Bloggin The Question

Propositional Functions

2009-05-14T11:17:00.003+01:00

I do not claim to be a Frege Scholar, but I am interested in this distinction between propositions and propositional functions that Drew and Mark Textor talked about last night. My interest is of course epistemological and probabilistic. Take the assertion that:
Fido smokes.
Lets stipulate that there is a particular dog named Fido. Let's also disambiguate "smokes" so that it means inhales tobacco with the nicotine delivery mechanism known as "fags", not some wierdly tensed expression for the early signs of catching fire.
Now I gather that according to Frege there is a fundamental difference between "Fido" and "smokes", and we can pretty easily get a grip on what this difference is. One way of saying what the difference is is that Fido names an object, whereas "smokes" doesn't name anything but predicates of something. Therefore, in a sense, "Fido" stands alone, whereas "smokes" doesn't. Fido is complete, whereas smokes is incomplete. We can use the ontology of propositions to make this difference clearer. "Fido" names a dog, "Fido smokes" names a proposition (or a truth value) but "smokes" names nothing.
Drew made an interesting distinction between a variable and a gap. We can complete "smokes" with a variable easily. Someone smokes. Who smokes? Who smokes dies. If you smoke please do so outside. Smoking causes cancer. We can also names those who smoke "smokers". The thought begins to emmerge that "smokes" is little different from a collective name for all those who smoke. We can think of smokes as a set or class, constituted by its members. The only difference between "Fido" and "smokes" is that Fido names one thing, whereas "smokes" names many things.
Now we enter into epistemology. We have a grammatical trick for converting predicates into collective names. "Ravens are black", is no different in structure from "black things are ravens".
The switch involves a difference in meaning, but this is just because "are" is directional. Since there are more than one Raven and more than one black thing, we can see that these two statements fail to satisfy the law of excluded middle until we quantify the first term with "all" "some" "no" or any proportion or range. So "75% of Ravens are black" is true or false and this has a clear empirical meaning. The meaning is very different from "75% of black things are Ravens". A probabilistic account presents itself. "Ravens are black" is the probability X is black given x is a raven. We then can complete it by a number or a range. P(B R) = 0.75. for 75% of ravens are black. P(B R) = 1, for all ravens are black. P(B R) > 0 for some ravens are black, and P(B R) = 0 for no ravens are black.
Now I don't believe that "Ravens" or "black things" name sets, or are constituted by their extension. The reason I don't believe this is because we can understand and act upon P(B R) = 0.75 without being acquainted with all the ravens that every have been or will be, and without being acquainted with all the black things. All we need are two independent criteria, one for verifying that x is a raven, and one for verifying that x is black. Our belief P(B R) = 0.75 is justified by its success, without the need to be true or false. 0.75 is the success rate of inferences from x is a raven to x is black.
So we still have "x", we still have these objects that underlie everything. This is because Fido smokes does not work like this at all. Fido smokes is a stand alone proposition that automatically obeys the law of excluded middle. We might be able to wonder what P(smokes Fido). But it would be a mistake to think there is any objective answer to this other than 0 or 1. If we were forced to bet, we might consider the classes to which Fido belongs and derive a probability this way. P(smokes dog) is probably very low, I don't know the exact figure. But if we knew that Fido was a circus dog, then we might be better off using P(smokes circus dog) which could be a lot higher. However, both these probabilities would be informed by our coming to know propositions of the form Fido smokes. Finding out that Fido is a circus dog and that Fido smokes would inform our P(smokes circus dog). If our prior belief was 0, we could not thereby reject the testimony of our own eyes when we see Fido lighting up. Our experience of particulars are the foundations on which the whole edifice rests. It is through dogs like Fido that we learn about dogs, and philosophers like Socrates that we learn about Philosophers. But it is not through "smokes" that we learn about Fido, or through "is mortal" that we learn about Socrates.

Concepts

2008-07-25T22:03:00.002+01:00

CONCEPTS, THE REALLY CURRENT VIEW

Anneli Jefferson gave an interesting talk about the subject that I am most confused about: the meaning of concepts. It seems that even within London there is no shared idea of what concepts are at all. This is alarming since philosophy is sometimes thought to be about conceptual analysis.
So here is a brief statement of a view that we can call the epistemological view:
[1] A concept is individuated by its possession conditions.
Fodor apparently calls this the “Current View”
The other option, the “Classical view” is that
[2] A concept is individuated by whatever it is that the concept represents.
I think this could even be called the Current Current view and I’ve got a feeling it is what David Papineau holds.
Anneli seemed to think that the possession conditions of a concept are a list of beliefs that one has that include the concept. Something like a Ramsey sentence. The problems with this are twofold
1. Publicity. What if two people have different beliefs including the same concept?
2. Error. How can a belief containing a concept be wrong?
There are of course various ways of addressing these problems. One being molecularism, which has it that there are a subset of core beliefs that it is necessary to have to possess a concept. These core beliefs then constitute the concept.
Fodor seems to be defending a more extreme Atomism, which is a combination of the Classical view, with the idea that all that is required to possess a concept is to be able to use it to represent the things the concept refers to.
Here is an example of a person who can clearly make statements including the concept that are true or false without any beliefs including the concept at all.
Mary is blind and has been brought up in a language community that were careful to never use colour words around her. Then she is given a spectrometer that tells her what colour things are when she points it at them. Mary can now have the following thought. “I wonder if the rose in the vase is red? I bet it is” I argue that Mary wins the bet if and only if the rose is red. She has no beliefs concerning red things whatsoever. She would still win the bet if and only if the rose is red even if she sold her spectrometer. The mere act of selling a piece of machinery cannot change the truth conditions of your thoughts or utterances.
Also she can wonder if her spectrometer is faulty and reports that green things are red. This thought is true iff her spectrometer is faulty and reports that green things are red. To have a reason to believe this she would need some beliefs about red things, but you don’t need any reasons at all to entertain a hypothesis.
Anneli might argue that Mary does have a red containing belief and that is that the spectrometer detects red things. But Mary can suspend belief in the existence of red things, in which case she can suspend belief in the ability of the spectrometer to detect red things.
What is clear is that she can form hypotheses and make statements involving the concept red that have empirical content. To anybody who has some method of settling whether things are red or not, she can represent things as red, truly or falsely. Neither party need have any beliefs about red things at all, they need not even be committed to the existence of anything red. What is important is that there are beliefs containing the concept red that it is possible for Mary to know. Let’s call this the Really Current view.
[3] Concepts are individuated by bet settlement criteria.

DOES MARY HAVE THE CONCEPT RED? a short play.

JOHN: Pass the red folder.
MARY: Ok, here you are.
JOHN: What colour is your front door?
MARY: Red.
JOHN: What colour shall we paint the kitchen?
MARY: I don’t mind, you choose.

THE END

Aristotelian Society and Mind Joint sessions, a personal view

2008-07-14T22:51:00.002+01:00

A perspectival review of the Joint Sessions. By Jonny Blamey

In the Grim city of Aberdeen in perhaps the coldest July weekend I can remember, over two hundred philosophers gathered in what to me felt like a celebratary festival of rationality.
Kit Fine made an point about methodology in philosophy. He said that you could judge a theory internally, or externally. Internally means you look at the theory from the inside, examine how simple it is, and beautiful and neatly structured. Or you can judge externally, judge how well it does the job of explaining the facts that need to be explained, and how well it fits the facts. Fine suggested that philosophy too often judged theories internally, without paying attention to the facts.
But Kit Fine was talking about metaphysics! He was talking about whether when there is an alloy sphere, there are many things (pluralism) or one thing (Monism)! There are no facts in metaphysics! I thought that was the whole point of metaphysics.

I’m writing about Fitch’s paradox in my thesis at the moment, specifically about the debate between Williamson and Edgington. WIlliamson has got the last word, though I think it is clear that Edgington’s analysis is correct. I went and sat next to her and she said that she had just finished writing an article about it, since many people had nagged her to reply to Williamson’s 1987 paper. She said she’d send me a copy. In general philosophers are good people, and good philosophers are really good people. Dorothy Edgington has got to be one of the best living philosophers. You can see where this is going.

At lunch I sat next to someone I didn’t know and he asked me my name. When I told him, he said “Oh, you’ve just had an article in “Think”. This was genuinely news to me. I didn’t realise it had come out yet. What pleasure! It turned out that he was Julian Baggini, the editor of The Philosopher’s Magazine, who publish Think, so it wasn’t that surprising that he had read my article. We all got a copy of TPM for free at the entrance to the conference, and it is really good. I recommend a subscription to anyone who seriously loves philosophy.

I saw a mysterious looking man called Martin Cooke from Glasgow present a paper on a physically possible supertask that he thought proved that propensity theories were contradictory, or physical tendencies were, if there is a difference. There were a lot of structural similarities with the 2 envelope paradox, so I went over and started talking to him at lunch. We talked for quite along time before we realised that he had actually commented on Blogginthequestion! Under the pseudonym Enigman!
“So you are Enigman!” I declared and shook him firmly by the hand.

Another blog commentator in the graduate sessions was Lee Walters, who gave a talk on Morgenbesser’s coin and counterfactuals, a topic that has been thrashed on Blogginthequestion. I may make the grandiose claim that anything on at the Joint session, you are likely to have read on Blogginthequestion first, but I shan’t because it is false unless you have very low standards for “likely”, I reckon somewhere on 1/25. Dorothy Edgington asked a question and Lee responded with a counter argument that her objection was inconsistent with her general views, revealing that he had read practically everything she had written on the subject.

There was a Society for Women in Philosophy session, which is something I find conceptually interesting. They made it clear that every philosopher was welcome to attend. There were four talks, one male speaker, and one talk with absolutely no relevance to feminism, other than that the speaker was female.

The first talk was about Iris Murdoch and how she made very little mention of the fact that she was of the first generation of women who had been allowed in philosophy. There is something that makes me sad about Iris Murdoch, and perhaps a little angry, and Marije Altorf gave informed and articulate voice to these concerns. Her point was that although Murdoch was a great philosopher and an outstanding novelist, the biographies that came out after her death made very little mention of how she came to write her philosophical work “The Sovereignty of good”, concentrating much more on her sexual exploits and her senile dementia. Although it is inevitable in a biography that the biographer will discuss the sex life of the subject, you would think that any decent biography of a Philosopher as great as Iris Murdoch would pay considerable attention to the development of her ideas. Of the three biographies, there was little more than a page on her position in the history of philosophy and literature. This is really shocking, and forces me to accept the reality of a culture of sexism in philosophy. I told Marije about our Kalbir Sohi’s grad seminar talk and said she’d look him up.

Another interesting talk in this session was from Lina Papadaki from Birkbeck on Pornography. Now here was a talk that no one could deny was dripping with gender tension. The talk was (to over simplify) basically a refutation of the quite extreme view of Malinda Vadas and Catharine MacKinnon that when men use objects as women, the objects become women, since objects are constituted by their use, and this leads to an objectification of women in general, which then makes consent seem morally irrelevant. The talk was fascinating from a metaphysical point of view and an ethical one. If an object becomes a women, why is then consent irrelevant? What was also interesting was the question period, because to get at the issues involved talking about effective masturbation techniques, which has got to be the greatest taboo. Over all I was impressed by the very fact that the discussion was possible, although there was a bit of a gender division afterwards when all us men scurried off to compare notes on various pornography.
In the bar I met Dr Philip Goff, who, the last time I saw him, was looking for work. Now he’s got a job lecturing in Birmingham, so it does happen! People do get jobs in Philosophy. Also it turned out that he was teaching Florian Demont, who is coming to KCL next year and will be attending the Philosophy of probability seminar.

My own session was very intense (from my point of view). I was fourth and last and the session was the last of the conference and I was completely over stimulated. Everyone of the three proceeding talks were about the effects of Stakes in knowledge!! This is the very topic that I gave a talk about in St Andrews two years ago and is the main topic of my thesis. I couldn’t help it, but I lost control of my emotions. I was trembling, my mouth went dry, my eyes on fire and I had a bubbling up of passionate rage. Peter Baumann in the first talk expressed an objection to Stanley’s Subject Relative Invariantism in a brilliantly and beautifully clear and simple way. Briefly its this.

Stanley and Hawthorne both look at a timetable and then get on a train that the timetable says stops at Toy town. It is desperately important to Stanley but not important at all to Hawthorne that the train stops at Toy Town (TT). So, though they have the same evidence, Stanley doesn’t know (TT) but Hawthorne does. Now Stanley, using his own theory works out that Hawthorne knows that (TT). But if Hawthorne knows that (TT) then from factivity, (TT) is true. SO, if Stanley knows that Hawthorne knows, then Stanley knows that (TT). But Stanley doesn’t know that TT, therefore SRI leads to contradiction.

Baumann himself pointed out the obvious counter to this objection, that Stanley doesn’t know that Hawthorne knows (TT), since Stanley himself doesn’t know (TT). At best Stanley knows that Hawthorne will correctly attribute knowledge to himself if (TT) is in fact true. But if (TT) is not true, then Hawthorne will falsely attribute knowledge to himself. But, by hypothesis, Stanley doesn’t know whether or not (TT) is true, so Stanley doesn’t know whether or not Hawthorne knows (TT). Baumann seem to think this counter doesn’t work, since, when Stanley is judging Hawthorn’s knowledge, then the stakes are lower, since whether Hawthorne knows or not is of little importance to Stanley. But I don’t think this works, since it involves shifting Stanley’s interest in the matter. Anyway, I got quite worked up.

I didn’t calm down during the next two talks. I even started ranting a bit, and got the killer “Is that a question?” from Burcu Erciyes. I was in what psychologists used to call “A high state of arousal”, my dopaminergic system was glowing like a Christmas tree. The third talk was by Christoph Kelp, and I was so giddy that I could scarcely listen, my head filling with white noise. It didn’t stop me from raising scatter gun objections.

My turn came and I had an amazing lucid moment where I saw my whole thesis like a crystal in all its awe inspiring over ambitious beauty. I also saw painfully the impossibility of explaining it all in twenty minutes to an audience of people who I had just recently viciously attacked. However I gave it a pretty good shot, and though no one, I suspect, did understand it, the wonderful Herr Baumann did ask some brilliantly pertinent and general questions, which I answered in full pulpit mode and felt like I’d got at least a glimmer of my wider picture across.

It turned out that Kelp had got the job that I think was made for me, in the formal epistemology project in Leuven. I’m thinking about going for a visit.

I talked to Alison Hall, from UCL who gave one of the graduate sessions on linguistics and I told her all about our hero Tim Pritchard. She had heard of him through reputation, and was going to a conference where he was giving a talk somewhere glamorous, Geneva?

Ned Block’s talk rounded off the formal events, and it was so well presented it felt like going and seeing a hollywood film. It was about change blindness with slides. Block reckons that there is evidence of accessible phenomenal content that is not actually accessed, whereas I guess the mainstream view is that in change blindness there is no phenomenal content whatsoever. I wonder if you could rig up some kind of Fitch’s argument to show that in this case there is phenomenal consciousness that is necessarily inaccessible.

To round off the conference we all went to the bar where everyone is friendly and everyone know lots of interesting things, and then we went to a pub which was the same, then we got kicked out of there, got threatened by a professional boxer who used to be in the army, then ended up talking about the fact that Philosophers should get paid huge salaries whilst drinking gin in armchairs in a private granite house. I was thinking, this is it! This is it! And in my mind I flew thrice round the globe in an ecstasy of optimism.

Address to the Hampstead Humanist Society

2008-06-30T16:51:00.006+01:00

This is a paper I gave to the Hampstead Humanists' society. Any Humanists who have any questions or wish to raise any points are more than welcome to add comments. To do this, scroll to the bottom. Click were it says comments, add your comment in the box. Click "anonymous" or "other". Please add your name in the comment at the top. Fill in the word recognition box. (its there to filter out spam). Sometimes you have to do this twice. Of course, you don't have to be a humanist to add a comment!

CONCIOUSNESS AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF. Jonny Blamey 29.06.2008

The aim of this talk is to dispel a philosophical myth and this myth is the myth of the self, where the self consists in consciousness. In order to effectively dispel a myth it is best to say what the myth actually is, and to check whether anybody believes it in the first place. So here goes:

THE MYTH OF THE SELF.

The myth is that we all have an inner world which is transparently available to ourselves but invisible to everyone else. This world is the world of our consciousness. Without this world there would be nothing that corresponds to our self, and we would not exist in a first personal way. In this world are all our thoughts, our beliefs and desires, our emotions, our sensations and even the way things look to us and taste. Nobody else has access to this inner world but our selves. No one can know our thoughts, our emotions or even how things appear to us. According to this myth we are completely alone in our inner world.

Once we adopt the Myth of the Self, many problems instantly arise. How do we know that anyone else has this inner world, given that we have no access to it? All we have access to is our own inner world. And in that world are various sense impressions or sense data. These consist in patches of colour and light and shade, sounds and smells. From this raw data we build up pictures of whole bodies and in this way we can observe the behaviour of other people. But according to the Myth of the Self, we cannot deduce from these impressions that any body has thoughts and feelings like our own. For all we know, we could be alone in a planet of Zombies, who, although they move around and talk, have no consciousness. Why is this possible? Because we know about our own inner life though introspection, we are conscious of our beliefs and desires directly in a way that gives us certainty. But other people we only know about through exteroception, we only can guess at their inner life. We can only hope that they too have feelings and emotions like ours, we can never be certain. This is the myth of the self. It is the myth that we know everything about ourselves and nothing about anybody else.

The Myth of the Self has some very undesirable consequences. One of them is tied up with religion and morality and I think is relevant to Humanist concerns. The consequence I am talking about is the primacy of Self interest. If we adopt the Myth of the Self then it seems to follow easily that the only real motivation for anything is self interest. This is because action is motivated by beliefs and desires, and beliefs and desires exist only in the inner world. Fundamental desires, like the desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure, are therefore also only in the inner world. Since we have no access to these beliefs and desires in other people, we are not motivated to act in anyone’s interest but our own. This self interest is assumed in most economic models and in biological models as well. When people don’t act in their own best interest it is assumed that they are behaving irrationally. It is a consequence of the Myth of the Self that it is only possible to act rationally in one’s own self interest, since one does not have access to the beliefs and desires of others, so one cannot act upon them. Obvious acts of altruism, like common kindness and decency, are thus in need of explaining. But the Myth of the self has no problem here. If one acts in someone else’s interest it is because one has made their interest into ones own interest. A mighty example of this is in the religious answer to the question “Why be moral”. In another form: Why should I refrain from hurting Adam if hurting him is in my interest? A religious answer would be because Adams pain will be avenged by a judgemental God, and that God will make me suffer as I made Adam suffer. So in the end my motive from refraining from hurting Adam is just another Self motive and the Myth of the Self is preserved. The Myth of the Self is dangerous because it makes ordinary morally good behaviour appear irrational and in need of explanation.

BELIEFS, DESIRES AND ACTION

To dispel the Myth of the Self I will show that when we think about it correctly it is clear that we are often conscious of other peoples so called “inner world”, and sometimes we can even be conscious of someone else’s beliefs and desires when they themselves are not. We can feel other people’s feelings without their feelings therefore becoming our feelings. We can act on other peoples desires without them becoming our desires and we can accept other people’s beliefs without them becoming our beliefs.

To do this I need to give a brief account of what beliefs and desires are, and what it is for us to be conscious of them. Beliefs and Desires are mental entities and therefore, according to the Myth of the Self, are accessible to our consciousness but are inaccessible to anyone else. But beliefs and desires issue in action and actions happen in the public world that is accessible to everyone through light and sound. Beliefs and desires are in the mind, whereas actions are in the world. For example, I believe my hat to have fallen on the floor. I desire that my hat should be on my head, so I act: I pick up the hat and put it on my head. The belief and desire came first, and they were in a way invisible. But they caused the action, and the action is perfectly visible. A belief is a kind of representation of how the world is. A desire is a representation of a way the world ought to be. So in general we believe what is true, and want what is good, or at least we try to.

Now it is perfectly clear that, even according to the myth of the self, we can be conscious of other people’s beliefs and desires in a kind of indirect way. But all this means is that we believe that other people have desires, and we are conscious of those beliefs. Suppose Susan were to see me pick my hat and put it on my head. It would be easy for her to deduce that I wanted my hat to be on my head, and that I believed it to have fallen to the ground. So in her inner consciousness she is conscious of me picking up my hat and she is conscious of her belief that I desire it to be on my head. But she is not conscious, according to the myth of the self, of my desire to put it on my head. Because if she was, then it would be necessarily her desire because one cannot be conscious of anyone else’s desire but one’s own. The difference between believing someone to have a desire, and being conscious of that desire, is that when one is conscious of a desire, then that desire has a motivating force. One is conscious of the motivating force in its effect on one’s action. To be conscious of a desire is to be conscious of a reason to act. To simply observe that someone has a particular desire in no way constitutes a reason to act in order to satisfy that desire.

The same distinction can be made of beliefs. I can be conscious in an indirect way that Susan believes that the winning lottery numbers will be 17 23 43 65 79. But, given that I desire to win the lottery, this does not motivate me to buy those numbers. Whereas if I was conscious that I believed those numbers would win, then I should be motivated to rush out and buy them immediately. According to the myth of the self, I can only be motivated in this way by my own beliefs, since these are the only ones that I can be conscious of directly.

CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE BELIEFS OF OTHERS

So according to the myth of the Self, we can only be conscious of our own beliefs directly, and other people’s beliefs indirectly. This means that if it can be shown that we can be directly conscious of the beliefs of other people, then the Myth of the Self is proven to be false.

The place to start is to observe that quite often we are not conscious of our own beliefs. I do not just mean suppressed Freudian type unconscious beliefs, but also everyday background assumptions that we don’t even think about. For example, how many times in a day do you presuppose that the person you are talking to can understand English? For most of the people that you talk to, you already know they speak English. You’ve talked to them many times before and they’ve never had any difficulty understanding what you say, so it is perfectly reasonable to believe that they understand English. If you didn’t have this belief, then you would act differently. You wouldn’t talk to them in English, or perhaps you would talk slowly with accompanying hand gestures. So this belief has a causal influence on your behaviour.

But are you conscious of this belief?

Not necessarily. It is not obvious that this belief is a part of your consciousness, accessible only to you and to no one else. The act of talking to someone involves all sorts of assumptions, and although these assumptions are in some way being made, it can’t be that we are conscious of all of them. Most of these background assumptions are correct, otherwise the conversation would break down and end in misunderstanding. But it just can’t be that we are conscious of all these thousands of necessary background beliefs.

Here is a little story:

Hans is a German on holiday in the Falklands. Hans does not know what language people speak in the Falklands. He goes into a pub where he sees Jim talking English to Joan, the attractive woman at the bar. Hans realises that Jim believes that Joan can understand English, and thereby Hans deduces that English is the language of the Falklands. This belief has an effect on Hans’ behaviour since from this point on he will initiate conversations in the Falklands in English.
In this little story, Jim’s belief that Joan can understand English is in Hans’ consciousness, but not in Jim’s consciousness. Notice that Hans does not even have to believe that Joan can speak English for this belief to be in his consciousness. Perhaps he has already discovered that Joan can’t understand a word of English. He can still be conscious of Jim’s belief and make the inference that English is the language of the Falklands, without actually believing himself that Joan can speak English.

When we engage in a good conversation, there are many beliefs we hold in common. Normally the beliefs we hold in common are not the subject of the conversation, why would they be? Because they don’t need to be said, or argued for, they are not present before our minds. We are not conscious of them. It is undoubtably true that such common beliefs exist. Without them we would not be able to communicate at all.

But under the model of the mind presented in the Myth of the self, this seems incredible. If my own beliefs are directly accessible to me through introspection, whereas I can only infer your beliefs from your behaviour, how could I ever know that we have the same beliefs? And how could the beliefs really be the same at all?

CONSCIOUSNESS OF OTHER PEOPLES DESIRES

Can we be conscious of other people’s desires? According to the myth of the self, we can only be indirectly conscious of the desires of others, but we are directly conscious of our own desires. It is only through this direct consciousness that a desire has any motivational force. On this picture the consciousness of a desire is in and of itself a reason to satisfy it. But while we can be indirectly conscious of the desires of others, we cannot feel their motivational force.

Now I think this is just flat wrong, and it is easy to come up with examples where a person is not conscious of their own desire while a third party is directly conscious of the desire’s motivational force.

It is best to break this down in to stages. The first stage is to give cases where a subject is directly conscious of their own desire without recognising its motivational force. Here’s another simple story: Fred has recently given up smoking. Bert offers Fred a cigarette using the conventional phrase “Do you want a cigarette?” Fred is honest and does not want to lie to Bert. He introspects. He is conscious of his desire to smoke a cigarette and so answers Bert’s question literally: “Yes I want a cigarette.” But he does not take one, because, although he recognises that he wants a cigarette, this desire has no motivational force. It does not provide him with a reason to smoke. In fact, in a way, its very strength provides him with a reason to be more resolute in his decision to stop smoking. Still, we want to say that he is conscious of his desire to smoke and that this desire is painful. Bert can recognise this desire and the pain it causes and resolve not to offer Fred any more cigarettes. Or alternatively, if Bert is not interested in Fred’s project of giving up smoking, Bert may try to persuade Fred to take a cigarette, since Bert himself may feel the motivational force of Fred’s desire in a way that Fred doesn’t.

