Who’s Afraid of Reduction? Massimo Pigliucci and the Rhetoric of Redemption
by rsbakker
On the one hand, Massimo Pigliucci is precisely the kind of philosopher that I like, one who eschews the ingroup temptations of the profession and tirelessly reaches out to the larger public. On the other hand, he is precisely the kind of philosopher I bemoan. As a regular contributor to the Skeptical Inquirer, one might think he would be prone to challenge established, academic opinions, but all too often such is not the case. Far from preparing his culture for the tremendous, scientifically-mediated transformations to come, he spends a good deal of his time defending the status quo–rationalizing, in effect, what needs to be interrogated through and through. Even when he critiques authors I also disagree with (such as Ray Kurzweil on the singularity) I find myself siding against him!
Burying our heads in the sand of traditional assumption, no matter how ‘official’ or ‘educated,’ is pretty much the worst thing we can do. Nevertheless, this is the establishment way. We’re hard-wired to essentialize, let alone forgive, the conditions responsible for our prestige and success. If a system pitches you to any height, well then, that is a good system indeed, the very image of rationality, if not piety as well. Tell a respectable scholar in the Middle Ages that the sun wasn’t the centre of the universe or that man wasn’t crafted in God’s image and he might laugh and bid you good day or scowl and alert the authorities—but he would most certainly not listen, let alone believe. In “Who Knows What,” his epistemological defense of the humanities, Pigliucci reveals what I think is just such a defensive, dismissive attitude, one that seeks to shelter what amounts to ignorance in accusations of ignorance, to redeem what institutional insiders want to believe under the auspices of being ‘skeptical.’ I urge everyone reading this to take a few moments to carefully consider the piece, form judgments one way or another, because in what follows, I hope to show you how his entire case is actually little more than a mirage, and how his skepticism is as strategic as anything to ever come out of Big Oil or Tobacco.
“Who Knows What” poses the question of the cognitive legitimacy of the humanities from the standpoint of what we really do know at this particular point in history. The situation, though Pigluicci never references it, really is quite simple: At long last the biological sciences have gained the tools and techniques required to crack problems that had hitherto been the exclusive province of the humanities. At long last, science has colonized the traditional domain of the ‘human.’ Given this, what should we expect will follow? The line I’ve taken turns on what I’ve called the ‘Big Fat Pessemistic Induction.’ Since science has, without exception, utterly revolutionized every single prescientific domain it has annexed, we should expect that, all things being equal, it will do the same regarding the human–that the traditional humanities are about to be systematically debunked.
Pigluicci argues that this is nonsense. He recognizes the stakes well enough, the fact that the issue amounts to “more than a turf dispute among academics,” that it “strikes at the core of what we mean by human knowledge,” but for some reason he avoids any consideration, historical or theoretical, of why there’s an issue at all. According to Pigluicci, little more than the ignorance and conceit of the parties involved lies behind the impasse. This affords him the dialectical luxury of picking the softest of targets for his epistemological defence of the humanities: the ‘greedy reductionism’ of E. O. Wilson. By doing so, he can generate the appearance of putting an errant matter to bed without actually dealing with the issue itself. The problem is that the ‘human,’ the subject matter of the humanities, is being scientifically cognized as we speak. Pigliucci is confusing the theoretically abstract question of whether all knowledge reduces to physics with the very pressing and practical question of what the sciences will make of the human, and therefore the humanities as traditionally understood. The question of the epistemological legitimacy of the humanities isn’t one of whether all theories can somehow be translated into the idiom of physics, but whether the idiom of the humanities can retain cognitive legitimacy in the wake of the ongoing biomechanical rennovation of the human. It’s not a question of ‘reducing’ old ways of making sense of things so much as a question of leaving them behind the way we’ve left so many other ‘old ways’ behind.
As it turns out, the question of what the sciences of the human will make of the humanities turns largely on the issue of intentionality. The problem, basically put, is that intentional phenomena as presently understood out-and-out contradict our present, physical understanding of nature. They are quite literally supernatural, inexplicable in natural terms. If the consensus emerging out of the new sciences of the human is that intentionality is supernatural in the pejorative sense, then the traditional domain of the humanities is in dire straits indeed. True or false, the issue of reductionism is irrelevant to this question. The falsehood of intentionalism is entirely compatible with the kind of pluralism Pigluicci advocates. This means Pigliucci’s critique of reductionism, his ‘demolition project,’ is, well, entirely irrelevant to the practical question of what’s actually going to happen to the humanities now that the sciences have scaled the walls of the human.
So in a sense, his entire defence consists of smoke and mirrors. But it wouldn’t pay to dismiss his argument summarily. There is a way of reading a defence that runs orthogonal to his stated thesis into his essay. For instance, one might say that he at least establishes the possibility of non-scientific theoretical knowledge of the human by sketching the limits of scientific cognition. As he writes of mathematical or logical ‘facts’:
take a mathematical ‘fact’, such as the demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem. Or a logical fact, such as a truth table that tells you the conditions under which particular combinations of premises yield true or false conclusions according to the rules of deduction. These two latter sorts of knowledge do resemble one another in certain ways; some philosophers regard mathematics as a type of logical system. Yet neither looks anything like a fact as it is understood in the natural sciences. Therefore, ‘unifying knowledge’ in this area looks like an empty aim: all we can say is that we have natural sciences over here and maths over there, and that the latter is often useful (for reasons that are not at all clear, by the way) to the former.
The thing he fails to mention, however, is that there’s facts and then there’s facts. Science is interested in what things are and how they work and why they appear to us the way they do. In this sense, scientific inquiry isn’t concerned with mathematical facts so much as the fact of mathematical facts. Likewise, it isn’t so much concerned with what Pigliucci in particular thinks of Brittany Spears as it is how people in general come to evaluate consumer goods. As a result, we find researchers using these extrascientific facts as data points in attempts to derive theories regarding mathematics and consumer choice.
In other words, Pigliucci’s attempt to evidence the ‘limits of science’ amounts to a classic bait-and-switch. The most obvious question that plagues his defence has to be why he fails to offer any of the kinds of theories he takes himself to be defending in the course of making his defence. How about deconstruction? Conventionalism? Hermeneutics? Fictionalism? Psychoanalysis? The most obvious answer is that they all but explode his case for forms of theoretical cognition outside the sciences. Thus he provides a handful of what seem to be obvious, non-scientific, first-order facts to evidence a case for second-order pluralism—albeit of a kind that isn’t relevant to the practical question of the humanities, but seems to make room for the possibility of cognitive legitimacy, at least.
(It’s worth noting that this equivocation of levels (in an article arguing the epistemic inviolability of levels, no less!) cuts sharply against his facile reproof of Krauss and Hawking’s repudiation of philosophy. Both men, he claims, “seem to miss the fact that the business of philosophy is not to solve scientific problems,” begging the question of just what kind of problems philosophy does solve. Again, examples of philosophical theoretical cognition are found wanting. Why? Likely because the only truly decisive examples involve enabling scientists to solve scientific problems!)
Passing from his consideration of extrascientific, but ultimately irrelevant (because non-theoretical) non-scientific facts, Pigliucci turns to enumerating all the things that science doesn’t know. He invokes Godel (which tends to be an unfortunate move in these contexts) commits the standard over-generalization of his technically specific proof of incompleteness to the issue of knowledge altogether. Then he gives us a list of examples where, he claims, ‘science isn’t enough.’ The closest he comes to the real elephant in the room, the problem of intentionality, runs as follows:
Our moral sense might well have originated in the context of social life as intelligent primates: other social primates do show behaviours consistent with the basic building blocks of morality such as fairness toward other members of the group, even when they aren’t kin. But it is a very long way from that to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, or Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism. These works and concepts were possible because we are biological beings of a certain kind. Nevertheless, we need to take cultural history, psychology and philosophy seriously in order to account for them.
But as was mentioned above, the question of the cognitive legitimacy of the humanities only possesses the urgency it does now because the sciences of the human are just getting underway. Is it really such ‘a very long way’ from primates to Aristotle? Given that Aristotle was a primate, the scientific answer could very well be, ‘No, it only seems that way.’ Science has a long history of disabusing us of our sense of exceptionalism, after all. Either way, it’s hard to see how citing scientific ignorance in this regard bears on the credibility of Aristotle’s ethics, or any other non-scientific attempt to theorize morality. Perhaps the degree we need to continue relying on cultural history, psychology, and philosophy is simply the degree we don’t know what we’re talking about! The question is the degree to which science monopolizes theoretical cognition, not the degree to which it monopolizes life, and life, as Pigliucci well knows—as a writer for the Skeptical Inquirer, no less—is filled with ersatz guesswork and functional make-believe.
So, having embarked on an argument that is irrelevant to the cognitive legitimacy of the humanities, providing evidence merely that science is theoretical, then offering what comes very close to an argument from ignorance, he sums by suggesting that his pluralist picture is indeed the very one suggested by science. As he writes:
The basic idea is to take seriously the fact that human brains evolved to solve the problems of life on the savannah during the Pleistocene, not to discover the ultimate nature of reality. From this perspective, it is delightfully surprising that we learn as much as science lets us and ponder as much as philosophy allows. All the same, we know that there are limits to the power of the human mind: just try to memorise a sequence of a million digits. Perhaps some of the disciplinary boundaries that have evolved over the centuries reflect our epistemic limitations.
The irony, for me at least, is that this observation underwrites my own reasons for doubting the existence of intentionality as theorized in the humanities–philosophy in particular. The more we learn about human cognition, the more alien to our traditional assumptions it becomes. We already possess a mountainous case for what might be called ‘ulterior functionalism,’ the claim that actual cognitive functions are almost entirely inscrutable to theoretical metacognition, which is to say, ‘philosophical reflection.’ The kind of metacognitive neglect implied by ulterior functionalism raises a number of profound questions regarding the conundrums posed by the ‘mental,’ ‘phenomenal,’ or ‘intentional.’ Thus the question I keep raising here: What role does neglect play in our attempts to solve for meaning and consciousness?
What we need to understand is that everything we learn about the actual architecture and function of our cognitive capacities amounts to knowledge of what we have always been without knowing. Blind Brain Theory provides a way to see the peculiar properties belonging to intentional phenomena as straightforward artifacts of neglect—as metacognitive illusions, in effect. Box open the dimensions of missing information folded away by neglect, and the first person becomes entirely continuous with the third—the incompatibly between the intentional and the causal is dissolved. The empirical plausibility of Blind Brain Theory is an issue in its own right, of course, but it serves to underscore the ongoing vulnerability of the humanities, and therefore, the almost entirely rhetorical nature of Pigliucci’s ‘demolition.’ If something like the picture of metacognition proposed by Blind Brain Theory turns out to be true, then the traditional domain of the humanities is almost certainly doomed to suffer the same fate as any other prescientific theoretical domain. The bottomline is as simple as it is devastating to Pigluicci’s hasty and contrived defence of ‘who knows what.’ How can we know whether the traditional humanities will survive the cognitive revolution?
