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.
Yes, quite so. And they do not say anything at all about
As is so common, I say A, and you mistake me as saying B. And then you rant on in post after post about how wrong I am for saying B (which I never actually said).
Now just hit that “Ignore Commenter” button, so that you will never have to misunderstand me again.
Just curious, but what would constitute a “false” path? One that leads to death maybe?
I do not see how truth or falseness can apply outside a formal system, and nearly everything that people and animals do falls outside of formal reasoning.
That is my perspective as well, Petrushka. But some folks keeping using the word “truth” and “know” when talking about the way of life and I’m wondering what they mean by those terms and what the contrast to those terms would be.
Curiously, my perspective is very nearly the opposite: I am not too sure that truth and falsity can apply within a formal system, unless one stipulates that by “true” one means “provable”.
I would not say that truth just is correspondence, but that there is something very much like correspondence that needs to be understood in naturalistic (i.e. non-magical) terms.
I can’t understand what someone means when they say all sorts of mystical things about “truth” or why some folks think that there’s a distinction between “truth” and “Truth”, but I see no reason why we shouldn’t say that truth is a property of assertions. My assertion that my cat weighs thirteen pounds is true, because he does. If he didn’t, the assertion would be false.
I think we’d need extremely compelling reasons to abandon common-sense on this issue.
Provable is a characteristic of formal systems.
From outside formal systems, truth seems to mean something like useful or likely.
If I act on assumption X, I will likely get predictable outcomes, and predictability is useful.
In common experience, some assertions seem to approach 100 percent certainty. But language is fuzzy. Idaho is a state and a geographical region. Except when it’s private. I do not wish to bore everyone with my own idiosyncratic thoughts, but it seems to me that most verbal communication is connotative, evocative, and metaphorical, rather than denotative and formal.
I never mean anything like that by it.
Similarly, I usually agree with your comments related to cognition.
I agree.
My advice to someone seriously interested in human cognition: DO NOT (and I repeat, DO NOT) study philosophy of mind until you already understand the problems that are involved in a study of human cognition.
Neil:
Neil,
To borrow your language: As is so common, you say A, and when I point out that A is mistaken, you rant on in post after post about how you didn’t actually say A. Yet you don’t say what you really did mean — because that would involve admitting that you did say A, after all.
You made a mistake, Neil. Bruce and I pointed it out. It’s not a crisis, not an emergency, not a catastrophe. You just made a mistake — that’s all. Why make such a big deal out of it?
I think KN is “seriously interested in human cognition,” and seems to me to have a good grasp of it. But I could be wrong: I’m no expert, certainly. Human cognition is not a particular interest of mine and didn’t play much of a part in my own decision to go into philosophy.
(It was mostly for the girls and money, if anybody’s interested)
Neil,
If you maintain that Bruce and I are misunderstanding you, then demonstrate it to us. Show us how your words have something other than the straightforward meaning that we attributed to them.
You wrote:
Bruce and I are pointing out that we do not organize our interactions with the world in the form of a binary tree.
Simple example:
If I’m deciding whether to lift something, I need to know whether it falls into the category “light enough for keiths to lift”. If I’m deciding whether to eat something, I need to know whether it falls into the category “edible”. If I’m deciding whether to pull a volume of the encyclopedia down from the shelf, I need to know whether the subject of interest falls into the category “contained in this volume”.
These categories can’t be placed neatly into a binary tree. If you try to force them, you’ll end up with bogus, highly specific categories like “things that are light enough for keiths to lift, and are edible, and whose entries appear in this volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica” versus “things that are light enough for keiths to lift, and are edible, and don’t appear in this volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica”. If you were dealing with a side of beef, you’d have to go over to the other side of the tree to find the category “things that aren’t light enough for keiths to lift, and are edible, and don’t appear in this volume of the Encyclopedia.”
That isn’t how we categorize things. I can make the edible/inedible distinction in one circumstance and the light enough to lift/too heavy to lift distinction in another, with no need to cram the two into a single binary tree.
An aside to owners of the (physical) Britannica:
Have you noticed some of the pleasing juxtapositions on the spines of the various volumes? I have the 1993 edition, which includes…
…which always makes me think of delirium tremens, and…
…which speaks for itself, and
…which almost sounds like it could be a real thing, until you think about it.