ORDERS ARE NOT PROPOSITIONS

Wittgenstein, when he wrote the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, made the observation that there is a lot more to language than propositions. Propositions are whatever is capable of being true or false. The philosophical background to Wittgenstein’s change in direction is complicated and controversial. Simply put the project of analytical philosophy exemplified in Wittgenstein’s earlier work, the Tractatus, had been to analyse language in terms of truth conditions of sentences. But a moment’s thought reveals that many sentences do not have truth conditions at all. One species of sentence that do not have truth conditions are Orders. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein uses the example “Bring me a yellow flower!”

If we attempt to translate this into a proposition, with the myth of the self, we can suggest that such an order is actually the expression of a desire: “I desire that you bring me a yellow flower”. Or perhaps a threat “If you do not bring me a Yellow flower, then I will punish you.” The first is a report of an inner mental entity that the speaker is conscious of through introspection. The latter is a conditional prediction. As such both are either true or false and are therefore propositions. But why should we even try to translate orders in this way? In seems that if anything is basic to the use of language, it is an order.

SATISFYING THE DESIRES OF OTHERS

Here is another story. Princess Beth tells her faithful knight Alfred to bring her a yellow flower. Alfred knows exactly what she means. He goes off and searches for a yellow flower. The Princess does not think much of Alfred and quickly forgets all about him and her order. Alfred however is unshakably obedient to Beth and his consciousness is filled with his mission to fetch a yellow flower. Meanwhile her consciousness is filled with Sir Cuthbert, the dashing Red Knight.

Alfred is conscious of the Princesses desire and feels its motivational force. Her desire fills his consciousness and guides his actions. When he finds a yellow flower and brings it back, he will feel the satisfaction of her desire. Yet the Princess, once she has issued the order, need do nothing further. She need not even be conscious that the order has been satisfied. But it was her desire that was satisfied, not his. At no point do we need to suppose that Alfred wanted to fetch a yellow flower. If he had wanted to do this on his own account, then it would not have been a demonstration of his blind loyalty.

To put this into a more mundane setting, suppose Beth was a business women and Alf was a keen employee. Beth tells Alfred to organise a party for the employees to show the companies gratitude for their good work. However, she asks him to do it when she is away, since she finds such events painfully embarrassing. She also tells him to just get on with it and not trouble her with the details. Consequently she forgets all about it. Alfred organises a fantastic party and it is a great success. The employees feel valued and are more productive as a result. In this case, Alfred has satisfied Beth’s desire, and this is true whether or not Beth even bothers to enquire about the employee’s party. The desire, its motivational force and its satisfaction are all present in Alfred’s consciousness, whereas Beth is not conscious of the desire at all. But the desire is still Beth’s. Alfred may have had the opinion that employee’s parties are a waste of time and not wanted to organise one at all. In this story Alfred is conscious of Beth’s desire while Beth is not conscious of it. The desire, however, is Beth’s not Alf’s.

The most important species of consciousness of other people’s desires is in charitable giving. I am not talking about writing a cheque for Oxfam, I’m talking about acts that are aimed at satisfying someone else’s desire with no ulterior motive.

The story here is that Alfred is talking very earnestly with Fred about a game of football he watched. He is so engaged in his conversation that he does not notice that he is really thirsty and wants a drink of water. Beth, however, does notice that Alfred wants a glass of water, and without a thought for herself she pours him a glass of water and sets it at his elbow. Alfred picks up the glass and drains it off in a single swig. Alfred is so engaged in his conversation that he is not even aware that he is doing it. Beth, however, sees how his thirst is quenched and feels the satisfaction of it.

In this story, Beth became conscious of Alfred’s thirst, consciously took action to satisfy it, and was conscious of its satisfaction. Alfred however, was never conscious that he was thirsty, nor that his desire for water was satisfied. However, the desire for water was Alf’s, not Beth’s. Beth did not want to give Alfred water. She gave him water because he wanted water.

CONSCIOUSNESS OF WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE FEELING

So it seems we can be conscious of other people beliefs and desires in a way that motivates us, even if they themselves are not conscious of those beliefs and desires.. But can we be conscious of other people’s feelings? The Myth of the Self says no, but once again I think the Myth of the Self is wrong.

In the previous examples it was already apparent that we can be conscious of the satisfaction of other peoples desires, desires that we are in the business of satisfying. When we are set a task by somebody, or organise a surprise for somebody or help somebody get something they want, we feel a sense of satisfaction, and this feeling is the satisfaction of their desire.

Compassion is possible. Compassion involves feeling somebody else’s feelings with them. People are more or less compassionate and some people have no compassion at all. Those with no compassion are considered to be mentally deficient and are diagnosed as psychopaths. The Myth of the Self can have no account of compassion. If other people’s suffering is inaccessible to us, then how can anybody be anything other than a psychopath? People in the grip of the Myth of the Self tend to think of themselves as being sensible and realistic. Economists and Biologists act as if the Myth of the Self is hard fact. But how realistic is it to suppose that we are all psychopaths?

Cruelty is also difficult for the Myth of the Self. It is well known that children are cruel. Then can spot very quickly when a certain phrase will cause somebody discomfort or embarrassment and repeat it endlessly. School bullies also delight in the physical suffering of their victims. In darker days, physical punishments meted out by the state drew large crowds. In Roman times the citizen would pay to watch people eaten alive. What is this cruelty? The simple answer is that it is the taking pleasure in someone else’s pain. But if people’s feelings are inaccessible, hidden from view, then what are these people taking pleasure in? Surely it is not the wincing of the face, or the flailing of the arms. These are just the signs of pain. The bully is exalting in the pain he is inflicting in itself. And it is an important part of this exaltation that the pain is felt by someone else. The bully has to be conscious of the feelings of another.

Can one feel somebody else’s happiness? Yes. Here is a story: A couple of newly weds who’ve just come in to a pile of money burst into a room babbling their good news and the whole room brightens up. Even poor Mavis who is terribly alone and grieving for her dead husband starts to smile.. Mavis can still feel the happiness of the young couple, and for a moment forgets her own grief. She is not feeling her own happiness, because she is unhappy. She is feeling the happiness of the young couple and their good luck.

Perhaps easier than happiness is laughter. Laughter is renowned for being infectious. What is it to be conscious when you are laughing? It is certainly a good thing. I even think that it is perhaps the best form of consciousness. A distinction is often made between laughing with someone or laughing at them. What is it to laugh with someone? Sometimes lovers or friends can just look at each other and begin laughing for no apparent reason, and laugh this way for a long time. Whole comedy audiences can laugh together at some shared joke. Pre lingual infants can laugh. When you are fully conscious of someone else laughing, then you often can’t help laughing yourself. Laughter is by its very nature shared. It doesn’t seem to fit the model of an inaccessible private feeling. Yet it feels like something to laugh. It feels good.

Can one be conscious of friendship? Of course. Sometimes people yearn to talk to their friend or even just enjoy being silently in their company. What are they yearning for? They are yearning for the presence of their friend, and this is something consciously felt. When you are conscious that your friend is walking behind you, it is the friend who is in your consciousness. Not such and such a view of their body or such and such a facial expression. This consciousness of your friend is not a feeling of friendliness that only you are aware of and is hidden from view. You are conscious of your friend and that they are your friend and that the friendship is mutual. Friendship is impossible according to the Myth of the self, since the mutual feeling involves an infinite regress. I infer from his actions that he infers from my actions that I infer from his actions that etc. etc. etc. But people are friends and so we must be able to directly apprehend this relation. The Myth of the Self cannot tolerate friendship.

Much the same can be said of love. In fact love is the vehicle by which we can become conscious of the beliefs, desires and feelings of another. The examples I have given do not involve telepathy or anything mysterious like this. I leave it to neuro scientists to learn how it is we can be conscious of the minds of others. But it is abundantly clear from my own experience that when someone loves someone, they can often know exactly what they are thinking and feeling, and what is more, feel the motivational force of their desires and the credible force of their beliefs. It is a common phenomena that a man and wife will have a furious row over some trivial disagreement, a disagreement that they would shrug off in a stranger. Why is this? A contradiction in the shared beliefs of lovers is an intolerable thing. They can feel the credible force of their own beliefs, and equally strongly the credible force of their spouse’s beliefs. Agreeing to disagree is not an option, because both beliefs have a motive force in one consciousness. Without love, then it may be that the beliefs and desires of others are truly inaccessible. The myth of the self ignores the possibility of love.

Love, laughter, happiness and suffering it seems we can share. But these are complex things, and maybe a good proponent of the myth of the self will have a complex answer to all of these points. A much simpler feeling is raw physical pain. Is it possible to feel someone else’s pain? Surely pain is a private thing that only the person who is in pain can be conscious of? Philosophers of love and laughter are few and far between, but, especially since Wittgenstein, Philosophers of pain are two a penny. And the myth of the self, as I am calling it, is of such consensus with regard to pain that it is reported as fact without argument in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of philosophy. Here are two quotes:

“Like other experiences as conscious episodes, pains are thought to be private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge
Pains are said to be private to their owners in the strong sense that no one else can epistemically access one's pain in the way one has access to one's own pain, namely by feeling it and coming to know one is feeling it on that basis”
[Murat Aydede (2005). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pain/]

The Stanford reports this as the common sense theory of pain. But is this common sense?

Here is a picture of what it would be like to feel someone else’s pain. I see someone bump their head and my experience includes a painful feeling. Surely I am not alone in seeing someone bump their head and feeling the pain myself. I am not some telepath, or extraordinary person. Even the most low brow football fan can be heard to say “Ooh, I felt that,” when seeing a particularly nasty tackle. When carried away by a film we can feel the pain of various sympathetic characters. Not as our pain, but as their pain. It is common enough in films and doubtless in real life too, that when a violent man wants to extract information from someone who is strong enough to resist torture, they will instead torture the girlfriend or the children, since it takes a different kind of strength to ignore the pain of your loved ones. The logic of this needs no explaining to men of violence, but to philosophers of the mind it is unaccountable. What is worse: being tortured, or knowing that your wife is being tortured? According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy this is not a well formed question since pain is essentially private, so you can never know that your wife is in pain.

Perhaps I will be accused of playing with words here. It is one thing to prefer to suffer yourself than to have someone else suffer. It is another thing to be able to literally feel their pain. But if a cinema showed someone getting their fingers jammed in a door and there is a collective sharp intake of breath from the audience, is it really playing with words to say that the audience felt the pain? Of course it wasn’t their pain they were feeling, they felt the pain of the person in the film. Perhaps a proponent of the myth of the self would want to say that the audience weren’t literally feeling the pain. But if they weren’t literally feeling the pain then what? Were they symbolically feeling the pain? Metaphorically? Were they going through the motions? None of this makes sense to me, let alone common sense.

Perhaps this idea of the privacy of pain is a result of philosophy being done in lonely offices and bedrooms. When a philosopher wraps his knuckles against his desk while writing an article about pain, then it is true that no one else felt his pain apart from himself. But then no one else could see him wrap his knuckles against the desk either. It is not his feeling of pain that is essentially private, but his office.

The idea that pain is epistemically private also results from of a kind of naïve picture of how the body works. I have a nerve that runs from my toe to my brain, so when I stub my toe, the pain messages go from my toe to my brain. But when Jack stubs his toe, there is no nerve that goes from Jack’s toe to my brain. Therefore I cannot feel his pain. This is a kind of Victorian plumbing model of consciousness.

This simple argument involves accepting this simple model of pain. But the simple model doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It is appealing, but it is not scientific. It is easy to disprove it. If we could only feel pain when there was a nerve connecting the painful area to the brain, then there could be no phantom pain. Phantom pain is when an amputee feels pain in an absent limb. There is no nerve where he feels the pain. Such a patient is still thought of as being in pain. The naïve model of pain that asserts the privacy of felt pain would deny that phantom is really pain at all.

Another reason to suspect the model of being false is the consideration that pain can be abated by distraction. A tooth that throbs appalling in a darkened room, can be completely forgotten about when the room fills with people. But presumably the nerve signals from the damaged tooth are constant, so why is there a variation in the pain?

One cannot deny the phenomena just because it doesn’t fit in with one’s theory. We can be conscious of other peoples feelings, beliefs, desires and motives. How we do this is a matter for scientists to work out. An interesting aside here is that there are quite plausible hypotheses that link emotional experiences to status. In the human case, one can be directly conscious of the status of somebody else and this consciousness will be causally effective in one’s attitudes toward them. (fawning to high status, condescending to low status) This status awareness is well documented in other animals and zoologists have little difficulty spotting “Alpha Males” and dominance hierarchies. Some very convincing experiments have shown that status is directly correlated to blood serotonin levels. So much so that in experiments on Rhesus monkeys it was found that one could artificially increase the status of a particular individual monkey by merely increasing its serotonin levels. (For a way in to this research go to this web address: Mhttp://nazaggression.tripod.com/brainfunction.html). The question might be asked “how can the other monkeys tell that the individual monkey now has increased serotonin levels?” A number of answers suggest themselves, but none follows directly from the data. If the serotonin levels really are the physical correlate of high status, then the question might be “how do monkeys recognise the status of other monkeys.” The very question shows that the fact that they do recognise the status of other monkeys is already established. People also clearly recognise when other people are in pain. How we do it is not known. The Myth of the self might impede a proper scientific enquiry into this interesting question.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion our conscious experience is filled with people and their thoughts and feelings, whether we are engaged in conversation, sharing time with friends or feeling compassion for a lover. We are not alone in our consciousness, it is not a private inaccessible world. Our consciousness is open to anyone who cares to love us, or even to hate us. And it is even possible that other people could be conscious of elements of our minds that we are not even conscious of ourselves.

21st Century sophistry: The use of the opinions of social scientists as empirical fact.

2008-05-25T19:36:00.007+01:00

There has been a tendency in philosophy to take some piece of research from social psychology to prove beyond doubt some point in favour of the philosopher’s favourite theory. Through a kind of slight of hand, the general maxim that one must not doubt hard empirical fact just because it conflicts with cherished beliefs, seems to forbid a questioning of the often highly subjective and biased interpretations of the evidence by the scientists who conducted the study. Whereas often, even a cursory examination of the original case study shows the results to be open to a number of equally valid interpretations. There is no general argument against this unhealthy philosophical strategy. It is incumbent on us all to remain vigilant against this pervasive bit of twenty first century sophistry.

In “Knowledge and its Place in Nature”, Kornblith develops an argument against the epistemic good of reflection by referring to some social psychology data about the “position effect”. The position effect is the tendency to select things to the right when asked to choose the most preferable out of a selection of similar consumer goods. Kornblith quoted an account of a study by Nisbett and Wilson.

“Passers-by in a shopping mall were invited to examine an array of consumer goods (four nightgowns in one study, four identical nylon panty-hose in another) and to rate their quality. There was a pronounced position effect on their evaluations, such that the right-most garments were heavily preferred to the left-most garments. When questioned about the effect of the garments’ position on their choices, virtually all subjects denied such an influence (usually with a tone of annoyance or of concern for the experimenter’s sanity)”

First let me point out that really we should ignore the parenthesis at the end. It must be annoying enough to be asked to rate the relative quality of identical panty hose. To then be asked whether you chose on a different basis from the one you were asked to choose upon just is annoying, and a peeved tone should be expected. The perceived tone of annoyance and concern for the experimenters sanity cannot be counted as data. It is Nisbett and Wilson’s interpretation of the subjects unspoken conversational intentions, which is already influenced by their hypothesis.

Kornblith explains the position effect by claiming that the subjects reconstruct the reasons for their choice after the event on the assumption that they made their choices on a rational basis. Kornblith asks the rhetorical question:

“How else could we possibly explain that those who are influenced by the position effect in judging the quality of consumer goods explain the source of their judgements as lying in objective features of the goods whose quality they judge?”

What would be the effect in the dialectic of giving a good answer to this question? Would it show that Kornblith’s theory of knowledge was false? Far from it. All it would show is that his use of empirical data is irrelevant to his argument. It merely has a rhetorical effect of luring the reader into thinking his arguments are supported somehow by hard psychological fact (if there is such a thing).
Here is how I answer Kornblith’s rhetorical question: the source of their judgements do actually lie in objective features of the goods whose quality they judge. The reason that the subjects deny the influence of the position in their decision is because the position didn’t influence their decision. This explanation has the wonderful bonus of fitting in with the first person reports of the people under investigation. Whereas Nisbett and Wilson’s bizarre hypothesis requires that they ignore this strong disconfirmatory evidence, claiming instead that the subjects are lying, or otherwise falsely reporting their own reasons and preferences.
But hang on, didn’t they prove empirically that the position influenced the subject’s preferences? No, all their results showed was that people tended to choose the far right item more often that the far left item. This is a lesser and distinct proposition from that the position of the item was a reason for their preference. This latter exciting hypothesis requires further argument. But the skewed preferences still need explaining. So here goes: people in general read from left to right and will survey a range of choices left to right. Nisbett and Wilson’s passers by had to make a single best choice out of 4 items. Let’s call them 1, 2, 3 and 4. A good cognitively efficient and time efficient strategy is to compare each one to its immediate predecessor. If you are by and large indifferent then there is no need to track back when you get to the end of your sequence. So you just choose the last one. This is making a selection as required over an issue that is of no importance when there really is no clear winner. It is not making a decision on the basis of position, but it does have the consequence that people will tend to choose 4 much more often than 1.
Perhaps this does not seem very convincing, so here is another problem. Which man do you settle down with and have a family? If you choose too early then you may settle for someone who is not as ideal as a later choice. If you wait too long, you may let the real love of your life go. It shouldn’t surprise a naturalist if human beings were very adept at solving this particular problem, since it is *the* problem of sex selection. With a little idealisation the problem can be solved mathematically. What you do is to estimate the number of eligible men you are likely to meet and think of them as a sequence. So let us suppose you are likely to meet 30 men in a life time if you keep breaking up after a year. What strategy will help you find the best man to marry? Well, we just need two values: best yet and over all ranking. Man 1, your first love, is clearly bound to be best yet, however much of an oaf he is. Man 2 has a 50% chance of being best yet, Man 3 has 33.3% of being best yet, etc. Now we can calculate the probability of any best yet being the best over all. The best yet Man 1 is 1 in 30, if Man 2 is best yet then he has 1/15 chance of being the best over all, etc. Given this model, it can be worked out that you should settle for any best yet after Man 11. This model assumes that you can’t go back to a previous relationship. In real life its obviously much more messy and complicated, but for a given socio economic climate we mind find that women tend to settle down with the next best yet man they meet when they reach a particular age, say, 28. If this were the case, would it be evidence that people’s selection of their beloved is based on or influenced by the age at which they met? Well, kind of, but you can expect some pretty hostile and annoyed looks if you were to tell somebody that the reason they married their husband was not because of his great beauty, wit, kindness or anything like that, but just because she was 28 when they met. This inference is absurd, and there would be some doubt as to the rationality of someone who thought that they had somehow established this as fact.
In selecting nylon pantyhose for the amusement of an on looking psychologist, the stakes are obviously not that high. In a tie situation the current choice may as well count as the best yet since it has the advantage of being fresher in your mind and nearer to hand. But because of the fact that in the panty hose experiment, you can go back, there is no disincentive to going to the end of the sequence. The result being that we should expect people with no pressing interest in the matter to tend to select the item on the furthest to the right if the qualities that inform the judgement of whether an item is the best yet are fairly uniform. (When I made the final decision, the last one I looked at came to mind most strongly) This is perfectly consistent with a denial that the position of the pantyhose influenced the decision. (I just love things that are furthest to the right).
How would I introspectively report how I had come to my decision if I used this strategy on four identical pantyhose?

I looked at the first one and it seemed ok, I looked at the second one and it seemed no different, maybe slightly better if anything, I looked at the third and again, no real difference, but perhaps slightly better, then I looked at the fourth, and really, I had no basis to prefer any but the last one did seem slightly better that the previous one. So I chose number 4.

This is what I would predict would be most peoples reflective assessment of their decision process. The seeming progressive improvement would be just on account of preferring the present choice to a previous one in tie situations to allow for the slight disutility of going back for another look. How often have you heard people saying that the book they are reading is the best book they have ever read? Americans in my experience have a tendency to be emphatic, and anyone with half a brain will not change their preferences on what looks like the prompting of a sales person. So a bit of “No way, number four is by way the best pair of pantyhose I have ever seen in my life,” is to be expected. But this verbal emphasis may be reduced somewhat if you offered them number 1, 2 or 3 for free, or 4 at the recommended retail price. The preferences that were so strong in the subjunctive tense would soon evaporate. That’s my prediction, test it if you like. I have no intention on wasting people’s time getting them to give a preference ordering over identical pantyhose. Whatever the results, they cannot possibly allow me to accept the conclusion that a good meditative reflection on difficult philosophical issues is not the best epistemic practice we have.
Jonny Blamey

The value of life and zero utility

2008-03-31T15:08:00.004+01:00

My general question is whether there is such a thing as negative value. Perhaps especially relevant in 2008 when the world is just waking up from a collective delusion of limitless borrowing.
It is clearly possible to talk of negative holdings. We do so all the time. How much do you have for example? I give even odds that the answer will be negative. You have a current account balance of minus £800, or, if you are affluent, a mortgage of minus some much larger figure. But have you really got less than nothing? You seem to be clothed and fed, able to navigate around the capital, I've even seen you buying drinks.
Bernoullie counts the exhange value of our earning power and any other exchangeable goods as a part of our holdings, which seems to me to be eminently sensible and easily explains the above paradox. The reader with the overdraft is expected to be able to repay on future earnings. The reader with the mortgage likewise, but failing that can make up the debt by selling her house. So neither really has less than nothing.
We could work out the worth of a man as follows: [resale value of all goods + (expected earnings - minimum living expenses) multiplied by life expectancy] . Call this number L, then we could think of any citizen whose total debts exceeded L as being in possession of negative value. However this is not entirely realistic, since any person whose debts exceeded L could no longer be considered as a debtor, since they could be under no obligation to pay back their debts. They would flip over into being more a thief, beggar or charity case. Perhaps in earlier times it might have been thought possible to extract such debts through torture or other punishment. The logic of this, although eminently human, is, thank evolution, no longer considered rational.
So here's a thought: Perhaps at the moment of suicide we could conjecture that a person has completely nothing.
Now imagine this. We find a large sample of people on the point of suicide. (shouldn't be too difficult, its fast becoming one of the biggest killers, especially if they succesfully reclassify traffic accidents). We then offer them goods to see if we can tempt them to desist from suicide. The quantity of goods necessary to prevent suicide could then be consider equivalent to the negative utility of their holdings at the point of death. Their fate could be considered worse than death by a measurable amount, not just in utility, but in actual money. Since the moment of self slaughter must surely be counted as zero, then this would be a negative value.
Some may think this unromantic, but I think it opens up as yet unseen romantic vistas of great poetic power. Comparisons of value are the very constituents of romance and poetry. Fie on those who say that the most valuable thing in their lives is a two bedroom flat in Dulwich village. Surely the most valuable thing in most peoples lives is their union with their beloved. The greatest negative value at the point of suicide must have been that of Romeo when he thought his beloved Juliet dead. Had one of our hypothetical research team approached Romeo in his last soliloquy and offered him goods to prevent his suicide, what would have stayed his hand? Nothing but the sight of his Juliet alive. As it happens, quite an easy thing to acheive. But what else, had this been impossible? Nothing, (we romantics hope), not the wealth of kingdoms, nor the power of empererors, nor mastery of the seven seas. So now we have a measure of the negative utility of Romeo's holdings, and by comparison the positive utility of Juliet's life. The number we achieve is a kind of de facto infinity. For any sum of money, or office of power, there is something of higher value, and that is Juliet's life. And for any debt, however large, there is a greater possible debt, and that is the debt of someone who owed Romeo his life once Juliete was no more.
As a kind of punch line for affecionados of probability, if we offered Romeo the St Petersburg Game, then we could suppose that he was prepared to pay the ultimate price. But how many consecutive heads would Romeo have to toss before the casino would be obliged to ressurect his Juliet?

Fitch's argument. Where I have gone wrong?

2008-03-26T17:26:00.006Z

Any metaphysical modal wizards out there that can help me? Here's a line of reasoning that I think is true:
1. In order to wonder whether p is the case, one must be able, at least partially, to understand the content of p.
2. To understand the content of p is to able, at least in some cases, to know that p when it is clearly evident that p.

3. If one didn't know that p when p was clearly evident, then one would not understand that p.

4. Therefore if S understands the content of p, it must be possible for it to be clearly evident that p.
5. If S wonders whether or not "p" where p is a proposition expressible by a declarative sentence, then it must be possible to for S to know that p.
6. If S wonders whether or not p, then (at least in some cases) it is possible that p is true and it is possible that p is false.
7. Therefore it is possible to know a proposition that is false.

Conclusion: Knowledge is not necessarily factive.

Applications

It is possible to know that (p and nobody knows that p).
There are many instances of contingently necessary propositions, for example
Jack doesn't know that (there is extra terrestial plant life and Jack doesn't know that there is extra terrestial plant life).

I'm not interested in hearing people disagreeing with the conclusion, I expect that most people do. But it is possible that most people are wrong. What I want to know is which bit of the argument is wrong. I expect there is a scope fallacy going on, or perhaps an illicit blurring of epistemic and metaphysical necessity.

Not necessarily possible

2008-03-21T19:52:00.002Z

William Bynoe’s most excellent talk provided a argument against two axioms which I find a priori absurd in any case. One is that anything that is possible is necessarily possible. The other is that anything actual is possible. Will gave these principles in terms of accessibility relations between possible worlds. So we can call them:

1. Equivalence: For any worlds A and B, if A is accessible from B, then B is accessible from A.

2. Reflexivity: Every world is accessible from itself.

This fevered adding of axioms renders accessibility redundant and meaningless, since all possible worlds become equally accessible from all others. Will’s argument comes from two premises:
1. (Roughly, there was no hand out): Truths about what is possible are grounded in the actual world.
2. It is possible that there could be nothing at all.

