now proceed on a corrected basis.
fifthmonarchyman:
Patrick:
😀
I hit the compose key, then the quote key “, and then the letter.
I’m using linux, and I can configure a compose key in user settings.
Before I knew about that, I tried the other method. I would google for, say, Goedel, and one of the pages that turned up (often the Wikipedia page) would contain the spelling with ö , which I could then copy/paste. I’m currently using right-ALT as my compose key.
Know about what? That most learning doesn’t follow the formal rules of logic?
Or that behavior is probabalistic?
Or that our ability to predict the future and behave productively is probabalistic?
If I need a foreign spelling, I google the word and copy the correct search result.
Windows users can temporarily switch to any non-English keyboard layout, if they want. Such as German or Scandinavian. They just don’t want to.
I use permanently Scandinavian layout+compose key. Other layouts inevitable for me are Russian and Greek.
It’s all in your keyboard, people.
Thank you. Though I hasten to point out that in technical, formal work — as with logic and mathematics — it is often obvious when someone has made a mistake. That is not the case in less rigorous or less technical fields of inquiry — such as philosophy or even (dare I say it) science.
KN,
I wouldn’t go quite that far. While it’s true that experts and highly knowledgeable people are less likely to make obvious mistakes in philosophy or science, that isn’t so for the less skilled. Ask any high school chemistry teacher who has just finished grading the final exam.
Anyway, I’m not concerned here with cases where the mistaker honestly thinks that he or she is right, despite the mistake being obvious to others. That’s fine — all we can ask is that such a person be willing to support their position and to consider opposing arguments fairly.
I’m speaking of cases in which a person knows that he or she is wrong, but refuses to admit it for various emotional reasons. Sometimes a mistake really is so obvious that the person can’t plausibly claim to be unaware of it.
It’s interesting that Neil characterizes the behavior of organisms as “binary-search” which is associated with traditional AI.
I think that the cognitive science Clark talks sees it more as selecting a causal model for the world based on Bayesian analysis, rather than as some kind of search algorithm.
Once we have language and the ability to write it down, interact with it, and share our interactions, then we can deploy formal deductive reasoning, which is a new ability beyond the Bayesian modelling bequeathed by biological evolution.
People def need your OP on this. I know I do.
OK
How do you know this is true? Please answer in a non-circular manor.
If I understand you you are just saying that reason is picking a path by trial and error that will help you eat and reproduce etc.
How do you know a particular path is the true one. Is truth even important given your understanding?
If truth is not important why should anyone care about your characterization? after all it might not be the correct one at all and it would make no difference
Peace
PS thanks for the interaction
Know anything.
I’m asking how you KNOW anything given your worldview.
peace
Supposing that one does need to know anything here (which Neil will likely doubt), as I’ve explained to you many times, Fifth, one knows X if one believes X, has justification for X, and X is true. One doesn’t need to know that one knows X in order to know X, and one doesn’t need to be certain of anything to know X. Furthermore, I don’t need to know that this explanation is right in order for it to be right.
I don’t think you really want to understand this stuff, however. Perhaps because it undermines your presuppositionism.
As mentioned previously, Jim Van Cleve has an excellent paper on this called ‘The Cartesian Circle’ which I think you should read if you’re asking these questions from a sincere desire to understand. I admit to having doubts about that, though.
Does putting KNOW in all caps have significance?
Here’s my reading of your position:
We can’t KNOW anything unless X.
Therefore X.
Seems kind of silly.
No, that’s not quite right.
My comment was about searching a binary tree. In normal usage, a binary search is something different. It can be described as if constructing a binary tree for the purposes of searching. But that’s not what I was suggesting. Rather, I was suggesting that the organism has an already existing binary tree in the way that it has organized its interaction with the world. Categorization (divide the world, then divide the parts, etc) forms a binary tree.
I’m puzzled by this kind of thing. It seems to suggest that people are looking at Bayes rule as a kind of magic, such as would allow something as magical as walking on water or turning water into wine.
Sigh! This similarly seems to see language as magical.
No, truth has nothing to do with it. If the organism knew that a particular path was the “true” one, then it wouldn’t need trial and error.
I see truth as a human invention, that we need as part of language.
Surely categories are more complicated than that? Yes, there are elements of hierarchy, but also of vagueness and overlapping as well, for example.
Well, you’d have to engage with the literature on the subject and not a one sentence summary by me to understand what the Bayesian stuff is about. There is no consensus on the details, of course.
Ditto for whether language gives us cognitive abilities distinct from animals that lack it. No one says it involves magic that I am aware of, though of course what it does involve, how language developed from biological abilities, and how that development interacted with biological evolution are the subject of ongoing research.
What makes you think it could possibly be false?
How can any path not be true?
I can’t answer for Neil, but I have no idea what “truth” even is in terms of living. I can think of a lot of other terms I’m more concerned with: “confort”, “health”, “happiness”, “enjoyment”, and so forth. How does one assess “truth” though?
People care about things because they feel a motivation to care. I don’t see any “truth” having anything to do with caring about things in most cases. Most times, people care about things because there’s some personal connection.
Make no difference in what way?
Much I liked Surfing Uncertainty, I do think that there are deep problems with the substance and presentation of the view. It’s not clear, for example, if predictive processing is presented as a model of neural activity or as a description of neural activity.
