Results tagged “philosophy” from Eccentric Eclectica

I just finished re-reading The Myth of Sisyphus for my philosophy book club. It has been almost twenty years since I last read it. When I read it before I thought it was brilliant, a cri de coeur for everyone to go out and live an authentic life. Today it doesn’t feel nearly so effective. No doubt some of that is due to changes in myself but there are still some exogenous factors that seem worth exploring.

My first theory was that Camus is too tied to a specific time and historical setting. He wrote in the middle of World War Two, a war that almost defines the absurd. As Adorno once said, there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. For an existentialist there can be no life that doesn’t consider suicide and face the absurd universe head on after the searing experiences of World War.

Then I considered that his argument is only effective for those who are ready to accept it. Perhaps there is a certain psychological state that the reader needs to be in to see the full force of Camus’ arguments. Maybe this is why the absurd seems like the perfect adolescent philosophy. See Holden Caulfield and Paul Goodman. Another group that seems particularly receptive to the absurd message are the religious. The form and style of the Myth of Sisyphus reminds me a lot of the mystical writings of various Christians like Meister Eckert or Pseudo-Dionysius.

My next thought, and the one that feels closest to a possible answer, is postmodernism. Perhaps Camus and the absurd are a relic of the modern era when there was a general consensus, a grand narrative, of enlightenment and human melioration to believe in. Although Camus rejected the meaning of human life he was living at the end of a time when a meaning to human life was still a live question. Today, in the postmodern world, there is no consensus that meaning exists.

On the one hand this may be considered to be the triumph of Camus’ existential absurdism, everyone is now in the middle of an absurd world that seemingly can’t be escaped. It is the impossibility of escape that makes reading Camus so difficult. The idea of revolt against the absurd seems woefully underdetermined. I guess this means I need to keep reading The Rebel if I really want to find an answer.

From John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology by Larry A. Hickman

“What, in Dewey’s view, constitutes responsible technology? This book is an attempt to suggest some answers to that question. By way of review and conclusion, it may be said that Dewey rejected what I have called “straight-line instrumentalism,” or the view that neutral tools are brought to bear on ends that are valued for reasons external to the situations within which those tools have been developed. Drawing on the metaphors that accompanied Darwinian evolutionary theory, Dewey argued that human beings are organisms within nature and that their tool use is one of the developmental edges of natural activity. Tools and artifacts are no more neutral that are plants, nonhuman animals, or human beings themselves: they are interactive within situations that teem with values.

Responsible technology involves for Dewey the choice, the implementation, and the testing of goals that arise from those situations. There is no need of divine intervention to point the way, and the quest for absolute truth constitutes an impediment. Values arise out of inquiry, and once they are refined by inquiry they are brought back to the situations from which they originated in order to ascertain whether they are appropriate. Tools that are utilized in choosing, implement, and testing enter into the articulation of ends, or things to be done, modifying those ends as the need arises. Evolving ends demand the modification of existing tools. Responsible technology thus remains flexible because it must accommodate changing situations. In addition to being resilient, responsible technology is redundant: it does not allow undue risk, and it backs itself up, both in terms of parallel development and in terms of the establishment of plateaus as possible fallback positions. Responsible technology is not so much radical as regenerative.” (202)

Cognition in Practice, by Jean Lave, 1998

“So far I have described a series of dichotomously polarized issues that have sustained limitations on debate between paradigms and disciplines over a considerable period of time. I have yet to describe the sources of the coherence with which the issues reinforce on another. They take their shape, the great divides formed, in terms of a positivist epistemology which specifies a series of assumptions on which they are based: rationality exists as the ideal canon of thought; experimentation can be thought of as the embodiment of this ideal in scientific practice; science is the value-free collection of factual knowledge about the world; factual knowledge about the world is the basis for the formation of scientific theory, not the other way around; science is the opposite of history, the one nomothetic the other ideographic; cognitive processes are general and fundamental, psychology, correspondingly, a nomothetic discipline; society and culture shape the particularities of cognition and give it content, thus sociocultural context is specific, its study ideographic; general laws of human behavior, therefore, must be dissected away from the historical and social obfuscations which give them particularity. These propositions entail one another in complex ways. To challenge any one of them draws the rest into question as well. A quest for better understanding of everyday cognition in context that questions conventional relations between the socially organized world, culture and cognition — and hence the whole field of assumptions — is unavoidably, therefore, a fundamental epistemological question.” page 87

While reviewing my philosophy weblog news feeds I came across a link to the live webstream of a brain dissection on the internet. H.M., a famous neuroscience patient, died a year ago. He was famous in brain studies because a surgery to cure seizures resulted in his being unable to form new memories.

“He loved to converse, for example, but within 15 minutes he would tell you the same story three times, with same words and intonation, without remembering that he’d just told it,” said Suzanne Corkin, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied and followed Mr. Molaison in the last five decades of his life.

