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.
If you are hungry, why aren’t you eating?
And how do you know that “empirical objective evidence” is the right tool for the job at hand?
Should we call this “Taking the fifth”?
We can be pretty sure that empirical objective evidence is far inferior to Making Shit Up when it comes to religious beliefs.
How do you know I’m not?
Your position is all about making shit up and has nothing to do with empirical objective evidence.
At least intelligent design evolution can be modelled whereas unguided evolution cannot be
Patrick,
And there isn’t any objective, empirical evidence that supports the claims of your position. Perhaps we don’t exist…
I’m asking because fifthmonarchyman claimed to have some.
😀 Comment of the week!
How would you know?
Glen Davidson
That’s all quite right, but we’re not (at present) discussing the intelligibility of non-empirical discourse. I’m perfectly happy with non-empirical discourse myself. At present we seem to be talking about presuppositionalism, which is problematic as a theory of how justification works.
My principle objection to presuppositionalism, to reiterate, is and has been that it relies on a false conception of our cognitive situation. The presuppositionalist assumes a Cartesian conception of our cognitive situation.
On this conception, we are locked within our own minds, unable to be sure about what (if anything) is outside of them, except insofar as the mind is illuminated by divine grace. Only by virtue of divine grace can we know anything about the world or about minds other than our own.
Hence, it is only by implicitly acknowledging God’s existence that we are rescued from sheer solipsism — indeed, since even memory is suspect, we would have no alternative to what Arthur Lovejoy nicely called “the solipsism of the specious present”. Since theism offers the only rationally coherent alternative to solipsism — according to the presuppositionalist — anyone who is not a solipsist is implicitly committed to theism, whether they acknowledge it or not.
I have addressed previously in this thread why the illumination of divine grace cannot do the epistemological work that presuppositionalism requires it to do. (As an aside, the sense-data of the empiricist also cannot do the epistemological work that she requires it to do. Both the data of the positivist and the illuminatio of the rationalist are versions of the Myth of the Given.)
The pragmatist alternative that I have been defending, here and in my published work, does not begin with the Cartesian conception of our cognitive situation, and therefore does not need an alternative to the either/or insisted upon by the presuppositionalist (either solipsism or theism). Instead the pragmatist begins with a completely different, non-Cartesian conception of our cognitive situation.
The pragmatist alternative, in the long arc that runs from Peirce and Dewey through Sellars to Joe Rouse and Michael Tomasello, begins with the idea that we are organisms of a certain kind. We are bound up with our environments, having a contingent natural history, and neither more nor less ‘imprisoned’ than sentient animals like ducks or raccoons. Insofar as sentient animals are aware of their environments, know how to skillfully navigate those environments, and even solve certain kinds of problems, they are cognitive agents. The whole Cartesian problematic is bypassed.
There is, however, an important distinction between sentience and sapience. A sentient animal is aware, can act purposively, has goals, and cares about satisfying its needs and desires. It can perceive the possibilities of movement in its environment (affordances) and is motivated to act in specific ways with regard to affordances (solicitations). The cognitive life of a sentient animal is a life of perceiving and acting with regard to affordances and solicitations.
By contrast, a sapient animal is a rational animal. It not only infers and reasons, but it reasons and infers with others. Its inferences can be corrected and improved by other sapient animals. Sapient animals, unlike sentient animals, can engage in the social practice of justification — what Sellarsians call “the game of giving and asking for reasons”. Insofar as its more-or-less reliable cognitive activities can be subjected to the scrutiny of others, its cognition amounts to a qualitatively different kind of knowledge than that of non-sapient animals.
A further and extremely important difference that sapience makes, and especially that exceedingly rare and fascinating form of sapience called “science,” is that we can – with diligence and care and often a good deal of luck — catch glimpses of the phenomenologically hidden causal structures that comprise the world’s real contribution to the affordances and solicitations that constitute our perceptual-practical awareness of the world. Furthermore, we can manipulate those structure to generate novel affordances and solicitations – though, it must be added, whether we do so ethically, wisely, and humanely is a question of culture, values, and political economy.
I’m hungry. I don’t have to know anything.
That could be your motto, Mung.
I wouldn’t have to know that you’re a know it all. Some benefit there I suppose.
