Blogosophy

2003-07-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

Blogosophy has Moved

The new url is http://www.webamused.com/blogosophy/

2003-07-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

Puzzling Knowledge and Knowing Puzzles

It's late, but I've just reread Brian Weatherson's Puzzle About Knowledge, and I finally think I understand what he's driving at as far as knowledge being true belief, not warranted true belief. It's the stress that is sometimes placed on the word know that seems to be puzzling him (stressing "know" changes the acceptibility of claims about knowledge), and he intuits that the unstressed version (where, for instance, you can get away with saying that nine people know they have a virus even though four of them believe they have a virus for the wrong reasons) is closer to the semantic meaning, so most of the time when people say "know" they intend nothing more than believe something that happens to be true, regardless of their reasons for believing it. My intuition says the opposite: almost all the time people intend "know" to mean justified true belief, but the fact that pragmatically true belief is good enough most of the time allows it to piggy-back on the intended meaning; what people are doing when they stress know, IMO, is emphasizing that they don't intend to allow this common bit of sloppiness. For instance, in Brian's example if the boss asks does Molly know she has the virus, what do you think his reaction would be if you replied "Yes, because she says her horoscope told her so." I think that's just as likely to provoke a "Whaddaya mean she knows she has it?" as Brian's scenario is to provoke a "Whaddaya mean she doesn't know she has it?" and it will do little good to point out that she does have it, she believes she has it, and for the most part that's all there is to knowing. The point is that as soon as you start relying on the difference between true belief and justified true belief, by attributing knowledge where people have the former but not the latter, you invite confusion, and it's not just late 20th century epistemology that causes it.

2003-07-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

Taking Knowledge Frivolously Frivolously

In Taking Knowledge Frivolously, Brian Weatherson offers a frivolous argument that knowledge = true belief (not, as is often supposed by philosophers, that knowledge is justified true belief). I'm not exactly sure what Brian's motivation for dropping the requirement of justification from the equation, despite having read his previous Puzzle about Knowledge, but I'd like to offer a frivolous counter-example.

Brian supposes the following scenario: Bob bets the barman that Frank is too drunk to know where his car is. Frank heads out to where he usually parked his car, forgetting that today he parked it in a different place. Unbeknownst to anyone, some joyriders stole Frank's car from where he parked it, and left it where he usually parked it. Frank takes them to the place he usually parks, and there is the car; therefor, according to Brian, the barman ought to win the bet. I.e. although Frank's belief about where his car was was completely unjustified, it turned out to have been true, so we ought to say that Frank knew where his car was.

Suppose, instead, that although Frank usually parks on Elm Street, today he is so drunk that he heads in the opposite direction, towards Main Street, thinking that he's heading towards Elm. When they get to Main Street, the joyriders have left the car there. "Here it is, right on Elm where I left it, " announces Frank. So, it would seem that according to Brian's argument, Frank knew where his car was...although even after finding the car, Frank still doesn't know where he is. Ought Bob still pay the barman?

I think all this shows is that while under the ordinary course of things when we say "know" we don't particularly care whether somebody's belief is justified, that's because most of the time we expect that it is. Whenever we have reason to suspect that's not the case, however, we become more circumspect about what it means to know something. Whether it's the case of someone who is drunk, or a hypochondriac, or a pathological liar, we are rightly hesitant to ascribe knowledge to the fool who always cries that it's noon, just because at the moment it does happen to be noon.

2003-07-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

As I suspected...

...there's been a fair bit of resistance to the term "Bright" already, some from people who might otherwise be sympathetic (e.g. some of the folks on Crooked Timber), some from creationists and their apologists (like this guy, Michael Rea) with whom there can be no accomodation anyway. Like Dennett, I agree with Dawkins when he says ?it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked). . .?, although I might take care to point out that otherwise smart people can have stupid beliefs, or keep themselves wilfully ignorant of facts supporting positions that they don't agree with. (To argue, as Rea does, that a position must be respectable if a lot of people, including "well-educated and otherwise reasonable, honest, and sound-minded individuals", hold it is, well, ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked. Not only is that fallacious reasoning, but counter-examples are obvious--so obvious that it's clear that Rea doesn't count as reasonable, honest, and sound-minded on the topic.)
Still, judging by the reaction I've seen so far, "Bright" does seem to be overreaching.

2003-07-01T20:11:00.000-07:00

Are you "A Bright?"

The Brights are a movement of people "whose worldview is naturalistic (free of supernatural and mystical elements)" and are trying to change the nature of public discourse and perception of such worldviews, by coopting the word "bright" as a noun much as "gay" was coopted to present a more positive, friendly term for homosexual. E.g. not "Are you bright", but "Are you a bright?" They claim Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and James Randi as Brights, which is certainly true; it may even be true that they self-identify with the Brights (Dawkins and Randi evidentally do). Nevertheless, I'm a bit sceptical of the linguistic theory that seems to underpin this cooption; hasn't anyone noticed that while Gay Pride doesn't cause most people to bat an eye, "that is so gay" is now not a compliment, where once it was? And despite the careful drawing of the noun/adjective distinction, trying to seize bright this way seems a quite a bit more aggressive and likely to raise hackles even among the sympathetic.

On the other hand, my world-view is naturalistic, free of the supernatural and mystical, and I wouldn't mind having a short-hand description that didn't characterize it totally in terms of what it's not (atheist, agnostic, unbeliever), and nowadays Epicurean requires just as much explication as would saying "I'm a Bright"--and if the meme takes off A Bright might end up requiring a whole lot less. It still makes me flash on those old Dr Pepper commercials, though....

2003-06-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

New: An RSS Feed

I've added an RSS feed to this blog; look for the XML link on the right. By the way, if you're looking for a good, minimalistic, free RSS-feed reader and you happen to be running Windows you could do a lot worse than Effbot News, a Python-based RSS reader. (Don't worry, you don't need to have Python installed: the download comes with enough of the core Python executable to run...and if you do have Python, installing it won't interfere with your regular Python installation.)