Each time he met a new acquaintance, each time he visited the corner store, each time he strolled around the block, it was as if for the first time.

Before H.M., scientists thought that memory was widely distributed throughout the brain, not dependent on any one area. But by testing Mr. Molaison, researchers in Montreal and Hartford soon established that the areas that were removed — in the medial temporal lobe, about an inch deep in the brain level with the ear — are critical to forming new memories. One organ, the hippocampus, is especially crucial and is now the object of intense study.

I am a neophiliac by personal inclination and this story cuts both ways. I’m astounded by the very fact that this procedure is being webcast on the internet in real-time. I watched as one of the scientists climbed onto the laboratory bench to adjust the apparatus just a few minutes ago.

On the other hand I’m terrified whenever I try to imagine myself as H.M. How would I feel if I could no longer form new memories? Would I even be able to tell the difference between my life today and my life after losing the ability to form new memories?

If there is more convincing evidence for the biological basis of the self then I don’t know it.

This article for the San Diego paper goes into more detail on the procedures used to preserve the brain and scan it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of expertise. Alvin Goldman, a philosopher at Rutgers, has written some interesting papers on the interaction between novices and experts. Next week I’m going to be leading a discussion on the topic.

I restarted my research on this topic after participating in some other recent discussions about economics and the reactions to the recent recession. How can economists propose such dramatically different explanations and remedies to the current crisis? The result is Paul Krugman asking How did economists get it so wrong?

Chris Dillow posts some interesting thoughts on whether economics is more certain about it’s conclusions now than it was 80 years ago when John Maynard Keynes was writing his General Theory.

To answer the question Dillow looks at two recent papers by economists about the rationality of markets. In comparison to Keynes the contemporary papers are more advanced, referencing more empirical data and having greater theoretical clarity. But they reach opposite conclusions by studying the same data, one finding evidence of rationality and the other finding evidence of irrationality.

Keynes wrote without any reference to empirical data. So which case is better? Someone of prestigious economic intelligence writing without any empirical data or two contemporary economists analyzing the data but reaching different conclusions.

This suggests that, if it is firm beliefs you want, economics regresses. Reading Keynes, you’d infer clearly that markets were somehow not rational. Reading the later papers you wouldn’t know whether they were or not. 70 years of advances in economics has merely generated doubt.

This kind of situation puts the novice economic observer into a major pickle. The novice must rely on the experts to analyze the information and data because the novice lacks the knowledge to even begin the analysis. But after the experts finish the conclusions are contradictory. Is there a way for the novice to resolve this problem?

I just finished rereading A Theory of Justice by John Rawls for a philosophy reading group. One of the themes I noticed is the attempt to deal with contingency in politics.

Rawls acknowledges that everyone approaches political decisions from their own point of view, with unique biases and ideas. The original position is designed to overcome these biases by acknowledging them and then rationally agreeing to make decisions while ignoring individual personal biases. For Rawls it is possible for people to use reason to overcome their prejudices. Once those prejudices are slaked then the real work of political justice can begin by the four-stage process of building just institutions based on the two principles of justice agreed upon behind the veil of ignorance.

A few days ago James Kwak at the Baseline Scenario wrote a post on whether hard working people deserve to make more money. Kwak acknowledges that contingency is as important to financial success as hard work. Sometimes people just get lucky and get very rich as a result. Is Bill Gates really work so much harder than any other software CEO that he deserves a financial result that is orders of magnitude greater than other CEOs?

Harry Boyte, a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, spoke to the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum on the topic Beyond the Knowledge Wars. The event was held at the Hosmer Public Library in Minneapolis.

Boyte began by discussing the cult of the expert, the ultimate outgrowth of the philosophical positivism and objectivism that dominated intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Objectivity became the byword for intellectual investigation, demanding the removal of all self-interest or awareness from the research process. He summed this up by the advice he once heard given to a sociology Ph.D. - “never research a topic that you are interested in.” The fear of contamination by personal biases and interests pushed academia to extol research over outreach.

There have been many critics of this ethos of detachment, but so far their impact has been minimal. The administration of the University of Minnesota bought into the “ponzi scheme of becoming the third best public research university in the world.” The result was the closing of general college. Further back in time Boyte described some of the changes to the coop-extension program which was transformed away from community building into an expert service provider. Another current of resistance was the tradition of the land grant colleges.

The cult of the expert is expressed in politics as mobilizing - get out the vote, door knocking and canvassing, robo-calls. It is the dominant political formula of our time. Mobilization was originally the strategy of the left, but now all politicians use it. It begins by defining an enemy, frames the issue as good versus evil using a simplified script, and then distributes it to the masses with the subtext that the masses are being victimized. It is the Nader and the PIRG formula, and recently it has been the Rove, Gingrich, and Beck formula. The problem with this view is that it treats people as stereotypes, labels, or abstractions. How will the Southern white male respond to message X? What will the soccer mom think of this commercial?

