Abstract: (emphasis mine)

My title, “Belief in Naturalism,” signals, not that I adopt naturalism as an article of faith, but that my purpose in this paper is to shed some light on what belief is, on why the concept of belief is needed in epistemology, and how all this related to debates about epistemological naturalism. After clarifying the many varieties of naturalism, philosophical and other (section 1), and then the various forms of epistemological naturalism specifically (section 2), I offer a theory of belief in which three elements – the behavioral, the neurophysiological, and the socio-historical – interlock (section 3), and *apply this theory to resolve some contested questions: about whether animals and pre-linguistic infants have beliefs, about the fallibility of introspection, and about self-deceptiion* (section 4).

Let’s stop and consider the italicized sentence and consider whether this is even the sort of thing a (naturalistic) analysis of belief could even hope to usefully provide. Note that as a naturalistic theory we assume from the outset there is no metaphysical mumbo-jumbo going on that renders a belief more than the sum of it’s parts. That is we assume the entire world can be fully described in terms of the trajectories of elementary particles and just because those particles assemble themselves into a human brain doesn’t give rise to some kind of ghostly new entity, ‘the belief.’ In other words belief is nothing more than a defined term that stands in for some complicated property about elementary particles just as in mathematics we abbreviate the epsilon-delta definition of continuity with the term continuous. While it would cost us brevity and flavor our language would be no less expressive if stripped of the term ‘belief’ only less convenient.

So what then to make of Ms. Haack’s claim that she will “resolve” the question of whether infants and animals have beliefs? (She resolves both in the negative.) Obviously she could proffer a definition of “belief” that could decide the question in either fashion (X believes P if … or X is an animal) but in no way would most people consider that to be resolving a question as that phrase clearly suggests something of significance has been learned. It would be extremely strange to say, “I’m going to define living being to be an entity capable of reproducing itself without hijacking another being’s protein making machinery,” and then to tell your listeners that you’ll use your definition to “resolve” the contested question of whether viruses are alive. After all you didn’t resolve anything, you just blatantly excluded them when you choose a definition.

Those unfamiliar with this kind of philosophy paper may be excused for assuming that what Ms. Haack means to say is that no concept satisfying desiderata 1…n that she takes to be necessary features of any definition she would consider for the word belief is compatible with granting babies or animals have beliefs. Let me assure you she is making no such argument. She quite plainly is advancing her definition¹ as the right definition for belief as if definitions could be right or wrong the same way answers to arithmetic questions can be. Unfortunately, in philosophical writing less clear than that of Ms. Haack the text doesn’t specifically and clearly refute this reinterpretation and the communities norms of charity thus protect it from such damning criticism. Certainly the norms about charity allow for criticism but they stridently resist writing off the entire work as such a simple an embarrassing confusion without incontrovertible, definitive textual support. Especially when the paper was written by an eminent philosopher. Thus we are left in the odd situation where minor fallacies may be freely critiqued and then corrected but pointing out that an entire body of literature is based on a profound confusion is beyond the pale.

At this point I’m sure some readers are spluttering that surely Ms. Haack means to be analyzing the English word belief and is really arguing that any moderately simple definition compatible with usage would preclude ascribing beliefs to animals or babies. Simple reflection on our frequent use of the word belief to successfully describe animal behavior shows this can’t possibly be correct and it’s quite clear this isn’t the claim being argued. But rather than refute every strained explanation seeking to resolve the tension in this paper I instead hope to sway you by offering a positive account of how this kind of blatantly confused situation develops.

Simple observation of people’s behavior reveals that we are instinctively naive realists about the meaning of words. Indeed, we are instinctively naive realists about a great deal more than that and many of us are disposed, when not reflecting on the question, to behave as if there were right and wrong answers (in more than a statistical sense) about what food is tasty, what movies are good and what people are pretty. One could easily offer some evolutionary story about the benefits of conformity/standardization but whatever the cause our natural temptation is to act as if there is an objectively correct fact about what a given word means and in our usual interactions such an assumption serves us well. To a first approximation there is only a single universal definition and this fiction only begins to unravel when we consider bizarre edge cases, subtle distinctions in context or when meaning shifts over time. The later case explains why people will often stubbornly insist that a supermajority of the population is using a word incorrectly when it differs from what they learned in school.

This attitude then leaks over when philosophers offer a conceptual analysis of a term and it is easy to slip into assuming that there is a single correct conceptual analysis just as there (more or less) a single correct meaning of the word. Conceptual analysis, however, involves cleaning up vagueness or imprecision in a natural language term and often results in multiple equally valid preciseifications. For instance even a perfect understanding of the natural language term “size” won’t tell you whether measure or cardinality is the ‘right’ way to preciseify the size of a set of reals. As each individual is likely to find one or the other potential preciseification more intuitive and is likely not to even think of the other alternative it’s easy to see how one might fall into the trap of assuming that your analysis was correct and the alternatives outright wrong. Once the dispute between alternatives becomes an established philosophical debate (like the argument between internalism and externalism, definite descriptions and the baptismal theory of names or the choice of function to provide a quantitative measurement of evidence) the existence of genuine conflict, i.e., the uniqueness of the correct analysis, is simply taken for granted.