I have no objection to your insistence that there are pure a priori concepts that constitute our ordinary experience of the world, such as “time”, “times,” “space”, “spaces,” “I”, “object”, and “cause”. I am not an empiricist — neither about semantics nor about epistemology. Where we disagree is on the account of a priori concepts. On your view, it is (pure?) thinking which produces these concepts. On my view, they are built-in to (any?) natural language.
I also think — and this goes back to my long-standing argument with Erik — that the whole picture of mindedness as “the senses + the intellect” should be abandoned. This picture is supposed to get us beyond the either/or of empiricism or rationalism, but it inherits the weaknesses of both parents.
The place of “the senses” in my picture is taken by the lived body — not just perceptual states understood as “snapshots” of the world, but the dynamical, temporally extended awareness of the necessary correlation or coordination of perceptual awareness and bodily movement.
Likewise, the place of “the intellect” in my picture is taken by two different kinds of conceptual activity: non-discursive or monological conceptual thought and discursive or dialogical conceptual thought. Non-rational animals, to the extent that they are able to solve problems, display the former — as indeed do we. But we also have the latter, which transforms our conceptual awareness in many fascinating ways!
So: it is the synthesis of embodiment and discourse that functions, in my picture, as a phenomenological-pragmatist replacement or successor to the Kantian shotgun-wedding of senses and intellect.
This does leave me with a successor-problem to Kant’s: how do the two interact? (In technical terms, what happens to the Schematism?) I’m still working on a solution to that one.
What I perceive of the tree depends on many things — including whether I’m just catching a glimpse of it, or taking a long, slow look. What I understand of the tree depends on how long I ponder its branches and bark, whether I observe how it changes with the seasons, get to know it in all kinds of weather, and also how much ‘theoretical’ knowledge I bring to bear.
Fine and good, but that’s a nice case of having one perspectival take on the world being corrected by another — you realize that the world has a consistency and structure to it independent of one’s at-the-moment subjective taking-in of how things are. And I wasn’t so much dismissing the appearance/reality distinction — it’s perfectly fine, as far as it goes — but rather objecting to the idea that our knowledge of reality involves going “beyond” what “the senses” disclose.
I can happily agree that some version of the subject/object distinction is acceptable, but not the radical Cartesian version that invites us to think of subject and object as spheres closed off from each other except insofar as something magical happens.
Yeah, for the theists here, if god is supposed to make sense of reason or whatever, and if you think we’re the only true sapient living form, can the rest of species just get by without god or what? For those not deluded enough to deny common descent this must pose a huge problem. It’s almost as if evolution goes from not needing god at all to gradually becoming god dependent as reason evolves in the human lineage (ignoring the other lineages course)
Perhaps what the theist would need to say here is that human knowledge is so radically different from animal knowledge that the former requires divine assistance in ways that the latter doesn’t, since (ex hypothesi) the former includes mathematical knowledge, theological knowledge, and moral knowledge, whereas the latter is just skillful know-how (knowing how to hunt, knowing how to find ripe fruit, knowing how to copulate without being seen by the dominant male, etc.).
Generally speaking I have found that theists have a very low appreciation of how cognitively sophisticated non-human animals are. For example, the typical theist will insist that non-human animals are governed solely by “instinct” and ignore the many cases in which we can observe (and also experimentally manipulate) the many forms of genuine reasoning in non-human animals.
Tell us again how our ability to do mathematics and science was necessary for our evolution. Must have been a beautiful accident.
The typical non-theist will insist that organisms are machines, including humans.
I guess that makes me atypical.
If that’s true, then I am also atypical.
Of course, unlike those who think that humans were designed.
Glen Davidson
Did someone mention James Van Cleve?
Problems from Reid
Great apes can count and solve problems. If one does not insist on a Platonic or rationalist conception of what we are doing when we do mathematics and science, the cognitive distance between us and great apes is not so formidable as to exceeds the scope of naturalistic explanation.
It wasn’t necessary for evolution, of course. But if you think that’s a sign of god’s hand it doesn’t bode well for you and he rest of creationists considering your difficulties to do math and science
What is a machine and what do you think differentiates organisms and in particular humans from them?
(I’d ask Mung but I think I’d just get a quote. See my previous exchanges with him for why I am not asking Neil).