Then there’s
…and…
…and…
…which alternately suggests
a) a poor pronunciation of ménage à trois, or
b) something that kinky Canadians do.
petrushka:
walto:
Me neither. Some truths are useful, others aren’t. Some truths seem likely, others don’t.
Excellent!
I used to have the 13th Ed. (which came with the 11th and 12th), but it took up so much room I sold it. Russell once made the amusing remark/insult that Huxley had the practice of memorizing a couple of exotic entries prior to making a cocktail party entrance, and that you could tell this by the alphabetical proximity of the topics.
We aren’t communicating. Your statements about truths are orthogonal to my thoughts. Not the first time.
petrushka,
Then what precisely did you mean by this?
walto,
Thanks for the Russell/Huxley anecdote. Was that Aldous or Julian?
Aldous.
I don’t think the two views are as symmetrical as you portray them. The difference is that Glen isn’t claiming that any particular position is the default, only that any position requires support. fifthmonarchyman is claiming that he has no obligation to support his preferred positions. He’s simply assuming his conclusions.
I don’t think the word truth can have an unambiguous meaning, but when we say something is true we generally mean that most people will not disagree with it.
And if we assume some statement about how the world works is true, we mean that assuming it will allow us to make things that work or do things without unexpectedly causing harm.
I’m not a big fan of the word or of what it often implies.
I never mean that by it. “This is true, even if nobody believes it,” is not a contradiction.
I don’t think he’s ever claimed that. Do you have a quote?
But my second “definition” covers things that are true regardless of what people believe.
I prefer the concept of utility to the concept of correspondence. I don’t think there is any “thing” for statements to correspond to.
True statements are statements that are not contradicted by testing or experience.
Such statements are often, but not always, agreed on.
By utility, I do not mean anything as pedestrian as leading to making a lot of money or flying to the moon. I mean it in the very broad sense of surviving scrutiny.
Did someone bring up instinct?
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/newsandevents/?id=35058
Bees learn. They are not completely hard wired automatons. Who knew?
I agree with Petrushka’s observation. I think for everyday conversations, at least in the circles of people I’ve encountered, most people just toss true around as a way of saying they agree. I hear this type of exchange all the time:
“Man…that Trump crowd is so dumb! They are totally missing that he’s duping them!”
“Yeah. That is so true!”
or
“Cat people are the best!”
“Totally true!”
and so forth…
petrushka:
I agree with walto’s response. Our belief that something is true is orthogonal to the fact that most people will, or won’t, agree with it. It is possible for a statement to be true even if everyone disagrees with it.
That’s also not correct. It’s true that the sun is reflecting off my neighbor’s window, but when I say that, I don’t mean that assuming that truth will allow me to “make things that work or do things without unexpectedly causing harm”.
I think it’s true because it is the case, as far as I can tell, that the sun is reflecting off my neighbor’s window.
I think it is the case that one can make measurements and formulate theories that are consistent with your assertion, and that your measurements and theories will survive scrutiny.
petrushka,
Sure, but your claim was different:
That isn’t what we mean when we say that a statement is true. When I assert the truth of “the sun is reflecting off my neighbor’s window”, I simply mean that the sun is, in fact, reflecting off my neighbor’s window. Whether that allows us to “make things that work or do things without unexpectedly causing harm” is irrelevant. The statement remains true as long as the sun is, in fact, reflecting off my neighbor’s window.
I think Clark does recognize that there are two separate issues. For example, see section 3.1 of the BBS article:
Forward connections thus convey error, while backward connections are free to construct (in a potentially much more complex, and highly non- linear fashion) predictions that aim to cancel out the error. Unfortunately, direct, unambiguous neural evidence for these crucial functionally distinct subpopulations is still missing. Hence: “One limitation of these models –and of predictive coding in general–is that to date no single neuron study has systematically pursued the search for sensory prediction error responses.” (Summerfield & Egner 2009, p. 408)
So there is ongoing work to try justify that the brain is computing, and not merely being modeled as computing. As I have said in previous posts, such work does depend on using a definition of physical computation which differs from traditional AI as in eg Fodor’s.
I did not mean to imply that the predictive processing approach on its own was the basis for an argument about language allowing for new cognitive abilities. Rather I was referring to Clark’s (and many others) work on cognitive technologies and how language could be considered an example of them. I understand the shared intentionality capability as something that allows us to use such technologies collectively.