The apotheosis of this form of politics was seen in 2008 when Mark Penn told Hillary Clinton that the only way she could win was by accusing Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer. Clinton stepped back from that edge. John McCain had a similar moment when he took the microphone from the woman in Minneapolis who accused Obama of being an Arab.

The antidote to this problem, according to Boyte, is an organizing paradigm, a viewpoint that acknowledges the “irreversible, plurality of the human condition.” It is a return to the original meaning of politics - how to deal with people different than the self.

Boyte offered some positive examples of resistance, such as the recent work by the Centers for Disease Control to promote community resilience, or the shift among development economists from only talking about government and market solutions to talking about community power. In St. Paul there is the Jane Addams School for Democracy connecting college students and immigrants and at the University of Minnesota William Doherty is working on a program for citizen professionals.

I basically agree with Mr. Boyte’s critique of the current situation, but the examples of hope seem very small bore compared to the scale of the challenge. I asked him about the reaction to his work among the business community and he basically said that he hadn’t presented the ideas to them. There were some local business alliances working on citizen business issues, such as the Citizens League and Target Corporation, but the overall scope was small.

The question I should have asked is how this message is going to be carried into the suburbs. I support his goals and the programs he works on, like the Jane Addams school and democracy promotion in Africa, but I see the center of the action as the suburbs for two reasons. Practically, the suburbs are where elections are currently won and lost in America. If we can’t convince suburbanites of this critique and the need for a more democratic form of education then change may never come. Ideologically, the problem is there are so few people in the suburbs who know what democracy. We, in the suburbs, are the ultimate ignorant consumers of government service. The attitude is “give me my driver’s license as rapidly as possible and then get out of my way, I need to go to work and pick up the kids for soccer practice.” There is very little citizenship in the suburbs, nor is there very much community.

The vision of a cocreative, relational, community-based future of education is enticing. I look forward to helping to build that future with Mr. Boyte.

My top 7 scholars:

1. Donald Davidson. Reading “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” is still one of the high points of my philosophic career. I was a pretty naive cognitive relativist in college when I read this essay and it convinced me then and still convinces me now that humans share much more intellectual and cognitive background than not.
2. Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions altered my perception of science and forced me to question my belief in a naive, progressivist narrative of scientific development. It also put a great word into wide circulation — “paradigm”.
3. Lorraine Daston. A relative newcomer to the list within the last 5 years. I still haven’t finished reading Objectivity by her and Peter Galison, but the short essay on the history of objectivity I read for my STS (science, technology, and society) class still echoes in my memory.
4. George Lakoff. I first encountered Lakoff through his work on moral metaphors in politics. There are a number of times when I think that he pushes his ideas further than they can be sustained, but the whole nation-as-a-nuclear-family idea is still powerful.
5. James P. Carse. I read Finite and Infinite Games in the final years of high school so I actually own an original hardcover edition. I’m still enamored of the idea that there are games played to win (finite) and games played to continue play (infinite). Breakfast at the Victory, his book of essays is also great.
6. Douglas Hofstadter. Godel, Escher, Bach made me want to be a cognitive science for a couple of years. I’m still interested in the field but took a turn toward the philosophical end of the topic.
7. Ian Hacking. I read The Taming of Chance a few years ago while working on a paper about the history of statistics in the nineteenth century. Hacking’s book was a central part of my thesis.

Inspired by a post I found while trawling through the MinneBar links. An old link but still worth considering.

Back in March there was a brief media flurry over a libertarian rant by Rick Santelli. I was struck at the time by the persistently moral language used by the right to describe economics and capitalism. Making money has become a moral obligation for the right and a reflection of the moral worth of a person. If you’re poor then you are a moral failure, if you are rich then you are an angel.

The language of morality pervades the discussion of economics and may be a cause of so much of the regular debate about economic policies that occurs. Economic decisions, for all the pontificating about rational man, are always moral decisions as much as they are rational decisions.

I recently heard an acquaintance talking about the difficulty of knowing whether the recent economic stimulus is working. Not even the putative experts can agree about whether it is working. A scientific controversy, like global warming or dark matter, is much easier to adjudicate because the moral dimension is reduced or non-existent.

At the New Republic Jonathan Chait reviewed two books on Ayn Rand and found her writings to be a major source for the moralistic tone of right-wing capitalists.

In these disparate comments we can see the outlines of a coherent view of society. It expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms—that taking from the rich harms the economy—but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand. Some, though not all, of the conservatives protesting against redistribution and conferring the highest moral prestige upon material success explicitly identify themselves as acolytes of Rand. (As Santelli later explained, “I know this may not sound very humanitarian, but at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rand-er.”) Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood. Her novels are enjoying a huge boost in sales. Popular conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have touted her vision as a prophetic analysis of the present crisis…..