Susan Carey claims that we are born with “core concepts”, including versions of cause, agency, and number, although this differ from the adult version. These core concepts are part of our evolutionary history and so are shared with some animals.
Precis of Origins of Concepts
Explaining the human capacity for conceptual understanding begins with the observation that evolution provides developmental primitives that are much richer than the sensori-motor representations that many hypothesize are the input to all learning. Some of these developmental primitives are embedded in systems of core cognition, and thus core cognition is the topic of the first half of TOOC. Core cognition resembles perception in many respects that distinguish it from other types of conceptual representations. These include the existence of innate perceptual input analyzers that identify the entities in core domains, a long evolutionary history, continuity throughout development, and iconic (or analog) format.
The representations in core cognition differ from perceptual ones in having conceptual content. TOOC reviews the evidence for three systems of core cognition: one whose domain is middle-sized, middle – distant objects, including representations of causal and spatial relations among them (Chapters 2, 3 and 6); one whose do main is agents, including their goals, communicative interactions, attentional states, and causal potential (Chapters 5 and 6); and the one whose domain is numbers, including parallel individuation, analog magnitude representations of the approximate cardi nal values of sets, and set-based quantification.
I don’t have a formal definition of machine on hand, so these are just some stray thoughts on the subject.
My initial thought here is a machine is a system with components or parts that can be partially isolated from the rest of the system and made to vary independently of the system in which they are embedded, but which has no causal loops that allow it to minimize the entropy produced by the system. It will generate as much or as little heat as it is designed to do, and will accumulate heat until the materials lose the properties necessary for implementing their specific functions. In other words, machines can break.
It might be significant that so many machines can be simulated by a Turning machine. Possibly a theory of machines and a theory of computation are the same thing?
What makes organisms qualitatively different from machines is that organisms are self-regulating, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems. Whereas machines are nearly always in thermodynamic equilibrium with the surrounding system, organisms are nearly always far from thermodynamic equilibrium — and they stay there. An organism at thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment is, pretty much by definition, dead.
Organisms can die, but machines can only break. That’s the difference.
Also, I don’t think there are “natural machines”. There weren’t any machines until intelligent beings like us started making them. Machines are no more “natural” than novels or paintings. In that regard, I don’t think that machines are a good metaphor for understanding non-biological nature — I don’t think that physics and chemistry are mechanistic.There are advantages to the mechanistic metaphor, and also severe limits.
I think that the kind of of constantly active, being-becoming process ontology of Deleuze and Whitehead is a better framework for understanding physics and chemistry than is the passive, mechanistic, intervention-driven ontology of the early moderns. But I only acquired that idea by reading Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman, so I’m not in the ideal situation to defend it.
Thank you for this! I’ll read it next week along with Putting Thoughts to Work:
So it is miraculous.
🙂
Wouldn’t this be an awesome topic for an OP? I can’t say I care for KN’s answer that organisms are alive and machines aren’t. How does that help us?
The Machine
But that was not my answer. That’s the fact that my answer explains.
How does a gasoline engine operate?
Could a bacterial flagellum break? Or a ribosome?
I don’t think molecular machines typically break, but they can. So can a lot of our bodies.
I’d not claim that humans are machines, since they are systems that seem to be so much more than just machines, but then I doubt I’d argue too much about it (what if a robot used a great deal of chemistry and was extremely complex?). I don’t see any real categorical difference between certain biologic molecular machines and human-made molecular machines, however.
Glen Davidson
Is the Cartesian Circle paper available for free online?
Are you all talking about Foundationalism, Epistemic Principles, and the Cartesian Circle
You wrote:
Organisms can die, but machines can only break. That’s the difference.
Mung,
It’s here on Branden Fitelson’s website.
“how to copulate without being seen by the dominant male” = Kantian naturalistic evolutionism?
KN:
Heavens, no! A crane is a machine, but you’re never going to explain it using computational theory.
Being far from thermodynamic equilibrium is what allows machines to do work. Hot gas in the cylinder of an internal combustion engine can push the piston only because it is not in thermal equilibrium with the surroundings.
In both cases a system has ceased functioning normally. Why doesn’t that qualifying as “breaking” in the case of an organism?
Thanks!
Right! This is the same point that Glen Davidson was getting at above, too, when he asked me to explain how a gasoline engine works.
