Fodor, Piattelli-Palmarini, and Darwin

I really look forward to a substantive discussion on Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s newest article “against” natural selection.

From what I understand, their argument here is: “Not all things are equal. Natural selection works in concert with other stable physical and chemical systems.” Putting aside their rhetoric, the argument sounds awfully benign.

But even if we grant this, I don’t understand why it matters. Natural selection hasn’t been refuted — any more than Skinnerian behaviorism has been refuted — for the solid chunk of core phenomena it sought to explain. The rats continue to give responses to stimuli based on reward schedules, and populations continue to lose undesirable traits when faced with cross-generational pressures imposed by their ecology. It just might be an incomplete theory to explain all the phenomena, and therefore need to be put in the company with some other naturalistic theories. Big deal. Darwin is a scientist, not a god, so who cares?

That having been said, I’ll grant that the final two paragraphs of Fodor/Piattelli-Palmarini’s article are obnoxious slander. It’s pretty much what you can expect from the Rutgers “philosophy as blood sport” crowd.

Chad Orzel is philosophically incompetent

(Courtesy Ophelia.) Chad Orzel claims:

OK, fine, as a formal philosophical matter, I agree that it’s basically impossible to reconcile the religious worldview with the scientific worldview. Of course, as a formal philosophical matter, it’s kind of difficult to show that motion is possible. We don’t live in a formal philosophical world, though, and the vast majority of humans are not philosophers (and that’s a good thing, because if we did, it would take forever to get to work in the morning). Humans in the real world happily accept all sorts of logical contradictions that would drive philosophers batty. And that includes accepting both science and religion at the same time.

Oh for pity’s sake sir. Quine:

Some of the ancient paradoxes of Zeno belong under the head of falsidical paradoxes. Take the one about Achilles and the tortoise. Generalized beyond these two fictitious characters, what the paradox purports to establish is the absurd proposition that so long as a runner keeps running, however slowly, another runner can never overtake him. The argument is that each time the pursuer reaches a spot where the pursued has been, the pursued has moved a bit beyond. When we try to make this argument more explicit, the fallacy that emerges is the mistaken notion that any infinite succession of intervals of time has to add up to all eternity. Actually when an infinite succession of time is so chosen that the succeeding intervals become shorter and shorter, the whole succession may take either a finite or an infinite time. It is a question of a convergent series.

I don’t blame Zeno for being unaware of the Calculus, but I do expect the modern reader to have heard of it. Orzel must have a pretty low opinion of philosophers if he thinks that they haven’t learned anything from Leibniz and Newton.

Nevertheless, Chad’s conclusion is something that you can make a serious argument for, on other grounds. You might argue, for instance, that true contradictions (i.e., dialetheia) hide in plain sight. The most banal examples arise from cases of vagueness (and have prompted interesting treatments from some forms of logic that allow for the assertion of contradictions).

The prospect of asserting that there are true contradictions will be difficult for many people to accept, of course. But even if one disagrees on that point, we can all agree that not all contradictions are innocent. And surely the burden of proof is on those of us who endorse this radical new option to give a clear account of what the distinction is between benign and explosive contradictions. It would be a new and interesting development that would challenge our classic outlook on language and the world — not an excuse to stop thinking altogether.

The Uncredible HallQ makes similar remarks here. I don’t have much to add to it, since he makes the very same point I did (minus the reference to dialetheia). But there is one important addition I want to make. It’s not just that it’s a contempt for thinking — it’s a trivialization of debate itself.

By-the-by, a chronic insensitivity to norms of rational discourse is a recurring theme for Chris Mooney, and so unsurprisingly he hums an endorsement of Orzel’s nonsense in that way of his.

Solidarity For Never

Serious philosophy.

Rorty, Richard. “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” Journal of Philosophy 1993 vol. XC (9) pp. 443

Rorty’s understanding of the role of solidarity in his explanation of warrant is problematic. In order for solidarity to do the things he thinks it will, solidarity must be incompatible with shame. I aim to show that this is quite mistaken.