Rand’s most enduring accomplishment was to infuse laissez-faire economics with the sort of moralistic passion that had once been found only on the left. Prior to Rand’s time, two theories undergirded economic conservatism. The first was Social Darwinism, the notion that the advancement of the human race, like other natural species, relied on the propagation of successful traits from one generation to the next, and that the free market served as the equivalent of natural selection, in which government interference would retard progress. The second was neoclassical economics, which, in its most simplistic form, described the marketplace as a perfectly self-correcting
instrument. These two theories had in common a practical quality. They described a laissez-faire system that worked to the benefit of all, and warned that intervention would bring harmful consequences. But Rand, by contrast, argued for laissez-faire capitalism as an ethical system. She did believe that the rich pulled forward society for the benefit of one and all, but beyond that, she portrayed the act of taxing the rich to aid the poor as a moral offense.

Countless conservatives and libertarians have adopted this premise as an ideological foundation for the promotion of their own interests. They may believe the consequentialist arguments against redistribution—that Bill Clinton’s move to render the tax code slightly more progressive would induce economic calamity, or that George W. Bush’s making the tax code somewhat less progressive would usher in a boom; but the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right. For it harbored a deeper belief in the immorality of redistribution, a righteous sense that the federal tax code and budget represent a form of organized looting aimed at society’s most virtuous—and this sense, which remains unshakeable, was owed in good measure to Ayn Rand.

I started a series on language and money last spring which I should return to. Once you start listening you realize that all of our talk about money is filled with moral judgments. My first post of the series talked about the difference between borrowing and leveraging, two terms for the same action but one used by the poor and the other by the rich. Some other terms that need pondering: angel investor, consume/invest, save/debt. Accounting also has a rich vocabulary for examination: asset, liability, appreciation, depreciation, balance sheet, double-entry, etc.

In the spirit of answering my own questions from last weeks Kierkegaard discussion I noticed this interesting article on the cross-cultural similarities in moral development.

Researchers have been conducting studies of moral development across cultures. The summary by Bruce Bower at Science News suggests that there are universal themes to moral development across cultures. This contradicts the arguments of some scholars that Eastern and Western cultures have different values about the role of individuals, family, institutions, women, etc.

Children everywhere stew in the same pot of family conflict, with different cultural seasonings added for flavor, in Helwig’s view. When parents restrict behaviors that children regard as personal choices, such as what clothes to wear or which friends to hang out with, disputes inevitably arise. Parental restrictions on behavior that kids view as morally wrong or as a violation of conventional social rules are often accepted, even if grudgingly.

During the teen years, kids in Asian and Western cultures alike gravitate toward a broader class of moral imperatives, including rights to privacy, education and freedom of speech, Helwig and colleagues find in another new study published in the August Social Development. Adolescents also appeal to democratic notions, such as majority rule, to justify a preference for representative forms of government — even if they live in a communist or authoritarian society.

Helwig’s conclusions trigger skepticism from some psychologists, including Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who contend that moral reasoning fundamentally differs in Eastern and Western cultures. In Kitayama’s view, only individualistic Westerners put a premium on personal freedoms and rights. Asians steeped in responsibilities to family and society guard the moral integrity of their assigned roles and duties.

Kierkegaard proposed a three-stage theory of psychological development: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. As far as I know he was one of the earlier stage-based theorists of individual development. In the twentieth century the action switched to psychology and the big names of Piaget, Kohlberg, Turiel, and Gilligan. The studies summarized by Bower suggest that whatever type of development occurs during childhood it is similar across cultures.

I wonder how Kierkegaard’s highly individualistic explanation of faith would be received by Eastern cultures. To me Kierkegaard’s individual relation to God parallels a lot of the mystical experiences described in many religious traditions. It’s been a long time since I read about mysticism East or West, but one of the things I remember in the Western tradition is the role of paradox and individual experience.

If there is a God I’ve always been attracted to apophatic or negative theology as a route to belief or understanding. God cannot be described by human expressions, just as Abraham cannot be explained by Johannes de Silentio. We can only approach the divine asymptotically.

I just finished rereading Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. I read it for a philosophy course in college and returned to it at the urging of my book club.

One of the questions discussed during our meeting was what we got out of reading the book. I recognize the value of such a pragmatic criteria for book reading and use something similar more often than not. I’ve abandoned plenty of books because I didn’t think I’d get anything from them or felt like I’d learned enough from the pages I did read. Business books are especially prone to bloat and I drop them faster than a lot of other works.

