tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29690362617390132002024-03-08T04:25:51.229-08:00emerson hall problemsSharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-51309355510936403992009-08-11T16:39:00.000-07:002009-08-16T08:44:37.643-07:00A Priori NeuroscienceEither Ned Block's Blockhead counts as thinking, or it's an empirical matter what possible configurations of stuff would count as thinking. For, suppose the claim labeled (2), below, were true and knowable<span style="font-style: italic;"> a priori</span>. Then you could do <span style="font-style: italic;">a priori</span> neuroscience as follows:<br />(1)I think (Descartes).<br />(2)A blockhead (i.e. a big physical system which passes the turing test just by having a big look-up table, with all possible series of questions that could be asked in, say, half an hour) would not count as thinking. (Ned Block)**<br />(3)Therefore, some part of me (call it my brain) is not a big look-up table.<br /><br /><br />**in <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Psychologism.htm">the paper where he introduces the blockhead</a>, Block argues that such a machine would not count as 'intelligent', not that it wouldn't count as 'thinking' but I presume he would also accept a similar claim for 'thinking'? <br /><br /><span class = "fullpost"><br />Now, the blockhead is explicitly cooked up to be a worse-case scenario for what physical stuff might realize a given behavior, so if you admit that the blockhead thinks it's hard to see how you could deny that any other thing with suitable behavior would count as thinking. Thus, rejecting a posteriori necessities, seems to be a direct route to behaviorism!<br /><br />I wonder if this could have motivated Wittgenstein's near behaviorism? I don't remember if he ever retracts the serious use of a prior=necessary in the Tractatus...and there definitely is that passage about 'what if you opened your skull and there was nothing inside?', so he does seem to have thought about these issues...<br /></span>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-72671024289780962402009-03-27T12:12:00.000-07:002009-08-16T08:22:39.692-07:00Pleasure from proofs and pleasure from 'psychologically insightful' novelsAnother post about something I don't really know about:<br /><br />Most people would agree that mathematical proofs can be beautiful and produce aesthetic pleasure, sometimes to a very high degree. From personal experience (though I don't think this is too controversial) I would say that beautiful proofs take statements and inferences that are well-known to you and/or feel obvious and combine them to produce something unexpected. [It may also be important that you can 'mentally survey' *how* familiar elements combine to yield something unexpected - that would be why proofs that split the question up into a large number of cases, or involve lengthy arithmetical computations tend to seem less beautiful.]<br /><br />Now, I propose what we find pleasing in 'psychologically insightful' passages in novels might be essentially the same as what we find pleasing in proofs. <br /><br /><span class ="fullpost"><br />I mean, merely learning new truths about psychology (e.g. by reading a psychology study) doesn't generally produce aesthetic pleasure. Nor do just any descriptions of people behaving in ways that are psychologically plausible (e.g. people running away from danger, or trying to earn money or whatnot). Rather, the psychological passages in novels which give us aesthetic pleasure are ones where people do things that seem a bit strange or surprising at first, but which we then recognize (on thinking about it more, or considering what the novelist says about this behavior) as in fact being psychologically plausible. When Proust's narrator describes feeling overwhelming excitement over a young woman's momentary nasal tone of voice, this seems strange at first (a nasal voice isn't generally an attractive feature) but then on a little further consideration it seems completely psychologically plausible, and actually very typical of what it feels like to experience erotic obsession.<br /><br />In these cases like this, we suddenly see how something rather new and surprising follows from principles about human psychology which we already implicitly accept. So the same thing is going on as when we read a beautiful proof - only it's our ability to recognize what's plausible psychologically, rather than our ability to recognize what's a good mathematical argument that's being milked to yield a surprising new conclusion.<br /><br />p.s. This idea might also explain how novelists would wind up learning things about psychology without making new empirical observations. They aren't coming up with new laws/principles but showing how new facts about the psychological plausibility of certain kinds of repetitive behaviors, neuroses, ambitions etc. are a consequence of things we already accept about (folk) psychology.<br /><br /></span>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-34096861591055441302008-11-26T14:30:00.000-08:002009-08-16T08:46:34.787-07:00Win Sharon's Money #7Here is a challenge for defenders of the modern notion of a priority as a (philosophically interesting) property which is distinct from necessity and analyticity....and for people who want to eat a really lavish Felipe's burrito for free.