Sadly there seem to be few effective forces working to, even slowly, eliminate this kind of confusion. It is a particularly hard issue because those people who have expertise in a dispute or genre of philosophy so afflicted are usually professionally invested in the dispute and unsurprisingly uninclined to advance the idea that their prior work was the result of a vast confusion and largely without merit. On the other hand those without a horse in the race are unsurprisingly reluctant to dismiss a traditional philosophical dispute as mere confusion and risk being lambasted for jumping to judgmental conclusions without sufficient knowledge. Worse, the allegation that a traditional dispute is wholly based on such a blatant and devastating confusion might generate a single paper, at most creating a selection effect where the only people who bother to study or write about say definite descriptions as opposed to the baptismal theory of names are those who naively accept the traditional ‘naive realist’ account of the dispute.

For the moment I’d like to set aside the issue of literature for another post and focus on subjects like philosophy and economics where (at least in theory) the aim is to genuinely progress towards a (more) accurate/useful understanding. Since I find it genuienly perplexing why one would ever feel the need to read the originals rather than the digested and improved material found in modern expositions as one does in math of physics I’ll quote Tyler Cowen’s justifications for returning to the original thinkers. Obviously these don’t represent every possible justification but they are the best justifications I’ve ever heard.

First though I’d like to be perfectly clear that the issue under consideration is whether there is some pedagogical benefit to reading original thinkers as opposed to modern summaries (of either the original thinker or simply the current state of the discipline). There is no accounting for taste so if you simply have some Plato fetish or like the way reading Plato makes you feel sophisticated you might find it more enjoyable to read Plato rather than more modern work just as someone else might prefer to have their philosophical arguments interspersed in Harry Potter slash. Also if your interest is in original historical research then influential works are a reasonable thing to read¹ but again the question at hand is the benefit of reading original works by great thinkers to the advancement of the discipline itself not it’s history or the practitioners feelings of sophistication. With this point clear let’s examine what Tyler Cowen has to say point by point.

1. Secondary sources are unreliable and they do not capture or understand many of the original insights. To remove it from the distant past, what I get from John Rawls or Robert Nozick is quite distinct from what I get from their distillers.

So what? The standard isn’t whether a latter distillation captures the exact content but whether it’s a more effective way to gain understanding. Reading a modern calculus book is extremely different from reading the original Newton. Newton’s notions of infinitesimals and fluxions have been excisced wholesale and replaced with the modern notions of limits and epsilon-delta proofs and that’s a huge improvement in the ability of calculus books to convey understanding.

2. Truly great thinkers require numerous distillers. Can you read just one book on Keynes? No. So you have to read a few. Shouldn’t one of these then be Keynes himself? Yes.

This presupposes the goal is to understand what Keynes thought. Keynes was a brilliant economist but he was just as human as the rest of us and some of his ideas were simply confused or poorly thought out. The benefit of later distillers is to transmit the insights while avoiding the confusions, so no, one of these shouldn’t be Keynes himself.

I mean imagine Keynes was really a highlander and was still alive and at the height of his intellectual powers. Who would it be more beneficial to read the 1936 Keynes or the 2010 Keynes who has used the intervening years to excise the confused parts of The General Theory and find more lucid explanations of the key insights? Surely it’s the 2010 Keynes who would (likely) provide the better explanation (if you disagree would you go back to his half-assembled notes? Further?). Yet surely if Keynes could improve on his own work than (as the goal is to convey economic ideas not Keynes personal beliefs) surely others could as well, especially when the benefit from the collaboration and exchange of ideas provided the academic discipline.

3. The errors of top thinkers are often more interesting and instructive than their successes. Distillers have a hard time capturing these errors and their fruitfulness.

But that’s the wrong comparison. The right comparison is whether it’s more useful to build upon the work of past greats and digest this new material including the mistakes made by those who have built upon the great thinkers of the past than to spend time digesting the errors of the past. Obviously if it was costless one would read every book on the subject but the key question question is would the time spent exploring the errors made by Keynes be better spent exploring later work that builds upon his insights.. The reason it’s so tempting to advocate reading originals is that we don’t properly take into account the opportunity costs incurred reading those originals.

Moreover, given that there is only so much time for students (or professors) to devote to learning a subject either one must give up totally on the idea of making progress or admit that it’s sometimes more effective to substitute modern materials for some works of great thinkers. Hence this argument either proves too much (progress is impossible because it’s always better to learn from the mistakes of past great thinkers) or proves nothing at all since we continuously make beneficial trade offs of replacing originals with more modern works.

4. We often read great thinkers not to learn what they understood but also to set our minds racing and to find interesting new questions. Great thinkers are usually better at supplying this service than are their distillers.

Again this assumes that the job of the distiller is to summarize the original author. A good analysis book doesn’t summarize Newton it digests his insights and presents them as part of a grander theory. Reading a modern analysis book does a much better job a posing interesting new questions than does reading Newton.[^empirial]

Moreover, I suggest this is largely a placebo effect. One is told that the reading great thinkers in the original is particularly inspiring so we search for questions to inspire us. We would probably do equally well if told that Joyce’s Ulysses conveyed deep economic questions. If you doubt this consider the stunningly large number of people who, despite not being religious, claim to derive deep moral messages and insights from the bible despite it’s blatant encouragement of genocide, rape, and every other kind of brutality imaginable.

5. Sometimes the value is in having read common sources and benefiting from the commonality per se. Great thinkers are usually more focal than any of their distillers and thus reading them is a good input for discussions with others.

OFten this is simply false as influential textbooks and articles are often just as widely read. More importantly by virtue of the novelty of their ideas original thinkers are usually lacking in clarity meaning the same work is usually interpreted in a host of different ways.. However, even if true this argues for more canonical books. In mathematics this issue is solved by the publication of various yellow books that provide a common base for everyone to use as a reference and there is no reason not to do the same for other subjects.