Well, we’ll have to wait and see what the science has to say.
Three Pound Brain 
“…essentially sterile, backward, useless, and annoying.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-consolation-of-philos/
I’d actually meant to link this, but it got distracted, as per usual. Danke, Ochlo. The whole kerfuffle is a testament to how seriously we wankers take the sound of our voice, if you ask me.
A couple thoughts after reading the post again and Ochlo’s link. Don’t the contentions highlighted arise because we choose to make these arbitrary divisions between academic philosophy and scientific theory? What happens if we simply framed the division as between researchers and theoreticians instead, wouldn’t many of these arguments fall off as irrelevant?
Also, do a post riffing some Wilson ;).
Hey Scott,
What are your thoughts on Vox Day being nominated for a Hugo?
Haven’t read any of his work, so I can’t say one way or another. What’s it for, best novel?
Best Novelette: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/04/20/another-day-another-hugo-controversy/
Lol… remember when you were “worse” than this guy… jeez.
Hugos aren’t doing well this year.
Christ. The sad thing is that he lives for this stuff. And I bet you it begins happening more rather than less, given the number of readers he has. This is the problem with going toe-to-toe with the likes of him or Crackedmoon: since both appeal to our base instinct to vindicate moral self-importance via scapegoating they instantly enjoy a communicative advantage over those making less morally intuitive claims. Man, I tried hard to get those guys to go at each other! A real honest-to-God misogynist in a room with a real honest-to-God misandrist and all they can think about is tearing into this poor old misanthrope… 😉
Haven’t read any of his work, so I can’t say one way or another.
You’re not missing anything,
“The dead goblin didn’t have any answers for him, and the gaping mouth gaping loosely open made it look about as stupid as Forex was feeling”
A real honest-to-God misogynist in a room with a real honest-to-God misandrist and all they can think about is tearing into this poor old misanthrope…
Lol. Yeah. It was quite the show – glad to have been able to partake.
I still think about those engagements often. There must be some Cants to breach those disparate walls…
I’ve read much of what Pigliucci has written on his blog for the last few years now (he’s recently started up a new blog). His debates with Jerry Coyne are always interesting. I’ve also read the article you’re criticizing, Scot. I pretty much nodded my head the whole way through Pigliucci’s article, since it seems uncontroversial to me, as far as it goes. Your main criticism, though, is that he’s ducking the real issue.
I was struck by a couple of points that come out in your discussion, one of which I think is more central. So you say that intentionality is “literally supernatural.” I honestly don’t see the force of that accusation, given the quantum basis of causation. The quantum world is partly digital, not continuous. When electrons switch orbits, there’s a gap with nothing in between. That’s part of the weirdness of the quantum world. It’s like an animated movie, with cell by cell flipping by, producing the illusion of continuity. The point is that causation isn’t just the clockwork, deterministic kind which seems to leave the least room for intentionality, or for the ghost in the machine.
As for our generalizations about ordinary causal relations, Pigliucci points to Hume’s problem of induction. The question is whether ordinary causality is entirely objective or whether it depends on a way of understanding the limited phenomena we encounter. If it’s even slightly observer-dependent, that leaves room for alternative ways of understanding the relations between things, including intentional and teleological ways.
I’m aware of the dangerous argument which runs as follows: science is incomplete and limited; therefore anything goes, including ghosts and gods along with intentionality and consciousness. This is the god-of-the-gaps argument. But there’s a big difference between nontheistic and theistic dualism: the latter is much more transparently a projection to make us feel better, since it’s literally a personalization of alien nature. By contrast, we talk about the meaning of symbols, because that’s the most useful way of understanding what we’re doing with most of the noises that come out of our mouth and with the many squiggles we write. Intentionality has something to do with information and you don’t think information is supernatural. So what’s so bizarre about thinking that symbols stand in for other things? How is that “literally supernatural”?
The problem of induction raises another issue, about the function of philosophy. You say, “The question is the degree to which science monopolizes theoretical cognition, not the degree to which it monopolizes life, and life, as Pigliucci well knows—as a writer for the Skeptical Inquirer, no less—is filled with ersatz guesswork and functional make-believe.”
I think this gets to the heart of it. I want to know how we might define “theoretical cognition,” to free your point about what science monopolizes from being tautological. There’s one definition of “theories” that makes them out to be nothing less than the well-justified explanations that scientists offer. Thus, when creationists say that natural selection is “just a theory,” there’s the well-known rejoinder that science doesn’t deal with that kind of theory; instead, there’s such a thing as the scientific theory, which is a much more iron-clad kind of explanation.
So when you say that science monopolizes theoretical knowledge, how are you not saying that only science does science? If by “theoretical cognition,” you mean just the general practice of offering an explanation of something, why should we expect that scientific explanations will be the only worthwhile ones? If all we want to know are the bare facts, that’s where science dominates, but who says all explanations must be so oriented?
I actually think that philosophers have fallen into the same scientistic trap as Christian fundamentalists. The latter read the Bible as if it were a scientific picture of the facts, because they’re competing with scientists for attention. Analytic philosophers do much the same with their articles and books. But philosophy and religion are much more about practice (i.e. life) than knowledge. One issue is what we know of the facts; another is how we should live.
As Pigliucci says, humanistic interpretation is needed to make fine-grained sense of the history of art, for example. We want to know what we get out of art and which art is best. There’s the naturalistic fallacy in the way of your pessimistic induction, if we’re talking about whether science will answer normative questions about art. We may come to ignore such questions, due to our materialistic, consumption-based society which turns us into drones, but that doesn’t mean those questions were always illegitimate.
“One issue is what we know of the facts; another is how we should live. ”
I think one of the important parts of Scott’s argument is that market capitalism/science is starting to be able to track how to manipulate the latter through the former.
“humanistic interpretation is needed to make fine-grained sense of the history of art”
For now. It might be that in the future, a hyper-intelligent AI or posthuman can track sociobiological causes behind any artistic movement to more reductionist terms than those presently used in humanistic circles. That is, it will be able to track the causal and functional information that allowed those movements to become socially integrated and disseminated through the collective.
Ooops, sorry, my EO Wilson is showing.
““One issue is what we know of the facts; another is how we should live. ”
I think one of the important parts of Scott’s argument is that market capitalism/science is starting to be able to track how to manipulate the latter through the former.”
What can be manipulated is the fact how people think how they should live. This doesn’t change the situation at all. Just ask questions like: ‘Should scientist manipulate people to alter their moral thinking?’ or ‘Why do science at all?’ ‘Why ask questions?’
Science doesn’t try to answer these questions, because it deals with facts, with what can be measured, directly or indirectly proven.
I don’t think your first question is scientifically tractable, deitl, but I do think the two following are!
Dietl, of course science can ask those questions. Right now, all we have is the clumsy tools and rhetoric of evolutionary psychology, but with decades of research we may much more definitive answers.
Just as a starting approximation: do you deny that asking questions and crafting better tools has adaptive value?
” Right now, all we have is the clumsy tools and rhetoric of evolutionary psychology, but with decades of research we may much more definitive answers.”
Sorry, I guess my last two questions weren’t clear enough. The question isn’t ‘How or why do human beings do science?’ and ‘How or why do human beings ask questions’ which are a scientific questions, but ‘Why should they do it?’ or ‘Is it good to do science?’.
For science to be involved in questions like the latter ones there must in principle be an experiment that determines objective value. But value itself or the goodness of an action or a goal isn’t measureable. What is measureable is peoples values.
“do you deny that asking questions and crafting better tools has adaptive value”
Adaptive value is not a thing in the real world, it is a concept. It doesn’t exist in the same way that mathematics doesn’t exist. But the word serves the goal of understanding why species survive better given a certain environment.
As for your question, if we were having a discussion about evolution I wouldn’t mind and say no (I don’t deny it). In a philosophical discussion about values I would have to be more precise and point out that your question is misleading in this context.
I think this is clearly happening with the growth of research like Sandy Pentland’s say. The dimensionality of the info available for theorization and testing is ballooning in lockstep with the tools required to lift patterns out of that info: the narrowness of the ‘intentional interpretative window’ is going to become very clear in short order I think. Advertisers, politicians, and the like won’t give a damn whether the results ‘reduce to physics’ so long as they are more actionable than existing intentional understandings.
Reminds me of a song: E. O. E-E-Eeeee-Ooo!
“As Pigliucci says, humanistic interpretation is needed to make fine-grained sense of the history of art, for example. We want to know what we get out of art and which art is best. There’s the naturalistic fallacy in the way of your pessimistic induction, if we’re talking about whether science will answer normative questions about art. We may come to ignore such questions, due to our materialistic, consumption-based society which turns us into drones, but that doesn’t mean those questions were always illegitimate.”
Again, I’m not clear on what you’re defending. If the theoretical cognitive legitimacy of the humanities actually did lie in making first-order normative judgments then the point would be moot. But the question has never been, ‘Will science tell us what art is ‘best’?’ The astronomical rennovation of astrological speculation still allowed stargazers to have their favourite stars. The question is whether the kinds of theories, the ‘isms,’ regarding the nature of this or that phenomena in the domain of the traditional humanities are going to survive. You can take the ‘death by a thousand qualifications’ route, philosophically worry the definition of ‘theory’ or ‘cognition’ or what have you – it’s easily done. But I’m not sure this amounts to a defence of theoretical cognition in the humanities so much as an attempt to scramble the critical signal. The questions still stands: the humanities are obviously replete with ‘isms’ that purport to cognize the nature of numerous different phenomena. What impact will the biologization of the human have on the credibility of these ‘isms’?
“So what’s so bizarre about thinking that symbols stand in for other things? How is that “literally supernatural”?”
Nothing at all. It’s a great short-hand way of orienting ourselves. The problem lies with positing the existence of intentional entities and relations – like representations and aboutnesses – that purport to explain these things. These are ‘literally supernatural’ insofar as they are understood to be superordinate to – to functionally supervene upon – nature. The word choice is meant to make intentionalists uncomfortable, to get them to appreciate the stakes involved in their claims.
“So when you say that science monopolizes theoretical knowledge, how are you not saying that only science does science? If by “theoretical cognition,” you mean just the general practice of offering an explanation of something, why should we expect that scientific explanations will be the only worthwhile ones? If all we want to know are the bare facts, that’s where science dominates, but who says all explanations must be so oriented?”
What other source of reliable theoretical cognition is capable of debunking scientific cognition? None that I know of. The question is whether the traditional humanities will somehow manage to preserve their theoretical credibility now that the sciences are gobbling up the human. I think the answer is pretty obviously, ‘No.’ Should this be the case? Probably not. But this is a quite different issue.
There’s no ‘naturalistic fallacy’ attached to the Big Fat Pessimistic Induction short of equivocating evaluations (which are neither here nor there regarding my thesis) with theories of evaluation. Like Pigliucci, you seem to think that the humanities are primarily in the aesthetic evaluation business, when they, like the sciences, are primarily in the theoretical explanation business. I just don’t see how anything you adduce here actually touches on the question of how the biologization of the human will impact this latter biz.