<br /><br /> I will describe creatures (the doctoroids) who know contingent medical facts a priori if they know them at all. If we allow that the doctoroids do know then the example can easily be generalized to show that for any true proposition there could be creatures with faculty which delivers knowledge of this proposition a priori, and hence that all true propositions are a priori. Thus the challenge for someone who holds the modern conception will be to say *why* the doctoroids don't count as knowing in a way that a) doesn't equate a priority with necessity or analyticity and b) seems remotely principled.<br /><br /><span class ="fullpost"><br />Imagine that in order to save people people 6 years of medschool we engineer 'doctoroids', people who are genetically and physically altered so that they find certain true propositions of organic chemistry and medicine brutely obvious, the way that we find the claim 2+2=4 obvious. That is: they don't ask for justification of these claims, and their acceptance of what has been hardwired into them is fairly causally independent of whatever they see after they are born (e.g. they all come to believe that smoking causes cancer at an early age regardless of how they are raised and continue to believe it in the face of strong evidence to the contrary). Also these creatures don't wind up doing anything that looks like empirically checking the accuracy of their medical intuitions - they find it perfectly obvious in advance that smoking causes cancer, and if they were to encounter cases where smoking seems not to cause cancer they would treat this the way that we treat cases where there seem to be 2 apples and 2 oranges which jointly constitute 3 fruit i.e. as evidence that their observations had somewhere gone wrong.<br /><br />(and here is a <a href="http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~seberry/doctoroids.pdf ">link</a> to my current draft of a paper on the subject, should you *really* want to procrastinate)<br /></span>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-28985530656706147852008-11-26T14:17:00.000-08:002008-11-26T14:27:55.815-08:00Win Sharon's Money 6I know nothing about bioethics so maybe this is an easy one. As usual, $5 (to be delivered after thanksgiving break) to the first person with a satisfactory answer. The question is, how is the violinist case morally different from the yaht case described below? Or why is it morally permissible to let the person on your yaht starve?<br /><br />In a famous article on abortion, Judith Jarvis Thompson presents the following thought experiment:<br /><br />"You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it?"<br /><br />She takes it that one would not be morally obliged to keep the violinist plugged in for nine months, and then uses comparison to this case to argue that - even if a fetus had the full moral status of an adult human - certain kinds of abortion would still be permissible. But is it permissible to unplug the violinist? I will argue that it is not.<br /><br />Consider the following case:<br />You are making a solo trip across the Atlantic in your yaht, and halfway there you hear the muffled sounds of a person coming out of a coma. It turns out that this person was conked on the head and tossed into your boat by gangsters, the day you left port. Now your engine breaks so it will take 9 months for you to get back. You have enough food stored to feed yourself in comfort for 9 moths or to barely keep both you and the involuntary-stow-away alive for 9 moths if you choose to share it. Are you morally obliged to share your food with the involuntary stow away?<br /><br />Intuitively (and perhaps legally) I think you are. It would not be morally permissible to let the person accidentally trapped on your yaht starve to death rather than share your food with them. But how does this case differ from the violinist example? The amount of sacrifice required, the fact that you are blameless in creating the situation of dependence, the fact that the space and resources which the person requires belong to you (you bought the food, and the yaht) are all the same.<br /><br />If there is no morally relevant difference we must conclude that Thompson is wrong, and it is not permissible to unplug the violinist. This is not, of course, to say that abortion is impermissible. But it does suggest that if abortion is permissible the reasons why it's permissible have something to do with the way that fetuses are different from adult human beings.