In his reply to Putnam, Rorty argues that the conditions under which an assertion (p) can be said to have warrant are relative to how we feel about the views that would be held by an idealized version of our own community. The meaning of “our community” or “our society” is plausibly determined by ideological postulates: for example, we use “wet liberalism” to describe the community that Rorty and Putnam share. (452) Whatever ideological postulate we select as a way of identifying our ideal selves as versions of us, it must conform to the expectation that we have a feeling of solidarity toward that ideal society. (453-54) The solidarity requirement also saves us from identifying with moral monsters. So for instance, suppose that in a counterfactual world the Nazis had won the war, and a Nazi Benjamin Nelson came into the world sired by Nazi equivalents of my actual parents. It is a fact that I do not want to have solidarity with this counterfactual person due to the odious nature of his beliefs and his life-world. So for Rorty, this person could not be me.

Rorty contrasts the notion of warrant with what he thinks Putnam might hold is an intelligible sense of the notion of truth. Insofar as Rorty is concerned with the notion of truth, he thinks we are interested in whether or not an idealized future society would affirm or deny our assertion (p). (450) Strictly speaking, there is no clear and explicit account provided for how we must feel towards this future ideal society, i.e., whether or not we require a sense of solidarity with the future world in order for us to legitimately claim that this society is a version of us. But there are only two possibilities: either we need a degree of solidarity to this future society, or we don’t. If we do need that sense of solidarity, then our account of truth collapses into our account of warrant. If not, then there is no reason to say that these idealized truth-holders are versions of us. (And of course, since Rorty is an ethnocentrist, he need not be interested in what other ideological communities call “true”, idealized or not. (452))

Rorty is best understood when we think of him as ignoring truth (a vague term of approbation) and focusing instead on warrant. Warrant presupposes solidarity with the counterfactual community, and to have solidarity with a person is to identify with them. Yet shame presupposes solidarity with the cause of the gross embarressment. Parents are ashamed of their children (and vice-versa), citizens are ashamed of their elected representatives, philosophers are ashamed of bad philosophers, etc. We could not feel ashamed of someone from whom we are genuinely alienated. I cannot be ashamed of psychotic Martians, since they have nothing to do with me. Shame presupposes at least a trace of solidarity, since the canonical purpose of the concept of ’shame’ is to describe certain kinds of negative relationships with individuals in some real or imagined fraternity.

The question is, can I feel ashamed of some distant denizen of this little Nazi world? I don’t see why I cannot or should not feel ashamed of my counterpart. So it would seem that there is a sense in which I am in solidarity with my Nazi equivalent.

I am not sure how Rorty’s account can survive this fact about feeling. For I have supposed from the start that I am an ethnocentrist, where my “ethnicity” is defined as “wet liberal”. But clearly this cannot be the whole story, since my feelings tell me that I am in solidarity with my illiberal counterpart even though I do not want to be.

He might reply by clarifying what he means by the “feeling of solidarity”, i.e., by saying that solidarity (or even solidarity with respect to the true) presupposes our approbation of (p). But nothing of the sort could be coherently suggested. After all, an idealized liberal society might approve of (p), yet we may presently be very fond of (~p), so much so that we’d be extremely vexed that these idealized cads in the future would give it up (no matter how sensible the reasons for doing this may be in the idealized world). In other words, our approbation and solidarity must come apart in order for us to make sense of a change in standards for warrant (as Putnam and Rorty want to do). (449) But once they come apart, we have to admit the possibility that our warrants could change for the worse without it constitutionally changing who we are.

Reading the Tractatus

Impressions:

Today’s stupid pun has been brought to you by the letters .

Nothing isn’t.

Rex Bennett is making sense. He proposes to dispense with that old question, “why is there something rather than nothing?”

Words are important. They are the tools we work with when we think. And yet, we use words so loosely, so recklessly, as though they deserve hardly any consideration at all. If we use words improperly, then what we end up with bears no resemblance to reality at all…

We have come to perceive empty space as “nothingness.”… First ask the question, “Is space nothingness?” And then ask, “Is space really empty?” The answer to both those questions is definitely, NO!”…

What does it mean to our original question if there is no state of “nothingness?” It means the question was formed using a false concept that does not have correspondence to the real world. The answer to the question is “There is something because there is no nothing. There is no ‘alternative state’ to existence. Only the form of existence may change.”… Physicists and cosmologists have searched high and low, from the very large to the incredibly small, and nowhere has physics been able to find a true level of nothingness.