If the former, then it has a “as if” atmosphere to it. Which is fine, actually. No one needs to be believe that electrons are just like tiny planets in order to appreciate the usefulness of the Bohr model of the atom. But then the theory amounts to “here are some ways in which it is useful to consider the brain as if it were implementing Bayes’s Theorem”. But if the latter — if Clark is saying that brains really do implement Bayes’ Theorem — then we’re going to have some problems.
I actually do like the PP model as a model of neurocomputation, and I do think that it is often useful to consider what brains do in terms of computation. But I don’t think that brains really are computers, or that neurocomputation is the only model of neural activity that we need. It’s an abstraction, and a very useful one.
I am not comfortable with that way of putting it, either a paraphrase of Clark or correction.
I like Clark’s basic contrast between “top-bottom and bottom-top information flow” (in nonlinguistic cognition) and “top-top information flow” (in language). But there’s a bottleneck to the latter than Clark doesn’t worry about enough — language isn’t telepathy, it’s just the next best thing.
And I think that this basic framework is excellent for understanding, at a generic level, the difference between enlanguaged concepts and simple concepts. The former can, and often do, involve information that originates in a different cognitive system.
When you and I are engaged in some joint activity, both of us co-construct and co-modify a shared metarepresentation of both your contribution to the activity and my contribution to the activity. I represent my activity from my point of view, and your activity from my point of view, and our activity from my point of view — and you do the same from yours. This gives us the beginning of our grasp on the concept of objectivity, because we both must ascribe relatively stable features to the whole situation in which we are both working in order to be able to have a relatively shared metarepresentation of what we are doing.
I do not think that non-human animals can engage in this level of activity, because they don’t integrate their activities into shared models of those activities. In Tomasello’s terms, they don’t have shared intentionality. Their intentionality is limited to what can be causally implemented by their top-bottom and bottom-top in their individually embodied cognitive systems.
Thus, while they often can think, reason, infer, use concepts (etc.), their ability to do is enormously restricted compared to that of a species that can causally implement a communicative system that allows for more-or-less reliable shared semantic contents. Non-human animals are “semantic islands”: their meanings are restricted to their own embodied perspectives. Language functions as a system of “isthmuses” between the islands.
I haven’t read that, but I’ve read a lot of Ken Westphal’s work on Hegel. Westphal argues that Hegel’s account of justification is precisely what we need to get out of the Cartesian circle because justification is social and historical from the very beginning. I don’t recall him citing Van Cleve but I’m sure he does.
The complexities are in how we divide.
The vagueness, and other complexities, are because we are a social species. We have to manage disagreements between members of the social group.
I’d be willing to bet that even animals that don’t depend on cooperation still have vague and overlapping categories. I think the vagueness and ambiguity of categories has as much do with how brains implements cognitive processes as it does with the need to patch over cognitive discrepancies in order to foster cooperation.
Truth and knowledge are very different things. You’re making the same mistake that FMM does here by conflating them.
If I wanted to know how brains work, I’d start with simple chemical reactions, then tropisms, then simple neurons, then brains having neurons in the tens or hundreds, and so forth.
The point at which we lack full understanding is the point at which philosophizing seems a bit pointless. Although we can still speculate and make testable hypotheses at higher levels of organization.
And we can and do make useful classifications of behavior, even human behavior.
But questions of how cognition works and whether it is reliable seem to be a far fetch.
My invocation of Bayes was not intended to imply that brains implement Bayesian analysis. I simply think that, however digital they may be at one level of analysis, brains are massively analog in function, and integrate countless dimensions of input and learning without doing any formal logic.
Don’t know Westphal. Van Cleve was the chair of my thesis committee; Chisholm and (Phil) Quinn were the other members. Incidentally, I just found out that Quinn, who had moved to Notre Dame (and who some of the theists here probably like) died a few years ago. He was a very gentle man.
I’m not sure where you think I conflated them. I was just doing my best to answer fifth’s not-really-appropriate question.
Neil:
Bruce:
Neil, you say the damnedest things
sometimes.Bruce is right. Categorization does not form a binary tree.
If you disagree, show us how the following categories fit into such a tree:
Neil:
You’re claiming that the reason our categories are vague is to foster the illusion of agreement, thus promoting social cohesion? So, for example, ‘living things’ could be a category with sharp boundaries, but we make it vague so that the people who think viruses are alive can get along with the people who don’t?
Well, FMM wrote:
and you replied,
But a particular path can be a “true” one without that being known by the organism using the path, or indeed by anybody.
Sigh.
The word “categorization” is used to mean two different things, though they can seem related.
I was quite clear as to which of those I was referring to.
Now you want to challenge me by insisting on the alternative meaning.
I’m not playing that game.
But then “true” has nothing to do with it. So, again, where’s the conflation?
Fifth put “true” there. It doesn’t belong.
These are your words, Neil:
I’ll buy that, but, contrary to your post, the reason it doesn’t belong has nothing to do with us knowing or not knowing anything about paths.
I’ve followed Neil’s arguments for some time, and when I have understood what he was saying, I have usually agreed. I think he and I have similar thoughts about how brains work, but there really isn’t a commonly agreed vocabulary.
I haven’t followed this latest argument, but I grant the benefit of the doubt.
I think the usual philosophical vocabulary is counterproductive when trying to understand and communicate about how brains work. And science hasn’t come up with any completely satisfactory alternative.