6. Original sources often help you challenge or reexamine your world view or intellectual ethos. Distillers very often pander to that world view, while pretending to challenge you.

Given their status as influential originals the content in these works has largely been either incorporated into your modern world view or people have developed standard objections. I know my world view (or even philosophical position) has never been threatened by the original work of an past great thinker but often it’s been shaken by a new argument or idea from a modern source.

7. Consider a simple comparison. You can read either Adam Smith’s two major books or any ten or even twenty books on him, toss in articles if you wish. It’s a no-brainer which you should choose.

Right, neither. Who the hell cares what some dude named Adam Smith thought. Given the choice between reading a modern economic textbook and any of Adam Smith’s books I know which one I would choose and it’s the same thing we always choose for undergraduates.

8. The best distillers often are original sources in their own right (and in part unreliable expositors), such as in Charles Taylor’s excellent book on Hegel.

Again the false dichotomy. Instead of trying to find out what Hegel said we should be finding out what is true (which in the case of Hegel will involve simply ignoring him).

9. Distillation works best in very exact sciences, such as physics and mathematics. If you rely on distillation for an inexact science, you will do best at capturing its exact parts. You will be left with a systematic bias, and knowledge gap, regarding its inexact parts.

So it’s only when you can’t actually go out and check whether going back to read the original works by great thinkers that it’s beneficial? That’s awful suspicious

Stepping back for a moment I would point out the fact that there are many different mutually contradictory disciplines of theology (every major world religion has one). Thus regardless of your religious views (and especially if you are an atheist) you must admit that there are academic disciplines which are totally bullshit. Now I would point out that in virtually all instances of theological study the original work of prior influential (but not prophets or otherwise supernaturally gifted) theologians is regarded as similarly important to read in the original.

Hence, we must all admit there are situations where academic disciplines are convinced of the important of reading influential past thinkers in the original despite even though it provides no actual benefit. Conversely in all those disciplines where we have reliable quantatative measurements of progress (with the obvious exception of history) returning to the original works of past great thinkers is decidedly unhelpful. Therefore at the very least anyone who wishes to claim that reading past great thinkers in the original (be it Plato, Keynes, Aristotle or whomever) has a substantial argumentative burden to meet and until they do the assumption should be against spending time doing so.

Perhaps this will be my last post here? A simple reiteration of negative Platonism, situating its significance in the context of awakening from the wrong expectations performed so thoroughly and unconsciously in the second Critique.

To put it once again with maximal simplicity: The diagonal is what relates, without religious/imaginary synthesis, our mathematical/cognitive and ethical/existential lives.

We already live in both places: in consistency through calculation and consciousness, in completeness through care and the unconscious. What we suffer from, as both theoretical inadequacy and ethical alienation, is an inability to relate these in a way that makes sense and is good.

Thus it has suddenly become possible, after long stagnation, to say something rigorous and suggestive, something that opens logoi both mathematically lucid and existentially thick (again without synthesis: it’s a matter of bridges and transitions, not of sovereign unities or systems) about the fundamental Socratic question: which knowledge, which part, of knowledge, would do us any good?

At stake here is exactly what gets talked about, prephilosophically, as “the meaning of life”. It is good philosophical practice to avoid this question until one has something real to say about it, and instead, to work the problem from either side. But it is not good practice, once the relation has become clear, to remain squeamish about naming it: Idea of the Good, Diagonalization.

Note, if you read the rest of the blog it’s totally clear that he really means diagnolization in the sense of the mathematical technique employed by Godel. Moreover, he seems to genuienly understand the mathematics (Godel’s theorem is a result in a meta-system describing provability in some formalized system) so what’s going on here is surely not mathematical confusion. It’s the philosophy that’s totally fucked (I’m pretty confident now that it’s not a hoax).

However, to be fair to this blogger, he isn’t some isolated crank, but rather a participant in a ‘respectable’ philosophical tradition. Indeed, one of the famous philosophers he references, Alain Badiou is even more incoherent. While he would almost certainly quibble with the description given on wikipedia if the following is even remotely accurate he might as well be spouting gibberish.

Badiou’s use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that (as with set theory) there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell’s paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic. (This paradox can be thought through in terms of a ‘list of lists that do not contain themselves’: if such a list does not write itself on the list the property is incomplete, as there will be one missing; if it does, it is no longer a list that does not contain itself.) So too does the axiom of foundation — or to give an alternative name the axiom of regularity — enact such a prohibition (cf. p. 190 in Being and Event). (This axiom states that all sets contain an element for which only the void [empty] set names what is common to both the set and its element.) Badiou’s philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the ‘one’: there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore — against Cantor, from whom he draws heavily — staunchly atheist. However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation ‘founds’ all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets — thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely ‘new’ occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically, it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently ‘pragmatically abandoned’ an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.

For any readers familiar with set theory the part about drawing ethical maxim’s from Cohen’s method of forcing might be even more amusing. Sure, he is hardly the first continental philosopher I’ve read who should be properly regarded as a crackpot but when it’s about my subject (mathematical logic) it just makes the point all the more clearly.

Now reading this sort of BS is kinda amusing but I do have a broader point. Despite being essentially indistingushable from the sort of crank theories that pop up from physics crackpots all the time the people publishing this stuff are still seen as respectable, even acclaimed, philosophers. If philosophy wants to be a serious intellectual discipline it needs to take the same hard line that they physicists do about crackpots, even if it means tossing out entire university departments.

