Philosophy bites: August 2007
April 18th 2009 05:24
Some things I found interesting in the August 2007 podcasts.
David Papineau on Physicalism
* Physicalism, as Papineau puts it, is the view that everything that exists is physical, including the mind. I've always thought that this position is somewhat circular (is it any different from saying "everything that exists exists"? doesn't it leave open what is to count as "the physical"?), but I'd grant that in a general way the idea is understandable. The paradigms of the physical presumably are the sorts of objects, relations, laws studied by physicists.
* Papineau argues that this is a discovery, not an assumption, of modern science. Two hundred years ago, Newtonian scientists postulated a variety of forces -- forces of contact, gravitational forces, electromagnetic forces, chemical forces, vital forces, mental forces, forces of sensibility, forces of irritability... -- many forces, many of which might seem to us strikingly non-physical. But throughout the 19th century, investigations into conservation of energy and physiology convinced people that there weren't any forces apart from basic physical ones -- nuclear, electromagnetic, gravitational... -- and there weren't any effects anywhere, even in living bodies, that couldn't be explained by these. So it's "not a cut and dried thing"; there might be magical or supernatural forces affecting the physical; and it's possible that "lurking in the interstices of our brains there are special mental forces"; -- but, says Papineau, there's no evidence for them, and a lot of evidence against.
* Papineau sums up: there doesn't seem to be room for anything that's non-physical to have physical effects, so you have to say either that conscious experience is physical, or that it's non-physical but doesn't affect the physical world -- it's just a sort of pictorial accompaniment ("epiphenomenalism").
* Papineau addresses Frank Jackson's knowledge argument. I don't want to go into the details, but in the course of replying Papineau mentions that it's plausible, for human beings, that the ability to imagine red might hinge upon having previously had that experience, because there's no way for you to create a red neural pattern without stimuli from a red object.
Well, this is an old tabula rasa idea, and I wonder if, as an empirical fact, it's actually true.
* Vagueness has to do with borderline cases -- for example, "red" is vague because there's plenty of shades between red and orange where it's not clear whether to count them as red.
* The classic paradox is the problem of the heap (the "sorites" problem): if you keep taking grains of sand from a pile, at what point is it no longer a heap?... There are similar problems for almost all concepts in ordinary thinking. If someone is growing millimetre by millimetre, at what point are they "tall"; if someone is earning money penny by penny, at what point are they rich?... Issues of vagueness also arise in the course of applying laws: what degree of loudness constitutes noise pollution?
* It's inevitable, says Williamson, that our language and concepts are to some extent vague. We can reduce vagueness, we can define and try to make things more precise -- as legal writing tries to -- but vagueness is never entirely eliminated. Among other things, the words with which we try to clarify will themselves be vague. If you define baldness in terms of the number of hairs on someone's head, there are still questions like what counts as the head, what length a follicle has to be to be considered a hair, etc. If you stipulate that a tall person is anyone "above 6 ft", well, people are slightly taller in the evening than in the morning, you have to decide whether to measure from the scalp or from the top of the hair, etc. There's no end to the pedantic questions that could be raised, but the fact is, says Williamson, that if they're not all answered, then there's still vagueness.
* I think it's worth mentioning that though Williamson elevates the unavoidability of vagueness to law of nature, the argument seems to be an empirical, inductive one.
* Some people have responded to sorites paradoxes by claiming that the sort of true/false dichotomy that works for mathematics doesn't work for ordinary language and thinking -- some statements are both true and false, or neither true nor false, or there's a continuum of truth ("fuzzy logic").
Williamson thinks that such reasoning has problematic implications. In the worst-case scenario, there might be a sort of global skepticism where you're prevented from drawing any conclusions at all. His own preferred solution enables the conventional logical system to be preserved, but at the cost of being counter-intuitive: the vagueness is epistemological and not ontological; there actually is a point at which someone goes from being bald to not being bald, but we don't know it and might never be able to.
I'm more inclined to side with the boring idea that "truth" isn't always neatly applicable (why do should you expect that it should be? are concepts like consent or personal identity always applicable?). But the practicalities of any situation are enough to limit global skepticism or the breakdown of communication or whatever. Words are irreducibly vague; concepts operate on a family resemblance, cluster-descriptivist basis; and what you mean by "dog" isn't the same as what I mean. In fact, this flexibility of words is a good thing. Language evolves in a piecemeal way and we create distinctions when we have to.
Jonathan Wolff on Disadvantage
* How do you define disadvantage? The main approach Wolff takes is that it's a question of what makes life go well, and he cashes this out in terms of the functioning or capability approach designed by Amartya Sen and developed by Martha Nussbaum. There's a number of different factors on which you can rate people (like life, health, control over environment, ability to experience emotions, ability to use imagination). Wolff extends this approach by also talking about risk and vulnerability -- the ability to sustain your good life over the future.
