I hope I will be forgiven for abusing the term “skepticism” here — for what I have in mind is not a perfectly innocuous “claims require evidence” epistemic prudence, but rather Cartesian skepticism.
According to the Cartesian skeptic, one can be perfectly certain about one’s own mental contents and yet also be in total doubt about what really corresponds to those mental contents. Hence she needs an argument that will justify her belief that there is any external reality at all, and that at least some of her mental contents can correspond to it.
There are many responses to Cartesian skepticism, and here I want to pick up on one strand in the pragmatist tradition that, on my view, cuts deepest into what is wrong with Cartesian skepticism.
I think that one cannot talk, in any intelligible sense, about justification in the first place without also committing oneself to a belief in other minds with whom one shares a world. (Not that I like that way of putting it — “a belief in other minds” is a much too intellectualistic interpretation of the myriad ways in which we experience the sentience of nonhuman animals and the sentience-and-sapience of other human animals.)
I say this because justification is itself a social practice — and one that we ourselves are taught how to participate in. (In the contemporary jargon, I’m a social externalist about justification.) For what is justification? It is a normative assessment of the evidence and reasons for one’s claims. But that normative assessment necessarily involves other rational beings like ourselves.
Think of it this way (taking an example from Wittgenstein): suppose I’m waiting for a train, and I want to know if it will be on time. I could look up the schedule. But suppose further that instead of doing so, I imagine the schedule: I look up the time in my imagination. Why isn’t that the same thing as looking up the actual schedule?
The answer is that there’s no constraint on how I imagine the schedule. It could be whatever I want — or subconsciously desire — it to be. But without constraints, there are no norms or rules at all.
Justification is much the same: it is a normative assessment of evidence and reasoning according to rules or norms, and there are no private norms. (Though Wittgenstein doesn’t put it this way, he might say that the very idea of a “private norm” is a category mistake — a category mistake on which Cartesian skepticism and several hundred years of subsequent philosophy have depended.)
So whereas the Cartesian skeptic thinks that we need to justify our belief in the world and in other minds, I think that this makes no sense at all. We cannot justify our belief in other minds and in the world because there is no such thing as justification at all in the first place without also accepting (what is indeed a manifest reality to everyone who is not a schizophrenic or on a bad acid trip) that there are other sentient-and-sapient beings other than oneself with whom one shares a world.
.A further point to make (and the subject of my current article-in-progress) is that justification and truth require both sentience and sapience.
The clue I’m following is Davidson’s triangulation argument: suppose there are two creatures who are each responding sensorily to some object in a shared environment. How is an onlooker supposed to know which object they are both responding to? If both creatures can compare its own responses with the responses of the other creature, then each can determine whether or not they are cognizing the same object.
The point here is that two (or more) sentient creatures — intentional beings that can successfully navigate their environments — can each have a grasp of objectivity if and only if each creature can
(1) represent the similarities and differences between its own embodied perspective and an embodied perspective occupied by another creature and
(2) be motivated to minimize discrepancies and eliminate incompatibilities between its own action-guiding representations and its action-guiding representations of the other creature’s action-guiding representations, and in the process
(3) attain the metacognitive awareness whereby it can take its own embodied perspective as an embodied perspective, and thereby be aware that how it subjectively takes things to be is not (necessarily) how things really are.
This process is facilitated by a shared language that allows each creature to monitor how each is representing the other’s representations and revise its own representations when incompatibility between representations is discovered. The function of norms — of discourse and of conduct — is to motivate each creature to revise its representations when incompatibilities are discovered.
One important implication of this argument is that sentient creatures cannot distinguish between their own subjective orientation on things and how things really are. They lack an awareness of objectivity and an awareness of their own subjectivity. By contrast, sapient creatures are aware of both objectivity — how things really are, as distinct from how they are taken to be — and subjectivity — how things are taken to be, as distinct from how they really are.
This line of thought also explains why I have been adamant that objectivity does not require absoluteness: sapient creatures can be aware of the difference between how things are and how they are taken to be, and thus be aware that they might have false beliefs, even though no sapient creature can transcend the biological constraints of its form of sentience.
It doesn’t entail that solipsism per se is false; it entails that the Cartesian is not entitled to ask for an argument against the possibility of solipsism.
You’re supposed to take the pants off first.
Do you ever tire of being irrational?
I can see why you would say that, but that’s not how I see it. I don’t think there is any such thing as “an accurate standard with which to compare inferences” — not in the sense you mean, anyway.
Rather, inferences can only be compared against each other — with an eye towards minimizing incompatibilities between cognitive contents, in order to maximize the probability of successful joint action.
Inferences can be compared in the short-term in joint intentionality, as when two or more people are having a discussion about what to do and why. And they can also be compared over longer terms, as when we are discussing whether an inherited bit of tribal lore is useful or reliable under perhaps novel conditions.
But apart from that process of synchronic and diachronic comparison, there is no other standard. Which is just another way of putting my earlier point that our knowledge of the world can be objective without being absolute.
How did he know what was real and what was his imagination?
I promised I would not say it.
I must resist the urge
😉
Patrick doubts it.
And if I don’t employ empiricism for some belief then it logically follows that it is a religious belief. Is that how you arrived at the belief you just expressed?
Just wag your head if it’s beyond you.
I think you’re wrong here. Even bacteria communicate with each other. What on earth would be the reason for that if it were not to compare inferences?
Patrick is obviously a squirrel. But I am not sure his method of classification would be accepted by biologists.
Amen. One can ignore the odds when gambling and still “have fun.”
You probably think you’re being reasonable. You probably think theists are being unreasonable. Why is another animal needed?
I eat shrimp.
I get sick.
Therefore shrimp is inedible.
Perhaps you should eat squirrel.
What is “provisional knowledge”? Is it “knowledge” that may be false? So then, who needs truth, really?
I appreciate your self-control there!
And I hope you at least have a better appreciation of my position now.
So, this is how philosophical debates matter. But it does not matter whether the public perception is true? Or, if it matters that the public have the true perception on these matters, how would you convey the truth? More importantly, how would you yourself arrive at the truth?
There needs to be some way to support or disprove your claim if it is to be relevant to our shared reality.
You’ve recognized in a previous comment that comparing inferences with others is not the only way to justify a belief. It is also possible to compare one’s beliefs with empirical evidence and determine if they are supported or disproved. While interaction with others is incredibly helpful, as the progress of science shows, it is not essential as far as I can see.
This one needs to be up on a wall somewhere
peace
Why don’t you reread that one a few times out loud, maybe a light bulb will go off
peace
I do appreciate it a little better. I hope that you understand some of the nuance of mine better as well.
In addition to synchronic and diachronic comparison think of a juxtaposition to an indissoluble standard otherwise your foundation is built on shifting sand IMO.
There is that Trinity thingy again
I told you that clarification can be a worthy goal.
😉
peace
Yes, indeed. But here’s the crucial point — the “shifting sand” is, to use a metaphor, a feature and not a bug of my view. I agree with you about the implication but it is one that I happily embrace. To be more provocative, I think that “shifting sand” is all anyone’s got anyway, and the vast majority of folks are simply in denial about it. Ideology is one helluva drug.
I think you have misunderstood me, or I have misunderstood you.
Firstly, any inference that is about the world will already contain reference to some objects and/or relations. Only inferences that are purely deductive are devoid of empirical content.
Secondly, inference per se is not unique to rational, sapient animals. Great apes can infer, and indeed, there’s literature suggesting that chimpanzees can even know what other chimps have and have not inferred.
Thirdly, although we — like apes — can and do make inferences about what we experience, we acquire the ability to determine if our inferences are correct or not only through how we are socialized into a shared language that allows us to compare (synchronically and diachronically) inferences based on discrete, distinct embodied perspectives on the world.
Fourthly, having acquired that ability through enculturation, one can then deploy that ability on one’s own. It’s not that other sapient animals are required for one to be justified in any particular instance, but that other sapient animals are required for acquiring the ability to justify, even to oneself.
I have no idea what it would mean to “arrive at the truth,” except in the Peircean sense of an idealized community that has been inquiring for infinite time. What I or anyone can take-to-be-true within any finite time depends on the kind of inquiry: logical, mathematical, scientific, ethical, etc.
Be that as it may, I certainly do not think that philosophers have any monopoly on truth or any privileged access to truths. What philosophers have to offer, at our best (which is exceedingly rare), is that we are not specialists. We are interested in “how things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term” (Sellars). This includes science, art, religion, politics, literature, ethics, politics — the interest here lies in understanding, as much as possible, how everything fits together. And this is an impossible task to complete, of course, but we always learn much from every attempt.
Hear, hear! Don’t let the desire for perfection overwhelm the reality of provisional knowledge.
It’s absolutely provisional.
Relatively absolutely, anyway.
Glen Davidson
I’m quite capable of misunderstanding you. 😉
I think this is our point of contention. As social animals with the capacity for language, interacting with other members of our species is certainly a very good way to determine if our inferences are correct. I am unconvinced that it is the only way to do so.
Again, I agree that other sapient beings can help us justify our inferences, but I don’t see how that is the only valid method of justification. Simple correspondence with reality, e.g. “That animal looks friendly, oops it bites!” can justify one’s inferences. That type of interaction with the real world can take place whether or not one is acculturated in a society.
Does your definition of “justification” require interaction with other sapient beings?
😉
If the case we’re imagining involves a sentient animal that has never acquired a language, then I would say that while the animal can certainly infer, and can even err in its inferences (the branch looked as if it would support the animal’s weight, the predator looked to be further away), it would still not able to take its own inferences as correct or incorrect, and thus not be able to take itself to be justified.
Some philosophers — I believe this is Walto’s position — would say that one can be justified in one’s beliefs without being able to take oneself to be justified. I disagree; I think of justification as a highly distinct epistemic and semantic achievement, and that acquiring the capacity to justify involves extended learning in a cultural milieu where is a shared language in which one can learn how to engage in the to-and-fro of exchanging reasons.
Once this ability has been acquired, then yes, one can then proceed to justify beliefs to oneself. But I don’t think that a merely sentient animal that’s never gone through that process can do so.
This isn’t just definitional fiat; this is a view based on what I know about cognitive developmental psychology. (Admittedly, that’s not much.) And in particular, I’m trying to think thorough how we acquire an understanding of what it is to give a reason at all. How any one of us acquires the ability to play the game of giving and asking for reasons — even if we then go on to play that game by ourselves — is as important to me as how this ability evolved over the course of hominid evolution.
Just my two sense.
Humans who do not grow up interacting with other humans are either dead or severely mentally crippled.
Just being born deaf guarantees lifetime mental retardation, unless special efforts are made in infancy to teach sign language.
Our ability to think does not exist except as a form of social interaction.
I am not an expert on this, but I do have an MA in the subject.
I’ll disagree with that one, though I agree with your other points.
On thinking, I don’t doubt that social interaction is important to how we think and the effectiveness of thinking. But it goes too far to say that there could not be any thinking at all unless there had been social interaction.
It depends on how one characterizes the thinking in question.
On the one hand, I don’t think that it’s going too far if one is talking about the fine-grained inferentially articulated content of ‘normal’ thoughts. Consider our ability to distinguish between (i) incompatibility between two people talking about the same thing and (ii) incompatibility between two thoughts held by the same person. I really cannot see how the ability to distinguish between (i) and (ii) could be acquired in the absence of an iterated, temporally extended process of social interaction.
On the other hand, I certainly agree that some simple concepts and thoughts are possible in sentient animals without any language at all, if we are talking only about classifications that play a functional role in inferences.
Why not? If it changes its behavior based on feedback from the real world based on its actions, how is that not acquiring a justified inference?
If it’s not merely a matter of definition, how would you propose to identify when what you mean by “justification” has taken place? For example, how would you operationally determine if a crow using a tool is justifying its inferences about the efficacy of the approaches it tries or not?
How does a rat get better at a maze if it doesn’t (in some sense) take some of its inferences to be incorrect, and thus to correct those inferences?
No, it doesn’t flag the “wrong way” as “false” in any kind of language, but it does recognize that one way is “wrong,” “incorrect” in some manner, and then goes the “correct” way the next time.
I don’t doubt the importance of language, especially in any complex understanding of propositional knowledge. I don’t get this idea of non-verbal animals not understanding anything to be “wrong” or “incorrect,” just because they don’t think the word “wrong,” or any equivalent word, when something fails. A non-verbal animal does–it has to–know when something really is wrong, in order to figure out what is right, in matters important to its life and well-being.
Glen Davidson
Depends on how you define thinking. Non-human animals solve problems without the benefit of language. There are elements of problem solving and communication that exist in the absence of syntactical language.
But mammals do not develop normally without interaction. Humans, doubly so.
these threads go nowhere because we talk past each other, and we do that because the deep meaning of language elements are not congruent.
We have artificial languages and jargons that attempt to be objective, and I assume one of the tasks of philosophy is to develop objective jargons for discussing existential abstractions, but I don’t see a lot of progress in reaching agreement.
How can you reach agreement when the object of discussion is fictional?
Science and engineering reaches across religion and politics because it deals in operations that work or not.
GlenDavidson,
The most I’m prepared to concede for right now is that rat has correct and incorrect inferences. But I don’t see how it can take its inferences to be correct or incorrect.