Scot, we’ve just got to settle this issue of your use of the words “theoretical cognition,” “cognize,” and so forth. I’ll try to be as blunt as I can to push the issue forward, because this keeps coming up.
I suspect that you’re begging the question when you say the “isms” of the humanities are in the business of “theoretical explanation.” What you’re doing is saying that the humanities are failing as sciences. You’re assuming scientific criteria and goals (e.g. the offering of “theories” for the sake of “cognition”), whereas the humanities are NOT in the same business as the sciences. There’s no such common business, although there’s plenty of overlap.
There are two main dictionary definitions of “theory”:
“(1) a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena: Einstein’s theory of relativity. Synonyms: principle, law, doctrine.
“(2) a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural and subject to experimentation, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact. Synonyms: idea, notion hypothesis, postulate.”
(1) is just the scientific kind of theory. The humanities are NOT (properly or commonly) in the business of coming up with theories in that sense. (2) is the kind of theory that motivates the creationist’s erroneous statement that natural selection is “just a theory.” Humanities are partly in the business of producing theories in this second sense, but notice that the criteria for success in this business aren’t necessarily those of a metaphysical realist (who wants just the facts) or even a pragmatist (who wants power).
What, then, are the humanist’s goals? What is the purpose of the humanities? Is it to tell us the facts of our inner nature? No, that’s the same scientism that misleads the religious fundamentalist to interpret her scripture as a quasi-scientific theory. The humanities are tools that humanize/civilize/Westernize/indoctrinate us. They uphold a culture which includes a set of values. The humanities prescribe a way of life, a worldview that tells us what we should be and do, not just what is. The humanities are fundamentally normative.
This is the postmodernist’s criticism, of course, and Pigliucci has to steer clear of that radicalism, according to which there’s nothing to the humanities except this normative mission (this secret patriarchal agenda, etc). But there’s a kernel of truth in the postmodern critique of the humanities.
Can we, then, please stop bashing the humanities for failing on scientific grounds? The facts that inform the humanities come mainly from the sciences and indeed from commonsense. Science usually conflicts with commonsense, so the humanities should update their world pictures as the sciences progress. But there’s more to the humanities that this “cognitive” business of discovering the facts.
I know that you say the sciences are set to undermine even that latter claim, that the sciences will leave no room for normative questions, so the humanities will deserve to disappear because they’re really just inferior sciences. But that “apocalyptic,” transhuman possibility doesn’t change the fact that currently the fact-value dichotomy grounds the separation of the sciences from the humanities.
Currently, it’s quite evident that human beings are interested in more than just the facts. Cultures exist as ways of life. Folk psychology isn’t just a protoscientific theory of certain facts. It’s part of a modern cultural worldview that’s left behind the crazy theistic origin of the naive self-image, but has maintained enough of it to uphold the liberal’s view of the dignified, rational individual. Folk psychology is ideological, not just protoscientific. If you’re saying that cognitive science is presently showing that all ideologies are illusions, you’ll have to show that these sciences aren’t being driven by ideologies. That’s a tall order.
All I’m asking the ‘ism’ proponent is, ‘How do you know?’ Are you saying this isn’t an honest and important question? Are you suggesting that once these theories begin rubbing elbows with scientifically grounded theories, they’re not going to suffer for the comparison?
“What, then, are the humanist’s goals? What is the purpose of the humanities? Is it to tell us the facts of our inner nature? No, that’s the same scientism that misleads the religious fundamentalist to interpret her scripture as a quasi-scientific theory. The humanities are tools that humanize/civilize/Westernize/indoctrinate us. They uphold a culture which includes a set of values. The humanities prescribe a way of life, a worldview that tells us what we should be and do, not just what is. The humanities are fundamentally normative.”
In the same way theories of ‘What Science Is’ simply add to the speculative burden when adduced to warn science off of this or that domain, ‘What the Humanities Are’ theories are a liability as well. Are the Humanities ‘fundamentally normative,’ bent on telling us how to live our lives? I don’t know many humanities scholars – any in fact – who see themselves ‘fundamentally’ being in that business at all. All of them, however, do think they trade in knowledge. And insofar as they make knowledge claims, the veracity of those claims will be called into question. In the absence of any real scientific cognition of the human, no one claim was really any better or worse off than any other claim, historically. Things are changing fast, however.
Your argument is morphing into the ‘To each their own yardstick’ argument I used to use all the time. Astrology has its own yardsticks. So did alchemy. So does Creation science. The question isn’t whether these other forms of cognition have their own yardsticks, the question is what will become of the yardsticks presently used in the humanities. Will they become astrological? I have no doubt that enclaves will continue discoursing on the nature of the human utterly oblivious to the science of the human, and that they will rail on and on (unless they’re Stanley Fish) about the legitimacy of their yardstick for everyone. We all live in the same world, after all! To short circuit the pessimistic induction you need to demonstrate why all things are not equal when it comes to the domain of the human as traditionally understood.
“Currently, it’s quite evident that human beings are interested in more than just the facts. Cultures exist as ways of life. Folk psychology isn’t just a protoscientific theory of certain facts. It’s part of a modern cultural worldview that’s left behind the crazy theistic origin of the naive self-image, but has maintained enough of it to uphold the liberal’s view of the dignified, rational individual. Folk psychology is ideological, not just protoscientific. If you’re saying that cognitive science is presently showing that all ideologies are illusions, you’ll have to show that these sciences aren’t being driven by ideologies. That’s a tall order.”
I don’t think the fact-value dichotomy separates the sciences from the humanities at all. I think humanities scholars see themselves dealing with a different species of fact, one peculiar to the human condition, and therefore particularly interesting. I also don’t think ‘folk psychology’ is theoretical in any discursive sense, and that conflating it with the Enlightenment theory of the human is clear cut equivocation, a way to blur everyday applications of intentional cognition (such as those my daughter has been making for years now) with a historically specific, second-order theory of the human (which my daughter is only now being indoctrinated into). Humanism is ideological, folk-psychology is biological, which is why it forms the basis of every ideology ever conceived.
Otherwise, why does claiming ideologies aren’t what we think they are require that one show that the claim itself isn’t driven by ideology as we think it is? If the initial claim is warranted, then it isn’t.
Scot, I agree that humanities scholars currently see themselves as producing knowledge. That’s scientism. That’s politics and the business of funding the humanities in competition with the sciences in a materialistic, consumer culture. The humanities are ideological and they still serve that original purpose, stemming from ancient Greek and Renaissance humanism, although now they must do so implicitly, in spite of the prejudice in favour of scientific knowledge of just the facts (as if there were no ideological motives behind scientific investigation, nor any cultural fruits of that knowledge).
Notice the linguistic connection between “humanities” and “humanism” and notice also that “humanities” is synonymous with “liberal arts.” From Wikipedia’s article on “humanities”:
‘In the West, the study of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. During Roman times, the concept of the seven liberal arts evolved, involving grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium). These subjects formed the bulk of medieval education, with the emphasis being on the humanities as skills or “ways of doing.”
‘A major shift occurred with the Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth century, when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to study rather than practice, with a corresponding shift away from traditional fields into areas such as literature and history. In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the postmodernist movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable for a democratic society.’
So of course the humanities are tied up with modernity, with the Renaissance and Enlightenment ideologies of going back to Greece out of respect for the individual’s dignity, contrary to the dogmas of the Dark Age, etc etc.
My argument does not necessarily slide into postmodern relativism. I’m realistic rather than just pragmatic about scientific methods, and I don’t know what exactly to make of normativity such as you find it in the humanities, because no one does. But the sciences tell us the facts; that’s axiomatic for me.
Are all things equal when it comes to the human domain, as you say, so that only scientific “yardsticks” count? No, since scientific methods don’t have normative implications. If and when science shows that normativity is nonexistent, then the yardsticks of liberalism and modernism which inform the humanities might be burned for firewood. On that apocalyptic day, we will be posthuman and past the point of the singularity, so that we can barely even imagine what we’d then be thinking or doing. Que sera, sera.
You say folk psychology is biological rather that ideological. This may be another point of interesting disagreement. I agree that folk psychology has a biological basis, just like folk physics. Of course, BBT’s diagnosis turns on that biological basis, since it’s what generates the illusions. But I deny that folk psychology has been the same in all cultures. The biological intuitions have different cultural expressions and interpretations. So we may have a heuristic to socialize each other and the world, but different cultures have different folk ideas about what constitutes a personal self. Analytic philosophy departments ignore those differences, because they’re in search of a version of personhood that’s compatible with naturalism, and most folk views of the self have been theistically crazy, full of mythopoeia, superstition, and magic. Much of that got stripped away in the modern age.
So now we have meaning, purpose, and consciousness minus the overt occultism. It’s still dualistic since it serves the grand ideal of humanizing our species, of separating us from the animals. As I said, the naïve self-image does that even though it’s illusory and carries subjective truth, because it inspires us to make the dream a reality, as it were. And that’s what we do with language, culture, and all the rest of our extended phenotypes which act as cocoons for our rebirth as people, as super-animals.
“Are all things equal when it comes to the human domain, as you say, so that only scientific “yardsticks” count? No, since scientific methods don’t have normative implications. If and when science shows that normativity is nonexistent, then the yardsticks of liberalism and modernism which inform the humanities might be burned for firewood. On that apocalyptic day, we will be posthuman and past the point of the singularity, so that we can barely even imagine what we’d then be thinking or doing. Que sera, sera.”
As a sidebar, it’s not that ‘normativity is nonexistent,’ only that it isn’t itself normative – that the question of norm-talk is not something that more, second-order norm-talk can solve. Theorizing meaning is as hopeless as theorizing the good so long as you think such exercises are cognitive. What is evaluation? is a question that only science can reliably answer.
Otherwise, you seem to be agreeing that the yardsticks of the contemporary humanities are in for a rough ride – that the pessimistic induction holds – but only because they were the wrong yardsticks in the first place. What you’re advocating, then, is a new humanities possessing different yardsticks that are genuinely irreplaceable (as opposed to irreducible) while remaining entirely compatible with new the sciences of the human. If so, I think this is a genuinely exciting project! I’m not sure it’s possible, but it seems to me that any leap in this direction is bound to come up with something new, and certainly more robust than what we have now. BBT might be able to offer a few ways of thinking this reorientation… I’m not sure though.
I almost wonder if this isn’t what Laruelle is up to in a sense…
Hello, Ben. Do you mean to imply that quantum mechanics is supernatural, so supernatural phenomena are not scientifically objectionable or that quantum mechanics is non-supernatural but non-deterministic in a way that allows for the existence of the intentional phenomena the existence of which Scott denies? I could be wrong, but I don’t think biological sciences has usually needed to descend to the quantum level to understand the things biological sciences tries to understand, and I don’t see any reason to assume the brain would be any different. Absent an actual quantum neurological theory the hope that such a theory can redeem intentionality seems also to be “transparently a projection to make us feel better.” I don’t “like” BBT because it implies that human beings are as undead as the undead god, but if the universe cared what I liked we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
No, the point about quantum mechanics is that the charge that folk psychology is supernatural is problematic, because even without the dualism between the physical world and the personal one, there’s currently a dualism *within* physics, between the subatomic and the spatiotemporal world, between quantum mechanics and relativity. What combines them are the scientific methods, which is why the naturalism of most scientists is only methodological.