* It's possible to get an overall score, just as it's possible to get an overall score in decathlons although there's ten different events. People might disagree over which factor on Sen and Nussbaum's list is the most important, but if you take all the different schemes of weighting, you'll find, suggests Wolff, that in situations of disadvantage the same people tend to be at the top and at the bottom of the lists. In other words, disadvantage and privilege cluster. Wolff employs the causal idea of "corrosive" disadvantage -- lack of sense of community might lead to poor health, which might lead to poor control over environment, etc. In contrast, there is the idea of fertile function (Wolff professes himself unsure as to what exactly leads to good function -- for instance, improving money doesn't always raise the standard of living; these seem to be familiar positive psychology ideas).
* How do you know when you've reduced disadvantage? Well, when you've declustered -- when different weighting schemes produce different results, or everyone comes out more or less the same.
* What also comes out of this is that disadvantage is a comparative idea -- it connects to the idea of equality of opportunity. So it's not enough simply to raise everyone's standard of living, because there might still be an ordering, you might still be less well off compared to other people.
* Wikipedia's list of Nussbaum's capabilities (I've somewhat edited this) goes:
Simon Blackburn on Moral Relativism
Two things that caught my eye were:
* The trickiness of defining "relativism". Blackburn doesn't offer an explicit or precise definition, but says something along the lines of "The core idea is that you've got your truth, and I've got my truth, so there's no absolute norm or value knocking about in the universe."
I wonder, though, whether it's the case that most people who identify as relativists will think this is putting the cart before the horse. A more sensible statement of the position might go: "There is no absolute morality, so the only meaningful way to talk about truth in morality is in terms that are relative to particular cultures."
* Blackburn mentions the anti-relativist argument in Plato ("the peritrope"), which goes: If you say "All truths are relative", aren't you contradicting yourself by making an absolute claim?
Blackburn thinks that the peritrope isn't convincing. I don't quite understand him, but it's something to do with the relativist adopting a rhetorical position. To paraphrase, Blackburn says the relativist might reply: "I don't put forward my toleration or my own relativism as an absolute position. I don't believe in absolute truths, I've already said that, so I'm happy to admit that for my own position. Instead, you have to take things as they seem to you. My ambition is to persuade you towards the way things seem to me."
Here's two other possible relativist responses to the peritrope:
1. The relativist could simply stipulate an exception. "All truths are relative except this one."
2. Relativism could be understood as an attitude rather than a claim. Instead of asserting that "All truths are relative", the relativist could simply set out to demolish any opposing argument or any claim for absolutism.
***
David Papineau on Physicalism
David Papineau
* Papineau argues that this is a discovery, not an assumption, of modern science. Two hundred years ago, Newtonian scientists postulated a variety of forces -- forces of contact, gravitational forces, electromagnetic forces, chemical forces, vital forces, mental forces, forces of sensibility, forces of irritability... -- many forces, many of which might seem to us strikingly non-physical. But throughout the 19th century, investigations into conservation of energy and physiology convinced people that there weren't any forces apart from basic physical ones -- nuclear, electromagnetic, gravitational... -- and there weren't any effects anywhere, even in living bodies, that couldn't be explained by these. So it's "not a cut and dried thing"; there might be magical or supernatural forces affecting the physical; and it's possible that "lurking in the interstices of our brains there are special mental forces"; -- but, says Papineau, there's no evidence for them, and a lot of evidence against.
* Papineau sums up: there doesn't seem to be room for anything that's non-physical to have physical effects, so you have to say either that conscious experience is physical, or that it's non-physical but doesn't affect the physical world -- it's just a sort of pictorial accompaniment ("epiphenomenalism").
* Papineau addresses Frank Jackson's knowledge argument. I don't want to go into the details, but in the course of replying Papineau mentions that it's plausible, for human beings, that the ability to imagine red might hinge upon having previously had that experience, because there's no way for you to create a red neural pattern without stimuli from a red object.
Well, this is an old tabula rasa idea, and I wonder if, as an empirical fact, it's actually true.
Timothy Williamson on Vagueness
Tim WIlliamson
* The classic paradox is the problem of the heap (the "sorites" problem): if you keep taking grains of sand from a pile, at what point is it no longer a heap?... There are similar problems for almost all concepts in ordinary thinking. If someone is growing millimetre by millimetre, at what point are they "tall"; if someone is earning money penny by penny, at what point are they rich?... Issues of vagueness also arise in the course of applying laws: what degree of loudness constitutes noise pollution?
