Greg Detre
Sunday, 07 October, 2001
Document - thesis on ‘rationality’
Notes – Bermudez, review of The Last Word
Notes – Cherniak, ‘Minimal rationality’
Using minimal rationality conditions
Notes – Kitcher, ‘The naturalists return’
Notes – Kornblith, Introduction to ‘Naturalising epistemology’
Antiskepticism and ballpark psychologism
Notes – Moore, ‘One or two dogmas of objectivism’, review of ‘The Last Word’ in Mind
Notes – Nagel, ‘The Last word’
Ch 2, Why we can’t understand thought from the outside
Ch 7, Evolutionary naturalism and the fear of religion
Notes – Nagel, ‘The View from Nowhere’
Notes – Nozick, ‘The nature of rationality’
Ch 1, How to do things with principles
Ch 5, Is instrumental rationality enough?
Notes – Papineau, ‘Evolution of knowledge’, web
Notes – Pinker, ‘How the mind works’
Ch 5, ‘Good ideas’, pp 299-363
Notes – Putnam, ‘Why reason can’t be naturalised’, in ‘Realism and reason’
Evolutionary epistemology [an evolved capacity for discovering truths]
The reliability theory of rationality
Why we can’t eliminate the normative
Notes – Putnam, ‘Two conceptions of rationality’
Notes – Raz, in ‘Engaging Reason’
Notes – Rorty, ‘Philosophy and the mirror of nature’
Notes – Rorty, ‘Philosophy and social hope’
Introduction – ‘Relativism: finding and making’
Notes – Rorty, ‘Putnam and the relativist menace’
Notes – Smolensky, ‘On a proper treatment of connectionism’
Section 7.1 – Semantics and rationality in the sub-symbolic paradigm
Notes – Stich, ‘The Fragmentation of reason’
Ch 3, Evolution and rationality
Notes – web, ‘November 16, 1998’, psychology rationality results
Notes – web, ‘How not to read Rorty’
Notes – web, ‘Lecture 13 – Cohen and Dennett’ - excerpts
Notes – Nagel, View from nowhere
Notes – Rorty, Philosophy and social hope
Decide that his position stands up???
How are we going to define reason???
What are the components of rationality???
What a theory of rationality must explain
Different types of theories of rationality
What would it mean for a naturalistic account to be compatible with rational objectivism???
Nagel, ‘The View from Nowhere’
Putnam, ‘Why reason can’t be naturalised’
Nozick, ‘The nature of rationality’
Kornblith, ‘Naturalizing epistemology’, Introduction
Stich ‘The fragmentation of reason’
Rorty, ‘Philosophy and the mirror of nature’
Rorty, ‘Philosophy and social hope’
Rorty, ‘Putnam and the relativist menace’
Kitcher, ‘The naturalists return’
Web, David13, ‘How not to read Rorty’
Discussions with Yousef and Steve
Is a naturalistic account of reason compatible with its objectivity?
Objectivists about rationality hold that our thought processes are capable of accessing, recognising and producing universal, objective truths. However, the more we understand about the mind, and about the evolutionary influences that have shaped us, the more contingent even our self-evident conclusions seem.
Starting from a materialist, reductionist viewpoint, I want to consider whether a connectionist view of mind could support the sort of claims that objectivists make, and to analyse whether the phenomenological character of our rational thought process can tell us about its nature and limitations.
judgement vs speculative reason
Can we talk of reason when the workings of the rational process are unknown to us???
Could two rational people disagree???
Why are some thoughts harder than others???
Is there any more to reason than seeing self-evidence???
Can Nagel be attacked here???
Does a scientific account of reason reduce reason’s claims to objectivity? (my suggestion)
Is a naturalistic account of reason compatible with its objectivity? (Tasioulas)
naturalism = derived from natural science (exhaustive)
What is (objectivism about) reason? What immediate problems does it face?
Introduction
Nagel’s definitions and outline
Empirical evidence undermining our perfect rationality
Cherniak’s levels of rationality
What is rationality??? How do various authors view/define rationality???
What does a ‘naturalist account’ incorporate with regard to rationality???
What sort of naturalistic account do Nagel & co. need, in order for it to be compatible with their objectivism???
consider pragmatism and truth (with relation to Stich’s discussion which I consider later about ‘true beliefs’)
does it make sense to lump naturalism + objectivism together??? should I try and discuss all the arguments that undermine evolutionary theory before discussing the evolutionary theory???
what did Quine mean by naturalised epistemology that’s different from what many contemporary philosophers are trying to do???
what are the different ways in which the term ‘evolutionary epistemology is used’???
Titles
What can evolutionary theory tell us about reason???
Does evolutionary theory lend more support to perfect rationality or subjectivism???
What adaptive purposes does it seem likely that reason served???
How much of our reasoning process can we give evolutionary explanations for???
To what extent are we still limited by the evolutionary origins of reason???
Does evolution provide stronger arguments for or against (perfect) rationality???
Notes
Why do people think that evolution insures rationality? (Stich)
does evolution produce optimally well-designed systems?
optimally designed
“A system is ‘well-designed’ if it enhances biological fitness [likelihood to survive and reproduce successfully] more than any alternative” (but which systems count as ‘alternatives’?).
biological limitations of evolution as a mechanism
natural selection is imperfect, doesn’t care about optimality so much as improvement - can only improve incrementally (hill-climbing problem of local optima), so you rarely reach theoretical optima, and rationality requires optimality
mutation, migration and random genetic drift
natural selection doesn’t necessarily choose the best anyway (meiotic drive, recessive genes + pairs, pleiotropy + heterozygote superiority)
our cognitive system may not have been (wholly) produced by evolution
why are/would be optimal systems rational?
optimality is conceptually reducible/identical to rationality (analytic epistemology)
this is implausible – why???
see Stich’s later arguments against analytic epistemology generally
having true beliefs is more adaptive
a system that produces true beliefs may be more expensive (than it’s worth)
a system that produces true beliefs may be worse for survival than rules of thumb that sometimes get things wrong but are less likely to get us killed, say
e.g. Euclidean geometry (does this work, given that the reason that we have Euclidean geometry probably has less to do with our inferential system than our perceptual system, and the fact that at the level of the universe within which we operate, it is a more or less Euclidean world)
see Nozick (self-evidence)
so what sort of inferential system is it likely that evolution has left us with?
Nozick’s argument that we come to see certain thought-processes as self-evidently true, and cannot help but feel this, even though they may not be
consider where Nozick’s account leaves us with regard to Nagel
the usual arg against subjectivism – which is a two-edged sword
Nozick concedes this, saying that though his account explains reason, it is not itself reason-independent, and so cannot be considered first philosophy
plus, Nozick reckons that reason can heal itself
How might the squishy brain instantiate reason???
What problems of explanation face an objectivist trying to explain reason in terms of modern science’s understanding of the brain???
To what extent does objectivism require a (quasi-)religious world view?
To what extent is the problem of rationality a problem of the philosophy of mind?
Is there an explanatory gap between naturalism and rationality?
Define naturalism, reason and objectivity???
prescriptivism vs descriptivism, pluralism vs monism???
What is left for the naturalist who decides that naturalism does undermine reason???
What can/should we believe if we do decide that current evolutionary theory cannot support objectivism about reason???
To what extent can we talk about rational objectivism without talking about truth???
introduction – define my principles of twentieth century scientific picture
what do each of those principles tell us about reason?
can we accommodate rational objectivism within them? if not, how must our naturalistic framework expand to accommodate rational objectivism?
is modern science in a position to broadly understand rationality (i.e. specifically, our rational capacity)???
if yes, then the title answer is yes, they’re compatible
if not, then where are the stumbling blocks, and to what extent might rational objectivism be accomodable within a naturalistic framework (even an enhanced one) at all???
Is rationality a glue process, a global fundamental/underlying process, a module for dealing with specific/linguistic/well-defined/novel situations over a long period???
To what extent is rationality linguistic???
Can we apply our rationality to any problem we can represent/conceive of, or is it better in some areas than others???
consider putting the a priori for/against discussions of rationality in the first section
evolution vs connectionism - teleology vs mechanism
crap
Nagel – plausible a priori?
Introduction to his views
Nagel’s objections to naturalism + reduction of reason
Inescapable vs valid
Evidence of irrationality
So why do rational people disagree?
Motivating faiths
What is naturalism?
Conflicts between naturalism and Nagel’s rationalism
What is objectivity? – earlier???
Evolutionary theory
Connectionism + cognitive science
Matrix
Conclusions
outline Nagel’s position
explain what he means by reason, what objective access allows us to do, how it excludes skepticism
list briefly why he is worried about naturalism, and how there doesn't seem much chance of reconciling the two
anti-reductionist
finite beings having infinite access
reason is not adaptive
cast them as seemingly irreconcilable world views/motivating faiths, both of which fit some of the facts (Nagel a priori, naturalism empirical)
outline my 21st-ish century naturalistic picture
attack Nagel’s position on a priori grounds
inescapable vs invalid
Moore’s argument about subjectivism/skepticism being self-refuting
people disagree
decide that his position stands up???
consider to what extent naturalism could be compatible with Nagel
evolutionary theory
connectionism
Penrose etc.???
likely future improvements in our understanding
finite life can + does access the infinite
loose ends/obstacles Nagel raises that haven't been dealt with
conclusions
naturalism and reason can be reconciled – recap how
word count
ch 1 + 2
5000
ch 3
2000
ch 4 + 5
8000
ch 4
evolution
3000
connectionism
3000
rest
1500
ch 5
500
intro to Nagel
intro to naturalism
motivating faiths - short
characterise naturalism as evol + conn
conflicts, attacks + arguments
a priori + empirical
advanced compatibility matrix
develop + synthesise
incorporate evol + conn???
finite/infinite here???
cherniak + cohen where???
conclusion
introduction 3700
evolution 4230
connectionism 2950
ending 2670
total 13550
connectionism 4000
ending 4000
total 16000
Bermudez
Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby (ed) - The adapted mind - Hooke
Cherniak, Minimal rationality (see also ‘Minimal rationality’ in Mind)
Cohen
Crane and Mellor, ‘There is no question of physicalism’
Churchland, ‘Epistemology in an age of cognitive science’
Damasio (1994), Descartes’ error
Dancy and Sosa (ed) - A companion to epistemology - H b 207/B
Davidson, ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’
Dennett, ‘The case for Rorts’ in Rorty and his critics (ed. Brandom)
Elman et al., Rethinking Innateness
Fodor, Modularity of mind(???)
Gowans, Introduction to Moral Disagreements
Haack, ch 1 + 9 in Evidence and enquiry
Jaynes – lack of consciousness in everyday thought chapter
Kitcher, ‘The naturalists return’
Kornblith, Introduction to Naturalised epistemology
Lakoff, George - Women, fire and dangerous things
Lucas
McGinn, ‘Reason, truth and philosophy’ in Problems in philosophy
Moore, review of Nagel
Minsky, ‘Why people think that computers can't’
Minsky, ‘Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious’
Nagel (1997), The Last Word
Nagel, ch on reason in The View from Nowhere
Nietzsche (e.g. Thus Spake Zarathustra (e.g. "On the Despisers of the Body"???), Genealogy of morals
Nozick (1993), The Nature of Rationality
Papineau
Penrose
Pinker, How the mind works, especially ch 5
Putnam (1981), ‘Why reason can’t be naturalised’ in Realism and Reason: Philosophical papers vol 3 (pg 194)
Putnam, ‘Two conceptions of rationality’ in Reason, Truth and History (1981)
Putnam, ‘Computational psychology and interpretation’
Putnam, Realism with a human face
Quine, ‘Epistemology naturalized’ in Ontological relativity and other essays and Naturalising epistemology (ed Kornblith)
Radnitzky & Bartley (ed) - Evolutionary epistemology
Raz, ‘Explaining normativity: On rationality and the justification of reason’ in Engaging reason
Raz, ‘Explaining normativity: Reason and the will’ in Engaging reason
Rolls, Brain and Emotion
Rorty, Introduction to Philosophy and the mirror of nature
Rorty, Introduction to Philosophy and Social hope
Rorty, ‘Putnam and the relativist menace’
Smolensky, ‘On a proper treatment of connectionism’
Stich (1990), The Fragmentation of Reason
Tooby + Cosmides (1992), The adapted mind
Wiggins, moral cognitivism article
Wiggins, Postscript IV (pp 351-356) in Needs, Values, Truth
Williams, The Project of Pure Enquiry
Cherniak:
See Goldman, ‘Epistemics: the regulative theory of cognition’, Journal of Philosophy, 1978 (pp 510, 514)
Alvin Goldman, ‘Epistemology and cognition’ (from Stich)
Also Campbell’s ‘Evolutionary epistemology’ in Schilpp (ed), The Philosophy of Karl Popper vol I (LaSalle, 1974).
Stroud, ‘The charms of naturalism’
N. Rescher, Rationality (Oxford, 1988).
N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (London, 1957) (and see reference in Stich)
Dennett (e.g. review of Damasio) (or on cognitive science + epistemology???)
Hume
more Putnam
Plantinga, ch 12 of Warrant and Proper Function (from Nagel)
Elliot Sober (from Stich), The evolution of rationality
Gettier, 1963 (from Stich)
Nisbett (from Stich)
Tversky & Kahneman (from Stich)
Davidson
Gould and the Panglossian paper
Grandy (from Stich)
Quine
Cohen, Leonard (from Stich)
Stich, Stephen P. "Could Man be an Irrational Animal? Some Notes on the Epistemology of Rationality." Synthese (July 1985), 64:115-134.
Humphreys (History of the mind) – prototypic somatic marker hypothesis???
Philip Johnson-Laird and others have combatted logicist models of reasoning for years
Artificial Intelligence by Allen Newell in his Unified Theories of Cognition. Newell and his colleagues designed a cognitive architecture called SOAR, which builds "problem spaces" only when it can't solve its current problem with current resources
what does Minsky’s ‘Alien intelligence’ article tell us about fundamental rationality???
can any connectionist system ever be said to be truly rational??? is it not simply a function-approximator of formal logic??? is there any difference between such a function-approximator and the function, if it’s reliable (and extensible to unusual applications of that function, e.g. infinity etc.)???
Penrose
Poincare
Fodor (from Stich)
Harman (from Stich)
Kripke (from Stich)
Strawson (from Stich)
Psychologism as blurring Frege’s distinction between normative principles of reasoning and descriptive laws of thought, i.e. where there isn’t "a sharp separation of the psychological from the logical, of the subjective from the objective" (Frege 1884 p. x, my emphasis)???
I. The fundamental principles of reasoning have normative force and make claims to universal validity
II. The fundamental principles of reasoning cannot be construed as the expression of contingent forms of life
III. The identification of fundamental principles of reasoning should be completely independent of psychological facts about how people reason.
"Being a realist about reason myself, I regard these reductive "rescues" as equivalent to skepticism; that is, they are forms of skepticism about the reality of what I take reason to be" (Nagel, p.9). That is to say, he effectively affirms that Thesis I entails Thesis II, and consequently that any denial of Thesis II is ipso facto a denial of Thesis I.
However much one may try to construe one's concepts and thoughts naturalistically, as the expression of contingent forms of life, the logic of the effort will always generate thoughts too fundamental for this, thoughts which one cannot get outside of in this way and which one must employ in trying to view from the outside anything else that one does. (pp.32-33)
These thoughts, rather than any facts about where they came from or who thinks them, have what Nagel calls the last word.
the argument from unavoidability:
“It is not just that in criticizing each part of our system of beliefs we must rely on the rest, whatever it may be. The thoughts that enter into such criticism must aspire to a universality that is lacking in the thoughts criticized. Some of these standards have to be discovered; others are simply those basic and inescapable forms of reasoning that enter into all possible criticism - even when some examples of them are among the objects of criticism. The serious attempt to identify what is subjective and particular, or relative and communal, in one's outook leads inevitably to the objective and universal.” (Nagel, p. 16)
“The weak response drives a wedge between two concepts that Nagel runs together - the concepts of understanding [i.e. explanation] and justification. The weak response to Nagel accepts the conclusion of the argument from unavoidability. That is, it accepts that the process of justification will inevitably come to a halt with principles whose validity is independent of our point of view. But, nonetheless, it still seeks to deny Thesis II, on the grounds that, even though the process of justification must inevitably come to an end with certain ground-level principles (the principles that are, in Nagel's phrase, the last word), the process of understanding cannot stop there. Those principles themselves need to be explained. They cannot be self- standing, even though there is a sense in which they must be self-justifying.”
e.g. justification vs explanation re our perceptual states
It seems, then, that Nagel's unavoidability argument does not entail Thesis II
interesting things on norms vs capacities, I think
do I want to use his three theses??? probably not – maybe use the distinction between I and III
perhaps I need to show that I have read him
Intentional explanations of behaviour (having a cognitive system of beliefs, desires, perceptions etc.) require rationality of the agent. Cherniak wants to characterise the minimal (as opposed to ideal) rationality conditions (with less than perfect deductive ability/ability to choose appropriate actions) for an adequate intentional theory.
Our everyday predictive theory of belief rests on assumptions regarding others' intentionality. However, Dennett ("if one wants to predict and explain the 'actual, empirical' behaviour of believers, one must ... cease talking of belief and descend to the design stance or physical stance for one's account") and Davidson (there can be 'strict' or 'serious' deterministic laws only in the physical domain, and that intentional theories cannot yield 'accurate' predictions) both defend fairly autonomist positions.
Cherniak is arguing that at least one crucial precondition for an intentional theory with predictive content has been mistakenly rejected by some of these autonomist positions - i.e. a pervasively and tacitly assumed conception of rationality that is too idealised to apply in an interesting way to human beings. This idealised conception of rationality has led us to favour instrumentalist (e.g. Dennett's) over realist accounts - "if the only possible rationality conditions on, for example, beliefs, are so idealised as to be inapplicable to humans, then any attributions of beliefs to humans cannot really be true".
The 'assent theory of belief' is the opposite of an idealised rationality, since it requires no rationality at all of a believer = "an agent believes all and only those statements which he would affirm" (or, believing a proposition = having an accompanying 'feeling of assent'). However, although it has the advantage of giving the believer final authority on what his own beliefs are, it does not impose sufficient rationality constraints on the belief set, or on the relation of the belief-desire set to the agent's actions - no inferences need be made from the beliefs, and the belief set can include any and all inconsistencies. The belief set is not required to guide at all the choice of appropriate actions, except for the small area of verbal behaviour of assent and dissent. It entails complete autonomy of the mental, but is completely without predictive content (and so it makes a mystery of our everyday success at predicting behaviour on the basis of belief-desire attributions).
In contrast, in decision and game theory, it is usually assumed that the agent will choose the action which maximises his expected utility, i.e. they assume perfect information and rationality. Most philosophy of mind or action assumes an ideal general rationality criterion:
If an agent has a particular belief-desire set, he would undertake all actions which are apparently appropriate
An action is 'apparently appropriate' = iff according to the person's beliefs, it would tend to satisfy his desires
A weaker version = an agent would underatke some non-empty set of apparently most appropriate actions
This idealised theory of belief is just too stringent, and unrealisable. It leaves no room for sloppiness, but also requires a peculiarly idealised deductive ability. It denies humans' 'finitary predicament' - having a fixed limit on our cognitive capacities and time available.
Trade-off between simplicity/manageability/formalisability vs applicability. His account will be principally concerned with verbally formulated beliefs, treated as a set of sentences, with inferences from them as sentences added to the set. He will not differentiate between un/conscious inferences.
The minimal general rationality condition is:
If an agent has a particular belief-desire set, he would attempt some, but not necessarily all, of those actions which are apparently appropriate
This is stronger than a purely extensional requirement, in that it has counter-factual implications.
As well as this, there has to be a ‘negative rationality’ requirement, of not doing inappropriate actions.
The minimal inference condition on deductive ability is:
If an agent has a particular belief-desire set, he would make some, but not necessarily all of the sound inferences from the belief set which are apparently appropriate
Inferences might be expressed in terms of actions instead of verbally represented beliefs.
The minimal appropriateness requirement on which inferences the person would attempt to make is:
The agent would undertake some of the sound inferences from his belief set which would be apparently appropriate for him to make
The minimal consequence requirement on deducing ability is:
The agent must succeed in performing some of the apparently appropriate sound inferences he has undertaken
He is not going to discuss whether or not the minimal inference condition is a sufficient condition for being locially competent to have beliefs. But he is going to argue against conditions that require a believer to have ideal deductive ability. The most extreme idealisation is that an agent’s belief set is deductively closed:
An agent actually beliefs (or, infers, or can infer) all consequences of his beliefs
But this includes the infinite set of consequences of all valid sentences expressible in the believer’s language, including some that could not be stated, let alone understood, in the agent’s lifetime. Hintikka explains that his axiomatisation is applicable to the actual world only in so far as our world approximates one of the “most knowledgeable of possible worlds”, “in which everybody follows the consequences of what he knows as far as they lead him”.
Ideal inference condition = …
Humans often fail to infer all apparently appropriate logical consequences from a set of beliefs, or even a feasibly small set of the apparently most useful consequences – and even when they have identified the inferences, they may not be able to perform the deductive tasks, e.g. although many wanted to know all their lives whether Goldbach’s conjecture is a consequence of accepted axioms of number theory, the task has not been accomplished.
Human behaviour is nothing like the idealisation – maths would be trivial, for example. Secondly, “the ideal inference condition is too strong [in] that it excludes humans from having beliefs”. Thirdly, “for a non-suicidal creature in the finitary predicament, it would be irrational even to try to satisfy it” – he should be more worried about his immediate survival.
If an agent has a particular belief-desire set, then if some (but not necessarily all) inconsistencies arose in his belief set, he would eliminate them
In contrast, the ideal consistency condition is too strong:
If an agent has a particular belief-desire set, then if any inconsistency arose in his belief set, he would eliminate it
He accuses Davidson in ‘Psychology as philosophy’ of saying that we need a “large degree of consistency” but actually arguing for ideal consistency, as does Quine’s translation policy. Inconsistency can be very difficult to unmask, if the logical relations are convoluted, and the inconsistency implicit – also, we tend to compartmentalise our beliefs, only comparing beliefs within a subset.
The minimal inference condition remains combinatorially vague; its structure makes every intentional concept a cluster concept. Not all concepts can be defined by a single, simple criterion (like ‘batchelor’ or ‘prime number’), and vagueness may still be predictively powerful.
He attacks Dennett’s claim that “as we uncover apparent irrationality under an Intentional interpretation of an entity, our grounds for ascribing any beliefs at all wanes” – Cherniak argues that this is not the case for above-minimally rational creatures. I’m not so sure – a just-above minimally rational creature might seem to hold only a skeleton few set of beliefs. It’s a matter of degree, really.
The minimal rationality condition is context sensitive(???).
We also know which reasoning tasks are more difficult for humans than others, i.e. a weighting of deductive tasks with respect to their feasibility for the reasoner, so that we can guess which inferences are easier and more likely to be drawn = the theory of feasible inferences. He leaves it as an open question whether the most ‘obvious’ inferences (like modus ponens) could be performed by any creature that qualifies as having beliefs.
Theory of human memory structure – helps you know which beliefs will be recalled when, e.g. whether the premises and rules are active at the time of consdiering a belief/conclusion. Thus, the activated belief subset is subject to a more stringent inference condition than the inactive belief set. Of course, I think it would be an even more powerful theory if it was couched in connectionist terms of association, rather than discrete subsets.
The set of inferences required by the minimal inference condition is only a proper subset of the set of inferences which a believer ought to make if he is to be pragmatically rational. Descriptive vs normative thesis???
In determining whether a person ought to make a given inference in order to be pragmatically rational, you need to take into acount: the soundness of the inference; its feasibility; its apparent usefulness according to the person’s beliefs and desires.
all inferences from A’s belief set
all sound inferences (deductive closure condition)
all apparently desirable inferences (ideal inference condition)
all feasible (for A) inferences (normative inference condition)
*inferences {from activated belief set / from inactive belief set } required for beliefs (minimal inference condition)
no inferences (assent theory of belief)
1. The central problem of epistemology is to understand the epistemic quality of human cognitive performance, and to specify strategies through whose use human beings can improve their cognitive states.
2. The epistemic status of a state is dependent on the processes that generate and sustain it
3. The central epistemological project is to be carried out by describing processes that are reliable, in the sense that they would have a high frequency of generating epistemically virtuous states in human beings in our world.
4. Virtually nothing is knowable a priori, and, in particular, no epistemological principle is knowable a priori.
A) Empirical studies of our actual cognitive practices, whether they be psychological, biological or historical, play only a minor role in the normative project of epistemology. The usual philosophical sources of normative principles are not displaced by traditional naturalism, which offers only the meta-epistemological principle that the deliverances of these sources are not a priori.
B) Only if we can arrive at principles that would properly guide inquiry in any world and which can be validated a priori will the problem of normative epistemology be solved. For otherwise the dependence of epistemology on information that had to be obtained using admittedly error-prone methods will lead to an unresolvable form of skepticism.
C) The history of science reveals that the goals attributed to inquiry vary widely from field to field and from epoch to epoch. There can thus be no universal epistemology, and we must settle either for description of the ways in which people actually form their beliefs or for local recommendations about how those working within a particular context should operate to advance their goals.
D) Traditional epistemology formulates its problems and answers by thinking of knowledge as primarily propositional. This presupposition should be scrutinised in the light of historical and sociological analyses of cognitive performance and in the light of contemporary theories of human cognition. Where necessary, the standard epistemological idioms of belief, justification and so forth should be absorbed within a broader vocabulary or, perhaps, descarded entirely.
E) Epistemology must examine the attainment of knowledge by communities as well as by individuals, and should investigate strategies through which communities could advance their epistemic ends. The appropriate strategies for individuals to follow cannot be identified without considering the communities to which they belong.
Kornblith’s introduction addresses the question of the extent to which the we arrive at our beliefs is the way that we ought to.
She argues that what is distinctive about the naturalistic approach to epistemology is its view about the relations between the three questions.
The traditional view considers the first to be a philosophical (normative), and the second an independent psychological (descriptive) question, with the third requiring collaboration between the two groups.
For example, the coherence theory answer to question 1 = in deciding whether to accept or reject any statement, one ought to consider how well it fits in with or coheres with one’s other beliefs, which is completely separate from a possible corresponding psychological answer to question 2 = some kind of nonconscious mechanism that measures the coherence of candidate beliefs with the body of beliefs already held.
Question 1 cannot be answered independently of question 2 – questions about how we ought and how we do arrive at our beliefs have a bearing on each other. Epistemological questions may be replaced by psychological questions. Three arguments:
1. Quine has the most radical view on how direct a bearing psychology has on epistemology:
“Epistemology still goes on, thoguh in a new setting and a clarified status. Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz. a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input – certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance – and in the fullness of time, the subject delivers as output a description of the three dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one’s theory of nature transcends any available evidence.”
Quine argued that the history of epistemology = the history of the foundationalist program. Foundationalism – there is a class of beliefs (typically about our own sense experience) about which it is impossible to be wrong, and which are sufficient to justify the rest of our beliefs – seeks to identify those beliefs, and show how they give us good reason for adopting the remainder of our beliefs. This foundationalist program has failed, and asks the wrong questions – the only genuine questions there are to ask about the relation between theory and evidence and about the acquisition of belief are psychological questions, i.e. question 2 (how we ought to arrive at our beliefs) wholly contains question 1 (how we do arrive at our beliefs).
Trying to answer the sceptic on his own terms (i.e. foundationalist terms) is wrong-headed – science made us question whether knowledge is possible (by showing the illusions we are susceptible to), and we may call on the resources of science to answer it – thus, epistemology is continuous with, rather than a prerequisite of, science.
2. Or, if ‘evolution selects for the acquisition of true beliefs’ then the ultra-Darwinian approach might allow us to answer question 3 (whether the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs are the ones by which we ought to) first, and in the affirmative – then we can fill in answers to the first two questions just by doing psychology. However, this does require a very strong conclusion to the Darwinian argument, to the effect that ‘the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs are exactly the ones by which we ought to’, otherwise the replacement thesis is much weaker, and requires some philosophy to fine-tune the psychological answer.
3. Rational belief acquisition consists in arriving at beliefs in the way we all do (e.g. Davidson, Dennett, Harman) – the argument from mutual interpretability:
“We normally assume that there are basic principles of rationality that apply to all normal human beings … We come to understand someone else by coming to appreciate that person’s reasons for his or her beliefs and actions, or by seeing how that person made a mistake. Someone who reasoned in a fundamentally different way from the way in which we reason would really and truly be unintelligible to us .. In assuming as we normally do, that we can make sense of other people, given sufficient information about them, we presuppose that everyone else operates in accordance with the same basic principles as we do.” – Harman
Again, a strong reading of this answers question 3 first – yes, the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs are the ones by which we ought to, because we would not consider someone rational if they arrived at their beliefs in a different way – “rational belief acquisition consists in arriving at beliefs in the way we all do”. However, if you consider Harman to allow for small discrepancies in the way people reason while still remaining intelligible to each other, then you will need to bring philosophy back into the picture to decide which one of psychology’s descriptions is rational.
Thus, we have the strong replacement thesis (psychological questions hold all the content there is in epistemological questions) and the weak replacement thesis (psychology and epistemology provide two different avenues for arriving at the same place). I think Kornblith is wrong about the weak replacement thesis – it seems to me to be saying that we almost arrive at our beliefs in the right way, which psychology can describe, but philosophy is necessary to show if/where we’ve strayed a little.
The difference between the strong and weak versions of the replacement thesis = whether there are legitimate epistemological questions that are distinct in content from the questions of descriptive psychology. If we accept the weak thesis, then a complete psychology will coincide exactly with a complete epistemology, and progress towards this should thus be a rapid result of interaction between the two (integrating their very different approaches).
Psychologism = the processes by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs are the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs, i.e. question 3 = yes. If the weak replacement thesis (that there are legitimate epistemological questions distinct in content from questions of descriptive psychology) is true, then so is psychologism. Nevertheless, it may be that psychologism is true and yet the weak replacement thesis is false.
Goldman’s answer to question 1 is that justified beliefs are beliefs that are reliably produced, i.e. we ought to arrive at our beliefs by reliable processes (i.e. those which produce true beliefs). Assuming Goldman is correct, and adding in psychologism = the processes by which we actually arrive at our beliefs are reliable. However, a completed psychology and a completed epistemology would be at wholly different levels of generality, and be pretty useless at answering each other’s questions.
Ballpark psychologism = the processes by which we arrive at beliefs are at least roughly like the processes by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs. Any rejection of skepticism entails it to a greater or lesser degree. If true, ballpark psychologism still endorse a fruitful interaction between epistemology and psychology.
Moore shares Nagel’s rather curiously passionate, righteous indignation and almost Victorian sense of moral opprobrium about the subjectivism that is 'epidemic in the weaker regions of our culture'.