The physicists wouldn’t simply sit quietly and say nothing about a crank being allowed to teach physics courses, nor attend conferences or journals that treated them as respectable researchers. Moreover, were they to do so the progress of the discipline, and certainly the public understanding of physics, would be greatly harmed. My point is ultimately that it’s not enough for analytic philosophers (particularly tenured ones) to sit back and privately dismiss all this crap as rubbish. They have a positive duty to denounce these people as cranks and eliminate them from the field. Failing that they have a duty, even if it imperils funding, to demand departments be split and otherwise clearly distingush what they do from what the continental crankpots do.

To be clear not everyone one might classify as a ‘continental philosopher’ should be deemed a crank. Despite being notoriously confusing Kant surely is not. Mere error or poor writing is not enough to be a crank. However, neither the blurriness of the line or our inclinations to charity are an excuse for tolerating obviously incoherent gibberish as valid philosophy. Since it’s notoriously difficult to conclusively establish that some convoluted continental style ‘argument’ lacks any reasonable interpretation the burden should be on the person presenting the apparent gibberish to convince others they are merely really poor writers with a meaningful point.

The really short version of my attitude to the problem of mathematical knowledge is “What Problem?” I mean obviously mathematical knowledge is subject to the same skeptical doubts that other forms of knowledge are but I’m unconvinced that there is any particular problem unique to mathematical knowledge. More specifically I would say that mathematical knowledge is nothing but a limiting case of other sorts of knowledge so it poses no problem over and above the problem of understanding the meaning and our knowledge of other sorts of statements. Of course explaining meaning is a notoriously difficult problem in it’s own right but I’m tempted to think that it’s a hopeless problem. Ultimately one must merely take meaning to be a primitive concept but that’s another discussion.

I need to get back to working on my thesis so I won’t give more than a very very quick sketch of my thoughts here but roughly I take it there are two primary reasons one might think that mathematical knowledge requires special explanation.

1. The Benacerraf problem: How could we come to know anything about numbers if they don’t have causal powers, we don’t interact with them and so forth.
2. How could it be that our mathematical theories turn out to be useful in the way they are.

Platonism and Reference

So if one accepts a platonic theory of mathematical meaning then there may indeed be special problems about mathematical knowledge. That is if the meaning of a statement like 2+2 =4 is really that some special 2 object out there bears a certain relation to itself and the four object one might wonder how it is that we come to know about these platonic objects. However, I’m inclined to simply turn the question around and ask whether the platonic theory in question provides any reason to think that “2″ refers to something we would ‘recognize’ as an integer or whether it could (logically not metaphysically) be that 2 refers to the concept of bunny rabbits and all our statements about arithmetic are really nonsensical. If the platonic interpretation of mathematics tells us that the reference of two must really behave like 2 to qualify as the correct reference then we know exactly how we come to have true beliefs about the numbers — because if our beliefs weren’t largely true we would be talking about something else[^enough]. On the other hand if we don’t have any restrictions about what sort of platonic object 2 might refer to then we aren’t justified in adopting this kind of theory in the first place.

Unfortunately the debate about Platonism and competing philosophies of mathematical largely distracts from what I think are the important issues. As I’ve argued previously Platonism in and of itself says very little about mathematics. What the last paragraph as well as my previous post on the issue emphasize is that it isn’t really Platonism that is doing the work it is your theory of reference. Really on it’s own Platonism says nothing very significant¹, it’s the means by which our talk maps to particular platonic objects that really does the work in the theory. This raises the obvious question of what we even mean when we say that the reference of a certain term is such and such. Are we merely making a claim about dispositions and talk or are we invoking some real metaphysical relation. While Platonism provides a good motivation to consider the issue I think a proper examination of this question of what sort of thing the meaning relation is in the first place illustrates the non-problem of philosophy of mathematics in general.

Platonic Realism About Reference

There are two ways one could understand claims about meaning and reference One could think that the relation of meaning is a truly objective notion with metaphysical substance. That is that the relation between words/mental states/speaking contexts is some and references/meanings is something like a platonic entity in it’s own right. On such a theory it is presumably logically possible (but not metaphysically) that when I say “2″ it really (by virtue of this objectively existing meaning relation) refers to rabbit. In other words the meaning of word is a notion much like the moral status of an action under on a realist moral theory.

Just as with moral realism I think the appropriate response to this notion of meaning is to challenge that it counts as meaning at all. Ultimately there is just this relation out there mapping situations/worlds/utterances/mental states/whatever to references/intentions but why should we think this picks out what we talk about when we use the term meaning? Additionally on this sort of platonic realism about meaning we don’t have any reason to actually believe that we really do have knowledge. After all maybe the objective meaning relation isn’t what we think it is at all and what we take to be true statements aren’t true at all.

One might still be tempted to insist that obviously we have knowledge thus the fact that this theory can’t explain this fact is a puzzle requiring explanation. However, this simply gets things backwards and implicitly rejects the very assumptions of the theory itself. If we accept this sort of theory we need to just bite the bullet and say we don’t know if we really know anything and thus how we know things doesn’t require explanation. Personally I think our intuition that our usage determines meaning is a good reason to reject this sort of theory but in either case this leaves no special problems for mathematics. Of course you might try and say that the mapping between statements and meanings/references must obey certain restrctions but this does no good at all since of course any actual map will have some facts that are true of it but this does nothing to offer us reason to think we have any knowledge of what they are.