The point is that we should understand that scientific models have this pragmatic aspect, that they form a patchwork, and while there are some physicists who dream of a Theory of Everything, such as string theory, there are many problems with that approach. String Theory was supposed to unify physics; instead, it expanded into a virtual infinity of string theories and universes in a multiverse.
In this context, appeals to “naturalism” lose much of their force. *Which* nature is being appealed to, the one that works according to bizarre, subatomic principles or the somewhat more intuitive–but still strange, especially as you approach light speed–mesoscopic and macroscopic worlds of space and time and galaxies, and so on? So the point is that a pragmatic take on folk psychology isn’t ruining the purity of nature, dividing any pristine unity as understood by scientists. No, there are all sorts of disharmonies between scientific models, even in physics itself.
That’s the thin edge of the wedge, you see, which should allow folk psychologists to say, “We’re just adding one more dualism to the list of ‘natural’ domains, charted by maps that are unified only by the words, ‘Here be dragons.”” If some scientific theories are already divided, because they’re models meant to serve practical purposes, there’s no such thing as Nature, such that this or that model is “supernatural”–unless we’re talking about acute differences between methodologies. Theism is supernatural on methodological grounds (faith vs reason, unfalsifiability, etc). Folk psychology isn’t supernatural in that way. We posit intentionality, consciousness, purpose, and value to explain human behaviour. It’s a model like any other, except that it’s protoscientific.
So there are discontinuities between folk psychology and cognitive science, but that’s just a case of joining the scientific club! Models form a patchwork picture of the world, with discontinuities between them. The folk image of the self as a conscious, rational, free, dignified person is a useful model and if it will be replaced by some mechanistic self-image, it will be on pragmatic grounds. We’ll have to discover that the usefulness of folk psychology was illusory all along, like the theory of witches which was socially useful mostly for evil purposes. The trouble is that I don’t know how to explain such a pragmatic preference for one model over another, without referring to the personal self of folk psychology who makes the choice.
What does patchwork pluralism in the sciences (which I heartily endorse) have to do with the scientific revolutionizing of the human, and therefore the humanities? Science is a big tent, but this in no mean implies that ‘anything goes.’ Thus, you don’t find astrology in that tent, or alchemy, or any other prescientific domain of knowledge. The question is one of where our prescientific theoretical discourse on the nature of the human will ultimately fit in, and Pigliucci’s argument is entirely irrelevant to this question. All ‘big tent’ arguments are outside establishing bare possibilities.
“The folk image of the self as a conscious, rational, free, dignified person is a useful model and if it will be replaced by some mechanistic self-image, it will be on pragmatic grounds. We’ll have to discover that the usefulness of folk psychology was illusory all along, like the theory of witches which was socially useful mostly for evil purposes. The trouble is that I don’t know how to explain such a pragmatic preference for one model over another, without referring to the personal self of folk psychology who makes the choice.”
You continually conflate the everyday use of folk-psychological terms with the radically different philosophical use. The question is whether second-order folk-psychological theorizing such as that found throughout the humanities at present will have any place in the humanities of the future. It’s hard not to see your appeal to pragmatism as anything other than a dodge. Saying, ‘insofar as the theoreticians using them find them useful’ tells us nothing whatsoever. If the ‘use’ turns on signalling, then you’re essentially saying it all amounts to fashion, and you’re agreeing with me. If the ‘use,’ on the other hand, turns on real world applications, on the degree to which the theories feed sensorimotor loops allowing for environmental (as opposed to merely social) manipulation, then either you’re claiming that intentional theories are in fact cognitive, that the kinds of theories presently characterizing the humanities will have a role in the future, or you’re agreeing with me and saying, very likely not, that the pessemistic induction does hold.
This is the whole point of my critique of Pigliucci: to show that nothing is really being defended in his defense. Big tent, sure. Pragmatics, sure. And so… ?
You don’t think it’s the least bit hinky to defend the theoretical viability of a discourse while systematically avoiding any mention of any of the theories that discourse is prone to adduce, Ben? This is what Pigliucci does, and what you’re doing now. Give us some examples of theoretical cognition in the humanities. Short of this, it seems pretty safe to assume that the prescientific domain of the human is likely as benighted as any other prescientific domain, isn’t it?
Scot, Nothing I said about the patchwork nature of scientific models implies that “anything goes.” As I said, the models are united by the scientific methods, so astrology isn’t on equal terms as theoretical knowledge of the facts, because its methods are pseudoscientific. The methods do the work there, not the contents of the theories.
As for the options you give about the usefulness of folk psychology, I agree with the second one, about the sensorimotor loops and environmental manipulation. Of course that’s how we use our model of the personal self, to manipulate each other in our social interactions. The terms “belief,” “desire,” “meaning,” and so on work to that extent. You agree, I take it. Then philosophers and others in the humanities want to organize those assumptions and come up with theories and “isms” that entail the reality of those properties. Whether what I’ve said so far justifies such optimism depends on whether you’re a realist or a pragmatist about knowledge. If you’re a pragmatist, you base your ontology on its utility in first-order matters. Those theories are true which help to make sense of the phenomena. And whether the model sits well with other models is neither here nor there. The patchwork stands.
Is it suspicious that Pigliucci doesn’t give an example of nonscientific knowledge from the humanities? A little, but he does give the examples of art criticism and Hume’s problem of induction. I’d add the field of history, which is divided between those who think history is a soft science and those who see it as necessarily ideological. We have knowledge of the history of art, but postmodernists point out that ideology intrudes in our interpretation of art periods. For example, modernists presuppose the idea of cultural progress, so they elevate modern works above premodern ones.
Another example: there’s modern Jesus scholarship, such as the Jesus seminar which used modern historical techniques to uncover layers of reliability in the New Testament. But these scholars turned Jesus into a fellow liberal. Once again, ideology intrudes even as the greater emphasis on rationality naturally sheds light on the facts, so that we do have more knowledge of early Christianity, thanks to modern historical methods. But is that history a scientific theory or is it partly an artistic interpretation?
“But philosophy and religion are much more about practice (i.e. life) than knowledge. One issue is what we know of the facts; another is how we should live.” The theory of how we should live espoused by Christianity is derived from Christianity’s theories about the origin and nature of the universe and about the origin and nature of human beings. If God created the universe and created human beings then the prescription of right moral conduct seems to be within God’s authority. If original sin exists then God’s use of His Son to redeem our sinful nature seems within God’s authority. I am not an expert in comparative religious studies but I think most theologies/philosophies that prescribe standards of conduct do so based on a theory about the origin and nature of the universe and on a theory about the origin and nature of human beings. I don’t think practice can be separated from knowledge in the way you seem to be implying. One of the things some people find disturbing about purely natural theories like BBT (and for that matter the Big Bang and Evolution) is that they cannot, by their very nature, provide guides for how we should live. I find BBT particularly disturbing because it implies that the things we though made human beings special are illusions. If human beings are not different in kind from cows and chickens there is no morally compelling reason for us not to kill and eat each other.
The non-Christian religions, such as Daoism, may simply be committing the naturalistic or genetic fallacy. It’s very hard to explain how prescriptive issues emerge from a world of indifferent facts. It’s been compared to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. I think there’s an existential leap of faith involved in setting our sights on some ideal to guide our life course, but that’s hardly a scientific explanation.
The question for me is whether all knowledge should be scientific or whether there’s an ineliminable artistic aspect of any worldview. Scientists tell us the facts, so will a scientific picture of the world necessarily be incomplete, since scientists as such won’t address normative issues? Will we need religious myths and philosophical speculations to fill in those blanks? Is the preference for cold and calculating scientific knowledge of the bare facts already indicative of a normative stance, that is, a preference for the ideals of instrumentalism, for a Nietzschean will to power over nature, etc?
“The non-Christian religions, such as Daoism, may simply be committing the naturalistic or genetic fallacy. It’s very hard to explain how prescriptive issues emerge from a world of indifferent facts. It’s been compared to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. I think there’s an existential leap of faith involved in setting our sights on some ideal to guide our life course, but that’s hardly a scientific explanation.”
What’s hard to explain? The fact that humans, like other social animals organize collective behaviour via feedback networks? Or that fact that it feels as if we hang undetermined, with only our will and rational acceptance of rules to constrain us? If you think this latter, metacognitive picture captures real entities and relations then the question of prescription isn’t simply ‘very hard,’ it’s pretty much impossible. But as it turns out, BBT has a very parsimonious, empirically based, explanation for why it feels the way it does, even though what’s actually going on involves social animals organizing collective behaviour via feedback networks.
So the question for you is, Why should anyone give theoretical credence to how it ‘feels,’ let alone how philosophers have been tackling the problem for thousands of years without any success?
“This isn’t a suggestion to give up, much less a mystical injunction to go ‘beyond
science’. There is nothing beyond science. But there is important stuff before it:
there are human emotions, expressed by literature, music and the visual arts;
there is culture; there is history. The best understanding of the whole shebang
that humanity can hope for will involve a continuous dialogue between all our
various disciplines. This is a more humble take on human knowledge than the
quest for consilience, but it is one that, ironically, is more in synch with what
the natural sciences tell us about being human.”….Massimo Pigliucci’s last paragraph.
Interesting that he ends it with the tribal recognition or as Sean Carroll says each group has its own vocabulary. Perhaps why philosophy of language or vocabulary is one the last big nuts to crack.
Hey. I was listening to the following on my commute this evening, and thought it might be useful to share:
http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/267185371/simply-happy
The interesting part, from the perspective of BBT, I submit, is the notion that the intrinsic workings of our brain our not merely neglected, but occulted in important respects. In particular, we can’t ever seem to recognize, in the moment, that we have evolved not to care so much about how the things we imagine ourselves to care about turn out. (This will make more sense in the context of the podcast).
Specifically, I am referring to the idea that our inability to predict the impact of our choices/accomplishments/failures is remarkably poor (“impact bias”). Were this not the case, we might not strive quite so much to achieve our goals, since the character of the lived experience of success or failure is surprisingly, even shockingly resilient to the “facts” of the matter.
This is touched upon to some degree in “Thinking Fast and Slow”, too, in terms of our intrinsic bias for optimism where our own endeavors are concerned.
I know that Bakker is quite interested in how our biases serve our “purposes”, shudder-quoted here in deference to the notion that we are without purpose in a certain ontological sense. In a prior rant, I noted that there is solace in the fact that what we are, it seems, immunizes us from – oddly enough – the implications of knowing what, in fact, we are.
This, I think, is interesting in the context of BBT if only because taking BBT seriously may actually require that someone not be “neurotypical”.
Having written this, I feel as if I have eaten my own tail, so to speak.