I’m all for consigning that old “something from nothing” chestnut to the dustbin. Against the background of the things we now know about the universe, the question doesn’t arise. The notion of “nothing” is a relic from the days when we only had knowledge of the macro-world.

I suppose that our modern translation of “nothing” would be something like “unrealised potential”, but that doesn’t get to fit into any analogous question; the best we might think of is “Why are potentials realisable instead of being unrealisable?” But it’s very hard to get a grip on what the question even means (let alone how we could test it), since a potential must be possible, on pain of incoherence.

Nevertheless, there are still questions to be asked that remain quite difficult and/or highly theoretical. All this talk about superstrings and so on is somewhat metaphysical, even if we think it is a scientifically informed kind of metaphysics. Still, there’s something quite humbling when you see one of the old guarded questions crumble.

Tiger Woods and the right to bullshit

Mike Laboissiere at Talkingphilosophy crafts an interesting argument, on the subject of whether or not we have the right to know about what goes on in the private lives of celebrities.

The recent media frenzy over the Tiger Woods‘ affair(s) raises numerous issues of philosophical concern. The one that I will focus on is the matter of the extent of our right to know about what goes on in the lives of others… [A] possible foundation for such a right is that people can give such a right to others. For example, when someone intentionally and knowingly provides another person with access to information then they have provided that person with the right to know. For example, if someone posts pictures of her drunken adventures on Facebook and has allowed her friends to view her photos, then she has granted them the right to know about said drunken adventures…

In the case of Tiger Woods his being a golf professional clearly does not grant people the right to know about his private life. However, Tiger Woods went beyond being a golf professional and became a professional endorser of products… In one commercial, the public was even invited in to see him reading a bedtime story to his child. As such, he was clearly establishing a relationship with the public that went beyond being a just a guy who swings a club… By entering into such a relationship based on trust Woods thus gave the public a right to know about what lies behind that carefully crafted image.

It seems to me that it is entirely correct for us to glom onto social roles for the purposes of talking about the right to know, and Mike has done right by chasing that intuition. But it does not seem to me that we are in the right condition if we use Mike’s account to get us there.

The Facebook analogy is significant here. Where Mike talks about giving away one’s right to privacy, I would rather talk about increasing the sphere of privilege. When you encourage people to trust you, you cannot be appropriately said to have signed your life away to Big Brother. Instead, you have to occupy some definite role which is connected to types of harms: the President, the CEO of a bank, etc. Being a celebrity golfer who hawks deodorant? Notsomuch.

Might he be a “role model”, nevertheless? And if so, is that connected with other people having a right to know, in some way that’s unconnected with the harm principle? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really seem obvious to me what the answer is. But that’s kind of the point. If it isn’t obvious, i.e., there is no contract, and there’s no dire consequences associated with his putative trust-relationship with people, then the moral default has to be to leave the damn guy alone.

Bottom line: we are in a culture that is addicted to its own bullshit. People have a gross sense of entitlement to privileges that they have no right to.

Lady, 9/11 is not your Generation

When first reading this article, I was bored after the first paragraph. This is despite the fact that I recognise that the author is capable of good, snappy writing. So either I have a short attention span, or I thought it was vapid, or I prejudged because I was only linked to the article by friends who are panning it.

On reflection, it seems to me that the trouble with triumphalist articles like this one is that they set themselves up as such easy targets for criticism. For I am not sure what I am meant to take away from the article except that there is an ongoing culture of hipsters who are just the newest iteration of a culture of irony, coming from people who live meaningless lives in middle-class industrial society.

For all my imagination, I can’t make sense of the claim that the millenials are the “most privileged and uniquely terrified generation in history”. Sure, it makes good sense if we think that history begins when Douglas Coupland began his career. For, the phrase “uniquely terrified” may be a nice contrast between Gen X and the millenials. But if we think history began more than 20 years ago, it certainly isn’t a good contrast between the millenials and, say, the boomers, who were arguably far more terrified and certainly more privileged economically. For granted, Osama killed 3000 people, and it was a horrible and defining moment for many of us. But this one-off event is nothing like living in a world of perfect certainty that an immanent nuclear annihilation will destroy humanity for good, as was the case in the Cold War.