The idea is rather that, in addressing the question whether certain ways of thinking are objective, we cannot help adopting those very ways of thinking. Thus if what is at issue is the objectivity of our belief that p, the proposition that Nagel says we cannot help assuming is not that our belief that p is objective, but simply that p.
Thus his opponents, who claim that these ways of thinking are not objective, because of anthropocentrism or because of some hidden cultural bias, say, find that they have no suitable vantage point from which to press their claim
He considers a sample of what happens when we reflect on our beliefs:
e.g. a theist who not only decides that God doesn't exist, but surrenders their very concept of God
“Arguably, this is the kind of thing that is going on in certain anti-realist retreats from classical logic. To be sure, there are anti-realists who think that classical logic is just wrong. But there are also anti-realists who regard classical logic as a perfectly serviceable piece of machinery which, however, for various reasons, we do well to put aside in favour of an equally serviceable alternative”
Sometimes though, they try to highlight contingency in what seems necessary whilst continuing to acknowledge the necessity, e.g. Descartes flawed attribution of necessity to twice four's being eight to our (humans') being unable to grasp any of the other possibilities – what other possibilities?
A 'subjective' belief is one that somewhere contains an 'I' or 'we'. Of course, like with contingent beliefs, we can still retain our subjective beliefs. “The subjectivity of a belief does not, in itself, impugn its truth.” (There are familiar arguments to the effect that even our belief that grass is green is subjective.)
“At one point he makes the standard but ot my mind facile objection to this view [that all our beliefs are subjective]: either the claim that all our beliefs are subjective is objective, in which case it is self-refuting, or it is subjective, in which case we have no reason to accept it because it does not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false (pp 14-5). But the second limb of this dilemma contains a confusion. If the claim is subjective, there can still be reason to accept it, if only subjective reason. It does not rule out any objective claim. At least it does not need to rule out any objective claim if there are no such things. It need only rule out other subjective claims, which it certainly does: it rules out the claim, from the same point of view, that some of our beliefs are objective. As regards what reason there is to accept it, that may be a matter, in part, of our coming to recognise the point of view which it is from as 'ours', something over which we may have no more control, at least while we are thinking about these issues, than we have over our position in time - our temporal point of view. But still, Nagel might say, what about alternative points of view from which some of our beliefs are objective? What can advocates of this view say about these? There are many things they might say. They might say that there *are* no such points of view, since what makes their own claim subjective is the fact that the very concepts of objectivity and subjectivity are only available to be exercised from that particular point of view.”
Moore is worried about certain problematic features of Nagel's fundamental idea, that it is impossible to question the objectivity of certain ways of thinking without eventually betraying a commitment to that very objectivity, i.e. we cannot help *adopting those very ways of thinking*
thus if what is at issue is the objectivity of our belief that p, the proposition that Nagel says we cannot help assuming is not that our belief that p is objective, but simply that p
cf minimalist theory of truth???
or, in terms of the eponymous metaphor – when the last word on an issue is that p, then two things at least must be true:
1. we cannot help but think that p if the question arises
2. the question does arise
these two things are independent – the second indicates why the last word is the last word on that issue (rather than being totally irrelevant to it)
Nagel’s idea is that the last word on whether certain beliefs are objective is given over to those very beliefs
this oblique approach faces two special difficulties:
1. simply that of showing that any given belief is the last word on the issue of its own objectivity
this is not just a matter of how irresistible the belief is, but also of whether ‘the question arises’
2. showing why, in exercising the belief, we are committed to its objectivity
“it is very important, in evaluating Nagel’s idea, to retain a suitably variegated coneption of what reflection can do and of how its effects can depend on what questions, and what range of subsidiary questions, are being addressed” ???
to begin with the first difficulty: ‘how is Nagel able to show that any given belief is the last word on the issue of its own objectivity?’, especially ‘how is he able to show that ‘the question arises’?’
are we not always able, when considering whether or not a given belief of ours is objective, to ‘bracket’ the first-order issue with which the belief itself is concerned?
if the belief is irresistible, then we cannot go any further than that – we have to avoid any proposition that is manifestly incompatible with it, but we can do that by being circumspect about how we proceed
e.g. if the belief is that modus tollens is valid, “what is to stop us from carefully ensuring that we come to a view on the amtter without exercising any conditional thoughts?”
Nagel can make many responses to this, especially that we have gone from talk about ways of thinking to talk about individual beliefs (although some are immune to the challenge)
his fundamental idea has rather to do with whole frameworks of belief: methods of reasoning, modes of argument, etc.
so even if we could consider the objectivity of our belief that modus tollens is valid without actually using modus tollens, it would not be possible to consider this or any issue without using logic
but this notion of a ‘way of thinking’ has to be:
a) broad enough to meet the challenge
b) but not so broad as to exacerbate the second difficulty (of showing why, in exercising a given way of thinking, we are committed to its objectivity)
…
another obvious line for Nagel to take on the first difficulty (of showing that a given belief is the last word on the issue of its own objectivity) is:
“In raising the question whether a given belief of ours is objective, we are raising a question about what would make the belief true. In particular, we are asking what our own involvement in this would be”
in the case of an objective belief, we would not be involved at all, except insofar as the belief overtly concerns us
but in the case of a subjective belief, whose truth would depend on how things stood at the point of view that the belief was from, we would be involved
e.g. the truth of our belief that a certain gesture is insulting depends on a web of social practices that we ourselves had spun that served to define the poitn of view that our belief was from
but in the case of an irresistible and objective belief, the best explanation of our having it must conform, in outline, to the schema: ‘We beelive that p because p’ – that is why the question whether or not p arises
problems with this line of thought:
pg 7
he says *something* about the inescapability of ways of thinking – something about whether ‘the question arises’???
Rationalist vs subjectivist – are there objective principles whose validity does not rest on a point of view?
The issue, in a nutshell, is whether the first person, singular or plural is hiding at the bottom of everything we say or think.
Appeal to reason is appealing to some source of authority within oneself that is not merely personal or societal, and by which we can persuade others. How is it that contingent, biological creatures such as ourselves can have access to such universally valid methods of objective thought?
This conception of reason cannot be qualified by ‘for me’ or ‘for us’, and cannot be ‘constructed’. The aim is to arrive at principles that are universal and exceptionless – to be able to come up with reasons that apply in all relevantly similar situations, and to have reasons of similar generality that tell us when situations are relevantly similar. He thinks that this fashion of subjectivism or relativism is intellectually lazy, and by implication, insidious – the counter-argument that doesn’t simply deflect a particular conclusion, but refuses to accept that there are any conclusions that everyone must accept. Replacing objectivity with consensus reduces it to a perspective, backed up only by statistics, not reason.
Nagel defines the rationalist position which he holds as:
that there is such a thing, or category of thought, as reason, and that it applies in both theory and practice, in the formation not only of beliefs but of desires, intentions, and decisions as well. This is not to say that reason is a single thing in every case, only that certain decisive aspects of our thought about such very different matters can all be regarded as instances of it, by virtue of their generality and their position in the hierarchy of justification and criticism.
He makes the obvious distinction between criticisms of reasoning and challenges to reason itself, accepting that we can certainly make temporary mistakes in our reasoning. He is happy to admit that it is often possible to discredit appeals to the objectivity of reason by showing that their true sources lie elsewhere, e.g.:
in wishes, prejudices, contingent and local habits, unexamined assumptions, social or linguistic conventions, involuntary human responses and so on
Sometimes, (e.g. in ethics), philosophers argue that an argument is not based on reason, but perhaps on ‘something different, less universal but conceivably better founded’. Nagel is a realist (in the Platonic or Cartesian vein) about reason and does not want to accept reductive interpretations of what reason really is as a ‘contingent though basic feature of a particular culture of form of life’.
However,
both the existence and the non-existence of reason present problems of intelligibility. To be rational we have to take responsibility for our thoughts while denying that they are just expressions of our point of view.
Sometimes we can expose a supposedly rational-seeming argument as having a psychological or subjective force. We may still retain our conviction, but our justification for it must lose some of its universality.
If we say that any thought or belief can only be justified as being historically contingent and culturally local, is this judgement supposed to apply to itself? Wouldn’t such judgements of relativity require a position of greater objectivity from which to be made? If so, Nagel thinks that this would leave us without the possibility of thinking anything at all. He says that such claims are like saying ‘Everything is subjective’ – these break down whether they are considered to be objective or subjective themselves.
Are general claims about truth and meaning applicable to themselves? If so, that rules out theories like logical positivism – relativism is self-refuting. All subjective rules need to sit inside an objective framework. Even if statements are resting on other statements, Nagel believes that they still require something more universal???
Nagel must be wrong when he denies that all human beings are just trying to make sense of the world from their point of view. Our objectivity is increased when we widen our point of view to the human point of view, but I think it’s still subjectively human, and based on our senses and limited collective experience of the world – this goes for all internalist/coherentist views of knowledge such as the one Nagel seems to be proposing.
He discusses Kant’s epistemology as being very austere – there is the phenomenal world which we inhabit which is wholly perspectival and subjective, and there is the Ding an sich of which we can have no knowledge, even knowledge of ourselves as we really are. Nagel thinks this is too stringent a conception of what we can know objectively, and prefers the Cartesian outlook.
He thinks that the true philosophical point of the cogito is that there are some thoughts which we cannot get outside of. They enter ‘inevitably and directly into any process of considering ourselves from the outside’. There are more than one such thoughts – it’s not just ‘I exist’, but also all of logic and maths, and possibly practical reasoning and moral reasoning.
There is no standpoint we can occupy from which it is possible to regard all thoughts of these kinds as mere psychological manifestations, without actually thinking some of them.
He argues that the distinction between the Cartesian foundationalist approach and looser, more holist scientific approach is not a good one. Science depends on foundationalist principles – the only difference is that these principles aren’t certain – they are subject to change as new data comes in, i.e. they become subsumed by new general principles.
He says that responding to challenges to reason with reason is not question-begging in the same way that responding to challenges to the validity of tea-leaf reading by reading more tea-leaves is. He argues that ‘the appeal to reason is implicitly authorised by the challenge itself’.
He doesn’t believe there is a ‘general, informative answer’ to the question of ‘what kind of self-understanding would make our capacity to think comprehensible?’.
The subjectivist’s all-purpose comment, applicable to anything we say or do, including any procedure of justification and criticism, is that it is ultimately the manifestation of contingent dispositions for which there is no further justification.
Nagel thinks that the defender of reason cannot supply an equally general reply, but must
mount his defense in each domain of thought separately [e.g. mathematics, ethics or natural science], by trying to show, from within a form of reasoning, that its methods are inescapable and that first-order engagement with them resists displacement by an explanation of the practice in other terms that do not employ those methods.
Nagel quotes Lovibond and Rorty as saying that all human assertions or arguments for objective validity can never transcend mere consensus or coherence. Rorty argues that there is nothing more to objectivity than solidarity with your speech community. Nagel retorts that if this was the case, it would not be intelligible to talk in terms of truths we don’t yet know or don’t believe, falsities which will never be revealed etc. Reasoning is not grounded in consensus – it is the other way round. Why can’t the subjectivist simply say that the apparent unintelligibility of objectivity being merely solidarity within a speech community is just psychological fact? Because such a ‘phenomenological reduction’ would be trying to get outside of these thoughts and regard them merely as appearances, which can’t be done. He argues that the distinction between mere phenomenological acknowledgement of reason and recognition of its objective validity is not intelligible, just as it is impossible to think simultaneously dismiss the objective validity of p while believing that p is true. He doesn’t accept that alternative conceptual schemes can help, since the thoughts that we cannot get outside of remain.
Nagel argues that there can be no reduction to contingent psychological facts of logic or mathematics, since the thoughts that one cannot get outside of always pop back up, and cannot be re-interpreted or qualified in the first-person. Nagel tries to argue that such subjectivising qualifiers as ‘This is simply what I do’, or ‘This is my form of life’ say nothing and prove nothing about objectivity. On the other hand, he would like us to stop short of qualifying statements as ‘absolute’ – this is one thought too many, and we would be best off employing our philosophical will-power to ‘just come to a stop with certain kinds of justifications and arguments, which neither admit nor require further qualification’.
Nagel wants to combat the idea that “the deepst level of analysis of our knowledge, thought and understanding must be through the analysis of language”, when languages are themselves merely “human practices, cultural products that differ from one another and have complex histories”. He thinks that this has lead to a “kind of psychologism about what is fundamental”, which leads to relativism, quite opposite to Frege’s intentions of a logic-based examination of mind-independent concepts.
In a broad sense, when we look at either language or verification conditions, we’re interested in logic as “the system of concepts that makes thought possible and to which any language usable by thinking beings must conform”, language as a “tool of thought”, an “aid to the formulation, recollection and transmission of thoughts”.
“The order of explanation here is from the fundamental nature of things tolang, even if in some casee the order of understanding can be the reverse”. “While there are certainly concepts which are just the artefacts of a particular language, with purely local roots, that is not true of the most important concepts with which philosophy is occupied”, and “any language adequate for rational thought must supply a way of expressing [the most general forms of reasoning”. “Grammar obeys logic”, and “no ‘language’ in which modus ponens was not a valid inference or identity was not transitive could be used to expres thoughts at all”. “Looking for the ultimate explanation of logical necessity in the practices, however deeply rooted and automatic, of a linguistic community is an important example of the attempt to explain the more fundamental in terms of the less fundamental”. “What I deny is that the validity of the thoughts that language enables us to express, or even to have, depends on those conventions and usages.”
He makes the important but obvious point that in the “cases of usage, as opposed to validity, one has to recognise that objectivity can’t really oustrip community practice”. It is different for the content of thoughts.
trying to understand how deductive (i.e. arithmetical or logical) thoughts exclude the possibility of a relativising external view
they’re examples of reason if anything is, and they are pervasive elements of the thought of anyone who can think at all
he thinks that the simplest of such thoughts are immune to doubt
whatever else we may be able to imagine as different, including the possibility that we ourselves should be incapable of thinking that 2 + 2 = 4, none of it tends to confer the slightest glimmer of possibility on that proposition’s failing to be true, or true only in some qualified sense
being unsure of the truth of the same proposition expressed in (e.g.) binary notation is just because it’s unfamiliar, and requires translation into base 10
if we are capable of thinking it at all, then it simply cannot be dislodged by any other suppositions
contraposition (modus tollens): ‘if p then q’ plus ‘not q’ implies ‘not p’
failure to employ this is involved in some of the most common forms of faulty reasoning (see Stich, ch 1)
but it cannot be called into question or given a subjective reading (no matter how it was learned or variations in its acceptance/use among different groups), even by someone who’s a bit shaky in its application
to think of it as a habit of thought is to misunderstand it: it is a principle of logic
“the judgement that it is impossible/inconceivable that the premises of a proof be true and the conclusion false relies on our capacities and incapacities to conceive of different possibilities, but it is not a judgement about those capacities, and its object is not something that depends on them”
“We can of course be mistaken about what is/not inconceivable. But such mistakes must be corrected at the same level at which they are made. That is, we must come to have some kind of positive understanding that we formerly lacked of how the proposition whose falsity we were unable to imagine might after all fail to be true, and the understanding must be in terms of the proposition itself” (??? pg 57/8)
we have to have/develop some internal understanding of the possibliity that a belief might be false before any suppositions external to it can bring us to abandon it
this is an example of one type of thought being superior in authority to others
even when we acknowledge that in various respects we might have been different (contingent in: biological development + environmental influence, constitution + psychology, language + notation, culture etc.) (or that creatures like us might not have existed)
none of these thoughts can get underneath the thought that 2 + 2 = 4, that contraposition is a valid form of implication, or Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many primes
i.e. that none of these empirical thoughts enable us to rise above the logical thought, thinking about it while withholding commitment from its content
“We cannot even momentarily ‘bracket’ the ground-level thought that contraposition is valid and substitute it for the purely psychological observation that we find the falsity of that proposition inconceivable. It forms part of the framework of everything we can think about ourselves”
Nagel thinks Descartes was wrong to entertain the hypothesis that an evil demon might be scrambling his mind temporarily
that would require him to think:
‘I can't decide between two possibilities:
a) that I believe that 2 + 3 = 5 because it’s true
b) that it believe it only because an evil demon is manipulating my mind, i.e. that my belief may be false and 2 + 3 may be something else’
Nagel thinks that thought is unintelligible for two reasons:
i. it includes the ‘thought’ that perhaps ‘2 + 3 = 4’, which has not been given a sense and cannot acquire one by being conjoined with the extraneous nonarithmetical thought that an evil demon might be manipulating his mind
that is not to say that ‘2 + 3 = 4’ is gibberish – it has enough sense to be necessarily false, and can be used in reasoning in a reductio ad absurdum, i.e. you can suppose it for the sake of argument, but it’s not possible to think that (perhaps) 2 + 3 = 4
“if the proposition is simple enough, we cannot conceive of anyone positively believing it is false, because we cannot attribute both understanding of and disbelief in it to the same person” (from pg 64)
ii. the judgement that there are two such mutually exclusive alternatives and that he has no basis for deciding between them is itself an exercise of reason, and by engaging in it Descartes has already implicitly displayed his unsheakable attachment to first-order logical thought, i.e. he can't even consider the implications of that possibility without implicitly ruling it out
similarly, the idea that God could have made the eternal truths of arithmetic different is unintelligible for the same reason
structurally, Descartes’s argument is the same as grounding logic in psychology or forms of life
certain forms of thought can't be intelligibly doubted because they force themselves into every attempt to think about anything
i.e. every hypothesis is a hypothesis about how things are and comes with logic built into it
to dislodge a belief requires argument, and the argument has to show that some incompatible alternative is at least as plausible
he then considers this possible argument:
‘If my brains are being scrambled, I can't rely on any of my thoughts, including basic logical thoughts whose invalidity is so inconceivable to me that they seem to rule out anything, including scrambled brains, which would imply their invaidity – for the reply would always be, ‘Maybe that’s just your scrambled brains talking.’ Therefore I can't safely accord objective validity to any hierarchy among my thoughts.’
there just isn't room for skepticism about basic logic, because there is no place to stand where we can formulate or think it without immediately contradicting ourselves by relying on it
it’s a special case of the impossibility of thinking, ‘if my brains are being scrambled, none of my inferences are valid, including this one’
impossible logical skepticism is different from ordinary epistemological skepticism
in logical skepticism, we can never reach a point at which we have two possibilities with which all the ‘evidence’ is compatible and between which it is therefore impossible to choose
the epistemological skeptic relies on reason to get us to a neutral point above the level of the thoguths that are the object of the skepticism – the logical skeptic can offer no such external platform
however, it is of course possible for a mathematician to have a belief about a controversial proposition like the continuum hypothesis which he neither finds self-evident nor is able to establish by a proof whose elements themselves are self-evident, and it could be that non-arithmetical beliefs about my calculations are essential to the support of a more complicated arithmetical belief
but with contraposition or ‘2 + 2 = 4’, nothing external to logic or arithmetic is involved – provided I have the concepts necessary to form such a thought, any confrontation between it and any empirical suppositions whatever must be regarded as unreal
there is then a hierarchy in which some thoughts dominate others
e.g. the thought the contraposition is a valid form of implication dominates all psychological/historical/biological propositions that would qualify/relativise/cast doubt on its truth
this includes the propositions that we learned it in a certain way, we cannot help belieivng it, that we cannot conceive of its not being true, or that if circumstances had been different we might not have been able to think it
the thought itself dominates all thoughts about itself, considered as a psychological phenomenon
as with the cogito, one cannot get outside of it, and nothing outside of it can call it into question
simple logical thoughts dominate all others because there is no intellectual position we can occupy from which it is possible to scrutinise those thoughts without presupposing them
he thinks: “That is why they are exempt from skepticism: they cannot be put into question by an imaginative process that essentially relies on them”
he thinks that the consequences of this kind of dominance include the impossibliity of any sort of relativist, anthropological or ‘pragmatist’ interpretation
“to say that we cannot get outside them means that the last word, with respect to such beliefs, belongs to the content of the thought itself rather than to anything that can be said about it”
we can discover that we were mistaken (failure of logical/conceptual/theoretical imagination) to think that the falsity of a certain proposition was inconceivable
“we must find the newly discovered possibility consistent, and if we come to believe it not merely possible but actual, that will be because it is more consistent than the alternatives with other things we have good reason to believe”
“No doubt, as Quine says, ‘our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body’ but the board of directors can't be fired”
thought has priority over its description, because its description necessarily involves thought
the use of language has priority over its analysis, because the analysis of language inevitably involves its use
“every external view of ourselves, every understanding of the contingency of our makeup and our responses as creatures int eh world, has to be rooted in immediate first-order thought about the world”
“however successful we may get outside of ourselves in certain respects, all of it must be done by some part of us that we haven't got outside of, which simply has the thoughts, draws the inferences, forms the beliefs, makes the statements”
regarding logical/arithmetical thoughts as mere manifestations of my nature, then I will be left with biology/psychology/sociology as the final level of first-order thought
this is no good, for it contains a good deal of material more superficial(???) than arithmetic, it also contains logic + arithmetic as inextricable components
when trying to regard such a thought as a mere phenomonen, I can't avoid also thinking its content (a logical proposition), which would eb true even if I were not in existence/hadn't thought it
the thought is about something independent of my mind/conceptual capacities/existence, which I cannot get outside of, for every supposition that might be brought forward to cast doubt on it simply repeats it to me again
he thinks this reply is useless: that the subjectivist can say that he is merely analysing what we ordinarily say, not recommending that we change it, and that he can say it is true that contraposition would be valid even if we didn't think it was – all of the rationalist claims tomind-independence are preserved within the system of statements that the subjectivist is prepared to endorse
it won't work because the subjectivist will always have something further to say which does not fit into this framework, and which simultaneously contradicts the true content of the original statements of reason
general moral: “reflection about anything leads us inexorably to certain thoughts in which ‘I’ plays no part – thoughts that are completely free of first-person content”
even ‘impersonal’ (completely free of first-person content) thoughts that have grounds which do have first-person thoughts, are in turn grounded in thoughts (including of logic + arithmetic) which are free-standing
“While they are had by us, they do not in any way refer to us, even implicitly. It is in this region of impersonal thoughts that do not depend on any personal ones that the operation of reason must be located”
“Reason, so understood, permits us to develop the conception of the world in which we, our impressions, and our practices are contained, because it does not depend on our personal perspective”
but that does not tell us what specific types of thought belong to this finally impersonal domain
there’s no telling in advance whether:
a) nearly everything objective rests on a fairly narrow logical base, with everything else coming from particular points of view
b) great ranges of judgments, including those of ethics and contingent statments about empirical reality, depend on inescapably non-first-person thoughts in their own right
this is the heart of the issue over the scope of reason, which includes those general forms or methods of impersonal thought, whatever they are, that we reach at the end of every line of questioning and every search for justification, and that we cannot in the end consider merely as a very deeply entrenched aspect of our PoV
the real character of reason is not found in belief in a set of ‘foundational’ propositions (e.g. logic/arithmetic), nor a set of procedures/rules for drawing inferences, but rather in any forms of thought to which there is no alternative
not just ‘no alternative for me/us’, but ‘no alternative, period’
that implies universal validity
although possibly being specific beliefs, this thing which has no alternative will usually be a framework of methods/forms of thought that reappear whenever we call any specific propositions into question
this framework will be part of even the most general thoughts about our intellectual + linguistic practices considered as psychological/social phenomena
the aim of universal validity is compatible with the willingness always to consider alternatives + counterarguments (though he believes that the simplest rules of logic are unrevisable)
- but they must be considered as candidates for objectively valid alternatives + arguments
you can accept a form of rationalism without committing oneself to a closed set of self-evident foundational truths
reason establishes a puzzling relation between the particular and the universal
it’s a local activity of finite creatures that somehow enables them to make contact with universal truths, often of infinite range
e.g. the infinite logical space in which known examples (e.g. of arithmetical/logical reasoning) are located is given as part of the system of thought that reveals them – a strong case of mind-independence
this is a judgement of reason about an infinite domain that at the same time our procedures of reasoning cannot fill out in detail, e.g. that every number has a successor, larger by one (he would guess that infinitely repeating numerical notations were the product, rather than the source, of this insight)
the thought/understanding that the numbers we use to count things in everyday life are merely there first part of a series that never ends – this is a paradigm of the way reason allows us to reach vastly beyond ourselves
the series has a built-in immunity to attempts at reduction – the finite activity of counting can only be understood as part of something infinite
this is a model for the irreducibility of reason in general – it shows how the application of certain concepts from inside overpowers the attempt to grasp that application from outside and to describe it as a finite + local practice
“it may look small + ‘natural’ from outside, but once one gets inside it, it opens out to burst the boundaries of that external naturalistic view”
“And it is precisely by posing the reductive question that we come to see this. We discover infinity when we ask whether these numbers we can name are all there is, whether we can undersatnd counting as just a finite human practice in which speakers of the language come to relatively easy agreement. From inside the practice itself comes a negative answer: The view from inside dominates the view from outside, unless the latter somehow expands to include a version of the former. (There is an analogy here with the philosophy of mind: An external view of the mental cannot be adequate unless it expands to incorporate in some form the internal view.)”
we cannot tell a story about ourselves and our rational capacities that is incompatible with the understanding of the world to which any story about ourselves must belong
the description of ourselves, including our rational capacities, must therefore be subordinate to the description of the world that our exercise of those capacities reveals to us
counting (even samples of it)must be understood as the application of a successor relation that generates an infinite series
any external view of the practice that leaves this out or makes it mysterious is thereby shown to be inadequate, by the standards evident from within the practice
presumably, ‘the practice’ could just as well mean ‘reason’ as ‘counting’???
this is the general form of all failures of reduction
mistaken impression that an external perspective alone is compatible with a scientific world view
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as the best anti-reductionist argument of all time:
mathematical truth cannot be reduced to provability in an axiom system, because:
1. the fact that a sentence is/not provable in a given axiom system is itself a mathemetical truth (so the reducting discourse itself presupposes a prior idea of mathematical truth)
2. in such a system, it is possible to construct sentences which assert the mathematical proposition that they are not provable in it
any reduction to something else must leave us with a more credible world picture than one that keeps them in, unreduced
we seem to be left with a question that has no imaginable answer:
‘how is it possible for finite beings like us to think infinite thoughts – and even if they take priority over any possible outside view of them, what outside view can we take that is at least consistent with their content?’
“the constant temptation towards reductionism – the explanation of reason in terms of something more fundamental – comes from treating our capacity to engage in it as the primary clue to what it is”(???)
e.g. the Kantian project which tries to explain the mind-independent features of reason and the world in an ultimately mind-dependent form
Nagel thinks that the only way to avoid such subjectivism is to make sure the explanation is in a certain sense circular: that it accounts for our capacity to think these things in a way that presupposes their independent validity
“the problem will be not how, if we engage in it, reason can be valid, but how, if it is universally valid, we can engage in it”
probably the most popular non-subjectivist answer nowadays is evolutionary naturalism: we can reason in these ways because it is the consequence of a more primitive capacity of belief formation that had survival value during the period when the human brain was evolving – this explanation has always seeemed to me laughably inadequate (see tVfN pp 78-81 – below, ‘ch 5 – knowledge’)
the other well-known answer is the religious one:
“The universe is intelligible to us because it and our minds were made for each other”
doesn't that sound *really* Hegelian???
Descartes used it as an argument against skepticism, but it’s also used in the opposite direction, as an argument for the existence of God (as the best explanation for why we can undersatnd the universe by the exercise of our reason)
such theories aren't explanatory – God seems to stand for a still unspecified purposiveness that itself remains unexplained – “but perhaps this is due to my indequate understanding of religious concepts”
what are the alternatives to Subjectivism, Evolution and God?