The argument then is, call the actual world WA: it seems possible grounded in the actual world that there could have been nothing. Let us call this possibility WN. WN is accessible from WA. But WA is not accessible from WN, since if WN was the actual world, then there would be nothing in WN that would ground the truth of the possibility of facts in WA. Further more, it might also be claimed that WN is not accessible from itself. So WN provides a counterexample to equivalence and reflexivity.

A lot of the discussion focussed on the nature of N. People found reflexivity and equivalence to be so “intuitively plausible” that the argument just showed that N was impossible. But this kind of thing I found weak for this reason: the intuitive nature of the two dodgy axioms rests on a few examples. But all this shows is that reflexivity holds in some central cases, as does equivalence. To jump from this to the claim that it necessarily holds in all cases requires more than considering a few tailor made examples. It involves a proof, or at very least a confrontation with ordinary usage which in fact throws up many counterexamples. I’ve never seen anything like a proof, and when ever I have offered counterexamples I usually meet with hostile verbal evasion of this kind “You are confusing metaphysical modality with epistemic modality”.

Will began with the intuitive case for the two axioms by giving an example of something possible but not actual. He was actually standing, but he could have been sitting. Reflexivity and equivalence clearly hold in this case. Had he been sitting then it would have been possible that he was standing, and given that he was standing, it is clearly possible that he was standing. So far all we have got is a generalisation based on a single case. 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, therefore all odd numbers without exception are prime.

Later, for contrast something impossible was considered. Tim is Portugal was the example. This is supposed to be clearly impossible. Why? Because it is nonsense, because it is impossible to imagine. But I thought we were talking about metaphysical possibility, not conceivability or semantics. A state can be defined in terms of its citizens and its territory and perhaps it constitution and economy. It is possible for a state to lose all its territory and all its citizens but one and that one could be Tim. The remaining citizen would then embody the whole of the state. If the state was democratic, and Tim was the last citizen, then the constitution of Portugal would be identical with Tim’s will, its territory identical with Tim’s property and body. Tim would be Portugal in this case. “I am the state of Portugal.” He could say with uncharacteristic grandeur. Is this scenario possible? What relevance does it have to the accessibility relationship?

Perhaps this is not possible because “Tim” and “Portugal” are rigid designators, and this scenario just changes Portugal too much for us to have a hold on what the possibility is supposed to consist in. With this in mind lets go back to the central example. It is possible that William Bynoe (rigidly designated) is sitting down at time t, when actually he was standing at that time. This is clearly not epistemic, since we know he was actually standing. So the accessibility relationship holds symmetrically between WA ( the actual world) and W1 (where William Bynoe was sitting not standing at time t). Now let us consider a second possibility: It is possible that William Bynoe (rigidly designated) does not exist. This is clearly not epistemic since in order to rigidly designate William Bynoe he must exist. The reference fixing must be grounded in the actual world. So the accessibility relationship holds between:
WA (the actual World) and W2 (a world in which William Bynoe does not exist). But is it symmetric? Well no, because in W2, William Bynoe doesn’t exist, so the possibility that William Bynoe is standing is not grounded in W2 and therefore can’t be a possibility. Complicated? Baroque? A misunderstanding of some kind? I don’t think so. Here are two propositions that, realist as you like about possibility, are straightforwardly true:

If William Bynoe did not exist then it would be impossible that he is now standing.

It is possible that William Bynoe did not exist.

There for it is possible that it is impossible that he is now standing.

This is a counterexample to the equivalence relation. It is also a counterexample to the axiom that whatever is actual is necessarily possible, since if William Bynoe is in fact now standing, then it is still possible that it is impossible that he is now standing.

bernoulli and I on necessity

2008-03-16T19:51:00.003Z

Necessary and Contingent.

I share these concepts with Bernoulli it turns out. “A proposition is called necessary, relative to our knowledge, when its contrary is incompatible with what we know.” Is how Hacking 19975 explains Bernoulli's use of necessary and contingent propositions. Suppose we are wondering whether H is certain given evidence E. There are 4 possibilities:

1. E is known, H given E is uncertain. Argument contingent, H contingent
2. E is uncertain, H given E is uncertain. Argument contingent, H contingent
3. E is known, H given E is certain Argument necessary, H necessary
4. E is uncertain, H given E is certain. Argument necessary, H contingent

Whether or not E is known would be to an empiricist and empirical matter. This is as much as to say that there are no foundational singular statements of fact. There could be some doubt to this, but this need not worry us here.

What is confusing and equivocal is what is means for H given E to be certain. A straight forward interpretation is that p (H given E) = 1. Now we must wonder what kind of interpretation of probability is at play here. To a rationalist, we might think that H given E is certain if it is a priori. This would be as much as to say that only logical and mathematical inferences are certain and therefore only mathematical and logical truths are necessary. But why can’t we be certain of H given E on the basis of experience? Well, because of the problem of induction. But that is circular, since the problem of induction is only a problem if we accept that we can only be certain of conditionals through pure reason.
Here are some certain conditionals that would count as being learned through experience:
If it is a Blue Whale then it is a Mammal.
If an act is motivated purely by cruelty, then it is wrong.
If a piece of Music is written by Mozart, then it is Classical.
If Jones intentionally fired the gunshot that killed Smith, then Jones killed Smith.
If Smith fell into a meat mincing machine and was turned into mince meat, then Smith is dead.
If x thinks, then x exists.
I guess that many contemporary post graduate students of philosophy would say that the above conditionals are contingent. Would you? I for one am certain of all of them, though I could imagine a different conceptual scheme where they weren’t certain. If Mozart had written some Baroque music, for example, or if “intentionally” included cases of hypnosis, or if Smith was some kind of super being who could regenerate himself, or if “Blue Whales” referred to something ostensibly similar to Blue Whales, but for hidden “scientific” reasons to do with molecules weren’t actually Mammals. I could imagine a society of sadists and masochists where only cruel acts were just. I can imagine a character who thinks, but yet does not exist. Hamlet, for example. But what do all these flights of fantasy have to do with necessity and contingency? Nothing useful, I say. A distinction monger might want to talk of what is necessary in the actual world and what is necessary in every possible world. So Blue Whales are only necessarily mammals here, whereas other worlds they are only contingently mammals. But then we have lost possible world modal semantics. To focus on the one example. Suppose we are certain of proposition E x is a Blue Whale where the reference of x is fixed by clear spatio temporal co ordinates. Now I count it as common knowledge that in general if x is a Blue whale then x is a mammal. Let H be the hypothesis that x is a mammal. Is H necessary or contingent?

Attributive and referential use of definite descriptions, not a semantic distinction. Tim Pritchard

2008-03-13T16:39:00.002Z

Tim’s talk last night was very good as most people seemed to agree. The central two claims were that
1. There is no linguistic mechanism that differentiates between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions . (Although the distinction can be made.)
2. We think what it is we want to communicate, and we then find the best words with which to express it. (In other words there is no such thing as intending to mean by a sentence whatever it is that the sentence means).

To prove Tim’s 1st claim is difficult since no single example will suffice. My thought is that if we give an epistemological informational account of the distinction then we can show that there cannot be a linguistic mechanism that would work. The account would be that the attributive use is one where the speaker is informing the audience that the description is true. The referential use is where the speaker presupposes that the audience presuppose that the description is true. Since in both cases the speaker is intending the description to be taken as true, there can be no semantic difference.
For example, the utterance type
SD: Smith’s murderer is the one who stole the diamonds.
Now we have two definite descriptions. The speaker cannot presuppose that the audience presupposes both descriptions to be true of the same person, since otherwise his utterance would be redundant. But equally clearly the speaker can’t presuppose that both utterances are descriptions that refer to different people, or the utterance is plainly false. So in making utterances of this kind, the speaker must be using at least one attributively. Yet both definite descriptions have the same structure.
This might be clearer if we think in terms of investigations:

Investigation 1. Who murdered Smith?
Background knowledge: John stole the Diamonds.
New Evidence: Smith’s murderer is the one who stole the diamonds
Result: John murdered Smith

Investigation 2. Who stole the Diamonds?
Background knowledge: John Murdered Smith
New evidence: Smith’s murderer is the one who stole the diamonds
Result: John stole the diamonds.

Investigation 3. Who murdered Smith and who stole the diamonds?
Background Knowledge. Someone stole the diamonds and someone murdered Smith.
New evidence: Smith’s murderer is the one who stole the diamonds.
Result: Someone murdered Smith and stole the diamonds.

From these examples it is clear that there is an important epistemological difference between the uses of the new evidence in reaching conclusions. But it should be equally clear that there is no difference in meaning across the three cases. The new evidence in each case expresses the same proposition. The attributive/ referential distinction is purely epistemological.

Just for completeness:

Investigation 4.

Background knowledge. John murdered Smith and Jill stole the diamonds.
New evidence. Smith’s murderer is the one who stole the diamonds.
Result: ERROR!!!! Reject evidence or accept that Smith’s murderer is not Smith’s murderer or the one who stole the diamonds did not steal the diamonds or that John is Jill.

On Hugh on Two Envelopes, by David Papineau.

2008-03-07T13:20:00.008Z

On Wednesday Hugh McCormack’s excellent discussion of the two-envelope paradox laid out Sonia’s reasoning as below (if I remember it right).

(For those new to this paradox, Sonia is shown two envelopes, told one contains twice as much money as the other, and is then given one of the envelopes at random, and asked if she wants to swap it for the other. She then reasons . . . )

(1) Let x be the amount in my envelope.

(2) There’s a 50% chance that I’ll lose by swapping and a 50% chance that I’ll win.

(3) If I lose, the other envelope will give me 0.5x. If I win, the other envelope will give me 2x.

(4) The expected result of swapping will thus be 1.25x (50% x 0.5x + 50% x 2x) which is more than x.

(5) So I should swap.

But of course this is a silly conclusion. (If Jim were given the other envelope, he could reason just the same, but there couldn’t be reason for them both to swap.)

Hugh said that Sonia’s calculation must be misapplied because it implies, absurdly, that swapping can lead to an increase in the total money in the envelopes.

That is true enough, but I still hankered to know exactly where the reasoning laid out above goes astray.

I think it’s helpful (as suggested by Hugh in later correspondence) to compare Sonia with Fred. We give Fred an envelope containing a certain amount of money, and then then spin a coin (or something equivalent) to determine whether we put twice or half in the other.

Now Fred can do Sonia’s calculation as above (it’s 50%-50% whether swapping will win or lose, winning yields 2x, losing yields 0.5x . . . so I should swap). But note that in Fred’s case this is a GOOD conclusion. Fred should indeed swap.

So why exactly does Sonia get a bad answer when she does the calculation? After all, it’s equally true of her (since it was random which of the two envelopes she was given) that it’s 50%-50% that swapping will win or lose.

Here's what I would say about the flaw in Sonia's calculation.

(1) Suppose first we understand 'x' as referring fixedly to the actual amount that is in the envelope Sonia (or Fred) is now holding. Then it is NOT automatically true for Sonia (as it is for Fred) that there is a 50-50 chance that she will double or halve THAT amount. (That depends on the probabilistic pattern governing the placing of the amounts in the two envelopes initially presented to Sonia. So, for instance, if the envelope she’s given actually contains a very large amount, towards the upper end of the range of possible amounts, then it's more likely she has 'big' and will lose by swapping--and conversely if her envelope contains an amount towards the bottom end of the range of possible sums.)

(2) What about the TRUTH that Sonia has a 50-50 chance of winning or losing? Well, that's true enough, but we can't plug those 50-50 odds into her calculation. Think of it like this. Her calculation says there are two 50-50 possibilities--she has the big envelope OR she has the small envelope. And the calculation tries to say that in the first possibility swapping will lose 0.5x and in the second swapping will gain x. But 'x' doesn't refer to the SAME number in each of these possibilities. In the first it refers to the amount in the big envelope, in the second it refers to the amount in the small envelope. No wonder this spurious calculation makes swapping seem attractive—it implicitly supposes that the sum in your envelope when you lose will be the SAME as when you win, when in truth it will be twice as big. (Note that for Fred it IS the same amount in his envelope in the two possibilities that he has 'big' and he has 'small'--that's why it is OK for him to do Sonia's calculation using the 50-50 odds.)

(There’s nothing original in the above—the literature says all this and lots more.)

David Papineau

THE SMEDLIUM CASE by Stephen Law

2008-02-27T15:08:00.007Z

This is adapted from my 2005 Ratio paper “Systems of Measurement”.

Wittgenstein says that we cannot describe the standard metre bar as being one metre long (because of its peculiar role in metric system of measurement). Kripke says we can, and that it is, in fact, only contingently one metre long.

Consider these two systems of measurement

1. The W-system of measurement

Let the reference of ‘one W’ with respect to any arbitrary time t and possible world w be the length that stick W has at t at w (and be empty otherwise). Thus stick W can never be and could never have been anything other than one W long. It is a necessary truth that, if it exists, W is one W long.

Having thus defined ‘one W’, we can now set about expressing the length of a given object as a multiple/fraction of one W.

Notice that in this system of measurement stick W’s length in Ws at any arbitrary time and/or world is stipulatively held constant. Stick W is necessarily one W long. Shrink or stretch it: stick W remains one W long. Indeed, by shortening stick W one alters the W dimensions of other objects.

I shall call this the W system of measurement. It seems plausible that on Wittgenstein’s view the ‘peculiar role’ assigned to the Standard Metre in the metric system is precisely that which is assigned to stick W in the W system.

2. The K-system of measurement

Suppose we introduce the expression ‘one K’ to refer to that length which stick K happens actually to possess at t0. We might then go on to measure length in Ks using stick K, and do so quite accurately, just so long as stick K remains the same length. But then, even though the length of K is used to measure length in Ks – indeed, even though it may be the only thing we use to measure length in Ks — it is nevertheless contingent that stick K is one K long. For stick K might not have been the length it actually is.

Let’s call any system of measurement in which all measures are used in this way K-type.

On Kripke's view, the metric system is like the K-system. ‘One metre’ names a certain length: that length which the Standard Metre happens currently to possess. Thus the Standard Metre is only correctly used to measure length in metres on the condition that it remains that same length.

Intuitively, it seems Kripke is right about this.

But now let’s turn to my Smedlium Case.

The Smedlium Case

Imagine a world quite similar to our own that contains large quantities of a metal-like material – let's call it smedlium – which gradually and unpredictably alters in size. All smedlium objects expand and contract in unison. At one o'clock on one particular day all the smedlium objects are 5% larger than they were at mid-day; at two o'clock they are all 10% smaller, and so on. Despite this peculiarity, smedlium remains a useful material. In fact, it is the strongest and most durable material available. One of the inhabitants of this world builds machinery made wholly out of smedlium. The machines are used in situations where their size relative to non-smedlium objects doesn't matter. The smedlium engineer constructs and calibrates a measuring rule made out of smedlium to use when manufacturing such machines. She measures dimensions in ‘S’s, one S being measured against the length of her smedlium measure. Of course, so far as manufacturing smedlium machines is concerned, a smedlium measure is far more useful than is a rule made out of some more stable material, for it allows the smedlium engineer to ignore the changes in size of the object upon which she is working. For example, she knows that, say, if the hole for the grunge lever measured 0.5 S in diameter at one o'clock, then a grunge lever which measures 0.5 S in diameter at two o'clock will just fit into that hole, despite the fact that the hole is now noticeably smaller than it was at one o'clock.

Now one might think that here at least is one case in which a measuring rod functions as does stick W in the W system, not as does stick K in the K system. Surely, one might argue, what ‘one S’ designates with respect to any arbitrary time and world is the length of the smedlium engineer’s measuring rod whatever it might be at that time and world, not the length that it actually possesses at some particular moment in time. The smedlium system is a W-type system.

And yet, oddly enough, we have the same modal intuitions about the smedlium system as we do about the metric system. It seems that the smedlium measuring rod might cease to possess the measurement one S. It might actually come to possess e.g. the measurement 0.9 S.
Suppose, for example, that mid-way through a month when the smedlium engineer is working on a particularly important project, a saboteur breaks into the smedlium engineer's workshop and indulges in some industrial espionage. The saboteur shaves 10% off the end off the smedlium measuring rod knowing this will cause the smedlium engineer all sorts of problems. Isn't it the case that the smedlium measuring rod no longer possess the measurement one S? To me, this certainly seems the right way to describe the situation. Indeed, it seems right to say that the smedlium measuring rod now has the measurement 0.9 S, given that it is now 10% shorter than it would otherwise have been.

It also seems right to say that the smedlium measure might never have had the measurement one S: it might always have been only 0.9 S long (one might tell a story on which the mould in which stick S was originally cast leaks at one end, producing a sightly shorter stick). So, intuitively, it is contingent that the smedlium measuring rod possesses the measurement one S.

A puzzle for Kripke

So we have the same sort of modal intuitions about the smedlium system as we do about the metric system.

We saw that the Kripkean explanation of why it is contingent that the Standard Metre possesses the dimension one metre is that ‘one metre’ is a rigid designator: it rigidly designates a certain length – a length the Standard Metre happens only contingently to possess.

But note that this explanation is unavailable when it comes to explaining why it is contingent that the smedlium measuring rod possesses the dimension one S. Clearly, “one S” doesn’t rigidly designate a length. An object can retain the dimension one S even while altering in length.

This raises a difficulty for Kripke: it seems that, in the smedlium case, the intuition of contingency is going to have to be accounted for in some other way. But if the contingency is to be explained other than by supposing that ‘one S’ is a rigid designator (of a certain length), then presumably that same alternative explanation might be provided in the metric case too.

For more, see the original paper:
http://lawpapers.blogspot.com/search/label/Systems%20of%20Measurement

philosophy of philosophy

2008-02-20T23:34:00.001Z

The Seminar on the philosophy of philosophy was amazing, its seems to be about everything I’m most interested in. Better still Barry Smith was there, I hope he’ll come every week, listening to Smith and Papineau arguing is like watching a speeded up film of whole debates in contemporary philosophy.
The thing about the philosophy of philosophy is it is productive. If you can make methodological distinctions clearly, then what may seem to be an intractable problem in philosophy maybe unravelled and revealed as a simply clash of methodological choices. If the goal of philosophy is to unravel the riddles of the universe, (rather than, say, create jobs philosophers), then this might be a generative source of successful philosophy. And what can be better than successful philosophy?
One aspect of the seminar that excited my interest without gaining my understanding was this point about Carnap and Ramsay sentences for the meaning of terms.
The background: a verificationist theory meaning (not the best one according to me) attributed to Quine has it that the meanings of a terms (are) (supervene on) (are constituted by) (are what cause) our dispositions to use the terms. Problem, if person A has theory X about f but person B has theory Y about f, they may have different dispositions. Does this mean that A and B are talking about different things when talking about f? I feel there are strong reasons for saying “no, they’ve just got different theories.” Argument: If A persuaded B to change theories, B may change her beliefs about f, but surely not the meaning of f, otherwise it is hard to say what the belief change consists in. But this is just me. Philosophers sometimes when confronted with a certain species of counterexample to their favourite theory will use the argument “oh, you just have a different concept of f”. So for example, if Ruth Millikan claims that 2 out of three people she has interviewed don’t actually share the Gettier intuition, then we can do one of three things. 1. Say that the interviewees have a different concept of knowledge. 2. Change our theory to accommodate the interviewees. 3. Use our theory to claim that the interviewees are wrong.
Another example:
Stich: “Beliefs don’t exist”.
Chorus: “Of course they exist (otherwise how am I supposed to believe that they don’t)”.
Stich: “But our concept of belief has it that beliefs are entities in the brain with causal roles, yet in our brains is just neural nets, nothing like beliefs.”
Chorus: That’s not my concept.

Now the bit I don’t really understand. A term can be fully (cashed out)? (defined)? (extended)? Using a conjunction of all its (applications)? (sentences in which it appears)? (true sentences in which it appears)? Using a Ramsey sentence.
T(f)
E(Q) T(Q)
The idea is, you list all the sentences in which the term f features, this gives you T(f), then you replace (f) with Q. Then your theory claims that E (Q) in which the Ramsay sentence is true. (E = existential quantifier)
(My view of this is it will only work, and it will work very well, if the Ramsey sentence is a list of sentences which are believed to probability 1, or “known” in which the term appears. This will include all known predictions and known hypothetical and counterfactual cases. Therefore it will include intuitions when we intuitively know, but not when we intuitively reckon, think or guess)
Professor Papineau then compares a Carnap version:
T(f) = If E (Q) then T (Q).

The difference is simply that the Ramsey version is false if nothing fits the description, whereas the Carnap version is true even if nothing fits the description.. Stich has a Carnap version of the concept of belief, because his T(belief) contains sentences like “beliefs are entities in the brain with causal roles within action”. The fact that there are no such entities therefore does not force him to change his concept “belief”, instead it leads him to assert that beliefs don’t exist. However when using a Ramsey sentence, then Stich’s “discoveries” that there are no beliefs simply proves that the theory is false, not that beliefs don’t exist.

What is puzzling me is how to proceed. How does this help untangle the riddles of the universe? My opinion is that our concepts are like the Ramsey sentences. Suppose I am such a materialist that I count it as known that beliefs are bits of brain that fulfil a certain causal role. Then my Ramsey sentence will be like this (S1, S2, S3……..SN). I am horrified to discover that nothing fits this description. I am wrong! Something I thought I knew was false! Impossible? Of course not, it happens all the time, except to the very narrow minded and dogmatic. But since S1 …SN count as known, there is a real conflict, which may well result in a strong desire to reject the evidence. But if the evidence is overwhelming, rationality will require that you give up what previously counted as certain. So let us say you drop SX to SN, the sentences related to the belief – brain identity thesis. Is your concept now different? Not that different, you still have a huge store of known sentences involving the term belief. You still know S1 to SX You still know a million facts involving the term “belief”. Eg. I know that John Wright believes that there is a region of London called Mayfair and he wants us all to go there on the 1st of March. I know that if he believes that there are pubs in Mayfair, then he also believes that there are pubs in London. No bit of fancy neuroscience is going to convince me to drop these facts. These parts of the Ramsey sentence remain intact. The term “brain” may have taken a bit more of a knocking, but hey, how much do I know about brains anyway? I am happy to leave that up to the scientists. Currently I know that the hippocampus is enlarged in taxi drivers and certain male birds, and is involved in navigational tasks. However, if some scientists demonstrate that this is false, then this may radically alter my concept of “hippocampus”. Ouch! But hey! Its only the hippocampus, its not my girlfriend.

How not to get published by Jonny Blamey

2008-02-07T09:45:00.000Z

Some time ago I promised to send my two envelope solution to a journal and post the referees reports on this blog. Here’s the whole story

Last May I gave a talk at a conference and someone told me afterwards that he thought my thesis would have some bearing on the Two Envelope paradox. I saw the solution straight away. Using Ramsey’s measure for degree of belief, the paradox becomes a simple disagreement in probability assignments. I was looking for a problem with which to demonstrate my new techniques in decision theory and here was one that fell into my lap.

I put my solution on the blog and received a huge amount of negative comments. As one of the labels was “rigid designator” I got one comment saying that I obviously didn’t understand the two envelope paradox since “rigid designator” was irrelevant to the problem. I got some other comments along the lines that I didn’t understand probability, maths, philosophy, the principle of indifference, Bayes theorem, the nature of argument and anything at all. My lack of knowledge is on Socratic proportions.

At another conference I met someone who had published work on the two envelope paradox. Friends with him was Sorin Bangu who gave a talk on the principle of indifference. I asked Dr Bangu to post on Bloggin the question. By November an article came out in Mind on the two envelope paradox using the concept of rigid designation by a pair of scholars from Dr Bangu’s university. Does this make my use of rigid designation retro actively valid?

Meanwhile someone on the blog challenged me to send my solution to a journal, specifically the BJPS and when it was rejected, to publish the referees reports on the blog. Instead of a flat rejection the BJPS asked me to rewrite in response to the referees reports. The referees reports said my solution was an ingenious contribution to the literature, but had a flaw. If I could respond to the comments they would consider publishing.

This I did, but in response to something that David Papineau said I was working on trying to express the solution in more natural terms. My Dad came over to visit and we spent an afternoon drawing graphs of possible pairs of envelopes, pigs, people etc. who fit the description. We found that the more densely packed and widely spread the envelopes, the more closely the graph fits 1/x for the sum of the pair and 1/SQRx for the second envelope given the first. If you normalise this then for any N you can show that the probability that swapping will double your money is 1/3. What no one in the literature had grasped was that the envelopes necessarily come in pairs. Once you accept this fact it is possible to find the probability distribution. It was assumed in the literature that you can have any prior probability distribution you like, which is absurd. Why should you act on an arbitrary probability distribution? And how can the probability that an envelope contains 2x P(2x) be greater than P(4x) + P(x)? And if you accept two end points below and above which there can be no envelope, then an equal distribution is impossible. P(2x, x) = 1/3 and P(1/2x, x) = 2/3 is the only pair of conditionals that works.

I tried to put this into easy accessible language and resubmitted to the BJPS. They were late coming back to me, saying that they had to wait ‘til after Christmas for one referee. Finally on my birthday they sent me a rejection with only an extract from one referee’s report.

Begin Quoted Text----------------------------------------------------------Sorry to be a bit slow on this. I have read the paper, and don't think it's really good enough to recommend. There is an interesting central idea, but (a) the paper has too much irrelevant detail in the first six pages and (b) I don't think the main contention of the paper is strongly enough supported. There are also some minor (but distracting) inaccuracies.----------------------------------------------------------End Quoted Text----------------------------------------------------------

I asked them to sent me the full reports, and they said they would, but it turned out that one referees report was lost and the other referee did not want his comments exposed to judgement.