The difficulty with using such a pragmatic criteria to evaluate Kierkegaard is my lack of religious faith. I waffle between describing myself as an atheist or an agnostic, but I’m certainly not a mainstream believer. Kierkegaard was a believer, but he wasn’t mainstream, in fact he disliked the church of his time more than I do the churches of today. So I think it’s hard to get a practical fact out of reading Fear and Trembling that I can apply to my everyday life.

The best I’ve been able to come up is the difficulty of faith. What makes Kierkegaard interesting, even to a person who doesn’t share his religious belief, is the psychological struggle he describes as being central to the action of faith. For Kierkegaard faith is hard, perhaps the hardest action a man can perform. I sympathize with that difficulty because the movement of faith is difficult for me as well.

I also like the idea that the movement of faith is an individual move, an action that can’t be done by, or at the urging, of a group of people. Ethics is something universal and shared by the group, but faith is absolute and particular. Part of the reason I distrust so many organized religions is the missing individual component. Sometimes faith seems to easy for a fundamentalist. Of course the personal experience may be different than the appearance of outward activity. It’s this distinction between inwardness and outwardness that is most valuable to me and hopefully of value to other believers.

A note from a few months back when I was reading Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I’m posting it as a reminder to my future self.

Reading Wittgenstein is a challenge. But toward the end of Philosophical Investigations it seemed to me that there were three spheres of argumentation going on in Wittgenstein.

1. There is the sphere of ordinary language. This is the source for the examples and cases which Wittgenstein builds his argument. Ordinary language is the testing ground for his ideas and becomes the touchstone for evaluation.
2. There is the sphere of philosophy. This is where the skeptical argument is mounted, defended, and perhaps defeated or supported. But the skeptical argument is a language game played within philosophy itself and never in ordinary language. Being skeptical about mental states in ordinary language just leads to weird looks and people wondering if you’ve been reading too much philosophy again.
3. There is a metaphilosophy sphere where an argument about the value of philosophy itself takes place. This is where the therapeutic argument is made - too much time in sphere 2 is bad for our mental health.

Wittgenstein is strongly skeptical in sphere 2. He is perhaps too accepting of the truth of meaning in sphere 1. And sphere 3 is suggested by implication - the idea that philosophy should be a type of therapy.

A related question is where does jargon fit in? Jargon seems to be in a middle state. It’s not quite ordinary language but it isn’t really philosophical language either.

A limited outline of philosophical methods and history. Being a partial summary from Philosophy’s Second Revolution by D.S. Clarke

Clarke divides philosophy into three eras. Classical, Cartesian, and Linguistic.

1. The classical Greek philosophy used rational intuition, “a direct apprehension of the basic structure of things,” to understand the world and do philosophy. Rational thought was a direct source of evidence for physics, metaphysics, ethics, etc. The goal was a rational cosmology that explained the world and everything in it.
2. Introspection. Descartes and his descendants use intuition to understand the world, especially mental concepts. A division between internal and external worlds was reinforced, dualism rises. The natural sciences get the laws of the natural world, philosophy gets the laws of the mind.
3. Linguistic turn. Pierce rejects intuition and focuses on signs - “The only thought, then, which can possibly cognized is thought in signs.” Philosophy becomes the investigation of language. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others continue this thread through to today.

This is as far as Clarke takes his historical survey.

I’d add some possible new methods/explanations.

1. Experimental philosophy, building off of the experimental economics tradition.
2. Social construction. For example definitions of art a la Dickie, Danto, and Eaton.
3. Complexity. There are hints of this in Hofstadter and Holland, especially for cognition.
4. Therapeutic — late Wittgenstein.

Based on another long discussion about rationality and the goals of philosophy.

Claim:

1. Everyone is biased therefore a philosophical program to achieve agreement is nonsensical because the biases will never be overcome on philosophical questions.
2. Mathematics has achieved greater agreement than philosophy because it has answered basic questions, such as 2+2=4, while philosophy has failed to answer basic questions of any kind - witness the continued argument about philosophical questions.

Against:

1) This is complete misreading of what actual mathematicians do. Mathematicians do not go around arguing about basic questions, 2+2=4, because the actual business of mathematics has moved onto a higher/more abstract level and turned 2+2=4 into an agreed upon assumption.

Similarly for philosophy there is a much larger sphere of agreement about basic facts than there seems. In order for philosophy to occur there has to be agreement about what questions are in and out of bounds. So a question about whether archival grade paper lasts longer than normal pulp paper is not considered a philosophical question. Philosophy defines itself into a pretty narrow and common set of areas: epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, etc. These are basic behavioral agreements, akin to the behavioral agreement among mathematicians that says questioning 2+2=4 is not a currently debatable/live mathematical question.

2) In order for us to recognize disagreement there has to be so much agreement about so many things that disagreement is almost nonsensical. There are two strands of philosophical argument I know of that defend this point of view.