2003-06-19T09:50:00.000-07:00

The Moebius Matrix

I remember seeing The Matrix for the first time, having no prior knowledge of the movie, and coming out of it thinking: "A big budget Hollywood movie about epistemology! How cool is that?!" Now the image of the Matrix is such a commonplace that philosophers have started using it, at least as a pedagogical tool, as in this game on the Philosophers Magazine website, and on Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants (look at the entry for Sunday). There are even two different books on the subject: The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real and Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix. Apparently there was also a post on the 617 blog about multi-level Matrices, but unfortunately as I write this their archives are unavailable, so I don't know if it has anything to do with what I'm going to talk about.

The basic Matrix argument is that a) you cannot be sure that every experience you have is not a perfect computer simulation and b) this is a live possibility in a way that , say, pure solipsism or the theory that there's an intangible invisible imp on your shoulder is not, in that there is a possible experience you could have which would tend to confirm it: to whit, being unplugged from the Matrix. Of course, the same argument applies to the world outside of the Matrix: the people who unplugged you face the same possibility that they and you are in a higher-level Matrix, which could be confirmed by being unplugged. Obviously this leads to an infinite regress of suppositions, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

What I would like to consider is the Matrix scenario with a twist: Upon being unplugged from the Matrix, when the unpluggers tell you "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," you respond:
"What do you mean, real? This world that you call real is itself a computer simulation. When you attempt to look in on the Matrix, you're actually being fed images from the real world, where I come from; when you decided to 'unplug' me, I was plugged into your Matrix. Of course, they gave me a drug to erase my short term memory of the experience of being plugged in, so that there's no difference between my memories and what you think my memories ought to be, but there is an experience that either of us could have which would tend to confirm the truth of what I say: being unplugged."
The question about this account is not whether it is plausible (I should hope not), but whether the unpluggers would have any better reason to discount the possibility than we have of discounting the possibility of the Matrix? I don't think so; it has what appear to me to be the same salient features: it perfectly explains what experiences we do have, while suggesting an experience that we could conceivably have which would tend to confirm the theory that they were merely simulated (granted, without closing down the possibility of further experiences that might modify the conclusion). I call this the Moebius matrix because it's (very loosely) a one-sided loop: there's only one reality, despite the two apparent sides, and if you accept the argument then the "real" world is always the one that your consciousness is not currently aware of.

2003-06-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

Imaginative Resistance and Cognitive Distance

The following is a comment that I posted to Brian Weatherson's Thoughts Arguments and Rants blog on the topic of imaginative resistance that he posted Monday 6/16. I figured that I'd post it here as well, just so I can refer back to it later if I like, but you really need to refer to Thoughts, Arguments and Rants, Brian's original paper Virtuous Resistance and Wo's weblog entry In Defense of the Impossibility Hypothesis for the context:

I think you can probably add Bertrand Russell to the list of smart people like Wo who would have problems with the Tower of Goldbach case. I stumbled across this in The Problems of Philosophy this morning (Oxford Univ. Press edition, p.79):
"When Swift invites us to consider the race of Struldbugs who never die, we are able to acquiesce in imagination. But a world where two and two make five seems quite on a different level. We feel that such a world, if there were one, would upset the whole fabric of our knowledge and reduce us to utter doubt."

My guess (it doesn't really amount to a theory) is that something like Wo's concept of distance in belief space applies, except that distance shouldn't be measured in degree of credence but something like degree to which it enters into our daily working set of beliefs (which is some function of how long/how much effort it takes to recall and reassure ourselves of its truth). E.g., my credence in Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is quite high, having learned two different proofs of it in my undergraduate days, but my imaginative resistance to a fiction where it's not true is rather low--lower, anyway, than my imaginative resistance to 7 plus 5 does not make 12--I think because it takes some time and effort to recall the proofs to mind and deriving the consequences of its falsity are similarly "distant" and difficult. If this idea is right, I'd predict two things: that imaginative resistance would (ceteris paribus) be lower towards stories that only imply the impossible without outright stating it (because it takes work to tease out the implication, making the impossibility more distant); that people who deal with and rely on certain concepts more frequently and heavily will have greater imaginative resistance to impossibilities regarding them, so that e.g. my complexity theorist friends might have imaginative resistance towards a story that makes Godel's Incompleteness Theorem false that approaches mine towards the Tower of Goldbach.

I think that the conceptual effort/distance idea goes some way towards explaining why time-travel paradox stories don't meet much imaginative resistance, but it does have a problem with the lack of resistance you and Tamar have towards the Tower of Goldbach. I find it hard to believe that you and Tamar don't rely on arithmetic enough to find 5+7=12 virtually effortless and immediate, so there has to be some other explanation. Maybe that's where metaphysical theories about mathematics come in: maybe for some people metaphysical theories that would permit its negation are "close" enough to the daily working set of beliefs to overcome the resistance.

