This is great. Apparently they now believe that C-fibers are actually excited by slow stroking and touching of the skin and cause us to become aroused and release oxytocin (at least this is what the science channel just told me).

I guess C-fiber firing isn’t pain after all.

So I don’t read Leiter’s blog anymore but I still hear about him around the web. I was just browsing on Volokh and there is a post about how he is threatening to sue to force powerblogs to take down/change the name of brianleiter.powerblogs.com blog.

I have no idea if this is a reasonable suit or what the background is but I found the way he always seems to be being talked about interesting.

UPDATE: Apparently Chalmers is making the same point about causal theories of reference in a more illuminating presentation. Though I posted independently I luckily seem to be giving a far out legal example of the type he mentions at the end.

Recently a case in Italy almost went to trial demanding the church prove Christ had existed. Apparently Italy has laws which would apparently make it illegal to teach about Christ’s existence if he was not in fact a historical person. The plaintiff was claiming that Christ was confused with John of Gamala. While I thought the case would have been pretty interesting to see go forward apparently it isn’t going to trial.

While I don’t know whether this trial would have been a good thing the philosophical issues it raises in that one simple question are amazing. If we assume that Italian law would make it illegal to teach that Christ existed if he in fact did not would the plaintiff’s claim even have established this result? After all he is arguing that there is a particular definite person who is the start of a causal chain resulting in our current usage of the word Christ. At least to the extent that Christ is a proper name and we find a simple casual theory of names compelling it would seem that Christ really does exist. Things would get even more interesting (though I’ve seen these cases addressed just don’t remember the solution) if there really was someone named Jesus and some people were acquainted with this name from a casual chain leading back to the guy really called Jesus.

One reason I decided to post this is that it reminds me of the discussion we had in Searle’s seminar today about Santa Claus. The point Searle brought up is that there is a clear casual chain leading back to Saint Nicholas (or however the name was at the time) but he was some guy who lived in a hot climate and had little to do with our jolly bearded present bringer who lives at the north pole. I personally find it pretty absurd to suppose that people are really talking about this real person but I suppose that someone with a casual theory of proper names could make the move to say that Santa Claus is not really a proper name but is more like a description though this would seem to create major cracks in the theory, e.g., is Socrates a name or description. So I’m not really sure what they would say. The best response I can think of at the moment is that Santa Claus is a title as well as a proper name, e.g., it is like saying King George which presumably fails to refer if its casual chain leads back to some non-king George, but whether or not you can be both on these sort of theories is something I don’t really know.

However, in any case if one accepts the intuition that Santa Clause did not once exist merely because Saint Nicholas exists the case in Italy would have gotten even more interesting. For instance suppose there was a historical personage Jesus (perhaps even the start of the casual chain for Jesus Christ) does his existence suffice to say that Jesus Christ exists? Does not the appellation Christ require him to occupy a particular metaphysical position the same way being Santa Claus seems to require some connection to giving presents at Christmas time? Given the fact that these teachings were made in a church context are they truly common words or are they technical terms defined in whatever manner the Catholic Church has chosen to do?

While it surely would never have happened I find the thought of the prosecution and defense calling modern philosophers of language to the stand to debate the nature of reference highly amusing.

One other interesting issue I think this case brings up is the following. It seems that most people have the intuition that not only should people not be held criminally responsible for statements of this kind (the way they might in Italy for claiming Othello was a real person) but in general don’t seem to hold people verbally responsible for this sort of statement. While I used to think this was a philosophically uninteresting question of politeness it seems many people don’t even apply the same notion of logic to religious statements. That is many (certainly not all) people seem to be happy to accept contradicting religious claims as both ‘being true in their way’ or otherwise refusing to draw the standard sort of logical conclusions. I don’t mean to bring up a religious debate or talk about who is right here but I do think it raises an interesting philosophical question.

What sort of statements are religious statements to people who don’t take them as amenable to the same sort of logical reasoning they apply to other statements about the world. It is tempting to say that they merely see them as metaphors or parables but they certainly would deny this if asked. It almost seems as if there is a separate class of statements that doesn’t quite have the force of “The first gulf war happened in 1991″ but isn’t really mere metaphor. In particular I’m wondering if anyone can come up with any other class of statements that seem to have this property because religious statements have all sorts of confusing attachments and issues that make them hard to consider.

Sorry for the long absence of hard philosophical content. I keep meaning to make a post on the content of perception but every time I’m about ready to write it I learn more and have to start thinking again.

So I was reading a recent post by my friend Kenny over at one of his blogs about Intelligent Design. In it he takes the New York Times to task for writing a ‘balanced’ piece which makes it seem the scientific explanation of the grand canyon seem no better than an intelligent design type explanation. Since I’m a cheap bastard and not willing to pay the New York Times to see the old article I can’t such much about the article itself, and besides I like to keep my political commentary over at my other blog but I’m sure I would be equally appalled. However, it got me to thinking about whether there is any objective sense in which the scientific explanation is better. Not that I think the attacks on the geological explanation have any merit but even without these attacks in what sense can we say one of two theories which consistently explain a phenomenon is better.

Ultimately the question of which theory¹is better — that the grand canyon is the result of billions of years of geological change or that it is the work of god — is all about how we assign our prior probabilities. Clearly if we assign a very high prior probability to the existence of a god who would make the universe look like it had been created billions of years ago that would be the better theory. This seems exactly what the ID advocates are really doing, the attacks on the scientific explanation being just an after the fact justification.