Meanwhile I sent off a really accessible version for the Jacobsen essay prize and did get to see some of the examiners reports from that one. So I’ll paste those below as a substitute.

EXAMINERS REPORTS

3. Envelope stall.
This short essay simply presents a well-known ‘paradox’. No references are given and there is nothing original said about the issues that it raises.

I expected to warm most to essay 3. But, aside from the fact that it makes no reference at all to the literature, and the fact that the answer surely (at least partly) lies in the fact that no one could really think, in anything like a real situation, that there is a uniform prior over all possible pay-offs (s/he assumes this away), I just couldn't see what basis there was for what seems to be the crucial premise namely the distinction between probabilistic and 'financial' terms (p.3).

3. Sam’s Envelope Stall
Lively, but the suggested solution is not cogent. And this is a topic on which there is a huge and sophisticated literature which the author simply ignores.

END

I hope this story is useful to those researchers hoping to get published.

Is the concept a priori passed its sell by date?

2008-01-31T11:27:00.000Z

The Philosophy Society managed to get Timothy Williamson to give a talk on a priori knowledge last night. The stated aim of the talk was to get people to stop using the a priori/ a posteriori distinction since it had passed its usefulness. The strategy was to show that there are many mixed and borderline cases, and that trying to classify these cases “obscures epistemologically crucial features of the examples”. He concludes that “We should resist the temptation to assimilate new cases either to the stereotype of the a priori or to the stereotype of the a posteriori.”.

Mike Gabbay made a point which struck me as right. I’m not going to get it quite right, but roughly, “a priori” knowledge is knowledge by inference. If we presuppose a body of knowledge K, then we can deduce a larger body K2 using inference. All the propositions in K2 but not in K will be a priori. There are many techniques and skills that could come under the heading “inference”, and it could be the case that we learn new skills, either collectively, or individually, from experience. What can be deduced a priori will therefore be relative to experience.

For example, if I knew that there were some trees planted in a square that was seven trees long and seven trees wide, I do not yet know how many trees are in the square. If I know about squares and squaring then I can deduce without further observation that there are 49 trees in the square. I will have made this deduction a priori. I could have found out this knowledge by going out and counting each tree. This would have been a posteriori. I may have been told by my line manager that the best way to count the trees is to multiply the length by the breadth on a calculator. Given this information and a calculator, I could discover that there were 49 trees in the square without counting them. Would this be a priori? I guess Professor Williamson’s point is that the concept of a priori has two much philosophical baggage for this to be a useful question. What have we solved by calling this technique for counting trees planted in squares a priori? No part of the process was either necessary, nor innate nor derived purely from reason, nor absolutely certain. Since these are often thought to be properties of the a priori, perhaps we should stop using the term since it just confuses matters.

However I think it highly useful to make a distinction between what we can find out before hand given a body of knowledge K, and what we just have to wait and see. Lets play dice. I’ll throw two dice and I’ll give you £35 if it’s a double six and you give me £1 otherwise. What do we know a priori? We know a priori that there is a 1/36 chance that you will win. We know a priori that the odds are fair. What we don’t know a priori is who will win. We have to actually throw the dice for that. The fact that we know these things a priori is not innate, or intuitive or necessary or any rubbish like that. It has been hard won by the greatest of our species and been passed down through teaching and tested through experience.

Ramsification of Leibniz

2008-01-24T11:21:00.000Z

Andrew Murray gave an interesting talk last night about Leibniz and Galileo’s paradox. Here are the main points (as far as I’m concerned).
There is a problem for Leibniz involving the distinction between necessary and contingent facts. He is in danger of all facts coming out necessary.
Concepts are constituted by parts. In my contemporary way of looking at things I take this to mean the extension. This is no doubt an offence to Leibniz scholars, but hey. The analysis of concepts terminates in primitive concepts that can’t be broken up any further.
Some concepts have infinite parts, and these are involved in contingent facts.
This is important for free will.
Galileo’s problem: lets take a concept n which has the extension of the infinite number series of integers. It seems that n^2 is a part of the extension of n. But there is a one to one correspondence of the elements that form the extension of both concepts.

Why does this interest me? Well I’ve been thinking about the difference between two types of probability and two types of generalisation. The two types have been discussed by Popper, Ramsey, Strawson and countless others no doubt. I’ll call them deductive and inductive:
Deductive probability: the domain of applicability is defined and finite.
Inductive probability: the domain of applicability is infinite.
Numerical example:
Deductive: the probability that n is even given n is an integer between 0 and 11 is ½.
Inductive: the probability that n is even is ½.
Empirical Science example:
Deductive: There are 118 elements in the periodic table.
Inductive: Water is H2O.

Inductive generalisations are counterfactual supporting whereas Deductive generalisations are not. Inductive generalisations therefore can never be verified but only falsified, whereas deductive ones can be verified (in principle)
Ramsey had the view (which I think was plagiarised by Wittgenstein) that the meaning of inductive generalisations can’t be identical to their extension because it is psychologically impossible. When I entertain the belief that all men are mortal, I can not be applying the property of mortality to each and every man because, well I just can’t. I don’t even know how many men there are. So an inductive generalisation is more like a rule for belief formation. Since beliefs come in degrees, these rules can be probabilistic. So “All men are mortal” means P( x is mortal given x is a man) = 1. Because the meaning is not constituted by the extension, the generalisation is not true or false, but good or bad. Since this is inductive it is perfectly possible that this generalisation is a good one, yet some man lives for ever. A rule is a good one if it generates true beliefs. Since these rules are neither true nor false, they would not be included in a complete inventory of the facts. An Omniscient God wouldn’t know them, with his infinite mind he wouldn’t need to. With our finite minds, however, we certainly do need them.

So back to Leibniz. Judas was the betrayer of Christ and this is something that he is responsible for. It is therefore a contingent fact. (if it was necessary, then it wouldn’t have been his fault). The problem is that it flowed from Judas’s nature that he betrayed Christ. In Andrew’s speak it is part of the concept of Judas that he was the BOC. Leibniz’s solution is that the concept of Judas has infinite parts. Look at this in Ramsey’s way it means that P(JBOC given Judas, W) = 1. In words, given Judas’s character and the situation he was in, a wise man should believe to degree 1 that he would betray Christ. But because this is an inductive generalisation rather than a deductive one, Judas is still free not to. The problem of free will solved and Leibniz has a distinction between necessary and contingent.
So what about Galileo’s paradox.

Well, we can think of infinite proportions of infinite sets quite easily if we think in terms of rules a belief formation rather than one to one mappings. P(x is even given x is a number) = ½. With n and n^2 it is a little more difficult since the relative frequency is itself a variable. P( x is a square given x is a number from 0 – n^2) = n/n^2. As n tends towards infinity then this value tends towards 0, but this is no concern of ours and is not in the mind of God. What we are interested in is the shape of the curve and the area underneath any interval. Essential n squared is a part of the concept of n because P(n given n^2) = 1 but P(n^2 given n) < 1.

Knowledge is value.

2007-12-31T20:00:00.000Z

As it’s the last day of the year I’ll allow myself a glimpse at the big picture. I started my second wave of philosophy with the intention of exploring the dual nature of the mad. I had seen at first hand the brilliant yet unpredictable thought processes of certified schizophrenics and manic depressives. Among the great thinkers and artists to whom we owe so much there are to be found a high density of mad men and women. Often their madness goes unmentioned in deference to their achievements. The summation is that creative minds seems to be capable of great folly and great wisdom. The rest of us look on in terror and pity.

My idea was that the mad know things that are beyond the reach of the sane. On a similar vein, the mad see the value in things that the sane overlook. The problem is that this is hard to even state, partly because the mad are seen by certain officious types as ill, their beliefs as “delusions”, or “symptoms”, their political rights as suspended and their condition one of suffering. But the real reason is that in philosophy, analytic philosophy at least, “S knows that p” is considered to be factive, so: “Einstein knows that time is relative” is only true if time is relative. Since the sane believe that a lot of what mad people believe is false, calling these things “knowledge” is against the rules, even if the mad person claims to know what he believes and we don’t claim to know that the mad person’s beliefs are false .

So I am under pressure to rephrase my initial thought as that the mad “believe” things that are beyond the reach of the sane. Now I can say that mad people believe things that are more likely to be false. This looks very promising indeed since we can explain the mad genius. If the mad believe what is more likely to be false, then they are higher risk believers. A Wall Street slogan is “the higher the risk the higher the return". When in the jungle of improbable beliefs the mad man stumbles across a true proposition, as long as he can tame it and bring back to the suburbs of probable beliefs alive, he will have found something of great value. Whereas the sane, who get their beliefs second hand from text books and TV, are scarcely likely to believe anything of any value. Of course, there is exchange value and use value. Second hand ideas can be very useful, and you can always hawk them to children or students. But beliefs that no one else have are for that reason worth a great deal. Of course this is only if they are true! But they appear to the believer just as valuable whether they are true or not, since to believe something is the same thing as believing it to be true.

But now enter the complication. Value and belief are the subject matter of decision theory. If something is improbable in decision theory, it is less valuable not more valuable. I put £36 on double six at even odds I have an improbable belief that the dice will come up two sixes. My speculation is worth £1 to anybody who knows the ways of dice. This is because out of 36 possible futures, only in one do I win. Yet if I believe it, in the sense that I know it, then my speculation would be worth £72. This is because there is only one possible future, and in that future the dice come up double six. So from my perspective I do not have an improbable belief at all. From my perspective, if I am certain the dice will come up double six, my belief is not just highly probable, it is true. So we have a pair of perspectives, from one of which my belief is improbable and from the other it is certain. Which perspective is right? The problem here is that this depends on no fact in the world!! Of course if the dice comes up snake eyes, then my belief was improbable and false. But if it comes up two sixes, those who valued my punt at £1 are still right. Their assessment of the situation is un-falsifiable in the face of experience.
The thoughts of the creative genius are clearly not of this kind. It is not as if when Einstein came up with Special Relativity it was clear to everybody else that the theory had only a 1/36 chance of being correct, and Einstein just got lucky. No one had even been able to conceive of it. A recent Lakatos award winner suggests that the pieces were all there and if Einstein hadn’t come up with it, some one else would have. It is easy to think up ideas that have already been thought up. Stephen Tiley came up with Hook’s law, I’ve come up with binomial probability distributions, “Bad News” came up with “A stairway to Heaven” by Lead Zeppelin, and a tax collector named Saul came up with Christianity, adding in his own homophobic twist.
Likewise with Darwin. The theory of evolution is, in its essence, very easy to understand. But it wasn’t a low probability hypothesis that no one but Darwin had the craziness to back. It wasn’t a hypothesis at all. Of all the people in the world, only one came up with evolution. The beliefs involved were highly improbable in this sense, they were one in a million. I am not implying that Darwin was mad incidentally, there are enough idiots who would love to go back in time and put him in a strait jacket as it is without me adding to their number.
So the decision theoretic model of improbable beliefs is not what I am after. Making wild guesses doesn’t count. One man’s wild guess is another man’s low probability hypothesis. What I am after is risky knowledge. This is not the same as betting on the thin end of the odds.
So now we have some highly philosophically interesting concepts in the pot. Knowledge, value, probability, belief contents. It seems like the value of knowledge increases in inverse proportion to its probability. But that knowledge is only knowledge if its probability is 1.
Let us look at the great mathematicians of value. They are no longer working in the abstract but are now in the stables of the super rich, hedging their wealth. Wealth does not stand still, but is alive. Leave it unattended and it will dwindle, tend to it and it will grow. The price of a stock now is an indicator of the price of the stock in the future. We can project the price into the future by seeing the range of future prices as a probability distribution. We can calculate a single value from this distribution and call that the expected value, or utility of the stock. But there is another dimension that is a little more mathematically slippery. The expected value of two stocks can be the same while the risk can be different. Black and Scholes came up with a measure of Risk in terms of variance. This can be thought of in terms of standard deviations from the mean. This again can be given a value and in derivative markets risk can be bought and sold like anything else. Here we have a mathematical equivalent of the creative genius idea. It has a probability of 1, but a high risk. However, the problem is that variance doesn’t work for probability 1. When a proposition has a probability of 1 of being true, there is no probability distribution.

Lets just try equating knowledge with value. How so? What is the value of a bet that pays £67 if p is true given that you know that p is true? Answer £67. In general the value given knowledge equals the value. Compare with probability. What is the value of an outcome with a probability of ½. Answer, ½ of the value of that outcome if it were known. Truth = probability times value. Knowledge = Value.

A contemporary question in epistemology is “what is the value of knowledge”. The answer here is that the value of knowledge is the value of the truth. Whereas the value of a partial belief is the value of the truth times the probability. What should we find out? What should be the subject of our inquiry? Which of the myriad facts that lie just beyond our reach should we step forward and grasp? The answer is, those that are of value, since the value of knowledge just is the value of the truth. It is the love of the good that should guide us through life.

Jonny versus John Wright on Freewill

2007-12-05T23:52:00.000Z

Tonight I’m not going to post about Ted Honderich’s talk on his new theory of consciousness, interesting though it was, but rather about John Wright’s exemplary talk about Freedom and Determinism. The reason for this is that in my mysterious past I carved out a thesis on freedom and determinism under the tutelage of Professor Honderich himself. It has been established by science that I have got a learning difficulty, which was given to Honderich’s consciousness as a teaching difficulty. Consequently my views on freedom and determinism may be negatively defined by Ted’s views. So in reading my views on J.Ws talk, you might be able to deduce T.Hs views on determinism. Two birds with one stone.

John Wright’s talk was exemplary in my view since he laid out the whole debate very clearly and not only presented his argument, but the whole logical space in which his argument worked. Consequently, (perhaps aided by my learning difficulty) I was able to see with great clarity where the argument went wrong.

John’s argument was what he called a barrel argument, meaning that you partition up the logical, or conceptual space into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive alternatives and eliminate each alternative. Usually the alternatives are that “e”, some event was either caused, or not caused. If it was caused, so the argument goes, it was not an act of free will, but if it was not caused then it was also not an act of free will. Therefore there are no acts of free will. Boom! Boom! both barrels.

Fast forward a few possible libertarian responses, including “Pink’s magic barrel”, and we get to the really interesting part of John’s talk. He tries to run the barrel argument by partitioning the logical space into 5 broadly speaking modal alternatives. The five alternatives were 1. Metaphysically impossible, 2. Contingent Random. 3. Contingent probabilistic. 4. Contingent historically/physically determined. 5. Metaphysically necessary. The argument goes that these categories are mutually exclusive and exhaustive in that for all e, if e is an event, (I’m a little weak on this, perhaps it shouldn’t be event, but proposition) then it falls into one and only one of these categories. The twist is that these categories don’t mention causation, explicitly anyway, since the libertarian justly accuses the original barrel argument of ruling out free acts from the start by implicitly assuming that free choices aren’t causes, and that the only powers are causal powers.

It is clear that we can rule out 1 and 5 straight away. If “e” is metaphysically necessary or impossible, then “e” is not an act of free will. Boom! Boom! So now it looks like if John can rule out 2, 3 and 4 then he has ruled out acts of free will without mentioning cause. He then says that 2, if an event is random then it is not an act of free will Boom! 3, If an event is probabilistic it is not an act of free will Boom! 4. If an event is historically/physically determined then it is not an act of free will Boom! Therefore there is no act of freewill.

Dirty Harry: “I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?"

So John seemed to think that the libertarian would be forced to find a sixth barrel but that there is no conceptual space left for a sixth alternative.. All in all, a great talk which provoked a lot of interesting discussion.

But I wonder why a determined event is not an act of freewill? The idea is immediately appealing and needs no sophisticated argument. “Determined” can be substituted with “couldn’t have been otherwise”. A free choice necessarily could have been otherwise. Therefore free choices are not determined, and determined events are not free choices.

Given this, why is it that a contingent yet historically/physically determined event couldn’t have been otherwise? What ever your views about time, it is now determined that the allies won world war 2. But could it have been otherwise? Yes. The allies could have lost WWII. What is the probability that the allies won WWII? Well, call me anti revisionist, but I would say the probability that the allies won is 1. But what was the probability in 1940? Considerably less than 1. Or might it not be the case that it was completely random that the allies won? Suppose aliens observing earth in the early forties tried to predict who would win using incredibly sophisticated science of human behaviour. Might they not conclude that it was random what the outcome would be? My point here is these categories: determined, random, probabilistic, aren’t mutually exclusive. The same event could be random, historically determined and probabilistic relative to different times and theories and information states. So the five barrel argument fails, not because there is a sixth barrel, but because the five barrels aren’t mutually exclusive.

To freely choose that F through action A it must be the case that P(F A) – P(F ~A) > 0. As P(F A) – P(F ~A) tends to 1, the greater the freedom of the choice. If P(F A) = P(F ~A), then F is not freely chosen at all, whatever value for P(F A). What is not clear to me is why John thinks that this equality must hold in all cases. Surely even in the most determined of cases we want to say that things would have gone differently counterfactually. Whatever the probability that I wrote this blog post, counterfactually, if I hadn’t freely chosen to have done so, then it wouldn’t have been written. Therefore it was a consequence of my free choice.

A Wager with John Lucas

2007-11-29T14:14:00.000Z

John Lucas gave a talk at the Philosophy Society tonight about the nature of time. He used an argument which is the exact reverse of an argument I have recently written into my thesis. To simplify matters I’ll give the two arguments in simple bullet points.
Lucas’s argument:

1. There is evidence from physics that there are objective probabilities.
2. If there are objective probabilities, there must be a privileged frame of reference.
3. Therefore there is a privileged frame of reference.

Jonny’s argument

1. There is evidence from physics that there is no privileged frame of reference.
2. If there is no privileged frame of reference then there can’t be objective probabilities.
3. Therefore there are no objective probabilities.

If this is a purely empirical matter, then I must bend my knee to Prof. Lucus and accept his authority. But I can’t help staying on my feet a little and questioning how it is possible to understand how a privileged frame of reference helps.

What is at issue is two interpretations of probability.

Jonny’s probability: The degree of belief a wise man would have given specific knowledge of the set up.

John Lucus’s probability: If P(A) = 1/3 then A is 1/3 true.

So I have a problem with quantum physics and Lucus has a problem with general relativity. The issue is deeply metaphysical since it is bound up in time itself. The Professor’s view has the objective truth values of propositions changing over time, whereas my view has the truth value of propositions fixed for all time, but our knowledge of them changing over time. To illustrate the difference lets imagine a wager between me and the Professor.

Day 1. We fire off a space rocket that accelerates to close to light speed. Inside the rocket is a gun powder keg attached to a Geiger counter and a delay device such that if a specific range of sub atomic events happens then at noon on Day 2 the keg will explode (keg!). Using our best physics we calculate that the probability that the keg will explode at noon on day 2 is ½ . P(keg!) = ½.
The Professor and I bet on whether the keg will explode. We both endorse contemporary physics and agree that odds of 1 : 1 are fair. He bets £1 on (keg!) and I bet £1 on ~(keg!).
Day 2. (keg time) The keg explodes. A radio signal is sent back to earth.
Day 2. (earth time) The signal arrives at earth. We now know that (keg!).

Now during his talk Professor Lucas gave the advice to use one’s opponents arguments to refute them. So to avoid paying him the pound that I owe him I offer the following argument.
1. On Day 1 P(keg!) = ½ . (According to physics)
2. On Day 1 (keg!) was ½ true and ~(keg!) was ½ true. (Lucas’s interpretation of probability)
3. (keg!) has a time index as a part of its content. (keg!) means that the powder keg explodes at noon on Day 2.
4. At the time I made the bet (keg!) was not true, but ½ true.
5. So that I have not lost the bet, since (keg!) is still not true at the time that I made the bet, it is only ½ true.
In summary, although I accept that (keg!) is now true, and has been in all locations simultaneous with noon day 2 from the privileged inertial frame of reference, this does not require me to accept that (keg!) was true before this absolute time. And it was before this absolute time that I made the bet.

Should I pay John Lucus £1? If not, are quantum mechanical statements falsifiable? When I state that some future event will happen, what do I mean?

2 envelopes revisited, a simpler version for the hard of hearing

2007-11-23T02:14:00.000Z

Sam’s envelope stall.

A seasoned gambler named Sam with axe to grind sets up a stall near Harvard university. He has thought up a scam to make money out of clever academics from the business school. He offers any punter a choice between two envelopes. Inside each envelope is written a sum of money on a ticket. He promises that the sum in one envelope is twice the sum in the other. If questioned he will tell you that he will round the lower amount down to the first decimal, so if the higher says $1.56.3, the lower will say $0.78.1. The punter pays nothing until he has picked one of the two envelopes. He now has a choice: walk away and pay nothing, or pay the price on the ticket, plus a commission of 5%, in exchange for the sum of money written on the other envelope. The rich smart students from the business school are attracted by the stall, and many of them try it out. At first they assume it’s a trick of some kind, but Sam never tampers with the envelopes and always allows a complete free choice. The envelopes are completely identical. What really convinces the students that there is no trick is that one statistician does an exit poll and discovers that half the punters double their money, and half the punters come away with half their original stake, both minus the commission of course. So it is clear that Sam is playing fair. There is a ½ probability of choosing the envelope with the lowest amount and thus doubling your money. Once word gets around, then more students roll up to play Sam’s game.

Some guys from the business school decide that Sam must be a fool. They reason like this: when you see the price on the ticket you know you have a ½ probability of doubling your money, and a ½ probability of halving your money if you buy the ticket, minus the commission. Let us say you have a ticket with $X written on it. The expected utility is ½ of $2X + ½ of $ ½X which is $1.25X. Since you only had to pay $1.05X including the commission, you should make a profit in the long run of $0.2X a pop. Some of them run back to their rich fathers telling tales of a unique business opportunity and getting early releases of their inheritances. They will buy as many tickets as Sam will give them.

Now Sam, being a seasoned gambler, knows how to be random. The amounts in the envelopes vary enormously. In one pair there will be $8843.33.1, and $17686.66. In the next there will be $4 and $2. There is no limit on how high the tickets will go. As his fortune increases he increases the range of amounts he puts on the tickets, so even the range of possibilities is not constant. But what infuriates and befuddles the students is that Sam’s fortune does increase. And although some students do come away richer, most do not, and the worst off are those who blew their inheritances on as many tickets as they could buy.

People from the maths department begin to ask Sam all kinds of strange questions. How does he select the amounts to put in the envelope? What is the prior probability distribution? Does he toss a coin at any point? Sam won’t give straight answers to these questions. He looks at tea leaves, he says, and the way the birds fly. He uses Archimedes principle and counts the bubbles in his bath.

Even the philosophy department gets involved. Which envelope is held fixed? They ask. Do you select both envelopes in the same possible world? Do you rigidly designate one sum and double it, or rigidly designate the other and halve it? Would you ever put an infinite amount in one envelope, and in which case, how much would you put in the other envelope? Sam smiles at these questions and taps his ever burgeoning wallet.
So what is the solution? How does Sam make his living? The answer is surprisingly simple. Although it is true that half the people who buy a ticket double their money and the other half halve their money, if the exit pole had been a little more detailed it would have revealed that the average price of a winning ticket was half the average price of a losing ticket. So although in pure frequency terms the chance of doubling is 0.5, in financial terms the losing tickets count as double since they are twice as expensive. This means that only a third of the money is doubled, whereas 2/3 of the money is halved. So, aside from the commission, the amount of money going in to Sam’s capital is on average equal to the amount going out. Of course, Sam should only rarely approach his total capital since a series of big losses could put him out of business. But he has total control of the stake size, so he doesn’t need to take risks. As long as the students keep buying tickets, he will make a steady profit.

So what fooled the students? They neglected to realise that the losing envelopes cost twice as much as the winning envelopes. They should have seen that it was a zero sum game minus the commission and walked away. Had they realised that being indifferent was the correct attitude they could have calculated the correct probabilities using a clever formula worked out by Frank Plumpton Ramsey in 1926. The formula says that if a Subject is indifferent between options:
1. A for certain or
2. B if p and C if ~p,
Then the subject’s degree of belief that p is equal to
A – C/B – C.
Suppose that the ticket price is X, and p is the proposition that S will double his money on swapping, then S should be indifferent between:
1. $0 for certain. (He can just walk away with what he started with) or
2. $X if p and – $1/2X if not p (because he wins his stake back twice if he wins and loses half his stake if he loses)
Then S’s degree of belief that p = 0.5X/1.5X = 1/3.

What this shows is that given that indifference is the correct attitude, then the probability one should assign to doubling your money in Sam’s stall is 1/3 and the probability of losing half your stake is 2/3. This number does not represent the frequency of events fitting this description, but the expected utitlity. It takes into account the initial stake size. It calculates the frequency of units of value that get doubled, rather than the frequency of transactions that get doubled. When calculating expected utility it is the former which is of prime importance and therefore it is probability so interpreted that should be used in expected utility calculations.

What confuses matters is that the amounts in the envelopes are random. This focuses attention unduly on how this process is randomised which is a distraction. The only function the randomising serves is to introduce ignorance into the situation. If, as the classic two envelope paradox is properly presented, you are presented with just two envelopes, one with double the other, it is hard to see why the selection procedure is relevant at all. We could represent the ignorance more simply by imagining a thousand students being presented with the same to envelopes without being able to communicate. Lets say the envelopes contain £10 and £20. Probabilistically, around 500 will pick £10 and the other 500 will pick £20 first. If they all elect to swap we can record the results in two ways. We can either say that 50% doubled their money and 50% lost half their stake. This would be enumerating the transactions. Or we could say that £10 000 worth of deals made a loss of 50% and yet only £5 000 worth of deals doubled in value. So the relative frequency of loss to gain is 2:1, making the probability of doubling your money 1/3 and halving it 2/3. Of the thousand students, five hundred lost £10 and five hundred won £10. Sam makes his money from the commission and the insensitivity of decision theory to risk.