It stands to reason that human beings should have a genetic bias toward optimism. If you leave the party to go home and masturbate after the first woman turns you down your genes don’t have a very good chance of getting into the next generation. On the other hand, if you proposition every woman you meet then no matter how lonely and desperate you are you will eventually meet a woman more lonely and more desperate than you. If we do have a bias toward optimism it stands to reason that we have to have the kind of non-veridical memory we have. We have to be able to ‘spin’ our histories to make them more positive than they really are. Our expectations about the future also have to be non-veridical in the same way. We expect the future to be better than an honest analysis of the available data would warrant. Our capacity for happiness is built on our capacity for self-delusion.
So a kind of ‘retrospective prospection neglect’? I haven’t listened to the piece yet, but the idea is fascinating. You think about the resources engaged by the default network: social prospection had to pay evolutionary dividends somehow. Perhaps it primarily comes down to signalling (like so much else), that the ability to ‘talk a good game’ gained a sexual selective advantage regardless of the game actually played. More cognitive peacocke feathers. And as you say, the great irony is that neglect is that it frees you of the very disability it imposes!
Another great one, Ochlo. You’ve had me mumbling to my cereal quite abit of late!
I think the issue here seems to be the presumed business of the respective disciplines. There are a few distinctions, the humanities as a whole has been crassly characterized as performing a role of either (i) ” aesthetic evaluation” or (ii) “theoretical explanation” where the concern is for the epistemological legitimacy of the conclusions derived by the humanities. Any fair comment on this distinction should recall how vast the humanities are, and the constantly changing function in society of its various sub-disciplines.
But lets assume that explanation is core role the humanities provide. Note that explanation in a subject S is a function of a statement that induces an epistemic/doxastic change in the recipients of the statement in such a manner that they usually draw connections between disparate beliefs pertinent to the subject S.
Why should any degree of discovery radically alter how we relate to the subject S? Take for example the study of history, and allow that an explanation for historically recorded change is put forward based on economic/political considerations as an inference to the best explanation. What revolution in our conception of ourselves or the world would prompt the conclusion that history itself was irrelevant, or that the example explanation is illegitimate? How is the style of abductive inference going to be overturned by a conceptual revolution in science. I suggest it won’t be, and could not be since speculative leaps of this kind are crucial to subject of science. So we are left with the possibility that history, politics or economics will themselves be scrapped by an advance in science. Short of the discovery of time travel and utopia, this will not happen for a host of practical reasons mostly relating to survival and prosperity. So I see no reason to believe that the humanities are even slightly threatened by the development of reductive explanations science.
The hope for an increase in reductive explanations of phenomena which some of the humanities focus upon, does not invalidate a continued focus on the emergent phenomena. Novels about people will not end if and when we have discovered the precise features which make up and determine personal experience. If we come to relate to ourselves in a different manner ( e.g. traditional tracts took our primary role in the world to be as moral agents) this is not to the detriment of the humanities. The transition in our conception of self from old models to new will just provide a tension to fuel more creative endeavors. The humanities evolve with the sciences they are not eclipsed by them. So even if our conception of ourselves fundamentally changes, the technique of fictional biography and illustrative analogy may still be used to elaborate features of the “humanity” we call our own. These skills will be preserved and the conclusions they underwrite will remain at least as legitimate as they are today in so far as they will continue to successfully induce epistemic/doxastic change in the minds of those willing to listen.
If the distinction you want to draw rests on the relatively loose intentional explanation of human behavior versus the broadly deterministic characterization of the same events, then I suggest that that the intentional order of explanation is equally apt, simpler and more efficient in the long term. As such, it will not be replaced by a causal/predictive explanation of the same intensional behavior, even if the former could be developed perfectly.
As to the use of Godel’s incompleteness arguments. This can be done successfully, but there is a neater argument directly about the limitation of knowledge. “Consider the following statement. “The list F of stated facts fails to have this statement on it.” But now suppose this statement to be on the list. Then it clearly does not state a fact, so that the list is after all not a list of the facts (contrary to hypothesis).And so it must be left off the list. But then in consequence that list will not be complete since the statement is true. And so the nondenumerablility of facts follows by considering that they can never be listed in toto because there will always be further facts—facts about the entire list itself— that a supposedly complete list could not manage to register.” This is an argument by Rescher, but the parallel with Cantor style diagonialisation arguments should be obvious. It’s not a trivial point either, the type of work done in the humanities often involves self reference of the kind that would preclude surveyability of the relevant particulars in an analogous manner. Think of the rhetoric of the royal “we” used in academic jargon.
Finally, just on the subject of reductive explanations. I recently worked through Chalmers’ arguments for the independence of the phenomenal from the physical and found them to be pretty compelling:
but I’d be happy to hear why I’m wrong.
Welcome, Nathaniel!
“I think the issue here seems to be the presumed business of the respective disciplines. There are a few distinctions, the humanities as a whole has been crassly characterized as performing a role of either (i) ” aesthetic evaluation” or (ii) “theoretical explanation” where the concern is for the epistemological legitimacy of the conclusions derived by the humanities. Any fair comment on this distinction should recall how vast the humanities are, and the constantly changing function in society of its various sub-disciplines.”
It’s a given that we’re talking cartoons here on TPB. This is all wankery of the highest order. The point stands that the humanities make theoretical cognitive claims everywhere, and if they were to stop, then they would be something quite different from what they are today.
“If the distinction you want to draw rests on the relatively loose intentional explanation of human behavior versus the broadly deterministic characterization of the same events, then I suggest that that the intentional order of explanation is equally apt, simpler and more efficient in the long term. As such, it will not be replaced by a causal/predictive explanation of the same intensional behavior, even if the former could be developed perfectly.”
Again, if you’re talking about everyday, in situ explanations, certainly: this is plainly what our intentional cognitive systems are adapted to do. If you’re talking about second-order theoretical explanations then I think you are almost certainly wrong – at the very least you owe us examples! This isn’t to say that some of our intentional heuristics can’t be exapted to new, second-order problem-ecologies, only that such exaptive success will be one-off and local (as is indeed the case with the operationalization of intentional terms in scientific contexts).
Regarding Godel and incompleteness, I personally think that the halting problem is actually behind it all, that the formal problems pertaining to ‘self-reference’ are low-D metacognitive glossess on what are high-D natural constraints on recursive processing. The point is, however, it does not do the work that Pigliucci suggests it does.
Chalmers is only convincing to the extent that you believe humans possess magical metacognitive powers. We all accept that exo-environmental cognition is a computationally onerous affair, requiring hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary tuning just to track relatively simply natural systems, and yet for some reason a great number of philosophers of mind simply assume that endo-environmental cognition – metacognition – is unproblematic, that the brain can somehow ‘just grasp’ the ‘nature’ of the ‘inner’ despite the astronomical complexities and the relative evolutionary novelty of the ability. Everything Chalmers adduces is much more parsimoniously explained away in terms of metacognitive neglect. Check out: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/the-something-about-mary/
Thanks.
“The point stands that the humanities make theoretical cognitive claims everywhere, and if they were to stop, then they would be something quite different from what they are today.”
How is this remark not just a tautology? I thought to the point was to claim that development of various reductive explanations will (in all likelihood) result explode the legitimacy of their methods, and cast doubt on their conclusions. Upon rereading I am a little more sympathetic to the claim if you meant that the various wanky theoretical frameworks such as psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism of literature, should drop out once their theoretical underpinnings are no longer tenable. Unfortunately, I think that’s already the case and there has to my knowledge been no significant change in the methods deployed. Still I think the broader point I was trying to make stands as the work done in the humanities is far better in general than the rubbish done in the name of literary theory. The latter often functions more like a crutch for those who while capable of doing good work are bad at conceiving the bigger picture in which their work takes place, and so adopt various “explanatory” frameworks… but the existence (or prevalence) of poor explanatory frameworks, does not entail that no good explanations arise from work in the humanities.
“If you’re talking about second-order theoretical explanations then I think you are almost certainly wrong – at the very least you owe us examples!”
So as I understand it the first order/second order distinction involves on the first hand explanations based on objects in the world, while the second order explanations would be explanations about their properties. So we’re talking about the first order objects of persons and a claim of the kind that “John went to the shop because he was hungry”, are fine. But you suggest that I am almost certainly wrong if I insist that we will retain a naive simple understanding of the second order claim that there is property instantiated whenever John is hungry, and this property admits proper description only in impersonal. So it would foolish of me to explain hunger as desire for food in the intentional order of explanation, but permissible if I explained it as a physical chemical process triggering certain brain states?
Maybe I haven’t followed your distinction well, but it seems to me that my explanation of hunger as desire for food is perfectly legitimate? Indeed, as you suggest, the propensity for us to describe objective phenomena in terms of purposive action is massively prevalent. I do not think any development in our sense of selves will buck this trend. That’s not to say that the impersonal level of description isn’t more correct, my only point was that scientific advancement will not eliminate intensional order of explanation in science or the humanities.
The proofs for the halting problem and diagonialization arguments are effectively the same: http://nathanielforde.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/hipsters-uncomputability-and-diagonalisation/ , so I’m not sure what the point of the distinction you draw here is? Both are proofs about the limitations of computation derived from the imagined full specification of a system. They suggest that for any functional characterization of a system, no matter how detailed, there will be questions unanswerable in the system. This works to point out that no matter how we come to view ourselves (no matter how perfectly we functionally specify ourselves) there will be room for speculation about how we will interact in fictional/hypothetical circumstances. Hence, there will be a role for the humanities…. I grant it’s not a great argument in the abstract. Too much depends on how the functional specification is made concrete, but there is an argument here.
I’ll look into the Mary piece now.
“Upon rereading I am a little more sympathetic to the claim if you meant that the various wanky theoretical frameworks such as psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism of literature, should drop out once their theoretical underpinnings are no longer tenable. Unfortunately, I think that’s already the case and there has to my knowledge been no significant change in the methods deployed.”
The domain was secure before simply for the lack of comparison. The cognitive sciences have already produced enough (in many cases, actionable) information that it’s hard to read any theory in the humanities without rolling one’s eyes. It’ll take time. Alchemy didn’t vanish overnight!
“So it would foolish of me to explain hunger as desire for food in the intentional order of explanation, but permissible if I explained it as a physical chemical process triggering certain brain states?”
The problem doesn’t lie in the intentional explanatory posits themselves, so much as the claims we make regarding those posits. Consider the use of ‘representation’ in cognitive science. It is used ubiquitously, and does quite a bit of work, but as soon as theorists begin asking what it is, all progress comes to a screeching halt. No one has a clue as to how to go looking for things like ‘aboutness’ and ‘evaluability,’ so if you insist that these are essential properties of a representation, you have yourself an unexplainable explainer. For an eliminativist like myself, however, because there just is no such thing as aboutness and evaluability, no ‘vehicle/content’ distinction. When we use ‘about’ or assign ‘value’ we are simply applying heuristics that we evolved to solve various causally opaque (because of the complexities involved) problem-ecologies. Since we have no metacognitive inkling of this heuristic specificity, and since we have to communicate these solutions in the same code we use to communicate the natural world, we are duped into thinking these problem-specific solvers are things like other things, only ‘special.’ And so we go about expounding about ‘transcendental’ worlds with varying degrees of ontological courage.