First, Donald Davidson’s work in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Schema.” When I read this paper in my class on relativism I thought it was one of the best philosophy papers I ever read. I still feel that way. Davidson writes:

What matters is this: if all we know is what sentence a speaker holds true, and we cannot assume that his language is our own, then we cannot take even a first step toward interpretation without knowing or assuming a great deal about the speaker’s beliefs. Since knowledge of beliefs comes only with the ability to interpret words, the only possibility at the start is to assume general agreement on beliefs.

Second, phenomenology and Wittgenstein both propose some set of beliefs/knowledge that is widely shared and used in conversation. Phenomenologists call it a lifeworld, Wittgenstein seems to be getting at the same idea when he uses the phrase “forms of life.” From Philosophical Investigations:

241) It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

3) Disagreement can mean many different things: it could be a mistake, it could be a failed communication, it could be bias, etc. Claiming that philosophical communication or any communication cannot reach agreement because of universal bias ascribes a single cause to a multifaceted problem.

4) Finally there is a pragmatic objection to the overwhelming bias argument. And it comes in two forms. First, so what? Does accepting universal bias really mean that we must abandon any behavior that moves or tries to move us closer to a consensus. Robin Hanson summarizes this nicely when he says “that although it hard to conclusively say anything, you shouldn’t just throw your hands up and say ‘nobody should know anything.’”

Second is the argument over ‘live options’, a phrase used by William James in his discussion of pragmatism. In The Will to Believe he writes:

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: ‘Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,’ it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: ‘Be an agnostic or be Christian,’ it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

In philosophy there are plenty of questions that present live options to the discussants. In fact these are just the questions that seem to cause philosophy so many problems. Real disagreement is only possible when we have agreed that the question is important.

5) My final point about the differences between mathematics and philosophy is that 2+2=4 and “justice is fairness” or “rationality is a good in itself” are statements of radically different levels of discourse. They may appear to be similar because of their brevity but that compactness hides an entire history of argumentation. Statements about justice or rationality presuppose an entire lifetime of experience with a language in order to even begin to understand what the words might mean. By contrast 2+2=4 is equivalent to the baby talk of mathematics.

We mistake the certainty of mathematics presented in textbooks as something that is eternal and unchanging. But this is historically invalid. Mathematics has changed over time as much as any language. Symbolisms, problems, methods, and more have altered in the past and will continue altering into the future. Just look at the impact of computers on mathematics.

The certainty of mathematics is just an impression of laymen. This certainty appears strong because math depends upon a symbolic language that people learn to wildly different degrees. Philosophy, by contrast, looks simple because it uses the language we use everyday, but it is really as complex and as certain/uncertain as mathematics.

In Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein:

(281.) …It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.

Where do we draw the lines between human and the rest of the world? Humans have a set of behaviors and a language that seems to differentiate them from the animal world. Is this a difference in complexity, in self-awareness, or some other unnamed quality?

(250.) Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behavior to be real simulation are missing.

Anyone who has a seen and heard a dog howl after someone accidentally steps on its paw knows, or thinks, that dogs experience pain. Many animals, even away from any human contact, would cry out if they were caught in a trap or injured.

Wittgenstein makes much of the fact that a person could be mistaken about pain. Our memories could be faulty in such a way that when we feel pain we cannot be sure that the pain we currently feel resembles our earlier pains in any way. Even more damning is the potential for dissembling. Someone could pretend to be in pain and we would never know by listening to or watching them. (e.g. a culture where people hide their pain and never talk about it)

But would we ever be mistaken about the pain of an animal? Wittgenstein suggests that dissembling could be taught to a dog but the surroundings necessary for a real simulation are missing. Is this surrounding language?

Is it the case that anything complicated enough to have recognizable behaviors is complicated enough to learn how to dissemble?

(284.) Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. — One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number! — And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.

And so, too, a corpse seems to us quite inaccessible to pain. — Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different. — If anyone says: “That cannot simply come from the fact that a living thing moves about in such-and-such a way and dead one not”, then I want to intimate to him that this is a case of transition ‘from quantity to quality.’

Quantity to quality of what? Isn’t Wittgenstein indeed claiming that part of pain is the behavior that comes with it and the language that we use to talk about the behavior?

Perhaps Wittgenstein is positing some sort of continuum from stone, to animal, to human along which behavior becomes more complex. The question is when do we switch from talking about behavior to talking about pain. On the one hand it seems like Wittgenstein claims that there is no way to know when or where to draw the line among these many behaviors. On the other hand he seems to suggests that sensations are only attributable to human beings alone, but there is always an out — resemblance. That W is a wily old gent.

A long and interesting discussion about art and interpretation at last nights Understanding Philosophy Meetup. We started with Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” and went from there. One of the issues that came up was the potential for harm caused by art or interpretation.