2003-06-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

Proper Names as Descriptions

There's something that strikes me as a little odd about Bertrand Russell's theory (in The Problems of Philosophy) that proper names are really descriptions of the object in question. For example (at least for people who didn't know Julius Caesar personally), according to Russell if you have a thought involving Julius Caesar, the name Julius Caesar really stands for a description along the lines of 'the founder of the Roman Empire', 'the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March' or 'the man whose name was Julius Caesar ', although the exact content of the description will vary from person to person. The only constant is that the object described will be the same object for everyone using the name correctly.
What strikes me as odd is this: almost without exception, any and all of the individual pieces of that description could be wrong as a matter of empirical fact--and yet we would still intend in using the name that it stand for that particular person, and moreover would be understood by others as doing so. For instance, one could easily imagine the following conversation:
Trurl: "I was wondering whether I should read one of Bertrand Russell's books the other day, and I was thinking about starting with the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding ; what do you think?"
Klapaucias: "Who?"
Trurl: "You know, Bertrand Russell, the French philosopher who wrote Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysic and Ecce Homo "
Klapaucias: "Bertrand Rusell was English, and he didn't write either of those. He did write The Problems of Philosophy and the Principia Mathematica ."
Trurl: "Right, him. So do you think I should read his books or not?"
Klapaucias: "Definitely."
I think the above exchange makes perfect sense (although it would also make sense if Klapaucias asked whether Bertrand Russell was really the philosopher whom Trurl meant, and not Kant, Nietzche, Hume, or someone else entirely) and the reason that it makes sense is because of the single exception--the one that we can't be wrong about. Of all the descriptions that might come to mind when we think of Russell, the one that we really mean in most cases is 'the man whose name was Bertrand Russell.' Everything else that we might believe about him can easily be amended in the light of new information, but that Bertrand Russell's name was not really Bertrand Russell is impossible to understand except in a context something like Bertrand Russell's name used to be something different before he changed it, or the man known as Bertrand Russell to some people was known as George Smith to others (and in either case one could maintain that whatever else his name was, it was also Bertrand Russell).

2003-06-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

Recent Reading

The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
I Think, Therefore I Laugh by John Allen Paulos
The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life by Robert C. Solomon
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy by Roger Scruton
The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufman

2003-06-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

Academics and Intellectuals

THREE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AN ACADEMIC AND AN INTELLECTUAL: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LIBERAL ARTS WHEN THEY ARE KICKED OFF CAMPUS?by Jack Miles One of the things I find interesting about this paper is that rather than just bemoaning (or hailing) changes in academia, it attempts to analyze and speculate about possible consequences and ways in which the problems might be mitigated. I find the distinction drawn between academics and intellectuals to be interesting, particularly sinceby Miles's definition I'm so clearly in the latter category by both life-history and temperament.

2003-06-11T07:11:00.000-07:00

Sorites, Shmorites

I was discussing Sorites paradoxes with my friend RI, the computer scientist, and he impatiently dismissed the reasoning as fallacious. According to RI, you can easily demonstrate sequences of sets such that each set and its immediate neighbors are computationally indistinguishable (no efficient algorithm can tell them apart), but where the endpoints of the sequence are computationally distinguishable. He regards it as obvious that vague predicates like "is a heap" are such sets: although the number of grains in the heap is of course efficiently computable, the distinction between heaps with n and n+1 grains in terms of "is a heap" is not. I'm not sure it's quite that easy. For one thing, it assumes that the identification of heaps is probabilistic; I think that's true empirically (for any group of grains there is some probability that a competent speaker will assent that it's a heap), but as a theory of meaning I suspect it's controversial. I certainly think, though, that as an example it completely undermines the intuition that justifies the sorites induction: namely that because the difference seems too small to matter, the sum of successive differences should still be too small to matter. Given the existence of a counter-example to the general principle, the burden of proof should rest with those trying to justify the intuition.

On the other hand, I never thought that intuition particularly sound; it would seem to rely on the imperceptibility of the individual difference. If we were confident in our ability to discern a single grain's difference in the size of two heaps would it still seem true that "if n grains is a heap, n-1 grains is a heap?" Suppose we made perceptibility explicit: If group of grains X is a heap, then a visibly smaller group of grains Y is still a heap. Does that even seem plausible, much less obviously true? Yet if we could always perceive one grain's difference, they would be equivalent.

One might object that of course sorites predicates rely on imperceptibility, that's what makes them vague, and if one grain was a perceptible difference you could always rescue the original intuition by proposing a smaller, imperceptible change, e.g. removing a fraction of a grain. I don't think that works, because you can calculate empirically how many imperceptible changes of a given size amount to a perceptible change.

2003-06-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

Sorites and Eldred

Seems like the Supreme Court can't recognize a Sorites Paradox when presented with one. (Sorites describes a class of "little-by-little" paradoxes, along the lines of "One grain of corn isn't a heap; if n grains aren't a heap, then n+1 grains aren't a heap; ergo no number of grains is a heap." I'll have more to say on this later.) In Eldred v. Ashcroft, the plaintiff asked the Court to strike down the retroactive portion of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act. Briefly, the Constitution grants Congress the power to create a monopoly on the distribution of a work in order to promote the public good, but only for a limited time. In the beginning that was 14 years, renewable once, but over time Congress has kept expanding that time (11 times in the past 40 years). The Sonny Bono Act extends it to the author's lifetime + 75 years, or 95 years for a corporation and makes it retroactively apply to copyrights that were about to expire under the old limits. Lawrence Lessig, for the plaintiff, argued that allowing Congress to retroactively extend the limit made it effectively unlimited, contrary to the Constitutional clause establishing the power in the first place. The Court sided with the government, apparently buying (albeit with greater or lesser degrees of unease among the 7 justices who voted against Eldred) the argument that if a term is limited, extending it by another finite term makes the new term still limited, and so within the power of Congress to grant.

2003-05-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

Coincidence? I think not

Sunday night, my friend SO the theoretical physicist was telling us about his pal Max Tegmark's Scientific American article on parallel universes. Today as I was trying to find an online copy of Lewis's Truth in Fiction article, I noticed Thoughts Arguments and Rants mentioned the parallel universe article on May 10th. Was this "just" a coincidence? Well, if you take Tegmark's article seriously it was a virtual certainty: there are infinitely many doppelgangers of me that stumbled across this link. (Of course, that doesn't guarantee that the subjective "I" must have experienced this discovery, since there are also infinitely many doppelgangers that didn't...) What struck me about this, besides the interesting classification of the "levels" of multiverses and the seemingly strong likelihood based on the current evidence that at least Level I is true (it's Borges's Library of Babel written in quantum states on volumes the size of the observable universe), was the way this relates to Huw Price's Origins of the Arrow of Time article mentioned earlier. Given a big enough Universe, the initial smoothness of our region of it may not be a puzzle at all...