“The proofs for the halting problem and diagonialization arguments are effectively the same: http://nathanielforde.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/hipsters-uncomputability-and-diagonalisation/ , so I’m not sure what the point of the distinction you draw here is? Both are proofs about the limitations of computation derived from the imagined full specification of a system.”
I agree, and I’ll definitely check this link out. On my own account, the ‘apriori’ and many of the characteristics commonly attributed to it are the product of metacognitive illusions: its implementations all the way down. The difference is that Godel was himself one of those implementations, and so a hostage to metacognitive neglect like all other mathematicians. I think mathematics, like logic, is actually an empirical discipline, extraordinary because our endo-environmental relation to it generates all kinds of low-dimensional illusions regarding reflexivity, internal-relationality, timelessness, and the like. So in a sense, incompleteness is what halting looks like from the inside, so different that it has spawned an endless number of second-order theoretical confusions.
“They suggest that for any functional characterization of a system, no matter how detailed, there will be questions unanswerable in the system. This works to point out that no matter how we come to view ourselves (no matter how perfectly we functionally specify ourselves) there will be room for speculation about how we will interact in fictional/hypothetical circumstances. Hence, there will be a role for the humanities…”
The irony here is that this is a cornerstone of BBT, the biomechanical indisposition of cognitive resources renders those resources incognito to that system. But in modular superordinate systems this need not be a problem. In the case of us humans, we’re just too damn complex to endogenously ‘solve’ ourselves the way we exogenously solve our environments. But this need not be the case for artificial systems (indeed, this is one reason why I think AIs will quickly become incomprehensible to us), nor for science. I think this is probably too slender to provide a basis for extra-scientific cognition of the kind the humanities want. Either way, it’s still a damn sight better than what Pigliucci is arguing!
Scott
I really enjoy your blog, although I’m not sure I follow everything. Sometimes the meaning sifts down over a period of time, so I might not have given the following enough time. Anyway you write:
“But in modular superordinate systems this need not be a problem. In the case of us humans, we’re just too damn complex to endogenously ‘solve’ ourselves the way we exogenously solve our environments. But this need not be the case for artificial systems (indeed, this is one reason why I think AIs will quickly become incomprehensible to us), nor for science”
Clearly AI will be experientially incomprehensible to us just as a frog is. But in the future let’s assume both frogs and AI are part of our environment ie we haven’t eaten all the frogs or destroyed their habitats and AI exists and it hasn’t eaten us or destroyed our habitats.
Why shouldn’t we be able to understand scientifically both frogs and AI, and having eliminated the basis for our illusions, why should we care AI experience is experientially incomprehensible just as Anural experience is. And if it does matter, then exploring how it matters (whatever mattering matters) becomes the humanities.
I think this is entirely possible. My argument, remember, is that the humanities understood as a project of intentional cognition is what will be driven extinct, giving way to the kind of naturalized humanities you suggest.
I apologize for all the wank, atomic! 😉
“[W]e are duped into thinking these problem-specific solvers are things like other things, only ‘special.’ And so we go about expounding about ‘transcendental’ worlds with varying degrees of ontological courage.”
It seems to me the issue then is the mixing of explanatory orders, not the existence of independent explanatory orders. I’m quite ontological generous in that I’ll accept that these things exist in some generic sense, but aren’t reducible in the way that some scientific posits are – this seems only to give us reason to prefer scientific explanations, not exclude all rough and ready pragmatic explanations. It seems to me the eliminativist is making a meta-claim that the domain of existential quantifier should only contain objects reducible to physical/quantum primitives? While i think this claim might be appropriate for science, I see no reason why such a claim would hold for the notion of existence ascribed to by the humanities?
“I think mathematics, like logic, is actually an empirical discipline, extraordinary because our endo-environmental relation to it generates all kinds of low-dimensional illusions regarding reflexivity, internal-relationality, timelessness, and the like.”
I think this is an interesting possibility, but I can’t convince myself of its truth. I would be interested in uncovering the kind of cognitive features that underwrite the phenomenal sense of surety I achieve on completing a proof. Ultimately I’m happy to concede mathematical facts exist independently of our appreciation of them, but it couldn’t hurt to understand how we come to appreciate them.
“I think this is probably too slender to provide a basis for extra-scientific cognition of the kind the humanities want.”
Well, i suspect they can still make compelling arguments about the relations between the humans and AI. The cognitive understanding achieved of this new world will be limited but not entirely irrelevant. In the worst case scenario it will happen in the same way that indigenous people of tropical jungles must still relate to our civil culture…. but as the degree widens the quality of their explanations will become increasingly poor (in an objective sense), but no less compelling for those individuals in a similar (or worse) epistemic situation.
So you believe in ghosts? God?
There’s a whole host of reasons in addition to parsimony warranting eliminativism regarding the existence of intentional phenomena. I have no objection to the notion that explanatory posits solve problems. God solves a whole heap of problems for a whole heap of people. So is there a God? Is it a ‘confusion of explanatory orders’ to say, ‘Of course not’?
So then let’s move to another intentional phenomena, free will. Is it a confusion of explanatory orders to say it doesn’t exist?
How about another notoriously problematic phenomena: aboutness?
BBT suggests we should looks at things on a gradient of dimensions, the quantity and kinds of information available, the applications enabled. Once you understand how bad metacognition is, you understand that we have far better grounds for seeing ourselves as biomechanistic components of our natural environments (the continuous view) than as ‘subjects’ somehow set against a world of objects (the dichotomous view). Given this, and given a way to see the latter in terms of the former, a way, moreover that dissolves any number of, in some cases ancient, conundrums regarding the mental, clearly has to represent an advance in understanding. If BBT’s picture of metacognition is correct, the dichotomous view can be seen as a heuristic artifact of the way ‘incompleteness’ blinds us to the high-D continuous view. Personally, I find it hard to understand what else the dichotomous view could be!
This is the thing. Eliminativism regarding the mental has very little to do with any grand project of theoretical reduction, and much more to do with simply trying to understand things as continuously and as effectively as possible. Go down the list from God to free will to aboutness, and you’ll find partisans crying confusion of explanatory orders, but what you won’t find is any decisive account of why this is so, how and what makes their posits immune to cognition in even the roughest, continuous terms. The intentional pretty plainly seems to be more than ‘just another explanatory level’: it’s the source of our deepest perplexities. Every understanding it purportedly leverages, we are told, moves in mysterious ways…
“So is there a God? Is it a ‘confusion of explanatory orders’ to say, ‘Of course not’?”
No, I don’t think there is a god. I was more thinking of mathematical objects and facts…. But my point wasn’t to deny the eliminativist project, it was only to point out that the picture you painted of how naive non-scientific explanations will come to be, does not invalidate their role as explanations. Your picture ought to promote a caution about confusing the reach of humanistic explanations, and their relative cognitive importance with the more “objective” explanations emerging from scientific considerations.
You’re right that the dichotomous view could be seen as an of the failings of our meta-cognition, but it’s not obvious to me that scientific explanations of some “dichotomous” phenomena will be able to replace in terms of efficacy the explanations we currently entertain. I’m happy to explain my expectations and disappointments of others in terms of my ascription to them, of free will. I might also concede that that free will doesn’t exist…. but in one mood the free will explanation seems as powerful as any we have to hand. That said caution should be used given what we know about psychological compulsion. Indeed caution is used in so far as court cases will consult with neuro-scientists and psychologists in an effort to achieve the best possible explanation of human behavior. The setting in which an explanation is deployed is sensitive the demands of the context and the stakes at play.
On this view i’m simply arguing for tolerance, where certain explanatory strategies are harmless and efficacious (to a point). The God explanation is neither.
On the other point, the distinction between the reductionist eliminativist and the theoretician who seeks explanations continuous with science doesn’t strike me as a clear distinction. One goes up, the other down, but both exclude the same kinds of ontological frippery.
God is efficacious for many purposes, and serves many interests. What I would interested in knowing is how something like, say, Brandom’s inferentialism is efficacious in any manner distinct from God.
Regarding this issue, BBT just picks up where Quine and Davidson left off, where one leaves the scheme/content distinction behind, commits to (what we now call) normative apparatuses only insofar as they are efficacious. One certainly doesn’t believe in ‘transcendental realms of rational constraint’!
Okay granted in the case of God I need to exclude him because he is less efficacious for explanatory/predictive purposes and it’s a posit which promotes harm in many applications.
But I think God is a good example for you. It’s a type of antiquated but effective explanatory posit which compares poorly contemporary ones. We can take talk of God is the same kind of cognitive error, that the AI’s will our talk of Qualia to involve.
As for Brandom’s inferentialism. As I understand it also drops the scheme/content distinction saying that content is reducible to scheme in so far as the meaning of an assertion is constituted by/reducible to its language entry/exit conditions.
No transcendental assumptions are required here. I’m only arguing for the idea that there is a legitimate cognitive role for explanatory strategies that are not “up to date” and the humanities will always be behind the curve… but that this does nothing to ensure that the explanatory strategies in the humanities (a) lack cognitive traction or (b) are necessarily inappropriate and flawed.
As for transcendental realms of rational constraint….. eh, not sure what you’re getting at?
… but while I believe in mathematical facts I’m a logical pluralist, so I don’t insist on one characterisation of rationality….
Yeah, Brandom overcomes the distinction by transforming content into scheme! Normativisms like his multiply the number of intentional entities purporting to ‘explain’ what they take to be irreducibly normative behaviour. It doesn’t matter how you characterize this domain of supernatural facts, it always seems to possess the essential characteristics of Kant’s transcendental: autonomous yet efficacious, irreducible yet real, and conveniently only scrutable to reason.
“No transcendental assumptions are required here. I’m only arguing for the idea that there is a legitimate cognitive role for explanatory strategies that are not “up to date” and the humanities will always be behind the curve… but that this does nothing to ensure that the explanatory strategies in the humanities (a) lack cognitive traction or (b) are necessarily inappropriate and flawed.”
I’m saying that this itself is something that cognitive science will shed light on. If BBT is true, then all things being equal, the kinds of theories you find in the humanities are largely confabulatory, ‘pseudoexplanatory’ in the same sense as anthropomorphic myths – and for the same reasons. The adaptive problem-ecologies of intentional cognition simply do not include questions like ‘What is knowledge?’ or ‘What is reason?’ and so on. If something like BBT is vindicated, then the bulk of traditional intentional philosophy is bunk. And I think the empirical case that something like BBT is true is becoming mountainous. This is the question I would press you on, Nathaniel: What do you think warrants faith in theoretical intentional explanation?
It’s not about faith. It’s about using what we have until something better comes along.
I have no doubt the humanities will be changed in the advent of future discoveries, but I contend that there will still be a role for the humanities, even if its current set of theoretical frameworks are shown to be false.