Moral Particularism

2007-11-01T12:58:00.000Z

Last night was my first visit to a KCL Philosophy Society event and I was very impressed. Rory O'Connel is a witty and sharp chairman and Jonathan Dancy was truly great. Before the talk began Dancy told some anecdotes reminiscent in style and content of the greatest Rap stars. To an audience who were still stuck in “the ghetto” of doing a degree in a subject with dubious claim to any earning potential at all, he was telling stories of sipping perfectly made margaritas in heated swimming pools, then jetting back to the lovely English spring to be “pestered” by adoring graduate student fans. In true hip hop style, he bragged about the publishing figures of his classic, still going strong after twenty years. This is inspiring stuff!

When he gave his talk, it was obvious that his success was well deserved. He had the utmost respect for the audience and dealt with questions with a true intellectual humility. He was arguing for moral particularism. As is usual with me, I’ll give my own views on the issue rather than attempting to give an interpretation of Dancy’s view. The issue as I see it is a direction of fit, or of ontological priority. The particularist believes that the value of a particular action is ontologically prior to the value of any general rule from which it can be deduced. The opposing view is that particular actions derive their moral value from being the consequences of general rules. So, to use Ayers’ example: the fact that it was wrong of Jack to steal my bicycle has a relationship to the law-like statement “stealing is wrong”. The particularist will admit that such rules can be true in some cases, but believe their truth is dependent on the moral worth of the particular actions to which they apply, rather than the other way around. So it is not in virtue of the fact that stealing is wrong that Jack was wrong to steal my bicycle, but rather that it is in virtue of the fact that many or even most actions involving theft are wrong that the general statement “stealing is wrong” gains its truth.
The big problem facing the particularist is epistemological. How can we tell whether Jack was wrong to steal my bicycle if not in virtue of the fact that it follows from the general principle that stealing is wrong? Dancy’s answer is that we know a priori. The universalist can’t object to this as easily as may be thought, since the universalist must also claim that we know the general principles a priori.
But my view is that we know the value of particular situations through raw experience. For example, we can experience temperature. When in a cold room, we know through sensation that it is cold. But the sensation of cold is not value neutral. It certain situations we also know that it is bad that it is cold. The cold might have a bitter sting, which will be a quality of the sensation, rather than a judgement about the probability of hypothermia. Looking over the sea with a full belly and the sun on my face, I experience as good. I do not deduce this from general principles sun on face = good, full belly = good, sea view = good. The goodness is a part of the experience. It is clear that this is so if we consider the case of disappointment. I eat a big meal and sit over looking the sea on a sunny day expecting it to be good. But to my disappointment the sun is a torment, the fullness of the belly bloating and nauseating and the sea hideous. A ménage a trois may be experienced as seedy and immoral, an orgy of loveless selfishness, but could also be experienced as an enlightening and liberating celebration of erotic love. There is no necessity that one should be able to tell in advance a priori how the experience will go. If one has to experience it to be able to judge its moral worth, then surely one's knowledge of the moral worth is gained through experience.
By the end of the questions I came around to the idea that perhaps these immediate experiences of goodness, or moral relevance, or moral similarity, could just as well be called a priori as empirical. When I see that the object on the table is a cube, have I gained this knowledge a priori or through sensation? When I see a policeman racially abusing and humiliating a terror suspect and judge it to be wrong, is this judgement a priori, or do I experience the wrongness?
Any comments welcome. Anonymous comment permitted but frowned upon.

Time and Value by Oscar Horta

2007-10-02T20:14:00.000+01:00

Time and Value
Oscar Horta
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Santiago de Compostela
Praza de Mazarelos
15782 Santiago de Compostela – Spain–

Can the value of some benefit or harm depend on the time of its occurrence (other things being the same)? Those who deny that this can be so assume the idea of the temporal neutrality of value, which can be expressed as follows:

(N) Other things being equal, the magnitude of the value which a certain benefit or harm has for its receptor is something in itself independent from the time at which it occurs.

Or else:

(e)(i) (e is a certain benefit or harm, and i is the one who is affected by e).
(w)(w’) (w is a world in which i is affected by e at a certain moment t and w’ is the world nearest to w in which e affects i not at t but at another certain moment t’)
The value of which i is a recipient in w = the value of which i is a recipient in w’
The value of e at t = the value of e at t’

This idea seems at first sight intuitively cogent. However, Derek Parfit has shown that our attitudes do not match it. He has pointed out that we have what he describes as a “bias towards the near”. We have a strong tendency to have higher concerns regarding the experiences that we may have closer in time to the moment at which we are. We display a preference for postponing negative experiences even when this will end up being worse for us in the long term, and we have an inverse tendency regarding positive experiences. On the other hand, as Michael Slote and Frances Kamm have pointed out, we also have a preference for what comes last (or, in other words, for inclines over declines). A story with a sad beginning and a fortunate ending seems to be happier than another one with a joyful start and a depressing conclusion, even if in the first one the period of joy is shorter. This seems paradoxical, since these two tendencies are at odds not only with temporal neutrality, but also with each other.
Besides, there is an even deeper way in which temporal neutrality is practically rejected, which has been also described by Parfit: we have what he calls a “bias towards the future”. We care more about the experiences which we will have in the future than about those we have already gone through in the past. This means that our appraisals, rather than being temporally neutral, do vary in accordance to the moment at which we are with respect to the benefits and harms we may experience. Explanations of this asymmetry in terms of the direction of causality or some physical arrow of time would be satisfactory if they were grounded on a sound ontology of time which gave the future some sort of priority over the past. However, none of the most accepted theories concerning the metaphysics of time grant this. Two of them are neutral regarding this: according to presentism, only the present exists; and eternalism maintains that all events occurring at some temporal point exist (so not only the present, but also the past and the future exist). For its part, the remaining leading theories, the growing block theory and the shrinking tree theory, actually defend an asymmetry towards the past, since according to them both the past and the present, but not the future, exist. Therefore, none of these theories provide the sort of the ontology of time which would be needed in order to support partiality towards the future. Such a theory should be described as a “futurist” or “shrinking block” one which considered that the present and the future, but not the past, exist. However, this theory has not received any support in the way in which the aforementioned have. Therefore, it seems that the appeal to the ontology of time not only does not provide a justification for the preference towards the future: it actually makes things more problematic for it. In the best scenario (that of presentism and eternalism) it dismisses it through an acceptance of temporal neutrality. And if we turn to the growing block and the shrinking tree theory, we can see that they actually contradict it by embracing a past-directed view, subsequently leading to a double and conflicting temporal asymmetry.
Things do not get any better to future-directedness if we consider what may the theories of the diachronic persistence of objects say on the matter. Three-dimensionalism can accomodote either this view or neutrality, whereas four-dimensionalism actually appears to support neutrality. Furthermore, a similar conclusion can be reached in the case of onto-semantic theories of time: neither the tensed nor the tenseless theory of time support future-directedness. If anything, it seems that the tenseless one is actually much more favorable to neutrality.
The peculiar conclusion to draw from here is that we value what we have a tendency to consider nonexistent over that which we are inclined to consider existent. This contradiction goes together with and is strongly reinforced –if not actually caused–by two contradictory facts concerning the way in which we cognitively relate to the past and future:
(i) We can know the past but not the future. The past, unlike the future, seems to be fixed and available to being recorded (rather than predicted). This clearly supports the ontological asymmetry, although it is not in itself a proof of it.
(ii) As Ingmar Persson has defended, we lack the capacity to make motivational representations of our past experiences which might resemble the ones we can make of our future ones (as a result of which we can have feelings such as fear concerning what may happen to us in the future but not towards what we have already passed through –when we do is because we fear that it happens again–). This supports the asymmetry concerning temporal value, albeit, again, it is not a sufficient proof of its appropriateness.
These conclusions are particularly puzzling since, even if we actually accept a priori the thesis of temporal neutrality, it seems hardly possible for us to get rid of the aforementioned preferences which deny it. But they are not only problematic on theoretical grounds, but also, obviously, on practical ones. This may not be so in the case of the preference for the future, given that, since we cannot change the past, our future-directed prudential concerns seem to be appropriate (although this is not necessarily the case of our future-directed ability to represent our experiences). But the preferences for the near and for the last often lead us to face significant practical dilemmas.

Actual Possibilities, by Jonny Blamey

2007-08-07T17:22:00.000+01:00

When people try to explain to me what is meant by metaphysical possibility, and possible world semantics, they tell me that possible worlds are “ways the world could be”. I feel like I understand. But when I say what I understand by “the ways the world could be” I am usually accused of mixing up metaphysical modality with epistemic modality. My intuitive understanding of “the ways the world could be” is actually a misunderstanding, since intuitively (to me) the ways the world could be is an epistemic notion. What is more “the world” in “the ways the world could be” is the actual world. I have no interest, certainly no practical interest, in the ways some possible world could be. I am a fan of science fiction, my interest is excited because the scenarios presented could happen here, in this world, albeit in the future. I equally enjoy fiction set in historical times. If the book is well researched then the events portrayed could have happened, they are ways this world, my world, could have been. The probability, according to my evidence, that Rob Roy cut an Englishman in half, like in the film, is zero and I am quite aware of this. But he could have done. The probability that Rob Roy became King of England is likewise zero, but this could not have happened, this is not a way the world could have been. If someone were to tell me that Rob Roy could have become king of England, I should respond by asking how. I would then sit back and enjoy listening to what facts would need to be unpicked, what chance happenings would have had to have occurred for Rob Roy to capture the throne. This pathway, to be of any interest to me, would have to be picked and unpicked out of the fabric of this world, my world, the only world there is.

Enough preamble. Here are two arguments that I take to be both modal and valid, but that seem to be about about the actual world and notabout possible worlds at all but . Neither are they about epistemic modals given the wonderful principle laid out by Moritz Schulz in this blog: (MIGHT c(might x) = 1 if c(X) > 0.)

POSITIVE MODAL ARGUMENT:

Premise: If John had set his alarm for eight o’clock he would have got here on time.
Premise: John could have set his alarm for eight o’clock.
Conclusion: John could have got here on time.

The conclusion is modal. We are to assume that in fact John did not get here on time. It is not consistent with our evidence that John got here on time, so this is not epistemic possibility. The probability that John got here on time is 0. So according to MIGHT it is not true that John might have got here on time. However, there is surely a possible world where John got here on time whether he set his alarm clock or not. But the conclusion of this argument is not trivially true. The second premise is necessary for the conclusion to follow.

NEGATIVE MODAL ARGUMENT.

Premise: The only way that John could have got here on time would have been by car.
Premise: John does not have a car.
Conclusion: John could not have got here on time.

This time the conclusion is not counterfactual, since it is assumed that John did not get here on time. So the probability that John did not get here on time is 1. We again are not using epistemic modals here since according to MIGHT John must have got here on time and the conclusion is redundant. In this second argument, the second premise must be true in the actual world for the argument to go through. Are there possible worlds in which John has a car? In these worlds he could have got here on time. But we know that in this world he doesn’t have a car, so in this world he couldn’t have got here on time.

These modal arguments are important, especially in assessing culpability, but also in improving design and assessing scientific evidence. But they don’t seem to fit either metaphysical modality nor epistemic modality.

The Principle of Indifference by Sorin Bangu

2007-07-19T13:41:00.000+01:00

Probability Assignments and the Principle of Indifference.
A Reassessment of the Eliminative Strategies

A central and controversial component of the ‘classical’ conception of probability, the Principle of Indifference (hereafter PI) claims that equipossibility entails equiprobability. A more complete version can be formulated as follows:

Given a null state of background information, equal regions of the space of possible outcomes should be assigned equal probabilities (Howson and Urbach 2006, p. 266).

As is well known, the principle plays an important role not only in physics (in the foundations of statistical mechanics) but also in our everyday probabilistic inferences (e.g., in predicting the outcomes of coin-tossing). Yet many philosophers and scientists also hold that PI is subject to serious objections. These objections are of two kinds. The first kind has to do with the (logical) inconsistencies introduced by the use of the principle. It has long been claimed that the principle must be rejected because it leads to paradoxes – especially when employed in infinitary (continuous) contexts.[1] The second kind of criticism, advanced by Reichenbach (1949, §§ 68-71), maintains that the principle is dispensable in probabilistic inferences. Consequently, he proposed to pursue what I call here an eliminative strategy. In a nutshell, the guiding idea of this type of strategy is to show that reliance on the a priori principle is not necessary in order to infer the correct observed frequencies of outcomes.

My goal in this paper is to analyze in detail two attempts to implement the eliminative strategy.[2] While I agree that eliminativism is a very promising kind of strategy available when dealing with PI[3], I’ll maintain that both attempts proposed so far are fraught with problems. The paper is divided in two sections, each aiming to highlight the difficulties faced by those attempts. In the first section I show that Reichenbach’s implementation of the eliminative strategy fails; more precisely, I’ll show that one of the premises of his eliminative argument just assumes PI. In order to prove this, I’ll examine the same example taken by Reichenbach (following Poincaré) as paradigmatic in showing the effectiveness of PI, namely its employment in predicting the correct probabilities in the game of roulette. Since there is presumably nothing special about roulette (in the sense that the eliminative strategy can be adapted to other cases in which PI seems effective), it is natural to expect that the failure in this case will have similar consequences for other potential eliminative attempts.

In the second section I turn to another attempt to eliminate PI, Gillies’ recent heuristic approach (Gillies (2000)). Despite the fact that Gillies allows PI a certain role in our probabilistic inferences – namely, in conjuring probabilistic hypotheses – I’ll construe his view as another attempt to dispense with the role of PI in probabilistic reasoning. My reason for doing this is Gillies’ emphasis on the incapacity of the principle to justify those hypotheses. Although I agree that this line of thought is quite promising, I’ll close by raising doubts with regard to its cogency. More precisely, I show that the alternative method of justification / rejection of probabilistic hypotheses endorsed by Gillies (in essence, the method of statistical relevance tests) is subject to the same kind of difficulties as the method of a priori justification involving the application of the principle.
[1] van Fraassen, for instance, notes that “the great failure of symmetry thinking” is revealed in those situations “where indifference disintegrated into paradox.” (1989, p. 293).
[2] With one exception, none of the analyses of PI listed below pays attention to these strategies; instead, they focus exclusively on the relation between PI and the (Bertrand type) paradoxes. See Mikkelson (2004), Bartha and Johns (2000), Gillies (2000), Castell (1998), Marinoff (1994), Schlessinger (1993). The notable exception is Strevens (1998) and I’ll take issue with some of his points in the first section.
[3] Another line of objections to PI is of course based on its role in deriving the Bertrand type paradoxes. While I’ll be saying something about this role in section 2, the focus of this paper is not on the paradoxes.

The Money Pump Argument by Stuart Yasgur.

2007-07-09T19:39:00.000+01:00

The Money Pump and the Justification of the Transitivity Condition
Stuart Yasgur

Rationality is said to require that agents have transitive preferences. The justification of the transitivity condition, as it will be referred to here, is widely thought to be provided by the money pump argument, though there is less consensus about the exact form of this justification.

An excerpt of a larger paper that examines the main justifications of the transitivity condition, this paper focuses on the consequentialist justification. It is important to note that since this paper focuses on the justification of the transitivity condition, it will differ significantly from papers which attempt to characterize the decisions within the money pump itself.

To begin, I will present a basic version of the transitivity condition and a statement of the money pump argument. There are a number of variations of the transitivity requirement, but here we can avoid complications and deal with a weak version, though the arguments in the paper apply equally to stronger versions:

Take the expression x>y to mean that the agent prefers x to y and the expression x > y to mean that the agent prefers x to y or is indifferent between the two. Given this, we can define transitivity as follows: an agent’s preferences are taken to be transitive if, for all triples of alternatives (x, y, z), x > y and y > z imply x > z. Correspondingly an agent’s preferences are taken to be intransitive if for a triple of alternatives (x, y, z), x > y, y > z, and z > x.

Generic version of the money pump argument:
An agent prefers x to y, y to z, and z to x. The agent also prefers more money to less. The agent is offered the opportunity to switch from z to y for a small amount of money, and he accepts. He is then offered the opportunity to switch from y to x for a small amount of money, and he accepts. And, he is offered the opportunity to switch from x to z for a small amount of money, which he accepts.

There is also an extended version of the money pump that is quite common, in which the cycle is repeated until the agent looses all of his money. Though it is easy to slip between the two, the potential justificatory force of each differs, so here they will be dealt with separately. Unless otherwise mentioned, I will be focusing on the basic version.

There are a few things to notice about the money pump argument. First, the agent has intransitive preferences. Second, the agent always moves from a less preferred option to a more preferred option. Third, in terms of his own preferences, the agent is unambiguously worse off at the end of the cycle than he was at the beginning of the cycle. I.e., in terms of his preferences over x, y, and z, the agent is no better off and no worse off, but in terms of his preference for more money rather than less he is worse off.

It should also be clear that the money pump is not an argument. It is an example, but examples on their own are not arguments. To establish that the money pump example justifies the transitivity condition, we must understand the force of the example, and this is where views begin to diverge.

Arguably, the consequentialist justification of the transitivity condition is the most plausible. As was already mentioned, the agent in the money pump is made unambiguously worse off, and it is thought to be these consequences themselves that justify the claim that transitivity is a requirement of rationality.

Consequentialist justifications of requirements of rationality take the following form:
· P1: If X leads an agent to suffer negative consequences, then X is irrational.
· P2: X leads an agent to suffer negative consequences, in suitable circumstances.
· C: Therefore X is irrational.

Much can be said to make arguments of this form more specific, but the general version should suffice to make the point at hand. The first thing to note is that the money pump offers a case in which P2 holds, and if P1 holds, then the conclusion follows. Next, notice that if we take X to be ‘false beliefs’, then P2 would also hold. If P1 holds, then it would follow that having false beliefs is irrational. Having false beliefs is not irrational, therefore P1 does not hold; and therefore the money pump does not offer a consequentialist justification for considering intransitive preferences irrational.

Further, because of the gap between preferences and the consequences of choices based on them, there does not seem to be a way to refine P1 so that it would apply to intransitive preferences but not false beliefs.[1]

Conclusion:
In the longer version of this paper I argue that despite its currency in the literature the money pump does not justify the transitivity condition. However, my own view is that the transitivity condition, suitably qualified, is a genuine requirement of rationality that can be justified based on a broader understanding of the relationship between rationality and value. Rather by discussing the money pump’s limited justificatory force I hope to bring into focus the need to reexamine the justification of one of the basic conditions of preference theory; and I am particularly interested in people’s thoughts about possible consequentialist justifications.
[1] Consider the following example:
· P1`: If X leads an agent to suffer negative consequences even when he is ideal in every other way, then X is irrational.
· P2`: X leads an agent to suffer negative consequences in suitable circumstances, even when he is ideal in every other way.
· C: Therefore X is irrational.

Since P2` still holds for false beliefs, P1` should as well. But it does not.

[1] Consider the following example:
· P1`: If X leads an agent to suffer negative consequences even when he is ideal in every other way, then X is irrational.
· P2`: X leads an agent to suffer negative consequences in suitable circumstances, even when he is ideal in every other way.
· C: Therefore X is irrational.
Since P2` still holds for false beliefs, P1` should as well. But it does not.

"Probabilistic Semantics for Epistemic Modals" Moritz Schulz, New College oxford

2007-06-29T14:54:00.000+01:00

The Thesis

It is prima facie plausible that “might” and “must” express a certain kind of
epistemic modality. We shall assume that “might” expresses some kind of epistemic possibility and that “must” can be used to express a corresponding kind
of epistemic necessity. Evidence for the view that “might” and “must” provide
an interdefinable pair of modals can be gained from examples like the following:

(1) They might be away.
(2) No, they must be at home.

It seems to be intuitively plausible that (2) is the negation of (1). In what
follows, we shall thus assume that “might” and “must” are interdefinable (in
their epistemic usages). In our informal discussion, we shall be mainly concerned
with “might” because it seems to be less ambiguous than “must”. Besides, we
shall only deal with indicative or present tense usages of “might”.
A good starting point for our investigation into the semantics of “might” is
the following observation:
(Basic Observation)
We are prepared to assert “It might be that X” iff our credence in X
is positive, i.e. iff C(X) > 0.
If one is not sure that they are away, one is in a position to say “They might
be at home”. And if one is sure that they are away, one should reject that they
might be at home. Moreover, the basic observation seems to provide a good
explanation why it would be an odd thing to say
(3) They might be at home, but I am certain that they are away.
Now, assuming that the basic observation gets the assertability conditions of
“might”-statements about right, we can go on and ask what our credence in a
“might”-statement should be. Since assertability goes by high credence, it follows
from the basic observation that our credence in a “might”-statement should be
high iff our credence in the embedded statement is non-zero. Actually, I would
like to argue for a more definite thesis:
(MIGHT)
Our credence in “It might be that X” should be 1 iff our credence
in X is positive and it should be 0 iff our credence in X is 0. Thus
C(Might X) = 1 iff C(X) > 0 and C(Might X) = 0 iff C(X) = 0 for
C being any reasonable credence function.

My main reason for proposing MIGHT stems from the observation that beliefs
in “might”-statements do not come in degrees. Rather, it seems to be an all or-
nothing matter. For instance, we usually do not qualify a “might”-statement
with a phrase such as “probably” which can be used to compare the likelihood
of statements. It is rather odd to say
(?) Probably they might be at home.
Also, we do not say that one “might”-statement is more likely than another:
(?) It is more likely that they might be at home than it is that they might be
away.
All this is evidence for allowing a “might”-statement to receive only two values.
In addition, it is hard to see what kind of further evidence (over and above nonzero
credence) would be needed in order to be certain about a “might”-statement.
It seems to be enough to give the embedded statement some (subjective) chance
of being true. So, it seems that one can make a good case for MIGHT.
Given our assumption about the interdefinability of “might” and “must”, our
thesis has a natural counterpart.
(MUST)
Our credence in “It must be that X” should be 1 iff our credence
in X is 1 and it should be zero otherwise. Thus C(Must X) = 1 iff
C(X) = 1 and C (Must X) = 0 iff C(X) < 1 for C being any reasonable
credence function.

Two envelope paradox solved. Jonny Blamey 22.6.2007

2007-06-23T14:19:00.000+01:00

ALF:

Here is a well known paradox for decision theory. I offer you a choice of two envelopes. Let’s call them A and B. A contains twice as much money as B, but we don’t know how much money is in either. It is not possible to tell by looking which envelope is A and which envelope is B. You select one of the two envelopes. Let us call this envelope E1. We still don’t know whether E1 is A or B, but we can safely assume that it is equally likely to be either. So the probability that E1 is A = the probability that E1 is B = ½.
Now I offer you a choice. You can either keep E1 and take the money inside, let us call this option KEEP. Or you can exchange E1 for E2 and take the money in E2. Let us call this SWAP. Which do you choose and why? Remember, you want to end up with envelope A since it has twice as much money in it as envelope B.

BETH

Frankly I am indifferent. I therefore choose KEEP since it requires less effort. I am indifferent because I was initially equally likely to have chosen A as B, and by swapping I am just as likely to end up with A as B. We can express this by multiplying the expected utilities by their probabilities. For KEEP we get whatever value E1 contains, which is either the higher sum A, or the lower sum B. We multiply A by the probability that E1 contains A, and multiply B by the probability that E1 contains B. For SWAP we get whatever is contained in E2. so we multiply the probability that E1 contains A by B and the probability that E1 contains B by A.

PAYOFF KEEP
P(E1 =A)(A) = ½ A = B
+
P (E1 = B)(B) = ½ B = ¼ A
=
1 ½ B = ¾ A

PAYOFF SWAP
P(E1 =A)(B) = ½ A = B
+
P (E1 = B)(A) = ½ B = ¼ A
=
1 ½ B = ¾ A

In fact, probability notions aren’t even necessary since SWAP is no different from choosing E2 in the first place, and this option was open to me. SWAP is just a dithering form of KEEP.

ALF

Ok, I agree, it seems like INDIFFERENCE is the most rational attitude to have towards the choice between SWAP and KEEP. But suppose you were allowed to open E1 before deciding whether to KEEP or SWAP. E1 contains had a specific amount of money in it, let’s call it x. Now we can deduce that E2 must either contain either 2x or ½ x.

BETH

That’s right, because if E1 were A, then E2 would contain ½ x, whereas if E1 were B then E2 would contain 2x and that exhausts the possibilities.

ALF

In fact we don’t even have to open E1 since the same is true for all values x.

BETH

I suppose so.

ALF

If I elect to KEEP, I will end up with x for certain, but if I SWAP I will end up with either 2x or 1/2 x. Therefore it is rational to SWAP since I’ve ½ chance of ending up with ½ x and a ½ chance of ending up with 2x, making the expected utility of SWAP 1¼x. Therefore I should SWAP, and what is more I should pay up to ¼ x to SWAP.