Since Plato philosophers and critics have acknowledged that art can be dangerous. For Plato this was a major reason to banish poets from the republic; art could only distract us from real world of truth and forms. Sontag thinks this fear of distraction is foolish and wants to push us closer to a direct experience of art. For her the danger is the interpreter who erects barriers between the audience and the art, too much interpretation and the erotics of art is lost. I don’t believe Plato’s account that art takes us away from the truth, so I’ll assume that art doesn’t harm us.

But consider the harms of interpretation in more detail. There seem to be at least three cases of harm that interpretation may lead to.

1. Interpretation may harm the status of a work of art as a work of art. Suppose a novel is hailed as a masterpiece of modernist fiction by 20th century critics, but future critics, in say the 22nd century, decide that it is not worth discussing. Is the work still an artwork in that future time? Accepting the power of interpretation may mean that what is art changes over time. The particular time frame, future or past, is not important to this example because all you need is a long enough period of time for interpretations and canons to change.
2. Interpretations may harm the viewer of an art object by giving him or her a mistaken or incorrect understanding of the artwork. The idea here is that there are some interpretations of an artwork that are better than other interpretations. In particular the intention of the artist needs to be given some weight. Consider an artist who paints a picture, enters the picture into a contest, wins the contest, and then finds out that the picture was hung upside down. Surely we want to say that a mistake was made, something went wrong, the experience of the artwork for the audience was different than expected or intended. Is this mistake enough to alter the status of an artwork to a non-artwork?
3. Interpretation may harm the ability of a viewer to appreciate or experience the work of art. Someone who reads about A Streetcar Named Desire as an allegory of the conflict between a brutish barbarism in our culture and the delicacy of Western civilization before they see the play for themselves loses something in the experience. “The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.” Sontag cites Freudian and Marxist interpretations as particular examples of harmful interpretations.

I think that Sontag’s major goal is to reject the third type of interpretation. The first is never really mentioned, but may be dealt with elsewhere in her work, and the second is mixed together with her objection to the third. For Sontag the possibility of a correct interpretation, or gradations of correct interpretations, seems questionable. She is more worried about the totalizing dangers of interpretation, for example Freudianism, than privileging any intentions the artist may have.

I don’t think there is any real harm to the viewer of an artwork from interpretation. First of all, interpretation is always already occurring when we encounter a work of art so why worry about it if we can’t escape it. Sontag says “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. In place of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art.” I’m not sure what this could possibly mean, perhaps I need to read more of her criticism to understand it. This feels like some type of foundationalism, that art would be pure art if we could just get close enough to it, just tear through the curtains of interpretation and experience.

Furthermore, I think that interpretation may actually be a benefit to the audience, may reveal something someone had not considered before. Interpretation slows us down and forces us to pay attention to the artwork that is in front of us. I think that Sontag is not asking us to abandon interpretation but to recognize its limits. A Freudian reading of Streetcar is not correct or incorrect, harmful or safe. It is merely one, among many, possible interpretations, an addition to our potential understanding of the play. Our stance toward an artwork should include an awareness of the cloud of interpretations that surround it. The more we know about these interpretations the more we can appreciate the work of art.

The problem with my reading of Sontag is that it requires a very sophisticated education about art, and possibly even philosophy. The harm question fails to mention the spectrum of abilities that an audience has when it approaches art. I think it is much more likely that a naive art viewer would be harmed by an implausible interpretation than an expert. At the same time the expert can become overconfident and bogged down in overinterpretation to such an extent that a Sontagian encounter with the sensual experience of the artwork may be useful. Sometimes we need to just step back and ask ourselves “What do we see/hear/read here?”

To me the second and third harms can be ameliorated or easily dealt with. I just don’t think that the third holds much weight as I’ve tried to demonstrate because the totalizing danger of interpretation is no longer a live possibility. In part we can thank Sontag for this change. The second harm of mistaken interpretations can be addressed by further discussion and education. Where this leaves the intention of the artist/author I will leave alone for now. The final harm is one that most art philosophy and criticism rarely mentions or even deals with. There is a lot of discussion about the process of canon formation in literary theory, and numerous examples of artistic recovery where a previously forgotten artist or artwork is dug up from the past and reassessed by new standards. Are these changes actually harmful to art in any way? This will require more thought.

I’ve been reading Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein with some fellow philosophers over the last few weeks. We’ve reached the point where Wittgenstein argues against private languages and qualia, like pain.

Wittgenstein argues against private descriptions or recognitions of these experiences, according to him we learn how to use the word “pain” in a certain context, together with certain expressions and feelings. We may act as though we have indicated some internal sensation to ourselves when we use a word like “pain” but there is no way to verify the identity of this word with any of our previous experiences of pain.