Most philosophers I know seem to be convinced that ID advocates are not just wrong but somehow objectively wrong in a way which an impartial observer could determine. Yet this would seem to require some objectively correct assignment of prior probabilities like Carnap wished to find and most modern philosophers don’t believe such things exist. Now we could try and turn to some kind of demarcation between science and non-science like Popper offered but this would only tell us something about how we use the word science and not give as an objective reason to prefer one explanation to the other.

To be clear this doesn’t really affect the legal issues of teaching ID in schools. Regardless of it’s objective status we have a certain cultural agreement on what counts as religious belief. However, I thought the situation brought up some interesting philosophical issues and illustrated the reasons I have such a hard time dismissing Carnap’s program. In some sense I really want it to be true since it feels like I have objectively better reason to believe in geology than a divine trick but I don’t know if that is the sort of intuition that is evidentiary or not.

So while wasting my Vegas winnings at the slot machines here in Reno I did some introspection about how I value money and why I enjoy gambling. Of course part of the attraction of gambling is just the fun involved in playing. This is the standard defense of gambling or playing the lotto against the frequent faux intelligent derision of the practice as irrational. However, I don’t think this response can stand on its own.

It seems that a key element in the fun of gambling is the fantasy of winning it big. Many people who won’t engage in even favorable bets with their friends quite enjoy playing the lotto or gambling in Vegas. If in fact it was just the thrill of betting at play we should expect people to find casual bets as appealing as the lottery. On the other hand if is the anticipation of future results shouldn’t a rational anticipation involve more dread than hope?

A sophisticated version of the standard explanation can explain this peculiar state of affairs. The line here would explain that gambling is a rational response to an essentially irrational human nature. Knowing that you are likely to overestimate the likelihood of very unlikely outcomes one might leverage this response to enjoy the fantasy of winning. No doubt this is part of the explanation but I think a fully rational agent might still enjoy gambling.

An explanation of this position follows and it rests on some subtle issues in our definition of utility. Basically there is a mismatch between our intuitive conception of the utility of some amount of money and the notion of utility the economists use. When we think about how much we would enjoy a certain amount of money we are imagining how much we would enjoy stuff with that price tag. The economic concept also asks us to consider how we might invest or even gamble with that money. Below I will spell out this point in greater detail and explain its relationship to the rationality of gambling. (more…)

Originally I was thinking of titling this entry ‘Does Love Exist?’ but I was afraid that would have provoked the same confusion as Quine did suggesting that the analytic/synthetic distinction didn’t exist in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” In both situations we have generally agreed upon instances so it would take quite a bit to establish the terms didn’t refer. Rather what I mean to question here, and what Quine rightly should be understood to be disputing, is whether the word in kind refers to a natural kind. In both cases we can easily provide a functional definition for the property in question, ‘that property sentences we say are true by definition have’ or ‘that strong feeling people have for each other in romantic relationships’ but this is far from satisfying. We want to know if there is anything besides its functional role which makes love love.

Or to put it another way is there something in common about the way we feel when we are in love? Our common biological basis (we all have similar sorts of brains) might make us suspect we feel similarly but as love is clearly part of our reproductive strategy it would be quite plausible for men and women to have entirely different feelings. Moreover, there seems to be a particular difficulty in recognizing or defining love that just isn’t present for other types of emotions. No one sits around wondering if they are feeling hopeless or afraid and we don’t have hundreds of insufficient definitions trying to capture these feelings. Does this difficulty in capturing the notion just indicate unrealistic social expectations for love or does it show that love really isn’t a natural kind?

Or to put it less philosophically is it really true there is some special aspect of our feeling present only when we are in love? Or instead is the difference between being in love and having strong feelings for someone merely a matter of judgement, as one might judge a relationship to be worthwhile?

Perhaps this is a bit of a frivolous topic but the Kantians and continentalists are always offering (BS) opinions about love and I wanted to try approaching the issue from a more analytic perspective. Besides, being firvolous is what makes blogs more fun than going to conferences. (more…)

I know a lot of you out there are busy writing bestselling novels involving philosophical zombies but you had better be careful lest you infringe on a possible new storyline patent.

So its not really a philosophical post but I thought some of you might be amused at the fact that the first story ever to be patented involves a philosophical zombie.

In addition to TAing for a philosophy of science course this year I’ve been listening to Sherlock Holmes stories on tape. I’m constantly amused at all the various theories of scientific explanations Holmes advances in description of his method of inference. It is always a reasonably plausible view, he for instance makes it quite clear that theorization is involved and facts are not simple read off from nature, and sometimes makes extremely astute points. In the last episode I listened to Holmes very elegantly explained the idea of falsification from postulating a theory to observing results inconsistant with that theory. In a previous episode he astutely pointed out that it is only in the light of a theory that we can distingush inconsequential from important facts. However, in an earlier episode (by my audiobook not necessarily an earlier publication date) he claimed he never prejudged situations.

Overall I would have to guess Holmes is most similar to Hempel in his philosophy of science but it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say Popper either. Anyone know if Arthur Conan Doyle was familiar with Hempel or has a different opinion on Holme’s philosophy of Science?

By the time this posts I should have finished grading my students papers. The statements the professor asked the students to comment about indirectly involved Leibniz and other’s views about god. Luckily for me in this assignment the students were asked to comment about how the Logical Positivists would have viewed the statements. Thus I could easily discard all significant meanderings on god as irrelevant.

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p> However, it made me wonder how I would grade a paper where statements about god could legitimately be brought into the discussion. On the one hand academic integrity would demand that I grade all students fairly based on the quality of their arguments. On the other hand many objectively flawed positions and arguments about god lie at the heart of popular belief systems. How would it be possible to rectify academic fairness and true religious neutrality with the pragmatic expectations people have not to be graded down on the basis of their belief system? (more…)