BETH

That’s absurd since then you should also pay up to ¼ x to swap back on the same reasoning. It is absurd because you end up with an intransitive preference. You have reasoned that you should prefer E1 to E2 and E2 to E1.Your mistake is in assigning a single value to x. E1 contains a sum of money and you have elected to call that sum x. If we call the higher sum “A” and the lower sum “B”, then p(x = A) = ½ and p(x = B) = ½ . So we can calculate the utility of KEEP as being ½ A + ½ B, which is ¾ A or 1 ½ B. We don’t know which x is, but we know that x is either A or B. So this gives us 2 possibilities.
1. p (E1 = A and x = A). = ½
The Pay off for KEEP is (A = ½ B = x)
The Pay off for SWAP (½ A= B = 1/2x)
2. p (E1 = B and x =B). = ½
The Pay off for KEEP is (½ A= B = x)
The Pay off for SWAP (A = ½ B = 2x)

So the total Pay off for KEEP is:
½ (A = ½ B) + ½ ( ½ A = B ) = (3/4 A = 1 ½ B )
If x = A, the pay off is ¾ x; if x = B the pay off is 1 ½ x
And the total pay off for SWAP is:
½ (½ A= B ) + ½ (A = ½ B ) = (3/4 A = 1 ½ B)
If x = A, the pay off is ¾ x; if x = B the pay off is 1 ½ x

As you can see, if you are clear about the value of x and the probability that x has that value, the expected utility comes out the same whether you SWAP or KEEP.

ALF

Very clever, but suppose I actually open E1 and count the cash inside. Suppose it comes out at for example £12. I reason that if I KEEP I get £12; whereas if I SWAP, I get either £6 or £24. Since I was just as likely to have chosen A or B, then the expected utility of SWAP is £3 + £12 = £15. Here I am being completely clear that x = £12 and that the probability that x has this value is 1 since I know it to have this value having opened the envelope. Furthermore, the same reasoning applies however much money is in E1. I should always SWAP.

BETH

Your mistake here is in assuming that prob (E2 contains £6) = prob (E2 contains £24) = ½. Why do you assume that? The correct assignments are prob (E2 contains £6) = 2/3 and prob (E2 contains £24) = 1/3.

ALF

I assume that prob (E2 contains £6) = prob (E2 contains £24) = ½ because it is obvious. It is obvious to everyone who has written about this paradox and it is obvious to me. If E1 contained £12 and E1 contained the lesser sum then E2 contains £24. If E1 contained the greater sum then E2 contains £6. There is a equal chance that E1 contained the greater sum (A) or the lesser sum (B), so there is an equal chance that E2 contains £24 or £6.

BETH

The reasoning is seductive, but it you refer back to the utility calculations there is only a chance of getting 2x when x = B and there is only a chance of getting ½ x when x = A. So it is not clear that you reasoning is valid. However it is difficult to explain why your reasoning is wrong, so instead I will demonstrate why the probability that E2 contains 2x is 1/3 and the probability that E2 contains ½ x is 2/3 on the assumption that E1 contains x.

Frank Ramsey developed a measurement for a subjects degree of belief that p given indifference between the options
1. A for certain
2. B if p and C if ~p.
In these conditions the subjects degree of belief that p is equal to
(A – C)/(B – C)
This quantity can be shown to be a probability in that it should conform to the axioms of probability calculus if the subject doesn’t want to be victim to a Dutch book.

This fits rather well with the two envelope paradox. Let proposition p1 be that E2 contains twice the sum of money in E1. Let’s call this sum of money “x”.
So the two options open to us in the envelope problem are
KEEP: x for certain
SWAP: 2x if p1 and ½ x if not p1.
A subject who is indifferent between these options has a degree of belief in p1 equal to:
(x – ½ x)/(2x – ½ x)
= 1/3
Let p2 be that E2 contains half the sum of money in E1.
KEEP: x for certain
SWAP ½x if p2 and 2x if not p2
A subject who is indifferent between these options has a degree of belief in p2 equal to:
(x – 2x)/(½ x – 2x)

= 2/3

So a subject who is indifferent between the options KEEP and SWAP has a degree of belief 1/3 that E2 contains twice the amount in E1 and degree of belief 2/3 that E2 contains half the amount in E1.
We started off agreeing that we should be indifferent between the options KEEP and SWAP. If we should be indifferent, then our degree of belief should be what the formula says it is when we are indifferent. So our degree of belief that E2 contains twice the amount in E1 should be 1/3 and our degree of belief that E2 contains half the amount in E1 is 2/3.

ALF: That is absurd and I can tell you why. If the reasoning was valid then it would apply equally to E2. This would make the probability that E2 contains twice the amount in E1 = 1/3 and the probability that E1 contains twice the amount in E2 also 1/3. But this exhausts the possibilities so the numbers should add up to 1. Worse still the probability the E2 contains half amount in E1 = 2/3, but so does the probability that E1 contains half the amount in E2, that means that according to your reasoning either the disjunction has a probability higher than 1, or there is a probability of at least 1/3 that both amounts are lower than the other. And the worst subjectivist crime of all, your degree of belief not only does, but should change according to how the case is described. For you have only a 1/3 degree of belief that E2 has half the amount in E1 but 2/3 degree of belief that E1 has twice the amount in E2. But surely this is the same state of affairs.

BETH: Go back and read your Kripke. “The amount in E1” can be a rigid or non-rigid designator, as can “The amount in E2”. Let us rigidly designate the amount in E1 as x and the amount in E2 as y. For non rigid designation we will use E1 and E2. If we rigidly designate (or simply find out) the value of x, but we don’t know the amount in E2, then prob (E2 = 2x) = 1/3 and prob (E2 = ½ x) = 2/3. On the other hand if we rigidly designate (or know) the value of y but don’t know the value of E1, then prob (E1= 2y) = 1/3 and prob (E2 = 1/2y) = 2/3.

To picture this suppose E1 = £4 and E2 = £2. Let call the sum of E2 and E1: T for total. A for the lesser sum and B for the greater sum

Possible values for E2 and T given E1 = 4 = x

1.
2. E2 = 1/2x = B
3.
4. E1 = x = A or B
5.
6. T = 1 ½ x = A + ½ B
7.
8. E2 = 2x = A
9.
10.
11.
12. T = 3x = A + B.

Possible values for E1 and T given E2 = 2 =y

1. E1 = ½ y = B
2. E2 = y = A or B
3. T = 1 ½ y = A + B
4. E1 = 2y = A
5.
6. T = 3x = A + B

So when I say that the probability that the amount in E2 is half the amount in E1 = 2/3 I mean the probability that E2 = 2 = 2/3. This is because “the amount in E1” rigidly designates x or 4. So the probability that E1 = 4 is 1. But when I say the probability that the amount in E1 is twice the amount in E2 I mean the probability that (E1 = 4) = 1/3. This time it is “the amount in E2” which is the rigid designator. When a term is rigidly designated it is assumed to have a probability 1.

Incidentally, don’t assume that we are talking about Bayesian or Kolmogorov conditionalization here. The prior or unconditional probabilities of E2 = 2 and E1 = 4 are either zero or undefined. Here is how Kolmogorov defines conditional probabilities

P(E2=2 E1=4)
=
P(E2=2 ∩E1=4)/ P(E1=4)

provided P(b) > 0.

But I take it that we don’t know any of the unconditional probabilities.

ALF:
Perhaps we could think of the total amount of money in both envelopes as defining the logical space of probability. A probability can be expressed as a proper fraction. If we take the total amount in both envelopes to be the denominator and the amount in each envelope to be numerators we get the result that envelope A contains 2/3 of the total and envelope B contains 1/3 of the total. When we open E1 we discover that there is £x inside. What we are interested in is whether we have 1/3 of the total or 2/3 of the total. If we have 1/3 of the total then E2 contains 2x and the denominator is 3x. If we have 2/3 of the total then E2 contains ½ x and the denominator is 1½ x.
In effect we have a 1/3 share of the 2x space of probability and a 2/3 share of the ½ x space of probability.
BETH:
Yes, here’s how I look at it. When we open E1 and find a sum of money in there, (call it x) we know that the total possible amount of money is 3x. Given 3x, we can make a pair of envelopes with x and 2x respectively; or we can make 2 pairs of envelopes with x and ½ x. Therefore given that E1 contains x, the probability that E2 contains ½ x is twice that of the probability that E2 contains 2x. Given that this exhausts the possibilities the probability that E2 contains 2x is 1/3 and the probability that E1 contains ½ x is 2/3.
ALF:
So contra Casper J. Albers, Barteld P. Kooi and Willem Schaafsma in Synthese 2005 145: 89–109, we can, and have, resolved the two envelope problem. To sum up: Indifference between KEEP and SWAP is the rational attitude. The correct degree of belief to have that the second envelope contains twice the amount contained in the first envelope is 1/3 and the correct degree of belief that the second envelope contains half the amount in the first envelope is 2/3. Therefore the expected utility of both SWAP and KEEP are the same. An explanation for the counter intuitive probability assignments is that 3x = 2(1 ½ x) so the lower pair of envelopes is twice as likely as the higher pair. Perhaps in slogan form: for every pair of socks there are two odd socks.
BETH That’ll explain why you wear odd socks half the time then Alf, or should that be 2/3s of the time!

Modal Copulation and Satisfaction. by Jessica Leech

2007-05-24T19:18:00.000+01:00

Many philosophers, for various reasons, feel uncomfortable with the use of possible world semantics in an explanation of modal language (fragments of natural language including modal locutions such as ‘possibly’, ‘necessarily’, ‘must’, ‘could be’, etc.). A common alternative suggestion is that we analyse modal statements in terms of modal predicates and/or modal properties. For example, “Socrates is necessarily a man” is understood as something like predication of ‘being necessarily male’ of Socrates. An amendment, and rival, of this approach understands the modal term, not as modifying the predicate, i.e. from ‘male’ to ‘necessarily male’, but as modifying the copula, i.e. from ‘is’ to ‘is necessarily’.

This kind of approach adheres to the intuition that de re modality is somehow involved with the relation between an object and a property, rather than being involved in the inception of new predicates and new properties. This can be illustrated by the difference between asking, ‘Is Socrates necessarily wise, or is he just contingently so?’, and asking which of two properties Socrates has, (contingent) wisdom or necessary wisdom?

McGinn, in his book Logical Properties, presents such a copula modifier account of modality. He claims that a statement of the form “a is [modally] F” is true just when a [modally] satisfies “is F”. So, for example, “Socrates is necessarily wise” is true iff Socrates necessarily satisfies the predicate “is wise”. Modal satisfaction is in turn explained in terms of modal instantiation. So, Socrates necessarily satisfies “is wise” iff Socrates necessarily instantiates wisdom.

The challenge for modal copula accounts that employ “modal satisfaction” is to flesh out this new semantic notion. McGinn’s strategy is to appeal to modes of instantiation. He claims that there are two and only two modes of instantiation, necessary and contingent. Our statements might leave this as neutral, e.g. “Socrates is wise”, but at the worldly level, where we find Socrates and wisdom, if they bear the instantiation relation to each another, then they bear that relation in one or other mode.

The problem with this theory is that there is no way to accommodate mere possibility. Firstly, it is prima facie unclear how one could begin to understand possible instantiation as a mode of instantiation, where there need be no actual instantiation, but there is only mere possibility. More worrying, a contradiction can be generated:

(1) “Socrates is possibly foolish” is true.
(2) So Socrates contingently instantiates foolishness.
(3) So, Socrates instantiates foolishness.
(4) “Socrates is not foolish” is true.
(5) So Socrates does not instantiate foolishness.
Contradiction!

In order to give the copula modifier account of modality fair trial, we cannot follow McGinn’s lead. We must either find an alternative way to understand modal satisfaction, or find a better way to make sense of copula modification than in terms of modification of satisfaction.

I am immortal

2007-05-03T18:01:00.000+01:00

Last nights talk was on immortality in the context of Plato and Aristotle. Considering that 40% of the worlds population testify to believing in life after death in one form or another it should still be considered a live issue. I for one became interested in philosophy through a morbid fascination with my own death and saw a possible way out in Plato’s republic. Here is what it is: good things perish, but goodness itself is eternal. “Eternal” can be seen not to signify a very long period of time, but timeless, unchanging, outside time. In the same way people can use the term “priceless” to mean very expensive. In particular contexts “priceless” can mean £150 000. But really priceless means not being measurable in money at all. Eternal then can be thought of as not being measured in time. Could our souls be eternal in this sense?
It seems that our souls participate in goodness in an essential way. Goodness is the light by which we understand things. This is not a contemporary thought. English speaking philosophers tend to think we understand things in terms of their truth conditions. But if we don’t know the value of something, then there is a very real sense in which we do not know that thing at all.
So my version of Plato’s version of Socrates version of the immortality of the soul is that when we understand things, we participate in the good, so in understanding we are eternal.
This is good enough for me, it certainly feels that way when one thinks a certain type of thought. “I think therefore I am”. This is always a valid argument, whoever thinks it. Either “I” is an indexical, or we are all immortal whenever we think this thought.
However, I suspect that the two billion people who believe in life after death want the afterlife to be a bit more personal than this.

Is Philosophy Science?

2007-04-25T20:55:00.000+01:00

I’ll just post some impressions of tonight’s seminar. I’ll not mention Chris Hughes since he was being too reasonable to warrant comment.

Wilfried made some beautiful statements that I found myself agreeing with. There is no know how/ know that distinction, if knowledge doesn’t have an application then it fails to be right or wrong and there is no criteria for truth. There is no criteria for correctness in philosophy so philosophy is like singing.
But I wasn’t convinced that this made philosophy any different from science. Wilfried also said that in science you stand on the shoulders of giants, whereas in philosophy you bring the giants to their knees. There is a one to one relationship between philosophers and theories. Science created his pen and was the fact that his TV didn’t work. I doubt that the TV repair man is anymore of a scientist than a philosopher, nor that the beautiful fountain pen relied on any scientific principles that weren’t around in Archimedes time.
David Papineau made a couple of interesting outrageous comments: That philosophy did not involve conceptual analysis and that philosophy was unlike science when it concerned itself with modality, but that modality was only peripheral to philosophy anyway.
Of course in a room full of philosophers there was a lot of singing going on about what philosophy was, and a lot of agreement in this regard. But there was no clear idea of what science was.
Science is exclusively modal (I polemically claim) Science tells us what is possible, what is necessary and what is impossible. Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. A modal claim. It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. A modal claim. Scientific laws extend to counterfactual cases, so any statement of scientific law is a statement about what might be, what can be, what can’t be and what couldn’t have been.
Science is not directly practical. Very little technology is developed by scientists. It is true that a good bridge builder, or pen manufacturer will use principles that have been worked out at some point by scientists. But they will also use aesthetic principles and operate within a political environment that has been shaped by ideas of a softer kind. The pen that Wilfried Ostended was as much a product of Bentham and Marx as it was of any science. Einstein, the archetypal scientist, was not a scientist because of Hiroshoma, he wasn’t even a scientist because of the motion of Mercury. If his theory had been proven false he may not have been so famous, but he would still have been doing science. Science without application is not thereby philosophy and philosophy with application is not thereby science.

Janiv Paulsberg against representational theories of pain.

2007-03-22T17:13:00.000Z

Janiv gave an interesting talk last night about pain. From what I gathered Tye’s representational theory is committed to the view that the phenomenal conent of a pain experience is identical to its representational content. Janiv then wanted to show that this must be false by providing a clear cut case where two experiences are phenomenologically the same but have different representational content. This would show that there is more to an experience than its representational content.
Although I am of the opinion that there is little sense in talking of aspects of an experience over and above its representational content, I found myself rooting for Janiv and finding Tye’s position less and less tenable. First off, two dials in a car could have their wires switched. Before the switch Dial A represents the amount of fuel remaining, and Dial B represents the amount of oil remaining. After the switch this is the other way around. B: fuel; A : oil. Suppose A has a white arm sticking towards the red number 4 before the switch and after the switch. The same person looks at the dial before and after the switch. It seems the representational content is different before and after the switch but the phenomena is the same. For a reason I didn’t quite grasp, this was only an analogy. I guess “representational content” is more about the “raw data” of the experience unmediated by higher level beliefs and inferences. So in both cases the representational content is of a dial with the arm pointing to the 4. But I’m already beginning to lose the point at this stage. It is plausible to me that the dial would “look” different in these two cases.

The more complicated and weird example that should please “Ds” family. (see comment on last post) is of inverted earth. Someone (lets call him Sam) is transported knowingly to inverted earth where the colour of things is the opposite of what it is on earth. Tomatoes are green, the sky is yellow and grass is red. People’s use of colour terms is also inverted on inverted earth, so they correctly call the sky blue and the grass green because they use the word “blue” to refer to yellow things etc.
Sam knows all this, but to make things easier for himself he wears some spectrum inverting glasses whilst on inverted earth. So when he looks at the sky, he sees that it is blue and therefore can agree with inverted earthling judgements without needing to revise his colour language.

OK, weird example, but lets accept it and see where it gets us. The idea is that when Sam looks at the sky on earth without the glasses, he has the exact same phenomenological experience as when he looks at the sky on inverted earth. But the representational content is different. (I'm not sure how. Is it because he falsely sees the sky as blue the second time, so therefore it's representational content must be that it is yellow?) Therefore experiences aren’t identical to their representational content.

What is mysterious to me is why the need for the complicated example. Perhaps if I could understand that, I could understand what is going on. In particular, why is it important that the inverted earth colour language is inverted?
Someone explain. What is the difference in the representational content of the two cases?

Pity without object. Gina Tsang

2007-03-15T16:14:00.000Z

How do you solve a problem like Anna Karenina?
Thomasson’s Artifactual Theory of Fictional Characters

Problem: Certain sentences of fictional discourse seem true yet there is no referent of fictional names. We emotionally engage with fictional characters yet there is no thing which we pity, desire or despise. Language and experience of fiction do not seem to match with non-existence of fictional characters.

Background:
Non-realists: those who wish to avoid ontological commitment to fictional characters
Frege, Russell (descriptivism) and Walton (‘Pretence’ view)
Realists: those who wish to postulate fictional characters
Meinong, Zalta, Parsons, Kripke and van Inwagen (abstract object view). Lewis (possibilism)

Thomasson (1999) = Realist about fictional characters.

1. What are fictional characters?

*Fictional characters are abstract artefacts.*
Artefact= an object created through the intentional activities of humans.

I1) Fictional characters are created by an author(s).

Provided there is no pre-existent character or real person to whom the author is referring (importing fictional character vs. importing real people into fiction).

I2) Fictional characters are created at a particular point in time.

I3) Fictional characters are ontologically dependent on their author(s) and literary works/ memory of the work/ competent readers of the language in which the work is written.

Some contingent entity A ontologically depends on some contingent entity B, iff necessarily, if A exists then B exists.

Two types of dependency:

D1) a fictional character is historically and rigidly dependent on its author(s).

Historic= Author brings character into existence at a particular point in time, though can exist independently thereafter.
Rigid= The character is dependent on a particular author (thus the author and social and historical circumstances need to exists in all pws in which the character exists).
Analogies= Child and parents, chair and maker, the colour of an apple and the apple, fictional work and the intentional acts of a particular author.

D2) a fictional character is constantly and generically dependent on either copies of literary work/ memory of the work/ competent readers of the language in which the work is written.

Constant= the character exists only as long as the work/memory/reader exist.
Generic= the character exists provided there exists any copy of the work/memory/reader exist.
Analogy= Government and the intentions and behaviour of its people, party and partygoers.

Most of these analogies seem unconvincing.

Further problems:
Have to give up traditional definition of ‘abstract’ that of being ideal, eternal and non-spatial.
It is not clear that the author intends to bring a character into existence in the way stipulated.
The seeming disanalogy between concrete and abstract artefacts has been ignored.

2. Why should we postulate fictional characters?

2.1 The Arguments from Language

Thomasson: Kripke’s direct theory of reference + chains of ontological dependence

Why should we posit such chains?

This is how language works: Kripke’s view can be generalised to cover fictional characters since they exist as abstract artefacts.
Separates ontological and referential worries: the desire for a sparse ontology is separated from worries about the referent of fictional names.

Quasi-indexicality and Illocutionary Acts

“The textual foundation of the character serves as the means whereby a quasi-indexical reference to the character can be made by means of which that very fictional object can be baptized by authors or readers.” (1999: 47) Emphasis added.

Illocutionary acts and possibility of error.

Serious Statements: Real versus Fictional Contexts

FC) Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.
RC) Anna Karenina first appears in chapter 18 (part 1).

FC) can be prefixed with a story operator whereas the RC) cannot be prefixed.

Thomasson cites unsatisfactory parsing of ‘serious’ statements as reason to posit fictional characters as abstract artefacts.

Intersubjective Identification: We refer to the same object when we both use the same fictional name as reference to object succeeds.

Problems:
“There is an abstract entity who we pretend throws herself under a train” does not seem like an adequate analysis of FC).
How do we manage to refer to the same abstract artefact? Through the same textual foundation?
Mixed statements do not neatly fall into either real or fictional contexts (e.g. I feel sorry for Anna Karenina when she throws herself under the train).
Creative biographies, Shakespeare’s Richard iii.

2.2. The Argument from Intentionality

Tripartite conception of intentionality:
Conscious act (the thought, desire etc)
Object (referent)
Content (like Fregean senses)

Three constraints:
Existence independence, conception dependence, context sensitivity.

There’s a non-realist reliance on either content or context to do all the work as they do not posit the object. However, this is not satisfactory for mixed cases in which two or more constraints are exercised.

a) The protagonist is loved by Vronsky.
b) Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.
c) The protagonist is the father of Goneril.

Non-realist cannot show how content in both cases refers to the same character (or perhaps more correctly, how both contents are unified) - intersubjective identification of the character fails.

Thomasson = all intentional acts have an object (not to be confused with ‘object of thought’) – intersubjective identification succeeds.

Problems:
Abundant ontology (numerous intentional objects of hallucinations/imaginings etc).
No possibility of error (again) over existence of object.
Unclear how the content succeeds in picking out the object or the same object each time.

Summary= Postulation of fictional objects does not seem to assuage our worries concerning both language and experience of fictional characters; indeed it seems to raise further problems.

The Meaning of "The". Timothy Pritchard

2007-03-12T11:46:00.000Z

What ‘the’ really means

1. What ‘the’ does NOT mean.
‘The’ is not a quantifier of any sort whatsoever. Consider the sentence:

The sheep bleated merrily amongst the buttercups.

How many sheep are bleating merrily amongst the buttercups? Is it one, or two, or three; is it a few, many, loads and loads? If I had written ‘One sheep bleated’ or ‘two sheep’ or ‘a few sheep’ or ‘many sheep’ you could tell me how many sheep were doing the bleating (even if in only relatively vague terms like ‘a few’). That is because these qualifiers are quantifiers. ‘The’ is not a quantifier – it tells us nothing about quantity.

2. What ‘the’ DOES mean.
To find out what ‘the’ means the best place to look is in the writings of the professional scholars who have committed themselves to describing the English language. I use a summary given in the OED, and it is the only account you will find in a comprehensive grammar of English:

‘the’ marks an object as ‘before mentioned or already known or contextually particularized’.

Suppose I write a children’s book and start with ‘A bear walked down the street’. If I speak about that bear again in the second sentence I will use the definite form: ‘The bear was going home.’ The bear is before mentioned.

Suppose a friend comes to me and says ‘I have finished writing the book’. If I did not know that my friend was writing a book I will be irritated – the use of ‘the’ suggests that the book is already known. If I point out to my friend that I didn’t know of any book, the friend will respond ‘Oh, I thought you knew about the book’ – note how it is OK now to use ‘the’ because the (sic) book has been introduced into the discourse.

Suppose I say: ‘We walked past a farm and the farmer greeted us’. The use of ‘the’ before ‘farmer’ is OK here because it is common knowledge that farms have farmers – the farmer is contextually particularised.

3. The sign of a good theory is that it fits and explains the data. The account which treats ‘the’ as a quantifier neither arises from the data nor explains anything. Notice how the whole emphasis in the debate on ‘definite descriptions’ is on solving problems that arise from the theory itself. The problems arise because the theory is false, and the resulting debate is all about defending the theory rather than on saying anything illuminating about language. The correct theory, given by descriptive linguists for at least 70 years, arises from the data and explains the data (or at least a lot of it). It also gives us an insight into language.

An argument from freedom against causal closure

2007-03-11T19:27:00.000Z

I want to approach this mind body problem from a fresh angle, which pretty well encapsulates everything I think about the nature of things.
Decision theory tells us what action to take given the reasons we have. The metaphysics involved is that we can (it is metaphysically possible to) decide to do things on the basis of our reasons. Reasons are made up of evidence for propositions, or beliefs; and subjective utilities which are ordered preferences of outcomes. Ultimately we have the choice to act not in accordance with our reasons. Decision theory tells us what we should do given our evidence and our goals. To make this simple, let us say that the best decision theory will be one such that you input beliefs and desires and you get an output in terms of action. The output will result in a physical event that is counterfactually dependent on the beliefs and desires and the operation of the decision theory. Given an internalist theory of Mind beliefs and desires and the decision process used by a subject in a decision will all be brain states, or at least be realised or supervene on brain states. So here a picture emerges of what we typically take to be mental causation. The agent has Belief states B1, B2, B3 and desire states D1, D2, D3. Churn these through some decision function DT and out pops A1 which causes physical effect E1.

Physical theory tells us what will happen given certain preconditions. The preconditions are churned through a physical theory PT and out pops the consequences, the physical effect E1. So B1, B2, B3, D1, D2, D3 and the mechanism that realises DT are identical with some set of physical preconditions PP. PP and PT will jointly entail E1. (For those who believe in quantum indeterminism or even macro indeterminism then E1 will presumably be a partition of probable effects). Causal closure of physics means in this light that for every actual effect E, there will be a causal explanation such that E can be entailed by the conjunction of the completed Physical Theory and a set of physically described preconditions.