“One possibility is that some things can't be explained because they have to enter into every explanation. The question ‘how can human beings add?’ and ‘how can electronic calculators add?’ In ascribing that capacity to a person, I interpret what he does in terms of my own capacity. And since I can't get outside of it, how can I hope to get outside of and explain the corresponding thing in anyone else? To follow a rule is not to obey a natural law. Perhaps there is something wrong with the hope of arriving at a complete understanding of the world that includes an understanding of ourselves as beings within it possessing the capacity for that very understanding.”
he thinks that something of the kind must be true. “There are inevitably going to be limits on the closure achievable by turning our procedures of understanding on themselves. If that is so, then the outer boundaries of our understanding will always be reached in unqualified objective reasoning about the real world rather than in the interpretation and expression of our own perspective – personal or social. To engage in such reasoning is to try to bring one’s individual thoughts unde the control of a universal standard that prescribes to each person those beliefs, available from his point of view, which can form part of a consistent set of objective beliefs dispersed over all rational persons. It enables us all to live in part of the truth.”
subjectivism about logic is directly self-defeating
can't take seriously the idea that logic/arithmetic are merely manifestations of contingent + local practices
cannot conceive of them as invalid
cannot conceive of a being capable of understanding them who did not also find them self-evidently valid
subjectivism about other kinds of reasoning can be refuted only by showing that it is in direct competition with claims internal to that reasoning and that in a fair contest, it loses
with respect to science/history/ethics, resistance to the external view comes from inside the domains being challenged, thought not, as with logic, because they are presupposed by the challenge itself
we do not find the answers to most questions of reason self-evident
“or if we do, we acknowledge that the appearance of certainty may be deceptive”
reasoning usually provides, not proof, but with with reasons for believing a conclusion likely, or for preferring it to the alternatives
reasonable persons can disagree
sometimes there are enough reasons in support of consistent alternatives
we can imagine ourselves drawing a different conclusion from the one we’ve actually drawn
the search for what is universal is itself a regulative principle in logical/empirical/practical reasoning
e.g. explicitly in the Kantian conception of moral reasoning
but also elsewhere, for we test our reasons partly by asking whether they are applications of principles that are generally valid
unless we think that anyone should draw the same conclusion from the same premises, we cannot regard the conclusion as justified by reason
reasons are by definition general, and we aim always to extend their generality
part of the question is whether an attachment to this method is itself something we cannot get outside of, as the form of final assessment of our beliefs
the process starts from the bare conception of an objective reality, within which more subjective points of view (including our own) are embedded
seek non-locally valid methods in trying to fill it out
“… take ourselves and our experiences as samples of a world that we hope to find the same everywhere (in time as well as in space), so that the order we discover in trying to explain what we observe aims toward something broader. There is nothing special about us, in other words: Each of us is just a piece of the universe. A vindication of this type of reason would require that we make it credible that the search for order, and some of the methods for idnetifying that order, will survive every attempt to interpret them as merely subjective – because all such interpretations are defeated by the first-order judgements whose authority they are trying to undermine. That would be structurally analagous to the situation with logic, but without the same kind of necessity in the results
“This extremely general point is so far compatible with the position that the rational base that cannot be explained away is very small – perhaps even limited to logic – and that everything else can be understood as a feature of some more particular type of viewpoint. It is also compatible with the position that reason has a fundamental role in logic, mathematics and empirical science, but that all ostensible examples of practical or ethical reason are better understood as manifestations of specific psychological dispositions. Definite conclusions on these matters depend on more substantive investigation of whether in each domain pursuit of the universal makes sense and, if so, whether it is reasonable to believe that our actual uncertain efforts in that direction are reflections of something that might be further perfected”
reliance on reason can coexist with very substantial doubts about the results
e.g. traditional epistemological skepticism depends on the objectivity of reason:
“it is always the product of reasoning to the conclusion that various mutually incompatible alternative possibilities are all equally compatible with one’s actual epistemic situation, and that it is therefore impossible to decide among them on rational grounds. Radical skepticism therefore has to rely on some thoughts that are not put in doubt and that are assumed to have objective content. But the same must be true of … the ordinary limited ocnfidence one has in most of one’s beliefs”
we try to make sense of our world, by generating, comparing and ranking possible versions
“But we being from the idea that there is some way the world is, and this, I believe is an idea to which there is no intelligible alternative, and which cannot be subordinate to/dervied from anything else”
Rorty, an intelligent man, certainly thinks there’s an alternative though, doesn't he???
even if a subjectivist wants to offer an analysis of this view in subjective/community-relative terms, his proposal has to be understood as an account of how theworld is and therefore as inconsistent with altenrative accounts, with which it can be compared for plausibility
“what we cannot avoid is the idea that something is the case, even if we don’t’ know what it is” (pg 81)
“we start from certain impressions about how things are, cast doubt on the objectivity of some of them by further thoughts (including thoughts about our own nature and our interaction with the rest of the world), and reject some of the appearances in favour of other beliefs about how things really are”
actual procedure: characterised by a high degree of cognitive inertia – “we begin from a natural view of the world and are led to retreat from it by discovering that in one way or another it is inconsistent with our observations. This creates a gap that we try to fill by imagining alternative possible worlds which would, if they existed, be more consistent with what we observe. The judgements of consistency themselves involve logic, but they cannot produce logical proof of the truth of any such picture, unless it can be shown that it is the only picture consistent with the observations”
driving force behind all empirical reasoning is the search for order (pg 82)
“I believe it is possible to understand the demand for order as a direct consequence of the idea of an objective reality, independent of particular observations + observers”
two potential charges of subjectivism – the aim, and what counts as success:
1. the demand for order cannot itself be rationally justified, nor does it correspond to a self-evident necessity, like arithmetic or logic
the assumption of the uniformity of nature could simply be the projection of our psychological need for a certain kind of world picture, rather than an intrinsically reliable tool for getting at the mind-independent truth
2. even the definition of what constitutes order seems to depend on us
it it means that at some level of description, similar causes will have similar effects on different occasions etc.
butt the only measure of similarity is what we count as similar (either by perception or more technical methods of detection/measurement)
Nagel thinks the only response is to argue that if those psychological analyses are taken seriously as hypotheses, they are themselves discredited by the very standards they purport to challenge – but how can we make this argument without beggin the question
“I think we can, and that there is an interesting difference in this respect between epistemological skepticism and the kind of subjectivism I wish to dispute”
a non-question begging refutation would have to resist the skeptic en route to his conclusion
subjectivism is not just a proposal of mere possibilities, but a positive interpretation of our thoughts
it has to survive in competition with other claims, and that includes the thoughts being interpreted, so long as they have not been displaced
if the subjectivist does not succeed in persuading us to suspend thinking the objective content of those thoughts, he has failed
that is why Nagel believes that resistance to subjectivism can come from the content of objective thoughts thesmselves without necessarily begging the question
- it is not question-begging, provided we rely on the thoughts themselves, rather than on the second-order claim that they must be interpreted objectively
the subjectivist proposal is not that we don't know whether our beliefs about the world are correct, but that it is a mistake to interpret them as beliefs about a mind-independent world order. Rather, they should be understood as general features of our persepective/linguistic practice/point of view
Nagel argues that this is an alternative world picture – in which the central element is a set of human perspectives – in direct competition with the objective judgements it is meant to displace
confrontations between unqualified first order claims and relativising reinterpretations need not always result in victory for the former
“Unqualified judgements about astronomy, by contrast, are part of a world picture that is very robust in comparison with the Kantian alternative. Unless, as Kant thought, it is a picture that can be ruled out a priori, there is no reason why those judgements should not themselves weight against a Kantian interpretation of them. In the same way, certain first-order moral judgements can resist emoitivist interpretations by their own weight.
“… There is no neutral standpoint from which they can be evaluated, so they have to compete with one another directly. The result may sometimes be a standoff, but it is not question-begging to regard the first-order credibility of a familiar proposition as a reasosn to reject a relativist or subjectivist interpretation of it. Of course one may be mistaken, but such mistakes are possible anywhere. (If two witnesses contradict each other, each maintaining that the other is lying, you can neverthless conclude that the first is lying, on the basis of the testimony of the second; even if you are mistaken, you will not have begged the question.) There is no alternative to considering the alternatives and trying to make up one’s mind.”
a subjectivist interpretation of empirical claims is attractive partly because it rules out radical skepticism, because skepticism depends on interpreting the content of empirical claims (scientific or more ordinary) objectively, and then perceiving a logical gap between them and their empirical grounds
internal realism = our apparently objective world picture should be understood as essentially a creative product of our language + point of view, and the truth of our beliefs should be understood as their survival in an ideal development of that point of view
is a recent example of subjectivism, usually presented as a way of transcending the outmoded subjective-objective distinction
truth is nothing but “idealised rational acceptability” (Putnam)
if ‘acceptability’ means ‘acceptability to us’, then the logical gap disappears
Putnam later asserted that internal realism was not supposed to be a reduction of truth to epistemic notions (that truth + rational acceptability are supposed to be interdependent), but he doesn't make the position any clearer
more recently still, Putnam: “whether I am still an internal realist is, I guess, as unclear as how much I was including under that unhappy label”
Nagel argues that internal realism fails its own test of rational acceptability (… see pg 88)
“Our point of view – what we accept on the basis of reason – is a set of beliefs about how things really are, together with copious acknowledgement that there is a lot we don't know and perhaps a lot we can never kow about how they really are. Here, just as in the case of logic and arithmetic, we can't get outside of our thoughts about what is the case and think of them merely as the expression of a point of view, within which their content must be situated. Their content, including the idea of a mind-independent reality, domainates any such self-conscious psychological or social image”.
“There is no way of determining that a belief is rationally acceptable except by thinking about whether it is true – thinking about the evidence and the arguments and being open to consideration of whatever anyone brings up as relevant. To say that its truth is its rational acceptability deprives both the notion of truth and the notion of acceptability of all content.”
the fact that observation is theory-laden seems to me an insignificant point which in no way tends to show that the process of confirming theories by observation is circular or non-objective (pg 90)
“it may require some theory, of telescopes or photography, to interpret the astronomical photographs that show the bending of light rays by the sun’s gravitational field, but the crucial observation – that the images of stars near the sun are displaced outward – is not dependent on the theory which it confirms – namely the general theory of relativity”
the possibility of non-circular confirmation is also, he htinks, the answer to doubts abou the role of our natural sense of similarity in determining what counts for us as a regularity/law
we should demote a similarity to ‘similarity for us’ only if it is shown to be not systematically connected with other observed regularities (otherwise, the most plausible hypothesis is that these are not artifacts of our perspective on the world but rather products of the world’s systematic interaction with us)
this is why the scientific image of the world has replaced earlier, associative + meaning-laden pictures, since they’re circular – the only theories these yield are mere summaries of the appearances or else delusional systems that give rise to appearances corresponding to them
but it has to be granted that the empirical confirmation of the supposition that the world is orderly and that particular phenomena can be explained by general laws has something inevitably circular about it (pg 91)
but there really is no alternative to assuming that our systematic observations are explained by an order that governs the posssibilities as well as the actualities and is not directly observable
the attempt to reconstrue the ordered world picture as a projection of our minds founders on the need to place ourselves in the world so ordered
it is certainly not a necessary truth that the world is orderly or that we can understand its order – but anything we can know about must be at least related in an orderly way to us, and given our success so far it is reasonable to try to continue
“The real problem is how to understand the inescapability of the idea of objective reality, which forces us to construe relativist/subjectivist interpretations of our thoughts as rival accounts of the world, in competition with the objectivist alternative. That is, it forces us, if we are asked to doubt the objectivity of our actual conceptions in some respect, to consider whether an alternative version of reality, known or unknown, is more likely to be true. A subjectivist interpretation of reason thus becomes just another hypothesis about the world and our relation to it, and that makes it subject finally to rational assessment to so that the aim of rational assessment of our beliefs turns out to be unavoidable”
a purely perspectival conception (in which the perspectives were not situated in any objective reality at all) is not an option
Descartes’s cogito is correct: it’s impossible to think of oneself except as something existing in the world, however little else the world may contain
but it’s necessary to claim more than that in order to counter the restriction on the scope of reason proposed by Kant
Kant acknowledged that we could not help thinking of ourselves as part of an independently existing world, but he denied that reason/perception told us anything about how that world was in itself (not even about ourselves as part of it)
every use of our capacity to reason, to form theories of objective reality, and to discover the best explanation of the appearances, is limited in its application to the phonemonal world (how things appear to us)
although not strictly relativistic, since it grounds reason in a perspective that is universal for human beings, it is the most famous form of subjectivism about reason
Kantian transcendental idealism is a thesis not about the phenomenal world but about the relation of the phenomenal world to the world as it is in itself
since it says that ordinary scientific reasoning applies only to the phenomenal world, it exempts itself from the usual conditions of assessment
it is not itself one of the synthetic a priori judgements whose validity it purports to explain, but it is an a priori claim all the same, based on the conviction that there is no other way things could be
Nagel thinks that once we admit the bare of idea of our placement in a mind-independent world, rather than denying the logical possibility of anything more, we cannot exclude the possibility of forming hypotheses about that world
it then becomes necessary to interpret transcendental idealism itself as one of the hypotheses – the that we know nothing whatever about those relations between us and the world that are responsible for the appearances
if the Kantian view is correct, ordinary methods of reasoning cannot be used to evalute it
on the other hand, if we stubbornly persist in trying to think about how things really are, then the Kantian view becomes just another hypothesis, unprotected from rational assessment + rejection
“to accept transcendental idealsim, we would have to cease to regard our ordinary forms of thought as being about the world at all, and I think we cannot do that”
“we cannot be prevented from thinking considering transcendental idealism as a minimalist theory of reality, which therefore forces us to consider whether it is true or not”
“while it may remain as a skeptical possibility, not decisively refuted it will not win automatically – and this means in effect that it will be refuted, since it is supposed to be not a mere possibility but a certainty”
“here, as elsewhere, reasoning its own right defeats efforts to depict it as subordinate to something else that discredits its pretentions”
“[reasoning] inevitability reappears because any such hypothesis invites the question, ‘what reason do we have to think the world is really like that?’”
“the alternatives always have to compete with the possibility that things are more or less as they appear to be – a possibility that can often be defeated, but only for reasons that make it less credible than one of the alternatives”
this makes it very difficult to dislodge the idea of an natural order and the associated search for regularities underlying what we observe
e.g. the detailed system of chemical laws summarised in the periodic table of the elements is not plausibly regarded as a result of the demands made on human experience by the conditions of the possibility of its having as objects things existing in time, either successively or simultaneously
“the proposal that scientific reasoning tels us nothing about reality is itself a hypothesis about the world and cannot simply stop us from thinking, any more than a psychological reductionist theory of mathematics or ethics can stop us from thinking about arithmetic or right and wrong”
the second order theories cannot avoid competition with the content of what they are trying to reduce or debunk
when we do discover order, the proposal that it is imposed by the conditions of our own experience, let alone by agreement, is completely implausible
the long reign of Ptolemaic astronomy might be an example of where an innate/acquired set of categories can overwhelm experience – but when it does, that is a fact about the world that can be investigated by further thought + observation
however we divide up the contributions of the external worl dand of our own perspective, the result is a conception of how the world is, ourselves included
general forms of empirical reasoning dominate any specific psychological/metaphysical hypothesis about the explanation of such reasoning
whatever is proposed, we cannot help asking whether the proposal is supported by the evidence. Even if the proposal is specifically designed to provide a discrediting explanation of certain methods of drawing conclusions from the evidence, it cannot thereby exempt itself from assessment by those methods
Kant’s TI doesn't pass his test, because when we ask (contrary to its intent) whether on the basis of all the evidence it is a credible view of the world and of the nature of our knowledge of it, we find that our unrepentant empirical + scientific reasoning persists at full strength and does not reduce its realist claims in the face of this challenge
faced with the standoff that both parties are using precisely the methods that are being challenged by the other to refute the other’s challenge, we just have to think hard about it and decide which line of reasoning is superior
“the conclusion of the argument is to be found only in the arguments themselves that cannot be resisted – not, it should be noted, in the fact that they cannot be resisted, but in their content”
“if we try to reinterpret [the pretensions of human reason] in amore modest fashion, we find ourselves, in carrying out the project, inevitably condemned to forming beliefs of some kind about the world and our place in it, and that can be done only by engaging in untrammeled thought”
is moral reasoning also fundamental + inescapable? unlike logical/arithmetical reasoning, it often fails to produce certain, justified or unjustified
like empirical reason, it’s not reducible to a series of self-evident steps
“I take it for granted that the objectivity of moral reasoning doesn't depend on its having an external reference” (like science’s reifying realism) or “a universe of moral facts that impinge upon us causally”
“the real work [in science] comes after [perception and other causal relations between us and the physical world], in the form of active scientific reasoning”
we consider our scientific beliefs to be externally true because we’ve been able to arrive at those beliefs by methods that have a good claim to be reliable, by virtue of their success in selecting among rival hypotheses that survive the best criticisms and questions we can throw at them
empirical confirmation plays a vital role in this process, but it cannot do so without theory
moral thought is concerned not with the description + explanation of what happens but with decisions and their justification
a subjectivist position is more credible here mainlyi because we have no comparably uncontroverisal + well-developed methods for thinking about morality
but at the early stages, we didn't know if we were doing any more than spinning collective fantasies in trying to arrive at objective truth beyond the deliverances of sense-perception
except we have been at this ethics game for a long time now…???
“The answer must come from the results themselves. Only the effort to reason about morality can show us whether it is possible – whether, in thinking about what to do and how to live, we can find methods, reasons and principles whose validity does not have to be subjectively/relativistically qualified”
since moral reasoning is a species of practical reasoning, its conclusions are desires, intentions and actions, or feeling and convictions that can motivate desire, intention and action
we want to know how to live, and why, and we want the answer in general terms
Hume famously believed that:
because a ‘passion’ immune to rational assessment must underly every motive, there can be no such things as specifically practical reason, nor specifically moral reason either
that is false, because while ‘passions’ are the source of some reasons, other passions or desires are themselves motivated and/or justified by reasons that do not depend on still more basic desires
furthermore, Nagel thinks that both the following questions are always open to rational consideration:
1. whether one should have a certain desire
2. whether, given that one has that desires, one should act on it
the issue is whether the procedures of justication + criticism we employ in such reasoning (moral or merely practical) can be regarded finally as just something we do – a cultural/societal/even more broadly human collective practice, within which reasons come to an end
“Although it is less clear than in some of the other areas we’ve discussed, attempts to get entirely outside of the object language of practical reasons, good and bad, right and wrong, and to see all such judgements as expression of a contingent, non-objective perspective will eventually collapse before the independent force of the first-order judgements themselves”
suppose someone says:
“You only believe in equal opportunity because you are a product of Western liberal society.
“If you had been brought up in a caste society or one in which the possibilities for men and women were radically unequal, you wouldn't have the moral convictions you have or accept as persuasive the moral arguments you now accept.”
the second, hypothetical sentence is probably true, but what about the first – specifically the ‘only’
the fact that I wouldn't believe something if I hadn't learned it proves nothing about the status of the belief or its grounds
a meaningful subjectivism must say not just that my moral convications are my moral convictions, but that they are just my moral convictions (or those of my moral community) – it must qualify ordinary moral judgements in some way
Nagel believes that it is impossible to come to rest with the observation that a belief in equality of opportunity (etc.) is merely an expression of our cultural tradition – true or false, those beliefs are essentially objective in intent
they could be wrong, but that would be a nonrelative judgement
the fact that they’ve gained currency only recently and non-universally, yo ustill have to decide whether they are right, i.e. whether one ought to continue to hold them
the question remains, at the level of moral content, whether I would have been in error if had accepted as natural, and therefore justified, the inequalities of a caste society (etc.)
whatever extra (historical, cultural etc.) facts, it’s inevitably a moral question – they don't disarm first-order moral judgement
when assessing social institutions, some version of uniersalisability does not lose any of its persuasive force just because it is not universally recognised
if others feel differently, they must say why they find these cultural facts relevant, i.e. why they require some qualification to the objective moral claim
the only way to defend universalisability or equal opportunity against subjectictivist qualification is by continuing the moral argument
it is a matter of understanding exactly what the subjectivist wants us to give up, and then asking whether the grounds for those judgements disappear in the light of his observations
it’s nearly as irrational to abandon/qualify basic methods of moral reasoning on historical/anthropological grounds as abandoning a mathematical belief on non-mathematical grounds
moral considerations occupy a position in the system of human thought that makes it illegitimate to subordinate them completely to anything else
the normative can never be trascended by the descriptive
the questions ‘what should I do (or believe) ?’ are always in order
the process cannot be rendered pointless by an fact of a different kind (or emotion, feeling, habit, convention, social background etc.)
it is always possible to take their relation to action as an object of further normative reflection and ask:
‘how should I act, given that these things are true of me/my situation?’
it is practical reason that generates answers to this question
the question can always take a specifically moral form, because it leads to:
‘what should anyone in my situation do?’
and then even more generally
if such universal questions do get raised, they require an answer of the appropriate kind (even though the answer may be that in a case like this one may do as one likes)
only a justification (and not by pointing to something more fundamental, e.g. psychological/cultural/biological) brings the request for justifications to its end
in general, normative questions are not undercut/rendered idle by anything, even though particular normative answers may be
even when some putative justification is exposed as a rationalisation, that implies that something else could be said about the justifiability or non-justifiability of what was done(???)
the point of view to defeat is in essence the Humean one
Hume was wrong in saying that reason is fit only to serve as the slave of the passions
but he’s right that there are desires + sentiments prior to reason that it must simply treat as part of the raw material on which its judgements operate
how pervasive are they?
are they ever the true sources of those grounds of action which are usually described as reasons?
resisting Hume’s theory of the calm passions (designed to answer yes to the second question) is not easy, even if set in the context of a minimal framework of practical rationality stronger than Hume would have admitted
if there is such a thing as practical reason, it does not simply dictate particular actions but, rather, governs the relations among actions/desires/beliefs
just as theoretical reason governs the relations among beliefs and requires some specific material to work on
“Prudential rationality, requiring uniformity in the weight accorded to desires and interests situated at different times in one’s life, is an example – and the example about which Hume’s skepticism is most implausible, when he says that it is not contrary to reason “to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter” (Hume)” (Nagel)
yet Hume’s position always seems a possibility, because whenever such a consistency requirement or similar pattern has an influence on our decisions, it seems possible to reprsent this influence as the manifestation foa systematic second-order desire or calm passion, which has such consistency as its object and without which we would not be susceptible to this type of ‘rational’ motivation
Hume would need then only claim that while such a desire (for the satisfaction of one’s future interests) is quite common, to lack it is not contrary to reason, any more than to lack sexual desire is contrary to reason. The problem is to show how this misrepresents the facts
there is no point in denying that people have such second order desires: the question is whether they are sources of motivation or simply the manifestation in our motives of the recognition of certain rational requirements
parallel point about theoretical reason: it is clear that the belief in (e.g.) modus ponens is not a rationally ungrounded assumption undelrying our acceptance of deductive arguments that depend on modus ponens: rather is simply a recognition of the validity of that form of argument
is this how you avoid the Tortoise and his endless A implies B implies C implies Z in GEB???
cf Stroud: “For every proposition or set of propositions the belief/acceptance of which is involved in someone’s believing one proposition on the basis of another there must be something else, not simply a further proposition accepted, that is responsible for the one belief’s being based on the other”
can something similar be said of the ‘desire’ for prudential consistency in the treatment of desires + interests located at different times?
he thinks it can
if you try instead to regard prudence as simply a desire (that you happen to have) among others, the question of its appropriateness inevitably reappears as a normative question , and the answer can only be gien in terms of the principle itself – the normative can't be displaced by the psychological
saying that you don't care about what happens to you in the future is different to saying that you don't care about movies (which is fair enough – no reason to regret it)
this is a judgement of rational acceptability
my recognition of that failure [to care about my own future] does not reflect merely the antecedent presence in me of contingent second-order desire
rather, it reflects a judgement about what is and what is not relevant to the justification of action against a certain factual background
… xxx ??? pg 109
relevance + consistency both get a foothold when we adopt the standpoint of decision, based on the total circumstances, including our own condition
introduces a subtle but profound gap between desire + action, into which the free exercise of reason enters
we can start to think in terms of the right/wrong thing (in an non-ethical sense) given our total situation, including our desires
once I see myself as the subject of certain desires, as well as the occupant of an objective situation, I still have to decide what to do, and that will include deciding what justificatory weight to give to those desires
this opening of a slight space between inclination + decision, is the condition that permits the operation of reason with respect to belief as well as with respect to action, and that poses the demand for genersalisable justificationrather than being simply pushed along by impressions/memories /impulses/desires etc., when you ask ‘what should I do/believe?’, reasoning becomes possible, and necessary
the standpoint from which one assesses one’s choices after this step back is not just first-personal
you’re suddenly in the position of judging what one ought to do, against the background of all one’s desires and beliefs, in a way that does not merely flow from those desires + beliefs, in a way that does not merely flow from those desires + beliefs but operates on them – by an assessment that should enable anyone else also to see what is the right thing for you to do against that background
even higher-order desires have to be placed among the background conditions of decision along with everything else
even with a purely self-interested choice, one is seeking the right answer, i.e. given the inner + outer circumstances, what one should do, i.e. what this person should do
the same answer should be given to that question by anyone to whom the data are presented whether or not he is in your circumstances and shares your desires – that is what gives practical reason its generality
the subjectivist will respond that this sense of non-relative judgement is an illusion, and that we cannot take ourselves as objects of contemplation/find a secure platform from which such judgement is possible
even after engaging in such an intellectual ritual, whatever we do will still inevitably be a manifestation of our individual/social nature
he doesn't think this can be established a priori, and there’s little reason to believe it could be established empirically
the subjectivist would have to show that all purportedly rational judgements about what people have reason to do are really expressions of rationally unmotivated desires/dispositions of the person making the judgement
but he doesn't think this can be established a priori or empirically
the subjectivist would have to show that all purportedly rational judgements about what people have reason to do are really expressions of rationally unmotivated desires/dispositions of the person making the judgement, to which normativity has no application
it involves a positive claim of empirical psychology
in a sense, it would have to be shown that all our supposed practical reasoning is, at the limit, a form of rationalisation
but the general response for the defender of practical reasoning is to say, every time one of his actual reasonings is convincingly analysed away as the expression of merely parochial/personal inclinations, ‘what in the light of all this, do I have reason to do?’
more important, as a matter of substance:
he doesn’t think it’s possible to give a debunking psychological explanation of prudential rationality, at any rate
take any (e.g.) biologically natural dispositions (e.g. planning for the future), we still have to decide whether acting on it is a good idea
if they were simply desires that there is no reason to have they wouldn't give us the kind of reasons for action that they clearly do
“it will never be reasonable for the rationalist to concede that prudence is just a type of consistency in action that he happens, groundlessly, to care about, and that he would have no reason to care about if he didn't already”
the null hypothesis – that in this unconditional sense there are no reasons – is acceptable only if from the point of view of detached self-observation it is superior to the alternatives; and as elsewhere, I believe it fails that test(???)
Williams as a representative of the opposite view
in ch 4 of EatLoP, he argues that reflective practical reason, unlike reflective theoretical reason, always remains first-person
one is always trying to answer ‘what shall/should I do?’ and the ansewr must derive from your internal ‘motivational set’
on the other hand, theoretical reasoning is about ‘what should I believe?’ but it is in general replaceable by a substantive question which need make no first-person reference
reflection on the influence of my desires + instincts and their suitability as reasons for actions will never take me outside of the domain of first-person thought
even at my most reflective, it will still be ad ecision about what I should do and will have to be based on my reflective assessment of my motives + reasons
however, it may be that Williams believes that there is an objective answer, discoverable by anyone to the question of what a particular person should do, given the contents of his ‘motivational set’
phenomenologically, the subjectivist view is more plausible in ethics than in theoretical reasoning:
“when I step back from my practical reasonings and ask whether I can endorse them as correct, it is possible to experience this as a move to a deeper region of myself rather than to a higher universal standpoint. Yet at the same time, there seems to be no limit to the possibility of asking whether the first-personal reasoning I rely on in deciding what to do is also objectively acceptable”
the fact that the question ‘what should I do?’ is always open/reopenable is logically consistent with the answer’s always being a first-personal anwer
it might be, as Williams believes, that the highest freedom I can hope for is to ascend to higher order desires/values that are still irreducibly my own
but since we can reach a descriptive standpoint from which the first person has vanished and from which one regards oneself impersonally, the issue is whether at that point description outruns evaluation
description can outrun some evaluations, e.g. there is no higher order evaluation to be made of my disliking shrimp
but there are some evaluations that seem at least potentially to be called into question by an external, descriptive view, and the issue whether those questions always lead us finally to a first-person answer
e.g. surely my hope that candidate X will not win the next presidential election – my reasons for holding it are not sipmly facts about myself, as my dislike of shrimp is a fact about myself
as elsewhere, he doesn't think we can hope for a decisive proof that we are asking objective questions and pursuing objective answers
but the only way to deal with that possibility is to think about it, and one must think about it by weighing the plausibility of the debunking explanation against the plausibility of the ethical reasoning at which it is aimed
“the claim that, at the most objective level, the question of what we should do becomes meaningless has to compete head-to-head with specific claims about what in fact we should do, and their grounds”
“so in the end, the contest is between the credibility of substantive ethics and the credibility of an external psychological reduction of that activity”
what about the problem of free will when trying to step back and evaluate one’s actions/beliefs?
“suppose you became convinced that all your choices, decisions + conclusions were determined by rationally arbitrary features of your psychological makeup or by external manipulation, and then tried to ask yourself what, in the light of this information, you should do/believe. There would really be now way to answer this question, because the arbitrary causal control of which you had become convinced would apply to whatever you said/decided”
cf the scrambled brain hypothesis
“not only that, but if the very belief in the causal system of control was itself a product of what you thought to be reasoning, then it too would lose its status as a belief freely arrived at, and your attitude toward it would have to change (though even that is a rational argument, whose conclusion you are no longer in a position to draw)”
“although the hypothesis of non-rational control seems a contingent possibility, it is no more possible to entertain it with regard to yourself than it is to consider the possibility that you are not thinking. I have never known how to respond to this conundrum”
however, the hypothesis that (specifically) practical reason does not exist is not self-contradictory
you could intelligibly suppose, without abandoning all your reasoning, that decisions to act are all ultimately due to arbitrary desires + dispositions (perhaps higher order/unconscious) beyond the possibility of rational assessment
if you really accepted this hypothesis, you would have to abandon the practice of rational assessment, all things considered, as an illusion, and limit the practical employment of reason to an instrumental role (since asking ‘what should I do?’ would contradict the supposition of non-rational determination, which would apply to all choices including this one)
he doesn't think that’s possible
the illusion is on the other side, in trying to see oneself as non-rationally determined
the opposition here is between a theory of how things are and a practice that would be impossible if this was how things are … (???)