Naturalist Theories of Meaning

I think a much more promising approach² is to jettison all the metaphysical baggage and start from the assumption that meanings, ultimately must be defined in terms of sounds, dispositions, actions and other arrangements of matter. That is nothing special or magical goes on with meanings. They are just a concept introduced to organize very complicated descriptions of human behavior in terms of atoms and physical laws. Thus the ultimate standard against which we judge a theory of meaning is it’s predictive accuracy and theoretical utility (how well does it work with other models we wish to use). In some sense already this approach should suggest that there shouldn’t be any deep paradoxes in terms of meaning. After all we are confident that the description of human behavior at the level of atoms is consistant thus any apparent difficulty at the level of meanings either reflects a confusion on our part or a poor choice of definition.

To put the point a bit differently we should think about a theory of meaning much the way we think about thermodynamics as derived from statistical mechanics. Yes, it can be a powerful theory with useful concepts and important impacts but ultimately just as debates about whether entropy is the log of the number of possible states holding X,Y and Z fixed or just X and Y doesn’t reflect any fundamental fact about the universe but a definitional choice we make that is judged on it’s utility. Thus theories like fictionalism or formalism shouldn’t be understood as making different philosophical claims but rather judged simply on their utility in predicting how people actually use words. Indeed one might very well conclude that different models are most appropriate in different circumstances.

Ultimately then the question about how we can come to have mathematical knowledge is largely a non-question. I can point to the actual ways that mathematicians prove theorems and reach conclusions and that right there shows how we come to have mathematical knowledge. Still one might ask but why are the results of our proofs actually true? However, this has a totally trivial answer. The reason that proofs give us true mathematical results is that every step of the proof is truth preserving. Indeed we can go through this and using the fact (in the meta-language) that A and B is true if and only if A is true or B is true show that the methods mathematicans use to reach theorems really do produce true theorems. Asking for anything more is a demand to know why logic is true. Obviously at a very basic level we have to just assume that logic is true (see Quine’s arguments about this point in his discussions of radial translation) so it’s unclear what is left to be explained at all.

To put the point slightly differently it’s contradictory to worry about how we get mathematics correct. Either the question tells us how we have reason to believe we do get mathematics right, in which case it tells us the answer or it offers no such explanation and we have no need to explain a phenomena that we don’t have reason to accept as true.

Usefullness of Mathematics

This finally brings us to the question of why mathematics turns out to be useful. One might think that it’s surprising that the results of mathematics tells us useful things about the world. Certainly in one sense it is surprising, but that’s the sense in which the understandability of the world is surprsing, i.e., that induction works. While it may appear that mathematics directly makes predictions about the world (if I have two apples in my bag and place another two apples into my bag I have four apples in my bag) in fact it’s only the combination of mathematical theorems with contingent bridge laws that makes these predictions (apples don’t appear or disappear when I place more of them together). One might try and minimize the significance of these bridge laws by saying something like “So long as apples don’t appear or disappear the number of apples in my bag is the number of apples I added minus the number I removed.” However, this merely begs the question by working in our expectation that the plus operation on the natural numbers describes how objects behave into the definition of appear or disappear. I could equally well claim that apples were disappearing and reappearing all the time but if they didn’t do so we could see that adding n apples to a bag with m apples in it results in a bag with n x m apples in it.

In fact the usefulness of something like mathematics is an easy consequence of a well known theorem in recursion theory. Supposing we have a language complex enough to express arbitrary procedures³ then that language will contain infinitely many different ways to state the same procedure, some subset of which will be possible to construct a verification that they are equivalent. In other words no matter how weird your language is you can’t get around the fact that some things will turn out to be non-obviously equivalent which suggests that it will be useful to have a means to identify at least some of them.

Usefullness and Knowledge

The final worry is that one might try and link the two concepts and ask how it is that we come to have mathematical knowledge that yields useful results. Thus even if we don’t have abstract reasons to believe that the syntactic manipulations of mathematicians meet some independent standard of being true we do notice that they let us build rockets and cure disease and the like. Thus one might think the utility of mathematics requires some explanation.

Once again though I think a careful examination of the question reveals it to be a non-worry. If by mathematics you merely mean the sort of thing that mathematicians do then it’s undeniable that what counts as mathematics is partially determined by what is useful. While many types of mathematics are very abstract the subject in the large is influenced by what has solved problems presented by the world. This point is made even more forcefully if you try to define mathematics as any abstract rule based manipulation of symbols. After all under such a definition certain types of astrology would qualify which most assuredly is not useful. Similarly any other means by which you tried to formally define the problem is likely to either reduce to triviality or not call our for any explanation at all.

This was a pretty hurried and scattered explanation of my thouhts so hopefully people ould follow it. If you are confused but curious about what I’m trying to say anyway feel free to post a comment or ask me via email

Consider a philosophical debate between two materialists over whether a virus is alive. Philosopher A advances the hypothesis that any organism capable of manipulating it’s environment to copy itself is alive. Philosopher B counters that Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” has this property as it’s induces people to produce reproductions of the work and instead argues that a being is alive only if it doesn’t require outside intervention to duplicate itself. Philosopher A counters with an example of a plant that humans have cultivated for long enough that it is now incapable of reproduction without intentional human intervention.