So the hope of token identity theory is that this is fine. We can go to work on PT and work out the underlying causes of our free decisions, which will be to do with neurons and what have you.

The problem now is that our free choices are vulnerable to the endemic problem of self reference. The problem of self reference can be also thought of as the problem of incompleteness. It underlies the liar paradox and the sorites. It destroyed Russell’s principia mathematica and lies at the heart of the ineffability of consciousness, which is irreducibly self referential. The problem is related, if not identical with Newcomb’s problem and since human beings are essential competitive, it is a problem that our brains have been under great pressure from natural selection to overcome.

Let us suppose that an agent has the complete physical theory and also has the wherewithal to measure his own physical brain states. He is in a competitive situation and he knows that his enemy has used PT and his brain states to predict his decision. In this case the agent may reason that his best decision is not to act in accordance with his own decision theory, but choose an action that his own decision theory would not recommend.

Let’s call the agent “Ace”, and his enemy, “Bad”. To simplify as much as possible, there are two choices before Ace. He can either choose Box 1 or Box 2. Bad has loaded the boxes. Bad has used the complete physics and a brain scan of Ace’s mental states to calculate what Ace will do. Ace knows this. Ace has also access to the complete physics and a brain scan of his own mental states. Bad is obliged by the rules of the game to put a Million pounds in one box and nothing in the other. Ace will get the contents of the box he chooses and Bad will get the contents of the other box. The complete physics and Ace’s brain scan predict that Ace will choose Box 1. Question 1: which box should Bad put the million in? Question 2: Which box should Ace choose?

Conclusion: The causal closure of physics is incompatible with our ever being able to use it for practical decision making.

On the causal efficacy of a lovers promise

2007-03-08T17:17:00.000Z

Marcella Herdova gave a talk on mental causation last night. It opened my eyes to why I think the whole business is misguided. By “the whole business” I mean supervenience and token identity theories and the causal closure of physics. All these claims are metaphysical, which, call me old fashioned, is another word for nonsense. The causal closure of physics is not hard science, it is a belief in the same category as the omnipotence of God. England is a free country, so you can believe it if you like, but you can’t demonstrate it, or argue for it, because as it stands at the moment, hardly any physical events have a complete causal explanation, and many of those that don’t have an adequate mental causal explanation. However, this is never where the philosophy starts. The philosophy always starts with PC, the physical cause of PE. So there is no room for any doubt that there is such a thing. The causal closure of physics demands that there is so there must be. So I want to give a case where there is a physical effect and a mental cause such that there can be no physical cause.
Here it is. In seven years every cell in your body is replaced. In May 1st 1991 Jack promises his lover Jill that in seven years time he will return to her and knock the knocker on her threshold, the one shaped like the head of the lion. This promise he burns into his mind, in a metaphorical sense, since there is nothing that his mind is identical to that can be burned into, just like there nothing that a promise is identical to that can “burn in” to anything. Jack goes off on exile and has all sorts of adventures, including quite a bit of drinking and neuro-chemical abuse. Every cell in his brain is replaced. In seven years time, he keeps his promise and travels across the globe to return to his sweetheart. On may 1st 1998 he knocks the knocker on her threshold. It was his promise that caused this to happen, and his promise remained operative, functional, causally efficacious, even though every physical part of him changed. This is a token mental cause of a token physical effect to which there is no token physical event that it is identical. In other words, no physical theory, however complete, could describe any conditions in or around Jack at the time he made the promise that would count as the cause of his return and the knocking of the knocker. I lay down the gauntlet to any physicalist to say what the physical cause would be here that is identical to the promise. The only plausible thing I can think of is the entire state of the universe at the time of the promise, and even then, you’d would have to be a determinist to count this as a cause. The only metaphysical principle I am relying on here is that if A is identical with B, or supervenes on B, then A and B must be contemporaneous.

What is Space, Stephen Tiley

2007-03-05T14:58:00.000Z

The Reality of Space

Two questions immediately arise:

1) what is space? [metaphysical question]

2) how can we know space? [epistemological question].

Needless to say, both questions are intricately connected: in order to ask what space is we must ask how, if at all, we can know acquire knowledge of it.

The two main historical positions concerning the nature of space are absolutism [or substantivalism] and relationalism.

Absolutism, most prominently expressed by Newton , argues that space has an existence over and above the objects contained within it.

Relationalism, most prominently expressed by Leibniz, argues that space has no existence over and above the relations between objects contained within it.

Both offered intricate arguments to support their respective positions.

According to Newton , as space is ontologically prior to the objects contained within it, viz., space can exist even when there are no objects contained within it, his view entails that objects in space can have absolute positions and velocities.

For Leibniz, on the other hand, space exists only as a relation between objects, and therefore has no existence apart from the existence of those objects; motion exists only as a relation between those objects.

Leibniz believes that such notions as absolute position and velocity, as espoused by Newton ’s absolutism, are meaningless and lead to contradictions.

The two arguments he offers us rely on his principle of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles.

Leibniz thought-experiment:
He asks us to imagine two universes situated in absolute space. The only difference between them is that the second is placed five feet to the left of the first, a possibility available if such a thing as absolute space exists. Such a situation, however, is not possible according to Leibniz, for if it were:
a) where a universe was positioned in absolute space would have no sufficient reason, as it might very well have been anywhere else, hence contradicting the principle of sufficient reason, and
b) there could exist two distinct universes that were in all ways indiscernible, hence contradicting the Identity of Indiscernibles.

In defence against Leibniz, Newton offered us his famous ‘Bucket’ thought-experiment.

Newton’s Bucket:

The rotating bucket argument attempts to show that true rotational motion cannot be defined as the relative rotation of the body with respect to the immediately surrounding bodies. It is one of five arguments from the "properties, causes, and effects" of true motion and rest that support his contention that, in general, true motion and rest cannot be defined as special instances of motion or rest relative to other bodies, but instead can be defined only by reference to absolute space.

Water in a bucket, hung from a rope and set to spin, will start with a flat surface. As the water begins to spin in the bucket, the surface of the water will become concave. If the bucket is stopped, the water will continue to spin, and while the spin continues the surface will remain concave. The concave surface is apparently not the result of the interaction of the bucket and the water, since the water is flat when the bucket first starts to spin, becomes concave as the water starts to spin, and remains concave as the bucket stops.

This argument attempted to demonstrate the necessity of the existence of absolute space to account for phenomena like rotation and acceleration that cannot be accounted for on a purely relationalist account. Clarke argues that since the curvature of the water occurs in the rotating bucket as well as in the stationary bucket containing spinning water, it can only be explained by stating that the water is rotating in relation to some third thing, namely absolute space.

http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/phisci/Newsletters/bucket.jpg

According to Newton , absolute space has the following properties:

1) Space has an ontologically prior existence to the objects contained within it.
2) Space can affect the objects/matter contained within it, but these objects cannot affect/influence space itself.

On a first reading absolute space seems to be endowed with a rather bizarre ontological status: it can exert an influence on objects contained in it but cannot itself be affected. It is immutable, eternal and unchanging.

Furthermore, if we cannot exert and influence of space itself, how can we possibly acquire knowledge of its existence?

As all we can really interact with are the objects contained within space, surely it follows that only these objects can be said to exist….?

Logical Distinctness. An interpretaion of Templing

2007-03-01T10:48:00.000Z

Robert Templing gave a great talk on causation last night best summed up in his own words: “What the heck is logical distinctness anyway?”. Rob was looking into what seems to be a fairly standard assumption in the philosophy of causation which is that the cause must be logically distinct from the effect. Two questions are: 1. Does the cause have to be logically distinct from the effect? What motivates this rule? 2. What is it for two facts, events, objects (whatever causes and effects are) to be logically distinct?
I will give my answer to the first question without further ado. Cause is a linguistic concept and language is governed at least partially by pragmatics. If one can deduce B from A anyway, one doesn’t need the concept of cause to explain the fact that B followed A. Where there is the relation of logical entailment between 2 events a causal explanation of the relation is redundant. So intuitively speaking “Frodo puts on the ring” is not the cause of “Frodo puts on the ring” because the counterfactual dependence is already explained logically. This explains the intuition as far as I am concerned. By way of argument, all I offer is that often people do make these kinds of causal claims, and their uselessness is the best argument against them. For example: “Eating something poisonous causes one to be poisoned.” The intuition I have is not “False!” but “Well duh! No shit Sherlock.”
The second question is the more interesting and wide ranging., especially now when the new logical inquisitors are asserting as fact that “necessary” means “logically necessary” and “possible” means “logically possible” and “identity” means “logical identity”. Logic is to do with true and false, and true and false only attach to representations, maybe even only linguistic representations. The universe as a whole is not true. It is not a conjunction of true propositions. The universe just is. The flash point in Rob’s talk as far as I was concerned was a challenge to logical distinctness from Davidson. Davidson views cause to be a relation between events. Logical distinctness seems to be a relation between descriptions. So the logical distinctness condition is false since you can always describe a cause and an effect in such a way that the cause and the effect are not logically distinct. Moreover, it doesn’t really mean anything to say that two events are logically distinct. Davidson’s argument is that
Suppose A causes B. This means the description “the cause of B” truly describes A. So we have this true causal statement “The cause of B causes B.” This is a tautology. Therefore under at least one description every cause is not logically distinct from its effect.
But this is rubbish. If “the cause of B” rigidly designates A, then, given that some causal relations are logically contingent, it is true that it is logically possible that the cause of B does not cause B. If on the other hand “the cause of B” only refers to whatever is in fact the cause of B, then “the cause of B” no longer refers to A necessarily, but merely contingently. Either way the cause of B and B are logically distinct.

To try and make this a little less abstract. Chapman by the action of shooting murdered John Lennon. Therefore Chapman’s action was the cause of John Lennon’s death. Now we have a description of an action “the cause of John Lennon’s death”. This refers to Chapman’s action. But suppose Chapman’s action was not the cause of John Lennon’s death. Now we have: “Suppose the cause of John Lennon’s death was not the cause of John Lennon’s death.” Are our high Priests of Modal logic going to deny us this hypothesis on the grounds that it is impossible? Of course they aren’t, they are reasonable people. So it is Davidson who has made the mistake. The cause of B is logically distinct from B, even so described.
Take a non causal example. Jack is married to his wife. Is this a logical tautology? Not really. It makes perfect sense to me that Jack actually never got married to his wife. I mean in this world, indicative possibility, epistemic possibility. They might never have had a ceremony.

Another example of this pervasive error is the fact that everything I know is true. Williamson and others take the appearance of tautology in this statement to ridiculous extremes. The fact that I know that p does not entail that p in any interesting way. I now hereby claim to know that Robert Templing gave a talk last night. These two events are distinct. Robert could have given his talk without me knowing about it. I could have claimed to know it without him having given it. It is true in a sense that if he hadn’t given his talk, my knowledge wouldn’t be knowledge. It is also true that if I hadn’t known about it his talk may have been a slightly different event. But this is not a logical relation. In my private world I refer to this representation of Roberts talk as “knowledge”. This act of describing does not warrant the inference that it is logically impossible that Robert failed to give a talk. It just entitles me to assume with certainty that he gave a talk. It is logically possible that I am a brain in a vat. Or that the world consists of two identical iron balls. The only logically impossibility is that logicians have got it wrong. This puts logicians up with Freud and the Pope.

Anneli Jefferson and I on content holism

2007-02-22T21:49:00.000Z

Content holism, to quote Gabriel Segal on this blog is the thesis that “the content of an individual’s concept depends on the totality of beliefs in which it features.”
The unattractive feature of content holism is that it loses a fantastically useful human invention that is central to rationality: error. We can see the problem clearly when we think about two types of disagreement : to use Quine’s terms, dogmatic disagreement and conceptual disagreement. Or less technically, genuine disagreements and disagreements that are merely verbal.
To illustrate with some examples:

DISAGREEMENT:

Alf: Zed is dead.
Beth: No he is not, I just saw him in the library.

MERELY VERBAL:

Alf: No not that Zed, I’m talking about Zed the astronaut, not Zed the librarian.

Here, what first appeared to be a disagreement turned out to be a misunderstanding. Of course this could have gone the other way.

ALF FALSE BELIEF

Alf: Really! That is amazing, I thought he was dead, I just heard that he had died on the radio. It must be a hoax.

Or

BETH FALSE BELIEF

Alf: No that can’t have been Zed you saw. I’ve just come from the hospital where I saw him die.

So the three options for a disagreement are 1. Alf has a false belief. 2. Beth has a false belief. 3. It is merely a verbal disagreement and neither have false beliefs.
The problem with any kind of holism is that everything falls into the third category and we end up never having false beliefs. This doesn’t amount to the fantastic news that we are always right, it is just absurd.
I guess a typical attractive way of avoiding this problem is by rejecting holism in favor of moleculism. This is to say that the content of an individual’s concept is dependent on a subset of all the beliefs that concept figures in. Anneli pointed out the problems with this. It is hard to come up with a principled way of saying which the meaning determining beliefs are. The Analytic/ Synthetic distinction won’t do because you end up with the same problem, namely which beliefs are analytically true. In the above dialogue, the sentence “Zed is Zed” may express an analytic belief or may be not. Nils’s suggestion that we make a dictionary met with derision for some unfathomable reason. So here’s my solution. Save holism by changing it to “dispositional holism”.

The content of an individual’s concept depends on the totality of situations in which the individual is disposed to have a belief in which the concept features.

So now I’ll flag up some advantages of this amendment;
Old Holism: Two people share a concept if and only if they have all the same beliefs in which the concept features. (absurd. Intuitively false)
New Holism: Two people only share the same concept if they are disposed to have the same beliefs given the same experiences. (Of course! This is true! Hooray!)

Disagreement problem solved: If Alf and Beth had a genuine disagreement then Beth must have had experiences such that, had Alf had those same experiences, then Alf would be disposed to believe as Beth does. This is the case. Had Alf seen Zed in the library, Alf wouldn’t have believed that Zed was dead. If Beth had watched Zed die in hospital, then Beth would believe that Zed was alive. The genuine disagreement depends on different experiences.

However, with the merely verbal disagreement this doesn’t happen. So even if Alf had just seen Zed (the librarian) in the library, he would not be disposed to believe that Zed (the astronaut) was still alive.

We can make of this a simple rule about belief content.
S grasps the content of p iff S is disposed to believe that p in situations where it is obvious that p.
Or a variation:
S grasps the content of p iff S is disposed to believe p in situations where the evidence warrants a belief that p.

This is supposed to be a mirror of truth conditional semantics.

This might frightened some linear thinkers since it is introducing epistemological terminology. But hey, it is these for these reasons I started studying epistemology. “Belief” is an epistemological term, and therefore so is “concept”.

A personal identity argument for Altruism

2007-02-08T15:38:00.000Z

Professor Segal ended his hand out on his talk on personal identity with the brilliant sentence: Which do you want to be?

This at once accords with my “no right answer” pragmatic approach to questions of personal identity whilst at the same time revealing the paradoxical and unstable nature of this solution. To show what I mean I want to talk about the Bernard William's preference ordering question. All A’s memories are erased from A’s brain and put into the brain of B. B’s memories are likewise moved into A’s brain. (I am using “memories” here trying to be as neutral as possible, you can flesh it out with whatever (non fleshy) stuff can be plausibly transferred in this way.). Either A body or B body gets a million pounds after the experiment, the other gets tortured. You are A to start with. Which body gets tortured. It is up to you.

What underlies this dilemma is an assumption of egoism. The personal identity questions can then be thought of as a reductio argument against egoism. Parfit himself took it to be so, although this is rarely spoken of. At the heart of most world religions there is a sense that egoism rests on an illusion, a lie. In Buddhism your real self is no self. In Hinduism there is only one soul, Atman, that is within all of us, the individual ego is an illusion. Jesus Christ tells us that we are all in God and God is in all of us, and we should love each other as ourselves.

In the William’s dilemma the utilitarian or the altruist will be indifferent whether A or B gets tortured, since it is irrelevant whether either is in some sense himself. The egoist is confused though since he does not want to get tortured, but does not know who “he” will be, or where his illusory “ego” or “soul” or “self” will reside. The dilemma can be seen as a reductio against egoism. Asking the egoist "who do you want to be", undermines his very criteria for making the decision.

Let us bring in some “irrelevant” details. Suppose young healthy but bad at business A is running an orphanage and has worked very hard to keep it running, she has dedicated her life to it. She is also humble and altruistic. She is kidnapped by scientists and has her memories swapped with B, a woman she knows to also be altruistic and humble, but to have better business acumen, greater intelligence and an old and cancer ridden body. The scientist offer her this choice: after the experiment, either A body or B body will get a million pounds and inherit the orphanage. The other body will be tortured and killed. The Altruistic A in this circumstance should certainly choose A body and B mind to run the orphanage, since that is the best result for the kids.

Now the question is “which do you want to be?” Let’s ask this of A before the op. Does she live on as the A body with the B mind? Her life’s work lives on. She chose this combination over the other to fulfil her life’s work. But it seems just as reasonable to say that she chose to die in order that B could live on in her place.

What this reveals to me is that the idea that values and desires are intrinsically subjective and not matters of fact seems to crumble in the face of these personal identity conundrums. Although it is true that people are generally more motivated by their own desires that those of complete strangers, this is better explained through ignorance than any intrinsic lack of objective value. I know this is too brief but in the absence of any fact of the matter about personal identity, it seems that value must be objective of necessity. Egoistic desires can then be seen to be irrational if they don’t stem from ignorance.

Nils and the Ten Pound Note

2007-02-06T23:03:00.000Z

Nils and the ten pounds, a tale with a mereological moral.

For the last two weeks at William Bynoes’ (legendary) metaphysics group we’ve been talking about things and parts of things and whether things are identical to the parts of them. Today Ali Oduncu from UCL named the wood that his chair was made of WOOD and named the chair CHAIR. I was ok with naming the chair CHAIR, but naming the wood that the chair was made of WOOD I thought a little confusing. So I thought of this example from true life.

Nils asked me to lend him ten pounds. I said I would so long as he promised to pay me back the ten pounds he owed me. I gave him a ten pound note and wrote Jonny on it. He spent it on lager and I haven’t seen it since.
Now let us imagine a bizarre counterfactual situation. Nils gives me the ten pounds he owes me. But I’ve forgotten about it by now, so I ask him what that is in his hand. He says it is the ten pounds I lent him. I go to the bar and buy drinks and get three pounds change.
The ten pounds I lent Nils is identical with the ten pound note with Jonny written on it.
The ten pounds that Nils gave me was identical with the ten pounds he owed me.
The ten pounds he owed me was identical with the ten pounds I lent him.
The ten pounds he gave me was identical with the ten pounds I spent at the bar.
The three pounds change was part of the ten pounds I took to the bar.
So the three pound coins in my hand are a part of the ten pound note with Jonny written on it.

I have no mereological stance, but for the sake of argument I say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Identity is not transitive. There are infinite things.

what is a speakers proposition?

2007-02-01T17:13:00.000Z

Tzu – Wei Hung gave a talk last night that utterly baffled me. My failure to understand I think was to do with the word “proposition” and perhaps certain assumptions about what cognitive states it is possible to be in. The puzzle that the talk drew out was that given a contextualist infinite regress argument it seems that there is an unbridgeable gap between the speakers proposition and the sentence proposition. I fear to say exactly what the regress argument is because I’m fairly certain I haven’t got it right, but it seems that if you try and remove the context sensitivity out of a sentence you end up with another context sensitive sentence. This sentence in turn can be clarified by another sentence. Presumably there will be an infinite number of these clarifications, therefore there will be no sentence that expresses the proposition that the speaker was trying to express. Although I don’t see that there is necessarily going to be an infinite number, I am a great fan of language and am willing to accept that this part of the regress argument is true. So when I write “John is ready” I mean “John is ready for the written exam” which means “John is ready for the Metaphysics written exam on Tuesday the tenth of April, 2007” by which I mean “John has written the exam time down in his personal organiser and has a clear idea of which topics he is going to answer.” And so forth.
I guess the puzzle is that it seems clear that none of these sentences is going to express exactly the proposition I had in mind. Some are too vague, others too precise. They can’t all express it, since this would mean that the speaker's proposition is infinite and we are assuming this is impossible. So there is an unbridgeable gap between the speaker proposition and the sentence proposition.
Now I wonder what the speaker's proposition is. Gabe’s suggestion was that it is the propositional content of what it is that the speaker is trying to express by the sentence. Tzu-Wei said that the speaker grasps the truth (conditions,) of the proposition when he grasps a proposition. Propositions are it seems at least minimally true or false. If we take some kind of belief norm of assertion, then we can say that the speaker proposition is the propositional content of the belief that he is asserting. Then here comes the analytic philosophy assumption that I think is too blatantly false to have been assumed for so long.
1. In order to believe a proposition one must grasp its truth conditions.
There are of course a number of ways of expressing this thought.
1* In order to believe a proposition one must know in which possible worlds the proposition is true.
This is certainly unrealistic since even to individuate a possible world would require an infinite cognitive effort.
1** In order to believe a proposition one must have a criteria for assessing the truth of p.
The problem with 1** is that if you believe p it seems that you have already assessed that p is true using some criteria.
1*** In order to believe a proposition one must have a translation schema such that the proposition is true if and only if some sentence in one’s language of thought is true.
Does anyone believe 1***? Or does everyone apart from me believe 1***? The problem with 1*** is that is really is infinitely regressive.
For me the problem with the whole notion of grasping a proposition by grasping its truth conditions is that it is possible that the world could be such that it is not determined that a particular belief is true or false, or true and false or neither.
Examples. I believe that John feels cold. John doesn’t know whether he feels cold or not. Is my belief true or false?
I believe that there are twice as many numbers as even numbers? Do I grasp the truth conditions of this proposition?
I believe that President Bush is unpopular. Is it not possible that the world is such a way that were I omniscient I still wouldn’t know whether Bush was unpopular or not?
I believe that space time is infinite and that the laws of physics are constant throughout. Do I really grasp the conditions under which this proposition is true and under which it is false? If we are to assume that I cannot grasp the infinite then I certainly don’t grasp the truth conditions of this proposition. But I believe it none the less.

Jonny on Lee Walters on counterfactuals

2007-01-23T19:10:00.000Z

Lee Walters gave a talk today at (The legendary) William Bynoe’s Metaphysics Group on my favourite topic: counterfactuals. Unfortunately I had to go just when it was getting interesting so this is a counterfactual post about what I would have said if I had been there.
I’ll jump straight to the controversy. I bet five pounds on tails. The coin comes up heads. Now we have the counterfactual.
1) If I had bet on heads I would have won.
First up: does this sentence express a true proposition? Intuitions please. (Yes it does)
A quick word on why this is important. It seems that a good theory of counterfactuals should make 1) come out true given that the coin actually came up heads. However, the problem lies in trying to give an account of counterfactuals where you hold the past fixed up to the point where the counterfact antecedent happens and then forward from there following the expected causal consequences of the counterfact. (I’ve just made up the word “counterfact” meaning the antecedent of a counterfactual, in this case that I bet on heads). But if I had bet heads, at the time of betting given that coin tosses are indeterministic, then the chance of me winning would have only been ½. So the counterfactual should come out as
2) If I had bet on heads I might have won and I might have lost.
Lee bites the bullet and says that 1) is in fact false. But this is only on the assumption that the consequent was indeterministic. I don’t understand objective probability, nor what indeterministic means in any non epistemic sense. I believe that all probability is relative to an epistemic frame of reference. If we specify the frame of reference the problem goes away.
So as far as I knew at the time, I might have lost with a bet on heads; but I now know that had I bet on heads I would have won. Here 1) and 2) are compatible.
My analysis of counterfactuals is that a counterfactual is relative to an epistemic frame of reference. The epistemic frame of reference includes any facts that are known to the relevant subject minus any counterfacts and their causal consequences specified or tacitly assumed. The relevant subject would normally be the speaker, but could be the subject of a counterfact action.
An example to show the plausibility of this view.
Person 1. If you’d bet on heads you’d have won.
Person 2. Yes, but there is no way I could have known that. As far as I knew at the time, if I had have bet on heads, I could have lost.

The agreement between person 1 and 2 shows that the epistemic frame of reference changes the truth conditions of the counterfactual, since otherwise person 1 and person 2 are asserting inconsistent counterfactuals.

Suppose Person 1 said before the toss but after Person 2 has bet on tails:
“If you had have bet on heads you would be going to win”

I think the most natural interpretation of this counterfactual is that it is true if the coin comes up heads. It is a bit difficult to parse because Person 1 would not be in a position to know that the coin was to come up heads so the knowledge norm of assertion forbids him from asserting it. But if we take a rigged horse race or a non gambling situation it becomes more plausible.
If you’d have caught the train, you would be going to arrive on time.
If you’d only have bet on Black Beauty, you’d be buying us all a drink tonight.

The point is that 1) is true if the fact that the coin is heads is fixed in our epistemic frame of reference. It is false otherwise.
One last example. Persons 1 and 2 enter into a gambling den and are offered a bet of £2000 on either heads or tails for the next toss of a coin. Being puritans they walk out in disgust without waiting to see whether the coin came up heads or tails.
Person 1 says; 1) “If you had bet on heads, you would have won.”
I think that Person 1 is in no position to assert this, but if he did it would have been true if and only if the coin had landed heads. Because in his epistemic frame of reference the coin landed heads has a probability of 50%, person 2 could rebuke him by saying. “No, you are wrong, I could just as easily have lost.” This is because from their epistemic frame of reference, it is true that if they had bet on heads they would have had a 50% chance of winning and it is therefore false that if they had bet on heads they would have won.