“I leave open the possibility that there is a form of causal determination that is compatible with rationality; if so, we could simultaneously engage in practical and theoretical reasoning and believe that we were so determined – including being so determined to believe that we were”
the unquenchable persistence of the conviction that it is up to me to decide, all things considered, what I should do, is what Kant called the fact of reason
the sense of freedom depends on the decision’s not being merely from my point of view
“there is a direct analogy here with the operation of theoretical reason, which employs universal principles of belief formation to bring my thoughts into harmony with a consistent system of objective beliefs in which others can also hold a share – more commonly known as the truth. Reason is an attempt to turn myself into a local representative of the truth, and in action of the right”
“freedom requires holding onself in one’s hands and choosing a direction in thought/action for the highly contingent + paticular individual that one is, from a PoV outside oneself, that one can nevertheless reach from inside oneself”
this picture is opposed to the Humean alternative: even when we transcend ourselves to develop a trues + more objective conception of how the world is, but this transcendence influences our conduct only instrumentally – by revealing ohw we may most effectively act on our motives, which remain entirely personal/perspectival
Nagel thinks that that alternative is untenable – even a moral system like Hobbes’, based on the rational construction of collective self-interest, affirms the rationality of the self-interest on which it depends, which puts it in competition with other conceptions of what is rational
with one we have developed the capacity to recognise our own desires + motives, we are faced with the choice of whether to act as they incline us to act, and in facing that choice we are inevitably faced with an evaluative question
even the subjective-seeming answer that there are no universal standards for determining what we should do and that each person may follow his own inclinations is itself an objective + universal claim
but that position obviously has competitiors, and one of those moralities that require some kind of impartial consideration for everyone is just much more plausible
the first step on the path to ethics is the admission of generality in practical judgements
he says that that is “actually equivalent to the admission of the existence of reasons, for a reason is something one person can have only if others would also have it if they were in the same circumstances (internal and external)”
“In taking an objective view of myself, the first question to answer is whether I have, in this generalisable sense, any reason to do anything, and a negative answer is nearly as implausible as a negative answer to the anologous question whether I have any reason to believe anything. neither of those questions – though they are, to begin with, about me – are essentially first-personal”
unlike theoretical reasoning, perhaps action wouldn't become senseless even if you decided that there are no (practical) reasons – you could still be moved by impulse + habit without it being justified – but he thinks this is very implausible
it implies that none of your desires/aversion, pleasures/sufferings or survival/death, give you any generalisable reason to do anything
“I can't seriously believe that I have no reason to get out of the way of a truck that is bearing down on me in the street – that my motive is a purely psychological reaction not subject to rational endorsement”
the second step on the path to familiar moral territory is the big one - the choice between:
1. agent-relative, esentially egoistic (but still general) reasons
2. some alternative that admits agent-neutral reasons or in some other way ackonwledge that each person has a non-instrumental reason to consider the interests of others
morality is possible only for beings capable of seeing themselves as others see them
we have to make a choice about the “relation between the value we naturally accord to ourselves and our fates from our own point of view, and the attitude we take toward these same things when viewed from the impersonal standpoint assigns to us no unique status apart from anyone else”
one alternative: keep the impersonal standpoint purely descriptive and our lives and what matters to us as we live tem would not be regarded as mattering at all if considered apart from the fact that they are ours/related to us
other alternative: assign some form of impersonal as well as purely perspectival value to one’s life and what goes on in it
… ??? pg 121
the agent-relative position: all the practical reasons that any of us have depend on what is valuable to us – we each have value only to ourselves and to those who care about us
the egoistic answer to the question of what kinds of reasons there are amount to an assessment of oneself, along with everyone else, as objectively worthless
“although this judgement satisfies the generality condition for reasons, and while perfectly consistent, but it is in my opinion highly unreasonable and difficult to honestly accept” – he thinks that “the concept of reasons for action faces us with a question about their content that it is very difficult in a conistently egoistic or agent-relative style”
we may admit that a system of reasons should accord to persons and their interest some kind of objective as well as subjective worth but there is more than one way to do this
the problem is to give more specific content to the idea that persons have value not just for themselves but in themselves – and therefore for everyone – but exactly what kind is this reason to consider one another?
illustrates the attempt to discover objective practical reasons by contrasting utilitarianism + contractualism:
both try to give equal value to everyone, but different kinds of equality
utilitarianism: assigns equal value to people’s experiences/personal good as a component of the totality of value
rights, obligations, equality and other deontological elements have to be explained in terms of their instrumental value in promoting the greatest overall good for people in the long run
contractualism: equality of status and treatment in certain respects, universal substantive guarantees (protections gainst violation and provision of basic needs)
uses a system of priorities to settle conflicts between interests
deontological features are fundemental rather than derivative
priority/rights-based vs maximising aggregative: comes down to a disagreement over how best to interpret the extremely general requirement of impartial interpersonal concern
this is an example of a large substantive question of moral theory that firmly resists subjectivist/relativist interpretation – he thinks that it demands that we look for the right answer rather than relying on our feelings or community consensus
once we admit the existence of some form of other-regarding reasons that are general in application, we have to look for a way of specifying their content + principles of combination – this is not a first-person enterprise
we are trying to decide what reasons there are, having already decided that there must be some
I have to try to arrive at a judgement, which often take the form of moral intuitions, but those are not just subjective reactions, at least in intention: they are beliefs about what is right
“The situation here is like that in any other domain. First-order thoughts about its content – thoughts expressed in the object language – rise up again as the decisive factor in response to all second-order thoughts about their psychological character. They look back at the observer, so to speak. And those first-order thoughts aim to be valid without qualification, however much pluralism or even relativism may appear as part of their (objective) content. It is in that sense that ethics is one of the provinces of reason, if it is. That is why we can defend moral reason only by abandoning meta-theory for substantive ethics. Only the intrinsic weight of first-order moral thinking can counter the doubts of subjectivism. (And the less its weight, the more plausible subjectivism becomes.)”
Peirce considers that ‘belief’ (“the willingness to risk a great deal on a proposition” (Peirce)) and ‘opinion’ belong to action and practical affairs – science must remain unattached to any propositions, and continually on the lookout for objections. “Only the willingness to change one’s mind gives any ground for thinking that what one hasn’t been persuaded to change one’s mind about may be right, or at least on the right track.” Science’s aim is the convergence on “eternal verities” (Peirce) through inquiry. Nagel quotes a number of alarmingly Platonist, antireductionist, realist excerpts from Peirce that he finds congenial, noting that they “maintain that the project of pure inquiry (“the Cartesian project of trying to discover the truth, without regard to any practical considerations whatever”) is sustained by our ‘inward sympathy’ (Peirce) with nature, on which we draw in forming hypotheses that can then be tested against the facts”. According to Peirce, reason has nothing to do with ‘how we think’ (Peirce). “If we can reason, it is because our thoughts can obey the order of the logical relations among propositions”. Nagel’s concern though is that Peirce’s Platonism requires a religious or quasi-religious world picture, which often accompanies rationalism. “Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality [or indeed any access to values that are objective or universal] makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.” This is “the fear of religion”, that he himself is subject to – “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers”.
He thinks that this “cosmic authority problem” underlies much of the scientism, reductionism and overuse of evolutionary biology to explain life and mind, and secularly re-cast “purpose, meaning and design from “fundamental features of the world” into “epiphenomena” explicable in terms of “the operation of non-teleological laws of physics” (whose existence, like the existence of anything at all, can be seen as posing a religious threat too). Of course, atheism, like theism, can lead one towards irrational beliefs. But he thinks that atheists need not be any more alarmed by “fundamental and irreducible mind-world relations” than “fundamental and irreducible laws of physics”.
The existence of mind, with humanity as just one example of presumably countless possible/actual rational species in the universe, “is certainly a datum for the construction of any world picture: at the very least its possibility must be explained”. Despite sounding quasi-religious, the idea “that the capacity of the universe to generate organisms with minds capable of understanding the universe is itself somehow a fundamental feature of the universe” “at no point [implies] the existence of a divine person, or a world soul”. He thinks that “the hypothesis of some systematic aspect of the natural order that would make the appearance of minds in harmony with the universe something to be expected” more explanatory than the religious proposal, which seems to employ God more like a placeholder for explanation than anything else. He suspects that the fear of religion may include even such a “cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and non-accidental part”. Of course, even such a “mind-friendly cosmology” (i.e. natural “laws that explain the possibility of intelligent life”) will need the right initial conditions.
Nozick’s evolutionary hypothesis (naturalised epistemology) explains both limitations and successes of reason, proposing “ a reversal of the Kantian dependence of the facts on reason”. Reason “is the dependent variable, shaped by the facts”, with reality “selecting for what seems ‘evident’” (tNoR pg 112). “Facts and reality are what they are independent of what we think”, and “our finding something self-evident is no guarantee that it is necessarily true, or true at all – since the disposition to find it self-evident could have been an evolutionary adaptation to its being only approximately, and contingently, true”.
“The evolutionary explanation itself is something we arrive at, in part, by the use of reason to support evolutionary theory in general and also this particular application of it. Hence it does not provide a reason-independent justification of reason, and, although it grounds reason in facts independent of reason, this grounding is not accepted by us independently of our reason. Hence the account is not part of first philosophy; it is part of our current ongoing scientific view.” (tNoR pg 112)
It explains but doesn’t justify reason – it grounds reason causally in evolutionary facts, but this is “not supposed to provide us with grounds for accepting the validity or reliability of reason. So the explanation is not circular.” Thus, it’s a “proposal of a possible naturalistic explanation of the existence of reason that would, if it were true, make our reliance on reason ‘objectively’ reasonable”, i.e. reliable “(allowing for the equally important function of reason in correcting and improving its own methods)”.
“But is the hypothesis really compatible with continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge about the nonapparent character of the world?” Nagel thinks rather that “the idea that our rational capacity was the product of natural selection would render reasoning far less trustworthy than Nozick suggests”, and moreover, “insofar as the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, it would be self-undermining”. Nagel says he’s confused about Nozick’s position, since Nozick first says that “Enhancement of inclusive fitness yields selection for approximate truth rather than strict truth” (pg 113) but goes on to say that “we can self-consiously sharpen our methods once we know this”. Nagel wants to know “what are we supposed to rely on for this knowledge and these revisions?” See Alvin Plantinga, ch 12 of Warrant and Proper Function, 1993 who argues that “it is irrational to accept evolutionary naturalism, because if it were true, we would have no reason to rely on the methods by which we arrive at it or any other scientific theory”.
Nagel thinks that without some independent basis for confidence in reason the evolutionary hypothesis is threatening. “I have to be able to believe that the evolutionary explanation is consistent with the proposition that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct – not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so”. “I can have no justification for trusting a reasoning capacity I have as a consequence of natural selection, unless I am justified in trusting it simply in itself – that is, believing what it tells me, in virtue of the content of the arguments it delivers”. “The recognition of logical arguments as independently valid is a precondition of the acceptability of an evolutionary story about the source of that recognition”.
“The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say.” “One cannot embed all one’s reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory”. “In any process of reasoning or argument, there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside – rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions.”
He concludes then that an evolutionary explanation of rationality is necessarily incomplete. “Even if one believes it, one has to believe in the independent validity of the reasoning that is the result.” He says he’s not denying that our capacity to reason had survival value, and it’s probably been extended/altered/distorted by natural selection – he is “denying only that what rationality is can be understood through the theory of natural selection. What it is, what it tells us, and what its limits are can be understood only from inside it”. He doesn’t have a proper positive response to the question of how we can “integrate such an attitude towards reason with the fact that we are members of a biological species whose evolution has been shaped by the contingencies of natural selection”. “Perhaps the evolution of the universe and of life operates on a much more constrained set of options than our present knowledge of physics would enable us to imagine.” “Second, the physical story, without more, cannot explain the mental story, including consciousness and reason.” “It is possible that rationality – the capacity to recognise objectively valid reasons and arguments – is a distinctively accessible member of the set of biological possibilities, one that becomes likely at sufficiently high levels of biological complexity”. He understates the truth when he says that “the theory of evolution as usually understood provides absolutely no support for this conception of ourselves [“as rational … and also as creatures who have been produced through Darwinian evolution”], and to some extent it renders the conception suspect.”
He thinks that an argument to the contrary would require:
These might reduce the “apparent clash between rationality and natural selection” but they “cannot underwrite our use of reason”. “Whatever justification reason provides must come from the reasons it discovers, themselves.”
“The basic methods of reasoning we employ are not merely human but belong to a more general category of mind” – “those same methods and arguments would have to be among the capacities of any species that had evolved to the level of thinking”.
Unlike with theoretical reason, in ethics and general practical reasoning, “a reductively evolutionary explanation of our deepest dispositions, of what we find self-evident or not in need of further justification, is not directly self-defeating”. Here then, the evolutionary and the rationalist (where we “[rely] on our moral reasoning in itself, in virtue of its content and independently of its biological sources”) are “genuinely competing hypotheses”. Again though, he considers that practical reason “may be among the fundamental biological possibilities on which natural selection operates”. All we can do is see whether “the external view is more convincing than the internal content of practical and moral argument”.
He considers whether race would be “an irrelevant ground for discrimination even if we were intuitively convinced that it was relevant and that it brought the need for further justification to an end”. If we do say that it’s irrelevant nonetheless, and that our answer has more weight and justification than just some biological disposition, then we are adopting a “rationalist conception”, relying on “moral reasoning in itself, in virtue of its content and independently of its biological sources”. Even if there is an “innate, biologically explicable disposition to racism”, it would not “exempt racism from moral criticism”. But might the “tests of impartiality and mutual justifiability” themselves be explained by the evolutionary story? He suspects “that for most people [regarding oneself as a mere biological product] is really inconsistent with what they do”, although “the supposition that there are no objective values seems intelligible in a way that the supposition that there are no facts of any kind is not”.
“If evolutionary naturalism is the whole story about what we take to be practical reasoning, then there really is no such thing”. All “external forms of understanding [e.g. psychological, sociological, economic or political] are themselves examples of thought, and in the end, any understanding we may achieve of the contingency, subjectivity and arbitrariness of our desires, impressions and intuitions (whether or not it is accompanied by acceptance(???)) has to depend on thoughts that are not so qualified”.
“Naturalistic accounts of reasoning” seek an external (e.g. as merely another natural (biological/psychological) phenomenon) “understanding of the world [which] could close over itself by including us and our methods of thought and understanding within its scope”, but “this hope cannot be realised, because the primary position will always be occupied by our employment of reason and understanding … even when we make reasoning the object of our investigation”. “I cannot trust a natural process unless I can see why it is reliable … and to see that I must rely on reason itself”.
“Even if we distance ourselves from some of our thoughts and impulses, and regard them from outside, the process of trying to place ourselves in the world leads eventually to thoughts that we cannot think of as merely ‘ours’. If we think at all, we must think of ourselves, individually and collectively, as submitting to the order of reasons rather than creating it.”
“To acquire a more objective understanding of some aspect of life or the world, we step back from our initial view of it and form a new conception which has that view and its relation to the world as its object”. “We place ourselves in the world that is to be understood.” The old view is “correctable or confirmable by reference to [the new view].” Sometimes this can lead to a false objectification.
“Only the supposition that we and our appearances are parts of a larger reality makes it reasonable to seek understanding by stepping back from the appearances in this way – still not all reality is better understood the more objectively it is viewed.”
“One limit encountered by the pursuit of objectivity appears when it turns back on the self and tries to encompass subjectivity in its conception of the real.”
“There is no way of telling how much of reality lies beyond the reach of present or future objectivity or any other conceivable form of human understanding.” “Objectivity itself leads to the recognition that its own capacities are probably limited, since in us it is a human faculty and we are conspicuously finite beings. The radical form of this recognition is philosophical skepticism, in which the objective standpoint undermines itself by the same procedures it uses to call into question the preflective standpoint of ordinary life in perception, desire and action. Skepticism is radical doubt about the possibility of reaching any kind of knowledge, freedom or ethical truth, given our containment in the world and the impossibility of creating ourselves from scratch.” “In general, I believe that skepticism is revealing and not refutable, but that it does not vitiate the pursuit of objectivity.”
Objective blindness: “a great deal is essentially connected to a particular PoV, or type of PoV, and the attempt to give a complete account of the world in objective terms detached from these perspectives inevitably leads to false reductions or to outright denial that certain patently real phenomena exist at all”, e.g. in philosophy of mind.
Idealism: “what there is and how things are cannot go beyond what we could in principle think about”, cf discredited logical positivism.
Scientism: “a special form of idealism”, which “assumes that everything there is must be understandable by the employment of scientific theories like those we have developed to date – physical and evolutionary biology are current paradigms – as if the present age were not just another in the series”.
Philosophy is after “eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that is not what we are going to get”. He’s proposing “candidates for the truth”. “We must be resigned to achieving [truth] to a very limited extent, and without certainty”.
Historicism: “there is no truth except what is internal to a particular historical standpoint”.
“Recognition of the objective contingency of a language does nothing to diminish its normative reality for those who live in it.”
He sees the attraction of theories like pragmatism which suggest “that the enterprise is misconceived and the problems unreal” as part of the “persistent temptation to turn philosophy into something less difficult and more shallow than it is”. “I do not feel equal to the problems treated in this book. They seem to me to require an order of intelligence wholly different from mine. Others who have tried to address the central questions of philosophy will recognise the feeling.”
Kant aimed for “an understanding from within of the forms and limits of all our possible experience and thought”. Nagel is saying that an objective self-understanding requires even more, “an explanation of the possibility of objective knowledge of the real world which is itself an instance of objective knowledge of that world and our relation to it”.
Darwinian natural selection “explains the selection among those organic possibilities that have been generated, but it does not explain the possibilities themselves”. “The possibility of minds capable of forming progressively more objective conceptions of reality is not something the theory of natural selection can attempt to explain, since it doesn’t explain possibilities at all, but only selection among them.”
He brings up the usual argument that our intellects are more advanced than they need to be, and more advanced than natural selection can account for. “If, per impossibile, we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious skepticism about its results beyond a very limited and familiar range.” He considers our “enormous excess mental capacity” to be unexplainable by natural selection. “It all rests on the assumption that every noteworthy characteristic of human beings, or of any other organism, must have a Darwinian explanation.”
“I don’t have [an alternative], and I don’t need one in order to reject all existing proposals as improbable”. He thinks that any explanation “either of the possibility of objective theorising or of the actual biological development of creatures capable of it” is “antecedently so improbable that the only possible explanation must be that it is in some way necessary”, just as the fundamental properties of the universe are conditions for physical and biological evolution to have happened. We may or may not be able to resolve this.
He recognises the parallels with the anthropic principle in cosmology, stated as “what we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers” (Carter, pg 291). The strong form of this is “the Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage”. He thinks that “even an entirely rigorous prediction based on the strong principle will not be completely satisfying from the physicist’s point of view since the possibility will remain of finding a deeper underlying theory explaining the relationships that have been predicted”.
Neurath: we are like sailors trying to rebuild our ship plank by plank on the high seas, “taking possession of a latent objective realm”. His form of rationalism: “we have the capacity, not based on experience, to generate hypotheses about what in general the world might possibly be like, and to reject those possibilities that we see could not include ourselves and our experiences” and to “reject hypotheses which appear initially to be possibilities but are not”(???). “The basis of most real knowledge must be a priori and drawn from within ourselves.” There is an element of luck in terms of what knowledge and experiences we have, what age we live in, and what possibilities and questions are suggested to us.
“If the possibilities, or at least some of them, are available a priori to any mind of sufficient complexity, and if the general properties of reality are fairly uniform throughout, then the pursuit of objective knowledge can be expected to lead to gradual convergence from different starting points. But this limit of convergence is not the definition of truth, as Peirce suggests: it is a consequence of the relation between reality and the mind, which in turn must be explained in terms of the kind of part of reality the mind is.” This is the rationalist tradition, minus the claim that “reason provides an indubitable foundation for belief”. For instance, “even induction, that staple of empiricism, makes sense only with a rationalist basis. Observed regularities provide reason to believe that they will be repeated only to the extent that they provide evidence of hidden necessary connections, which hold timelessly. It is not a matter of assuming that the contingent future will be like the contingent past.”
We might just not be able to form a complete understanding of the world. “There is no reason to assume that even if we are so organised as to be capable of partly understanding the world, we can also gain access to these facts about ourselves in a way that will fill the blanks in our understanding.” “The hope is to develop a detached perspective that can coexist with and comprehend the individual one.”
We are finite, short-lived and of limited understanding. Reality probably extends beyond what we can conceive of. “The development of richer and more powerful objective hypotheses does nothing to rule out the known and unknown skeptical possibilities which are the other aspect of any realist view”.
There are dangers of ambition: excessive impersonality, false objectification and insoluble conflict between subjective and objective conceptions of the same thing.
We can’t bracket “our ordinary beliefs about the world so that they dovetail neatly with possibility of skepticism.” “A view deserves to be called skeptical if it offers an account of ordinary thoughts which cannot be incorporated into those thoughts without destroying them. One may be a skeptic about x no matter how sincerely one protests that one is not denying the existence of x, but merely explaining what x really amounts to.”
Kant gave reason a humbler role than ‘cognizing the heart of an independent reality’, just ‘knowing an empirical realm that it partly constitutes and shapes’
problems in philosophy may arise from trying to extend our rationality beyond its restricted evolutionarily delimited scope/function
e.g. problems of induction, other minds, the external world and justifying goals
it is not enough to change bias (e.g. from conceptual scheme) – you need to know how it’s distorting in order to correct it
assumption about intellectual principles (e.g. in law) is that true particular judgements are consequences of general principles applied to specific situations
we have no mechanical procedure to decide whether such a principle exists
demarcate scientific laws from accidental generalisations
- predictive/normative
lawlike statements do not contain terms for individual objects (dates, temporal periods etc.), or they can be derived from further, more general lawlike statements)
purely qualitative predicates
unrestricted universality
supported also by a linkage of direct evidence
lawlike statements ® subjunctive inferences (= if there was another case, it would fit this theory)
principles + general theories also provide interpersonal justification
in law, fitting decisions to principles + precedents makes legal consequences more predictable, and constrains the judges’ preferences + prejudices
however, in science, fitting the scientific data usually does not narrow down to just one lawlike statement, so additional criteria are employed tentatively:
simplicity, analogy to lawlike statements in other areas, fit with other accepted theories, explanatory power, theoretical fruitfulness and perhaps ease of computation
ethics may be similarly under-determined too
are there further criteria we can use in ethics?
assessment against a general principle helps weed out irrelevant considerations, and pick out unnoticed factors that are not relevant in related cases
wrongness – individualistic – in this case
aggregative – in these cases, one by one
comparative – when cases that should be decieded the same way are treated differently
maxim of justice – like cases should be decided alike – but which likenesses are the relevant ones?
choosing a film is not a just decision – what demarcates the domain of formal justice?
see Anarchy, State and Utopia – distributive justice, ‘entitlement theory’
(pg 9)
principles have an interpersonal function of reassuring others that one will get past temptations
e.g. in contract law, where a contract binds one person so that another can trust him enough to take action that depends on that first person, and may indeed benefit the first person
principles are also a kind of binding (cf Pinker’s theory that emotions like anger, vengefulness, honour etc. perform a similar binding function)
announcing principles ® reputation effects (especially important for repeated transactions with many people)
surely these are all only reasons for seeming to have principles?
but the most convincing way to seem to have principles is to have them
can one come to have a principle purely because of its useful interpersonal functions?
mustn't he believe that the principle is correct/right?
holding a principle purely as a reassurance for others does not seem stable enough
thus, even a ‘senseless belief’ in one’s principles might be a useful trait to have
similarly, a belief in divine prescriptions and dire punishments would serve as an indicator of reilability
Þ possibility of a sociobiological explanation, not of particular patterns of conduct, but of belief in an objective moral order, or in deontological principles
justice must not only be done but be seen to be done – it may be necessary to follow principles that are less subtle + nuanced but who (mis)applications can be checked by others (Þ public confidence)
it has been considered that women’s moral judgements are more subtle and finely tuned because they have not had to be held to account outside the family arena – there may be changes to the women or the arenas when many more women get involved
principles allow us to predict the probability of others’ behaviour – for the individual, the principles affect not (merely) estimates of the probabilities but the probabilities themselves
this interpersonal function must be based on the personal
principles may define our identity – they give our life coherence
the self as a system of principles? why principles rather than goals? the principles might instead be constraints on her (goal-defined) identity…
(Kantian self-creation and self-legislation)
principles as promises from my future selves to commit to long-term projects
they might serve as a short-cutting exclusionary or filtering device (like a censor???)
principles get us past hurdles, temptations + distractions
we ‘discount’ a future reward according to its distance
innate ‘time preference’ may be a rule of thumb substitute for taking uncertainty into account
in us, this leads to a ‘double discounting’
he considers Ainslie’s time preference graph, analysing whether we should opt for the sooner, smaller reward or not
Nozick argues that the larger, longer-term reward is her stable preference, and the sooner/smaller one is a distraction
could he still argue this though if the total time spent wanting the larger/LT reward was actually the smaller though?
yes, because it represents the maximisation of utility over a lifetime
there are various devices for getting past that period of tepmtation
Odysseus tying himself to the mast
making a bet with another person about it
avoid noticing or dwelling on it
formulating a general principle of behaviour
general principles of behaviour group actions together
the rationality of a belief/action = responsiveness to reasons for + against, and the process by which those reasons are generated
maybe we use reasons to help choose beliefs + actions in terms of truth and satisfying desire
believing for reasons vs believing the truth
what is the connection between reasons and what they are reasons for?
considers two philosophical views on reasons for a belief
the a priori – the faculty of reason apprehends some structural relation between the reason and hypothesis, such that if the reason is true, so will the hypothesis be – he doesn’t seem satisfied by this
the factual view – the reason is evidence for the hypothesis when it stands in a certain contingent factual relationship to it (see Philosophical Explanations re factual relation of reason)
but the factual view leaves out what most strikes the a priori view, that sometimes the reason connection seems (almost) self-evident
combined view – the reason relation is a factual connection that appears, from experience, to be one of support
>1 basis for acting in accordance with a factual connection:
1. action could be pre-wired (evolutionary selection for that automatic fact-action sequence)
2. operant conditioning
3. acting upon reasons involves recognising a connection of structural relations among contents
this recognition may have been evolutionarily selected for
he is not saying that it is the capacity to recognise independently existing valid rational connections that is selected for
rather, there was selection for recognising as valid certain kinds of connections that are factual, and then coming to seem to us as more than just factual
i.e. a specialised inferential mechanism for common past situations that have been selected for, e.g. the process of inductive inference (see Cosmides + Tooby)
= a possible instance of the Baldwin effect
those to whose ‘wiring’ a connection seems closer to evident learn it faster = selective
leads to the problem of induction – because a certain factual connection held in the past, we have evolved to see it as a valid basis for inference, but that it will continue to hold in the future is not guaranteed by its seeming self-evident to us, for that seeming was produced only by its having held in the past
moreover, this indicates that something that seems self-evidently true to us does not guarantee that it ever was strictly true
e.g. Euclidean geometry – selection for Euclidean geometry seeming self-evidently true would have been adaptive, but not strictly ‘true’ of physical space as we have come to understand it
making modern geometry self-evident instead might have involved greater neurological costs (possibly!), but it would not have bestowed any selective advantegae in that environment – [plus, surely our sensory world is a Euclidean one???]
“the apparent self-evidence of a connection’s holding (by virtue of some other manifest structural feature or relation) is no guarantee that it does hold in fact”
he considers that this might undermine deductive rules of inference, logic and all traditional a priori knowledge – but no
evolution instilled not the truth of the principles of logic, but their self-evidence(???)
this position is not open to Quine’s objection that all logical truths cannot owe their truth to convention, since the principles of logic themselves need to be invoked to derive the infinite consequences of the conventions
the principles of logic might be true, even if only contingently, or even just ‘true enough’ (like Euclidean geometry)
Hume’s problem of induction: to find a rational argument for why (inductive) reasoning works
Descartes’ problem: why must self-evident propositions, as seen by the natural light, correspond to reality?
Þ Cartesian circle
ultimately, Descartes grounded his trust in another being
Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ – we cannot show why our reason would conform to objects, so the objects must conform to our knowledge, to the constitution of the faculty of our intuition
(hence our knowledge is not of things in themselves, but only of empirical reality, for that is what is shaped by our constitution)
if reason and the facts are independent variables, why should they be correlated? so he proposed that the (empirical) facts were not an independent variable – their dependence on reason explains the correlation + correspondence between them
but: it could be that it is reason that is the dependent variable, shaped by the facts = the evolutionary hypothesis
“reason tells us about reality, because reality shapes reason, selecting for what seems ‘evident’”
this evolutionary hypothesis cannot guarantee that future facts will continue to fit present reason
moreover, it does not provide a reason-independent justification of reason – it is part of our current/ongoing scientific view, not part of [first???] philosophy
philosophy = the love of reasoning rather than wisdom
will this evolutionary hypothesis undermine the philosopher’s love? Nozick argues that it’s no different from understanding our perceptual organs, but we cannot now distinguish necessary from contingent by means of reason etc. ??? xxx
natural selection works on (2):
1. p being the rational thing to believe
2. believing p being the rational thing to do
enhancement of inclusive fitness yields selection for approximate rather than strict truth
if truth in general underlies the serviceability of a belief, which is what natural selection works on, we can sharpen our goal and procedures, Nozick thinks – especially if evolutionary theorising can direct us towards the subclass of serviceability that truth underlies
evolution may end up selecting for organisms that focus on believing for reasons (a component of reliability) rather than reliability itself – [this solution would certainly be more flexible]
rationality as a biological adaptation with a function
defines function in terms of goal-state of a homeostatic system(???)
the homeostatic mechanism is the designer and its goal is that some other thing X produces effect Z – it is X to which the function is attributed, according to X’s design by the homeostatic mechanism
reasons have double connection: a factual connection that also is structural and self-evident
reasons themselves are evidence for what they are reasons to
function of reasons? believing for reasons is a route to the truth (through their factual connections)
rationality = taking account of (and acting upon) reasons
the function of “believing or acting for reasons” will be some feature/effect this has that some underlying homeostatic mechanism “aims at” its having
\ the function of rationality depends on the homeostatic operating on and shaping us to be rational
would evolution be the homeostatic mechanism? was rationality selected for? it could even have been a by-product
reasoning would be useful to an animal facing and adapting to constantly changing local circumstances
the list of philosophical problems we’ve been least successful with all mark assumptions that evolution has built into us: problem of induction, of other minds, of the external world, of justifying rationality – see his discussion (pg 121)
it was never the function of rationality to justify these assumptions, because all we needed was to utilise them as stabilities
we are unable to establish the rationality of acting on the basis of what is most probable
despite Butler: “probability is the guide to life”
instead of trying to justify we should act on the basis of probability, the Von Neumann-Morgenstern instead defines probabilities in terms of how we should act
Nozick says that we still have no answer to why we should act on the most probable or believe that the most probable will occur
Nozick attacks Kant’s attempt to make principled behaviour the sole ultimate standard of conduct
he says that principles are partial – they are devices formed to function in tandem with already existing (sometimes biologically-instilled) desires, just as humans (and our reason) are limited to fit an ecological niche – “rationality as embedded within a context and playing a role as one component among others, rather than as an external, self-sufficient point that judges everything” (quote???)
thus we cannot rationally justify certain assumptions because our rationality was designed to work in tandem with those facts, performing other functions
the question is not just whether the stable regularities of the past continue to hold in the future, but also whether evolution has picked out the ‘right’ regularities or given us ‘green’ in a ‘grue’ world
the fact that rationality wasn’t designed to justify itself or its framework assumptions does not mean that it can’t
or that we can’t find objections to these biologically-instilled assumptions, e.g. Euclidean geometry
a group of roughly accurate reason relations can shape itself into a more accurate group
a 2nd homeostatic mechanism might be the way that society makes and molds its members into rational agents
each person acts in a web of interacting constraints + incentives
institutions need to recruit, train and provide incentives to new members/functionaries: norms, habits of rationality, modes of choice and belief-formation, in order for the institutions to survive into the next generation – they needn’t be trying to reproduce – those that don’t perform these activities though, do not survive
just as in selfish gene theory, “a chicken is an egg’s way to make another egg”, a significant function of rationality may be to propagate institutions into temporally later stages
he considers that wealthy people have more offspring and can provide for them better, and so a heritable predisposition to desire and strive for wealth would be selected for
parents may have inherited dispositions to reinforce in their children those psychological traits the parent has – if true, this would make the nature-nurture debate even harder to untangle
rationality is self-conscious, in that it attempts to correct biases in information coming to it and in its processes of reasoning
but how wide/restricted is our scope for correcting bias?
different kinds of adaptation fit different tempos of change
sometimes it’s rational to accept something because others in your society do
sometimes it’s rational to be the majority, e.g. Marx unmasking people’s ‘false consciousness’
might some biases themselves be selected for?
talks about local/global societal optima and crossing values – this is what being rational allows us to do
as well as the biological and social mechanisms that shape our acting for reasons, we shape ourselves (using biological and social shaped capacities)
we can bootstrap
“Whatever the initial functions of reasons were, we can use our ability to employ reasons to formulate new properties of reasons and to shape our utilisation of reasons to exhibit these properties. We can, that is, modify and alter the functions of reasons, and hence of rationality.”
is instrumental rationality the whole of rationality?
instrumental rationality = means-end connectoin in causal decision theory(???)
= the efficient + effective achieving of goals
instrumental rationality is incorporated within all broader descriptions of rationality – it does not stand in need of justification
it is the base state of rationality – there is no question that what it demarcates is indeed rationality – but is the whole of rationality?
arguably, one cannot extend instrumental ratioanlity by non-instrumental means
why should we be instrumentally rational?
to best achieve goals/desires – is there any non-circular, non-question-begging answer to why do this?
arguments for instrumental rationality employ cognitive goals – so, at best, the thoroughoing instrumentalist can only convince those who share those goals
the instrumental rationalist may take the goal of satisfying desires to be given
Nozick thinks that there are other forms of rationality besides instrumental, but wants to first show that even the instrumental is subject to the charge of circularity
he sees an interplay between the character of the world and our standards/notion of what counts as rational
pure theory of rationality = theory of what standards are to be adhered to at all times by any/every kind of being in the world
but, if they exist, they would be unlikely to be contentful/helpful (cf Williams???)
our standards were born with impurities however
further interplay between prinicples of decision + reasoning
we can reason about which principles of decision to follow, and we can decide which principles of reasoning to employ
we might strike a balance in choosing our principles of reasoning between reliability and costliness when it does go wrong, or particulary good for particularly valuable types of truths (=decision-theoretic considerations of expected utility, not simply probability)
we want our paving of prinicples of decision/reasoning to converge on rational self-correction
rationality (like principles) can come to be a part and extension of ourselves
rationality can be a means of understanding, or even a defining component of it
a rational decision will maximise an action’s decision-value (= a weighted sum of its causal, evidential and symbolic utility)
but instrumental rationalty = just causally expected utility, so there must be more to rationality than instrumentality
2 stage theory of rational belief:
eliminates as candidates for belief statements whose credibility value is less than that of competing statements
deciding whether to believe a statement when there are no more credible alternatives is not instrumental – instead, the decision value is being assessed
can we instrumentalise this, though? I think he says that we can, with a broader notion of instrumentality(???)
can the credibility value be instrumentalised in terms of cognitive goals? that depends on how good the feedback learning rule is
Nozick tries to combat the Humean picture of desires as given, e.g. principles allow us to control and reshape desires, though cannot function as Kant wanted them to, entirely in isolation from desire
(pg 139)
discussions of symbolic utility???
there remains the question of priority among legitimate modes of rationality (including the evidential and symbolic) beyond the instrumental
how do we evaluate the (cognitive) goals of instrumental rationality itself?
one tiny step beyond Hume Þ something similar to the Von Neumann/Morgenstern conditions
e.g. transitivity of preferences, and that we prefer the consequence with the higher probability over an identical one
he considers preferences for:
the means and preconditions to satisfying rationality conditions C
the 3rd order preference not to have a 2nd order preference conflict with first order one (e.g. preferring x to y but wishing I didn't)
Hume claims that all preferences are equally rational – Nozick is showing that there are some rationally desirable structural preferences
preference = a disposition to choose one thing over the other (given certain preconditions, e.g. beign alive, having knowledge + freedom to make the chioce)
unlike arbitrary first order preferences, second order preferences require reasons behind them (where a reason = a preference that functions like a reason, being general though defeasible)
so do first order ones, when the person is unwilling to shift them
the desires and preferences must be in equilibrium, i.e. they can withstand a knowledge of their causes
the person does not have (rational) desires they know are impossible to fulfil
preferences get filtered to become desires, and must pass feasibility tests (and consistency), since they will feed into a decision process
goals are different again – they are used in choice situations to filter out actions that don't serve the goals (well enough)
goals generate actions, and they help assess outcomes
do goals arise out of a matrix of preferences, desires and beliefs about probabilities etc.?
or as actions with probability distribution over outcomes Þ expected utility framework?
but the difference between a goal and a not-quite-goal is very large
goals need to be stable and have a feasible route
Theoretical rationality, the rationality of the beliefs you adopt, contrasts with practical rationality, the rationality of the choices you subsequently make
There may be different desiderata on modes of thought, even given a consequentialist approach to reason – besides looking for truth (reliabilism), you may also want to focus on significant propositions that can be arrived frugally (quickly, inexpensively). There may be other desiderata, and even different desiderata for different people, although they will be irrelevant to knowledge/justified belief.
Darwin and Wallace disagreed over whether the mind had evolved – Wallace was a creationist about intelligence because he thought that our superior level of intelligence is redundant, and could not have evolved in response to the needs of a foraging lifestyle – the savage languages “contain no words for abstract conceptions; the utter want of foresight of the savage man beyond his simplest necessities; his inability to combine, or to compare, or to reason on any general subject that does not immediately appeal to his senses” (Wallace).
Gould sees Wallace as “an extreme adaptationist who ignores the possibility of exaptations: adaptive structures that are “fortuitously suited to other roles if elaborated” (such as jaw bones becoming middle-ear bones) and “features that arise without functions … but remain available for later co-optation” (such as the panda’s thumb, which is really a jury-rigged wristbone)”. Pinker argues that Wallace’s errors did not result from his extreme adaptationism, but because he was short-sighted and misinformed about forager linguistic and cognitive abilities and the intellectual requirements of their lifestyle, and the links with modern ‘abstract rationality’ and intellectual pursuits like chess and calculus.
We are all (innately) intuitive physicists, biologists, engineers, mathematicians and psychologists. “Children insist that a piece of styrofoam weighs nothing and that people know the outcome of events they did not witness or hear about. They grow into adults who think that a ball flying out of a spiral tube will continue in a spiral path and that a string of heads makes a coin more likely to land tails” (see Stich).
There are “discrepancies between how we naturally think and what is demanded in the academy”, for two reasons:
1. Natural selection has “no qualms about building parochial inference models that exploit eons-old regularities in their own subject matters”, e.g. “recognising objects, making tools, learning the local lang, finding a mate, predicting an animal’s movement, finding their way” – the “subject-specific intelligence of our species” that Tooby and Cosmides call “ecological rationality”.
“A ground rule when you solve a problem at school is to base your reasoning on the premises mentioned in the question, ignoring everything else you know.” We have since developed “methods of inference that are widely applicable and can be disseminated by writing and formal instruction. These methods literally have no content”, e.g. logic, long division or statistics. In the case of geometry, we feign ignorance and refuse to use rulers and protactors in order to “inculcate a method that later can be used to calculate the unmeasurable, such as the distance to the moon”. “But outside school, of course, it never makes sense to ignore what you know”, hence the Kpelle’s obtuseness about whether or not Yakpalo is drinking cane juice given the syllogism. “No organism [in the wild] needs content-free algorithms applicable to any problem no matter how esoteric”.
2. We did not evolve into true scientists because of the cost of knowledge. “In a large society with writing and institutionalised science, the cost of an exponential number of tests is repaid by the benefit of the resulting laws to a large number of people, … but for the provincial interests of a single individual or even a small band, good science isn’t worth the trouble”.
3. “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not”.
We also rely on experts, since we cannot and need not know everything ourselves that our community has knowledge of. This gives rise to charlatan shamans and the like.
“Brown looked at twenty-five civilisations and compared the ones organised by hereditary castes with the others. None of the caste societies had developed a tradition of writing accurate depictions of the past; instead of history they had myth and legend. The caste societies were also distinguished by an absence of political science, social science, natural science, biography, realistic portraiture and uniform education”.
“Good science is pedantic, expensive and subversive. It was an unlikely selection pressure within illiterate forging bands like our ancestors’, and we should expect people’s native “scientific” abilities to differ from the genuine article.”
Why do we have the urge to classify and categorise?
1. Memory cannot hold all the events that bombard our senses. Pinker argues though that the brain, with its trillion synapses, hardly seems short of storage space for our “paltry” 2 billion second lives. Moreover, the categories often add to our memory load. Both these seem like rather facile responses to me. Might the categories be like templates or frames, from which individual members are derived???
2. The brain is compelled to organise, otherwise mental life would be chaos. But organisation for its own sake is useless, e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorders, Jorge Luis Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia classification of animals.
3. Pinker argues that the real reason for categorisation is inference-making. If we categorise an object, we are able to make predictions about it on the basis of other members of that category. “The smaller the category, the better the prediction”. But it requires more knowledge to tag objects into precise categories. Most of our everyday categories “represent a compromise between how hard it is to identify the category and how much good the category does you” – what Eleanor Rosch called “basic-level categories”. “They are the first words children learn for objects and generally the first mental lable we assign when seeing them”, e.g. car, chair, rabbit.
Categories are not “arbitrary conventions that we learn along with the other cultural accidents standardised in our language”. Rather, “mental boxes work because things come in clusters that fit the boxes”. This is because “the world is sculpted and sorted by laws that science and mathematics aim to discover”.
He argues people form two kinds of categories: those with stereotypes, fuzzy boundaries and family-like resemblances; and those with definitions, in-or-out boundaries and common threads running through their members. The fuzzy categories correlate clusters, and the well-defined categories “work by ferreting out the laws that put the clusters there”.
“Some categories are definable, but others really are fuzzy.” He considers the difficulties of taxonomising branches in the tree of life. Pristine categories often dissolve under scrutiny too – but Pinker argues that we should see systems of rules as “idealisations that abstract away from complicating aspects of reality”. He considers for example that although the omnibus concept of ‘mother’ may be variously ambiguous, it is still precisely defined within any given domain, idealising “away from the messiness of the world and [laying] bare its underlying forces”.
Racism may be partly a symptom of this tendency to form stereotypes, “an overeagerness to form categories” and an “insensitivity to the laws of statistics that would show the stereotypes to be false”?
“There are many ways to explain an event, and some are better than others”. The mind may be equipped with “innate intuitive theories or modules for the major ways of making sense of the world”, for “objects and forces, for animate beings, for artifacts, for minds and for natural kinds like animals, plants and minerals”. He argues that “a more realistic inventory would include modes of thought and feeling for danger, contamination, status, dominance, fairness, love, friendship, sexuality, children, relatives and the self”. “Saying that the different ways of knowing is different from saying that knowledge is innate”. Learning “requires couching the records of experience so that they generalise in useful ways”, finding a vocabulary or conceptual framework for the domain.
What mechanisms do babies have for making sense of their world? For 3-month old babies (Kelman & Spelke), as for adults, an object is defined first and foremost by common motion, as well as in terms of a smooth silhouette and homogenous colour and texture – shown by gaze length for two aligned occluded objects (either stationary or moving in tandem). Baillargeon and Spelke have shown that infants don’t expect objects to pass through other objects like ghosts. They expect objects to move in continuous trajectories, that objects are cohesive and that objects move each other by contact alone. Moreover, three-month-olds can barely orient, see, touch and react, let alone manipulate, walk, talk and understand enough for the standard learning techniques of interaction, feedback and language. However, they have a poor grasp of gravity and inertia.
McCloskey, Caramazza and Green asked college students what would happen when a ball was shot out of a curved tube. A large minority, including some physicists, guessed wrongly that it would continue in a curving path (Newton’s first law that a moving object continues to move in a straight line unless a force acts on it vs the medieval theory that an object is impressed with an ‘impetus’ that maintains the object’s motion and gradually dissipates). However, when people view the ball spiralling out of the tube as a computer animation, they burst out laughing. The cognitive misconceptions run deep – the linguist Talmy argues that impetus theory infuses our language, and that the conceptions drive the language, not the other way round. Proffitt & Gilden have showed that even physics professors get simple questions wrong about spinning tops, wheels rolling down ramps, colliding balls and liquid volume displacements – indeed some possible events look unnatural, likes spinning tops. That the mind is non-Newtonian makes sense, since the real world masks the idealised motions of classical mechanics with friction from the air, ground and the object’s own molecules, hence our tendency to conceive of objects as having an inherent tendency towards rest. Weird and complicated motions like spinning tops and rolling wheels depend on evolutionarily unprecedented machines with negligible friction with multi-variable complex equations – apparently our perceptual system can handle only one at a time at best.
Heider and Simmel’s animation with dots led them to conclude that people interpret certain motions and objects in terms of animate (usually goal-orientated) agents, able to violate intuitive physics by initiating movement, especially when they persistently approach or avoid some other object.
Besides agenthood, there are three other major ways of knowing: categories given by nature (animals/plants/minerals), artifacts (cars etc.) and theory of mind (things that act out of beliefs and desires).
“People everywhere are fine amateur (‘folk’) biologists” – “they enjoy looking at animals and plants, classify them into groups that biologists recognise, predict their movements and life cycles and use their juices as medicines, poisons, food additives and recreational drugs”. Natural kinds (like animals) are defined in terms of some sort of hidden essence – folk taxonomies all over the world follow the Linnaeaan tree (Berlin & Atran) “guided by a sense of proper categories based not on similarity but on underlying constitution”. In contrast, artifacts are defined in terms perhaps of function (or in the case of videotapes, there is no single correct classification). Evolution explains this hierarchical grouping of living things, but shows that species’ essences can change/evolve over time, and that species are populations, not ideal types. As children get older, they become more essentialist about natural kinds. Children have a crude sense of inheritance from early on, and can use their categories to reason about how unknown animals work – this approach appears to arise in us without experience or direct teaching from parents.
“Artifacts come with being human.” “One-year-old babies tinker obsessively with sticks for pushing, cloth and strings for pulling and supports for holding things up.” By eighteen months, “children show an understanding that tools have to contact their material and that a tool’s rigidity and shapre are more important than its colour or ornamentation.” “Some patients with brain damage cannot name natural objects but can name artifacts, or vice versa”. An artifact is an object suitable and intended for attaining an end – they’re defined in terms of intended function – we take the ‘design stance’ towards them (Dennett), and “so are subject to interpretation and criticism just as if they were works of art” (“artifact hermeneutics”).
We explain other people’s behaviour in terms of beliefs and desires. Mental states = ‘a relation between a person and a proposition’. “Two-month-olds stare at eyes; six-month-olds know when they’re staring back; one-year-olds look at what a parent is staring at, and check a parent’s eyes when they are uncertain why the parent is doing something; between eighteen and twenty-four months children begin to separate the contents of other people’s minds from their own beliefs.” “Two-year-olds use mental verbs like see and want, and three-year-olds use verbs like think, know and remember.” By four, children can pass the false belief test – the age-based results are the same in every country in which children have been tested. Autism affects 1/1000 children, and may be related to a lack of theory of mind. It occurs in every country and social class, lasts a lifetime (though sometimes with improvement)” and “almost certainly has neurological and genetic causes”. Baron-Cohen, Frith and Leslie have shown that autistic children can pass a test that is logically the same as the false-belief task but not about minds (about the contents a polaroid photo taken of a bathtub from which Rubber Ducky has been removed, then returned to). Buckminster Fuller once wrote: “Everything you’ve learned … as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”
“Logic, in the technical sense, refers not to rationality in general, but to inferring the truth of one statement from the truth of other statements based only on their form, not their content”. “It is hard to imagine a species discovering logic if its brain did not give it a feeling of certitude when it found a logical truth. … With enough time and patience, we discover why our own logical errors are erroneous. We comes to agree with one another on which truths are necessary. And we teach others … socratically, by causing the pupils to recognise truths by their own standards.” All languages have logical terms like not, and, same etc. Children use and, not and if before they’re three. But logical words in natural language are ambiguous, often depending on context. Because “any true statement can spawn an infinite number of true but useless new ones”, “even the best logical inferencer has to guess which implications to explore and which are likely to be blind alleys”. This “guessing can’t itself come from logic; generally it comes from assuming that the speaker is a cooperative conversational partner conveying relevant information”. Moreover, mental logic is enmeshed with our system of knowledge about the world, and some domains may have their own inference rules that may interfere.
“Wason wanted to see how ordinary people do at falsifying hypotheses. He told them that a set of cards had letters on one side and numbers on the other, and asked them to test the rule ‘If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other’, a simple P-implies-Q statement. The subjects were shown four cards and were asked which ones they would have to turn over to see if the rule was true.”
D F 3 7
“Most people choose either the D card or the D card and the 3 card. The correct answer is D and 7. ‘P implies Q’ is false only if P is true and Q is false.” Only about 5-10% get it right. It’s not because people assume it’s an ‘iff’ statement, otherwise they’d turn over all the cards. People seemd to be “confirming their prejudices rather than seeking evidence that could falsify them”.
Sometimes though, rephrasing the experiment with real-world events helps, e.g. being a bouncer checking for under-age drinking – but only when the rule is a contract, an exchange of benefits. When faced with logically identical problems that instantiate mere cause and effect, e.g. beer and chili eating, people don’t use the cheater-detecting rules, and make mistakes – often different to choosing the equivalent (wrong) card to turn over. The same story can draw out both logical or non-logical choices, e.g. the employee pension question, depending on whether the subject takes the employer’s or the employee’s point of view. These basic findings have been replicated among the Shiwiar, a foraging people in Ecuador. Trivers predicted that humans, “the most conspicuous altruists in the animal kingdom, should have evolved a hypertrophied cheater-detector algorithm”, which Cosmides seems to have found. So the mind is only sometimes logical in the logician’s sense, but definitely well-designed in the biologist’s sense. Our use of logical rules can spin off trivial truths and miss consequential ones, and incorporates “the processes of language understanding, mixed with world knowledge, and supplemented or superseded by special inference rules appropriate to the content.
“One-week-old babies perk up when a scene changes from two to three items or vice versa.” By eighteen months “children can be taught to choose the picture with fewer dots”. The ability to count may not depend on language. Human adults use several mental representations of quantity – analogue, quantities – for measurement, counting and arithmetic. “All cultures have words for numbers, though sometimes only ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘many’ ... – the concept of number has nothing to do with the size of a number vocabulary.”
Mathematician Sanders Mac Lane “speculated that basic human activities were the inspiration for every branch of mathematics”:
counting ® arithmetic
measuring ® real numbers, calculus, analysis
shaping ® geometry, topology
forming ® (as in architecture) symmetry, group theory
estimating ® probability, measure theory, statistics
moving ® mechanics, calculus, dynamics
calculating ® algebra, numerical analysis
proving ® logic
puzzling ® combinatorics, number theory
grouping ® set theory, combinatorics
But we may not be biologically designed for (and it would be surprising if we were) large number words, large sets, the base-10 system, fractions, multicolumn addition, carrying, multiplication/division, radicals and exponents. These skills develop slowly and unevenly, perhaps by applying the sense of number to things that at first feel like the wrong kind of subject matter, and by practicing (chunking and automaticity – fitting together over-learned routines). Teaching can’t rely on constructivism, so much as doing things repeatedly in different ways, in a culture which values mathematical skills. Similarly, in reading, “the insight that language is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into the evolutionarily improbable claim that reading is a naturally developing human instinct”.
“It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future” (allegedly Yogi Berra). Whenever there’s any regularity, it’s better to make decisions informed by the past than at random, so we would expect humans to have evolved acute intuitions about probability. Yet Tversky and Kahneman’s “ingenious demonstrations of how people’s intuitive grasp of chance appears to flout the elementary canons of probability theory”:
Tversky, Kahneman, Gould, Piattelli-Palmarini and others have concluded that “the mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rules the universe”. The brain appears to employ crude rules of thumb, rather than theorems (Pinker puts this down to the brain’s limited processing capability, in contrast to his earlier point about its storage), e.g.:
1. the more memorable an event, the more likely it is to happen (e.g. plane crashes)
2. the more an individual resembles a stereotype, the more likely he is to belong to that category (e.g. Linda)
Pinker argues though that some of the risky choices listed above, e.g. gamblers, plane phobics and chemical avoiders, can be explained to some extent, e.g. the anticipatory thrill of the possibility of a big win. Gigerenzer has noted that even when judgements of probability depart from the truth, they may not be being irrational. For example, our visual system’s colour constancy mechanism can be fooled because it makes assumptions to be efficient, but that doesn’t mean it’s not well-designed. For instance, you’re not committing the gambler’s fallacy when you expect that the hundredth railroad car on a passing train portends the caboose with greater likelihood than the third car, i.e. a hazard function (a changing probability over time). One of the (rare) exceptions to this sensible time-series analysis is the gambling machine, designed to “foil an observer who likes to turn patterns into predictions”. Probability can mean “relative frequency in the long run” or “subjective confidence about the outcome of a single event”. It may be that the mind isn’t designed for single-event probability calculations. When the problems were re-stated in frequency terms, 92% of people behave like good statisticians. “The same is true for other judgments under uncertainty, such as guilt in a criminal trial”. The notion of relative frequency is problematic though, because in order to calculate the relative frequency of an event, what relative frequency do you use, since any event belongs to an infinite number of classes of events, each perhaps with different probabilities, e.g. during the OJ Simpson trial, Dershowitz said that “among men who batter their wives, only 0.1% go on to murder them”, but in Nature, “a statistician then pointed out that among men who batter their wives and whose wives are then murdered by someone, more than half are the murderers”. Other mathematicians say that single-event probabilities are ‘utter nonsense’, or at least not mathematical statements that admit precise truth or falsity. Perhaps people employ a non-mathematical definition of probability, ‘degree of belief warranted by the information just presented’, e.g. probable cause, weight of evidence and reasonable doubt. Lastly, the world is not completely stable, so the “person who avoids letting his child play in a river with no previous fatalities after hearing that a neighbour’s child was attacked there by a crocodile that morning’ might well be being rational. So, yes, people do reason fallaciously, but “a species that had no instinct for probability could not learn the subject, let alone invent it. And when people are given information in a format that meshes with the way they naturally think about probability, they can be remarkable accurate”.
Thus, although the human mind “is not equipped with an evolutionarily frivolous faculty for doing Western science, maths, chess” etc., “it is equipped with facluties to master the local environment and outwit its denizens”. “People form concepts that find the clumps in the correlational texture of the world”.
Ray Jackendoff considers the following sentences as using space and motion as a metaphor for more abstract ideas:
The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul
The inheritance finally went to Fred
The light went from green to red
The meeting went from 3:00 to 4:00
We are not merely co-opting words, but co-opting their “inferential machinery”. “Some deductions that apply to motion and space also apply nicely to possession, circumstances and time”. He also considers that the double-object construction, used for expressing ‘giving’, has been co-opted for communication – “the speaker is the sender, the audience is the recipient”. The other fundamental set of metaphors in language is force, agency and causation (c.f. the ‘impetus theory’ underlying people’s intuitive theory of physics). These concepts and relations of space and force “appear to be the vocabulary and syntax of mentalese, the [combinatorial] language of thought”. He speculates whether if “ancestral circuits for reasoning about space and force were copied, the copy’s connections to the eyes and muscles were severed and references to the physical world were bleached out”, “the circuits could serve as a scaffolding whose slots are filled with symbols for more abstract concerns like states, possessions, ideas and desires”. As evidence, he considers Premack’s experiments on chimps which showed that they could pick out the object which plays a causal role linking before-and-after pictures. Also, “space and force metaphors have been reinvented time and again in dozens of language families across the globe”. “Preschool children spontaneously coin their own metaphors in which space and motion symbolise possession, communication, time and causation” (Bowerman), e.g. ‘Can I have any reading behind the dinner?’. Space and force aren’t really metaphors at all – they’re so basic to language that we can’t really talk about possession, circumstance and time without using words like going, keeping and being at, and there’s no sense of incongruity like literary metaphors. Lakoff and Johnsons’s list of ‘metaphors we live by’ include ‘argument is war’, ‘virtue is up’, ‘love is a patient/force/madness/magic/war’ and ‘ideas are food/buildings/people/plants’ etc.
Thus our minds aren’t really adapted to think about arbitrary abstract entities, so much as having inherited “a pad of forms that capture the key features of encounters among objects and forces, and the features of other consequential themes of the human condition such as fighting, food and health”. We can adapt these inherited forms to more abstruse domains. Children say that if you divide a piece of steel often enough it becomes so small that it “no longer takes up space or has any steel inside it”, and that a grain of rice weighs nothing. Smith and Carey argue that it is only by merging our intuitions about objects with our intuitions about number that we have a more sophisticated understanding.
He considers genius. He quotes Woody Allen’s ‘If the Impressionists had been dentists’. He argues that “geniuses are wonks”, immerse themselves in their work, tweak, and are either discriminating or lucky in their choice of problems – plus being genetically lucky. “The genius creates good ideas because we all create good ideas; that is what our combinatorial, adapted minds are for”.
mental states = “a relation between a person and a proposition”, e.g. “X believes-that P” (pg 329)
he suggests that language might have evolved out of mechanisms for understanding the phsyics of our world, hence the building block grammatical notions of place and projectile/cause and time/sapce and motion/force (pg 353)
indeed the neural circuitry could be imagined to be copied, severed from the senses, to make room for a host of ready-made abstract symbols (prefabricated and unfurnished)
again, it’s a procedural notion of language, but with a clearer idea of what sort of procedures and some definite bridges between grammar and more ancient thought processes
xxx
Naturalised epistemology is the attempt to “reduce intentional/mentalistic notions to materialistic ones”, attacking the “quest for certainty” and the “traditional enterprises of epistemology”, e.g. the theory of knowledge of how a belief is justified or rationally acceptable.
“Reason is a capacity we have for discovering truths. Such a capacity has survival value; it evolved in just the way that any of our physical organs or capacities evolved. A belief is rational if it is arrived at by the exercise of this capacity.” Putnam thinks that “a metaphysically ‘realist’ notion of truth … as correspondence to the facts” is incoherent.
“Is it true that brown objects exist? Yes, relative to a common-sense version of the world: although one cannot give a necessary and sufficient condition for an object to be brown, in the form of a finite closed formula in the language of physics.”
“I chose brown because brown is not a spectral colour. But the point also applies to spectral colours: if being a colour were purely a matter of reflecting light of a certain wavelength, then the objects we see would change colour a number of times a day (and would all be black in total darkness). Colour depends on background conditions, edge effects, reflectancy, relation to amount of light etc. Giving a description of all of these would only define perceived colour; to define the ‘real’ colour of an object, one also needs a notion of ‘standard conditions’: traditional philosophers would have said that the colour of a red object is a power (a disposition) to look red to normal observers under normal conditions. This, however, requires a counterfactual conditional (whenever the object is not in normal conditions) and we saw in the previous chapter that the attempt to define counterfactuals in ‘physical’ terms has failed. What makes colour terms physically undefinable is not that colour is subjective but that it is subjunctive. The common idea that there is some one molecular structure (or whatever) common to all objects which look red ‘under normal conditions’ has no foundation: consider the difference between the physical structure of a red star and a red book (and the difference in what we count as ‘normal conditions’ in the two cases).”
“We have many irreducibly different but legitimate ways of talking, and true ‘existence’ statements in all of them.” The only sense in which we have a “vital and working notion” of truth is “rational acceptability” “under sufficiently good epistemic conditions”, and those epistemic conditions are themselves relative to the type of discourse in just the way rational acceptability is. But “reason is a capacity for discovering truths” Þ “reason is a capacity for accepting what is (or would be) rationally acceptable”. So the evolutionary epistemologist must presuppose a ‘realist’ notion of truth or “see his formula collapse into vacuity”. Indeed, Frith has argued that any characterisation of reason as a “capacity for discovering truths” will always collapse into a kind of “epistemic vacuity” since we have no way of identifying truths except by reference to what we find rationally acceptable.
The evolutionary epistemologist cannot be rescued by redefining reason as a capacity for arriving at beliefs that increase inclusive fitness (in this case, the cockroach’s proto-beliefs would have a higher claim to rationality), since Putnam reckons that science has mixed effects on inclusive fitness, e.g. nuclear war. He contends that, in reality, we can have rationality without survival value and vice versa.
There aren’t distinct, modular capacities in the brain. “A sharp line at one level does not usually correspond to a sharp line at a lower level.” Saying that reason is a capacity is taken to be informative, when in fact it tells us nothing useful. He doesn’t deny that we need brains in order to reason, and those brains are the product of evolution, but this doesn’t “answer any of the philosophical questions”.
Goldman's (1978) approach is based on reliable methods rather than beliefs, on the basis of the proportion of the beliefs it yields that are true over the long run. A rational belief is one which is 'arrived at by using a reliable method'. It too presupposes a metaphysical notion of truth (though it needn't - it could be fitness- rather than truth-linked). Putnam thinks that reliabilists forget that "rational acceptability does the lion's share of the work in fixing the notion of 'truth', the reliabilist only pretends to be giving an analysis of rationality in terms that do not presuppose it. The second objection to evolutionary epistemology, relating to the vagueness of the notion of 'capacity', is replaced by the notion of a class of high truth-yielding methods. Putnam thinks though that 'learning' is not reliable enough to count as rationally acceptable on this theory. "No hypothesis is made as to whether the reliable methods we employ are the result of biological evolution, cultural evolution or what: this is regarded as no part of the theory of what rationality *is*, in this account."
He cites what he considers to be a counterexample – say that the Dalai Lama is in fact infallible – anyone who follows him will be following a method that is 100% reliable – thus, such a person would be considered rational, “even if his argument for his belief that the Dalai Lama is never wrong is, ‘the Dalai Lama says so’”.
“Truth and rational acceptability (a claim’s being right and someone’s being in a position to make it) are relative to the sort of language we are using and the context we are in”. “Talk of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ only makes sense against the background of an inherited tradition [immanent], but traditions themselves can be criticised [transcendent].” We need to remember reason’s immanent and transcendent aspects to avoid indulging in either philosophical fantasies (e.g. the ‘ideal language’ or ‘inductive logic’) or cultural/historical relativism.
He counts Rorty among the cultural relativists, because “he identifies truth with right assertibility by the standards of one’s peers”, and Foucault “because his insistence on the determination of beliefs by language is so overwhelming that it is an incoherence on his part not to apply his doctrine to his own language and thought”. He regards cultural relativists as ‘naturalised epistemologists’ even though their paradigm of science is not physicalistic ‘hard’ science, but ‘soft’ science (like anthropology, linguistics, psychology or history). Saying that “reason is whatever the norms of the local culture determine it to be” is still “deference to the claims of nature, the same desire for harmony with the world version of some [social/soft] science”. Cultural relativism is dangerous because it amounts to a denial of thinking, even a denial that the deep questions of philosophy are deep at all. “But the questions are deep, and it is the easy answers that are silly.”
He wants to give a (further) “somewhat messy, somewhat ‘intuitive’ reason” why cultural relativism is inconsistent, in analogy with an argument against ‘methodological solipsism’ (“who holds that all our talk can be reduced to talk about experiences and logical constructions out of experiences” – solipsism – but “that he kindly adds that you, dear reader, are the ‘I’ of this construction when you perform it: he says everybody is a (methodological) solpsist”). But while “his solipsist stance implies an enormous asymmetry between persons: my body is a construction out of my experiences, in the system, but your body isn’t a construction out of your experiences. It’s a construction of my experiences. And your experiences – viewed from within the system – are a construction out of your bodily behaviour, which, as just said, is a construction out of my experiences. My experiences are different from everyone else’s (within the system) in that they are what everything is constructed from. But his transcendental stance is that it’s all symmetrical: the ‘you’ he addresses his higher-order remark to cannot be the empirical ‘you’ of the system. But if it’s really true that the ‘you’ of the system is the only ‘you’ he can understand, then the transcendental remark is unintelligible. Moral: don’t be a methodological solipsist unless you are a real solipsist!”.