The difference, it seems to me, is that machines require some agent to manipulate them in order to push them away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Organisms sustain themselves at far-from-equilibrium attractors in phase space.
Some parts of an organism can break — a bone, for example. But I worry that to produce a concept general enough that both breaking and dying are subsumed under it, one can lost sight of the specific difference that one is trying to explain. That’s the exact problem with Intelligent Design theory — the ID theorist says, “organisms and machines are exactly the same, except for all the differences”. Which is why the ID theorist then concludes that organisms are just really special machines — the kind of machines that only a supremely intelligent being could have made. As Fuller nicely puts it, according to ID “biology is divine technology”.
I don’t doubt that abiogenesis has a purely naturalistic explanation, but conflating organisms and machines isn’t going to help us arrive at it.
If you want to start one, go right ahead. The question is somewhat interesting to me but I’m actually much more interested in the distinction between sentience and sapience. I just finished my second paper on it and I have more planned as my thinking on this develops.
I do not believe that most present are parsing their words as finely as you are.
Again, I think you are according more credit than is actually due. My understanding of most of those who pretend to champion presuppositionalism would be they simply are incoherent dolts who could not possibly pass a freshman philosophy course at a credible university.
You are beginning to remind me of freshman classes decades back when we discussed the ideas of George Berkeley.
FTR – are you certain it is I and in fact not you who is guilty of digression on this thread?
That could be true of the average Internet presuppositionalist, but my understanding is that there is a set of ideas in Van Til, Bahnsen, etc that are worth taking seriously — seriously enough to refute, anyway.
That’s fair. I gave up on trying to defend the ideas with which the OP started, so now it’s kind of a free-for-all. We can certainly talk about Popper if you want!
Never heard of them! More reading to catch up on! I am definietely not in your league.
Out of curiosity, what did they say that George Berkeley did not already say earlier… i.e. quickly in a nutshell?
To be honest, I don’t really know. My knowledge of this stuff is all second-hand. I have a friend who is writing his dissertation on presuppositionalism and pragmatism, and he keeps me somewhat informed. I’ll pass your question onto him and see what he says, though.
My own knowledge of theology is meager, which is why I rarely comment on theological issues — I know when I’m out of my depth! I’m only commenting here on why presuppositionalism seems really problematic to me as an epistemological position.
Of course that is the case. Why should you expect anything different?
quote;
But to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.
(Deu 29:4)
end quote:
It never ceases to amaze me how efforts to deny the obvious can make even very simple concepts appear difficult.
When I say “truth exists” I mean exactly the same thing that I mean when I say that “the definition of exists exists”.
If you can comprehend the second phrase the first one ought not give you trouble.
And you can comprehend the second or you would not ask me what I mean by the first.
Perhaps the dictionary definition of exists might help you to grasp what is meant by the term
Exists—— have objective reality or being.
Now I suppose that pondering the exact nature of existence when it comes to nonmaterial things is an interesting philosophical exercise but that musing is completely irrelevant to what we are discussing here.
Perhaps truth “exists” only in minds.
Perhaps truth “exists” as a relational proprietary of propositions to reality.
Perhaps truth “exists” as an eternal Platonic form
Perhaps we don’t have a clue how abstract nouns can exist
It does not matter
What matters is that truth exists necessarily.
And it does because God is Truth
peace
What is your justification for beginning here.
It certainly possibly that what you have proposed here is merely your imagination.
Certainly you have no direct evidence of any of this narrative but instead are relying on the very cognitive faculties that need to be justified in order to put together this story.
peace
How do you know this?
How could you possibly know this?
It sound like nothing more than an empty platitude like
“The smell of hot coffee in the morning is contentment.”
How is your claim not simply a subjective opinion?
peace
Patrick, are you ever going to defend your scientistic view of knowledge, or do you know how lame it is except as a club you can use to avoid critical thinking?
Because you claimed that you have objective, empirical evidence for the existence of your god. Clearly you do not or you would present it.
No, it is exactly what we are discussing here. What, exactly, do you mean when you say “Truth exists.”?
In other words, you have no idea what you mean when you say “Truth exists.” It’s just a feel good phrase for you with no actual meaning in the real world. Thank you for clarifying that.