Here is an extended quote from Clark’s BBS paper on the relation of predictive processing and the cognitive technologies:
But this neatness hides important complexity. For, another effect of all that material and socio-cultural scaffolding is to induce substantial path-dependence as we con- front new problems using pre-existing material tools and inherited social structures. The upshot, or so I have argued, is that a full account of human cognition cannot hope to “jump”directly from the basic organizing principles of action-oriented predictive processing to an account of the full (and in some ways idiosyncratic) shape of human thought and reason.
What emerges instead is a kind of natural alliance. The basic organizing principles highlighted by action-oriented predictive processing make us superbly sensitive to the structure and statistics of the training environment. But our human training environments are now so thoroughly artificial, and our explicit forms of reasoning so deeply infected by various forms of external symbolic scaffolding, that understanding distinctively human cognition demands a multiply hybrid approach. Such an approach would combine the deep computational insights coming from probabilistic generative approaches (among which figure action-oriented predictive processing) with solid neuroscientific conjecture and with a full appreciation of the way our many self-structured environments alter and transform the problem spaces of human reason. The most pressing practical questions thus concern what might be thought of as the “distribution of explanatory weight” between the accounts on offer, and approaches that explore or uncover these more idiosyncratic or evol- utionary path-dependent features of the human mind, and the complex transformative effects of the socio-cultural cocoon in which it develops.
I agree. We need to provide a model before we can speak of truth.
I take the distinction this way:
truth (small t) is about a property of assertions, but that property can vary by assertion or at least by domain of inquiry.
Truth, big T, say there is one common property that applies to all true assertions.
OK, but what about binary search. Doesn’t garden variety binary search require a strict less then, equal to, greater than comparison, that is a well-ordered set of searchable things. If categories are being search in that way, it seems to restrict categories in an unnatural way.
Now maybe there are extended versions of binary search that allow for fuzzy logic and probablistic search results of some nature. Is that what you had in mind?
When I have these exchanges with you, Neil, I seem to always end up at the point of not understanding how you are using words. I really should learn from that experience. Something wrong with my priors, I suspect.
On your other comment about studying cognitive science before philosophy: that reminds me of a saying about a pot and kettle and the color black. What was that saying? Anybody know the one I mean?
Bruce, to Neil:
I do. 🙂
BruceS,
Thank you for the long quotes from the BBS article. I’m really interested in how Clark, Tomasello, and Margolis are developing very similar approaches at three very different levels of analysis — neurocomputational, cognitive psychological, and philosophical anthropological. Not sure how to cash that out in terms of what the next paper will be, though.
I don’t have that much trouble, although I don’t always understand or agree. But I find myself agreeing more often than not.
I might add that I have been thinking about learning and behavior and neuroscience science I encountered the subject in college, about 50 years ago. I’ve only met a few people who make sense to me on the subject. On the plus side, the people I find interesting are rather well known. AI research has trended in the direction I expected.
Bruce, to Neil:
Neil is talking about a plain ol’ binary tree, nothing fuzzy about it:
I think it’s hard to improve on Sellars’s insight that different kinds of inquiry will have different constitutive rules that determine what is assertable in that inquiry. But for any assertion, the predicate “is true” can be applied.
Thank you. That’s helpful.
In analytic philosophy of language, we sometimes invoke the idea of “representation” to get at this thought that all true assertions stand in the same relationship to truthmakers. Neopragmatists like Brandom and Huw Price have been chipping away at this assumption for a few years now. And now there’s Meaning Without Representation. From the product description:
A friend of mine who works in neuroscience insists that the concept of representation is pragmatically indispensable in neuroscience. He’s gotten me thinking that there could be something interesting to be done in arguing that representation is best understood as a causal-explanatory concept, and not a constitutive-expliciative concept at all. And that this might even have been what Sellars was really getting at when he urged a distinction between what can be asserted according the norms of a language-game (“semantic assertability”) and how adequately a lanaguge-game represents the world (“picturing”).
I thought he was truth. Is your god all abstract nouns? Speaking of which, you still haven’t answered in what sense truth exists.