<br /><br />OH and here's a link to the article: http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htmSharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-21052078024254206142008-01-22T15:50:00.000-08:002008-01-22T18:54:54.023-08:00Win Sharon’s Money 5: Bioethics, Sandel<p class="MsoNormal">So does anyone have an interpretation of this argument of Michel Sandel’s against genetic engineering *even when it’s feasible for adults to genetically modify themselves and if these opportunities are subsidized and equally available to all* which makes any sense? As usual, $5 to the first convincing answer. </p> <p>“Why, after all, do the successful owe anything to the least-advantaged members of society? The best answer to this question leans heavily on the notion of giftedness. The natural talents that enable the successful to flourish are not their own doing but, rather, their good fortune—a result of the genetic lottery. If our genetic endowments are gifts, rather than achievements for which we can claim credit, it is a mistake and a conceit to assume that we are entitled to the full measure of the bounty they reap in a market economy. We therefore have an obligation to share this bounty with those who, through no fault of their own, lack comparable gifts. </p> <p>A lively sense of the contingency of our gifts—a consciousness that none of us is wholly responsible for his or her success—saves a meritocratic society from sliding into the smug assumption that the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. Without this, the successful would become even more likely than they are now to view themselves as self-made and self-sufficient, and hence wholly responsible for their success. Those at the bottom of society would be viewed not as disadvantaged, and thus worthy of a measure of compensation, but as simply unfit, and thus worthy of eugenic repair. The meritocracy, less chastened by chance, would become harder, less forgiving. As perfect genetic knowledge would end the simulacrum of solidarity in insurance markets, so perfect genetic control would erode the actual solidarity that arises when men and women reflect on the contingency of their talents and fortunes.”</p> <p>-- from The Case Against Perfection http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200404/sandel</p> <p>So far as I can tell he is intentionally ‘splitting the difference’ between two bad arguments. One argument says that the best and indeed only sufficient moral arguments for social services for the worst off depend on the fact that our talents are merely gifts. In this case if subsidized voluntary genetic engineering in facts stops peoples’ talents from being gifts of fortune then allowing it will indeed stop people from supporting social services but (by hypothesis) it will also bring an end to the moral need for social services! It is no argument against a policy that adopting that policy will prevent people from doing something they are now obligated to do, *by creating a situation in which they accurately realize that they are not longer obligated to do that thing*. </p> <p>Maybe Sandel could try to work some magic with saying that having social services are always morally good, but would not be morally obligatory post genetic engineering and we want to create societies where people are morally obliged to do as many as possible of the things which would be good, but I can’t see this working. I mean, would it even be good for people to be taxed to support someone who refuses to undergo the (subsidized, freely available!) gene therapies they would need to make a living?</p> <p>The other argument is that people *erroneously* feel that our moral obligations to provide social services come from the fact that talents are gifts of fortune so preventing genetic enhancement is a good propaganda move in that keeping talents a gift of chance makes people keep voting the right way for the wrong reasons. This is at least *some* argument against genetic engineering, but it’s a very poor one. It reminds me of the bioethics argument against human cloning, that if you choose to raise the clone of your dead husband as your child you might then be sexually attracted to them and find this awkward. Surely this isn’t an argument against cloning, but an argument for cloning with some kind of advisory/legal mechanism to say ‘hey, cloning your dead husband might make things awkward so don’t do it!’ Surely given the potential benefits of genetic engineering (to lifespan, human dignity in the face of senility and professional obsolescence not to mention all the environmental, medical etc advances that could come from improving human abilities) we can find another less costly way to make sure we act on our genuine, independently existing, obligations to the poor.</p> <p>So, given that Sandel teachers here and whatnot (and of course given my ignorance about bioethics) I feel there must be something more going on here that I am missing. I am offering $5 to find out. </p>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-9911936572989243272007-09-06T06:59:00.000-07:002007-09-06T07:31:33.417-07:00Anti-Quinean Hoaxers?<p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>This NYT article quotes a letter in which Quine tells his friend’s kid about an arithmetic trick. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/a-little-math-puzzle-to-ponder/#more-1836<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"> It is interesting to hear about the private life of the great man, but I think the comment section is even more interesting: rather than proving to themselves via normal elementary school math why the trick *must* work for all positive integers many posters seem to just try a bunch of cases. e.g. “The algorithm does not work for 29 x 31.” “In fact, it does not work for the number 29 at all. Why is that?” Then, sometimes they forget to take into account the first column (which causes trouble only when the first number you are trying to multiply is odd) so these cases seem to ‘falsify’ the claim, from which they conclude that the algorithm has “holes”. They even guess (apparently purely inductively) what the holes might be e.g. ‘all pairs of numbers starting with 29’. Other responders disagree by going through their observations of the particular instance in question. Then the same thing happens with another pair of numbers!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Is this just a case of decaffeinated blog posting or a bit of sly performance art which envisages what the state of mathematics would be like if we *did* form and <span style=""> </span>revise mathematical beliefs in the same way as other more traditionally empirical parts of our web of belief?<o:p></o:p></p>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-1563708117842211352007-08-19T11:27:00.000-07:002007-08-19T11:37:05.316-07:00realist Pen Maddy, wafflesI just bought "Organic Vanilla Mini-Waffles 8 sets of 4 waffles". Hopefully the ur-elements are in the same box.Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-21275258182323076892007-06-25T09:32:00.002-07:002007-06-25T09:46:47.965-07:00from L.W.'s notes on Culture and Value<p class="MsoNormal">"If it is true that Mahler’s music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question is what he ought to have done with his talent. For obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he, say, have written his symphonies and then burned them? Or should he have done violence to himself and not written them? Should he have written them and realized that they were worthless? But how could he have realized that?"</p>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-80770536072299897802007-06-22T10:24:00.000-07:002007-06-22T11:05:26.654-07:00incompatible complaints?<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">A traditional objection to empiricism is that you couldn’t learn math empirically because math doesn’t make empirically testable predictions. On the other hand a traditional objection to formalism is that it would be surprising if a mere formal game had the scientific applications which math does. So prima facie it seems like on the one hand we are saying that the problem with empiricism is that math *doesn’t* make empirically testable predictions while on the other hand the problem with formalism is that math *does* <span style=""> </span>seem to make such predictions and these predictions turn out right. So it seems like these traditional objections can’t both work. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">One natural/obvious thing to say here would be that the applications problem for formalism is not that math itself makes empirical predictions (as the empiricist would like) but that it can be combined with a lot of empirical stuff to make predictions. But if the “applicability of math” just consists in the fact that mathematical statements can be usefully combined with a lot of empirically discovered stuff to make correct predictions this doesn’t seem like much of a problem for the formalist. Given two complex systems like the game of producing mathematical proofs on the one hand and the physical world on the other hand it would be more surprising if we *didn’t* find some parallels between the two. Newton et al just noticed the bits of math that seem to match certain transactions in the physical world. For all we know you *could* do just the same with any sufficiently complex formal game. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Specifically, the feature of math which (immediately seem to) pose a problem for the formalist are the *direct* applications – the claim that when there are 2Fs and 2Gs there are 4 F-or-Gs and predictions about what a computer will do so long as its electricity behaves in a certain way, or whether you will literally be able to tile a certain floor with certain physical features and certain tiles or whether a someone doing a certain kind of formal manipulations will get a certain string. It’s not surprising that some connection can be found between a complex formal game and what goes on in the external world, but here the ‘arbitrary formal manipulations’ of mathematical practice seem to call the shots and directly make predictions –and then these predictions turn out to be correct. If one allows that the formalism of math has direct predictive applications then it does indeed seem miraculous that the particular mathematical game which we ended up with makes the right predictions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But if math does have these *direct* predictive applications (if this program halts you should expect to find a mouse in the wiring, no one will ever manage to cover a flat floor with tiles in those shapes) which turn out to be correct when tested then how can we make the other traditional objection that ‘you can’t learn math empirically because math doesn’t make empirical predictions’?