Jonny Blamey V Timothy Pritchard on the Truthlessness of Sentences

2007-01-11T23:55:00.000Z

Tim's talk last night was very inspiring. However I completely disagree with his conclusion.
I understood the talks main point to be this:
When one puts a sentence in inverted commas, as in "elbows bend" then one is referring to the bit of language, let us say the sentence. When one uses a that clause, eg. "that elbows bend", however, one is referring to the propositional content of the sentence. Interestingly from my perspective, "if" does the work of "that". So for example
1 "Elbows bend" has a kind of alliteration.
2 It is a good job that elbows bend.
3 If elbows bend then this is not an elbow.
Depending on what you are trying to say, one of these forms will be incorrect. They are never interchangeable. So the following are wrong:
1 That elbows bend has a kind of alliteration.
2 It is a good job that "elbows bend"
3 If "elbows bend" then this is not an elbow.
Never? Well what about truth? We might want to say, with a host of semanticists, that "elbows bend" is true if and only if elbows bend. Tim thinks this is wrong because
4 "Elbows bend" is true.
Doesn't make sense, since the appropriate form is
5 That elbows bend is true. Or more naturally: It is true that elbows bend.

I find this very informative, but I do so because I think Tim is wrong and that 4 and 5 are both correct, but Tim is right in that it is a coincidence if both 4 and 5 are true. By revealing this to me Tim has open my eyes to the informativeness of complex sentences like:
6 "elbows bend" is true if and only if elbows bend.
By realising the contingent nature of 6, I come to appreciate its informativeness. In probabilistic terms, Tim’s talk made me see how unlikely it is that "elbows bend" is true if and only if elbows bend. The increase in unlikliness increases the informativeness. But Tim thinks that it is not merely unlikely but actually false, and truth cannot be predicated of sentences at all, only of the content of sentences. Against Tim then I will offer cases where it must be the case that we are talking about the sentence and not the propositional content when we predicate truth. I'll just give the examples without saying what my own intuitions are.

1 If the sentence "I love you" is true, then the sentence "Ich liebe dich" is true.
Contrast with:
2 If it is true that I love you then it is true that Ich leibe dich.

3 If Bonn were called "Berlin", and Bonn was on fire, then the sentence "Berlin on fire" would be true.
Contrast with:
4 If Bonn were called "Berlin", and Bonn was on fire then it would be true that Berlin was on fire.

5 There is a prophet among us who speaks in tongues. We believe that whenever he speaks in tongues he is the mouth piece of God but speaks a language we do not understand. Yesterday he uttered the sentence: "Dithrock pertuns bladly." We are sure that the sentence "Dithrock pertuns bladly" is true, but we have no idea what it means.

Impossible Beliefs

2006-12-06T10:34:00.000Z

In the Metaphysics Seminar an issue came up that is confusing me. The issue is what is it it possible to believe and what is it possible to know. In particular is it possible to believe something that is necessarily false? Or what amounts to the same thing, if I believe that p then is p possible? The intuition changes sharply in the third person case. It seems obviously true that S can believe that p where p is impossible. This difference in first person and third person ascriptions makes me suspect that "possible" "impossible" "necessary" are propositional attitudes. Moorean paradox can be seen as the mark of the propositional attitude. It is nonsense to assert "I believe that p but it is impossible that p" "I know that p but it is possible that ~p" Interestingly this works across the knowing how and knowing that distinction. So "I know how to ride a bike but it is impossible to ride a bike" is contradictory, as is "I believe I can ride a bike but it is impossible to ride a bike".
The example which came up in the seminar was that Pythagoras believed there were two non zero integers such that the ratio between them was the square root of 2. During his life time this was demonstrated not to be the case. So therefore Pythagoras believed something that was impossible.
But my contention is that this is just another way of saying that Pythagoras believed something false. Mathematical truths are timeless. So it will never be and was never true that the square root of 2 is the ratio between two integers, and we know that now. But I guess it is a fairly standard view that all propositions are timeless in this way. So it will never be and was never true that I had kippers for breakfast this morning. And from my perspective now, it is impossible that I did. But yesterday evening it was possible. My point is that just because something is timelessly true doesn't give it the special status of necessarily.
But maybe mathematically proven truths are necessary, not because they are timeless, but because they are mathematical. What is mathematically proven is true in all mathematically possible worlds. But what about mathematical theorems that have yet neither been proven nor disproven? Are they possible in mathematically possible worlds? There is no way of telling. If there is no way of telling, then introducing the notion of mathematically possible worlds doesn't help in elucidating the meaning of possibility. In a possible world I prove that Goldbach's conjecture is false. Is this a mathematically possible world? It seems like we have to find out whether Goldbach's conjecture is false before we can answer this question.
Some say it is impossible to find a needle in a haystack, but this is false. Given enough time and a good methodology, it is possible to find a needle in a haystack. So Pythagoras sets about searching for a needle in a haystack. He believes that he will find the needle in the haystack. It is possible that his belief is true. After Pythagoras has been searching for many years someone invents a metal detector and demonstrates that there never was a needle in the haystack. So in a sense it was impossible that Pythagoras would find one. But is this to say anything mataphysically different from simply that Pythagorus's belief that he would find a needle was false? Or his belief that he could find a needle was, in this case, false? I can't bring myself to believe that his belief was necessarily false in any non epistemic sense. Of course it is impossible to find something that isn't there. Once you realise it isn't there you stop looking.
One good rule seems to be that if something is true then it is impossible that it is false. But another equally valid rule seems to be that it is possible that something is true, were it not for the inconvenient fact that it is false. So we are tempted to think of a more absolute impossibility where something is necessarily false when, even if it were true, it would still be false. The only thing I can think of that fits into this category are self denials like "This sentence is false". It is impossible that this is true, because even if it is true it is false. But unfortunately this just means that it is necessarily true as well as necessarily false. I contend that the only propositions that are metaphysically necessarily false are also necessarily true. I am generalising from one case and my own lack of imagination. So counterexamples please: Necessarily false timeless propositions.

What the Germans know. Jonny Blamey

2006-11-08T13:59:00.000Z

It’s world war two. The Germans are occupying a French town and the British are going to attack at dawn, hoping to surprise the Germans. A British spy in the town finds out that the Germans know of the attack. Back at the British base the spy has this exchange with the British General:
SPY: “The Germans know we are going to attack at dawn.”
GENERAL : “Then we will call off the attack.”
ENTER PHILOSOPHER : “Why are we calling off the attack?”
GENERAL : “Because the Germans know we are going to attack.”
PHILOSOPHER: “But the German’s don’t know we are going to attack.”
SPY. “Yes they do, I heard them discussing it.”
PHILOSOPHER. “No, I mean that the Germans don’t know we are going to attack, because knowledge is factive, and we are calling off the attack. So it is not true that we are going to attack and therefore not true that the Germans know we are going to attack.”
GENERAL : “So the Germans don’t know we are going to attack?”
PHILOSOPHER : “That’s right, they don’t.”
GENERAL : “Then there is no reason to call off the attack.”
SPY (PEEVED) : “Look, if factivity is so important, I’ll rephrase it. The Germans know that we intend to attack at dawn.”
GENERAL : “Then we will call off the attack.”
PHILOSOPHER: “So we don’t intend to attack at dawn?”
GENERAL. “No.”
PHILOSOPHER. “Then the Germans don’t know that we intend to attack at dawn. Knowledge is factive, remember.”
SPY (Through gritted teeth): “Alright, you pedant, two hours ago when I was bravely spying on the Germans, I discovered that they then knew that we were then intending to attack at dawn, although they don’t know this any more.
GENERAL: “So they don’t know that we are now intending to attack at dawn?”
SPY: “I suppose not.”
GENERAL : “Then there is no need to call off the attack.”
PHILOSOPHER : “But if you don’t call off the attack, then they will know we are going to attack.”
SPY: “How about this, the German’s expect us to attack. Expectation is not factive, so they will expect us to attack whether we attack or not.”
GENERAL. “I haven’t got where I am today by underestimating the enemy. The Germans are in a state of constant readiness. They expect us to attack at all times. So of course they expect us to attack at dawn. What I want to know is whether they know we are going to attack at dawn.
PHILOSOPHER : Well, that’s up to you, if you call off the attack, then they don’t know, if you continue with the attack they do know. You see, knowledge is factive, so whether they know what we are going to do or not depends on what we decide to do.
GENERAL : “Look, I may be a military man of action, but I know a thing or two about natural science, and I know that we can’t affect the state of German intelligence in the town down there by these word games up here. Either the Germans know we are going to attack at dawn, or they don’t. Which is it?”
SPY : “They know we are going to attack.”
GENERAL : “Then we will call off the attack.”
PHILOSOPHER : “Do you see? Now they don’t know we are going to attack.”
GENERAL : “Get Out!”

PROBLEM
What do the Germans know? Does the answer to this question depend on whether the General decides to call off the attack? If so does this mean that knowledge content is external? I'm assuming that even if the British call off the attack, the Germans still know something. It is not as if they were wrong when they thought they knew the British were going to attack.

Analytic Bullshit, Ben Kotzee

2006-10-24T20:01:00.000+01:00

Can analytic philosophers talk bullshit?

The publication as a small book last year of Harry Frankfurt’s (1986) paper “On Bullshit” ignited great popular interest in “bullshit”: what is it “to bullshit someone” and why is there so much bullshit about these days? Prime examples of bullshit mentioned in the many popular contributions to the subject post-Frankfurt (just google for it) are found in “business-speak”, in advertising and in politics. What people enjoy about Frankfurt’s book, it seems, is that having a theory of bullshit available makes it possible now to do with a straight face what you previously had to hide in a cough: say that someone is talking bullshit. (We might say that, after Frankfurt, “bullshit” is a technical term.)

As far as I can tell, the theory of bullshit is in its infancy and I’m afraid that I don’t have much to add. Frankfurt distinguishes between honest assertion, lying and bullshitting as follows: In making an honest assertion (in telling the truth) one aims to say what is true and in lying, one aims to say what is not true… both in honest saying and lying one is guided by the aim of truth. In bullshitting, however, the speaker is unconcerned with the truth of what he says; the bullshitter pretends to make an honest assertion whereas he really is just mouthing off. As such, bullshitting is a faking of assertion: the bullshitter pretends to make an assertion, but actually asserts nothing. To people who know me, it will be quite clear why I’m interested in this: I work on the relation between truth, believing and assertion and think Frankfurt makes a very good point about the nature of assertion: honest saying and lying, as species of asserting, involve a concern with the truth of what one says. This comes into sharper focus when we consider the case of the bullshitter who pretends to assert, but, not caring about the truth of what he says, really ends up saying nothing (ends up not really asserting at all).

Be that as it may, Frankfurt thinks that bullshitting is a kind of dishonesty: whenever one speaks dishonestly in this way, what comes out one’s mouth is bullshit. Jerry Cohen disagrees with this characterisation of the relation between bullshitting intent and the shittiness of what one says. He holds that it is possible to talk bullshit without dishonest intent and mentions as an example the stuff emanating from French departments of philosophy and departments of literature in the English-speaking world overly occupied with French theory. (Holding up an example of bullshit, Cohen refers to Althusserian Marxism; he also mentions the writings on science of French theorists from Latour to Kristeva that Sokal criticises.) Cohen holds that there need not be any dishonesty on the part of these people: the problem is not that they are unconcerned with whether what they are saying is true, it is that there is a deficiency in the concepts and language that is deployed by people who “do theory”. What is wrong with much of French philosophy, Cohen thinks, is that it is unclarifiable nonsense and this he wants to distinghuish as a sort of bullshit in its own right. He provides a test for being unclarifiable nonsense that involves adding a negation-sign: if adding a negation-sign to what one is saying makes no difference to its intuitive plausibility, it is bullshit of the “unclarifiable nonsense” kind.

What Cohen calls bullshit, it is clear, is that kind of philosophy perpetrated by people whose names sound continental, that is obscure, a little bit avant garde and generally down on mathematics, science, logic and technology. Recently, I criticised Cohen’s “unclarifiable nonsense” account of bullshit, but offered the following (qualified) support for his views on French philosophy. I held that “postmodernism” is bullshit for the following reason: Assume that the central tenet of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as truth or that the word “true” is no more than a clever cover for whatever beliefs or attitudes are generally accepted in some culture (and that is accepted due to concealed coercion). The problem is this: If there is really no fact of the matter as to what is true and someone may become conscious of this, then there can be no honest speech and no lying; this is because, as Frankfurt holds, assertion and lying is characterised by aiming to say what is true and aiming to say what is not true, respectively. Being fully aware that there is no truth either way, no-one can honestly assert anything (or lie) at all; without truth, assertion looses its goal. All that can remain of speech, if there is no truth, is bullshit or pretending to assert (although just pretending to assert would require at least the idea of truth and truthful assertion to remain, itself a tension in the postmodernist’s position on truth).

My argument invited the accusation of tu quoque from an editor. Analytic philosophers, he suggested, shouldn’t cast stones. Bullshit is not confined to the continent and, in any case, I wouldn’t take it as alright if a “postmodern philosopher” made a blanket attack on analytic philosophy in the same manner as I did. He had me wrong – I am perfectly willing to consider any reasonable argument that there is something systematically wrong with the presuppositions and method of analytic philosophy, its just that I haven’t heard one, despite listening. (By the way, I’m not complaining about the editor, who liked the rest of the piece and accepted it.)

In the interest of fairness, though, my question to the blog is this: do analytic philosophers ever bullshit? Nothing suggests that an analytic philosohper can’t talk Frankfurt bullshit – that is, pretend to care about the truth of what they say when they do not: of course any analytic philosopher is just as capable of this form of dishonesty, psychologically speaking. What’s less clear is that an analytic philosopher can talk Cohen-bullshit. I would suggest that the true analytic philosopher cannot. This is because analytic philosophy is characterised by its reliance on the method provided by formal logic: by formalising the contentious parts of our work, we make absolutely clear what we mean. At least when we formalise our philosophy, we can of course be wrong, but not “unclarifiably unclear”. Precisely the ideal of analytic philosophy is to be clear.

Bearing in mind these two points, does anyone want to offer examples of analytic philosophers talking bullshit (of the Frankfurt or Cohen variety)? Specifically, I’m interested in the role that formalisation in the language of logic plays in making our work clear or unclear. To some – that is people who’ve never taken a first level course in logic – much analytic philosophy looks absurdly complicated and technical. I’m interested in this. Does the method provided by formal logic ever obscure rather than clarify, or is this just a matter of not being able to read the logic? Even assuming that everyone should be capable of following it (and why should they?), can someone think of an example where formalising a point or argument renders something that is clear obscure? Would people write to me with their nominations for the prize “most gratuitous formalisation in the language of logic of something that’s perfectly clear in English”?

Certainty and Knowledge: Jonny Blamey

2006-10-16T12:04:00.000+01:00

Is there more to knowledge ascriptions than factivity and evidence?
Jack’s dog is dead. Jack got a phone call from the vet saying his dog died this morning. Jack’s evidence is undefeated, (the vet saw Jack’s dog die). Is this enough to determine whether: “Jack knows his dog is dead” is true or false?

Let’s start with a simple definition of knowledge:

S knows that p iff S has a rational degree of belief 1 that p and p is true.

To have a degree of belief 1 that p means that you would accept odds of 1:0 on p. To have a rational degree of belief 1 simply means that you would be rational to accept these odds. The odds are the ratio between the loss if p is false against the gain if p is true. Degree of belief 1 is unique because one can increase the loss indefinitely without affecting the gain. For example, if Jack were to a bet a penny for no gain that his dog was dead, his degree of belief that his dog was dead would be 1. If Jack were to bet £1 million for no gain, then his degree of belief would still be 1. It is perfectly rational to demand more evidence to risk £1 000 000 for no gain than to risk a penny for no gain. Therefore the evidential requirement for a rational degree of belief 1 varies with the size of the stake. Conversely, the evidence alone will not determine whether someone would be rational to have a degree of belief 1. So evidence and truth alone cannot determine knowledge ascriptions.

If certainty is the disposition to rely on beliefs on a loss/no gain basis, then we should expect truthful knowledge attributions to vary with the magnitude of the loss. Is Jack rational to be certain that his dog is dead on the basis of the vet’s phone call? Let us take two situations.

1 : The Dog bed.
Jack decides on the basis that his dog is dead to throw away the dog bed. He has nothing to gain by throwing the dog bed away today. But if his dog is alive, then he will have to get a new dog bed. At this stake size, he is certain that his dog is dead. He is prepared to risk the cost of a new dog bed for no gain. Given his evidence, Jack is rationally certain : Jack knows his dog is dead.

2: The Inheritance.
Jack stands to inherit £1 000 000 conditional on Jack showing that his dog is alive to a lawyer. If he phones the lawyers to tell them his dog is dead, he loses £1 000 000 for no gain. Instead he drives around to the vet to check for himself that the dog is dead on the off chance that there has been a mistake, or that the vet is lying. He is not prepared to risk £1 000 000 for no gain on the basis that his dog is dead. Therefore he is not certain that his dog is dead. Given his evidence he is rational not to be certain. Jack does not know his dog is dead.

Things in themselves, appearances, noumena, and phenomena, Jessica Leech

2006-10-05T11:34:00.000+01:00

Consider two distinctions: the ontological distinction between things-in-themselves and appearances (what things are), and the epistemological distinction between noumena and phenomena (how an object may come to be known). One might take these distinctions to be co-extensional, i.e. all appearances are all phenomena, and all things-in-themselves are all noumena. I have reason to disagree with this (and the preferred interpretation leads onto an account of a distinction between self and world). The first conjunct is acceptable; all the appearances are the same as all the phenomena. Both ‘appearances’ and ‘phenomena’ are defined by experience, in the first case the general type of what is experienced, and in the second case how it comes to be experienced. In both cases the same things are going to be picked out; everything experienced in the empirical world is appearance, and everything here experienced must be experienced through sensible intuition and the understanding, and thus is phenomenal.
I do not accept the second conjunct; that things-in-themselves and noumena are co-extensional. Take a simple general case, the thing Y: Y1 is a thing-in-itself, underlying an appearance y1, y2 is the phenomenal object the experience of which corresponds to the appearance y1, and Y2 is the noumenal object postulated through y2. Roughly speaking y1 and y2, and Y1 and Y2 correspond, those numbered 1 being ontologically defined, those numbered two being epistemically defined, those in lower case being part of the empirical world of experience. Now contrast this with a special case, the thing Z, where Z is a thing-in-itself (we do not have experience or knowledge of Z in any way). In the same terms as above, we have the thing-in-itself Z1, but no appearance z1. As there is no appearance, and appearances and phenomenal objects go together, then there is no phenomenon z2 here either. Finally, as noumenal objects are postulated as a result of experience of a phenomenal object, with no z2 there is no Z2. Thus, one has the thing-in-itself, Z1, with no corresponding Z2. Therefore the ontological and epistemological distinctions in question are not co-extensive.
This conclusion is perhaps not so surprising, given the different foundations on which each distinction is based. The ontological distinction concerns the nature of things; what they are. Although what appearances are is the product of our intuitions and concepts, the distinction does not rely on a human subject. It is just that without human experience to provide appearances, there would only be things to satisfy one side of the distinction—the possibility of there being a thing-in-itself with no appearance is just the possibility of there being no experiencing subject to “create” the appearance. Conversely, the epistemological distinction is based deeply in human experience, as it depends on different ways of knowing objects, presupposing that there must be a ‘knower’ before anything can be distinguished.

Now take the self as a supposed object of investigation. Suppose there is a real self, a thing-in-itself, S1, then there may be a corresponding appearance s1. We might accept this, allowing that the appearance is the empirical self. The empirical self is phenomenal, thus we then also have s2, and further postulate S2, the noumenal self. Now, the phenomenal s2 is related by some knower to the postulated S2. We are purportedly classifying the self, or elements of the self according to the phenomena-noumena distinction. However, this distinction itself is driven by there being a (human) knowing subject. This knowing subject is the recipient of intuitions, and will apply the concepts of the understanding and so on, resulting in knowledge of the empirical self, and inference to the noumenal self, these being associated with that same knowing subject. However, it is unclear whether something that is a foundation of a distinction can have that distinction applied back to itself in this way, i.e. can a distinction founded in some x be applied to x?
This kind of self-referential problem is a serious and wide-ranging one. (Related issues arise in the study of logic, associated with Russell’s Paradox, the Liar Paradox and the use of diagonalisation in Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.) It is unclear if the distinction at issue here, based on how a subject has knowledge, can be applied to that very same subject. We would no longer be considering the case of how a separate object is known, but rather the special case of self-knowledge. Do we know the self through sensible intuition and the understanding, or do we postulate the self as underlying phenomenal experience? Above I have already rejected both accounts, at least where the self in question is that in a self-world distinction. This lends support to the claim that the phenomenal-noumenal distinction cannot indeed apply to the subject on which it relies, whereas the ontological distinction can.

What justifies believing? Jack Darach.

2006-09-28T00:44:00.000+01:00

What I'm trying to understand is what kind of norms, if any, govern the rational acquisition of belief and the kind of responsibility we have to such norms. A basic division to start with might be between intrinsic and extrinsic norms. Intrinsic norms are those that are based in the concept of belief (whatever that is, I'm still not sure) while extrinsic norms for belief would be based outside of epistemology; for example they could be practical or moral norms. If we accept that the function of belief is to represent accurately how the world is then we move towards an intrinsic evidentialist position. This position suggests: one would be justified in believing that p only when one has sufficient evidence for the truth of p. Obviously this can't be enough as it stands. Evidential considerations alone cannot determine what counts as 'sufficient' evidence. The evidentialist proposal needs to include non-evidential considerations, such as how much time you have to inquire as to whether p; how much of your cognitive resources you can devote to the issue, etc, that help to determine when someone is justified in believing that p. These other considerations do not do any justifying. It is not that by accepting the need for non-evidential considerations one is then giving a space over to practical norms in the rational acquisition of belief that tells you when you can believe that p. And certainly knowing that you haven’t got much time left to inquire as to whether p can’t motivate you to believe that p. But this position arises most naturally when we start with the assumption that the function of belief is to represent the world accurately. (Isn't this a way of stating the oft used, difficult to explain, phrase: belief aims at the truth?) And it is this I'm not sure about and what I need help on. Why is the only function of belief to represent the world accurately? Belief plays a role in our actions; mightn’t it have another function connected to this, to facilitate action (or facilitate successful action)? In which case wouldn't it be better if our beliefs were subject to practical considerations? Specifically about what it would be desireable to believe in order to generate acts that are more likely to satisfy our intentions and desires?

Content Holism: Gabriel Segal.

2006-09-15T12:21:00.000+01:00

I think I inadvertently stumbled into what looks like a really good argument for a sort of holism about cognitive content (published in ‘Ignorance of Meaning’ in Alex Barber ed. The Epistemology of Language). It’s tough being a holist about content, if, like me, you are also what might be called a naive realist about content: content is just part of the natural world, along with elms and elephants and everything else. Content, then, is in principle open to scientific investigation. But we seem to be struggling a little with the practicalities of that. And holism may be part of the problem.

The sort of holism I have in mind might be very roughly expressed by saying that the content of an individual’s concept depends on the totality of beliefs in which it features. So, for example, if, one day, Bart thought that measles is more common amongst girls than boys, and the next day he came to believe that it isn’t, then his ‘measles’ concept must have changed. Equally, if Bart thinks that measles is more common amongst girls than boys and Lisa doesn’t, then Bart and Lisa have different ‘measles’ concepts.

Here is a very rough thumbnail sketch of the argument for holism. Suppose that Bart and Lisa disagree on the question of whether measles is more common amongst girls than boys, but agree on pretty much all the other properties of the disease. They also both know that ‘measles’ and ‘rubeola’ are synonyms and they use the terms interchangeably. Now suppose that a naïve subject, Maggie, learns ‘measles’ from Bart and ‘rubeola’ from Lisa. She becomes competent with the terms, sharing most of Bart’s and Lisa’s ‘measles’ and ‘rubeola’ beliefs. Maggie comes to believe that measles is more common amongst girls than boys, but that rubeola isn’t. So, of course, she believes that they are different diseases.

Evidently, by standard Fregean principles, the content of Maggie’s ‘measles’ and ‘rubeola’ concepts differ. Now, by liberal, non-holistic standards of individuation we would want to say that the content of Bart’s and Maggie’s ‘measles’ concepts is the same and that the content of Lisa’s and Maggie’s ‘rubeola’ concepts is the same and that the content of Bart’s and Maggie’s ‘rubeola’ and ‘measles’ concepts are the same. But, given the difference between Maggie’s ‘measles’ and ‘rubeola’ concepts, that’s impossible. So we must deny at least one of the identity claims. But all the identity claims are on the same footing: there is no reason to favour one over another. So we should deny them all. So, it follows from the fact that Bart and Lisa differ in just one little, unimportant belief about measles, that their concepts differ in content.

The argument from the Simpsons generalizes. So holism is true.

Of course, spelling out the argument properly takes some time and patience. But it can be done. So what then? Then we wonder how it is possible coherently to use opaque propositional attitude attributions to talk about the Simpsons. How can they all believe, de dicto, that measles causes spots if the contents of their ‘measles’ concepts are different? Then we see that psychological generalizations work fine because they deploy a flexible standard of sameness of content, with different levels of content-similarity governing the correctness of opaque generalizations, in different conversational contexts. But how does that work? What is the metric of similarity here? Where do we even begin to look?

So the challenge is: either answer those last questions or find a flaw in the argument from the Simpsons.