The Lingering of Philosophy
by rsbakker
The ‘Death of Philosophy’ is something that circulates through arterial underbelly of culture with quite some regularity, a theme periodically goosed whenever high-profile scientific figures bother to express their attitudes on the subject. Scholars in the humanities react the same way stakeholders in any institution react when their authority and privilege are called into question: they muster rationalizations, counterarguments, and pejoratives. They rally troops with whooping war-cries of “positivism” or “scientism,” list all the fields of inquiry where science holds no sway, and within short order the whole question of whether philosophy is dead begins to look very philosophical, and the debate itself becomes evidence that philosophy is alive and well—in some respects at least.
The problem with this pattern, of course, is that the terms like ‘philosophy’ or ‘science’ are so overdetermined that no one ends up talking about the same thing. For physicists like Stephen Hawking or Lawrence Krauss or Neil deGrasse Tyson, the death of philosophy is obvious insofar as the institution has become almost entirely irrelevant to their debates. There are other debates, they understand, debates where scientists are the hapless ones, but they see the process of science as an inexorable, and yes, imperialistic one. More and more debates fall within its purview as the technical capacities of science improve. They presume the institution of philosophy will become irrelevant to more and more debates as this process continues. For them, philosophy has always been something to chase away. Since the presence of philosophers in a given domain of inquiry reliably indicates scientific ignorance to important features of that domain, the relevance of philosophers is directly related to the maturity of a science.
They have history on their side.
There will always be speculation—science is our only reliable provender of theoretical cognition, after all. The question of the death of philosophy cannot be the question of the death of theoretical speculation. The death of philosophy as I see it is the death of a particular institution, a discourse anchored in the tradition of using intentional idioms and metacognitive deliverances to provide theoretical solutions. I think science is killing that philosophy as we speak.
The argument is surprisingly direct, and, I think, fatal to intentionalism, but as always, I would love to hear dissenting opinions.
1) Human cognition only has access to the effects of the systems cognized.
2) The mechanical structure of our environments is largely inaccessible.
3) Cognition exploits systematic correlations—‘cues’—between those effects that can be accessed and the systems engaged to solve for those systems.
4) Cognition is heuristic.
5) Metacognition is a form of cognition.
6) Metacognition also exploits systematic correlations—‘cues’—between those effects that can be accessed and the systems engaged to solve for those systems.
7) Metacognition is also heuristic.
8) Metacognition is the product of adventitious adaptations exploiting onboard information in various reproductively decisive ways.
9) The applicability of that ancestral information to second order questions regarding the nature of experience is highly unlikely.
10) The inability of intentionalism to agree on formulations, let alone resolve issues, evidences as much.
11) Intentional cognition is a form of cognition.
12) Intentional cognition also exploits systematic correlations—‘cues’—between those effects that can be accessed and the systems engaged to solve for those systems.
13) Intentional cognition is also heuristic.
14) Intentional cognition is the product of adventitious adaptations exploiting available onboard information in various reproductively decisive ways.
15) The applicability of that ancestral information to second order questions regarding the nature of meaning is highly unlikely.
16) The inability of intentionalism to agree on formulations, let alone resolve issues, evidences as much.
Three Pound Brain 
Reblogged this on Critical Clarity.
I had a doctor who, when I told him that I studied philosophy, said to me “Isn’t philosophy just a large grey area?”. It’s been a nearly universal reaction to the disclosure of my chosen field of study. Some form of “But . . . why?”
I still don’t have a good answer. The fact of it is that many Philosophy departments at many universities have kept themselves irrelevant, expounding the virtues of the pursuit of their discipline while hanging loose on the payoff. While the practice of Philosophy, of reflecting and asking questions and promoting a spirit of open inquiry, will always have its uses and merits, the institutional study of Philosophy, of its long history of erroneous theories and the often arrogant and condescending personalities who came up with them, struggles to find purchase as relevant and useful. As with other increasingly irrelevant anachronistic cultural fetishes, it feels like we are preparing to inter the discipline itself in a museum. It is as if Philosophy has become something to wonder and marvel at and ask one another with incredulity “Can you believe people used to think that was true!” Its just another thing from the past we can point to in order to remind ourselves how far we’ve come.
And it’s only worse now that every paper begins by rehearsing the critique of correlation. Rather than concern with access we are debating whether Egyptian cotton can ever touch the essence of the fire that’s burning it.
they can’t help themselves and we can’t help them either, godz help us all…
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/21/were-doomed-now-what/
Here’s what I think a trained analytic philosopher would say about this. The eliminativist owes us a way of understanding “theoretical cognition” that’s consistent with the elimination of intentionalism. If we should dispense with the notions of meaningful symbols that allegedly get at the truth by some correspondence or coherence relation, and if science is the most reliable provider of theoretical cognition, what exactly is science thereby doing? What is a theory and what is cognition? Presumably, these must be matters purely of causality. For example, scientists are interested in tinkering with the natural environment and they use their brain states and established cognitive methods to try out certain means of bringing about certain preferred environmental effects. That’s all “heuristics” should come to for the eliminativist: trial and error as a matter of utilitarian, self-interested causality.
What, then, are the effects that theoretical cognition is supposed to bring about, which science produces much more successfully than philosophy? The obvious answer is that scientific theories lead to economic growth and cultural transformation via technological progress, whereas philosophical ones don’t. Notice that there’s no mention here of truth. The eliminativist’s way of understanding the defects of philosophy must be couched in terms of utility and causality, nothing more. Otherwise, there would be no eliminativist way of understanding to speak of and we’d be back at square one.
Clearly, philosophers aren’t competitive in the business of testing and applying their speculations, to transform society and the rest of the world with technological innovations. True, ethicists may have an impact on business and medical procedures, and aestheticists may influence the fine arts, but philosophy in general isn’t as socially productive as science. And the response that I think most philosophers would be inclined to give to that fact is a resounding: “So what?” Philosophers were once in the forefront of trying to understand reality, when science was young and hadn’t yet distinguished itself from philosophy. Now that science has shown us all that we can stomach of natural reality—and the eliminativist must couch that statement in pragmatic, utilitarian terms rather than intentional, realistic ones—philosophers have another role to play. It’s the old Socratic role of bringing out the dire social implications of empirical knowledge, either subverting mass delusions along with the social order that depends on them (Nietzsche, Hobbes, Machiavelli) or helping the elites in particular come to terms with our horrific existential predicament (as in Leo Strauss’s interpretation).
If intentionalism is bunk, that itself is one aspect of our existential predicament which philosophers, not scientists, are interested in dealing with. Philosophers, not scientists, rock the boat with provocative formulations of the implications of naturalism. Philosophers, not scientists, speak to the costs of science-centered modernity (globalization, ecological catastrophes, etc). To be sure, anyone can address these issues, but what are scientists inclined to say about them? “Nothing to see here, everything’s going smoothly, no apocalypse on the horizon.” Pinker and Coyne, for example, both chastise pessimists and Nietzschean atheists for agreeing with a premise of evangelical Christianity, which is that naturalism undermines the popular self-image, threatening the modern social order.
Philosophers face those facts precisely because they’re not currently as privileged as scientists and because they identify with the Socratic tradition, whereas scientists tend to be blinkered Baconians who shoot first and ask questions later. Ask a scientist whether progress in empirical knowledge threatens the popular self-image and thus mass culture and she’ll dismiss the entire question as philosophical while simultaneously condemning the philosophical enterprise as muddled. Better to be a methodological naturalist and keep pursuing scientific inquiry until it deifies or destroys us. Evidently, resistance is futile in this particular stream of causality.
But if it’s all about causality, as the eliminativist would have it, the superiority of science to philosophy isn’t likely to consist in the fact that science is useful whereas philosophy is absolutely useless (epiphenomenal). Philosophy does have an effect especially on the elites who are acquainted with the philosophical traditions. That effect, however, is socially counterproductive, because philosophy is a twice-removed messenger bearing ill tidings, merely bringing out the subversive implications of scientific knowledge. Were philosophy simply useless, that would be because natural reality should stun us into inactivity, should paralyze us with a trance in which we’re condemned to see all our dreams reduced to insignificant vanities in light of cosmicism.
What scientific cognition does, then—and again, this pragmatic question is the only one that should interest the eliminativist—is distract us with a consumption-based society, so that people become fixated on a new, secular round of feel-good myths rather than pruning the trees of technoscience and capitalistic industry before they yield their full apocalyptic fruits. Is that useful? Does it make science superior to philosophy? If modernity ends up destroying the biosphere and extinguishing our species in turn, because we aren’t wise enough to use our powerful technologies, will science have been “alive” and philosophy “dead”? Philosophy, which tried to warn us that the popular myths are foolish, and that science and its “useful” applications are dangerous?
Think again.
“Techoscience” makes it possible for me to watch pornography while riding the train home from work, but many things that technology makes possible are unwise. I agree that science can provide knowledge but not wisdom. I don’t know that philosophy can provide wisdom. The Muslim Brotherhood has a saying, “Islam is the answer,” To the extent that philosophy is unable to prove (rather than merely persuade) its assertions it finds itself in the same boat with religion, astrology and other kinds of ersatz knowledge. This reminds me of Glen from “Crash Space” trying to explain why human beings giving themselves conscious control over the operation of their minds is a bad idea. Because religion and philosophy have been the primary intellectual venues within when men tried to understand how to live wisely, the ongoing destruction of philosophy and religion by science may be destroying our ability to seek wisdom. It may even be destroying our ability to believe that such a thing as wisdom exists. I suppose that makes sense. Wisdom is an intentional concept.
That having been said, I think that questions such as “what is cognition” are premature given the size of the known unknowns with which neuroscience is wrestling. If one accepts that cognition is at least in part a neurological process one can reasonably argue that knowing how brains are wired together in synapse-level detail (that is to say being able to, given a particular brain, specify every connection withing that brain and how each of those connections reacts to a given stimulus, etc) might be the minimum necessary knowledge needed to explain cognition, There is so much we know we don’t know about the structure and function of human brains that any attempt to work from the little we know about brains to explanations of minds is too much to expect. Philosophy of mind was so much fun precisely because speculations about mind were unconstrained by data. We only have a little data now, but apparently it’s enough to spoil the fun.
My bad on what should have been “Technoscience.”
Michael Murden,
You seem to want to have it both ways, conceding that the brain is largely a mystery but maintaining that the data point in BBT’s direction. Regardless, this isn’t relevant to my criticism of Scott’s article. I’ve granted for the sake of argument that we should eliminate intentional terms from our discourse. And I’ve raised the question of what that does to our comparison of the actual and potential *consequences* of science and philosophy. Is science still obviously superior purely in terms of what it *does* for society and for nature? You see, once we deprive ourselves of the right to appeal to the *truth* of scientific theories, we’re left just with such questions of causality.
Scott talks about how science solves many problems. And that’s true. Science has solved far more technical problems than philosophers ever dreamed of. But that’s not the end of the story, since science also has negative impacts, creating problems that didn’t exist before such as the problem of human overpopulation. We have to make just such observations if we want to rank science and philosophy on nonintentional grounds. That’s all I was saying.
These strike me as ingroup points, arguments that only provide warrant to the already converted. I think I can actually layout a far better abductive account of ‘coherence’ and ‘truth’ than any analytic philosopher could hope to, insofar as I can give them a plausible way of tying their intuitions into genuine theoretical cognition, and they all have their head planted up different ancient assholes. You’re right: they’re going to want science to explain their ghosts, but the extent they hold that as criterial, they’re just begging the question. “Your denial of my intentional posits is wrong because because it cannot explain the reality of my intentional posits.” Otherwise, it would be a mistake to think they have anything approaching a coherent explanation to offer of their own. They don’t, which is why they invest so much effort in dressing ignorance up as irreducibility and the like.
I guess I don’t understand your philosophical optimism, Ben. What has intentional philosophy ever decisively solved? Give me one example. As a result, I actually think your claims about philosophers, not scientists, rocking the boat is quite inaccurate. I don’t see intentional philosophers having any special insight whatsoever into second-order ethical or political issues: in fact, I think they quite clearly don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, which is why their messaging, as an institution, generally comes out as noise. Count the Yeas, count the Nays, forget the whole thing happened. I take this to be platitudinal. It’s only when you commit to some intentional position in these debates that you have any feeling of being ‘onto something important.’ It never is, hasn’t been in 25 centuries, so why should anyone take any of it seriously, especially now that we’re amassing empirical evidence that we were tilting at windmills all along.
Do see what I’m saying: these criticisms don’t so much challenge my kids-in-the-hall account as they merely shut the classroom door.
Scott,
I don’t see how you’ve addressed what I said. Why bring up the possibility of providing a better account of truth and coherence? I assumed eliminativism at the outset. That means truth and coherence are off the table. Forget about them. Let’s talk causality and minimalist pragmatism and see where that takes us in comparing science and philosophy. You say I’ve made only “ingroup points” that should be persuasive only to those already converted (to what, intentionalism?). On the contrary, I’ve thrown intentionalism into the sea, given you eliminativism, and asked that we rank science and philosophy therefore strictly in terms of their environmental effects. So you’ve gotten that exactly wrong, I dare say.
As for your second paragraph, I don’t see how you got optimism out of my account of philosophy’s social role. The point is that philosophy is more pessimistic than the centrist secular humanism that passes for scientists’ methodological wisdom. Yes, analytic philosophers largely assume intentionalism. But I’m talking about the upshot of the whole philosophical traditions, both the Western and the Eastern ones. What is a student likely to take from reading lots of philosophy? Optimism and centrist deference to popular opinions? Or skepticism and a creeping suspicion that life is absurd?
As I said, there’s a complication here since philosophers either try to subvert all of society (Socrates, Nietzsche, Zizek, Dugin) or they follow Leo Strauss and conceal the subversive implications of their interpretations of scientific knowledge (Locke, Spinoza and the early deists).
You ask for one problem that philosophy has ever solved. But I never claimed philosophy has found success in the Socratic role it’s taken upon itself. No one knows what to do about the world’s absurdity! But philosophers have tackled that problem head on. See especially the existentialists. My point was that philosophers attempt to draw out the dark implications of what scientists have shown us the natural world is really like, whereas scientists go full steam ahead with their investigations regardless of the cultural impact.
And I raised the pragmatic question about consequences: if science ends up destroying us all, which is a distinct possibility, will science have been superior to philosophy in the pragmatic terms which alone can be of interest to the eliminativist? The answer’s hardly as obvious as you’d have us think.
If we’re going to be good eliminativists and discuss only causes and effects, we must tally not just the many scientific solutions to problems that have been found, but the new problems created by scientific advances, such as the threat to the whole ecosystem. Read Harari’s book Sapiens, which points out that domesticated animals (including livestock) far outnumber the animals in the wild, and that we treat the former as machines, making life for them hellish. That’s a product of capitalistic industry which follows from scientific materialism. Do scientists speak out against it? Not as prominently as philosophers like Peter Singer. Does that mean philosophers are successful in halting capitalism and devising a new way of organizing the economy? Obviously not. But the scientific alternative was supposed to be soviet communism and look where that got us.
Anyway, if the truth status of theories is off the table as relevant only to outdated intentionalism, the comparison of science and philosophy must be based solely on a comparison of their effects. At present, professional philosophy has few social effects, whereas science has a great many. I think that’s because philosophers now side with Strauss’s view of their Socratic role: they’ve given up on the deluded masses and have concentrated on a minority of elites (like the neoconservatives who tutored and handled Bush II, the result of which was admittedly a fiasco). And who is responsible for those secular delusions? Not postmodern philosophers who follow Nietzsche in being skeptical to a fault, but the capitalistic industries (especially materialistic advertisements) that work hand-in-glove with science.
But your second paragraph still assumes the issue is intentionalism. Well, that’s the issue in your article, but it’s not relevant to my criticism of it, since I’ve assumed for the sake of argument that you’re right. Now let’s conduct the comparison between science and philosophy like good eliminativists and see where that takes us. That’s the challenge I’ve meant to raise.
Sorry, Ben. I was simply assuming that intentional philosophy was what you were referring to here by ‘philosophy’ (I bite the speculation bullet in the piece, after all). What Jorge says, I think, is a good way to look at where that speculation needs to go (naturalism, basically) to maintain any credibility in our akratic future. I fully agree that the debates will not come to an end, but I don’t think naturalism entails that everything be cashed out in terms of causality and interest–far from it, actually. The science will depend on forming actionable, systematic relationships–heuristics–in a great many instances. In some cases the mechanisms will be known (and the opportunities for intervention will abound thereby). But in a great many cases, they will not, simply because the complexities involved defeat our cognitive capacities. We will simply be disabused of the belief that anything magical is involved. We’ll understand that we have low-dimensional ways of solving things and high-dimensional ways, and that the adventitious nature of our resources and the kinds of ‘hacks’ happened upon via by nature generates cognitive illusions whenever we attempt to solve low-dimensional cognition via low-dimensional cognition. What ‘causality’ is or isn’t in some metaphysical sense simply isn’t significant given the high-dimensional nature of the role it plays. And ‘interest’ simply amounts to what we happen to find ourselves doing. We’re machines. After all, that is the truly abyssal upshot, right?
But it’s a fact that everything that you think is happening in your ‘phenomenology’ involves information boiling up from vast parallel networks to be consumed by vast parallel networks, that ‘you’ are suspended in an ocean of third variables. The more cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience learns, the more ‘thought’ is carved along material joints. No more noocentrism is basically what I see the Undead universe amounting to, one where individuals are simply stitched in by their lack of metacognitive capacity, there’s nothing supernatural.
This is what I was getting at when I emailed you a while back saying that I was willing to concede you the possibility of ‘aesthetic conceptualization.’ Because it does seem like a live possibility to me that–in the absence of information any other way–then why not continue casting the conceptual nets, only now using aesthetic as opposed to cognitive criteria? It even struck me that my novels could be characterized in those very terms.
Scott,
I’m not sure I see the consistency of your statements that “I don’t think naturalism entails that everything be cashed out in terms of causality and interest–far from it, actually” and that “We’re machines. After all, that is the truly abyssal upshot, right?” You seem to be introducing an element of ignorance into the works, as it were. You’re allowing for low-resolution answers, such as intentional ones, but you’re saying with Rorty, I think, that we’ll treat those answers with knowing, postmodern irony. We’ll know that some mechanisms are too complicated for us to understand, given our evolutionary weaknesses and susceptibility to illusion. And so we may even go on to talk about gods and leprechauns as well as conscious, free persons, but with Dennett, we’ll think of such things only *as if* they were literally so. We’ll know we’re employing in those cases the most ratty, last-ditch cognitive maps at our disposal. We’ll treat most of our beliefs as fictional.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but I don’t think this reckons with the scope of pragmatism. It’s turtles all the way down. Yes, scientific models are much more powerful than the ones based on cognitive illusions, like theism and intentionalism. But the very notion of truth arose from those illusions. All our concepts are infected with the illusions that amount to the ordinary human way of life itself–unless we develop a form of posthuman thinking. Postmodern pragmatism is a start along those lines. It means we should condescend to science just as we condescend to intentionalist philosophy. In particular, it means appreciating that scientists aren’t in the business of telling us The Truth or The Facts, but are part of the enterprise of artificializing the natural wilderness, as I say in that article I sent you. “Methodological naturalism,” which is the beginning and end of most scientists’ way of handling these issues, is a euphemism for pragmatism and more specifically for a step in the process of artificialization.
We begin to see the turtles all the way down when we consider your statement that “it’s a fact that everything that you think is happening in your ‘phenomenology’ involves information boiling up from vast parallel networks to be consumed by vast parallel networks.” We should realize, as I said before, that just as personal psychology may reduce to cognitive science, so too cognitive science would reduce to chemistry and thus to physics. Does that mean the brain doesn’t exist? As Kant explained, understanding something is an act of limiting it by carving it up with what we can call conceptual models. All our cognitive acts, including the most sophisticated scientific ones are therefore fundamentally arbitrary and gratuitous. This is to say they’re distinctly human ways of dealing with a world that couldn’t care less. In the final picture, which we can think of as the universe’s own, there is no such thing as an atom. There are no protons, planets, or forces of gravity or electromagnetism. There is only the nameless, undivided whole, as Heraclitus said. All else, meaning each attempt to understand and break down that whole, is pragmatism.
You say the world’s undeadness means there’s nothing supernatural about us. There we disagree (although I’m not here saying what you likely think I am), but I’m excited about our emerging common ground in the aesthetic interpretation of epistemology and morality. I think we should take on board something like Whitehead’s notion of metaphysical novelty. Nature’s undeadness consists in mindless creativity. That’s why we should be pantheists as well as ascetics. Nature is supremely creative, hence divine (awesome in its productivity and its saving of being from nothingness). But nature is also impersonal and so we informed, enlightened creatures living within the behemoth have an aesthetic duty not just to create, but to create in such a way that we negate the monstrosity of nature. To the extent that we’re artificial, we’re unnatural and therefore practically miraculous.
Anyway, I’ve written several articles laying out this case. Perhaps we should have another dialogue on how aesthetics might bridge our two projects. If you have the time, maybe you can email me your thoughts on where you see aesthetics fitting in. (When you say your novels are relevant here, are you talking about their medium or their message? I’ve drawn and painted since I was a kid, so we both share the artistic perspective.)
I’m setting up a print version of my blog’s essential writings. It’s up to 750 pages, and one of the six sections is called The Aesthetic Dimension. I try to get as much mileage as I can out of aesthetic values. They impact not just logic and technoscience (artificialization), but morality and thus the judgment of cultures. Nietzsche said much the same, but his writings aren’t systematic enough for my taste.
I fear I don’t see the inconsistency at all. I’m just guessing as to the way we will be figuring things out (in a progressively more eliminativist fashion, yes, but one which is still deeply heuristic).
And your second paragraph, I actually see as an example of the trap you keep slipping back into, this idea that some non-scientific story of What Science Is provides us a way to put the power/import or what have you of science in its ‘place,’ such that we can frame ‘turtle all the way down’ pictures that we can plug science into. This is what keeps duping pragmatism into cooking up normative metaphysical accounts. To whit: “As Kant explained, understanding something is an act of limiting it by carving it up with what we can call conceptual models. All our cognitive acts, including the most sophisticated scientific ones are therefore fundamentally arbitrary and gratuitous. This is to say they’re distinctly human ways of dealing with a world that couldn’t care less. In the final picture, which we can think of as the universe’s own, there is no such thing as an atom. There are no protons, planets, or forces of gravity or electromagnetism. There is only the nameless, undivided whole, as Heraclitus said. All else, meaning each attempt to understand and break down that whole, is pragmatism.”
The problem being that Kant was almost certainly wrong–empirically wrong. You’ve found an interpretative mode that allows you to pin scientific posits to your metaphysical lapel… and… so what? Who’s going to agree with you? Why should anyone agree with this story? I once did, but now I think I was just congratulating myself. Now I think, with a growing number of cognitive scientists, that ‘concepts’ are far too low dimensional to do anything but butcher what’s going on. I actually think Kant will be diagnosed as running afoul a variety of metacognitive illusions, and that his problem amounted to thinking a dogmatic account of human cognitive capacity could rescue philosophy from the excesses of dogmatism. Kant was a zombie, like the rest of us, prone to make zombie mistakes, such as think he was more than zombie.
The mistake is to presume that your posits and scientific posits dwell within the orbit of your posits, when plainly such is not the case. The science, I think, is going to shoot off in ever more technical, ever more arcane directions, delivering more and more power as it does so, transforming more and more, and becoming ever more unintelligible to the tradition. The only constraints you can count on attempting to interpret this are natural ones.
““As Kant explained, understanding something is an act of limiting it by carving it up with what we can call conceptual models. All our cognitive acts, including the most sophisticated scientific ones are therefore fundamentally arbitrary and gratuitous. This is to say they’re distinctly human ways of dealing with a world that couldn’t care less. In the final picture, which we can think of as the universe’s own, there is no such thing as an atom. There are no protons, planets, or forces of gravity or electromagnetism. There is only the nameless, undivided whole, as Heraclitus said. All else, meaning each attempt to understand and break down that whole, is pragmatism.”
the whole for kant has no determinate content. it’s just the idea that the reason’s explanations can interlock and form some kind of overall conceptual coherence. he does use it as a metaphysical thesis.
Scott,
What does “heuristic” mean here? Are you saying the low- and the high-dimensional models have the same ontological weight? Are intentionality and causality both equally real, because we’re being “heuristic”? I’m assuming heuristics are just rules of thumb based on trial and error. If we’re treating cognitive science as heuristic too, we’re into full-blown pragmatism. If not, goal-directed causality is deeper than meanings and values. Which is it to be?
Regarding Kant, I shouldn’t have used the word “explained,” as if I wanted to lay everything he said on the table. Of course I don’t defend the part of his explanation where he said his model of the psyche is epistemologically necessary, that his cognitive categories are necessary for human experience. I meant to bring up only his basic distinction between phenomena and noumena, interpreting the mental maps that stand between them with pragmatic flexibility. It should have been clear from the context that I was being Kantian only in spirit (because I went on to mix in other philosophers). So of course Kant’s particular model of the mind was wrong empirically and all his talk of what’s necessarily so may even have run afoul of certain metacognitive illusions, as you say. Still, this doesn’t preclude the pragmatic picture I’m giving which I take to be consistent not just with the science itself, but with methodological naturalism.
The question, then, is whether there’s some nonscientific context in which we should situate science, such as the pragmatic one I offered (Kant, Heraclitus, Whitehead, etc). You say it’s a mistake to think so and that I’m trying to limit science according to my posits. But this isn’t right. I’m trying to make sense of science. The fact is that scientists themselves have philosophical presuppositions that add up to methodological naturalism. Science has social and natural, evolutionary roles. Why on earth wouldn’t it? You yourself invoke a nonscientific context in which science should be judged when you say “The science, I think, is going to shoot off in ever more technical, ever more arcane directions, delivering more and more power as it does so, transforming more and more, and becoming ever more unintelligible to the tradition.” Since when do purely scientific theories entail that we should prioritize “power” and “transformation” as goals for science? Am I supposed to pretend that these philosophical assumptions don’t exist? Which is the bigger “mistake,” I wonder, to try to make sense of them or to let them slip in the first place?
You say the only constraints on science will be natural, not supernatural ones. I think you’ve been misled here by the double distinction between natural vs supernatural and natural vs unnatural/artificial. I talk about this in some of my articles. When I say we’re “supernatural,” I’m speaking ironically; I mean our unnaturalness, that is, our antinatural efforts make us virtually or practically, not metaphysically so. The transformations and novelties I assume are perfectly natural in the sense that they’re consistent with scientific theories. I’m talking about the history of our use of technology to transform the planet in the Anthropocene. And I’m saying we needn’t ignore the obvious anomalousness of that history, which makes it unnatural and thus virtually supernatural. That is, that history is the basis of our theistic projections and exaggerations; it’s the kernel of truth in the theistic myths.
But let me address the issue more directly. Does the philosophical/religious story of what science is generally doing have to be deeper than the science itself? Does it have to put constraints on science? I don’t see how I implied that scientists should limit themselves by my pragmatism. On the contrary, the pragmatic interpretation implies that scientists are free to try anything in their investigations, because the underlying motive is the urgency of progressive artificialization. Again, artificialization isn’t an appeal to anything supernatural in the sense you’re assuming. Science’s ties to industry and imperial politics have been well-established by social scientists and historians. (Recently, I’ve been reading Lewis Mumford’s and Yuval Harari’s takes on them.) There’s no reason to ignore them, because the connections are natural.
Indeed, the positivistic insistence that we should attend only to the content of scientific theories rather than situating them in some economic, psychological or other natural context itself goes back to Kant. You’re assuming the old distinction between internal and external questions. The former are supposed to have transcendental authority, whereas the latter are supposed to be irrelevant. According to the pragmatic view of models, though, nothing need be irrelevant in principle unless it’s useless in practice. So if you’re invoking the criteria of empowerment and transformation, you have no basis for ruling out the “nonscientific” picture I gave that encompasses science, unless my picture has no implications with respect to those two criteria.
Thus, I return to my initial concern: if pragmatic science is ultimately going to *disempower* us all by threatening the ecosystem, because science works hand-in-glove with selfish, corrupted capitalistic industry, and philosophy is more free to warn us directly about this danger, a pragmatist should be inclined to rank philosophy rather highly. In the limit case, philosophy may empower us by keeping us alive, by reminding us that scientists are effectively artificializers and that the replacement of the natural wilderness with an unnatural/artificial world is a dangerous, potentially apocalyptic business that threatens all living things. But I’m not limiting scientists by commanding that they cease and desist. I’m observing that science may be self-destructive, that reason may be accursed.
I don’t believe in ‘reason’ per se–or I should say, I think when we finally do understand it, it will make our traditional conception look like a fairy tale. The problem isn’t that you adduced Kant, but that you’re primed to make the Kantian mistake. You keep saying things like ‘we’re into full-blown pragmatism,’ trying to drag the problematic into the circuit of your (intentional) explanatory apparatus. That’s the problem, what has you simply repeating all the fruitless moves made by intentional philosophy more generally, and ultimately running afoul the conceit that reflection actually does offer some kind of synoptic picture that adequately captures what’s going on. You’re still doing philosophy the old way, leaping at what seem to be obvious (traditional) questions, problems, without pausing to ask yourself why anyone should trust the cognitive systems involved. The fact is, you can’t. Once you realize that, then the old intentional interpretative schemas need to be tossed overboard. You need to accept that only science can theoretically cognize its own activity, that your discourse’s relation to its subject matter is every bit as frail as other traditional discourses, and likely every bit as doomed. It can’t be the case that science has wiped semantic guesswork out everywhere except where your semantic guesswork is concerned. That ‘except’ has lost all credibility.
The best way to understand heuristics, I think, is as cognitive mechanisms that solve for mechanics without sensitivity to mechanical detail. This is the picture of heuristics that I think cognitive science is in the process of developing as we speak. I could be wrong, but then I could be right (and I’m not sure how your ‘pragmatism’ could be either). The challenge isn’t to find the ‘story of stories’ (such as pragmatism) but rather to anticipate the stories that the science will tell.
DivisionbyZero,
As I just said to Scott, I didn’t mean to bring up Kant’s whole system, so I probably shouldn’t have said “As Kant *explained*…” Still, it may be useful to compare the idea of the whole universe with that of the noumenon, and to think of those ideas as merely regulative. My point was that this fits into the pragmatist’s picture. It’s the reason we should talk more about uses and other effects than about truth. Instead of corresponding to facts, our symbols limit them–meaning the noumenal whole–in a human act that’s part of some natural process such as what I call the artificializing of nature (the wilderness’s transformation into an unnatural, potentially apocalyptic world).
Scott,
I think you’re losing the thread of the discussion. We’d established that I’m *not* bringing intentional thinking into the discussion. I’m arguing that philosophy may not rank so low on eliminatistic grounds, once we pay attention to the relevant causes and effects.
So the confusion here must be about what I mean by “pragmatism.” Look at how I’ve been using the term in this thread. For example, I said, “Now that science has shown us all that we can stomach of natural reality—and the eliminativist must couch that statement in pragmatic, utilitarian terms rather than intentional, realistic ones—philosophers have another role to play.” Here I’m explicitly contrasting pragmatism with the intentional, meaning-based realism about truth.
Or I say, “Let’s talk causality and minimalist pragmatism and see where that takes us in comparing science and philosophy.” The assumption there was that I’m not assuming a thick notion of pragmatism according to which the self that has the interests must be understood in the intuitive ways.
Yes, I used the word “concept,” but just about every natural language word used on this page of your blog has an intuitive default meaning, so that’s irrelevant. Indeed, I spoke of “conceptual models” partly because *you* introduced them in this epistemic context when you said, “This is what I was getting at when I emailed you a while back saying that I was willing to concede you the possibility of ‘aesthetic conceptualization.’ Because it does seem like a live possibility to me that–in the absence of information any other way–then why not continue casting the conceptual nets, only now using aesthetic as opposed to cognitive criteria?”
Anyway, my pragmatic, neoKantian point about conceptual models was that to fairly compare science and philosophy, given eliminativism, we need some criterion other than the obvious one, that scientific theories are factual whereas philosophy is highly speculative. Eliminativism undermines not just intuitions about personhood, but the realistic interpretation of scientific theories. That’s why it’s turtles all the way down: we have low-resolution interpretations not just about what we are, but about what we do, such as our doing of science. And I’m not the one putting science in a philosophical box; rather, BBT is putting science in an eliminativistic and thus an anti-realistic, pragmatic box. I’m merely reminding readers of that fact. Scientists would be talking about causes and effects, but they wouldn’t assume their theories are true; instead, they’d conclude their theories are useful or powerful.
Am I cooking up normative and metaphysical accounts? Not really. Whatever scientists will reduce concepts to, I doubt a concept will ever make causal contact with the entire universe. Indeed, I think the Einsteinian point about light cones establishes that fact. So this “pragmatism” is built into the mechanist’s ontology of causality. Thus, all our cognitive efforts are limited in terms of their causal impact. Philosophy is limited and so is science. We need merely compare those limited impacts to see how either is “alive” or “dead.” That’s really all I was saying.
By “pragmatism,” then, I mean the attention to causal relations, including the genetic basis of self-interest which directs our efforts. Again, no, I’m not presupposing that the self in “self-interest” must be understood in the intuitive sense as having meaningful and normative mental states.
You say, “You need to accept that only science can theoretically cognize its own activity.” I take it this is obviously false (or else it’s tautological). Of course we *can* nonscientifically understand science. What you meant to say, I think, is that only science *should* be used to understand itself, because, as you went on to say, the other disciplines like philosophy are “frail” and so forth.
Here again, I’d insist that we be rigorous eliminativists and attend only to the causal relations. Does philosophy’s frailty, that is, its lack of consensus on how to address its questions, entail that philosophy is useless in interpreting science? Maybe. Or perhaps the lack of rigid philosophical paradigms allows some philosophers to draw out the troubling, naturalistic implications of scientific theories–which is exactly what you and I are doing on our blogs! Will we change the world? Not likely. But do you really want to assume that might makes right? Because that’s how I’m beginning to see the assumption at the root of your anti-philosophy viewpoint.
Honestly, it’s hard to see what else the eliminativist is left with than an appeal to power, such as the power to transform, as you put it. If you go this route, though, you’ll need a consistent way to make sense of the “right” part of the equation, so perhaps that’s where aesthetic evaluation comes in. Science is better than philosophy, because science is more useful in transforming the world in aesthetically marvelous ways. Case closed–and notice how pragmatism and aesthetics help make sense of this justification of the ranking. We’d still be left with my concern that science might be self-destructive, but you might respond that that’s part of what makes science aesthetically admirable, since beauty arguable requires tragic finiteness.
You say “The challenge isn’t to find the ‘story of stories’ (such as pragmatism) but rather to anticipate the stories that the science will tell.” If philosophical stories tend to be false and scientific ones are reliably true, and that’s what we care about, then I can see your point. But if we’re eliminativists and we don’t care about meaning or truth, because those are weak, low-res glosses, it becomes less obvious why we should refrain from telling meta-stories. Again, shouldn’t the eliminativist’s concern be merely with the story’s actual and potential effects? Off the top of my head I can name a dozen types of effect of philosophical stories. These may or may not be “cognitively” or “theoretically” relevant. As you know, I’m not sure there’s a non-intuitive way of thinking of those terms. In any case, who cares if the effects are part of some cognitive process? Why should the pragmatic eliminativist be so concerned with cognition/knowledge, given that there’s no such thing as meaning or truth? Doesn’t everything become a tool with more or less utility or transformative power, on this view? Isn’t it turtles/causality/mechanism all the way down? What am I missing here?
“Anyway, my pragmatic, neoKantian point about conceptual models was that to fairly compare science and philosophy, given eliminativism, we need some criterion other than the obvious one, that scientific theories are factual whereas philosophy is highly speculative. Eliminativism undermines not just intuitions about personhood, but the realistic interpretation of scientific theories. That’s why it’s turtles all the way down: we have low-resolution interpretations not just about what we are, but about what we do, such as our doing of science. And I’m not the one putting science in a philosophical box; rather, BBT is putting science in an eliminativistic and thus an anti-realistic, pragmatic box. I’m merely reminding readers of that fact. Scientists would be talking about causes and effects, but they wouldn’t assume their theories are true; instead, they’d conclude their theories are useful or powerful.”
This is what I was taking you to be saying. Again, there’s nothing ‘anti-realist’ or ‘pro-pragmatic’ about BBT: again, it is only saying what (it thinks) the science will find, namely that intentional idioms are heuristic tools possessing ecological limitations. Scientists would conclude their theories were ‘true’ or ‘powerful’ or ‘holy’ or what have you, understanding the limitations of the idioms involved to the extent they empirically understand those idioms. It’s not like ‘tools’ have an edge over ‘truths’ on some eliminativist reality indicator. We cognize our environments via different modalities, and we communicate that cognition via different modalities, and in both cases, we simply neglect as much information as possible. That neglect imposes severe constraints on where those modalities will be effective. It’s a bizarre way of looking at things (perfectly ‘flat’ as a continentalist might say), I grant you that, but only because we so naturally assume our frames of reference as given (we evolved to do as much). The eliminativist, however, is entirely free to claim their position is ‘more true’ or ‘more powerful’ than its competitors. Stripped of second order intentional interpretations, the idioms themselves still effect heuristic understanding in certain communicative ecologies (which I actually see as endangered). Their naïve applications are generally their most effective ones.
As for why a ‘critical eliminativist’ (BBTian) should prefer theoretical effect over, say, theoretical romance, I haven’t a bloody clue. All I can say is that I seem to gravitate toward those things promising future impact. I have a child, and I’m sure that has something to do with my compulsive need to get some kind of handle of what’s going on.
Does that make more sense? Do you see why I see you as continually attempting to circle the philosophical wagons?
Scott,
The disagreement seems now to be about labels; thus, it’s ironically “semantic.” Instead of saying that scientists have pragmatic, philosophical presuppositions, you want to say, in effect, that they’ll discover the utility of those assumptions, that is, they’ll find that “intentional idioms are heuristic tools possessing ecological limitations.” They’ll discover, as you put it in “Thinker as Tinker”, that:
“Information is the solvent that allows cognition to move beyond its low-resolution fixations. It’s not a matter of what’s ‘true’ in the old semantic sense, but rather ‘true’ in the heuristic sense, where the term is employed as a cog in the most effective cognitive machine possible. The same goes for ‘existence’ or for ‘meaning.’ These are devices. So we make our claims, use these tools according to design as much as possible, and dispose of them when they cease being effective. We help them remember their limits, chastise them when they overreach. We resign ourselves to ignorance regarding innumerable things for want of information. But we remember that the cosmos is a bottomless well of information, both in its sum and in its merest part…And you see, my dear, materialist friend, that you and all your philosophical comrades–all you ‘thinkers’–are actually tinkers, and the most inventive among you, engineers…Effectiveness is the concept possessing maximal applicability…Once you adopt information as your new Master Heuristic, the antipathy between redness and apples vanishes, along with all the other dichotomies arising out the old, semantic Master Heuristic.”
So scientists will adopt the mechanistic, effectiveness/causality-oriented Master Heuristic—which is redundant, since “heuristics” is already mechanical, being “specialized information adapted for uptake via specialized processors adapted for specific cognitive tasks”; at any rate, the scientists will see us all as machines, interpreting intentional concepts as inferior to mechanistic ones, because the former will be low-informational tools, like Fox News-watching voters. But the inferior tools will still be tools, indeed innate tools we’re stuck with. You even say this sounds like Rorty or Wittgenstein, except that what underlies their relativism is normativity, whereas what underlies yours is the materialistic assumption that nature is made up of mechanical systems. That emerging, scientific picture of the self is pragmatic in the sense I was trying to get at. Instead of taking its terms from philosophy, it takes them from evolutionary biology. Everything becomes a problem with a specific domain that can be solved via effective tools. There’s relativism there as well as self-interested consequentialism, that is, instrumentalism/utilitarianism.
Or take some of your more recent writings:
“Correlative comportments, as we have seen, are idiosyncratically parasitic upon the mechanics of their environments. The space of possible solutions belonging to any correlative comportment is therefore relative to the particular patterns seized upon, and their differential relationships to the actual mechanics responsible. Different patterns possessing different systematic relationships will possess different ‘problem ecologies,’ which is to say, different domains of efficacy. Since correlative comportments are themselves causal, however, causal comportments apply to all correlative domains. Thus the manifest ‘objectivity’ of causal cognition relative to the ‘subjectivity’ of correlative cognition….what distinguishes causal comportments is an actual behavioural sensitivity to the actual mechanics of the system.”
Here, presumably, objective cognition is better than the subjective kind because the former is more effective, based as it is on “sensitivity to the actual mechanics of the system.” Again, there’s the materialist assumption that reality is defined by actual mechanics, meaning a system of causally-ordered material parts.
Here’s another passage: “The best way to understand intentional philosophy, on a blind brain view, is as a discursive ‘crash space,’ a point where the application of our cognitive tools outruns their effectiveness in ways near and far….Once one understands the degree to which intentional idioms turn on ‘inherence heuristics’–ways to manage causal systems absent any behavioural sensitivity to the mechanics of those systems–you can understand the deceptiveness of things like ‘intentional stances…’”
Again, we have the talk of tools and their effectiveness, the mechanist’s Master Heuristic. So I come along and say that if we want to compare science and philosophy, based on the science-centered eliminativism, we need to adopt this same pragmatic, relativistic, materialistic perspective. We’ve got to think only of differences in power due to the use of causal relationships; we’ve got to compare the effects/consequences. And I pointed out that science may bring our species to ruin, in which case this emphasis on effects might lead us to think of science as being as useful as a time bomb.
You’re saying I’m imposing a philosophical metastory to encompass science’s story. I’m saying I’m summarizing the Master Heuristic you say is emerging from science itself.
But now you’re saying also that “It’s not like ‘tools’ have an edge over ‘truths’ on some eliminativist reality indicator. We cognize our environments via different modalities, and we communicate that cognition via different modalities, and in both cases, we simply neglect as much information as possible. That neglect imposes severe constraints on where those modalities will be effective.”
Are you saying low-res tools can be more useful than high-res ones? Even when it comes to theorizing? Or are you saying that illusions are real, that even though we’re systematically misled into speaking about meaning and value, the mechanical underpinning is no more real than the manifest image of ourselves? I don’t know whether any such inclusive interpretation can be squared with passages such as the previous ones I quoted. At any rate, you’re well within the pragmatist’s territory. Rorty also wrestled with antirealism, relativism, and the like. Scientific methods may be only indirectly related to evolution, since they derive from cultural developments, but cultures themselves may have evolutionary functions, so we’re led to think of the scientific theories of evolution and heuristics themselves as tools, in which case we end up with the antirealist’s version of the liar’s paradox.
Regarding why an eliminativist should care so much about theories and cognition, given the pragmatist’s Master Heuristic, according to which the inner and the outer worlds are identical except that thoughts are instrumental mechanisms built by evolution to take us in a self-interested, gene-preserving direction, whereas outer (nonliving) phenomena are systems directed by physics, not biology, you imply that cognition “gives us a handle on what’s going on.” This instrumental idiom is well-chosen, of course, because it avoids the intentionalist’s illusion. But it also returns us to the issue: according to the mechanical Master Heuristic, it’s turtles all the way the down! There are only material things that can be handled more or less easily by creatures like us. There are systems that work or that have certain effects, given certain inputs. Those systems can be used, which is how instrumental tinkerers like us, being inquisitive creatures driven to survive, prefer to construe things. We can wrap our hands or our other tools around them and see if they fit. Cognition and scientific theories therefore don’t tell us what’s really going on; they enable us to survive by supplying us with powerful tools to make use of things-treated-as-systems.
The distinction isn’t, then, between theoretical science and *theoretical* romance, but between theoretical maps/models, in general, and, say, the telling of fictional stories or noble lies such as myths. Which further increases the chance of our survival? Science improves our standard of living in the short run, but in the end it may be self-destructive. Or the distinction may be between the attempt to understand things and the more extroverted way of life in which we act without thinking. On what basis does an eliminativist prefer one way of engaging with systems over the other, without appealing to any low-res ideal?
Again, are things really material systems or does that notion presuppose the illusion of meaning and truth? You say I’m slipping back into an unscientific metanarrative, but the aesthetic interpretation of nature as a set of artistic self-creations is easily derived from mechanistic materialism. I treat philosophical and scientific stories as ultimately things made that have aesthetic value, reinforcing natural horrors or nobly opposing the undead aesthetic with promethean artificiality. Just as your instrumentalism permits us the use of low-dimensional tools, the aesthetic perspective allows us to evaluate the originality and artistic vision of any story. Instead of saying you’re presupposing a philosophy, you want to say your instrumentalism derives from the sciences themselves or from what scientists will say in the future. Likewise, my widest-lens aesthetic take on everything is inspired by naturalism and the sciences. The difference looks pretty superficial to me.
Tool talk leverages understanding of heuristics, but nothing more than that. The instrumentalist idiom is fraught with metacognitive illusions of its own, more perniciously than representationalist idioms, I think. Performances feel so much less ghostly, supernatural.
Bottom line is that I’m a pretty odd instrumentalist, given that I don’t think there are any such things as far as reality is concerned.
“Are you saying low-res tools can be more useful than high-res ones? Even when it comes to theorizing? Or are you saying that illusions are real, that even though we’re systematically misled into speaking about meaning and value, the mechanical underpinning is no more real than the manifest image of ourselves?”
It seems clear to me that any tool can be more useful than another depending on the task. The intentional posits of traditional philosophy are ‘illusory’ in the sense that visual illusions are: heuristic misapplication confounds processing. The “mechanical underpinning” possesses more dimensions that we can exhaust–What else do you want ‘real’ to be? It’s what’s going to be on our autopsy report after all!
I don’t have any Rorty-like problems with realism or anti-realism or instrumentalism or representationalism simply because all of them are clear-cut artifacts of the kinds of heuristic short-circuits motivating my position in the first place. To me, our debate here has been pretty clear: I’ve yoked a variety of idioms to a far, far different theory of meaning than any out there, and you keep trying to pin those idioms to various traditional commitments I quite simply don’t hold. Me using shared idioms does not imply your understanding of those idioms.
Do you agree that your ‘tools’ are, when considered high-dimensionally, nothing of the sort, nor is the agency that gives them meaning?
“Because it does seem like a live possibility to me that–in the absence of information any other way–then why not continue casting the conceptual nets, only now using aesthetic as opposed to cognitive criteria?”
aesthetic is a form cognitive criteria though.
i guess i don’t see where you two think this is some kind of enclave. more and more mechanical creep is coming in day by day. the last one i saw was the digital composite images averaged over faces in a population of people converged to the ideally attractive face. i guess the idea was that the attractive person is a ‘spread’ of genotype of the population thus implying some kind of optimum wager as far as sexual selection goes.
I don’t see it the way Ben does, which is to say as a kind of theoretical smithy where we fashion the conceptual tools we need to live. I’m not even sure how I see it, at this point, save as improvisational and atheoretical. Any suggestions would be welcome!
Scott,
Your assumption that “any tool can be more useful than another depending on the task” is a pragmatic truism, but your way out of pragmatism seems to be your distinction between high- and low-res perspectives. In the same way, if we step back and look at things aesthetically, which is nearly the same as looking at them objectively, with near-indifference, everything looks like a natural or an artificial work of art, but there’s still a way of ranking them. The high- and low-res distinction seems to track the reality-appearance one, right? Without that, you’ve got relativism (whatever label you want to use for it).
You ask if I’d agree that my “‘tools’ are, when considered high-dimensionally, nothing of the sort, nor is the agency that gives them meaning.” I’d certainly agree that the discourse changes with the perspective. Obviously, we can think of ourselves in purely physical terms, in which case all sorts of things are ignored, including the teleological, biological aspect, not to mention all the cultural assumptions. We become physical objects, made of mass and energy. But is that low-res or high-res? In one sense, it’s deeper since you’re peering more deeply into the ultimate constituents of matter, and this takes higher and higher energy levels (e.g. the LHC).
But this shift in perspectives also involves a sweeping change of topic rather than just a zooming in. Things are left out of physical laws and principles, making them ceteris paribus, and those things are left out not because the scientist has theories for reducing or modelling them, but because they don’t matter for the scientist’s purposes. In particular, no normative consideration is relevant to the business of scientific explanation. The scientist isn’t interested in how we should live, but only in how things actually work. Does this mean the normative questions are low-res or just irrelevant to science?
I know you think you show the low-res phenomena are illusions. They’re “heuristic misapplication confounds processing.” But “misapplication” relative to what, evolutionary function? If scientists can ignore what doesn’t interest them, maybe we can ignore what the genes would have us do and supply our own cultural functions. That’s obviously what we’ve historically been doing for millennia in so far as we’ve acted as humans rather than lower animals. Indeed, I’d contrast your high-res/low-res talk with mine of higher/lower animals. So your talk of illusions assumes the cognitive scientist’s theory of evolutionary norms. Those norms aren’t normative; they’re only probabilities, not even physical necessities. The point is about what traits or species tend to do. What *we* tend to do, thanks to our big brains which detach us from the environment and from the genes in unprecedented fashion, is to chart an unnatural (anti-wilderness) course. If you can’t see that, you’re missing far more than you think I’m missing with regard to the cog sci data.
Anyway, without that reality/illusion distinction, your high-res/low-res dichotomy falls into relativistic instrumentalism, a kind of Baconianism. So if we strap on the cog sci tools and look at ourselves as machines, of course meanings and values and agency disappear. The question is obviously whether one perspective is supreme in the relevant sense or whether we’re stuck with relativism. You assume science is supreme when it comes to “theoretical cognition.” I’d say science is supreme only when it comes to understanding nature. We happen to be unnatural in the above respect, which is why we have the humanities to help make sense of culture. Thus, we’re disagreeing on the issue of whether human behaviour is anomalous.
You’re still missing the point, Ben. The following kinds of comments are what I’m talking about (how you keep trying to install a priori, intentionalist speculation (now it’s ‘relativism’) as something somehow superordinate to scientific theoretical cognition):
“Anyway, without that reality/illusion distinction, your high-res/low-res dichotomy falls into relativistic instrumentalism, a kind of Baconianism.”
So, on the assumption that BBT (or something similar) will be empirically vindicated, you’re saying, “Without applying the ‘reality/illusion heuristic,’ ‘dimensionality’ (which is continuous, not dichotomous, btw) lapses into an application of the ‘tool heuristic.'” How does this make any sense, short of presuming that BBT is wrong from the outset (which is a fair assertion to make, but belongs to an entirely different debate)? How can not applying one drastically procrustean mode of cognizing automatically entail the application of another drastically procrustean mode, especially when both turn on rampant neglect?
Your argument only makes sense so far as we ignore what’s going on biologically. The whole problem, meanwhile, is that we can no longer play these theory-games ignoring what’s going on biologically, thanks to science and technology.
Otherwise, the fact that science can’t answer certain questions could just as easily imply that those questions are unanswerable, either because they have no answer, or because science has yet to catch up to them. 25 centuries of near total intentional philosophical futility certainly imply unanswerability. BBT implies as much. So I take your bet to be far and away the longer one, and even worse, the perpetually underdetermined one.
So, once again, when I say ‘low dimensional posits are illusory’ or liken heuristics to ‘tools’ I’m not buying into any of these supernatural speculative schemes you keep adducing. BBT is not a relativism or an instrumentalism or an anti-realism or whatever. It’s an empirical account of human cognition that naturalistically dissolves the problem of meaning, which is to say, the bolus of confounds informing your account.
Otherwise, you can scream up and down that the limits of scientific cognition are this and that, but the bottom-line is that not only do you not know, you don’t even know what it would take to decisively evidence your guesses. Odds are, you’re just another in a long line of philosophers dragging your toe through the sand, asserting that the tide, certainly, cannot cross here. You are, rather obviously, I think, caught up in the credibility crisis that pretty clearly seems to be swamping all traditional discourses. You’re presuming (as all philosophers do) there’s at least two roads to theoretical cognition, the (bad) scientistic way, and a (good) aesthetically retooled understanding of the traditional philosophical way, one where all the old ‘isms’ retain some semblance of probative force.
But again, traditional discourses couldn’t resolve any of their theoretical issues over 25 centuries of relatively gradual ecological change: why should we think they hold any promise now?
Scott,
From where I’m sitting, you keep presuming I’m bringing in folk psychological/manifest image/intentionalist discourse even though I’m not. What allows that to happen, as I said, is that every word written on your blog can be interpreted as having meaning in the intuitive, semantic sense. Also, you’re assuming that because “relativism” figures prominently in the philosophical discourse, which takes semantic meanings and values seriously, I must be drawing on that background when I apply that term here–even though I said at the outset I’m not doing that.
Anyway, all I mean by “relativism” is the antithesis of there being one best form of cognition for the solution of all problems or for dealing with all environments, such as one that alone gets at reality. The alternative is that there are many possible forms of cognition and that they all have advantages and disadvantages, depending on the problem to which they’re applied. Substitute “heuristic/neural process” or whatever cog sci term you like for “form of cognition” and that distinction between necessarily one best way and openness to all possible ways remains. Thus the posthuman can be a relativist.
When you keep appealing to the pessimistic induction against philosophy, saying that philosophy has been nearly futile for 25 centuries, I interpret this as you inadvertently revealing that you’re not a relativist after all, because you think science alone can solve all our problems. Your mistake here is the same as the fundamentalist’s, which is to regard religion (or philosophy, in this case) as a failure if it doesn’t succeed in competition with science. So if the bible isn’t literally, transparently accurate like a scientific theory, the religion is embarrassingly futile. Again, the alternative is relativistic pragmatism. Maybe religion and philosophy have other functions which they fulfill. Do they fail in so far as they’re trying to be cognitive? That depends entirely on how the limits of cognition are defined. And again, once meaning is dissolved, I don’t see the utility of “cognition” or “theoretical”. Those words would have to be scrapped for being entirely misleading.
Philosophy’s proper function is to instill certain virtues, to enable intellectual elites to cope with their subversive knowledge of nature. The “theoretical” aspect of philosophy is almost incidental, a means of achieving that basic goal. Philosophy isn’t obviously a failure in that respect, nor is that role irrelevant to cognition. Thus, I reject your anti-philosophy induction.
When you say again that I’m buying into “supernatural speculative schemes,” that’s a cheap shot. I explained that there’s nothing supernatural about my philosophy–not in the metaphysical sense you’re assuming. And you’ve dodged the real question at issue, which is whether human behaviour is unnaturally anomalous. Are we unnatural in that we’re obsessed with ending nature, with replacing the accidental, undesigned wilderness with designed, artificial worlds?
You want to leave open the possibility that scientific methods are unlimited, so that a critic who throws around the word “scientism” is like the religious ignoramus on the street corner who shouts that the world is ending. But it’s clear that science has worked mostly as a way of understanding objective nature. Granted, in the course of their investigations, scientists have explained many seeming anomalies, showing that phenomena are more unified than is at first apparent. And just as science includes the idea of an anti-natural black hole, I’m sure scientists can explain unnatural human behaviour. Scientific theories are unlimited for the Kantian reason: to someone holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That unifying, analytical scientific map can then be used to achieve the social goal of artificializing more of nature, since we’ll be able to view each other more completely as (nature-ending) natural objects.
It will remain to philosophers to worry about the ensuing apocalypse, to wonder if there’s a way to live well in light of that anti-human, reductive knowledge. Science will be able to lay out the possible ways of life, but science isn’t positioned to take the cultural steps to push society towards one or another end–and that’s so regardless of whether we have freewill. Philosophy, religion and art can then step in, reacting to scientific theories and helping to fulfill our collective destiny.
Rather than proclaiming that science is limited, I prefer to take up the pantheistic, cosmicist, aesthetic perspective to unify scientific theories (via naturalism) and the other human intellectual products–philosophical speculations, religious creeds, fine arts–in a coherent worldview. That fulfills the purpose of learning to live with tragic knowledge in the interim before the apocalypse/singularity.
“When you keep appealing to the pessimistic induction against philosophy, saying that philosophy has been nearly futile for 25 centuries, I interpret this as you inadvertently revealing that you’re not a relativist after all, because you think science alone can solve all our problems. Your mistake here is the same as the fundamentalist’s, which is to regard religion (or philosophy, in this case) as a failure if it doesn’t succeed in competition with science. So if the bible isn’t literally, transparently accurate like a scientific theory, the religion is embarrassingly futile. Again, the alternative is relativistic pragmatism. Maybe religion and philosophy have other functions which they fulfill. Do they fail in so far as they’re trying to be cognitive? That depends entirely on how the limits of cognition are defined. And again, once meaning is dissolved, I don’t see the utility of “cognition” or “theoretical”. Those words would have to be scrapped for being entirely misleading.”
I think scientific theoretical cognition is turning the physical world into pudding. Don’t you? Otherwise, I’m sure a great deal of our idioms will be scrapped or redefined beyond all recognition. I have a long, empirically grounded account for why some of those words must go. Where’s your empirically grounded account for words like ‘cognition’ or ‘misleading’? Give us that, and we can see where the science stands in ten years or so.
“Philosophy’s proper function is to instill certain virtues, to enable intellectual elites to cope with their subversive knowledge of nature. The “theoretical” aspect of philosophy is almost incidental, a means of achieving that basic goal. Philosophy isn’t obviously a failure in that respect, nor is that role irrelevant to cognition. Thus, I reject your anti-philosophy induction.”
Using only words no less! I dunno, Ben. I just don’t see how claims to the ‘Proper Function’ of philosophy can ever be anything but philosophical. These kinds of arguments strike me as ingroup oriented, something that anyone so skeptical as me will dismiss with a shrug. And this, I keep telling you, IS THE DILEMMA. You believe that a great many folk philosophical idioms still matter, and I’m trying to tell you that they’re already dead as far as their outgroup credibility is concerned. Troy is overrun.
“It will remain to philosophers to worry about the ensuing apocalypse, to wonder if there’s a way to live well in light of that anti-human, reductive knowledge. Science will be able to lay out the possible ways of life, but science isn’t positioned to take the cultural steps to push society towards one or another end–and that’s so regardless of whether we have freewill. Philosophy, religion and art can then step in, reacting to scientific theories and helping to fulfill our collective destiny.”
There will be no end to Eckhart Tolles, I agree. You and I, however, will only ever be chirps in the dark. Science is already re-engineering innumerable institutions and relationships and is set to play an ever more prominent role. You assume otherwise, I think, because you miscast the nature of the dilemma as something not ecological. The problem is that we evolved to be targeted, shallow information consumers in unified, deep information environments. As targeted, shallow information consumers we require two things: 1) certain kinds of information hygiene, and 2) certain kinds of background invariance. (1) is already in a state of free-fall, I think (thus my pessimism regarding philosophy), and (2) is on the technological cusp. I don’t see any plausible way of reversing the degradation of either ecological condition, so I see the prospects for traditional philosophical discourses only diminishing. The only way forward that I can see is just being honest to the preposterous enormity of the problem. The thought that rebranding old tools that never delivered back when (1) and (2) were still just problems on the horizon will suffice when (1) and (2) are beginning to collapse altogether just strikes me as a longshot.
I think your argument is well-argued and to a degree I actually agree with it, but I see Mr. Bakker has already beaten me to the punch here. It strikes me as in-group rationalization, and I end up with the exact same question: show me what the discipline (which is to say the institution) has done to affect change in the environment it has for so long kept at arms length. Anyone can enjoy pondering a ‘philosophical’ question, it simply isn’t clear to me how a long, classical, expensive, institutional training in that act is suppose to improve its outcome (if that’s even what you think the goal of that education or even pondering philosophical questions to begin with is). This ambiguous pay off (the best answer I’ve got so far is ‘critical thinking’ which you could arguably learn from studying nearly any discipline) fails to merit its cost to such a spectacular degree that I’m left with vanity and social regard as the real reasons people go into the field. We think of ourselves as “big thinkers” and want the pedigree to go with it so that we can openly demand acknowledgement of not only our intelligence, but the important role we play for our society. This can only be argued in large part because that role is so vague. Our lines of inquiry often strike people as absurd wastes of time, not in and of themselves but in the context of the urgent immediate problems facing us. Too often we think we are giving rational argument in the defense of our field when what we are furnishing is actually apologetic defensive rationalization. I know what I’m talking about here because I’ve done it myself and have seen many peers and professor do it too. Heck, I could even argue that this is the primary role we are being trained to play.
But again I think its important to separate philosophical inquiry from the institutionalized study of the history of Philosophical thought. To the degree that through this study we are critically engaged with changing our environment I can argue for or at least understand defending this study, but the line of study itself is too often so esoteric and removed from practical considerations it sometimes feels like the whole point is to alienate the very society we are claiming to want to change.
James S,
I didn’t say much about the institution of professional philosophy. I meant to compare science and philosophy in general, meaning that we have to look at the actual and potential effects of the whole traditions and trajectories. I’m not defending academic philosophy, although I offered a Straussian interpretation of the apparent irrelevance of its scholarly discourse.
Yes, there’s a difference between the institution and the discourse, but my point is that if we’re going to be good eliminativists and go along with BBT’s interpretation of cognitive science, we have to think only of causes and effects (not of meanings, truths, or values). At present, the humanities aren’t as consequential as the sciences with respect to their professional capacities. But the philosophical, Socratic virtues of skepticism, creativity, and the love of knowledge more than opinion have the potential to curb the excesses of science-centered modernity. In that case, philosophy may not be dead, after all, not even in the eliminativist’s terms of efficacy.
Ben,
I agree with the values you attribute to philosophy. My problem here is that these “virtues” of “skepticism, creativity, and the love of knowledge” are in no way unique to Philosophy. These virtues are also thousands of years old, and are too easily hijacked and used to disguise their opposites. Any facility with ‘reasoning’ can become, and too often does, facility with ‘rationalizing’. How are we to tell the difference?
How is doubt supposed to change a world defined by actions anchored in belief? And where belief begets action, doubt begets paralysis. For me this is a big problem: what to actually DO with BBT?
Mine too. There’s the project of developing its discursive implications (by solving meaning I think it could leverage a ‘great synthesis’ in cognitive science the way evolution did in biology), the project of diagnosing the traditional philosophical project in its terms, but Ben’s question, the question of how to live, is the one that jams my gears. If BBT is right, then such a question is only adaptive in some indeterminate range of shallow information ecologies (I’m reading The Sagas of the Icelanders at the moment and you see this question raised and answered time and again). Philosophy, by adducing ‘deep information’ and by demanding categorical solutions, pushes the question into crash space, transforms the soluble daily problem of how to live into the insoluble theoretical problem of how to live.
BBT clearly seems to rule out the possibility of any credible Lebensphilosophie. I dunno.
“BBT clearly seems to rule out the possibility of any credible Lebensphilosophie. I dunno.”
Right, and that not knowing I would guess is the best approximation of ‘credible Lebensphilosophie’ BBT seems capable of furnishing. What was it, ‘the only certainty is that certainty is not your friend.’ This already sounds like a crash space to me though: another cuckoo’s egg, making certainty out of doubt.
But hey, what else are we supposed to do with this overwhelming native capacity for delusion? If it can be ignored at all I’d wager you’d be doing so at your own peril. I have some hope in our collective ability to access this higher dimensional complexity.
Indeed, I think the philosophical virtues push one towards renouncing the conventional way of life, towards some degree of asceticism. This is where philosophy hooks up with the esoteric core of the major religions. I like how Dostoevsky put it in Notes from the Underground, when he talked about mice and men who were basically the introverts and the extroverts. Getting philosophical is always a matter of taking a step back and asking the meta-question, the answer to which nonphilosophers take for granted. Instead of going with the justice system you have and throwing certain people into prison, the philosopher asks, “What is justice anyway?” The philosopher always wants to reinvent the wheel.
How should we live, especially in light of naturalism and the other accursed findings of reason, including cognitive science and philosophy? This is the big question that I try to answer on my blog. There are practical philosophy books out there, but who knows if they’re useful to people with very specific problems? Again, I think the medium of philosophy is more important than its messages. Its about transforming your character and your expectations, by reading lots of philosophy to think in the subversive, Socratic way. Of course philosophers aren’t the only ones who do that. Those Socratic virtues were passed on to early modern scientists who doubted the Church dogmas and investigated matters for themselves.
And now we find ourselves in the hypermodern situation in which we can see that science and philosophy are in some ways detrimental to our happiness. The question isn’t just how we should live, but how we should live with postmodern irony? What should we do with our farcical, anti-intellectual society, which reason tells us is bankrupt? When we still want something to believe in, which Roger Scruton recently calls the sacred, and yet our hyper-rationality dissolves all metanarratives, is there any worthwhile way of life left to us? Or must we live a double life, pretending to care about this or that, but secretly loathing everything in sight? This is just the familiar point about modern ennui. I’m working on a solution, but it’s certainly a pickle.
Ben said “I think the philosophical virtues push one towards renouncing the conventional way of life, towards some degree of asceticism”. I had just made a joke earlier today about the accompanying vow of poverty one makes in the decision to study such a field. Students of philosophy are certainly a select breed, but then so are Shar Peis.
“The question isn’t just how we should live, but how we should live with postmodern irony? What should we do with our farcical, anti-intellectual society, which reason tells us is bankrupt?”
In short I’d suggest that we love it or leave it. My complaint from the beginning was that Philosophy as a historical institution of study seems to constantly choose the latter (and then hijack the conceptual resources offered up by philosophy to justify their retreat and further demean the society they have failed to change), which for me is highly problematic. I’d call them armchair philosophers were the postmodern irony of it not so nauseatingly thick.
This is all to say that we should love our society. I think embracing it is the first step to changing it, and its the step that isn’t taken. It really upsets me how often my professors, past and present, take cheap potshots at popular culture, simultaneously establishing the very in-group mentality they supposedly were just criticizing, thus tacitly endorsing the maneuver as ‘critical thinking’.
Society may be farcical, but its an earnest farce.
At least I hope it is.
Benjamin Cain,
I did not mean to claim the brain is largely mysterious. By the phrase “known unknowns” I meant to convey the idea of details (admittedly a lot of details) that need to be worked out to fill in a picture whose broad outlines we already know. I meant to agree with you that science grants us power over the material world but does not give us any idea of what to do with that power. Most importantly, at least as I see it, is the fear that as science erodes the intellectual legitimacy of both philosophy and religion it erodes our ability to seek wisdom even as science gives us more need for wisdom. I guess the question I would put to you as a philosopher is what wisdom can philosophy provide regarding how we should live our lives under the conditions created by technoscience and capitalism? I suppose the related question is how can this wisdom make itself heard under the conditions created by technoscience and capitalism?
Michael Murden,
Fair enough. And your questions are just the ones that should be asked. I think you’re right not only to raise the distinction between knowledge/information and wisdom, but to question whether there can be such a thing any longer as wisdom, after the cultural apocalypse that should follow from naturalism.
Of course, I’m trying to work out for myself what should count now as wisdom. I think aesthetic virtues may be crucial, and Scott is beginning to agree.
What does philosophy have to teach us? The particular ideas that you learn from philosophy aren’t as important as the changes to your character that happen as you wrestle with the Great Conversation. If you study law, you start to think as a lawyer, and you’ll find your new-found predilections ably satirized by Kafka. If you go into medicine, you’re liable to be infected by the God complex (as Ben Carson evidently was) to the detriment of your friends and patients. If you go into business, you find excuses for your latent sociopathy.
And if you study philosophy in good faith, with a youthful open mind, you find yourself both jaded and capable of intellectual creativity, both skeptical and intellectually curious. I don’t know whether that combination of character traits will help us discover a respectable path in our posthuman future. What we have in store for us is likely to be as terrifying as McConaughey’s descent into the black hole in the movie Interstellar. This is why I’ve been calling for a respectable, postmodern pantheistic religion, to ease us into the abyss and perhaps to guide us out of it.
In the first place, though, we need a respectable way to talk about values so that we can rank our goals without falling into postmodern, feminized tolerance for the alleged equal merit of all goals and cultures. This is where aesthetics would come in. Wisdom would be a kind of artistic creativity, the mastery of life according to artistic standards that put us in proper alignment with what Daoists call the way of the world–except that contrary to Daoism, we should resist that way, as Schopenhauer said, not succumb to it. Nature’s creativity is monstrously undead and thus indifferent to the miraculous anomaly of life, and so enlightened animals ought to create an unnatural world to replace nature. That’s what we’ve been doing for thousands of years, but our artificial habitats have a habit of falling back into animalism, as when we allow power to corrupt us. And so we struggle with the temptation to fall back into unoriginal animalism and with the terrifying prospect of fulfilling our anomalousness and being as original and unnatural as possible.
Philosophy straddles science, mathematics, psychology, and art. In a world where specialization is increasingly valued, it’s no wonder it looks like it is dying.
To anyone studying philosophy reading this, I would strongly suggest that you become a specialist in something else while simultaneously studying philosophy. Learn biology and neuroscience. Learn number theory. Learn cognitive psychology. Learn to write fantasy fiction.
While being an armchair philosopher may be a dying profession, there’s no reason why the rhetorical techniques and language games learned in philosophy can’t aid other endeavors.
I think Ben has a point, in a way. What’s the point of ‘imprinting’ upon science like a baby bird imprints on a human as it’s mother? Animals raised exclusively by humans are kinda weird and at odds with their own biology even for the stretches their synapses have had to make, Philosophy might be the drunkard uncle or sloshed aunt (pffft – ‘might’!). But they are definitely family. Where is the science on the potential socio cultural damage to humans produced BY scientific discovery? Where’s the science on us being made into weird little imprinted on science animals?
But yeah, Uncle and Aunt can’t acknowledge to themselves they are alcoholics. They leave the table bare for their drunken stupor, while science leaves out food – tames us. Makes us adopt it. Imprint on it.
It’d be an edge runner role – to accept the findings of science on ones drunkenness in order to play a human guardian and guide to humanity against the human continuum wrecking effects of scientific discovery. Maybe it’s something like this that Scott keeps ragging on at the various philosophers and humanities peoples rather than just discarding them like the irretrievable drunks they not only appear to be, but celebrate themselves as (‘Performative contradiction! *glug glug glug!*’)
So yeah, maybe if philosophers want to be of ‘use’ (yes, that terrible word!) to family, they have to swallow some of the hemlock of science to acknowledge being drunkards before they can get some food on the table (hell, sometimes even literally so! I know, such a dirty feeling! That’s…laboring! And ye got into philosophy to move up/, didn’t ye?)
That’s quite the extended metaphor, Callan. You ask “Where is the science on the potential socio cultural damage to humans produced BY scientific discovery? Where’s the science on us being made into weird little imprinted on science animals?”
Of course, science tells us all about the effects of our actions. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, warns us about what will happen if we keep consuming the planet’s nonrenewable resources. He even makes value judgments, but when he does so he’s no longer speaking as a scientist, but as a liberal secular humanist.
What would a truly scientific value judgment be like? Is that a contradiction in terms? Scientists objectify phenomena and so subjectivity is anathema to scientific methods. Values guiding our choices of what should be done–as opposed to our judgments of what is factually the case–seem to be subjective along with qualia.
The exceptions, though, are aesthetic values since nature itself is plainly creative (and destructive), and we appreciate aesthetic properties of beauty and ugliness when we look at something objectively/quasi-scientifically. When we step into an art museum and look at a painting, we appreciate its aesthetic dimension precisely when we lay aside our subjective preoccupations and biases and scrutinize what’s there before us on the canvas. An artwork’s aesthetic status is thus paradoxically objective. That’s the start of science-centered wisdom, I think.
What would a truly scientific value judgment be like? Is that a contradiction in terms? Scientists objectify phenomena and so subjectivity is anathema to scientific methods. Values guiding our choices of what should be done–as opposed to our judgments of what is factually the case–seem to be subjective along with qualia.
That probably explains why there is no science on the effect of science – it has no principle for which it would turn back on itself and examine it’s own effect. Concioussnessless. Or maybe some fancy word IDK would describe that better.
Of course, that’s kind of BS because the processing done to do the act of science is essentially funded by emotion/desire/etc. That processing just doesn’t happen without the go ahead of some sort emotive agenda at the start of each processing cycle (to describe it as such). So while one might say science itself has no principle to turn back on, it’s practitioners acting as if the same applies to them is a load of BS. As it’s probably quite scientifically provable that synaptic processing is initially triggered by desires/certain primal processing elements of the brain. But maybe that slash in between is the big problem – either it’s a desire, so outside their field/outside what they actually think about, or it’s just a processing thingie and so no warrant for anything. Just as hard divide as some (most?) philosophers make between mind/materialism.
When we step into an art museum and look at a painting, we appreciate its aesthetic dimension precisely when we lay aside our subjective preoccupations and biases and scrutinize what’s there before us on the canvas. An artwork’s aesthetic status is thus paradoxically objective. That’s the start of science-centered wisdom, I think.
I don’t think I can agree aesthetic is objective. That’s going back to the drink, to use my analogy.
I’d think the idea of refering to aesthetic is to cut back on the drink by going from some sort of cosmological rules(/ontology?) of what is and start refering to an aesthetic, which is much lower proof (the alcoholic kind of proof!). Referring more to preference. Not quite so drunk. But as much as it’s less drunk, one can acknowledge a lot more objective components that are built into the aesthetic. But just the idea of the aesthetic itself being entirely objective? You’d have to show some evidence on how that’s the case. But really I find it valuable and have a personal commitment to the value of cutting back on the drink, so to speak, Ben.
Maybe instead of philosophy of science we should start by discussing the politics of science. Large Hadron Colliders and Human Genome Projects don’t come cheap. How do we as a polity decide who bears the costs of technoscience and who reaps the benefits? How do we decide what science should be done? Are there better alternatives than the current model, where those questions are decided by for-profit corporations so that the costs are borne by he public at large and the benefits accrue to the owners and managers of those corporations? If so, how can we move from the current model to those alternatives?
Can philosophy help us to address questions such as these? I think Ben and Callan are right that philosophy can play a role by informing debates about these issues, but I think Scott is right that philosophy can’t play this role until philosophers get over the need to perceive philosophy as ‘prior to’ or ‘grounding’ science. The intentional philosophy we have is keeping us from having the political philosophy we need.
but I think Scott is right that philosophy can’t play this role until philosophers get over the need to perceive philosophy as ‘prior to’ or ‘grounding’ science.
Ie the attempt to kind of mash the square peg of science to fit the round hole of philosophy. Yup, fair call Michael. Though the other way around is hard, I think it deserves to be noted – it’s mashing the round peg of philosophy to fit the bizarre findings square of science. But I think peeps need to avoid having an ‘ex smokers hate smoking the most’ response to any backward philosophical practitioners – IMO it’ll just make that hard even harder.
Andy Clark: Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action& Embodied Mind
http://philosophyofbrains.com/author/clarka
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/77308-2/
Kathinka Evers is a philosopher working at the cutting edge of neuroethics
Scott, I don’t disagree with your position but think much of this only applies to philosophy of mind rather than philosophy in general. I mean, the subject is very broad: ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, political philosophy, epistemology, you name it. Obviously, there’s also different traditions of practicing philosophy and a lot of reflection on the role of philosophy which is usually covered in metaphilosophy classes. So, I think talking generally about philosophy is a bit misleading, more so than talking about science in general. Unless you show a way of generalizing your conclusions about philosophy of mind, to cover the entire spectrum. But that effort will probably rely on some crude reductionist story.
I never said speculation was going away, just philosophy that trades in intentional idioms/posits as basic explanatory tools–intentionalism, which cuts across all the distinctions you raise. This is the argument as posed: these idioms adventitiously turn on neglect regarding what’s going on. Why expect them to tell us what’s going on?
Unrelated, but still worthy of your attention Scott-
http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions-of-a-free-to-play-producer/
The problem being that Kant was almost certainly wrong–empirically wrong.
I can’t tell if Scott is saying to Ben that he can’t get through this without admitting he is, with all this philosophy stuff, an alcoholic so to speak. Or whether Scott thinks there is a claim that is not equal here. If we’re going to talk empiric, is there such a thing as a ‘claim’?
Assessment processors hover around the blackboxes they don’t know – unless there’s an answer to why there is a universe at all, the practice of science will hover around a blackbox. Maybe not the particular blackbox we humans have tended to hover around and have become accustomed to. But while we do the processing work, it’ll be our desires/our particular hovering that drives where the pinpoint investigations of science end up poking. A weird crown of thorns starfish, each needle extending out from the human.
The mistake is to presume that your posits and scientific posits dwell within the orbit of your posits, when plainly such is not the case.
Apart from maybe providing an impetus to the first step of alchoholism recovery of admitting you’re an alcoholic, what is the point of saying this? What is anyone gunna do about this, apart from from non normalising it?
Seems to me Ben is pretty much biting a bunch of bullets. Maybe he’s missing the philosophical drunkess one – but apart from that, what else is there without ceasing to be human anyway?
– Confused Spectator and highly skilled at wasting posting space
Callan,
Are you saying all humans are drunk on philosophy? When Scott says science will become more and more technical, and will continue to empower us and transform the world more and more, it looks to me like he’s assuming some nonscientific priorities in his ranking of science and philosophy. Crudely put, he’s saying science is better than philosophy, because science is more powerful and might makes right. That’s a nonscientific, political story that underlies the assumption that science progresses more than does philosophy. But this assumes also that technoscientific power is ultimately, rather than just temporarily, progressive. Maybe science’s allegiance with sociopathic capitalism is currently dooming us, in which case our scientific empowerment is itself an illusion, and we need to rethink the rankings of science and philosophy on pragmatic, naturalistic grounds. So it’s beers and philosophy all around!
Hey Ben,
I think I get what you mean with the politics – it’s describing the practice of science in very non scientific ways. But I think the question is of how accurately anyone thinks they are describing science. Compare the difference between someone who evaluates science through a very kludgey, vague, rough and heuristic way and knows they are doing that (in my analogy, the knowing is the admitting to being an alcoholic) vs someone who evaluates science through a very kludgey, vague, rough and heuristic way and…does not know it. And as such sees their evaluation and perfectly accurate. They don’t at all acknowledge their evaluation system as compromised.
I can read a lot of your posts as being the former, when you engage science – that you’re describing in your own posits (as Scott puts it) because what else is a drunk gunna do, so to speak? So of course you’re engaging science with what capacity to evaluate you have – and in light of this Scott sounds a bit like he’s trying to say science has true claims and aught to be taken seriously at a personal level (technical side note: science never comes to a conclusion, ever. It’s true practice acknowledges that the experiment could always turn out different on the millionth run. Only men/women come to conclusions)
But the other way I guess I could read you posts is that you think you are assessing science with a perfectly accurate capacity to assess. And Scott is trying to raise the accomplishments of science to try and put a crack in your sense of perfectly accurate assessment.
I’ve read you as the former. But I could be wrong. Do you think there are any beer goggles in between science and your perceiving of science? Yes, any time someone talks up science, it seems like scientism – but perhaps they mean less to talk about science and more to talk about the beer goggles we all wear?
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/consciousness-and-crazyism-responses-to-critique-of-integrated-information-theory/
the everyday doings of research science (and the related applications/engineering) have little to nothing to do with conceptualizations of Science, for more detail check out:
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-to-think-about-science-part-4-1.465007
“How to live?”
How did you live before?
The question seems to be one of ‘how to encompass this?’ even as Ben seems to be chided for treating philosophy as encompassing science/acting as if it can encompass it.
James S.,
But hey, what else are we supposed to do with this overwhelming native capacity for delusion?
I would think calling anything delusion would be toward some practical purpose – like maybe reducing occurrences of going off to kill other humans in the name of sky fairies, for example.
Without practical purpose, calling out delusions…well, eventually ‘delusions’ becomes a delusion.
Without a sense of the practical to navigate by, where would the whole delusion witch hunt thing end? At the bit that ‘just knows’ without any sense of practicality by which to measure that?
Ben says “The eliminativist owes us a way of understanding “theoretical cognition” that’s consistent with the elimination of intentionalism.” I think part of the disagreement between Ben and Scott is that Scott sees himself as presenting a scientific theory that explains why philosophers make certain kinds of philosophical arguments, rather than a philosophical argument. To me this implies that Scott sees himself as owing science a set of empirically testable claims and perhaps a set of experimental designs to test them. It implies that Scott does not see himself as owing “us” (meaning philosophers) anything.
One might even argue that since “scientific theories lead to economic growth and cultural transformation via technological progress” it is the job of philosophers of science to explain how science has the effects on the material world that it does. Scientists, and the engineers and business people with whom they are aligned, plainly have no interest in doing so. Indeed scientists don’t seem to believe that the ability of science to affect the material world stands in need of explanation at all.
But one unfortunate effect of science’s disdain for philosophy is a certain naiveté about some issues regarding which philosophy might be useful. One of the things I liked about “Crash Space” was Glen’s predicament. The story seemed to imply that business people, and the scientists who make technological process possible, have no intellectual tools that could be used to think about the consequences of technoscience. The story seemed to imply that technoscience types (meaning scientists, engineers, businessmen etc.) believe that because the intellectual tools they use for doing technoscience can’t be used for thinking about the consequences of technoscience or about normative issues regarding technoscience, technoscience types are absolved from any responsibility for the consequences of technoscience. Some scientists seem to believe that the intellectual tools employed by technoscience are the only legitimate tools, and that questions which can’t be answered using those tools are not legitimate questions. This naiveté is self-serving to some extent. Scientists do science, so they understandably do not wish to see entities outside of science exercise any control over science. For example many biologists believe that non-scientists’ opinions about embryonic stem cell research are illegitimate regardless of their content because non-scientists do not have ‘standing’ to offer opinions about matters which scientists believe to be within their exclusive domain. (Of course some theologians believe that some of the issues fall into their exclusive domain.)
As I mentioned in a previous comment, I think the primary intellectual venues within which human beings seek wisdom are philosophy and religion. To the extent that science delegitimizes religion and philosophy science delegitimizes wisdom. What, if anything, can science offer in its place?
[…] way of continuing the excellent conversation started in Lingering: The problem is that we evolved to be targeted, shallow information consumers in unified, deep […]
The points you raise have given me some sleepless nights 😉 The only area where institutional philosophy is valuable to some extent today is small fringe areas of the philosophy of science(as long as people have the formal training to engage in real scientific problems in biology, cognitive science, physics…) In case of doubt look in the science section for interesting new philosophy. Even though academic philosophy today can be classified as “scientific” garbage collection at best some notable counter-examples should be mentioned
– http://www.nickbostrom.com/old/predict.html
– http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-philosophy-of-guessing-has-harmed-physics-expert-says/
– work by Nassim Taleb who is able to use philosophical/cognitive science heuristics(Popper & Kahnemann) in finance/risk management where pseudoscience is still pervasive
As far as metacognition is concerned, you should check out (2nd order) cybernetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics especially stuff by Heinz von Foerster, one of the scientific/philosophical founders of cognitive science.
Welcome to the board. I agree with your estimation of philosophy, largely, but we do need some kind of post-intentional way of thinking through the shallow information tools we use to troubleshoot our conduct. Otherwise, these are some great links! Cybernetics remains my big blind spot: I’ve read Luhmann here and there for years, but very little else. I’ve yet to crack Pickering’s last book. If you ever run across overlaps or relevances you think important, by all means let me know.
I cannot but agree with you on the necessity of a post-intentional way of thinking about cognition, otherwise we will only keep fooling ourselves with ‘intuitive’ but wrong conceptions of ourselves. This quote by Dennett illustrates these issues in the philosophy of mind pretty well (nevermind his own ravings about intentionality):
“They have proceeded as if the deliverances of their brute intuitions were not just axiomatic-for-the-sake-of-the-project but true, and, moreover, somehow inviolable … One vivid … sign of this is the curious reversal of the epithet ‘counterintuitive’ among philosophers of mind. In most sciences, there are few things more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind a counterintuitive ‘result’ (for example, a mind-boggling implication of somebody’s ‘theory’ of perception, memory, consciousness or whatever) is typically taken as tantamount to a refutation. This affection for one’s current intuitions … installs deep conservatism in the methods of philosophers.” (Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, Ladyman et al., 2007)
Cybernetics most certainly has big overlaps with your posts on metacognition(among other things); I can wholeheartedly recommend these 2 books:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=9ae13f4d7e646f8758e9f7c6616e56df
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=861A342AED90CCE1A4C15AE2375CC3F7
Another invaluable resource is the website by astrophysicist Bob Doyle who tries to merge physics, cognitive science, neurobiology & philosophy to tackle old philosophical questions of mind, free will etc.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/mind/
Check out his great talk on the problem of free will
These are gold, polymechanos, thank you. Do you know of anything exploring the connections between old school cybernetics and complex adaptive systems science?
You should check out Santa Fe Institute publications and stuff on principia cybernetica
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/LIBRARY.html
http://santafe.edu
This looks especially interesting:
Click to access cognitivesystems.pdf
http://www.santafe.edu/research/videos/play/?id=276ef16d-b4d9-41b1-96bc-679a4e0c1e3f
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