It will be an empirical fact you turn out to be correct, and the methodological assumptions that underwrite the humanities are so horrendously debunked that nothing recognizable survives… or whether I’m write and a more subtle relationship develops between humanities and the sciences, where the latter is seen to extensively inform the concerns of the former.
I don’t have faith that theoretical intentional explanation will survive the coming discoveries but I’m happy to say that it is often a framework I find enlightening. Until that is no longer the case I will not prematurely abandon it. Whether this is false enlightenment, and I’m just grasping in the dark for any kind of light is a decent question. But rather some light now, than just the promise of future rescue.
This strikes me as a reasonable position. It really is a question of degree, how radically the humanities will be transformed. A post-intentional humanities is an extreme outcome, one that I only consider likely because of my account of intentionality more generally.
That makes sense, Ben. I guess you could say that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics each has a problem ecology and that until a theory comes along that can be used to solve problems in both fields it makes pragmatic sense to use each theory where it works. In the same way we have folk psychology for first order questions like “I wonder what he intends to do” and more scientific methods for second order questions like “what, in general, is the process by which human beings form intentions?” I agree with Scott’s argument that the two types of questions should be addressed using different methods. I also think that if a theory comes along that can solve both first and second order questions about mind we should use that theory where we can. Whether BBT proves to be such a theory remains to be seen.
But I don’t see that first-order, second-order distinction as being so decisive here. Folk psychology is as general as the cognitive scientist’s mechanistic theory of the mind. That’s not the difference between them. We use the same folk psychological terms (belief, desire, rationality, freewill, consciousness) to make sense of all people’s behaviour. The difference is that folk psychology is protoscientific, or rough-and-ready. In each case, though, whether we’re talking scientifically about everyone’s common evolutionary background or brain structure, or folk psychologically about everyone’s personhood, we’re explaining phenomena in a rational way. We’re positing certain underlying properties to explain and predict observed patterns. We’re coming up with models that work in the real world. That’s why folk psychology is protoscientific rather than supernatural or delusional (unfalsifiable).
So where does the first-order, second-order distinction fit into that?
I’m not sure there’s a bigger difference between ways of knowing. Do we ‘make normative models’ when understanding the actions of others? I highly doubt that, though I think we belong to a long culture of assuming as much. People used to think that fielder’s unconsciously relied on complex models of balls following trajectories according to certain velocities to make catches: it turns out nothing of the sort is involved. Are the problems suffered by autistic children related to their ‘irrationality,’ their inability to ‘learn the rules’ well enough to ‘follow the game’? I highly doubt this as well. These are empirical wagers I would take any day. Intellectualism has been on the empirical retreat for quite some time now.
And I’m not sure what you mean when you say folk-psychology is ‘as general as the cognitive scientist’s mechanistic theory of the mind.’
I did not mean to imply that first order or folk psychological methods were illegitimate but I do think that a folk psychologist and a neuroscientist would approach a question like “what, in general, is the process by which human beings form intentions?” differently. I think that a general, neurologically grounded theory of intention could be more useful than a folk theory of intention in areas such as criminal law, where attributions of intent can make the difference between a five year sentence and the death penalty. If attributions of intent could be made as reliable as DNA evidence we could send murderers to the gallows with a song in our hearts. I think that neuroscience, but not folk psychology, has the potential to provide such a theory. (Alternately, such a general theory could be used to change the way we deal with people who kill other people from a criminal justice model to a psychiatric/medical model and possibly eliminate the need for the state to kill people at all. And I’m being a little bit silly about the gallows; we use the far more humane method of lethal injection nowadays.) I think that folk psychological methods can be useful in dealing with specific situations but less so in creating, verifying and implementing general theories. Neuroscientific methods can create general theories, which can then be applied to specific situations. I think that the ‘move so as to keep the ball centered in your field of vision’ trick that baseball players use to track fly balls is useful in a baseball game but if you know the underlying physics that governs the trajectories of objects in gravitational fields you can track the flight of a baseball but you can also launch a spacecraft so that it catches a gravitational assist from Jupiter and eventually comes into orbit around Neptune. Whether neuroscience will produce theories that are as explanatory and as generally useful within their area of application as Newton’s theory of universal gravitation has been for understanding the movement of massive objects through space remains to be seen, but I think neuroscience is more likely to do so than folk psychology.
Michael Murden,
The question of which model is more useful, cog sci or folk psychology is separate from whether any such difference in utility is captured by the first-order, second-order distinction. As to whether a theory of the brain that overlaps with the folk concepts of the mind would be deeper than the folk psychological theory of beliefs, desires, freewill, and so on, that depends on whether we want to be realists about it. From a pragmatic viewpoint, both the folk psychological and the neurological properties underlie the phenomena of human behaviour. If we’re going to be realists rather than pragmatists, we need a nonintentional “account” of what it means to speak of facts and of deeper and deeper truths. In any case, the properties of personhood are general too (all properties are general, by definition), and the same folk psychological analysis can be applied to all instances of that class of phenomena. That is, we can think in terms of rational interactions between beliefs and desires when interpreting any case of human behaviour.
So when you say that folk psychology is useful only in “specific situations,” the protoscientific point is that it’s useful in ALL specific situations in which those personal properties seem to manifest themselves. The very same point can be made about a mechanistic theory of personhood. Again, this doesn’t mean the two explanatory approaches are equally useful or reliable. One is scientific, the other isn’t. But there’s a formal, epistemic similarity between them, and the first-order, second-order distinction seems to obscure that fact.
Scott,
I think we internalize the folk analysis of the mind, so we apply it unconsciously. It’s not a mathematical model requiring all sorts of conscious, serial calculations. It becomes intuitive because we use it so often. I doubt it’s entirely innate, though. We have to be taught to respect other people’s intentions, as children.
I assume autistic children have a neurological disorder. No one here denies that the brain is tied up with the mind. As Pigliucci would say, that might be a point about ontological rather than epistemic reduction. So a brain defect may be sufficient but not necessary for abnormal social interactions, since an antisocial personality may produce the same behaviour without the neurological defect.
The reason I said folk psychology is as general as cognitive science (but not necessarily as useful or reliable) is that I was responding to Michael Murden’s comment that ‘we have folk psychology for first order questions like “I wonder what HE intends to do” and more scientific methods for second order questions like “what, IN GENERAL, is the process by which human beings form intentions?”’ (my emphases).
Who said anything about ‘conscious, serial calculations’?
Does the brain possess representations, ‘models’ that are somehow logically (supernaturally) related to environments? The evidence is clearly trending in the opposite direction, I think. So the brains of fielders, for instance, rather than ‘unconsciously model’ trajectory and velocity, adjust their position relative to where the ball lies in their visual field, relying what amounts to an incredibly effective heuristic short-cut geared to realtime sensorimotor feedback. The retreat of representationalism is tied to precisely to these kinds of discoveries, ones that require we look at cognition in terms of dynamic environmental linkages. The only thing preventing anti-representational, enactive/embodied approaches from sweeping the field, I think, is the insistence that the intentional phenomena associated with cognition count as positive explananda, and the whole problem of illusion and decoupled cognition (like prospection). Neglect provides a parsimonious way to dispense with these hang-ups as well. Certainly the brain recapitulates certain environmental systematicities, but only insofar as they facilitate actual environmental interactions, which is to say, as biomechanical components of a larger enviromechanical picture. Since this is all that is required to produce machines capable of doing what we do, the question is why we need any overlay of inexplicable theoretical intentional posits.
Knowing a bit about the developmental psychology of mindreading and having a young child has been quite an eye-opener to me – certainly enough to bring home the trouble with the learned/innate dichotomy. Mindreading, like language, is one of those things we’re hardwired to learn. There’s actually some interesting stuff out there on ‘mind-forming.’ The point remains, though, that there is a huge divide between explicit theorization (whatever it amounts to) and implicit capacities, between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how,’ as the debate is framed in the literature. My daughter’s mind-reading know-how is becoming more sophisticated every day, and yet she can’t cash any of it out in second-order terms. My daughter’s humanistic know-that, on the other hand, is entirely the opposite: it’s something she continually struggles to ‘internalize,’ to incorporate into her heuristic regimes. I actually think BBT has pretty good story to tell as to why there’s such a big divide, as well as why it generates so many problematic assumptions – such as those informing intellectualism.
Intentionalists have a vested interest in closing this know-how/know-that gap because they want to claim that their intentional know-that stories somehow inherit the obvious efficacy of intentional know-how. But again, it’s an empirical question whether intentional know-how has anything to do with the myriad kinds of (unarbitrable) theoretical know-that stories provided by intentionalists. Since I can’t see you denying this, I find it difficult to understand what you’re driving at.
If folk psychology includes both desire and belief, doesn’t that allow for making sense of rationality and meaning in terms of what one wants/desires to believe, thus ignoring the question of falsifiability?
Hello, Benjamin Cain,
Consider Oskar Pistorius. In a few days a South African jury will attempt, using their folk psychological mindreading skills, to determine what his intent was in the moments before he fired the shots that killed his girlfriend. I would like to think about intention in the light of that jury’s task. It seems to me that Mr. Pistorius’ intent can be a neurological phenomenon, an other-than-neurological phenomenon or a hybrid phenomenon, meaning one possessing both neurological and other-than-neurological components. Similarly, his memory of his intent just before he killed his girlfriend can be neurological, other-than-neurological or hybrid. If Mr. Pistorius’ intent at the time and his subsequent memory of his intent at the time are neurological then it should in principle be possible to determine his current memory regarding his intent just before he fired the shots. In other words if intent and memory are purely neurological phenomena it should be possible to determine by purely neurological methods whether Mr. Pistorius (or at least a future man in his situation) thought he heard a burglar or thought he heard his girlfriend’s voice one more time than he could stand.
If this kind of technological mindreading is possible it will only be actualized based on a general theory regarding how neurological activity generates psychological phenomena. When the Pistorius jury begins its folk-psychological deliberation they will be dealing with a specific situation, that of Mr. Pistorius, not trying to solve the general problem of how to determine what people intend by their actions. That is what I meant by “I think that folk psychological methods can be useful in dealing with specific situations but less so in creating, verifying and implementing general theories.” By and large, people use folk-psychological methods to solve particular problems, not to create general theories. People use first order methods to solve particular situations and use second order methods to create general theories. When the second order theorizing is successful it can be used to create technology that performs the jobs performed by first order, folk-psychological methods more reliably and more accurately than the folk-psychological methods. In effect technology made possible by a general theory of how neurological activity generates psychological phenomena has the potential to replace folk-psychological methods completely in situations where the expense is justified. To “think in terms of rational interactions between beliefs and desires” will no longer be necessary “when interpreting any case of human behavior.” I think that cognitive science is more useful than folk psychology because it can be used to create technology that solves the problems in folk psychology’s problem ecology better than folk psychology can. We are not there yet but that seems to be the direction we are headed.