Now we can imagine this debate continuing as both philosophers refine their theories as to what constitutes life but no matter how long they argue in this fashion they can’t hope to reach any substantive conclusions. Why? Because they didn’t disagree about anything but word usage at the outset. As materialists they both reject the notion of some elan vital that we might add to our fundamental ontology to ‘explain’ what counts as alive and what doesn’t. As far as the virus goes they would both accept the biologists explanation as to how it reproduced they only disagree on how to label this event. Now there are certainly times it makes sense to argue about labeling but we naturally expect such debates to take a very different form. In particular when people merely disagree about how we should term something they will usually sidestep the debate eventually and simply qualify their wording. When people disagree on how in fact people are inclined to use words they tend to either shrug and move on or to start pulling out real empirical data¹. In no case where people understand themselves to be merely debating a matter of labeling would we expect them to argue about the issue for decades in reputable journals with no hint that they view themselves as debating some empirical fact about usage or pragmatic fact about what would make for good usage.

Unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of arguments in philosophy that can’t be explained as anything other than a confusion of a question of terminology as a substantive question². There are a host of examples but let me give a couple

Is formalism or fictionalism the right philosophy of math?

Now there is (arguably) a genuine substantive question as to whether mathematical Platonism is true. Is there or is there not a realm of platonic objects out there? And if you believe in a substantive notion of reference (reference facts aren’t ontologically reducible to physical/mental facts) whether or not that is what we refer to with mathematical talk. However, when we get down to debates between functionalism and fictionalism things suddenly become much more unclear.

Neither theory disagrees about what in fact mathematicians assert nor makes any fundamentally different metaphysical suppositions. Nor do the two theories compete on genuine empirical predictions. Neither theory attempts to best predict what in practice people will tend to assert about mathematics. So in what sense can there be said to be a substantive question at issue here? And if not why believe these two interpretations are in opposition to each other?.

The “Proper” Conception of Evidential Support

In formal epistemology there seems to be a great deal of ink spilt arguing over what the ‘proper’ notion of confirmation is. Now Brandon Fitelson has always (at least to my eyes) pushed for a ‘there is no fact of the matter’ resolution to many debates in this area so I wouldn’t accuse him of making this sort of mistake but this paper of his gives a nice picture of what sorts of arguments are at play in the area. In particular there seems to be a long lasting dispute as to what the ‘right’ notion of confirmation turns out to be. Is it a three place relation between evidence, theory 1 and theory 2 or is it a two place relationship between evidence and a hypothesis?

Now I would be most surprised if anyone in this debate thought confirmation was an substantive notion (but I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before), that is that when we assert that evidence E favors hypothesis H we aren’t just asserting some fact about probabilities, models or events but actually claiming that there is some special ‘confirmation’ property in our ontology that adheres to that particular relation but not to others that we might have chosen instead to term confirmation and that. Yet if we aren’t being ontologically liberal like this it would seem that all this debate about what is the ‘right’ notion of confirmation seems silly. We can all agree on the formal consequences of each notion and just set aside the contentious terminological question³.

Is Welfare Desire Satsifaction or Utility Maximization

I mention this because it was the argument that first made me realize that many of these debates couldn’t be substantive. While many people want to add an extra ontological fact to explain morality few people are inclined to indiscriminately add ontological entities for subsidiary moral concepts like welfare yet they are perfectly happy to debate the issue as if it were substantive.

In particular many people argue about whether we maximize welfare by maximizing utility or by maximizing desire satisfaction (or something else) as if it was a separate question we resolve prior to figuring out what is morally good. However, short of proposing a new fundamental property or relation it would seem that the debate over what increases someone’s welfare is merely a terminological question.

Kripke’s Causal Theory of Reference for naturalists

I debated about including this one since some people who buy into Kripke’s theory believe it as a genuine substantial claim. That is they add extra fundamental objects to their ontology (references, meanings etc..) and make the substantial claim that somehow our intuitive explanations of words in terms of other words track these objects and that as a real ontological fact it turns out that the reference of our word is determined by it’s causal history.

However, many of the people who take these theories seriously would call themselves naturalists or physicalists and would balk at the suggestion that by endorsing Kripke’s theory they were making grandiose metaphysical claims that couldn’t possibly be explained in terms of anything physics could in principle ever discover. Presumably as a physicalist one should accept the fact that there is nothing more to speech acts than certain configurations of matter and that there is no free floating metaphysical object ‘the reference’ that exists over and above the configuration of matter. As I’ve argued before it’s absurd for a good naturalist/physicalist to have a horse in the internalist/externalist debate except insofar as one turns out to be a genuinely better empirical predictor of future events.

My thesis is that there is a strong bias towards taking mere disputes about terminology and assuming that they are substantive. Not only is it a tempting fallacy to fall into on it’s own but it also creates for a much more interesting seeming discussion. It seems much more significant to say that one is figuring out the nature of life than to admit one is merely debating what we should call “life.” In any case whatever the reason it seems that this is a common fallacy that I see in philosophical discourse and one we should guard against. There are more than enough substantive arguments to keep philosophers busy and some of these non-substantive arguments are worth having as well but which arguments we take to be persuasive will be very different once we understand it is merely a terminological debate. Importantly once we accept that many of our debates are merely terminological we can no longer assume that there is any tension between things like internalism and externalism or different measures of confirmation.

As an aside I think this is in some sense the issue between Carnap and Quine over the nature of analyticity but that’s something for another post.