Similarly, if a cultural relativist says “When I say something is true, I mean that it is correct according to the norms of my culture … When a member of a different culture says that something is true, what he means (whether he knows it or not) is that it is in conformity with the norms of his culture”. Thus a cultural relativist would say:
“When Karl says ‘Schnee ist weiss’, what he means (whether he knows it or not) is that it is true as determined by the norms of American culture that it is true as determined by the norms of German culture that snow is white.”
Basically, “if R.R. understands every utterance p that he uses as meaning ‘it is true by the norms of American culture that p’, then he must understand his own hermeneutical utterances, the utterances he uses to interpret others, the same way” – ultimately then for the cultural relativist, when he qualifies the utterances of a person from another culture, he has to ultimately qualify those qualifications as being from the perspective of his own culture. “Other cultures become, so to speak, logical constructions out of the procedures and practices of American culture”. Saying that “the other culture has ‘incommensurable’ concepts” is “just the transcendental claim in a special jargon.” You can’t acknowledge others symmetrically if you “think that the only notion of truth there is for you to understand is ‘truth-as-determined-by-the-norms-of-this-culture’”. This discussion of relativism with respect to truth applies to rational acceptability, justification etc. – though they usually all go hand in relativist hand.
Cultural imperialism (like real solipsism) says that “the only notion of truth I understand … is defined by the norms of my culture”. This postulates an objective notion of truth, and like consistent solipsism, becomes indistinguishable from realism. It is realist in that “it accepts an objective difference between what is true and what is merely thought to be true”, but it is not a metaphysical/transcendental realism “in that truth cannot go beyond right assertibility”.
However, only totalitarian or theocratic cultures have ‘norms’ which decide philosophical questions. So the doctrine that “a statement is true (rightly assertible) only if it is assertible according to the norms of modern European and American culture”, say, “is itself neither assertible nor refutable in a way that requires assent by everyone who does not deviate from the norms of modern European/American culture”. It is self-refuting because “if this statement is true, it follows that it is not true (not rightly assertible)”.
The job of philosophy (according to Cavell, for example) is to interpret and criticise cultural norms, and bring them and the ideals which inform them into reflective equilibrium. “It is true that we speak a public language, that we inherit versions, that talk of truth and falsity only make sense against the background of an ‘inherited tradition’, … but it is also true that we constantly remake our language, we make new versions out of old ones, and that we have to use reason to do all this, and … even to understand and apply the norms we do not alter or criticise”. “Consensus definitions of reason do not work, because consensus among grown-ups presupposes reason rather than defining it.”
Quine’s positivist philosophy turns on the notion of an observation sentence.
He moved from a phenomenalistic interpretation to a definition in neurological and cultural terms. Preliminary definition: “the stimulus meaning of a sentence is defined to be the set of stimulations (of ‘surface neurons’) that would ‘prompt assent’ to the sentence”. “It is thus supposed to be a neurological correlate of the sentence.”
I don’t see where Putnam’s definition fits in with Quine’s original article – ah, this is the 1975 article, not ‘Epistemology naturalised’. Quine defines an observation sentence as being keyed to a stimulation (inter-subjectively according to speakers of a common language) – a sentence which can be verified empirically on its own, rather than only in a group with a pile of other sentences. Mach held that talk of unobservables and introducing ‘objects’ is justified only for reasons of economy of thought.
Quine (1975)’s criteria for just one ‘system of the world’: “
1. it must predict a certain number of stimulus-true observation sentences
2. it must be finitely axiomatised
3. it must contain nothing unnecessary to the purpose of predicting stimulus-true observation sentences and conditionals
Putnam suggests a two-order understanding of Quine’s bivalence, which is not inconsistent like the methodological solipsist – it’s equivalent to the methodological solipsist withdrawing his claim that his first-order system reconstructed the only way he could understand the notion of another mind, which would be philosophically uninteresting. He says that one understanding of the statement of right assertibility is self-refuting. “Positivism produced a conception of rationality so narrow as to exclude the very activity of producing that notion.”
‘Justification’ (in the Cartesian setting) has failed. But Putnam implies that we already knew this, since “Hume taught us that we can’t justify our knowledge claims (in a foundational way)”. Conceptual reduction has also failed. So, Quine urges, let us give up epistemology and ‘settle for psychology’.
At face value, he’s saying we should “just abandon the notions of justification, good reason, warranted assertion etc. and reconstrue the notion of ‘evidence’ (so that the ‘evidence’ becomes the sensory stimulations that cause us to have the scientific beliefs we have)”. But apparently he didn’t mean to “rule out the normative”(???). And the paper seems to rule out the sort of naturalised epistemology that various philosophers consider themselves to be doing.
Putnam considers “replacing justification theory by reliability theory in the sense of Goldman; instead of saying that a belief is justified if it is arrived at by a reliable method, one might say that the notion of justification should be replaced by the notion of a verdict’s being the product of a reliable method”.
But Quine rejects metaphysical realism which reliabilism presupposes. Instead, Putnam thinks that Quine adopts a Tarskian notion of truth, where ‘p is true’ becomes just ‘p’. “Whatever we affirm, after all, we affirm as a statement within our aggregate theory of nature as we now see it; and to call a statement true is just to reaffirm it” (Quine, 1975, pg 327).
Thus the ‘normative’ becomes “the search for methods that yield verdicts that one oneself would accept”.
“Why not eliminate the normative from our conceptual vocabulary? Could it be a superstition that there is such a thing as reason?” If you abandon justification, rational acceptability etc., then ‘true’ goes as well, except as a “mere mechanism for switching from one level of language to another” (‘semantic ascent’). Eliminating all epistemic and metaphysically realist notions of rightness is “attempted mental suicide” – “what are our statements but noise-makings?” Relying on a criterion for assertibility of ‘method that leads to verdicts I accept’ leads to solipsism. One of our fundamental ‘self-descriptions’ (Rorty) is that we are thinkers, which requires truth and correctness, which means no eliminating the normative, and no reducing it to science. “A grand theory of the normative in its own terms”(???) – too ambitious. We need to free ourselves from the reductionist and historicist hangups of recent philosophy. “If reason is both transcendent and immanent, then philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity. We don’t have an Archimedean point; we always speak the language of a time and place; but the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place”.
He discusses logical positivism and anarchism as the two major philosophies of science of the 20th century, and argues that they are both self-refuting.
shows how there can be optional reasons (i.e. reasons which do not require us to perform a given action but merely make it a more attractive option), and how two rational people may disagree
“Philosophy has made no progress? If somebody scraches where it itches, does that count as progress? If not, does that mean it wasn’t an authentic scratch? Not an authentic itch? Couldn’t this response to the stimulus go on for quite a long time until a remedy for itching is found?”
He treated all his teachers as saying that “a ‘philosophical problem’ was a product of the unconscious adoption of assumptions built into the vocabulary in which the problem was stated – assumptions which were to be questioned before the problem itself was taken seriously”.
“Philosophy as a discipline thus sees itself as the attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art or religion. It purports to do this on the basis of its special understanding of the nature of knowledge and of mind.” “To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations.”
“We owe the notion of a ‘theory of knowledge’ based on an understanding of ‘mental processes’ to the 17th century, and especially to Locke.”
He regards Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey as the most important philosophers of our century – each tried initially to find a new way of making philosophy foundational, eventually coming to see their earlier efforts as self-deceptive, “as an attempt to retain a certain conception of philosophy after the notions needed to flesh out that conception (the 17th-century notions of knowledge and mind) had been discarded”. “Thus their later work is therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophising rather than to supply him with a new philosophical program.” They are all three in agreement that “the notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned”. “Further, they set aside the notion of ‘the mind’ common to Descartes, Locke and Kant – as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible.” “They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines.” They don’t seek flaws in these arguments, so much as see the whole inherited “vocabulary of philosophical reflection” as “pointless”.
He hopes to be able to “criticise the very notion of ‘analytic philosophy’, and indeed of ‘philosophy’ itself” as understood since Kant. From his standpoint, the “difference between ‘analytic’ and other sorts of philosophy is relatively unimportant – a matter of style/tradition rather than a difference of ‘method’ or of first principles”. Analytic philosophy is one more variant of the Kantian attempt to “[judge] other areas of culture on the basis of [philosophy’s] special knowledge of the ‘foundations’ of these areas”, but with a linguistic rather than mental representation, and the same intention of constructing a “permanent, neutral framework for inquiry, and thus for all of culture”.
He contrasts:
the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition of “a set of presuppositions discoverable a priori”, a framework “which can be isolated prior to the conclusion of inquiry” “imposed by the nature of the knowing subject, by the nature of his faculties or by the nature of the medium within which he works” – these “foundations of knowledge” “[impose] limits on the possible result of empirical enquiry”
a Deweyan conception of knowledge, “as what we are justified in believing” and of justification “as a social phenomenon rather than a transaction between the ‘the knowing subject’ and ‘reality’
a Wittgensteinian notion of “language as tool rather than mirror, we will not look for necessary conditions of the possibility of linguistic representation”
a Heideggerian conception of philosophy, “we will see the attempt to make the nature of the knowing subject a source of necessary truths as one more self-deceptive attempt to substitute a ‘technical’ and determinate question for that openness to strangeness which initially tempted us to begin thinking”
You could see analytic philosophy as “an attempt to escape from history”. Rorty’s book is divided into historicising ‘mind’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘philosophy’. He outlines the structure of the book (pg 10). Truth is "what it is better for us to believe” (James) rather than “the accurate representation of reality”. Or, the notion of “accurate representation” is really only a preference for “those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we want to do”. This is part of his pragmatist conception of knowledge which “eliminates the Greek contrast between contemplation and action, between representing the world and coping with it”. The attempt “to explicate ‘rationality’ and ‘objectivity’ in terms of conditions of accurate representation is a self-deceptive effort to eternalise the ‘normal discourse’ [“any discourse (scientific, political, technological or whatever) which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching argument] of the day”. Edifying is helping “readers, or society as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide ‘grounding’ for the intuitions and customs of the present”.
“The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations – some accurate, some not – and capable of being studied by pure, non-empirical methods”, with Descartes and Kant seeking knowledge (more accurate representations) by inspecting and polishing the mirror (through ‘conceptual analysis’, ‘phenomenological analysis’, ‘explication of meanings’, examination of ‘the logic of our language’ or of ‘the structure of the constituting activity of consciousness’). Wittgenstein’s ‘post-positivistic’ stance in the Philosophical Investigation mocked these attempts. In Dewey’s ideal society, “culture is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement”.
‘Platonism’ represents ‘a brood and nest of dualisms’ (Dewey) – appearance/reality, matter/mind, made/found, sensible/intellectual. The “vocabulary which centres round these traditional distinctions has become an obstacle to our social hopes”.
“’Truth’ is the will to be master of the multiplicity of sensations” (Nietzsche). “The ‘true’ is simply the expedient in the way of believing” (James). Kuhn thought that “science should not be thought of as moving towards an accurate representation of the way the world is in itself”. “Truth is correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality” (Plato). Pragmatists never call themselves relativists.
The ‘correspondence theory of truth’ – obvious and self-evident? or barely intelligible, of no particular importance, and “just one philosophical view among others”?
‘Objective’ – i.e. found or discovered, “in some sense out there waiting to be recognised by us human beings”? or “really made or invented”?
But Rorty can’t accept the making/finding distinction, otherwise “Have we discovered the surprising fact that what was thought to be objective is subjective, or have we invented it?” “If truths are merely convenient fictions, what about the truth of the claim that that is what they are?”
Rorty wants to stop using the finding/making, objective/subjective, nature/convention, real/apparent and absolute/relative vocabulary and distinctions. But some opponents suggest “that to be rational consists precisely in respecting these distinctions”.
Relativists includes post-Nietzschean European philosophy (Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, Derrida and Foucault) and post-Darwinian American philosophy (pragmatists James, Dewey, Kuhn, Quine, Putnam and Davidson). He argues that the Europeans are more negative about empirical science and keen to introduce some magic new methodology, while the Americans are happy to be naturalists.
Rather than arguing over whether what traditional philosophy is/isn’t really there, pragmatists must talk in terms of what is useful. The vocabulary of the ‘onto-theological’ (Heidegger) tradition was useful for their purposes, but “we have different purposes, which will be better served by employing a different vocabulary”.
Pragmatists want to get away from the Cartesian-Lockean “picture of a mind seeking to get in touch with a reality outside itself”, starting instead with “a Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment”. “Words are among the tools which these clever animals have developed.” “Tool-use is part of the interaction of the organism with its environment”, “whether the tool is a hammer or a gun or a belief or a statement”. “To rid our thinking of the vestiges of Cartesianism, to become fully Darwinian in our thinking, we need to stop thinking of words as representations and to start thinking of them as nodes in the causal network which binds the organism together with its environment”.
Dennett wants us to discard the Cartesian Theatre, and “substitute a picture of an adult human organism as one whose behaviour is so complex that it can be predicted only by attributing intentional states”. In this way, beliefs and desires are simply ‘sentential attitudes’ (“dispositions … to assert or deny certain sentences”). “[Attributing] beliefs and desires to non-users of language … is, for us pragmatists, to speak metaphorically.” A belief is a “habit of action” (Peirce). It’s not that rocks and plants are non-conscious, but just that their habits are so familiar and simple that we don’t need to ascribe them sentential attitudes to predict their behaviour. Saying ‘I am hungry’ is “simply helping those around us to predict our future actions”. “This is not to say that one can ‘reduce’ mental states … to physiological or behaviour states. It is merely to say that there is no point in asking whether a belief represents … either mental or physical reality”. Rather, we should ask, “For what purposes would it be useful to hold that belief?” It’s like when choosing whether to load a piece of computer software – you don’t ask whether it represents reality accurately.
For instance, when comparing modern astronomy to the flat-earth hypothesis, our ancestors might argue that their tool enabled them to believe in the literal truth of the Christian Scriptures, which we have to respond to by arguing that the benefits of modern astronomy and space travel outweigh the advantages of Christian fundamentalism. The argument should “not be about which of us has got the universe right”. “We cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry”. “The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends.” “All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavour to make life better. There is no deep split between theory and practice”.
“To treat beliefs not as representations but as habits of action, and words not as representations but as tools, is to make it pointless to ask, ‘Am I discovering or inventing, making or finding?’”
“All the descriptions we give of things are descriptions suited to our purposes. No sense can be made, we pragmatists argue, of the claim that some of these descriptions pick out ‘natural kinds’ – that they cut nature at the joints”. “All we need to know is whether some competing description might be more useful for some of our purposes”.
“The relativity of descriptions to purposes is the pragmatist’s principal argument for his anti-representational view of knowledge”. We cannot compare/assess the relative amount of subjectivity + objectivity in a belief: “elements of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into reality that the very project of representing ourselves as being ‘mappers’ of something ‘language-independent’ is fatally compromised from the start” (Putnam). In order to have perfect knowledge we have to discard the biologistic view, turning your back on the rest of science, and “this amounts to making knowledge into something supernatural, a kind of miracle”.
His pragmatism differs from the secular Enlightenment in that they replaced “supernatural guidance” with a “quasi-divine ‘reason’”.
When philosophy professors bring their relativism into discussions of moral choice, magazines start to take notice. He considers Nietzsche, Dewey and James as broadly agreeing in terms of theory of knowledge etc. and even to some extent on what Nietzsche termed the WTP. To the pragmatist, “no sharp break divides … the evil from the inexpedient”. “What matters for pragmatists is devising ways of diminishing human suffering and increasing human equality.” He does not seek legitimating, universal principles behind every right action.
“The idea of a universally shared source of truth called ‘reason’ or ‘human nature’ is … just the idea that [discussion of preferences for the society with which one identifies oneself, like discussion of the relative superiority of a beloved book] ought to be capable of being made conclusive”. “Rather, she will have to talk about the various concrete advantages of her society’s practices over those of other societies.”
Pragmatists “see the charge of relativism as simply the charge that we see luck where our critics insist on seeing destiny”. If the future holds the “replacement of democratic governments by feuding warlords” rather than the Helsinki Declaration of Human Rights, then “our species will have been unlucky, but it will not have been irrational. It will not have failed to live up to its moral obligations. It will simply have missed a chance to be happy”.
It is not enough for ‘antifoundationists’/‘antidualists’ to “appeal to Darwin and ask our opponents how they can avoid an appeal to the supernatural” because “that way of stating the issue begs many questions”. “I suspect that all that either side can do is to restate its case over and over again, in context after contex. The controversy between those who see both our species and our society as a lucky accident, and those who find an immanent teleology in both, is too radical to permit of being judged from some neutral standpoint.”
Rorty quotes five points from Realism with a human face on which he whole-heartedly concurs with Putnam:
(I) ... elements of what we call 'languge' or 'mind' penetrate so deeply into what we call 'reality' that the very project of representing ourselves as being 'mappers' of something 'language-independent' is fatally compromised from the start. Like Relativism, but in a different way, Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from nowhere (RHF 28)
(II) [We should] accept the position we are fated to occupy in any case, the position of beings who cannot have a view of the world that does not reflect our interests and values, but who are, for all that, committed to regarding some views of the world - and, for that matter, some interests and values - as better than others (RHF 178).
(III) What Quine called 'the indeterminacy of translation' should rather be viewed as the 'interest relativity of translation'... 'Interest relativity' contrasts with absoluteness, not with objectivity. It can be objective that an interpretation or an explanation is the correct one, given the interests which are relevant in the context (RHF 210).
(IV) The heart of pragmatism, it seems to me - of James' and Dewey's pragmatism, if not of Peirce's - was the insistence of the supremacy of the agent point of view. If we find that we must take a certain point of view, use a certain 'conceptual system', when we are engaged in practical activity, in the widest sense of 'practical activity', then we must not simultaneously advance the claim that it is not really 'the way things are in themselves'.
(V) To say, as [Bernard] Williams sometimes does, that convergence to one big picture is required by the very concept of knowledge is sheer dogmatism ... It is, indeed the case that ethical knowledge cannot claim absoluteness; but that is because the notion of absoluteness is incoherent (RHF 171)
Rorty claims not to know why Putnam brands him a 'cultural relativist', when they agree on all those points. Putnam describes Rorty as being gripped especially by two ideas (RHF 18-26):
1) The failure of foundationalism ("wanting or thinking that we could have a foundation") "makes a difference to how we are allowed to talk in ordinary life - a difference as to whether and when we are allowed to use words like 'know', 'objective', 'fact' and 'reason'." "Philosophy was not a reflection *on* the culture ... but a *basis* ... on which the culture rested, and which has been abruptly yanked out" (Putnam).
Rorty argues that Putnam is plain wrong about this, and that in fact he has "urged that we continue to speak with the vulgar while offering a different philosophical gloss on this speech than that offered by the realist tradition" and "complained over and over again about Heidegger's and Derrida's overestimation of the cultural importance of philosophy". (Rorty)
2) When he "rejects a philosophical controversy", e.g. the realism/antirealism or emotive/cognitive controversies, "his rejection is expressed in a Carnapian tone of voice - he *scorns* the controversy" (RHF 20)
Rorty agrees that there is a tone of Carnapian scorn (e.g. speaking of "pseudo-problems" rather than "problematics and vocabularies that might have proven to be of value but in fact did not", or of "unreal" or "confused" philosophical distinctions instead of "distinctions whose employment has proved to lead nowhere, proved to be more trouble than they were worth"), and there should not be. "For pragmatists like Putnam and me, the question should always be 'What use is it?' rather than 'Is it real?' or 'Is it confused?'.
Rorty doesn't agree with Putnam's approach when he follows Stanley Cavell in saying that "the illusions that philosophy spins are illusions that belong to the nature of human life itself" (RHF 20), since this doesn't fit with the five pragmatic tenets above, or with Putnam's view that "our norms and standards of warranted assertibility ... evolve in time" (Putnam). Rorty sees Conant's discussion of this area in RHF as "drawing on an analogy between philosophical therapy and psychoanalysis" which is a symptom of the "same urge to exalt the importance of the topics listed in the "Philosophy 101" syllabus" and treating philosophy as the pedestal on which culture rests that Putnam accused him of. It may be that these "philosophical themes will always creep back in disguise", but we can't be sure of that until we've had a much better go at getting rid of them.
So Rorty doesn't think that Putnam's got to the bottom of the rift between them in his discussion of the two ideas that grip Rorty.
Rorty still thinks that "Darwinism provides a useful vocabulary in which to formulate the pragmatist position" (see I-V). However, it need not entail a "*representational* relation to an intrinsic nature of things". "It is good to be rid of representations, and with them the correspondence theory of truth, for it is thinking that there are representations which engenders thoughts of relativism" (Davidson).
Putnam doesn't like Darwinism and physicalism because he thinks they are scientistic and reductionist. Rorty suggests that rather than seeing Darwinism as a picture of "how things really and truly are", we adopt it merely "in the spirit of Deweyan experientalism ... in the hope of having fewer philosophical problems on our hands". We are simply "[attempting] to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheist position" (Sartre), and to conduct this experiment we need to discard the subject-object, scheme-content and reality-appearance distinctions, and "think of our relation to the rest of the universe in purely causal, as opposed to representationalist, terms".
Putnam wants to know which of the following principles of 'warrant' Rorty can accept:
1) In ordinary circumstances, there is usually a fact of the matter as to whether the statements people make are warranted or not
2) Whether a statement is warranted or not is independent of whether the majority of one's cultural peers would *say* it is warranted or unwarranted
3) Our norms or standards of warranted assertibility are historical products; they evolve in time
4) Our norms and standards always reflect our interests and values. Our picture of intellectual flourishing is part of, and only makes sense as part of, our picture of human flourishing in general.
5) Our norms and standards of *anything* - including warranted assertibility - are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards (RHF 21).
Rorty is unsure about 1 and 2, but has no trouble with 3-5. As far as he is concerned, warrant is "a sociological matter", ascertained by observing the reception of a statement by one's peers. He is concerned about Putnam’s phrase, "matter of fact".
Rorty thinks that "matter of fact" must mean more than just "our ability to figure out whether S was in a good position, given the interests and values of herself and her peers, to assert p", that it must mean "whatever makes it possible for a statement not to be warranted even though a [vast] majority of one's peers say it is". This must require "some natural order of reasons which determines, quite apart from S's ability to justify p to those around here, whether she is *really* justified in holding p". He thinks this claim for a "non-sociological sort of justification" is irreconcilable with I-V. Whether p is true is independent of whether it is warranted.
Rorty agrees that "Relativism, just as much as Realism, assumes that one can stand within one's language and outside it at the same time". But he doesn't think that his own, explicitly relativist position, is guilty of this.
Rorty argues that "reforms in our standards of warranted assertibility are not "better by reference to a previously known standard, but just better in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors". Rorty thinks that Putnam's problem with him is that this statement denies any possibility of appeal to a "fact of the matter", e.g. which could adjudicate against a world in which Nazis won.
Rorty thinks that Putnam is trying here to maintain both his anti-convergence thesis (V) as well as "truth as idealised rational acceptability". What can this mean except "acceptability to an ideal community", which can only mean "*us* ["educated, sophisticated, tolerant, wet liberals"] as we should like to be". This is what he means by saying "that pragmatists should be ethnocentrists rather than relativists". What alternative does Putnam have, given that he doesn't want to follow Williams and Peirce in saying that "the notion of knowledge entails that of convergence to a single result". Similarly, we're not allowed to use 'idealized' to refer to "a process built into any and every inquiry ... which will guide us ... along convergent lines". Without that, "the terms 'warranted', 'rational acceptability' etc. will always invite the question, 'to whom?'". Surely just "us at our best"?
He is arguing that we should choose our standards of warranted assertability on the basis of how good they will come to seem to us-at-our-best (the idealised wet liberals we would like to be), rather than in Putnam's terms of 'idealised rational acceptability'. This will not satisfy necessary or sufficient conditions for a view/theory/practice being better, "for the usual 'naturalistic fallacy' reasons". We should set aside 'better' and ‘true', and just ask "which explications raise more problems than they solve".
He also wants to combat Putnam's assertion that the only reason there can be for describing a feature as 'bad' is that it is "based on a wrong metaphysical picture", since he can't talk in those terms - instead, he wants to talk of better or worse as described above. Moreover though, the goodness/badness of ways of thinking can be judged by how well they serve our interests and values.
This anti-Rorty argument is attributed to Putnam by Williams: "[Rorty's views] simply tear themselves apart. If as Rorty is fond of putting it, the correct description of the world (for us) is a matter of what we find it convenient to say, and if, as Rorty admits, we find it convenient to say that science discovers a world that is already there, there is simply no perspective from which Rorty can say, as he also does, that science does not really discover a world that is already there, but (more or less) invents it."
Rorty responds in various ways, arguing that Williams has conflated two claims, one of which is a "straw-man claim" that "there were no dinosaurs or atoms before we 'invented' them" which is "not entailed by anying in I-V above". Moreover, there will be things that are even more convenient to say in the future that supercede the ideas that Williams lists as being currently convenient. The metaphilosophical question about pragmatism doesn't centre on what the most convenient beliefs it is currently holding are, but "whether there is something other than convenience to use as a criterion in science and philosophy", where "'convenience' in this context means something like: ability to avoid fruitless, irresolvable, disagreements on dead-end issues".
Rorty's strategy to "[escape] the self-referential difficulties into which 'the Relativist' keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics to cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try", but Putnam does not adopt it. "At the last moment, it seems to me, he turns intuitionist", even though he concedes that we might "behave better if we became Rortians - we may be more tolerant, less prone to fall for various varieties of religious intolerance and political totalitarianism", which is exactly what Rorty wants. Putnam wants to know why, if these are Rorty's goals, why he doesn't argue directly for them - Rorty responds that this is just the sort of approach that someone who "thought of philosophy as the pedestal on which culture rests" would take...
Putnam accuses Rorty of secretly saying that "from a God's-Eye View there is no God's-Eye View". Rorty doesn't understand what the difference is between what he says about 'better' and Putnam's I-V, that they are both just "criticising accepted cultural norms and standards" by suggesting alternatives.
Rorty reckons that Putnam's main problem lies with Rorty's Darwininism, e.g. a naturalistic account of reason. They both dismiss the idea that we have evolved to track truth and "represent it accurately", "as opposed to merely coping with it cleverly". Then Putnam dismisses Foucault and Rorty as 'cultural relativists', "who want to reduce 'better' to consensus, and thus are unable to offer rational criticism of a prevailing consensus" ("reductionism and historicism"). Putnam concludes that "as thinkers we are committed to there being *some* kind of truth, some kind of correctness which is substantial and not merely 'disquotational'. That means that there is no eliminating the normative".
Rorty thinks that Putnam runs together the question 'Can we give necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of normative expressions?' with 'Does our familiar use of normative expressions show that there is "some kind of correctness which is substantial" (or that "the rightness or wrongness of what we say is not *just* for a time and a place")'? Rorty thinks 'no' to both questions. "I think that nothing about the substantiality or atemporality of correctness follows from the irreducibility of a set of expressions to one another"(???). Rorty points out again that "nonlocal correctness of assertion" requires denial of one or more of I-V, i.e. metaphysical realism.
"Putnam's claim that "reason can't be naturalised" seems to me ambiguous between an uncontroversial but inconsequential truth about irreducibility and a false claim that the Darwinian story leaves a gap in the fabric of causal explanation"(??? - pg 20). Rorty agrees that "reason is both transcendent and immanent" because "all I can mean by 'transcendent' is "pointing beyond our present practices, gesturing in the direction of our possibly different future practices", but Putnam seems to mean more than this ("philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity"). Rorty thinks Putnam is "running together our ability to use tensions with our wpresent body of beliefs of desires to put anything (including our present norms and standards for warranted assertibility) up for grabs with our ability to achieve a rightness that is "not just for a time and a place".
Ultimately, Rorty thinks they disagree about "how much can be saved from the realist tradition once we affirm I-V". Putnam thinks there is "room for something like the Apel-Habermas notion of a ‘universal validity claim’", "nonlocal and nontransient rightness", whereas Rorty wants "to experiment with an image of ourselves (i.e. us wet liberals) as as local and transient as any other species of animals, yet none the worse for that".
Sub-symbolic semantics hypothesis: “a cognitive system adopts various internal states in vairous environmental conditions. To the extent that the cognitive system meets its goal conditions in various environmental conditions, its internal states are veridical representations of the corresponding environmental states, with respect to the given goal conditions.”
assignment of blame problem – can’t localise errors/failures of veridical representation to a particular state or state component
“How can internal processes (e.g. inference) be guaranteed to preserve veridical semantic relationships (e.g. be truth-preserving)?” Þ “How can the connection strengths be set so that the sub-symbolic system will meet its goal conditions?”
He also briefly addresses the question: “how can a cognitive system be put in a novel environment and learn to create veridical internal representations that allow valid inferences about that environment so that goal conditions can be satisfied?”
This addresses Kant, who argued that we cannot show why our reason would conform to objects, so the objects must conform to our knowledge. Our knowledge is still bounded by our senses, say, but the idea of a self-organising system is that it creates veridical representations of its environment out of the inherent structure in the environment – however, Smolensky relativises this to ‘goal conditions’.
This is similar to Nozick’s point that it could be that it is reason that is the dependent variable, shaped by the facts. Nozick was pointing to evolution as the main organising force, though the principle remains the same, I think. Unfortunately, the weaknesses of Nozick’s position remain too:
a self-organised connectionism system cannot any guarantee that future facts will continue to fit present reason than evolution
“moreover, it does not provide a reason-independent justification of reason – it is part of our current/ongoing scientific view, not part of [first???] philosophy” - it’s no different from understanding our perceptual organs, but we cannot now distinguish necessary from contingent by means of reason etc.
is the next section relevant too???
re soft at the low-level, hard at the high-level Þ symbolic-like computations emerging, possibility of implementing rule-like processes (e.g. grammar, reason) … xxx
Ch 1, Something between an Preface and an Introduction
Ch 2, Good reasoning and intentional content: how irrational can we be?
He’s just “rejected a cluster of conceptual arguments which sought to show that human reasoning couldn’t be all that bad and couldn’t get much better”. Now he’s criticising the family of evolution-based arguments that try and show the same conclusion, that “irrationality is empirically impossible or unlikely” because of evolution etc., e.g. Quine: “creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die out before reproducing their kind”. Rather than showing conclusively that “there is no good evolutionary argument for constraints on how badly people can reason”, he just wants to show that the burden of proof lies with those who think that. Moreover, biology does not show that our inferential strategies are innate, or that descriptive cognitive pluralism is untenable.