In the experimental set-up, correctness and incorrectness are defined by the experiment’s intentions in setting up the experiment. In nature, it would have to be the goals or purposes of the animal itself against which inferences are correct or incorrect — correct if they contribute to the satisfaction of goals, incorrect if they do not.
In sapient animals, this dimension of biological normativity is expanded or augmented into a dimension of discursive normativity. (Rouse calls this approach “two-dimensional normativity.”) This involves not whether the inference contributes or hinders the satisfaction of species-specific goals, but whether the inference is incompatible with the inferences made by others.
The function of norms — what our friends at UD like to call “the laws of thought” — is to prevent incompatible commitments, because commitments to incompatible semantic contents prevent successful joint action.
This is because semantic contents are linguistic markers attached to action-guiding, affordance-detecting representations. If the representations don’t cohere, then there won’t be successful joint actions, since the function of representations is to guide action.
But whether a belief conforms to discursive norms is just what it is for that belief to be justified, since justification is a matter of whether one has good reasons for that belief.
This identifies part of my confusion about your position. The first part of the sentence seems to be defining “justification” as requiring interaction with others, but you’ve said earlier that it’s not merely a matter of definition.
The last half of the sentence doesn’t seem to follow from the rest of your argument because correspondence with reality is a good reason for belief, whether or not one shares that belief with others.
“Correspondence with reality.” There goes skepticism.
I’ve heard that some experimenters were less than scrupulous about cleanliness and overlooking the possibility of urine acting as a scent marker.
Whilst the documenting of feral children is possibly sensationalist and any experiment would be beyond unethical, we are social animals and we come from a long line of social animals. Tom Hanks was almost normal before Cast Away
I’m not aware of any authentic case of a feral child. Certainly there have been children locked away, but as you say, any experiment would be criminal.
What we do have are deaf children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelingual_deafness
This leaves me wondering about Chomsky’s theory of linguistic development. It would seem, that despite professional intervention, language acquisition is heavily dependent of the ability to hear and speak.
I wonder what this implies about disembodied minds.
That may be, but there is certainly evidence of spatial mapping in their brains.
I remember watching a program on eagles, where a male eagle had lost his mate, but found another. I believe he kept the nest throughout. And it was his nest after his mate died. His new mate would bring sticks and what-not, put them in what appeared to be good places, and every time he would pick up each piece and put it someplace else. He knew what was right (correct), and was going to keep his nest just right (they didn’t say if this possessiveness declined over time, but one would think it a real possibility).
To me it’s more or less a given that language is both going to deal with things differently and to open up many possibilities (propositions become possible, often having to be argued rather than shown). But ravens think out puzzles apparently rationally without language, and almost any reasonably intelligent animal knows that there either is or is not something under a rock or bottlecap, or whatever. I tend to see continuity of thought from pre-verbal animals to those with language, just with a whole lot more ability to deal with abstraction and complexity arising with language.
Glen Davidson
Deaf children invent sign language. One needn’t have to hear to develop language, and “speaking” with their hands is sufficient.
Glen Davidson
Got any evidence that deaf children invent adequate language without intervention?
I’d like to see links to studies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/nicaragua/1471947/Deaf-children-invent-a-new-sign-language.html
Yes indeed. Deafness from birth is hugely isolating. Helen Keller was 19 months old when illness rendered her deaf and blind.
Again I’m at a distinct disadvantage because I promised not to ask the obvious question. 😉
I think it is a tad arrogant to claim that shifting sand is all that exists while standing on a vast plane of shifting sand.
I would think that a more rational position would be to withhold any judgement whatsoever on these matters unless in a position that make that sort of judgement possible.
Maybe folks who claim to be standing on solid ground are correct maybe they are totally deluded but you will never know if you simply assume that yours is the privileged position.
And you can never know if yours is actually the privileged position unless you have something in addition to synchronic and diachronic comparison with which to justify yourself.
Those two planks cry out for the third leg of the stool.
Don’t get me wrong here,
You are two thirds of the way to a compelling epistemology that is far better than most folks I encounter from your side of the fence.
peace
Sure. Can’t find it now but I previously posted a pic of a tame Corvus monedula (Western Jackdaw). It had fallen from a nest as a chick and was found and raised by a local family. They fed it and did not restrain it in any way but the bird was fixated on humans and sought out human company, especially if they were wearing jewellery.
Unfortunately, with the apparent gift of hearing and speech, you never learned to read.
Keller was not pre-linguistically deaf. It makes a difference.