I suppose that distinction is pragmatic rather than realist and I don’t have “a nonintentional “account” of what it means to speak of facts and of deeper and deeper truths.” I think that all human behavior is neurological/biological and that there is no mind independent of brain. I think that a complete theory of how neurological activity generates psychological phenomena is possible and that such a theory would enable accurate prediction and control of all human behavior based on knowing the neurological/biological substrate of that behavior. I hope I’m wrong.
One last thing… For most of human history determining the parentage of children was a common folk-psychological task. Consider Solomon. The legend has it that when faced with the task of determining which of two women was the mother of a baby he came up with a brilliant bit of folk psychology. He offered to divide the child with a sword and give half of it to each woman. The true mother so loved the child that she chose to give it up rather than watch it die. Today people go on talk shows such as Maury Povich to determine the parentage of children. Is Maury wiser than Solomon? Of course not, but he has access to better technology made possible by a general theory which in turn was made possible by second order theorizing. I apologize for the length.
Michael Murden,
I agree that cognitive science may prove more useful than folk psychology. Then again, the technology produced by cognitive science may ultimately destroy civilization by enabling the top 1% to enslave us all. Wouldn’t such a social catastrophe count against the utility of the mechanistic theory of the mind, including BBT?
You say that “By and large, people use folk-psychological methods to solve particular problems, not to create general theories.” I deny that that’s so. The Pistorius example is somewhat loaded, because folk psychology is used in quite general ways as well. Think of fiction, which works out lessons about how people interact, as such, and those lessons have general applications.
I agree there are differences between folk psychology and cognitive science, but the first-order, second-order distinction doesn’t shed much light on it. Cognitive scientific models are more exact and operational, and they’re continuous with neurology and other mechanistic, reductionist approaches to explanation. Folk psychology is motivated not by reductionism or even by the scientific interest in knowing the empirical facts.
Folk psychology has had at least two motives: thousands of years ago, we personalized ourselves because we were curious and we found we could tinker with our mentality to such an extent that we came to dominate much of the planet and thus seemed superior to the other animals. We personalized ourselves with theistic myths that explained that dichotomy between animals and people, by positing all sorts of magic. Alternatively, we concealed that dichotomy by personalizing the whole world, finding spirits everywhere we turned.
After the death of God and the modern rebirth of Europe, we came up with new myths of our uniqueness as a species, which posit not spirits or magic, but the powers of reason: the power of the self-made individual’s autonomy and of science and technology, including the less visible technologies of our social systems such as capitalism and democracy. Modern folk psychology, then, which is to say the modern commonsense notion of personhood, isn’t exactly the same as a scientific model. It’s not motivated just by methodological naturalism. It’s not part of science, although it’s meant to situate science within an ethos. We talk about our personhood not so much because we think people exist as plain, material facts. Personhood is an ideal; it’s shot through with normativity. Personhood is defined by the ideal of rationality and by various other virtues. It’s a myth of human dignity.
Is that myth entirely wrongheaded? I argue that the myth began as an illusion, but it’s not wholly a delusion because it’s bootstrapped itself into reality, as it were, by motivating us to train ourselves to be unique, to transcend our animalistic, mechanistic heritage. We create our artificial environments to teach us to be less like animals. We acquire habits of civility and so our behaviour changes, which ironically vindicates that dream our ancestors had long ago, of our greatness which they could grasp only in terms of fairy tales of spirituality.
…And regarding the relative merits of Beethoven and Britney Spears:
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/27/282939233/good-art-is-popular-because-its-good-right
It seems like the cake just walked into the earth, if you ask me.
Based on all this contemporary philosophy that I’ve read (particularly Blind Brain Theory), I honestly don’t know why I haven’t killed myself yet. Why the fuck do I continue?
As Kurt Vonnegut would say: “Give me the gun! This Party’s over.”
“Why the fuck do I continue?”
Obviously because you are living a life devoid of extreme hunger, fear and pain and you spend your time reading contempory philosophy. My guess is that you are too bored to kill yourself.
Why the fuck not continue? None of this says anything one or another about what you ‘should’ do, just that you are as much a mystery to yourself as to others. We have a hardwired allergy to mystery, which is why it strikes so many as ‘negative,’ but there’s wonder as well. A tremendous amount of wonder.
I hope you’re being facetious. If not the very fact that you are asking for a reason to live suggests that you want to live, so live. Your life does not require justification. As I have said elsewhere (on Rants Within the Undead God, in fact), there is more wisdom in 3 billion years of evolution than in 3000 years of philosophy. If your mind is telling you to die and your body is telling you to live, trust your body. Your mind will come around.
I was being somewhat facetious (and I was also incredibly drunk). I pretty much agree with everything you guys have all said. I get melodramatic when sufficiently under the influence. Apologies for any concern. I’m not actually a very depressed person. Er, carry on.
Hello, Benjamin Cain
I read your analysis of the subprime mortgage disaster on Rants and it reminded me that regarding the use of technology for the public good I can be quite naive. The technology likely to come out of cognitive science will change human life more profoundly than the industrial revolution or even the rise of agriculture. It may change us more profoundly than anything since Homo Sapiens diverged from (and then likely exterminated) the rest of the genus. By the very nature of this technology and by the nature of the society it will be born into it will be highly centralized. The possibility that it will be used to utterly enslave virtually all of humanity is real. I also think you’re right about the loss of fighting spirit on the left as its myths have crumbled and I admire your attempts to give non-sociopaths some philosophical backbone.
I also see your point about fiction, in that a good, sympathetic reader can extract generally useful lessons about life from a good story. That having been said, for me the best fiction feels like life, in that it feels like real, specific people confronting real, specific situations. I also think there are some folk-psychological attempts to construct general theories. The economic models you attacked on Rants can be thought of as folk-psychological general theories. They purport to be generally valid descriptions of human behavior and they are based on a theory of human nature derived from non-scientific observation. As you noted, they are not particularly good theories, but I have to grant your point about the existence of folk-psychological general theories.
Lastly, the myth isn’t entirely wrongheaded. The problem is that myths only work if you believe in them. It’s one thing for modernity to debunk a particular myth. It’s another to destroy the capacity for belief in myth completely. I don’t know what human beings will be like without a stable set of core beliefs about who and what human beings are. I think the loss of traditional understandings of selfhood is a part of the semantic apocalypse that deserves attention.
I’m glad you got something out of that article. Yes, it’s hard to see what we’d be like with no myths or delusions. The question Scott Bakker raises is about knowledge of our real self, regardless of whether we’re capable of assimilating and acting on that knowledge. That seems to me the first-order, second-order distinction that’s relevant here. It’s just the practice vs knowledge distinction. There are the mental states that cause our everyday behaviour and then there are theories about what’s really going on in the behaviour, regardless of the thoughts we have to entertain in practice, as we go about our daily business. It’s really the difference between folk practices and scientific discoveries.
What I’ve been trying to say is that, given a pragmatic view of knowledge, folk psychology stands between those two orders. The naive self-image is commonsensical and operative in folk discourse and practice, but it’s also protoscientific and self-fulfilling in the way I outlined.
Are beliefs and desires, as such, real rather than just useful to talk about for practical, first-order purposes? That’s a question for a metaphysical realist, and I don’t see how a proponent of BBT or of any other eliminativist, mechanistic “theory” of the mind, can help herself to that concept of reality or of the facts (since it seems to presuppose the concepts of truth and semantic meaning).
How is this not question begging? Say, as is entirely possible, that 10 years from now, the heuristic status of ‘concepts’ becomes an accepted scientific fact. What then? Is the scientific community still presupposing your semantic interpretations? I just don’t see how this line of criticism even gets off the ground, Ben. It is entirely empirically possible that we simply do not possess the gear required to think things like ‘reality’ and so on without generating cognitive impasses. All I need is this possibility. The fact that I have a comprehensive, parsimonious, conundrum dissolving, empirically grounded case for why this is probably the case just makes this criticism seem more like a Hail Mary play.
I’m aware of your point about circularity here. But are you saying (1) that the only current way of positively conceiving of reality or of the facts is the semantic way, which posits the correspondence relation between symbols and non-symbols, but that (2) it’s possible there’s a posthuman way of conceiving of “reality” that is entirely non-semantic? So when BBT speaks of the real self to which we’re blind through introspection, BBT is gesturing towards a radical conception which must now appear quite mysterious, given how unenlightened and merely modern (not posthuman) we are. In other words, is BBT like a work of theology that uses metaphors to refer indirectly and quite imperfectly towards an unknowable mystical reality? If that’s how you conceive of it, that’s quite interesting and it clarifies the issue for me. I hope I’m on the right track with that interpretation, because it would be nice to make some progress here.
Agnosticism is the easy answer, but not one I’m entirely comfortable with. When people discourse about the ‘real’ in every day contexts they ‘know’ what they mean without having the least way of making it explicit. Philosophy, of course, wants to claim that they are ‘presupposing’ one of the thousands of different interpretative explications, but there really is no reason to assume this must be the case, and good reason to assume it is not. This is what I mean by ‘flatfooted realism’: the theoretically agnostic sense of ‘real’ used by scientists and the folk without training in philosophical confusion.
But there’s nothing apophatic about this take, no more than any other skeptical position.
Well, there’s a sociological question here about where ordinary folks acquire their sense of reality. Are their realist notions hand-me-down memes from some dusty philosophy text or indeed from some decades-old physics paper? Does that sense of realism come from the ground up or does it flow from the intellectual elites to the less reflective folks? I can see an origin in blue collar culture, involving the “hard” reality of manual labour such as farming, as opposed to Ivory Tower decadence which runs counter to “reality.” This cultural notion may be bound up with the everyday idea of “reality,” of “the real world” of brutal economic competition, nature’s indifference, and so on.
Anyway, I agree it’s possible that we can’t think of reality and truth without generating cognitive impasses. My question then is whether science overcomes those impasses whereas philosophy doesn’t. You’re saying that scientists can ignore the philosophical issues, like everyday folks, without begging philosophical questions. They can just go right on “speaking” of the truth of scientific theories and so on, without presupposing realism as opposed to pragmatism.
But I suspect that any such post-philosophical mindset, assuming there really is no underhanded presupposition going on, amounts to a currently unknowable, mystical state of mind. I can’t imagine what scientists could “mean” by their claims to truth and to the reality of the mechanisms they posit, were they to eschew anything like the concepts of intentionality and the agreement between symbols and facts. So I seem to be in a position similar to that of a humble religious person who envies the enlightened mystic–except that this mystic isn’t yet born but may rise in the posthuman world after the cultural apocalypse brought about by progress in technoscience.
I think human beings are born with a sense of reality. I’ve never met anyone who questioned the reality of reality who did not have at least a smidgeon of philosophical training or a psychiatric disorder, or both. Regarding beliefs, desires and so on, if you accept the idea that mental/psychological phenomena are neurological/biological phenomena seen darkly you can say that a belief or intent or desire is a particular neurological state and therefore has physical reality within a brain. I don’t know that a case can be made for the existence of mental/psychological phenomena otherwise.