Two main reasons people think evolution insures rationality:
What is ‘optimally well-designed’?
“A system is ‘well-designed’ if it enhances biological fitness [likelihood to survive and reproduce successfully] more than any alternative” (but which systems count as ‘alternatives’?).
Why is it that evolution produces close approximations to well-designed systems?
i. Evolution is caused by natural selection
The question of ‘what causes evolution?’ amounts to ‘what causes changes of gene frequency in populations?’. Natural selection is only one of the processes. Other processes that can lead to changes in gene frequency include:
Mutation (and differential rates of mutation)
Migration
Random genetic drift = “A process that may result in a gene going to fixation in a population, while all of its competing alleles disappear”, especially “in small populations where random events have a better chance of eliminating all the copies of a given gene”. This can lead to “the elimination of a more fit gene and the fixation of a less fit one”, and apparently “rapid evolutionary change is often associated with small populations”
Kitcher argues that sometimes this may be more than a temporary setback: “Typically the fixation of an allele at one locus will affect the fitness of mutants that arise at other loci. If these mutants arise and become prevalent before the unlucky allele receives its second chance, then the new opportunity may come too late. In the altered genetic environment the previously optimal allele may not longer be superior. The originally less fit allele that displaced it may have armed itself with alleles at other loci, so that the invasion of the unlucky allele is now resisted by selection.”
ii. Natural selection chooses the best-designed systems in the gene pool
Even if we ignored the other processes besides natural selection that affect gene frequencies in a population, and assume that there are genes for the optimal phenotype available in the gene pool, we still cannot be sure that this phenotype will spread through the population.
Meoitic drive – “certain genes have the capacity to ‘cheat’ in meiosis [“the process that produces sperm and eggs”] and end up significantly over-represented in the sperm or eggs”. “Obviously, such a gene will spread quickly through a population, even if the phenotypic effects of the gene are harmful”. “Obviously it is not always the case that natural selection leads to well-designed systems.”
The other, deeper problem with the idea that natural selection will lead to the fixation of the fittest phenotype relates to recessive genes and combinations of genes. “Indeed, it can even happen that natural selection will result in an optimally fit homozygous phenotype disappearing from the population.” See Kitcher, following Templeton’s example.
iii. This amounts to a huge and varied set of options over evolutionary time, some of which will closely approximate a theoretical optimum
Natural selection doesn’t necessarily have mutations coding for (near) optimal design available:
Pleiotropy (“the widespread phenomenon … in which one gene affects two or more distinct traits or systems”), where natural selection might not be able to keep the positive traits without the negative ones, e.g. the albino genes, which provide adaptive white coats for arctic animals but also typically produce serious eye problems.
Heterozygote superiority (“the most fit phenotype is produced by a genotype having different alleles at a given locus. When this is the case, natural selection cannot eliminate the less fit homozygous phenotypes from the population, since half the offspring of the optimal heterozygotes will be suboptimal homozygotes”). “There is no guarantee that the optimal mutants will ever appear”, e.g. sickle-cell disease (homozygotes) vs resistance to malaria (heterozygote) in humans.
How does this all relate to what our cognitive system is like?
iv. Our cognitive/inferential system was produced by evolution
“Even if it were the case that natural selection is a flawless optimiser and that it is the only cause of biological evolution, it would still not follow that our system of inferential strategies is optimally well-designed” unless “evolutionary factors are the only [or major] ones that have shaped our current inferential strategies”.
If natural selection is to shape a characteristic:
1. “The population must exhibit some variation in that characteristic of a sort that affects the reproductive success of organisms in a systematic way”
2. “The variance must be under genetic control either directly or indirectly”
He considers clothing styles and language as examples in which there is great diversity within the human population, that may have some impact on fitness, but is not genetically based:
1. Even though clothing styles probably have some effect on fitness (survival + reproductive success), it’s clear that much of the variance is due to non-genetic factors, so we don’t expect that the most fitness-enhancing of current clothing preferences will ultimately spread through the population
2. There is a great diversity among humans with respect to the language(s) they speak, but there is little reason to think that any of this variation is genetically based. Had I been born elsewhere, I would now have the ability to speak Lapp or Korean rather than English.” It’s possible that the capacity to speak some languages is more fitness enhancing than the capacity to speak others”, but the processes by which the capacity speak certain languages spread are almost entirely independent of biological evolution (they depend much more on social and historical factors, for example).
It may be that “the strategies a person employs, like the language he/she speaks, are determined in large measure by environmental variables”, and that variations in them (or indeed, if there was just one) are independent of genetic factors.
i.e. “if one cognitive system is more fitness enhancing than another, it is also more rational”. Why should we accept this claim?
1. “If we analyse what we ordinarily mean when we say that one inferential system is more rational than another … we will find we mean that one is more fitness enhancing than the other”, i.e. “the claim that optimally well-designed cognitive systems are rational is a conceptual truth”. He regards this as implausible, but he doesn’t like analytic epistemology in general (ch 4).
2. “The rationality of an inferential system is a function of how well it does at producing true beliefs” (and avoiding falsehoods) – resembles reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification (Armstrong, Dretske and Goldman).
We then need to claim that inferential strategies that generally yield true beliefs are fitness enhancing, i.e. having true beliefs is more adaptive. Of course, there are exceptions.
Stich considers that a less reliable system could exceed a more reliable system in both internal and external fitness (Sober):
1. External considerations – how conducive to survival and successful reproduction the input/output pairings it effects are
Reliable strategies may be expensive in time, effort and cognitive hardware – declining marginal utility of an expensive, reliable system vs a less expensive, less reliable system.
2. Internal considerations - what is going on inside, i.e. how economically the genetic program achieves its effects (e.g. demands made on the organism’s memory, energy, resources etc.).
A very cautious risk-averse inferential strategy (i.e. plenty of cheap false positives, avoids fatal false negatives) might well be less reliable (i.e. yield false beliefs more and true beliefs less), but still be favoured by natural selection.
There will almost always be this trade-off between overall-reliability and reliability-when-it-counts-most - reliabilist accounts make the mistake of perpetually prioritising the former.
Ch 4, Reflective equilibirium and analytic epistemology
Ch 5, Do we really care whether our beliefs are true?
Ch 6, A pragmatic account of cognitive evaluation
"Reasoning is the process by which a person's store of beliefs is modified and updated as the result of new information or new insight about the relations among existing beliefs. Reasoning also has a role to play in the generation of new wants and desires."
Cherniak: “Even a computer capable of checking line in a truth table in the time it takes a light ray to cross a proton, running for 20 billion years, could not handle a belief system containing only 138 logically independent propositions.”
You can be competent, yet still make performance errors. Cohen: A theory of reasoning must be based on basic intuitions. ...Reflective Equilibrium. But, how do we explain persistent fallacies? Don't some people simply have the wrong intuition?
Possible Resolutions
Maybe rationality is not susceptible to definition, in the sense of ‘necessary and sufficient conditions.' (Wittgenstein)
Reasoning may be more like pattern recognition than rule-following.
Consequentialism: Reasoning may be best viewed as a set of tools used to attain certain goals ... truth?
Relativism: Are certain tools appropriate in some contexts and not others?
http://www.the-spa.com/thirteen/rortypap.htm
Rorty is attacking ‘epistemological foundationalism’, the view that “by correctly spelling out the nature of the human mind and its relationship to what is outside the mind, we can then have knowledge of reality as it exists in and of itself” (web). Rorty characterizes the foundationalist philosopher's main conviction: “to know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations. Philosophy's central concern is to be a general theory of representation...(Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 3)”.
Rorty, after all, is formulating his ideas within the tradition of analytic philosophy, and he describes the antifoundationalist "therapy" he is offering as one that is "parasitic upon the constructive efforts of the very analytic philosophers whose frame of reference I am trying to put in question" (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 7).
The question we must ask ourselves is precisely how many "steps further" we have license to take without becoming incoherent.
‘The world’ is just whatever that vast majority of our beliefs not currently in question are currently thought to be about.
Putnam defends a position he calls "internal realism" from Rorty's purely "conversational" picture of philosophy. Putnam: a correct epistemology, a correct concept of reason, although always bound to the interests, values, and the general language-game of each particular time and place in society, is nonetheless immanent, that is, because reason is presupposed in any deliberation over what can be known to be "true", reason is a normative ideal that is somehow beyond time and place. Exactly what the nature of such immanent reason is like is, however, impossible for us to express in words, as we're always captive to our particular language-game. In this respect, all modern believers in the "epistemological project" are followers of Kant, who pointed out the necessary existence of the noumenal dictates of reason. This general belief in the normative quality of reason takes us in the direction of Peirce's Thirdness, Habermas' ideal speech community, Popper's philosophy of scientific progress, and various other tempered and fuzzy realist philosophies of science. If this so-called "immanent" domain of reason does exist but essentially cannot be talked about in any absolute/objective/definite way, then it may be that all we can have here is a faith in this notion. It is, after all, not a concept that can in any way be empirically verified-- it can't be supported by physical evidence because it is a presupposed concept to our interpretation of empirical phenomena. Is the basis of our norms of "warranted assertability" then really no more than faith?
Peirce's cable vs chain metaphor: that in philosophy, as in science, we ought to, "trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected."
"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view” ("Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism" 166-7).
Arguably, Rorty caricatures his own opponents even more than the relativist is caricatured by others.
An explanatory approach to behavior and the constitution of cognitive states that regards particular behaviors and cognitive structures and capacities as playing functional roles in particular domains or contexts. See also
defining characteristic of a mental state is the set of causal relations it bears to inputs, other mental states, and outputs. Functionalism (2), by contrast, can be described as a quasi-teleological theory of adapted faculties and their functions.
“The view that the physical realization of a functional component is not, in some sense, its essence. Rather, what makes a functional component the type it is, is characterized in terms of its role in relating inputs to outputs and its relations to other functional components. See multiple realizability, Turing machine, functionalism(2), causal functionalism.”
“The only way to tell that modus ponens and modus tollens are valid inference rules is that competent thinkers judge arguments of this form to be good ones. Note that this does not mean that competent thinkers will never be misled by the presentation of an argument and fail to recognize that modus tollens is an applicable inference rule.”
Cohen concludes that: “What I have been arguing is that normative criteria for ordinary human reasoning rely for their substantiation on a procedure analogous to what is called "bootstrapping" in artificial intelligence ... The intuitions of ordinary people are the basis for constructing a coherent system of rules and principles by which those same people can, if they so choose, reason much more extensively and accurately than they would otherwise do. Consequently these ordinary people cannot be regarded as intrinsically irrational in regard to any such cognitive activity” (Cohen 1981, page 322).
“In other words, just as competent speakers of English cannot be regarded as relying cognitively on an incorrect representation of English grammar (though they can sometimes speak in ways they themselves would on reflection regard as incorrect), competent thinkers cannot be regarded as relying cognitively on an incorrect representation of logic. Human rationality, in the sense of the possession of a basic competence in judging inferences to be logically sound, follows from the fact that we can only know what the rules of logic are by comparing them to what people intuitively judge to be logically sound.”
Cohen explains the results of psychological research into human inferential failings as resulting from “either the presentation of the problem, or from subjects' inability to properly encode the logical structure of the task being presented. In other words, the research in question does not indicate a failure of logical competence, but a failure in performance (in particular, a failure to represent the problem as researchers intend it to be represented and then use one's logical knowledge to make a proper judgment). For example, Cohen characterizes the results of Wason's experiments as resulting from a "cognitive illusion." First, he points out that subjects do better at Wason's selection task the more the task is presented in a way that resembles a "realistic" situation that subjects might have encountered before.
“In their familiar concrete concerns human beings show themselves well able to apply the law of contraposition to appropriate problems. Faced instead with a situation in which the items against a conditional rule is to be checked are things (cards bearing letters, numerals, words, sentences, geometrical diagrams, and the like) that echo the symbolism in which the conditional rule itself is formulated, subjects' reasoning tends to be led astray in the "matching bias" to which Mankeltow and Evans have traced the fallacy” (Cohen 1981, page 324).
Cohen also thinks that the way in which researchers such as Kahneman and Tversky attribute an "availability heuristic" to human beings is also mistaken.
If the argument for rational competence [given previously] is accepted, the "availability" results must be interpreted to have shown, not that the subjects are estimating the frequency or probability of an x by reference to the availability of an x, but that they are doing this by reference to those x's that happen to be available. The subjects are not to be construed as operating on the evidently wild assumption that frequency can safely be taken to equal availability. Rather, where A is the available population, they are to be construed as operating on the not so evidently wild assumption that frequency can safely be taken to equal frequency in A, which is a very different matter (Cohen 1981, page 325).
The overall thrust of Cohen's conclusion is that the research on human inferential shortcomings should be construed as showing how subjects can be vulnerable to "cognitive illusions" when problems are presented in unfamiliar ways that interfere with their inferential performance, not as showing that human beings lack the logical competence to deal effectively with reasoning problems, in that they systematically rely on "heuristics" rather than on correct logical rules.
Notes – Quine, ‘Epistemology naturalized’
Notes – Stich, chapter on reflective equilibrium in The Fragmentation of Reason
Notes – Putnam, ‘Two conceptions of rationality’
// Notes – Putnam, ‘Computational psychology and interpretation(?)’
Notes – Introduction in Evolutionary epistemology
epistemic - Of or relating to knowledge or degree of acceptance
“to recognise objectively valid reasons and arguments” (Nagel)
evolutionary epistemology –This is an approach to the theory of knowledge claiming that the very fact that we humans are the end-product of a natural process of evolution must be a significant factor in the ways in which we know and understand the world.
all knowledge is shaped and informed by certain innate principles (like the laws of logic and mathematics, as well as such epistemic norms as a preference for simplicity) which have been selected into human thought because of their adaptive value. Controversial is the question whether these principles represent the necessary conditions of rational thought (that is, the synthetic a priori) or are merely contingent and non-unique, and could well have been quite different. Is the logic on Andromeda as different from that of Aristotle as the slithering of the snake is different from the walking of the human? Equally controversial is the question whether such a philosophy points to the conclusion that knowledge is a generally faithful mapping of a real (human-perception-independent) world, or whether one is pointed towards some sort of pragmatic or coherence theory of truth.
Nozick defines evolution as involving “heritable variation in fitness, transmission to offspring of parental characteristics that vary across organisms and play a role in non-random differential reproduction”. Fitness “consists in an organism’s (probabilistic) propensity to survive and reproduce”.
The theory of evolution due to Charles Darwin (1809-82). The fundamental tenet of Darwinism is the principle of natural selection, whereby the variations in form displayed by the members of a species have differential survival values. Those variations that are 'adaptive' in the struggle for survival will be the ones most likely to enable those possessing them to live and, if they have reasonably high Darwinian fitness, to be passed on to their offspring. This process gradually gives rise to diverse forms leading ultimately, through selective adaptation to specific econiches, to the emergence of new species. Note that the term denotes a gradualist position; other theories which emphasize a saltatory process in which new species are assumed to emerge in a relatively short time period (geologic time) are properly not called Darwinian, nor are other theoretical models such as the Lamarckian hypothesis of inheritance of acquired characteristics (although it should be noted that Darwin did accept the possibility of a Lamarckian process). The currently accepted Darwinian-based model is often called neo-Darwinism. See evolution and evolutionary theory.
biological fitness = “likelihood to survive and reproduce successfully”
The cogito is a philosophical Rorschach test – we each see our own obsessions in it
“The range of genetic possibilities is not itself a random occurrence but a necessary consequence of the natural order”.
The “vocabulary which centres round these traditional distinctions has become an obstacle to our social hopes”.
Relativists are generally those who “do not accept the Greek distinction between the way things are in themselves and the relations which they have to other things, and in particular to human needs and interests”.
Rather than becoming embroiled in a philosophy of science discussion about how paradigm-shifts occur in science, I simply want to observe that the spectrum of increment size runs from gradual to highly saltatory. In fact, there is a helpful parallel here with the debate in evolutionary theory between the gradualists and saltationists who differ over whether the punctuated equilibrium (a sequence of sharp changes followed by relatively stable plateaux) that is observed over evolutionary time (measured in terms of the dynamics of gene frequency in populations) requires the occasional huge macro-mutation in an individual’s genome that confers an enormous advantage and spreads like wildfire through the population, or whether the non-linear dynamics of evolution can explain how a small adaptive change quickly takes over in a population
(assuming continued rapid and radical progress)
generative
prescient
fit data at the moment
explanatory power
predictive power
coherence
elegance
salient
broad, encompassing
It seems to me that the two broad conceptions as integral to a naturalistic account that can made sense of at all in modern terms: Darwinism and connectionism.
I find the empirical evidence it much more plausible that our status as biologically evolved animals (or ‘survival machines’, to borrow Dawkins’ terminology) makes it highly unlikely that we are or could be rational,
Backtracking a little, the issues were aired by Descartes and Hume. Hume’s problem of induction addressed the impossibility of finding a rational (deductive) argument for why (inductive) reasoning works.
These questions left Hume a skeptic, and Descartes a theist (which amounts to a sort of mysticism and other-worldly non-rational trust unless his proofs for God can be validated).
divine ® Kant ® Nozick
In effect, we have come full circle. Descartes was able to rely on the natural light of reason as a reliable guide when ascertaining that something is clearly and distinctly so because of his faith in our being divinely designed. Kant turned us into sceptics about the world in itself,
Without this theist recourse, Hume showed that we can not be certain of the conclusions that we have induced from experience in the way that we can about deductive conclusions.
What Nozick proposes amounts to a reversal of Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’, arguing that
He considers that if, in general, truth underlies the serviceability of a belief (which is what natural selection works on), then
He argues for rationality to be conceived of as taking account of (and acting upon) reasons. Believing for reasons is a route to the truth (through their factual connections)
Moreover, even when the gene pool is large and contains the genes for optimal systems,
An evolutionary account of reason requires optimality of design in order to explain how our cognitive system is so good at
In this way, he is safe to accept an evolutionary account that supports his objectivism, since such an account leaves reason intact and able to use its own reasons to justify itself. (I’m not sure if I’ve understood this correctly???)
According to Peirce, reason has nothing to do with ‘how we think’ (Peirce). “If we can reason, it is because our thoughts can obey the order of the logical relations among propositions”.
“The basic methods of reasoning we employ are not merely human but belong to a more general category of mind” – “those same methods and arguments would have to be among the capacities of any species that had evolved to the level of thinking”.
Pinker’s aim is to show how modern man’s rarified rationality can be traced back to prehistoric man’s needs, and understood in terms of the adaptive role our various cognitive functions played in a foraging society. Although the human mind “is not equipped with an evolutionarily frivolous faculty for doing Western science, maths, chess” etc., “it is equipped with faculties to master the local environment and outwit its denizens”[1]. He argues that:
1. Natural selection has “no qualms about building parochial inference models that exploit eons-old regularities in their own subject matters”, e.g. “recognising objects, making tools, learning the local lang, finding a mate, predicting an animal’s movement, finding their way” – the “subject-specific intelligence of our species” that Tooby and Cosmides[2] call “ecological rationality”.
2. We did not evolve into true scientists because of the cost of knowledge. “In a large society with writing and institutionalised science, the cost of an exponential number of tests is repaid by the benefit of the resulting laws to a large number of people, … but for the provincial interests of a single individual or even a small band, good science isn’t worth the trouble”.
3. Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth.
I am going to ignore all arguments about the biological implausibility of various popular models, since there is good reason to believe that they are simply intermediary steps towards an eventual biologically plausible, powerful connectionist toolkit.
The problem is the other way round – what issues might connectionists raise in response to Nagel’s claims about the capacities of our brains.
The situation is more complicated when considering the human genome, since we cannot simply alter a gene here or there and dispassionately note the result. Also, the situation is incomparably more complex. Indeed, this is the major difficulty facing us when we try and decode our DNA – unlike planetary bodies and neural networks, DNA may not be formalisable or reducible to a set of underlying dynamic equations. Our scientific toolkit has trouble dealing with irreducibly complex systems, where one component affects another, which in turn has affects a multitude of other genes, each of which has a direct or indirect effect back. This is the case with our genome. Each gene expresses itself in terms of proteins, which have various effects on each other. This is still the low level. At a higher level, the mass of protein interactions results in the cellular system that makes up the human body, including the brain. Perhaps the only way to understand such a system will be to simulate it.
Indeed, if anything I think he fails to recognise just how inescapable these thoughts are, and the extent to which they underly absolutely all thought, that all thought is rational, whether pro-rational, anti-rational or simply neutral. We cannot truly survey ourselves thinking, except by thinking.
John Searle raised the debate of understanding with relation to purely syntactic processing memorably and eloquently in his discussions of the Chinese Room. I think he has been firmly rebuked even by the interlocutors in his original paper (‘Minds, brains and programs’), and will not
The field is polarised by the degree to which these ‘artificial neural networks’ are intended to be biologically-plausible, that is, the degree to which a model corresponds to actual processes instantiated in the brain.
This debate centres around the use of powerful, but biologically unrealistic learning rules like back-propagation.
Most computational models are conducted on serial machines which can approximate, at a comparatively coarse temporal resolution, hugely simplified neuron-models.
Some neuron-level models aim to simulate the processes going on inside a neuron to an almost molecular level, while others ignore the sub-neural computation, treating neurons as just simple devices for integrating inputs.
There are various reasons why an arch-rationalist like Nagel might have concerns about Smolensky’s PTC. – ignore this
Systematicity
Productivity etc.
The weaker claim simply states that the brain is a self-organising connectionist system – it is composed, at the neural level, of nodes with weighted connections. Sensory input is transduced into action potentials, propagated and processed, and eventually transduced into muscle activity. As mentioned briefly above, there is some debate about the extent to which sub-neuronal processes play a computational role. In effect, this is little more than a fleshed-out reiteration of functionalism(???).
does the weaker functionalism connectionist claim have anything to say about the symbolic/sub-symbolic debate???
do I actually need to talk about strong and weak claims at all???
Following Smolensky’s ‘Proper Treatment of Connectionism’ (PTC),
If we’re as charitable as possible to our connectionist account by saying that it wholly contains the symbolic approach within it, since you can always implement the symbolic approach as a connectionist system (officially – ignoring learning issues aside). Similarly, Smolensky has shown that systematicity is not, in principle a insurmountable problem at all.
I think that a connectionist system, especially an evolved, specialised, jury-rigged one like ours, will always be a little unpredictable in its behaviour. We form representations
However, it is at all obvious that this is a linguistic act of reasoning procedure. According to Nagel’s definition of reason as ‘accessing objectively valid truths’ it qualifies as reasoning, but it seems implausible that our performance of the task is a linguistic operation.
This can be weakened slightly by modifying some of the instances of ‘all’ to ‘most’, or perhaps just, ‘some non-empty set of’. However, it
However, when we watch a chess game or consider the move that our opponent has made,
we might try and decide why a given move was made. Given a close starting and finishing point, we try and establish why a move is good. We are evaluating a static situation. Indeed, whenever we consciously consider a move that has welled up out of our subconscious, we are using backwards reasoning.
surely even short leaps of reasoning/comprehension are no more ‘open’ than the big searches though???
can look at a chess board and choose a ‘best’ move. This is what I will term ‘forward reasoning’. It is directed towards an ultimate goal, that of winning the game.
Where do the incompatibilities between naturalism and objectivism about reason lie?
I can't see that either one is more important they correspond to any neat division of academic disciplines.
I am deliberately avoiding the categorical/hypothetical and theoretical/practical distinctions that are usually made.
chess, maths, philosophy use them both, detective
reading vs thinking/writing???
why does forward reasoning take time – sinking into an attractor
restructured or re-approaching the entire debate from a
For ease of story-telling, let us assume that the discussion is in an area of philosophy with which we are relatively unfamiliar.
Assuming that we are all at least minimally-rational agents, and not ideally-rational, then we will
make some, but not necessarily all of the sound inferences from our belief set
eliminate some (but not necessarily all) inconsistencies that arise in this belief-set
Although the process or conversation needn't follow this strict a chronological order
In constrast,
forward reasoning allows us to draw possible inferences from a set of premises, and any thinking where we are considering a potentially infinite number of unknown conclusions, trying to find the ‘right’ one(s).
When we talk of the number of moves that a chess-player actively considers as being a handful or perhaps a few tens, we are talking of the number that our faculty of backwards reasoning can consider. However, in order to narrow down the enormous space of possible moves in the first place to these few most appropriate ones, we use forward reasoning. Our brain explores an enormous possibility space unconsciously, presenting only the best few for careful consideration.
Descartes’ method of doubt provides the supreme example of forward reasoning - having elected to suspend all belief, he has to reason forwards from nowhere. He argues that the Cogito is not a syllogism, but rather serves as a premise. In a way, he knows that he is trying to justify his beliefs in the world as it manifestly appears to us, but the routes available by which we might attempt this are genuinely numberless and cannot be wholly captured by any schema. This is partly an aspect of language – as long as our arguments are based in language, and we have no real alternative, the combinatorial nature of syntax (which is what gives it its huge expressive power) is such that we can construct a genuinely infinite number of sentence-propositions, although of course most of these would be wholly nonsensical.
The situation in philosophy then is very different to that of a chess game, where the available/allowed moves are restricted by definitely-describable and easily-applied rules. In philosophy the only restrictions are of grammar (propositions must be expressible as sentences) and of plausibility (the more believable, i.e. justified, a proposition seems to us, the better). This may present different challenges for our reasoning systems, and it may be that we are better at either forward or backward reasoning in this situation.
adaptive value
amount of time we spend on it
context dependence
practical/theoretical – is this the same as instrumental vs what(???)??? – acting vs inferring???
choosing premises vs arguing from those premises
physical and abstract
We might ask a grandmaster to consider a chess position against a written description of the reasons for choosing a given move, and to assess whether the reasons are valid. Of course, we would somehow have to ensure that the grandmaster wasn’t
he’d be tempted to do forwards reasoning, and wouldn't he have to do forward reasoning to do the backward reasoning???
We could also ask him to simply come up with a selection of moves that fulfilled a stated aim, e.g. threatening the opposing queen within three moves, or
controlled the centre of the board even at considerable expense of pieces
If, however, we were to specify that the grandmaster had to take x points’ worth of the opponent’s pieces within n moves, we would force the grandmaster to continually backward-evaluate each considered
go players
we’d probably just learn more about the chess-playing part of the grandmaster’s brain
To an extent, these parallel the debate in evolutionary epistemology about the extent to which true beliefs are adaptive, and that truth-tracking could have been selected for.
how???
What problems might be raised when considering how a connectionist system could implement rationality? Is there hope that a connectionist system could implement rationality?
Some are relatively general difficulties with connectionism, in its various forms. Others stem from a seeming incompatibility between the two.
. This is not simply a point about developmental psychology. Clearly, our brains are undergoing various genetically-timed stages of progression, especially during our earliest years, initially forming an enormous profusion of synaptic connections that are subsequently pruned. This is not what I am really referring to – as we progress through education, even long beyond the point at which our brains are undergoing developmental (i.e. internally-prescribed) changes, our ability to reason improves. We are continually forming new conceptual spaces, and this improvement is incremental. This is related to the reason that maths, for instance, requires an element of trudging practice that cannot be avoided. An essential part of learning a new theory or technique is practicing it, repeatedly, with different problems. In this way, we are expanding our set of training data to be more representative of a given problem domain, and in the process expanding the generalisation ability of our reasoning.
However, it should prove tractable over time, since it is mainly its computational complexity plus the ethical difficulties surrounding genetically-based experiments that present problems for the usual scientific method.
the DNA may constrain things into representations, allowing the interactionist to more or less posit innate ideas
I am not thinking of 'multiple realisability' here - this is the term that functionalists use to mean that the same abstract organisation, the same underlying function, and so the same mental abilities, could be implemented in physically very different systems (e.g. a silicon chip could be functionally identical to a biological brain). Rather,
In the discussion above, Cherniak showed that there is a scale of rationality, and that Nagel’s requirements for objective rationality place him at the high end, but not the top of that scale, requiring a high level, but not maximum, optimality.
A reason is a propositional belief that justifies another belief. Defining a ‘reason’ becomes difficult and circular – a reason is a justifying belief, and to be justified is to have a good reason.
A ‘reason’ is a propositional justification that can underly beliefs, assertions, actions or desires.
the umbrella mental faculty, ‘reason’, by which we apprehend reasons
The faculty of reason is our means of abstracting, comparing – of seeing relations between ideas – but a particular kind of relation - justification
I will end by considering how far a synthesis of rational realism and naturalism can go, .
Before going any further, I’d like to demolish any simplistic assertion that we are unequivocally, wholeheartedly rational by putting forward some of the strongest evidence and examples of human irrationality. Any theory of rationality must eventually explain these.
|
|
naturalism does not think reason can be objective |
naturalism does think that reason can be objective |
|
Nagel’s a priori arguments for reason’s objectivity do stand up |
incompatible – attack Nagel |
no conflict – describe and agree/support Nagel |
|
Nagel’s a priori arguments for reason’s objectivity do not stand up |
no such thing as reason – attack Nagel |
new arguments to support Nagel |
do I want to structure according to the matrix, or do I want to argue by themes, and then use the matrix only to introduce + conclude???
– introduce + conclude
might the matrix not need to be more complicated to take into account my restricted characterised naturalism???
Before I discuss the possible responses that can be made to Nagel’s anti-skeptical and anti-subjective arguments, I want to first broadly outline what is meant by naturalism, so that I can emphasise objections that release the strictures operating particular on naturalistic accounts.
I think there are a number of responses that can be made to Nagel’s strictures:
I don't feel entirely comfortable with any of these responses as knockdown arguments against the ontological thesis of reason, but I do feel they very seriously question it.
if we’d accepted the ontological thesis, we would be in a situation where there are objective norms of reason, but as finite beings we are unable to follow them reliably.
If this objection holds, then the burden of proof lies with the objectivist to show that the platform of reason upon which such arguments must rest is large enough to encompass all the domains to which he would like reason to apply. Since I think it is clear that any rich naturalistic account rests heavily on a wide base of logic and maths, there is no way that a naturalistic account that tried to argue for a limited, subjective form of reason without being charged with itself employing some more objective methods of reason to support that, as are necessary in any modern natural science.
The ‘thoughts that you cannot get outside of’ is a powerful argument that Nagel uses in a variety of different situations, including to undermine evolutionary explanations and reductions of reason. This argument is powerful because it can be applied to whichever naturalistic discipline the naturalising subjectivist is trying to reduce our thoughts to, whether it’s anthropology, sociology or psychology. Because the argument is a priori, no empirical results can ever refute it – the advocate of reason can simply adopt one level higher, and argue that by treating all of our thoughts as psychological phenomena, that thought itself must be one too, and so the view becomes incoherent. Only if we adopt an external, objective platform from which to make such assertions, can they be intelligible. We call this platform ‘reason’.
it seems clear that pragmatism is unwieldy, and really doesn't line up with the way we speak, but it provides a convenient and reasonably coherent fall-back position that can be adopted in the absence of the ontological thesis – but it is implausible to use it to argue that, for instance, we only consider ‘2 + 2 = 4’ to be a useful belief in a useful (but contingent???) system we call arithmetic
???
talk about the hierarchy of thoughts???