2003-05-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

Truth in a manner of speaking

Wo wonders what I mean by the operator "a manner of speaking", specifically what are the truth values. I wonder myself sometimes, or at least I wonder whether there are well-known and accepted objections to this line of thought, but I'll try to fill in some details.

P is true "in a manner of speaking" iff P would be true assuming that:

We took assertions in fiction A at face value ("Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street.") OR

In addition to 1, we took assertions in fiction B at face value as long as they didn't contradict anything in A ("Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe are in the same profession.") OR

In addition to 1 we took all actual facts that didn't contradict A as true ("At the end of the street where Sherlock Holmes lived is Regents Park.")

I haven't read wo's positive theory of fictional characters yet, so I don't know why wo thinks there's a problem with the notion that there are differing modes of speaking about fictional characters, only that wo disagrees with it.

2003-05-22T05:26:00.000-07:00

Are fictional characters abstract?

It doesn't seem likely. Ben Caplan has a nice discussion of this in his paper Fictional Characters and Other Abstract Objects According to him, David Lewis claims that abstract objects can be characterized in one of two ways: "The Way of Example" (numbers and sets are abstract, rocks and chairs are concrete) and "The Negative Way" (abstract objects aren't located in space or time, and they neither causally affect or are causally affected by anything). Further, Caplan points out that The Negative Way has definite problems when it comes to "creatures of fiction": If Dickens caused Mrs. Gamp to come into existence then she is in a causal relationship with him, and she exists in time since there was a time before which she didn't exist. He suggests that one might try to resolve these problems by arguing that The Negative Way is flat wrong (abstract object can exist in space & time and enter into certain kinds of causal relationships), or partially wrong (abstract objects can be located in time, just not in space), or one could concentrate on the Way of Example instead.

It seems to me, though, that it may just be better to abandon the contention that fictional characters are abstract objects, and grant them their own category. For one thing, on the Kripke-van Inwagen view discussed in Caplan's paper, as abstract objects fictional characters don't have the properties attributed to them (being old, being fat, being a woman), but instead have the property of having properties attributed to them. But this leads directly to wo's observation that on this kind of view, Sherlock Holmes (or Mrs. Gamp) is a ghostly invisible character who lives at no place in particular and never does anything at all. It seems to me that we want to be able to say "Sherlock Holmes was a detective" and have it be both meaningful and true (at least in some sense), and "Sherlock Holmes was a ghostly invisible character who never did anything at all, but the property of being a detective was attributed to him" isn't an adequate substitute. Moreover, John Burgess's Numbers and Ideas paper offers a pretty plausible argument for why for abstract entities like numbers it makes no sense to ascribe a position in space and time and or to regard them as causally active or acted upon. If that's so, then either fictional characters are not abstract (or are a different kind of abstract), or it's wrong to argue as above that they exist in time, if not in space, and are caused by their authors--but the reasons that Burgess offers for supposing that about numbers (e.g. that it's crucial there are an infinity of them) don't apply to fictional characters.

2003-05-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

Are fictional characters real?

Over in my favorite philosophy blog, Brian Weatherson has mentioned wo's weblog review of Fiction and Metaphysics a couple of times. wo, in turn, read Amie Thomasson's Fiction and Metaphysics because of "Brian's puzzling remarks about fictional characters being real but abstract."

Now, I'm not sure what exactly is meant by "real but abstract" (because I'm not sure exactly what abstract in this context conveys), but it certainly seems plausible. I certainly think that Sherlock Holmes is real; I just think that he's a real fictional character (if that introduces a new ontological category I'm not sure that I see why that's a problem). The difficulty with realism about fictional characters seems to be that if you look at statements such as "Sherlock Holmes was a detective; he lives at 221B Baker Street; he is human" and "Holmes was invented by Arthur Conan Doyle; he doesn't really live at 221B Baker Street; he is what the Sherlock Holmes stories are about" while both sets express propositions that we would regard as true under appropriate circumstances, they both can't literally be true since they contradict eachother. Without going into detail about wo's summary of Amie Thomasson's theory, or his objections to it (read his post--it's interesting), it seems to me that the difference between the two sets of statements is that the first are only true in a manner of speaking, while the second are true literally speaking. What can we say about this manner of speaking? Well, one possibility is that it postulates as true everything that is asserted to be true within the story, plus whatever is true in the real world (if you can say that in metaphysics) that is not contradicted by anything in the story. Moreover, it seems to me that this manner is the default when we speak of fiction: it raises no eyebrows among competent speakers of the language when we simply assert "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street", even when they know that Holmes is a fictional character. When we wish to speak literally, and deny the truth (or at least emphasize the fictionality) of the facts in the story, we have to signal our intent to change modes; in my view this is what the word "really" is doing in the sentence "Holmes doesn't really live at 221B Baker Street." Thus "Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street but did not really live at 221B Baker Street" is not a contradiction, since what's being asserted is something like "Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street in the default manner of speaking which accepts the facts in the stories as true, but did not live at 221B Baker Street when we speak literally."

I think that using "in a manner of speaking" and "really" or "literally" as operators signalling an intended mode gets around the problem that wo pointed out with Thommasson's attempts to divide statements into "fictional" and "serious", namely statements that seem to cross the barrier. For instance (from his examples):
1) Arthur Conan Doyle invented a detective who is always lucky in his hazardous inductive inferences.
2) The hero of the Sherlock Holmes stories consumes drugs that are illegal nowadays.
3) Daniil Charms used to dress and behave like Sherlock Holmes, whom he admired much.
4) The Sherlock Holmes stories are not about a ghostly, invisible character who lives at no place in particular and never does anything.