When I first encountered Neil on the internet (I hope he won’t mind these stories!) I was drawn to his geometer’s sensibilities and, as I knew he admired Gibson’s psychology (which I found very difficult) I hoped he would be able to explain Gibson to me.
To my dismay, I discovered that I often couldn’t understand Neil either, which is likely as much (or more) my fault as his. I don’t blame him for that, but I’ve always found his and petrushka’s gratuitous attacks on philosophy weird. It’s made me think that a philosophy prof gave them a bad grade once or something. And so–like the De Niro character in “King of Comedy”–they’re now going to show THEM.
I guess some philosophers (Wittgensteinians mostly) disdain cognitive psychology too, so maybe we’re all even. I don’t share that disdain, myself.
Just as you haven’t provided any evidence for your assertion that FMM “is claiming that he has no obligation to support his preferred positions.”
You first.
No doubt there’s some polysemy around, but when philosophers or scientists talk about what’s true, they generally mean, as keiths says, ‘what is the case’. The other usages are derivative, I think.
I think “what is the case” is an overgeneralization of “what do most educated people believe is the case.”
If there is a case, we are not privy to it and probably not constitutionally capable of being privy to it. Glass darkly, and all that.
Nor do I, obviously. I think that a big part of the appeal of Sellars for me is that he wanted to hold onto lots of different views that are normally seen as incompatible, but which really aren’t — if one is willing to see what is true about the view and what is accidental and unnecessary.
Sellars accepted a great deal of Wittgenstein on language-games, but he never thought — as Hacker does, among contemporary Wittgensteinians — that cognitive science is irrelevant to philosophy of mind or epistemology. (Ryle and McDowell have the same blind-spot, though they excel at dissolving the conceptual difficulties.) But at the same time, Sellars never thought — as Quine, Churchland, or Alex Rosenberg do — that the manifest image/folk psychology/phenomenology is something that just be thrown under the bus.
The fact of the matter is, figuring out any of this stuff is really hard, because we have to be both critical and reflective about coherence and legitimacy of the concepts we’re using and testing the adequacy of those concepts against relatively stable causal structures or processes. The idea that we can do without either philosophy or science seems quite absurd to me.
I don’t think utility works well as “truth”.
My own take is that truth, roughly, is conformance to standards (sometimes informal standards or norms). Having standards is utilitarian, but there is also utility in knowing whether something conforms to standards.
Andy Tanenbaum famously said “The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” Generally speaking (but not always) the context tells us which standard to apply for a particular assessment of truth.
But then how would Darwin write On the Origin of Species, saying why it’s true that life evolved via observable processes?
It seems to me that a lot of discovery has involved “truth” that was not what educated people believe is the case, even if that often changed rapidly.
Glen Davidson
In effect: I think it is true because synonym of “it is true.”
It’s an example of why correspondence seems to me to be circular (and vacuous).
I think truth has a lot of baggage. When I want to refer to “what is the case” rather than what is useful, I prefer to say regularity. Predictable relationships in nature.
But in 50 years I have, more often than not, regretted getting into these discussions.
I don’t seem to communicate well, and I see others doing it better.
Did Darwin use the word true or truth?
I don’t strongly object to using truth to mean that which holds up to scrutiny.
Not really the point.
Glen Davidson
But “binary search” is your term. It’s not the same as searching a binary tree.
I divide the landscape into the part west of the river and the part east of the river. Then I divide the part east of the river into the grassy part and the non-grassy part. Continuing, I have a binary tree structure which has nothing to do with “less than” or “greater than”.
Doesn’t Burge say the something similar about psychology, that is that representation is a natural kind because of its role in psychology? You can find his extended argument in Origins of Objectivity. A pdf is available online; it comes up first in my DuckDuckGo search for “Burge Origins Objectivity”. (I’ve only read bits and pieces of it!).
But there is also this argument about what it takes to make representation a necessary part of an explanation: Representation Reconsidered and whether most scientific explanations using it really require that concept.
I don’t have a clear idea about the exact relation between representation as philosophy of language take it in fashioning a view of meaning and language, and the concept of representation as used in the cognitive sciences. It is commonly said, though, that most scientists ignore the issue of misrepresentation and norms which is of concern mainly to philosophers (not to say this is not an important and valid concern). . Burge certainly does consider it (hence the title of his book). I do understand that one of Brandom’s goals to is explain how those two are related to language usage