In the Blue Book Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment where the nerves and hands of two people are connected together and then the hand is stung by a wasp. “Both of us cry, contort our faces, give the same description of the pain, etc. Now are we to say we have the same pain or different ones?” (54)

I was trying to think up counterexamples for this problem and alighted upon intoxication. Surely when I take a drink I am the only person who becomes intoxicated and my feelings are definitely my own.

But my quest was futile. The sociologists are already at work destroying this objection.

Angus Bancroft was interviewed on BBC radio about his research on drugs and context. It turns out that the effect of drugs on people is much more socially determined than I originally supposed.

There are tribes in Africa who drink almost pure alcohol without any of the boisterousness or boorish behavior we expect to see on a typical Friday night. Howard Becker studied marijuana users in the 1950s and discovered that first-time users did not get high. Becker theorized that they did not know how to get high; they had to learn how to smoke, recognize the effects, and learn to enjoy the sensations.

Back to Wittgenstein:

§272. The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible - though unverifiable - that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another.

Is there a difference between the following statements:

1. If a kangaroo had no tail then it would fall over.
2. If the gravitational constant were different then humans would not exist.
3. If you were a woman then you would have a different philosophy.

The Wednesday philosophy meetup was sparsely attended, only 4 of us, and a bit thick to get through, but still interesting. Our topic was counterfactuals. Harland proposed the topic because he wanted to find a logical response to (3), an argument that he wants to reject. So he walked us through a chunk of Nelson Goodman and David Lewis. There was a lot of technical tooing-and-froing about the set of conditions that would invalidate a counterfactual statement and possible worlds a la Lewis that were close enough to our world to only be different in respect to the antecedent. We concluded that it was a difficult topic and a good effort by all present.

The nagging questions still bugging me is whether we can really treat all of sentences the same way. The balancing ability of a kangaroo seems quite different from the philosophic prowess of a woman or man. Should logic treat them the same way?

Furthermore, I wonder just what is the purpose of our making counterfactual statements. I think one reason we use these statements is to teach others about our point of view or beliefs. Saying that a kangaroo would fall over without a tail is just a way of saying that tails are an important part of how a kangaroo keeps its balance. Making a statement like (3) is a way of saying that your philosophy depends on your gender. I feel there is something in the purpose of these statements that might help to unlock them but it remains just beyond my grasp.

A question that’s been kicking around my head for the past few days. This is just the start of a rough outline.

Determining what is excellent:

1. Judgment based on history. The “time will tell” adage. What is good and beautiful is sieved by history and reveals itself over time. This is also the base for the quantitative approach that Charles Murray takes in "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950"
2. Judgment based on peers. The basic mode of scientific research. Good research is research that meets the criteria set by a group of peers.
3. Judgment based on the market. Whatever sells is what is good. This is the dominant defense is discussions about contemporary culture. People who reject “coarse” elements of culture, especially entertainment such as video games or movies, are dismissed as being ignorant of how the market works. The “if people didn’t want this stuff, then they wouldn’t buy it.” No?
4. Excellence is its own reward. The extreme result of the intrinsic reward viewpoint mentioned below. If people are more motivated by intrinsic rewards then why worry about external rewards. This view runs into some obvious problems when dealing with groups of people instead of individuals. Groups and societies influence how resources are distributed, and this distribution influences excellence.

Rewarding excellence:

1. Intrinsic motivation is the key to sustained excellence. See the work of Alfre Kohn and Teresa Amabile.
2. Extrinsic motivation is key. Market dogmatists, intellectual property law. Any system that talks about incentives or incentivizing for certain behavior.

Other questions:

1. How should we reward the best cat burglar or bank robber? Why shouldn’t they be rewarded for their skill?
2. Are there time limits for the effectiveness of rewards? What is the function of posthumous awards? The awardee seems unable to derive any benefit. Posthumous awards may help the judgment based on history through the creation and support of canons or classic works.

There are two extreme answers to the question of what we are responsible for?

The maximalist position is that we are responsible for everything. When we act, whether consciously or not, something happens in the world. A series of effects propagates outward from our actions, and that series may be endless.

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost… and on, and on.

We rarely glimpse the long-term, distant outcomes of our actions because our perceptions are limited. My presence at tonight’s Socrates Cafe meeting may lead to another person reading a book I shared with her. That book could change her life but I may never know it.

From the maximalist perspective we arrive at the ideas of globalism and environmentalism. My choice to drive to the library releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and leads to global warming. Everything I do becomes significant.

The other extreme in this debate is the minimalist. We are responsible for our actions and nothing more. Each of us is surrounded by sphere of agency. Sometimes these spheres may touch but they never overlap.

I always have a choice about how to respond to a situation. Someone cuts me off in traffic. Do I become angry? Do I ignore the situation? Do I try to run them off the road?

The emphasis is on freedom and choice. Even under the extremes of distress there is always a choice. It’s an existential view of the world.