Prepending "In a manner of speaking," to mean "taking the facts of the stories as true", 1, 2 and 3 certainly appear to true and not problematic, although emphasizing it appears a little odd, as if you might be implying that it's only in a manner of speaking that Doyle created Holmes, rather than that Doyle created a character who is only in a manner of speaking a detective who is always lucky in his hazardous inductive inferences. I think, though, that may be just a result of making explicit what would ordinarily be the implicit default assumption. It's also possible that in order to be precise when mixing modes you ought to mark where in the sentence the mode shift occurs as in the clause above following "rather than that". 4 is simply true under this interpretation, without need for any signals (it's true whether you take the facts in the story as given or explicitly reject them). I suppose you also might say that 4 is false in a manner of speaking, where that manner implies that you are taking wo's characterization of the consequences of Thommasson's position as the fiction you are endorsing--but I don't think we use language that way when talking about theories rather than fiction.

"At the time of Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street didn't exist, although since then it has been created to house a Holmes museum." At first glance, this seems to be a perfectly plausible, even true, utterance that the mode-shift theory doesn't resolve. If we add "in a manner of speaking" to signal that we were taking the facts of the stories as true even where contradicted by the real world, then 221B most certainly did exist, but without it "At the time of Sherlock Holmes" doesn't seem to have literal meaning (or if it does it includes the present-day when we are reading the stories). Upon further reflection, though, I think that it just calls for more precision in applying shift indicators to the relevant clauses: At the time, in a manner of speaking, of Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street didn't really exist, although since then it has been created....

There still may be a problem when the stories themselves contain contradictions: even in our manner of speaking is it John H. Watson's war-wound in the shoulder or the leg? (This example is briefly mentioned in The Seven-Percent Solution as part the relevant fiction, No if you rely only on Doyle's stories. I think that in the ordinary course of things, we would not regard the truth of that sentence as indeterminate, but simply as a matter of which fiction you are endorsing for the purposes of the current conversation.

2003-05-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

Badgerbag comments:

About ataraxia:

Yet if you're always trying so hard to live without pain doesn't that mean you're afraid of pain? Isn't pain and loss inevitable no matter how virtuous you are and how studiously you avoid it?

I'm not trying to be very logical here, but if you love other people, doesn't your happiness depend on them and their continued existence? Isn't fear for the future sort of built in to relationships with others? I would question that minimizing risks maximizes happiness. Unless you treat other people with detachment, so that they are appreciated yet still in the category of "small luxuries" that you could live without, doesn't that mean "no love"?

It also seems a bit to me as if Epicurus thinks of pain and happiness as limited commodities that are used up or gambled away.

And what if empathy is necessary for happiness, and the development of empathy requires pain? Doesn't wisdom require pain as well?

I know I'm missing a lot of your point here but... at least it's some response. You need some real philosophers reading this and commenting!

My response

I think the Epicurean response would be along these lines:

If pain is inevitable, does it make sense to fear pain and strive to avoid it?

Of course you're afraid of pain! Pain hurts: that is clear sensory evidence. If it is necessary to suffer some amount of fear or mental unease in contemplating the future in order to plan to avoid it, then at worst that is one of those minor ills which we put up with for the sake of the greater future pleasure, namely the avoidance of that foreseeable catastrophe that heedlessness will bring on. "If you do not on every occasion refer each of your actions to the ultimate end prescribed by nature, but instead of this in the act of choice or avoidance turn to some other end, your actions will not be consistent with your theories." Certainly pain and loss are inevitable, but it doesn't follow that they cannot be mitigated in any way by forethought or proper understanding. (An example of the former might be not binge-drinking in the evening to avoid the hangover the following morning; an example of the latter might be to realize how foolish you're being if you tell yourself "I just have to have that new pair of boots/vacation to the Bahamas/sports car/yacht or I'll be miserable!") Also, though much of his philosophy involved reasoning about pain and pleasure, he held that once you understood, it was not particularly difficult to live without pain and fear ("What is necessary is easy to obtain...").

Epicurus understood that there were two kinds of pain: physical pain and mental pain. According to him: "Continuous bodily pain does not last long; instead, pain, if extreme, is present a very short time, and even that degree of pain which slightly exceeds bodily pleasure does not last for many days at once. Diseases of long duration allow an excess of bodily pleasure over pain." (It might be argued that in some cases modern medicine has tipped that balance, allowing even diseases of long duration to inflict continuous bodily pain in excess of bodily pleasure, but that's a discussion for another time.)

As far as mental pain, there were two chief sources: Fear of death, and fear of the gods (and the afterlife). Death is nothing to fear: "Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us." If death does not cause the dead pain, it's foolish to allow the fear of it to cause you pain now. Lucretius offers the further argument: Consider the time before you were born; we do not consider the infinity of time when we didn't exist before we were born an evil thing, so why should we regard the infinity of time when we no longer exist after our death with horror? As to fear of the gods, if they exist they are perfectly indifferent to us, for anger and partiality would necessarily rob them of their blessed perfection (there are other arguments, too, which I'll deal with some other time).

As far as we can tell, to Epicurus this wasn't just idle theorizing; he died after two weeks of agony from kidney stones, but at least according to his followers, he died cheerfully and at peace with himself (in a warm bath after a draught of unmixed wine). Here is (according to Diogenes Laertius) one of the last letter he wrote, to Idomeneus:
On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them; but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations. But I would have you, as becomes your lifelong attitude to me and to philosophy, watch over the children of Metrodorus.

Does love make us hostages to fortune?

If it does, then that's just another of those pains that we have to put up with in order to achieve the more significant pleasure of loving and being loved. What's more, friendship is the best bulwark against misfortune possible, and one of the greatest sources of pleasure (c.f. the letter above). But it's possible that a stronger case can be made: that the loss of a loved one is not so horrible as it seems--certainly not horrible enough to more than offset the joys of all the times prior to that loss, once you understand the groundlessness of fear of death and the gods. For how much of the grief that you experience stems not from your selfish consideration of the hole the loved one's absence leaves in your life (a real consideration, though very much mitigated by the memories that you have of them and the understanding that the loved one's existence was not and could not have been essential, the way that something like breathing is essential, however romantic it is to imagine otherwise), but from your empathetic fear of what they might be experiencing in death or the afterlife (entirely imaginary and groundless; nothing can matter to them any more, and fear of death on their account is no more justified than fear of death on your own)?