Bermudez – understanding vs explanation
If we consider a lowly bacterium, it is able to produce a semi-infinite range of behaviour in response to a continuum of very basic stimuli (such as light intensity). This range is restricted in kind to simple motion, and can be characterised in simple stimulus-response terms, but it consists of a continuum of directions and speeds.
Perhaps part of the problem with current conceptions of rationality is that they may conflate a number of components, which together give rise to what we consider to be rationality. This is a specific application of a broad idea currently popular in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, which goes under many names, including modularity, the multiple drafts hypothesis (Dennett), the society of mind. I will adopt Dennett’s terminology of ‘multiple drafts’, used to refer to concurrent, restricted processes or modules, which interact, influence each other and compete for control of the system. At different times, different modules will dominate, allowing us to react flexibly in a variety of situations, and to literally ‘contain multitudes’[3].
consider to what extent naturalism could be compatible with Nagel
problems:
can’t account for scientific rationality itself
domain in which you’re using it, ecological, e.g. theory of mind, mathematical, inferential … Tooby & Cosmides etc.
induction vs deduction???
Is it possible that the scientific and the logical domains of reasoning actually reflect fundamentally different rational processes??? Not really, the more I think about it.
If we could show that the demands placed on our reasoning are somehow less for naturalistic reasoning than for a priori or philosophical reasoning, then we might be able to accept a naturalistic account of the limitations of philosophical reasoning, while avoiding any attempts by philosophers to show that such arguments are self-refuting.
How can we understand this idea of levels of rationality? Is it simply that different domains of thought/discussion place greater or fewer demands on our intellect? That our brains just get them right more often? Or that they are somehow fundamentally, of their nature, easier to grasp, and their conclusions are easier to draw? Or even less satisfyingly, simply because we just have no choice but to take some things as given, otherwise our mental scaffold can never get off the (wholly skeptical) ground?
in a sense, I’m affirming that there are rational truths in the world, like modus ponens, while trying to explain how we can be capable (competent) of rational access and yet disagree and fail to apprehend such truths sometimes
My stated intention at the start of this paper was to investigate how easily a naturalistic framework and rational objectivism can accommodate each other. I was hoping and expecting to find that they were incompatible in certain fundamental, ineradicable ways. Given that I feel that we are far better scientists than philosophers, this would have further persuaded me that the reason we disagree on almost all non-empirical issues is that we are not sufficiently rational or powerful thinkers to make real headway in such areas. This would not necessarily be to dismiss out of hand the entire philosophical enterprise, but it would undermine it in those areas where there is no support from other disciplines to provide arbitration in disputes.
As it has turned out, I have found even a restrictive, contemporary naturalistic account to be surprisingly pliable with respect to our rational capacities.
Nozick’s account is attractive in a number of ways. It can be accommodated with minimal metaphysical commitments,
Its price is that it does not really face Nagel head on – Nozick is content to admit that he is not explaining rationality ‘from first principles’(???) – he is presupposing a degree of rationality in order to consider oneself rationally. And, as I will discuss later, this is the only position that I think we can take as philosophers. On the one hand, we face an empty, skeptical suspension of belief since we recognise that in order to hold any justified beliefs whatsoever, we first require a justified belief about our ability to form such beliefs. And yet, in suspending our belief, we have already recognised that this is the only rational option. In this way, Nagel’s characterisation of “thoughts that we cannot get outside of” is particularly appropriate.
In a way, it’s obvious that we could never monitor our entire brain – with what would we be doing the monitoring? Where can we stand that we can view our position from any position but our own? Can we turn our eyes back upon our own skull (in a more meaningful sense than just the eyeball-rolling party trick)?
So we have little choice but to accept that simply being able to frame the question of one’s own rationality is a sort of base condition for rationality. Doubting is, of necessity, a kind of rational thinking. Descartes’ cogito may thus serve instead to bootstrap us (or evidence that we have already boot-strapped) into knowledge of our own rationality.
Perhaps it’s not so much the doubting about questioning one’s own rationality, as simply being able to conceive of rationality at all. Perhaps the complex notion of rationality is its own key. Being able to conceive abstractly of context-independent, formal, generalisable methods and propositions, or perhaps the notions of context-independence, formality, generalisability, method or proposition collectively form the tip of a cognitive framework iceberg comprising a syntax-manipulating, representation-of-representation mind, even a fallible, specialised, evolved one.
Either way, the fact remains that there are discrepancies between the way we naturally think and the careful, academic, rational (e.g. mathematical) way. A common evolutionary explanation is that these discrepancies result from having evolved parochial inference mechanisms which exploit long-term regularities in our world, since real science and a generalised rational approach are expensive and slow, and because evolution selects specifically for fitness rather than truth. The questions that remain to be answered are whether our inferential mechanisms are sufficiently powerful in their generalising to qualify as rational, and if so, to what extent this is explicable in terms of a naturalistic picture.
is the above paragraph important???
This could be for a variety of quite prosaic reasons, such as the ones given above for the sportsman, as well as a few deeper and more specific ones. In the case of grammar, although we regard most speakers of the English language as competent grammarians, insofar as they can distinguish grammatical and ungrammatical sentences very reliably, our performance varies a great deal – we often make grammatical errors during the slapdash flurry of a casual conversation, including grammatical errors that we could identify as errors.
This leads convincingly towards a sort of reflective equilibrium view of human reasoning, where normative reasoning criteria are based on the intuitions of ordinary people. These intuitions have been systematically described in greater and greater detail, from Aristotle through to Frege, “constructing a coherent system of rules and principles by which those same people can, if they so choose, reason much more extensively and accurately than they would otherwise”. Thus, “human rationality, in the sense of the possession of a basic competence in judging inferences to be logically sound, follows from the fact that we can only know what the rules of logic are by comparing them to what people intuitively judge to be logically sound.”
We continually find that some concepts, arguments or ideas are more complicated, remote or difficult to grasp, follow or apply than others. I am not referring to the trivial fact that we have imperfect senses and finite, fading long-term memory. I am not really referring either to differences in deeper cognitive capacities, such as limitations on the complexity of syntax we can parse, levels of articulacy, varying success with arithmetic or abilility to imagine a scene. Rather, I am talking about fundamental restrictions and variations between how easy thoughts are to conceptualise, convey or fully absorb, or certain processes to follow and criticise. What we can conceive is bounded. This is so obvious to us that we scarcely consider its significance. Similarly, it is trivial to point out that different people’s abilities in these areas vary, and even a single person’s faculties wax and wane with diet, the number of hours of sunshine in the day and innumerable other factors.
It is an ineliminable aspect of our description of an omniscient being that it would find all such conceptual hurdles to be inconsequential. We cannot usefully speculate over whether such an infinite mind would consider all problems and concepts equally trivial, or whether it would recognise some to be harder than others but still confidently within its ability. Either way, the fact that we falter, and sometimes fail entirely, to follow new arguments is clear evidence that our rational understanding is bounded.
Furthermore, our bounded rationality is evidenced every time two intelligent, humble and well-meaning, sane and highly rational experts seeking a resolution on their topic meet to debate, and disagree. Sometimes, one convinces the other. Perhaps they will realise that they agree after all, and their disagreement was based on a minor definitional point. Often, especially in science, there simply isn’t enough data available to incontrovertibly confirm their respective hunches. Occasionally, they agree to disagree because the resolution comes down to an article of pre-rational faith, such as religious beliefs.
The charitable assumption implicit in these explanations of why the experts’ (who will label philosophers, since they make excellent case studies here) views are so often irreconcilable is that they simply have different ‘epistemic profiles’. This is a handily vague term that stretches over our entire framework of beliefs and desires, and masks a multitude of sins. It is intended to describe the ease or degree to which one accepts things as justified, or the nature of justification one demands. Different people might be more or less predisposed to employ formal logic, mathematics, a reasoned argument or speech, intuitions etc. as a means of justification. When our two philosophers continue to disagree then, it is because the sorts of justification they look for are different. One might regard the syllogism as mightier than the scientist, or have a penchant for the slightly mystical (e.g. panpsychism, belief in God). It might be that their inability to agree on the issue at hand rests on a long-forgotten willingness in their undergraduate days to adopt certain invisible background premises which have come to seem self-evident. One might point to the very small proportion of professional philosophers whose views have changed substantially in print over the course of their careers as evidence of this.
Ascribing their discrepancy of opinion to epistemic profiles is more charitable, and leaves more room for rationality than does the alternative – we constantly, unwillingly and unwittingly err in our reasoning. We pick these errors up regularly, or others do for us, but it seems quite possible that however powerful in some ways our reasoning capacity is, these are symptoms of what is at heart a jury-rigged composite of souped-up survival-enhancing behaviour modules. These fallacies take the form of mis-applications of definitions, erroneous steps in an argument, or simply the failure to infer all the possible conclusions from a given set of premises.
I don't think that any of the philosophers whom Cherniak accuses of idealising rationality would explicitly accept the premise couched in those terms. It is obvious that that would require infinite resources, since it would probably require analysing some belief-sentences that could not be stated, let alone understood, within the agent’s lifetime.
I now want to move away from empirical issues for the epistemological claim of reason to a few more general concerns about the limitations of our rational capacity that a theory of rationality needs to address.
bermudez
These are the paradigmatic rational thoughts for Nagel.
how does he show that they’re valid, as opposed to merely inescapable???
this is all very convincing – but how does it fit in with naturalism???
science has had a very good century, and looks to have a popular future – are the two compatible
even given our rejection of the ontological thesis, our technological success gives us cause to trust the thought processes that got us here, and so support the epistemological claims of both science and reason, and the ontological claims of both naturalism and reason
this would imply that the norms of reason and the nature of the universe are in some way linked
this is Nagel’s thesis, but from the opposite angle
If we want to better understand the development of abstract spaces, there are various simple basic cases to consider, starting with the senses. Experiments on patients with phantom limb syndrome demonstrate the somatosensory cortex’s plasticity, just as early experiments have been conducted on the redirection and processing of sound input through the visual cortex. More impressively still, infants whose left hemisphere (where the language centres are located in 98% of right-handed people) is lesioned, learn instead to speak by using the corresponding areas in their right hemisphere.
In neurophysiological terms, it is clear that our brains undergo various genetically-timed stages of progression, especially during our earliest years, initially forming an enormous profusion of synaptic connections that are subsequently pruned. This is not what I am really referring to –
I would like to emphasise a deeper problem about evolution for objectivists that Stich touches on. Evolution is not teleological – it does not modify towards an end-goal, but by producing various slightly different incarnations, each one a little bit more or a little bit less adaptive than its parents. Most modern biologists are gradualists, that is, they believe that a host of these tiny changes amount to large-scale improvements in the organisms, like a new organ. In contrast, saltatory explanation holds that sudden, marked ‘leaps’ (macro-mutations) drive evolution forwards. Assuming the gradualists to be correct, evolution suffers from what artificial intelligence researchers term the ‘hill-climbing problem’. In outline, this considers that the space of possibilities which evolution is exploring through natural selection working on population variation can be visualised as a landscape, in which the hills and mountains represent more optimal designs. If the mechanism of evolution progresses incrementally, visualisable as travelling in a continuous path uphill, then a population may become stranded on a nearby hill, unable to traverse to the nearby mountain (an optimal design) which is separated by a valley.
As a result, it is highly unlikely that any evolved system is ever wholly optimal. The empirical evidence given above only hints at the ways in which humans are manifestly sub-optimal thinkers. But I don't think that this means that there is no hope that we could be rational in the way that Nagel envisages? When I discuss the problem of generality for connectionism, and Cherniak’s attack on notions of ‘ideal rationality’, I will argue that a sub-optimal, finite system might nevertheless be able to make objectively valid claims.
It is worth noting as an aside that one of the reasons that Nagel considers evolution to be “laughably inadequate” as an explanation for how we might be able to engage with objective rational norms is that it would probably require us to be almost perfectly optimal, otherwise
Nagel’s response to this aligns with Plantinga in saying that “it is irrational to accept evolutionary naturalism, because if it were true, we would have no reason to rely on the methods by which we arrive at it or any other scientific theory”.[4] Even an account that is compatible with his objectivism can play no epistemic role in a justification of reason, unless it can be grounded itself on a basis other than that which it is seeking to prove.[5] However, without the assurance of substantive rational norms,
But this leaves us in an unsatisfactory limbo. Nagel is prepared to admit that he doesn’t have a proper positive response to the question of how we can “integrate such an attitude towards reason with the fact that we are members of a biological species whose evolution has been shaped by the contingencies of natural selection”. He seems to place his hope in the thought that “it is possible that rationality – the capacity to recognise objectively valid reasons and arguments – is a distinctively accessible member of the set of biological possibilities, one that becomes likely at sufficiently high levels of biological complexity”. He understates the truth when he says that “the theory of evolution as usually understood provides absolutely no support for this conception of ourselves [“as rational … and also as creatures who have been produced through Darwinian evolution”], and to some extent it renders the conception suspect.”
An evolutionary argument which did make an objectivist account of rationality less mysterious would be reassuring, but still would not ‘underwrite’ our use of reason in a reason-independent way. Ultimately, according to Nagel, “naturalistic accounts of reasoning” seek an external “understanding of the world [which] could close over itself by including us and our methods of thought and understanding within its scope”, but “this hope cannot be realised, because the primary position will always be occupied by our employment of reason and understanding … even when we make reasoning the object of our investigation”.
if you feel you can trust your reason, then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using it in explaining how you came to have it – this is what Nozick means when he says his explanation is not from first philosophy
Connectionist representations are not propositional at all. Our understanding of connectionist implementations of language is currently so basic that we can barely even speculate about how a propositional representation might be implemented in the brain. However, Nozick is highly specific about the sort of neural representations that he thinks might be hard-coded in the genome, and implies more generally that he thinks a whole host of regularities (or at least the neural architecture that would most probably lead to their development) could be genetically coded. As a result, I will briefly consider the debate over whether there could be quite specific hard-wired neural representations.
the fact that connectionist systems are function-approximators, and cannot be easily mapped onto each other is difficult to interpret in terms of either the ontological or epistemological theses of rationality
At the same time though, it may helpfully flesh out our conception of ourselves as rational beings, partly by restricting or constraining the number and type of possible explanations, and partly by providing a good idea of the sort of properties we should expect to find.
Hopefully, considering ourselves as connectionist-rationalists might give us a new approach to the problem of alternate rationalities (i.e. 'conceptual schemes'). I am thinking of the low-level differences between the brain of every human on the planet, despite being very similar macroscopically. In terms of the actual computation being performed, nobody thinks in exactly the same way. It is an empirical question how similar our brains are - but it is certainly clear that mapping an area from one brain to the corresponding location in another brain is far from easy (as neuroimaging researchers constantly find). It may be that these differences amount to more or less identical computational processes at a higher level. One might imagine such functionally irrelevant differences as being analogous to the difference between, say, 2(a + b) and 2a + 2b.
Perhaps, if we were able to say how people’s brains differ in terms of the computations being performed, we might eventually begin to trace a broad schema of computational approaches which qualify as rational, to a greater or lesser degree. In fact, a growing number of approaches seek an understanding of the mind in terms of numerous interacting components, moving away from the “monolithic internal models, monolithic control, and general purpose processing” of ‘classical AI’ (Brooks et. al (MIT), Dennett’s multiple drafts, Fodor’s modules). I will discuss some ideas for how these interacting cognitive components comprising ‘rationality’ might be taxonomised.
surely the underlying norms are the same – see Bermudez on ‘expression of contingent life’
Nagel seems to have found another explanatory gap – again between a set of inalienable first-person properties and the very different picture that a third-person scientific understanding seems to provide – this time though, the conflict lies between our own perceived rationality and an evolutionary explanation of our cognitive (and rational) processes
It all comes down to teleology - whether we must always progress towards something, or whether we can meander - in evolution as in communal rational acceptability.
Don’t forget that of course Stich’s arguments against the objectivist who wants to use evolutionary theory to support their argument can just as easily be turned against the subjectivist…
quote from Nietzsche about philosophers’ predilections (especially in epistemology) (BGE first book???)
do I want to ‘[starting] from a materialist, reductionist viewpoint’ (my abstract)???
how am I going to fit ‘naturalised epistemology’ and the kornblith introduction in with my introduction???
should I admit that my chosen 20th century framework is quite a personal one???
Smolensky point - non-monotonicity of sub-symbolic systems
in terms of (functional) components???
in terms of what we use it for, what role it plays in our behaviour???
what it’s applicable to, what role it plays in our cognitive economy – the relation between beliefs (+ reasons???), desires, will + action???
practical/theoretical
understanding/explanation + justification (Bermudez)
being able to conceive it (incorporate it within our conceptual scheme, i.e. having a broad enough one (or even being able to modify it)), being able to recognise (or produce) a valid argument, persuading others
how we get things wrong
why we find some concepts harder than others
the connection between concepts and arguments
the phenomenological character of rationality
the link between rationality, truth and justifiability
whether we can reason objectively
whether our reasoning is deductive, or intuitive, or creative, or random
psychological experiments showing our particular breed of (ir)rationality
examples of our super-rationality (e.g. maths and logic)
our slipups
whether we can or should reason differently
evolutionary theory
reflective equilibrium
pragmatic
reliabilist – truth-linked
self-evidence
phenomenological character of rationality
curiously, different authors use it to argue for opposing theses
Nagel and the objectivists’ requirements of a naturalistic account - What sort of naturalistic account do Nagel & co. need, in order for it to be compatible with their objectivism???
see how connectionism + evolution can inform our phenomenological perspective
e.g. it seems that we do a big wide search for the next step in our meditations, whittling down to the few that we’re conscious of, but it’s parallel constraint satisfaction not serial, and so in a way it settles into a groove that’s implicitly contained in our synaptic connections in some way
what if I was to make self-organisation my major naturalistic point???
parallels between symbolic approaches and rationality
a connectionist system is a Universal Turing machine, and so could just be the hardware implementation of a symbolic rational mode
symbolic-only approaches have made little progress in modelling any aspect of the mind, including the sort of broad rationality we’re talking about
rationality seems so intimately tied to things like creativity and analogy that maybe it requires some sort of sub-symbolic system
like evolution, connectionism is about self-organisation, and so gives an alternative demonstration of how our minds could be so adapted to our environment
put certificate in envelope
put everything (2 copies + certificate) in envelope addressed to ‘Chairman of the examiners – PPP’
read Nagel on Stich
read Nozick on Stich
re-read Raz
note Stich other chapters
note Nagel other chapters (science first)
type up other Nozick notes
expand on mutation and migration etc.
consider whether universal generalising requires absolute optimality
discuss Cherniak
not enough analysis
what is a ‘naturalistic account’???
is it possible that human reasoning evolved later than the first man (or carried on evolving) during our peripatetic charge across the globe, to enable to us to adapt each time to our new environments (in which case the most rational are probably the ones who reached their destination latest)
do I need to worry about the fringe bogeymen, like questions of objectivity, truth, knowledge, justification etc.???
am I at all interested in practical reasoning, ethics, beliefs + desires, action theory etc.???
what is ‘theory of knowledge’??? what is a ‘justification theory of knowledge’???
i like my idea of ratiocination as the origin of our notion of causation - my arguments about the private language argument undermining the idea that an insensible man could be rational miss the point - we are talking really about ourselves, ordinary normal people, and whether or not everyone gets their notion of causation from ratiocination and then projects it onto xp - this is particularly interesting given the erosion of boundaries between empiricism/rationalism etc (Quine, Davidson/Putnam etc.)
"Rationality is the faculty of judging rationality in our thoughts, rather than producing rational thoughts themselves. If we allow ourselves 'reason' in this sense, then we are allowing ourselves the faculty perceive indubitable order in the mental anomalousness, just as we can perceive order in the physical world." (me)
does it help to personify irrationality as the Evil Demon???
is a faith in reason necessarily a faith in regularity???
what are *reasons*??? ??? ???
if we're rational, why do we find formal logic + programming, for example, so hard???
is there any more to reason than a very quick. intuitive application of the scientific method to everything???
but that ignores reason's equally important role in assessing things, or is that just pattern recognising our internal model against the world in an non-'rational' way???
intuition vs reason (more commonly held intuitions)
the adaptive forces acting on a language may be different at different stages of its (and its speakers') development - e.g. initially to communicate, then shapes cognitive processes, allows cultural knowledge to be encoded etc.
delusions vs rationality
what is a reason??? it's a response to a question. for what is a question, but a demand for reasons...
does it have to be a why-question??? other q-types include: who, what, where, how, when
does it make sense to speculate that the other q-types also want reasons??? no, they fill syntactic (or base semantic) gaps. only 'why' demands 'because'
does 'why' have to come after all the other types then??? well, it certainly seems to help to have the concepts of agent, means, time + place - maybe you don't necessarily need all of them for every why-question
does 'why' require intention???
is there a way to link talk of reasons, reason, naturalism and causality, and Hume, together
a reason = a response to 'why'
how does that help, unless i can give a reason-independent definition of a 'why' question??? can i??? something to do with causes and normativity perhaps???
i want to explore the idea that a naturalistic account of reason and a reason-based account of naturalism are inter-dependent, and both rest on the objectivity of the other
is that true/do i mean that??? how is a naturalistic account of reason important??? i'm twisting it to mean a
reasons are perspectival accounts of happenings - they are causes (or at least they are couched in the language of causality)
they require a naturalistic, i.e. realist account to have any force
hang on, careful now - to what extent are naturalism and realism the same???
this seems to be straying away from my discussion of our rational capacities towards a discussion of the extent to which there is rational normativity in the world...
does saying that reasons are "couched in the language of causality" require them to be in any way actually about causality though???
reason vs a reason???
what do i mean by my fucking title???
normative /"n<revc>:m<schwa>tIv/ a.L19. [Fr. normatif, -ive, f. L NORMA: see -ATIVE.]1 Establishing a norm or standard; of, deriving from, or implying a standard or norm; prescriptive. L19. 2 Petrogr. Of or pertaining to the norm of a rock. E20.normatively adv. M20.normativeness n. M20.normativism n. a normative approach or attitude L20.normativist n. a person having normative ideas or attitudes M20.norma'tivity n. the quality of being normative M20.
where does Nagel talk about 'the last word' in the way that Tas described???
how is Nagel's 'thoughts that we can't get outside of' different from the normal attack on subjectivism as self-defeating???
i think my thoughts about forward/backward reasoning were unclear, and relied too much on the analogy in computer science and discrete problems of searching through a finite space
there seems to be a difficult applying a form (e.g. contraposition) to content/circumstances (e.g. in psychological experiments)
at the same time, we have to apply Nagel's conception of reason to what we know of our brains etc. and the world, in fact
how do NNs count???
different ethics for different stages of mental/communal development - perhaps Jesus' ethics place a higher demand on man than he was able to manage, but the ten commandments were easier and more appropriate - as technology and social ideas progress, so ethics will progress/run alongside
contraposition as a foundational reason??? he kind of says this, doesn't he???
are there reasons in arithmetic??? that's what axioms are
what sort of mental equipment does it take to consider reasons??? do you need to be able to express them linguistically??? is that the same as propositionally???
is it fair/useful to characterise reason in terms of seeing order (where it exists)???
“Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end--by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds” (p.213 of Nagel's Other Minds)
how does Nagel explain imperfection???
important to differentiate tween perfect/limited (i.e. *minimal*!), ir-/non- rationality???
check old misc notes for reason statements, go through my questions with a fine-tooth comb to come up with a new structure
is there a difference tween relativism + subjectivism??? pluralism??? do they all amount to the same thing??? in all domains??? is it to do with qualification, or no single perspective from which to judge, or what???
you know my feeling that Nagel only shows that reason is unavoidable, but not necessarily valid - i think his bits about skepticism in ch 6 sort of show that part of being unavoidable is that you can't avoid thinking of it as valid - but i'm still not convinced
deadline for thesis: 19 april!
how do I talk about objectivity without thinking about truth??? can you have objectivity without truth??? is this Rorty’s absolute/objective distinction???
is there a 2x2 matrix of pragmatism/(reliabilism/objectivism) and realism/antirealism??? or are some positions unoccupied???
reason as (the force of) justification???
what stronger forms of objectivism about reason are there???
what do I think is the weakest form that deserves the label ‘rational objectivism’ – surely there’s nothing much objective about relativist Darwinism???
‘that’ vs ‘which’???
how many years ago did we stop evolving???
what do philosophers of science make of paradigm shifts and the like – are they divided, universally agreed on saltation, or what???
punctuated equilibrium, macro-mutations and small changes (see Blind Watchmaker???)???
relation to the mind-body problem???
what’s the difference between universality and objectivity???
does functionalism refer to consciousness only???
do functionalists have to be materialists??? yes, to the extent that they hold that mental activity is describable as a (possibly complex, non-linear, hidden-representation etc.) *function*, that is to say, there is a determinate (and by implication, though perhaps not for sure, determinable) relationship between (sensory) inputs and (motor) outputs. In order to relate material inputs to material outputs, as is required by the body, then the functionalist pretty much has to think in terms of a material implementation of the intermediate function
rational objectivism is a bad name for what i'm talking about - i'm not talking about fabric-of-the-universe(???) norms, so much as our rational capacities
in doing this, and phrasing it like this, am i first assuming fabric-of-the-universe norms, and how does this change and straitlace me, and relate to truth etc.???
why do 'states' matter so much to the functionalist???
is this anything to do with the fact that a Turing machine needs states for its computational properties???
is the a + b + c example a good one???
to what extent is rationality a continuum???
what am i trying to do???
terminology!!!
is connectionism really part of our naturalistic framework???
y, surely – it just depends whether we’re talking about the strong or weak claim
in order for the discrete-like non-linearity to emerge, does it have to be a distributed representation, or is the non-linearity (e.g. of the activation function) enough???
is the fact that the brain is self-organising part of the generalisation/systematicity issue???
are the problems of generality and systematicity related to the difficulties of formal, context-independent symbols emerging in a connectionist systems???
I suppose you can imagine that a neural net which has learned to add two numbers together - but do those numbers have to be of a certain size – well, they have to be representable within the input vector – is that different from the way that we have limits on the size of numbers we can hold in our heads??? well, maybe, but that’s why we have algebra
merge evolution + connectionism???
how many neurons???
is reasoning syntactic???
to what extent are discreteness and generality related??? is generalisation the same thing as generality???
penrose
2 formal systems, watching each other???
how does the quantum help???
do I need to discuss Nozick, semi-innate ideas and genetically-coded neural representations???
When a connectionist system represents a proposition as a vector of synaptic weights, is it really understanding the proposition?
nietzsche quote in kinds of minds
what does Descartes mean when he says that the Cogito is not a syllogism???
what is the difference between evolutionary discussions and connectionist discussions???
evolution is about why humans as a species might/might not be rational, and connectionism is about how whether what we know about ourselves tells us about the extent of our rational capacities
to say that something can be expressed propositionally is to say that it can be expressed a tru-or-false sentence, i.e. linguistically, right???
to what extent are we searching a space – connectionist question
is it true to say that long-term disagreements arise more or less only in non-empirical discussions???
intuitive thinking??? association etc. in my ‘do machines think?’ essay???
better vs faster intelligence??? see ‘Coding a transhuman AI’
do you frame or draw an inference???
Simon’s ‘bounded rationality’???
schisms in opinion in grammar are branded dialects – but what happens if we get a schism between groups of reasonsers??? would Cohen then say that there are dialects of reason???
when we talk of degrees of rationality, how is that linked to degrees of objectivity???
the other problem with his comparison of grammar and reason is that language is a human construct – to what extent is rationality a human construct???
if it is, then to what extent would Nagel be happy with it??? and to what extent can Cohen really be dumped in with Dennett, Davidson etc.
if it isn't, then is it a good example – and how does Cohen show that our reflective equilibrium is converging on anything, and that that convergence is centred on truth???
part of rationality is its generality, and, you would think, its ability to abstract to allow us to compare things independent of context – if so, why according to Cohen do subjects suffer from ‘cognitive illusion’ when performing in unrealistic experiments???
am I confusing forward/backward, open/closed or conscious/unconscious reasoning??? are they the same???
am I confusing linguistic and propositional???
when we talk of degrees of rationality, how is that linked to degrees of objectivity???
theoretical vs practical???
is backwards reasoning simply instrumental reasoning???
performance/competence then levels of rationality, or the other way round??? Cohen then Cherniak
the burden is on Nagel to explain why we can't do the things that a perfectly rational being can do – this requires a naturalistic approach – in order to make his position intelligible, he has to explain why maths isn't trivial, rather than trying to appeal to our intuitions about our ability to appreciate a mathematical or logical truth from the content of the proposition alone
if rationality amounts to searching a space, then we aren't rational – what about if we employ special heuristics in some way???
where does reconceptualisation (i.e. restructuring the premises themselves, or re-forming one’s own abstract space, i.e. intellectual creativity, in a sense) fit in with forward/backward reasoning???
part of the reason for differing epistemic profiles is that language masks different assumptions for each of us???
lateral thinking is simply a type of forward reasoning, right???
are they qualitatively different???
if backward reasoning is a check on forward reasoning, then surely it’s only backwards reasoning we’re interested in??? well, to an extent, but if we’re feeling flummoxed and frustrated with philosophy, say, then it’s only correct forward reasoning that’s going to
forward reasoning as necessary for paradigm shifts
to what extent are all (Nagel’s) questions of rationality open to empirical study???
why don't we agree on backwards reasoning??? do we disagree on backwards reasoning more than forwards??? is this more of a problem???
why does Nagel think that the sceptical argument against reasoning about reasoning affects the subjectivist any more than the objectivist, or places the burden of proof any more in their court???
how does Nagel explain our imperfect rationality??? does he talk about cognitive/physical constraints???
Nagel’s definition hinges on what ‘(objectively) valid’ means???
does our cognitive system need to be completely fully optimal in order to be able to generalise universally???
is there anything about Nagel’s closing argument against evolutionary naturalism that restricts it to evolution, or is it equally applicable to cognitive science and all forms of naturalism???
he says that rational justifications may have to end somewhere (though not with ‘for me’ or ‘for us’) – what basis could they have that would satisfy us as to their universal legitimicacy???
need reason be universally applicable, as well as universally persuasive – that is, although a perfectly rational argument must be right for everyone, isn’t that different from saying that there must be perfect arguments that we can apply or conceive for ev