It seems to me that if you want to pretend that you’re speaking on behalf of an entire generation in some unique way then you have to do a bit more than just make a few references to Obama, 1337speak, and 9/11. Otherwise the entire article rests on a parenthetical jibe against Gen Xers, but is otherwise indistinguishable from their complaints (now 20 years old and going strong).

Philosophy and The World Of Tomorrow

Podcasts from the conference, “Metaphilosophical Directions for the 21st Century”. I know what I’ll be listening to for the rest of today.

(Via TPM)

Post-note: All very good lectures. Timothy Williamson’s critique of the experimental philosopher’s challenge to philosophical expertise is particularly potent.

Ritchie, Naturalism, and All That

As santitafarella noted, a scholar of philosophy at the University of Chicago recently started a buzz over Jack Ritchie’s Understanding Naturalism (2009). A review of Ritchie’s book says, among other things:

The attitude Ritchie recommends for the genuine or serious naturalist is metaphysical agnosticism. Like Fine’s Natural Ontological Attitude, the naturalist should not take sides in the metaphysical debates between physicalists and nonphysicalists, or between “realists” and “antirealists” about theoretical posits, universals, possible worlds, numbers, and the like. Metaphysics wants to tell us how things must be, or can be, once and for all, but “science forces us to revise our conceptions of what is and is not possible, of where a concept can be meaningfully deployed and where it can’t”. Further, it is idle speculation to try to foresee how our future science might develop. Philosophy should purge itself of scientific soothsaying. In light of these considerations Ritchie interestingly suggests a reconception of metaphysics as metaphor: “Thinking of metaphysical theories as inspirational pictures or metaphors strikes me as . . . perhaps the best way to understand how science and metaphysics relate to one another from a deflationary naturalist perspective”. . . . In general, for the deflationary naturalist there is no unified story to tell about what exists: all he can do is to endorse “the many different things that our many empirically well-supported sciences say about the world”.

Part of the problem here is that when we talk about “taking sides”, as Ritchie purportedly does, it’s hard to see whether or not there are distinct sides to take. What difference on our research programs and potential results does it make if we ignore the realism/antirealism debate over the above-stated matters in the empirical sciences? Probably none. So sure, these are just metaphors, exemplary models that help us fill in our more serious picture of the world.

But on the other hand, there really does seem to be a clear contest in some cases, and when there is a clear contest then it pays to take sides. It makes a great deal of difference to science whether we’re physicalists or not — it’s the difference between ufology and astrophysics. So let’s be physicalists. If that division is just a metaphor for Ritchie, then it’s only in the sense in which scientific principles and laws themselves are indistinguishable from the models they employ.

At bottom, there’s this distinction that floats out there between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. But I’m not always sure what it’s meant to be doing for us. On the one hand, if metaphysical naturalism gives us something relevant to talk about as an answer of which ontology science recommends, then it must follow along with a methodological naturalism (as in the physicalist case). And on the other hand, though methodological naturalism can be indifferent to metaphysical naturalism (as in the realism/anti-realism case), it can’t be at all friendly to metaphysical supernaturalism lurking in the background (as with the non-physicalist case).

Those are the serious cases. By contrast, almost nobody is really serious about the question of the existence of god(s), in the sense of having clear kind of metaphysical endorsement and a high degree of confidence. We now know that those that are, are bafflingly wrong in what they’ve specifically proposed as evidence. And for the unserious metaphysical religious types, it’s hard to see where the scientific method lies. But that’s not saying much for the method/metaphysics distinction.

Thoughts on the Dawkins-Lennox debate

Over the past while I’ve been watching Youtube debates, mostly debates over atheism and the like.