Are happiness and pain limited commodities?

I don't think so; at least I don't see how. If that's the impression I gave, it's just something wrong with my summation. In fact, Epicurus appeared to have argued the opposite: that given the correct understanding pleasure is for practical purposes infinite in obtainability if not intensity (presumably pain could also be, on a similar argument, if one's understanding was incorrect, but I don't think there's any evidence that he examined that point). More specifically, he argued: "Unlimited time and limited time afford an equal amount of pleasure, if we measure the limits of that pleasure by reason." This is a bit cryptic, and similar points in the Principle Doctrines are even more so, but I think that the clear thrust is that it is foolish to fear that your life will have less total pleasure than another, longer life, let alone that an infinite life, offering infinite duration for pleasure, is so much to be preferred as to render it sensible to rob ourselves of our current pleasures to wallow in envy of that infinite life. It's also clear that Epicurus believed that memories of past pleasures are very much something that one can enjoy in the present and weigh against present pain (while memories of past pains can easily be dismissed), and since these necessarily accumulate over a properly lived life, happiness seems neither limited nor a commodity. It's not clear whether the latter point can be reconciled with the former, although I suspect that it could if you considered that no matter how long you live, there are only so many pleasant memories that you can process at once in the subjective now.

What if empathy is necessary for happiness, and development of empathy requires pain?

Epicurus was an empiricist, not an idealist, and empirically it doesn't look like the world is going to run out of painful experiences to teach empathy by any time in the near future. IOW, he was dealing with the world as it seemed to be constituted according to his senses and reason, not as it might be if everyone managed somehow to embark on his program so successfully as to avoid pain and fear entirely. Later philosophers, particularly philosophers of religion, would worry about such cases a lot (particularly when trying to answer Epicurus's riddle), but it wasn't on his map as far as I can see. In any case, if a certain amount of developmental pain is avoidable, but necessary for future happiness, it's pretty clear that Epicurus would have been comfortable with seeking it out.

Real philosophers

I think that Epicurus would have strongly rejected the notion that it requires real philosophers to do philosophy; the whole point of opening his teaching to women and slaves (something that let his detractors slander him with holding orgies at The Garden) was that he thought everyone could benefit from philosophy. I happen to agree with that; I think it's a real shame that the practice of philosophy has become so rarified as to be all but unintelligible to even the smart, educated lay-person.

2003-05-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

On the Origins of the Arrow of Time: Why There is Still a Puzzle About the Low-Entropy Past - an interesting paper by Huw Price.

2003-05-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship. - Epicurus

See, that's the kind of thought that makes me really like Epicurus.

2003-05-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

Ethics

Ethics attempts to answer questions along the lines of "What is good?" and "How should I live my life?" Epicurus held that pleasure was the highest good, but he had a pretty complex understanding of what pleasure was. Firstly, pleasure is not just the active satisfaction of desires (eating when one is hungry), but also--and perhaps more importantly--pleasure is the static state of satisfaction you reach once you have satisfied your desires (the feeling of having satisfied one's hunger). Secondly, avoidance of pain and fear is a necessary part of pursuit of pleasure. That being said, there are pleasures that a prudent person will forgo in order to avoid the pains that will likely follow, just as contrariwise there are pains and difficulties that we deem worthwhile to bear in order to achieve resulting pleasures. The real goal is ataraxia : tranquility or peace of mind. The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together. - Epicurus

Pleasure, properly understood, as life's primary goal can be explained by combining an Aristotilean definition of "good" as that which we value for its own sake with the psychological observation that in point of fact the only thing that we clearly value for its own sake is pleasure/absence of pain (and not, say, self-actualization or any such working out of our distinctly human telos). The fact that pleasure is desirable and pain undesirable is something we can directly perceive, just as we perceive that fire is hot. However, when it comes down to satisfying our desires, "The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity." In other words, between the strategies of extending ourselves further and further in pursuit of pleasure or reigning in our desires to what is actually necessary, Epicurus would advocate the latter. There is nothing wrong with small luxuries, provided they can be had without too much trouble, but it is unwise to make one's happiness depend on them, since you necessarily thereby increase your chance of unhappiness and your current anxiety over whether you can continue to obtain happiness. Anxiety and fear for the future are the chief sorts of mental pain, and the biggest obstacles to the life of pure pleasure.

When it comes to the treatment of others, many people found (and still find) Epicurus shockingly immoral, for holding that there is no absolute standard by which injustice towards another is wrong but "only in consequence of the fear which is associated with the apprehension of being discovered by those appointed to punish such actions." Critics ask what kind of morality is it that says if you're sure that you'll never be caught there's no reason not to behave badly? Nevertheless, Epicurus argued that since you can never be free of the fear of discovery and retribution, no matter how many times you've gotten away with injustice before or how long you've remained undiscovered, and this sort of anxiety about the future is the worst sort of mental pain, "It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life."

Personally, I'm not completely convinced that there's no more solidly grounded rational reason to avoid injustice than fear of punishment, even with the understanding that the apprehension is in itself an ill and worth avoiding (i.e. that's it not just a calculus of the expected punishment versus the expected gain, but that there's an ongoing an perhaps large cost to having behaved unjustly). On the other hand, 2300 years later it's still controversial whether you rationally ought to be able to count on better behavior from self-interested people (or, indeed, anyone) than what you can exact through threat of sanction, and it seems clear that you cannot as a matter of fact rely on people behaving justly where there is no chance of being caught. It may be that you can show that people who cheat even when they won't be caught are behaving irrationally (at least in certain systems of justice), or even that there is an absolute standard of ethics, or both (e.g. when you assume that an all-powerful and all-knowing God will invariably punish transgressors against his universal law), but in practice neither of those seems to be a better guarantor of people's virtuous behavior than does Epicureanism.

2003-05-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

Epistemology

What do we know, and how do we know it? The first challenge to any account of epistemology usually comes from skeptics, who ask "How can you know that?" The typical immediate response is along the lines of "Bite me."