</p>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-27666781265871184672007-05-17T05:04:00.000-07:002007-05-17T05:05:08.104-07:00umm...free willthis really speaks for itself, i think<br />http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18684016/Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-52685050500278052592007-05-06T16:56:00.000-07:002007-05-07T06:40:31.768-07:00Win Sharon’s Money #4Quine, Backsliding<o:p> </o:p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It’s been a while since I have come to a philosophical question such that knowing the answer to it was worth $5 to me but here we have the latest Win Sharon’s Money with a prize of $5 to the first answer that convinces me (I will send out an email saying so) or what I think is the best one if none of them convince me. This one is about defending a very famous position of Quine's, so it should be on the easy side…</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If you are feeling public feel free to post your answers as comments here on the blog, otherwise email me:</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>So, as happens with alarming frequency whenever I think about stuff in the neighborhood, my grasp of Classic Quine has gotten unstuck. What did it this time was reading a bit of Davidson, in case that helps you see where this is question is coming from (not to imply that Davidson would agree with this point, as I understand it he wouldn’t, which is what got me thinking)…</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The question:</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Why can’t you take into account facts about whether a person <i style="">says</i> S in situations where it would be appropriate/normal to say that P as well as those about whether they assent to S in situations where P in deciding whether or not to attribute someone the belief that P? (If you did it, seems like this would cut down on a lot, though probably not all, indeterminacy)</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Specifically, what if our ideas about when it is appropriate/normal to say P are sometimes not just some kind of empirical/sociological knowledge about what 21<sup>st</sup> century western humans like to say but are part of our very conception of what it is to mean that P.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Consider the example –from W I think, though I don’t remember where - of a person who is trained to say the words ‘I think that…’ before every assertion. A person who was taught language in this way wouldn’t be a person who refused to make claims about anything which extended beyond their own epistemic state (wouldn’t you agree?). Rather, using the words ‘I think that’ in this uniform way would deprive them of their usual meaning. So this person’s sentence ‘I think it is raining’ would be much closer in meaning to my sentence ‘It is raining’ than to my homophonic sentence ‘I think it is raining’.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>I think this example shows us (among other things) that the evidence relevant to whether a given person’s sentence S means ‘I think that it is raining’ goes beyond their *assenting* to S in the right circumstances. For, the conditions under which one should *assent* to ‘I think it is raining’ and ‘It is raining’ are the same. However the conditions under which one should *assert* ‘It is raining’ and ‘I think it is raining’ are quite different (we use the latter to signal respect and the existence of disagreement or hint that there is a certain kind of relevant justification which one doesn’t have). Now I claim that there is a difference between meaning ‘It is raining’ by your sentence and meaning ‘I think it is raining’ and we are rationally required to attribute the former state and not the latter one to the person described in the paragraph above. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>If one allows that these notions of appropriate assertion (as opposed to merely assent) as being part of what is necessary for a person to mean P by their sentence S then it seems like a lot of traditional indeterminacy disappears. So, for example, there are definite (though relatively limited) conditions under which it is appropriate to assert ‘here is an undetached rabbit part’ or ‘the spatial complement of a rabbit is presently avoiding this spot’ which differ from those under which it is appropriate to assert ‘here is a rabbit’. Thus one might think that more detailed consideration of the way that a person’s linguistic behavior constrains their meaning (it’s not just a matter of assenting to what’s true but of asserting what’s appropriate) removes a lot of apparent indeterminacy of reference.</p>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-30245160093481537652007-04-05T10:12:00.000-07:002007-04-08T09:55:47.007-07:00Fun with Quotes<span style="font-style: italic;">Back when I was TFing for QR22 I used to pass the time by making up puzzles. At some point, I came up with some quote puzzles (of the standard use/mention type) which I proposed to Peter as extra credit problems. He thought we had best not use them, which in retrospect was a wise decision. Anyway, no reason they should go to waste, so here they are!