For the mostpart it’s unfair game. The debate between the Horsemen (Sam Harris, Chris Hitchens, Dan Dennett) and theists (Dinesh D’Souza, Shmuley Boteach, and Nassim Taleb) is an utter clown show, with the latter camp recalling to mind George Carlin’s infamous tripartite classification: stupid, full of shit, and fucking nuts (respectively). The Intelligence Squared debate, featuring Chris Hitchens and Stephen Fry (against two other nameless muppets), produces an audience that was overwhelmingly convinced to condemn the Catholic Church. The list goes on.

Vatican defence league 07 (file photo)

Still I see enough of a pattern that I have to think something is amiss. Why are all these religious defenders such wastrels? Can’t they find some halfway clever altar boy or girl who is willing to put on a nice tie and say a few sensible things on behalf of their beliefs without turning into a gibbering idiot along the way? I don’t expect D’Souza to pay careful attention to what the claims are under discussion, and I don’t expect Boteach to understand evolution or natural selection, and I don’t expect Nassim Taleb to have any substantial respect for social science. But I don’t expect all religious believers to be so reminiscent of David Koresh.

After I had been complaining about this for a while in private, a friend referred me to this debate between Dawkins and John Lennox. I was happy to find a debate video that was almost collegial. Lennox is quite clearly a very learned man, and seems quite sincere as well.

But where my friend and I differ is that I still found many of Lennox’s arguments (especially near the end) to be far off base. As a refresher: Lennox is an Oxford mathematician, a devout literalist who genuinely believes in events like the Virgin Birth (and scorns the God-o’-the-Gaps), and a metaphysical idealist (in the Berkelean sense). He considers himself to be a scientist, and purports to arrive at his supernatural beliefs through the evidence, not in spite of it. (He calls this state of mind “faith”, though it’s not a sense of the term that is apt to describe belief that tracks evidence. “Knowledge” is closer.)

Lennox acknowledges three kinds of evidence, objective, historical, and subjective. In these, he evidently means the blind watchmaker argument, taking of the historical record at its word, and taking seriously the consolations of holding fidelity to his God. Dawkins does well enough in addressing the objective and historical arguments, both in the The God Delusion and in the debate, and don’t require any additional comment at all.

Like Dawkins, Lennox disavows NOMA, or the Non-Overlapping Magesteria claim (coined by Stephen Jay Gould, of course). For In Lennox’s estimation, science is vitally dependent upon religion, in two ways. First, science would probably not have emerged without religion, so in that sense the former is parasitic upon the latter. (Incidentally, at the risk of committing a post hoc fallacy, I do think that something like this may be right.) Second, he also seems to make a stronger claim, that without a sense of guiding faith in the intelligibility of the universe, nothing in science could even be investigated.

And sure enough, if Lennox’s metaphysics were true, then it makes good sense to think that science must be dependent in this latter way. If the “intelligibility of the universe” is presupposed by scientific investigation in an idealist sense, and this presupposition is denied, then of course we have no reasons for belief in anything. That’s because an idealist metaphysics is forcing us to treat causes as reasons as an explanation of the will to believe, instead of the other way around as the rest of us do. (Or at least that is the only way I can understand his discussion of reductionism and materialism about 40% of the way through). Reasons are such that when you sincerely deny them, they lose their force. But since the rest of us can deny the motley causal network behind the success of the laws of causal gravitation without having any effect at all on the behavior of falling apples, we infer that such sorts of causes must not be reasons (or at least, not reasons of a sort that we could recognize).

If reasons are something else entirely for God, then I don’t even know what would count as evidence for calling them reasons. If I thought there were God(s), then this would be an area where I would have to say some puff about how the Lord works in mysterious ways. But an appeal to mystery is an active denial of evidence, so surely that’s not persuasive.

But he also, confusingly, demarcates science from rationality, and puts (for example) aesthetic judgments to be among of what is merely rational and not scientific. Presumably, judgments of consolation as well. If we were talking about rationality, then it’s not clear what good our talk of evidence is doing, in the sense that is supposed to be motivated by science.

This is all well and good, and there other interesting points to be made. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. There are two examples of utter and complete nonsense near the end of the debate: concerning atheist dictators, and the idea that atheism itself is a form of faith. Both claims are blatant misrepresentations of what’s been said.