A somewhat more philosophically sophisticated dialogue might go something like this:
Setting: a symposium in the Garden
Epicurus: All our knowledge ultimately comes from the senses, and we can trust the senses when properly used.
Skeptic: How can you know that?
Epicurus: Come again?
Skeptic: How do you know that your senses aren't deceived? Can you prove that you can trust them?
Epicurus: We can make a provisional judgement, which can later be corroborated or disproved by further sensory evidence.
Skeptic: But that's assuming what you're trying to prove. For all you know, further sensory evidence could be just as deceptive as the original evidence.
Epicurus: That seems unlikely; our experience shows a high degree of correlation between sense experiences at different moments. If they were deceptive, you'd expect them to hardly correlate at all.
Skeptic: You might be being systematically deceived. Or your memories might be wrong. You can't ever prove that you're not, without appealing to something other than your senses as evidence. Pass the wine.
Epicurus: Which wine?
Skeptic: That wine right by your elbo--D'OH!
Epicurus: It seems pretty hard to live consistently as a Skeptic, without starving to death.
Skeptic: More like dying of thirst. Give me that. I still claim that you can't know anything for sure.
Epicurus: You're certain of that?
Skeptic: Positi--D'OH!
Epicurus: More wine?
Skeptic: Ok, you can't know anything for certain except that you can't know anything for certain. No contradiction there, and you can't deny its truth.
Epicurus: Yes I can. I deny it categorically.
Skeptic: No you can't deny it.
Epicurus: I never have denied it.
Skeptic: You just did.
Epicurus: That's untrue.
Skeptic: Of course it's true, I heard you with my own--D'OH!

And that, in a nutshell, is the traditional Epicurean response to skepticism: it's impossible to live consistently as a skeptic; the proposition that knowledge is impossible is self-defeating; and even if it weren't the skeptic isn't entitled to use terms like "truth" and "knowledge" without giving some account of how it is that he knows what they mean, which he can't do without appeal at some level to sensory evidence.

2003-05-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

Materialism

When ordinary folks say "materialism" they mean the desire for wealth and material goods, but when philosophers say "materialism" they mean the doctrine that matter is the only reality. The ordinary usage might be because of an implicit intuituion that if matter is all there is, then it's only sensible to regard accumulation of material things as the greatest or only good. Accepting materialism as a doctrine, though, doesn't necessarily commit you to the position that concepts like love and beauty have no meaning, any more than it commits you to the position that the concept of a storm isn't meaningful because only air and water molecules are real. A materialist might say that they are real, but only insofar as their interpretation rests ultimately on facts about the material world. Materialism is usually understood as being in contrast with idealism, which holds that only ideas are real and that matter is an illusion (Platonic idealism is a form of this).

According to a materialist, for instance, something is beautiful because of the way that the real physical object causes certain patterns of sensations in our sense organs which cause physical changes in our brain that we experience as a certain kind of pleasure which we call "beauty" (leaving aside for a moment the question as to just what the hell we mean when we say "experience" in that sentence, or indeed what we mean by "we", concepts which philosophers have argued are not without their problems). An idealist would maintain that something is beautiful because it possesses the objective immaterial property of beauty, or that a physical form is beautiful insofar as approximates the perfect ideal form, and that's all there is to it. Our sense organs and all that other crap, insofar as they exist at all, are just there to allow us to more-or-less dimly apprehend the existence of that property.

The above example, by the way, is just one kind of materialist/idealist split, and not all materialists and idealists would endorse it even as a gross simplification of their views. In particular, the idea that beauty is an ideal property is called Aesthetic Idealism, and one could be an idealist without being an aesthetic idealist in that one believes in the existence of certain immaterial forms, ideals, or ideas without counting beauty among them. I think it's fair to say, though, that nobody who called herself a materialist would accept that beauty is a real thing that has a metaphysical existence unconnected to the material world.

Epicurus and Materialism

Epicurus was a materialist: he held that Platonic forms didn't really exist, and everything was made up of small indivisible bits of matter called atoms moving through empty space. In this he was following Democritus, although unlike Democritus he believed that individual atoms had weight, size and shape, and that properties of objects like sweetness and color weren't just "conventions" but actual properties caused by the differing configurations and properties of atoms, and that atoms sometimes moved about randomly.

It is tempting for people of a certain point of view (I call it the "Silly Ancients" school of thought) to think that any resemblance between views such as Epicurus's and modern physics to be purely coincidental, and exaggerated by taking the term "atom" directly from Democritus, but I think that they underestimate the power of reason to understand the natural world. Epicurus had rational reasons for all of these beliefs, and to the extent that we know his arguments (much of which, including his treatises on physics, have been lost) they still seem logically sound, although sometimes based on premises which we now know (but he could not have) to be false. For example, Epicurus reasoned that the cosmos must be infinite, since if it wasn't you could walk up to the boundary, stick your fist beyond it and the cosmos would have a new outermost edge--and this process could be repeated ad infinitum. If, as we now suspect, the universe is finite it's not because there's a big wall at the edge (a la a certain Star Trek movie), but because space folds back on itself in a higher dimension so that no matter what direction you go you will eventually return to your starting point; I'm inclined to forgive Epicurus for not spotting that possibility.

It's also tempting for some people to make too much of the similarities (the "Dancing WuLi" school of thought), and pretend that everything we now believe was prefigured in some pre-modern viewpoint somewhere and sometime and we are only now rediscovering their wisdom, but there were definitely things that Epicurus was wrong about. Atoms, for instance, do not have a tendency to fall straight downward at uniform velocity forever, and in this Epicurus was wrong. However, and I think this is the important point, it seems clear that not only would Epicurus understand and probably accept our reasons for believing otherwise if they were explained to him, it seems likely that if he had access to our data he would arrive at the same conclusions that we do. The reason he believed that all naturally atoms travelled downward wasn't any a priori commitment, but a simple empirical observation that objects tend to fall. Since atoms must be moving (or else how would macroscopic bodies form and come apart again?) it's reasonable to suppose atoms, too, tend to fall.