<br /><br />To answer these puzzles, all you have to do is put a certain number of quotes into the given sentence to transform it into a truth. To give you a feel for the locutions I use, the following sentence has two quotes in it, the first of which is an opening quote, and the second of which is a closing quote.<br /><br />“Boston” names Boston<br /><br />Puzzle (1) below is my attempt to create a slightly more challenging limerick puzzle than the well known one given in most logic classes which features the sentence about Boston above. One of (2) - (4) throws self-reference into the mix. One of the nice things about puzzle (4) is that (so far as I know) it has a unique solution. (6) is inspired by part of Dave Gray's recent Eminees presentation. I might post hints in the comments. Enjoy!<br /><br />(1) A few quotes placed right help construe<br />the sense of this jumbled word stew:<br />James names names names James<br />names names names James names<br />names names James names names, which is true.<br /><br />(2) This sentence has the quoted expression this in it, but there is no instance of it unquoted.<br /><br />(3) This sentence has exactly two instances of in it.<br /><br />(4) The number of quotes in the sentence on this page beginning with the words the number of quotes on this page is three, and moreover, they are all opening quotes occurring before the first letter t in it.<br /><br />(5) This sentence uses but has no mention of the word akimbo.<br /><br />(6) Names name names name name.<br /><br /></span>Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11795150797147601778noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-73674354755335405112007-03-24T09:39:00.000-07:002007-03-24T09:43:25.521-07:00A little Davidsonian WisdomNothing terribly deep, but something worth reminding ourselves of every now and then:<br /><br />"Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant, to pick a few winners, recognized no lines between metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy, psychology, philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy, and neither would we if our universities and colleges [and departmental workshops] didn't often compel us to think of ourselves and our colleagues as belonging in one or another field." (from "Aristotle's Action" p. 291)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-31276577449338577392007-03-19T13:51:00.000-07:002007-03-19T14:01:12.050-07:00Agreement, Political Authority and ProcrastinationPolitical philosophy is not my area either, but I wanted to add a post here to keep up the momentum of this blog and since I’ve been thinking about political philosophy in relation to my teaching obligations, here are some undeveloped thoughts which I could be easily persuaded to abandon.<br /><br />Despite all their differences, there appears to be a surface similarity between Hobbes’ and Socrates’ views on the nature of political obligation: both seem to hold that one’s obligation to obey the law stems from an agreement one has freely made (or would hypothetically make). For Hobbes, you contract with your fellow (future) countrymen to transfer your rights to a powerful sovereign and thereby incur an obligation to obey the law. For Socrates – according to one of the various arguments hinted at in the Crito – you agree to obey the laws of the state by choosing to live in it. Socrates could’ve moved away from Athens but didn’t and thereby incurred an obligation to obey its laws. Unlike Hobbes’ view, Socrates’ isn’t exactly a general theory about political obligation; Hobbes’ theory is mean to apply across the board whereas Socrates’ argument applies only in cases where the agent freely chose to remain in (or emigrate to) the state in question in full knowledge of the fact that doing so would put him under political obligation.<br /><br />But though both views seem to ground political obligation in an agreement, the mechanism by which the agreement gives rise to obligations is very different in each case. For Hobbes, our agreement sets up a powerful sovereign who in turn makes it self-interestedly rational for each of us to obey the law. (On this reading it sounds rather odd to speak of an obligation to obey the law; the sovereign’s subjects may have decisive reason to obey the law but it sounds odd to my ears to call it an "obligation".) For Socrates, the agreement gives rise to obligation more directly; he doesn’t spell this out, but presumably the agreement works like any other sort of promise: if I promise you that I’ll do X, I have thereby incurred an obligation to do so.<br /><br />Assuming the interpretations of Hobbes and Socrates I’ve just sketched are (close to) correct, I’ve come to think that neither view succeeds in grounding the obligation to obey the law (or the corresponding rights of rulers to command) in anything plausibly thought of as an agreement.