CLARIFICATION: I don’t want to claim that these debates couldn’t be rendered substantive. Really all I want to claim is that they are not naively substantive questions so using a standard of argumentation suited to this assumption is in error. I don’t mean to say that we need to abandon these questions only that we should figure out what we are trying to say and what it would take to establish our claim before we try to argue for one side or another.

Also I’m not convinced that any particular philosopher is making this error. It often seems that when I talk to any given philosopher about the matter they have some complex alternative interpretation of the claims at issue that either recognizes them as not substantive or renders them so through some non-obvious interpretation. It’s entirely possible that this is merely a process error but at the very least something is wrong when people adopt the form of a substantive argument for notions that don’t seem like they could be substantive without giving an indication as to what way it is (non-obviously) substantive (least different people think they are debating different questions). What I really want to do hear is not so much to advance my particular theory as to what is going wrong but to call attention to the fact that something seems really out of wack (or have someone give me a satisfactory explanation as to why it is not).

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of all time. He has, however, been largely ignored by American “analytic” philosophers of the twentieth century. John in particular, and Ken to a lesser extent, don’t know nearly as much about Hegel and his philosophy as they should.

Note the clear assumption in the description that Hegel is worth learning something about. Sure as an influential philosopher it may be worthwhile to read the cliff notes for cultural literacy and have enough familiarity with his work to decide if he is worth further investigation but as the comments made during the program indicated this assumption of merit goes far beyond that. The hosts of philosophy talk are just doing the same thing I see almost all philosophers do at conferences, assuming that any philosophy that is or was academically studied is worthwhile. The defacto attitude in philosophical circles seems to be that anything recognized as genuine philosophy (not a layman’s ‘philosophy’ of life) has continuing value and if you don’t see the merit in their ideas it is because you don’t understand them.

The fact that philosophers still put great value on reading the original contributors has always made me suspicious that social (and perhaps literary) considerations were interfering with the quest for the truth (more on this later) but the example of Hegel puts the matter beyond any doubt. Just the sheer number of incompatible interpretations of Hegel should already make on suspicious of Hegel’s worth. It seems totally plausible that the lack of clear content in Hegel is letting people read their own ideas into his writings. If I was to publish a blank book I should clearly not be given credit for whatever people happen to write in it and similarly we should credit Hegel’s works (not the historical person) as saying only that the truth lies somewhere in the range of plausible interpretations. In other words if the cost in effort of extracting good arguments and theories from Hegel is the same as the effort to come up with those on your own then Hegel is no more valuable than a blank book.

The real damning piece of evidence though is that we know Hegel’s methods and philosophical ‘analysis’ produces complete nonsense. Several good examples are given on this page. Among other things Hegel claimed to have proved (false) facts about the location of the planets from pure philosophical considerations. Popper has pointed out that many of Hegel’s statements appear to be little more than sheer gibberish or when intelligeable completely trivial facts dressed up in fancy words. Thus our situation with Hegel is much the same as it would be if we were talking to a crazy man on the street. If we read parts of Hegel and find they don’t make sense to us or the arguments and claims seem unconvincing we shouldn’t give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it is our failing for not understanding him. We know that Hegel often writes complete gibberish and claims to have shown obviously false facts so we have good reason to suspect other passages of his suffer from similar problems.

In order to progress philosophy, like other disciplines trying to uncover the truth, needs to effectively winnow out invalid and unproductive theories. Since philosophy has less external checks on its theories than mathematics or science if anything philosophers need to be even more vigilant to make sure that inertia or social pressure doesn’t allow invalid or nonsensical theories to persist. Unfortunately as this example with Hegel illustrates the discipline is unfortunately doing just the opposite. By making the assumption that anything some philosophers study has important worthwhile things to say even if all the claims we can evaluate are false or non-sense we virtually guarantee that bad philosophy is never winnowed away. Since anyone who hasn’t spent large chunks of their life interpreting Hegel is considered just not to understand him well enough to see the valuable contributions he makes the claim that Hegel is worthwhile becomes unfalsifiable. Effectively it’s like saying that only priests are qualified to concluded God is unlikely to exist.

So it is quite possible I just have a misconception of applied bioethics but I keep hearing bioethicists on NPR or quoted in papers and what they do seems to have very little to do with philosophy. I’m sure their is real philosophy done by academic bioethicists but increasingly people called bioethicists seem to be in the pragmatic position of advising hospitals, scientific research and placed in other applied roles. Of course someone needs to make these decisions and for the most part the people who do bioethics seem to reach acceptable answers (in some sense) but there seems to be a fundamental tension between this pragmatic role and the job of a philosopher.

What I find particularly troubling is that the applied bioethics I hear about in the news and mentioned in scientific studies is so uncontroversial. Where, for instance, are the utilitarian bioethicists who are comfortable authorizing scientific studies which lack clear consent (the subjects are deceived in some way that goes beyond what is currently accepted) so long as the potential for benefit is great. Where are the Peter Singers of applied bioethics who view animal experimentation as only differing in degree from human experimentation. Alternatively where are the Rawlsians (or other theory if I am making a mistake about Rawls) who object to the rich paying for better doctors? Even if this positions are discussed in bioethical debates I very much doubt that any hospitals are stealing organs from non-donors because the expected harm from discovery was less than the benefit to the recipient. To cap it all off I just heard a bioethicist on NPR talking about avoiding genetically engineering pig genes into other products so as not to surreptitiously inflict pig on those who don’t eat pig for religious reasons. The justification he provided was not that it was in fact morally wrong to eat pig or even that we have a universal moral obligation to respect the desires of others (if this was the justification these people should be treated no differently than those who oppose genetic engineering for other grounds) but instead seemed to reflect the public sentiment that people’s religious beliefs are deserving of greater respect than other beliefs.