Materialism and Me

I think materialism is a perfectly reasonable position to start from: whatever else may or may not exist, the material world certainly seems to. Programs of radical skepticism are either self-defeating or unlivable (nobody actually behaves as if radical skepticism or solipsism were true, especially in the act of defending it, so why should the burden of proof fall upon skepticism's opponents?), and while I'm not entirely out of sympathy with attempts to temporarily adopt a radically skeptical point of view with an aim towards constructing a logically sound basis for our intuitions about the existence of the material world starting from first principles, I'm not about to sit around and wait for that program to be satisfactorily completed. Justifying our belief about the existence of the material world is all very well, but if some particular justification fails that doesn't make us any less sure, and if an argument came to the opposite conclusion--that the world was completely illusory, most of us--myself included--would take that to be the reductio ad absurdam that disproved the argument. But if that's the case, then the apparent reality of the world is just the sort of primary fact upon which we are entitled to rely as a basis for further reasoning. At least, any counter-argument that starts out by denying it has a much tougher row to hoe than the argument that assumes it.

2003-05-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

My personal philosophy

My personal philosophy, meaning how I try to live my life rather than how I try to approach philosophical questions, is Epicureanism. As far as I can see, Epicurus was right on all the major particulars of his philosophy, even if some of his points have been expanded upon and some of his ideas about physics were naive. Alfred North Whitehead once said, "All of Western Philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato." In my view, however, you might as well have the correct answers in the main text, and save the historical antecedents for the footnotes. Actually, Epicurus was a student of some of Plato's followers (and Democritus's, where he got many of his ideas on atoms), and really did seem to live a life according to his philosophy. His students included women and slaves, and rather than setting his school in a public forum as did most of his contemporaries, he gathered his followers in the garden of his home. Unfortunately most of his writings were destroyed over time, and out of something like 300 manuscripts we only have three letters and a handful of short fragments, so much of what we know about his philosophy comes from (not always sympathetic) later sources, primarly Diogenes Laertius and Lucretius, who counted themselves Epicureans, and Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, who did not.
Epicurus's views in brief:

Metaphysics: Materialist. The world is made of atoms flying through empty space, and that all natural phenomena are explainable in terms of this; Platonic forms and immaterials souls don't exist.

Epistemology: Empiricist. Our senses and reason are largely trustworthy, and skepticism is unwarranted (if not self-contradictory).

Ethics: Hedonist. The purpose of our actions is pleasure, which is properly understood as tranquility and freedom from pain and fear.

Philosophy of Mind: Reductionist. Epicurus was probably the first philosopher to identify the mind with the brain.

Philosophy of Religion: Atheist. Epicurus was definitely the first philosopher to formulate the "problem of pain", hence sometimes known as Epicurus's Riddle: If God is omnipotent and all-good, why is there evil in the world? Either he cares but cannot stop it, in which case he is impotent, or he can stop it but doesn't care, in which case he's not good, or both.

2003-05-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

What sort of Philosophy?

Why, analytic, of course. For a brief introduction to analytic philosophy, you can't do better than Bruce Hardcastle's Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy
as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python

2003-05-13T12:05:00.000-07:00

Why Philosophy?

Only that it deals with fundamental questions, is all. Literally, philosophy is the love of wisdom, and what's not to love about wisdom? Who would really rather be a fool than one of the wise? (Many romantics pretend to, but curiously few have gone about life as if they actually desired to be foolish...) Philosophy lies at the heart of every single human inquiry, and forms the basis of our understanding of anything and everything: it is, in fact, the study of that understanding and whether and in what sense it is even possible to understand something. As a practical matter one can, of course, get along without ever asking any of the greater or lesser philosophical questions (Does anything really exist? Why are we here? Is it moral to do X? How do I know? Is it possible to know anything with certainty? Is there a God? Are these questions even meaningful?), let alone answering them...or at least attempting to answer them. Nevertheless, I can't help but feeling that it requires a uncommon dullness and lack of curiosity not to entertain them at least briefly, and that if one desires to live a good life it is insouciance bordering on recklessness never to think seriously about what "a good life" means and how to go about having one, or how to recognize one if you have it.

Broadly, once can divide philosophy along the following lines, based on the questions it grapples with:

What is?- Metaphysics

What is truth?- Logic

What is knowledge?- Epistemology

What is good?- Ethics

What is beauty?- Aesthetics

What is justice?- Political Philosophy

What am "I"?- Philosophy of Mind

What is this sentence?- Philosophy of Language

Who is this God person, anyway?- Philosophy of Religion

Naturally, the above is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and hardly comprehensive, but as a first cut it's not bad. Almost all of these questions fascinate me, and I keep returning to them and rolling them over in my mind. I go through periods where I metaphorically throw up my hands, and dismiss them--or much of the conversation that has grown up around them--as esoteric and artificial, but that only lasts until I go haring off after a glimpse of a shiny new idea.

2003-05-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

The Purpose of this Blog

I'm starting this blog to record some of my thoughts on philosophy. Philosophy used to be a passion of mine as an undergraduate (although for one reason and another it's not what I ended up majoring in while in college), and as I'm considering going back to school, philosophy is one of the subjects that I'm thinking of pursuing. Unfortunately serious philosophy, particularly of an analytic bent, is not something most people, even most intellectuals, have much patience for so at the moment I lack a community with which to discuss some of the issues that interest me. Actually, one of the reasons to persue a degree instead of following my usual course of autodidacticism is precisely to have a community to bounce ideas off of.

While I'm kicking the the tires on this idea, I figure it will be helpful to have a place to write some of my thinking down, and a blog's a good place to do it: more formal than just talking to myself or jotting notes, less formal than a real essay or paper. Eventually I might try to turn some of my ramblings into an essay or essays, but for now it's just an aide-mémoire.