<br /><br />Socrates’ argument actually presupposes the notions of political authority and obligation thus does not succeed in accounting for them. Socrates imagines that the Laws of Athens tell him to either leave the city or to obey their commands. But for his choice here to be morally transformative in the way he thinks it is (i.e. if it is to yield obligations towards the Laws), the Laws must already possess political authority. If I stop you on the street and tell you to leave the city or pay me $50, I haven’t really succeeded in doing anything other than to utter some powerless words (and perhaps to puzzle or annoy you). I certainly haven’t made it the case that your staying in the city constitutes an agreement to pay me $50. What do the Laws of Athens have that I don’t such that Socrates’ choice to remain in Athens does give rise to specific obligations to obey the laws whereas your choice to remain in the city doesn’t give me a claim against you for $50? I’m inclined to say that it is political authority. Socrates’ decision to remain in the city cannot be what confers political authority on the Laws since the decision is only morally transformative in the way he supposes if the Laws already have that authority.<br /><br />(I’m muddling here but I can’t quite see my way clearly. Even if we assume that the Laws have the authority to require Socrates to choose between exile and obedience, before he actually makes his choice to remain in the City there doesn’t seem to be any sense in which he has an obligation to obey the law. I’ve been speaking as if political authority and the obligation to obey the law are mirror notions but that’s probably not the case.) <br /><br />Hobbes is easier since it is really rather straightforward that what does the work of generating reasons to obey the law is not our agreement with our fellow countrymen, but rather the sovereign’s power to punish lawbreaking. There is a sense in which the agreement is a necessary condition of our overriding reasons for obedience but Hobbes’ social contract is not morally transformative the way promises, agreements and freely entered contracts are normally thought to be.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-51011324937808267062007-03-17T17:14:00.000-07:002007-03-17T19:38:08.026-07:00When is ‘seeming to see’ enough?<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><span style=""> </span>There are a lot of different cases where people claim to have an experience which amounts to simply seeing that some P is the case. Chess players ‘see’ the weakness of a pawn structure, potters ‘see’ that a certain pot will crack when fired, people having religious experiences suddenly ‘see’ that god is real and cares about them, intro math students ‘see’ that you can’t put 4 puppies into 3 boxes without putting more than one puppy into some box, and nearly all ordinary people can ‘see’ that you can’t pick a lock with a banana and, of course we can see that we have hands. This raises a some natural questions: how much justification do these experiences-as-if-of-seeing-that-p provide? And, are there natural divisions in the list of examples I just gave, or do they all have the same epistemic status? </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>At present I am torn between two opinions about the epistemic status of these ‘seeming to see’ experiences. The simple view would be to say that any such experience where it feels like you are sensing that P provides prima facie warrant for believing that P. The case of religious experience gives me some qualms though, and one can cook up even more implausible cases. Some people claim that they can feel via a sense of forboding in their heart that their twin or loved one is in trouble. Or, imagine looking northwards at the clouds in the direction of Canada and ‘feeling a great disturbance in the force’ as it were, which seems to let you feel that something terrible is happening in a certain small town in Canada.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Now I hesitate to say, given this kind of example, that seeming to see that P provides prima facie justification. It’s pretty clear that in these circumstances a rational person should not immediately believe what their strange experience seems to show them but check (say, by making the appropriate phone calls) whether this experience really does reliably track how their twin is doing or what is going on in Canada. And a supporter of the ‘prima facie warrant’ idea can agree with this. But what about cases where there is no practical possibility of checking – suppose you have these experiences when you are out in the woods, or suppose God tells you as part of your religious experience that you will only get normal empirical evidence for his existence after he is dead [ed: after YOU are dead :)]? Here I am inclined to think that you shouldn’t believe what you seem to see at all, until you have checked the reliability of your experiences as if of seeing – and that once you do this the amount of evidence which your seeming to see provides is proportional to the evidence that you have now accumulated that your experiences of seeming to see are reliable.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But what about the case of sense perception? You can’t check the reliability of your senses against something else, but surely seeming to see that there’s a table in front of you does give you reason to believe it. This leads to the second more complicated theory of the epistemic status of seeming-to-see-that-P. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">On this (slightly Peacockian theory) most such experiences give one no reason to believe anything on their own. You are only justified in believing what such experiences seem to tell you if you are also frequently exposed to evidence that confirms the reliability of this supposed perception. So the chess player who ‘seems to see’ that his queenside pawns are weak only has as much reason to believe that the pawns *are* weak as he has evidence that these experiences of his are reliable (so e.g. if he is a chess master he will have strong reason to believe it while if he is infamously bad at chess like myself he will have very little reason to believe this). </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">BUT (here’s the Peacockian part) in some cases the experience of seeming to see that P is central to, or indeed nearly all there is to our practice of saying that P. In these cases the facts about when we ‘seem to see that P’ largely determine what we mean by P and hence what it would take for P to be true. Specifically, these facts determine the meaning of P in such a way that if we say P whenever we feel like we can ‘see that P’ we are quite likely to be right. So, for example if what tends to give us the experience of ‘seeming to see that there’s a table’ is tables then ‘there’s a table’ means there’s a table, if it is vat state T then ‘there’s a table’ means the vat is in state T and so on a la Putnam on the BIV. Thus, in these very special cases believing that P when you have the experience of seeming to see that P will be a reliable, and maybe even justified method of forming belief.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This proposal has the advantage of giving a motivated way of separating up the list of ‘seeming to see’ experiences I started with in a motivated way. We have other practices which give us an independent grip on what it would be for your twin sister to be in trouble or disaster to be striking in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Canada</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Thus your feeling of conviction that P remains just that until you have evidence that this sixth sense of yours is reliable. But, on the other hand, in the perceptual case we don’t have this kind of independent grip on the stuff which our five senses seem to show us. Thus your experience of seeming-to-see that there is a table plays a role in determining *what it would mean for there to be* a table there which ensures that you are justified. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">So how does this sound? Any takers on the simple proposal or the split (not to say…shudder…disjunctive ;) ) proposal? New proposals? Obvious points in the philosophy of perception which I am missing?</p>Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-43024509034668071692007-03-17T08:58:00.000-07:002007-03-17T09:03:28.201-07:00Conflicting conceptions of what it takes to have knowledge vs. what it takes to have *mathematical* knowledge?<p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Suppose someone is doing a bunch of really long sums e.g. adding 12 digit numbers, with a blunt pencil and in a hurry. Under these circumstances they are quite likely to make at least one mistake during the course of each of the sums, so (as they learn when they check over their answers) overall they get only about one sum in ten correct. Now after doing this for a while, suppose they do one more sum and, being the confident person they are, they believe that the answer to it is in fact 1789200056911 as their calculations suggest. And suppose that this is, in fact the right answer, and in this case they have been lucky enough not to make any mistakes along the way. Then do you think that they know that whatever + whatever = 1789200056911 or not?/ Is their belief justified?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">On the one hand, it seems like they know since they have gone through and been convinced by a correct process of reasoning which entails that this is the right answer. On the other hand, it seems like they don’t know that the answer is that because they usually make so many mistakes that the mere fact of their computing a certain result is very little evidence that that result is correct.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">My impulse would be to say that this shows that we two different standards – for mathematical knowledge and for knowledge in general which are clashing in this case. Maybe one can also get a conflict between these standards for knowledge in the opposite direction: setting computers to check the first few billion cases of goldbach’s conjecture (that every number greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes) could eventually give you very strong justification for believing it (and hence perhaps knowledge in the ordinary sense) but it would be strange to say that you know the conjecture was true if you didn’t have a proof.</p> Also this case seems similar to the familiar lottery example 'do you know that you won't win the lottery, when you have evidence that that your chances of loosing are overwhealmingly good?' so maybe the lottery example is further evidence that our conception of knowledge is fragmented/highly context dependent.Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.com8