I don’t mean to criticize the people who are doing this job. It is probably better policy for hospitals and researchers to adopt some pragmatic generally inoffensive guidelines for behavior. However, their role is not really the discovery of truth or the development of philosophical arguments but rather the crystallization of public opinion with a grain of local consistency thrown in. Sure their ultimate goal is to achieve morally good ends but that is also the goal of politicians, humanitarian workers and virtually anyone who feels an obligation to be good.

In fact the applied nature of bioethics seems to make it impossible for them to both achieve moral ends and do philosophy. In order to be a philosopher I think at a minimum one must feel that the end product of your work should be the best argument possible for your position and view internal inconsistency to be a fatal flaw. However, the result of any serious attempt to create consistent moral theories is bound to run afoul of the public’s emotional commitments to conflicting principles (e.g. strong affirmation of the claim that all men are made equal combined with a strong aversion to considering the welfare of foreign nationals as equal to that of US citizens in law making). Sure any small number of these conflicts can be explained away but, as with every other interesting area of philosophy, the results of a serious attempt to work out a consistent theory are going to be counterintuitive in some respects. In fact, if we think the results of philosophical moral theory are only going to contradict intuition in trivial ways we should give up on unapplied moral philosophy as uninteresting. Yet, for pragmatic reasons and to achieve other larger moral goals I doubt applied bioethicists can be giving advice of the kind, “Yes if no one were to find out it would be better to steal organs from non-donors but the risk of discovery makes it better not to do it.”

Ultimately, it seems that the role of bioethicists is more akin to that of a judge than that of a philosopher. Like a judge an applied bioethicist cannot and should not substitute his beliefs about what moral positions are truly justified for the underlying values set by the public. Like a judge it is important that bioethicists come to some kind of common agreement, i.e., follow precedent, not figure out new clever arguments showing the current system is subtly inconsistent. Finally, and most strikingly, it seems appropriate for a bioethicist to be offered jobs on the basis of having mainstream or reasonable views (e.g. not really advocating utilitarianism) in a way which would be an egregious violation of academic freedom and a disservice to truth if they were truly a philosopher (of course philosophers need not be employed by a university but it seems in some sense essential that they have great freedom to take unpopular opinions).

Of course one might just grant that applied bioethicists aren’t philosophers in the traditional sense and take this step in stride. However, I am worried (though not convinced) about this for two reasons. First it only adds to the confusion in the public about what philosophy really is not to mention creating confusion in academic environments. Secondly, and more importantly, it appears to create the perception that applied bioethicists somehow have the ability to divine what is truly right and tell that to the public instead of merely interpreting what the public decides is acceptable. However, it is quite possible that my concerns merely stem from an inaccurate perception and I would appreciate feedback from anyone who knows more about the matter than I do. Especially if you have done any teaching in this area. (My comment system is a bit flaky so hit reload after you post to see if your comment is there)

The reason for this combative approach is the same as that for the adversarial system in our justice system, namely that by letting both sides of a dispute present their ideas in the most forceful means possible the best idea will win. Admittedly, just as in the law, which idea comes out ahead depends on both the argumentative skill of the participants as well as the value of the ideas themselves. However, without this sort of direct challenge we leave the matter just as much influenced by the presentation and writing skills of the advocates. Moreover, in philosophy often the problems with a viewpoint lay in technical details of the argument, a slight shift in word definition, or an error in a mathematical interpretation which are much more easily revealed in direct confrontation than in disparate presentations or articles.

While some people may be discouraged from participating because of this combative nature others may be discouraged from participating because of the paper writing requirement. However, I see no reason to believe that any worthwhile ideas are being excluded from the discussion. Of course unpolished and vague ideas may be discouraged but such ideas don’t belong as presentations at a conference but should rather be worked out in private discourse or at the very least presented as unfinished. However, I frequently see philosophical ideas which contain misleading redefinitions or simply gaping holes continue to be promulgated because they are not subject to enough adversarial scrutiny. For instance people are still presenting Kantian moral theories despite their inability to answer the freshman objection that every rule can be made universalizeable. If these theories were subject to a more adversarial setting and less default respect for being based on Kant I think more progress would be made on either clarifying what they meant by universalizeable or the whole approach would be justly thrown out. In other words if anything philosophy is characterized by too much respect for certain sorts of ideas not by being overly combative.

Finally a word on the discrimination issue. Clearly in order to allege some practice is discriminatory or unfair it isn’t sufficient just to show one sex or group tends to dislike the practice much more than another. If this was sufficient mathematics itself or physics would be in and of themselves discriminatory. At the very least one must also demonstrate that this practice serves no valid academic ends and if that practice has at least a plausible academic purpose those claiming it to be unfair must surmount a considerable presumption. Though it isn’t clear that even this would be enough, suppose we demonstrated men disliked taking notes considerably more than women and that students learned better in courses that provided online notes would it thus follow that any course not providing such notes was discriminatory? In any case even if you don’t believe my argument about more combativeness being needed it does seem clear that there is every reason to believe the presumption of academic usefulness of combative philosophical interaction is very much still standing. Also I think it is somewhat insulting to those women I know in philosophy who are very competent and very much able to defend their ideas to suggest they are somehow caving in rather than utilizing their talents but this is a separate topic.