* It's inevitable, says Williamson, that our language and concepts are to some extent vague. We can reduce vagueness, we can define and try to make things more precise -- as legal writing tries to -- but vagueness is never entirely eliminated. Among other things, the words with which we try to clarify will themselves be vague. If you define baldness in terms of the number of hairs on someone's head, there are still questions like what counts as the head, what length a follicle has to be to be considered a hair, etc. If you stipulate that a tall person is anyone "above 6 ft", well, people are slightly taller in the evening than in the morning, you have to decide whether to measure from the scalp or from the top of the hair, etc. There's no end to the pedantic questions that could be raised, but the fact is, says Williamson, that if they're not all answered, then there's still vagueness.
* I think it's worth mentioning that though Williamson elevates the unavoidability of vagueness to law of nature, the argument seems to be an empirical, inductive one.
* Some people have responded to sorites paradoxes by claiming that the sort of true/false dichotomy that works for mathematics doesn't work for ordinary language and thinking -- some statements are both true and false, or neither true nor false, or there's a continuum of truth ("fuzzy logic").
Williamson thinks that such reasoning has problematic implications. In the worst-case scenario, there might be a sort of global skepticism where you're prevented from drawing any conclusions at all. His own preferred solution enables the conventional logical system to be preserved, but at the cost of being counter-intuitive: the vagueness is epistemological and not ontological; there actually is a point at which someone goes from being bald to not being bald, but we don't know it and might never be able to.
I'm more inclined to side with the boring idea that "truth" isn't always neatly applicable (why do should you expect that it should be? are concepts like consent or personal identity always applicable?). But the practicalities of any situation are enough to limit global skepticism or the breakdown of communication or whatever. Words are irreducibly vague; concepts operate on a family resemblance, cluster-descriptivist basis; and what you mean by "dog" isn't the same as what I mean. In fact, this flexibility of words is a good thing. Language evolves in a piecemeal way and we create distinctions when we have to.
Jonathan Wolff on Disadvantage
Jonathan Wolff
* It's possible to get an overall score, just as it's possible to get an overall score in decathlons although there's ten different events. People might disagree over which factor on Sen and Nussbaum's list is the most important, but if you take all the different schemes of weighting, you'll find, suggests Wolff, that in situations of disadvantage the same people tend to be at the top and at the bottom of the lists. In other words, disadvantage and privilege cluster. Wolff employs the causal idea of "corrosive" disadvantage -- lack of sense of community might lead to poor health, which might lead to poor control over environment, etc. In contrast, there is the idea of fertile function (Wolff professes himself unsure as to what exactly leads to good function -- for instance, improving money doesn't always raise the standard of living; these seem to be familiar positive psychology ideas).
* How do you know when you've reduced disadvantage? Well, when you've declustered -- when different weighting schemes produce different results, or everyone comes out more or less the same.
* What also comes out of this is that disadvantage is a comparative idea -- it connects to the idea of equality of opportunity. So it's not enough simply to raise everyone's standard of living, because there might still be an ordering, you might still be less well off compared to other people.
* Wikipedia's list of Nussbaum's capabilities (I've somewhat edited this) goes:
- Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length.
- Bodily health. Being able to have good health, including nourishment, reproductive health, and adequate shelter.
- Bodily integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.
- Senses, imagination, and thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason -- and to do these things in a "truly human" way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one's own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one's mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain.
- Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside oneself; to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger, etc. Not having one's emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety.
- Practical reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one's life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)
- Affiliation. Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (This entails protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedoms of assembly and political speech.) Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others.
- Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.
- Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.
- Control over one's environment. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one's life; having the right of political participation, and protections of free speech and association. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure.
Simon Blackburn on Moral Relativism
Simon Blackburn
* The trickiness of defining "relativism". Blackburn doesn't offer an explicit or precise definition, but says something along the lines of "The core idea is that you've got your truth, and I've got my truth, so there's no absolute norm or value knocking about in the universe."
I wonder, though, whether it's the case that most people who identify as relativists will think this is putting the cart before the horse. A more sensible statement of the position might go: "There is no absolute morality, so the only meaningful way to talk about truth in morality is in terms that are relative to particular cultures."
* Blackburn mentions the anti-relativist argument in Plato ("the peritrope"), which goes: If you say "All truths are relative", aren't you contradicting yourself by making an absolute claim?
Blackburn thinks that the peritrope isn't convincing. I don't quite understand him, but it's something to do with the relativist adopting a rhetorical position. To paraphrase, Blackburn says the relativist might reply: "I don't put forward my toleration or my own relativism as an absolute position. I don't believe in absolute truths, I've already said that, so I'm happy to admit that for my own position. Instead, you have to take things as they seem to you. My ambition is to persuade you towards the way things seem to me."
Here's two other possible relativist responses to the peritrope:
1. The relativist could simply stipulate an exception. "All truths are relative except this one."
2. Relativism could be understood as an attitude rather than a claim. Instead of asserting that "All truths are relative", the relativist could simply set out to demolish any opposing argument or any claim for absolutism.
| 45 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog