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

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.

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.

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.

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. The standard account of the connection between money and utility is that, after some weird behavior at the very low end, utility increases something like logarithmically with money. Of course at the extremely high end this relation must actually become sub logarithmic as well since an infinite amount of money would not be worth an infinite amount of utility. The important point for our considerations is that in the relevant section the function from net worth to utility is generally assumed to be a smooth monotonically increasing function with a smooth monotonically decreasing derivative, i.e., every extra dollar you receive increases your welfare but slightly less so than the last one did.

Taken simplistically this account seems to get things wrong. At least for me receiving 10,000 dollars is more than 10 times better than receiving a 1,000 dollars. The former would let me skip working for a term while the later would end up just getting spent on a new laptop. Yet this seems to violate the assumption that the derivative of the utility function is monotonically decreasing, i.e., that each additional dollar increases your welfare less than the previous.

Before we simply abandon the assumption that each additional dollar matters less to you than the last we need to carefully examine what we mean by utility. If money could only be spent or saved this assumption would obviously be wrong. Idealizing our disposable income as completely fixed, i.e., we can’t skimp on food to buy toys, then if we want a $2048 dollar computer there is a huge difference in the utility of having $2047 in the bank and $2048 while barely any between $2046 and $2047. Thus if we could only spend or save money it seems likely that each additional dollar doesn’t always improve our welfare by less than the prior dollar.

However, in the real world it isn’t true that we can only save or spend our money. We can also gamble with our money. Given $2047 dollars we can wager $1 on a fair flip of a coin and if we win buy our computer. If we lose we can then wager $2 and so forth. Working out the numbers it is easy to see that with $2047 we have a .999% chance of buying our $2048 computer by making bets on coin flips. So even if the relationship between our well-being and the dollar value of the stuff we own is not nice and smooth this doesn’t mean that the relationship between money and utility is not. In fact making some reasonable assumptions our utility functions must look like I described but among these assumptions is the idea that we can enter into fair wagers.

In the real world, however, one cannot easily enter into gambles. Their are social costs to wagering money except in certain societally approved ways. As a result the idealized utility function considered by economists doesn’t quite match the value we rationally assign to money. While our expectation of this idealized economic notion of utility may always be negative when we gamble it does not necessarily mean that our expectation of total welfare is negative when we gamble (excluding any fun had gambling of course).

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. First I want to make it absolutely clear that I am interested in what ‘love’ actually means. So any responses should plausibly describe how the word is actually used not what you would like it to mean. No responses like, “Love is the continued interest in someone’s spiritual growth.” That simply has nothing to do with the way the word is used. We commonly speak of people being in love who have no or even negative attitudes toward spirituality and their are obviously cases where love actually encourages someone to morally devolve. If you want a word to describe ‘good relationships’ pick another one, love is already taken. Though if anyone wants to argue that one of these type of definitions really describes usage I would be happy to give them a verbal beating.

Secondly, since people who matter to me a great deal read this blog I want to be clear on my introspective observations. I most certainly have a very particular and extremely strong feeling toward significant others. I’m not disputing that there is a feeling of overwhelming intensity towards those I ‘love.’ What I’m genuinely unsure about is whether it differs in kind or only in intensity from feelings which wouldn’t qualify as love. There is clearly a feeling of attachment to a significant other which has a unique character but at least for me this feeling seems to appear long before one would deem one was in love and gradually increase in intensity over time. Also it persists long after one would say that you were no longer in love.

Assuming my introspective experience is not radically abnormal this observation lends itself to several explanations of the apparent difficulty we have in explicating love as compared to the other emotions. The most obvious answer, and the only one that seems to comport with the idea that love is some natural kind of emotions, is that love is actually far more prevalent than we admit. In this explanation love really just refers to that special sort of feeling one has towards a romantic partner and it is just the social implications of admitting that one is in love which mean we acknowledge it so rarely. In this explanation we have a strong commitment to love referring to some natural kind so if the only natural kind in the neighborhood would have us falling in love with people on first dates and in other casual circumstances then we are just mistaken in not using our language in this manner. In this case most people do fall in love at first site, or at least after a few dates and those who don’t acknowledge this are using language incorrectly.

Alternatively our stronger commitment is to the usage of the word and we can dispense with the idea that love is some nice natural kind. In this explanation do be in love with someone means that you feel this particular sort of emotion sufficiently strongly. It is only a difference of degree that separates that feeling you might have for the friend or acquaintance you are just starting to date and what you will ultimately feel for them after growing closer. Perhaps there are also some additional requirements about the nature of this feeling but ultimately the idea that there is some special recognizable feeling of ‘love’ is incorrect. This doesn’t mean that one can’t clearly know one is in love, just as one can clearly know when they despise someone as opposed to just dislike them, there are going to be clear exemplars on both sides. However, when we are unsure if we are in love what we consult is the intensity of our feelings not whether they do or don’t have some particular feature.

Another take on this second option is that ‘love’ is not entirely about feelings at all. A certain type and intensity of feeling may be a necessary condition of love but what we mean by the word is that feeling plus a certain disposition toward the person in question. I personally find this explanation incompatible with usage especially in regards to unrequited love and other cases where love clearly exists without any relationship. However, I wanted to throw out this option anyway.

My inclination is toward the second explanation, though the first is plausible as well. Love refers to a certain intensity of romantic feelings and affection towards the individual in question. It is not really a natural kind and introspection only has limited value in determining whether or not you are really in love. This would explain the great difficulty in conveying what it means to be in love. It is easy to indicate the type of feelings involved but it is near impossible to communicate ‘how much’ of those feelings are necessary to constitute love. Still, I would guess many people have a different take on things so I’m making this post in the hope of hearing alternative explanations.

Even this less than satisfying resolution just assumes that men and women really are having the same sorts of feelings. I suspect that they do but I’m unsure how I would go about verifying this. If anyone has any thoughts I would love to hear them.

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.

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?

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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? Of course I would never grade someone down just for a metaphysical belief be it about god or anything else. Someone who simply stipulates or assumes the existence of god is on no different a standing than someone who does the same thing with induction. However, whether or not it is consistent with the opinions of organized churches to many students being in a justified epistemic state with respect to god is also near the core of their belief systems. Or in other words many people are just as attached to having a good reason to believe in god as the existence of god himself.

So what should one do when one comes across these patently false religious arguments in the course of a serious class? Of course as a professor I would always try to avoid assignments which would result in such situations but had my professor been less careful than he was in picking the topic I very well could have ended up in such a position. At least in introductory classes the students seem most adept at bringing their personal beliefs into such a situation.

Have other people out there faced this issue. If so how did they resolve it?