Differently abled?

So, this post of Jon Cogburn's about ableism. (See also here.) I wanted to try to sort the wheat from the chaff in both the post and the comments without spending all day doing so, but in an hour I didn't manage to get far at all into the whole thing. Instead of a point-by-point commentary, then, here's more of a summary with comment.

I take his key claim to be this:

all else being equal, it is better to be able. Speaking in ways that presuppose this is not bad, at least not bad merely in virtue of the presupposition 

That it is better to be able than disabled is surely close to being analytic, although of course one might disagree about its always being better to be "able" than "disabled." (That is, so-called abilities might not be so great and so-called disabilities might not be so bad, but actual disabilities can hardly fail to be at least somewhat bad.) Perhaps disability has spiritual advantages over ability (I don't think it does, but someone might make that claim) but in ordinary, worldly terms disabilities are bad. Hence the prefix 'dis'.

Cogburn makes two claims here. Not only that it is better to be able but also that it is OK to speak in ways that presuppose this. The English language comes very close to presupposing this, so Cogburn is more or less defending the language that even anti-ableist-language people speak. There is language and there is language, of course, as in English, on the one hand, and the language of exclusion, say, on the other. But the idea that it is undesirable to be blind, deaf, lame, weak, sick, insane, and so on and so on runs deep in ordinary English. Could this change? Surely it could. Should it? That is the question. Or one of the questions. Another is how bad it is to argue that speaking in such ways, ways that presuppose the badness of blindness, etc., "is not bad."  

A caveat is probably necessary, or even overdue, at this point. Cogburn has been accused, among other things, of defending hate speech, so I should address this thought. He is not defending attacks on disabled people. He is not attacking disabled people. He is defending some linguistic expressions of the idea that all else being equal it is better to be able. These expressions might harm disabled people (by perpetuating harmful prejudices) or fail to benefit them as much as some alternative expressions would (by countering those prejudices), but Cogburn's claim is that no use of language should be condemned simply on the grounds that it involves the presupposition that disabilities are generally bad things to have.

Roughly his claim is that the presupposition is true, and therefore ought to be allowed, and that it is patronizing to disabled people to think that they need protection from words that are only imagined to be hurtful to their feelings. The claim against him (again roughly, and there are multiple claims against him) is that some speech directed at disabled people really is hurtful, even when it's intended to be sympathetic, and that the kind of speech in question creates an environment, a kind of society, that is detrimental to the interests of disabled people whether they feel it or not, and whether it is intended or not. It is this that is the more interesting claim, I think,because Cogburn agrees that disabled people should not be insulted or patronized.

As I see it, two questions arise here. Is it lying to say that it is not better to be able (other things being equal)? And if so, is this a noble lie?

The idea that it is a noble lie would depend on a form of utilitarianism combined with faith in the possibility of linguistic engineering. There is something obviously Orwellian about this idea, but something seemingly naive too. If we start calling blind people visually impaired instead how much will change? I have no objection at all to making such changes if the people they are intended to help like them. Presumably Cogburn doesn't object to this kind of change either. But if all we do is to change the vocabulary we use without changing the grammar then sooner or later 'visually impaired' will be used exactly the same way that 'blind' is now used, and will have exactly the same meaning, connotations, etc. These superficial linguistic changes, i.e. changes in vocabulary or diction only, will not effect deep grammatical change (by what mechanism would they do so?). Superficial changes can have deep effects, as when disfiguring someone's face leads to people treating them much worse, but it isn't obvious that changing labels will have good effects. Nor will they change anyone's ability to see.

Which brings us to the question whether that matters. Is it bad to be blind, or worse to be blind than to be sighted? In "Practical Inference" Anscombe writes:

Aristotle, we may say, assumes a preference for health and the wholesome, for life, for doing what one should do or needs to do as a certain kind of being. Very arbitrary of him.

Ignoring her irony, is it arbitrary? Is it bad or simply different to have 31 or 33 teeth rather than the standard 32? Are two legs better than one? One comment at New APPS says that it is not disability but suffering that is bad. Is that what we should say?

I don't think I would bother trying to do anything about a disability that did not lead to suffering, that much is true. But some conditions surely lead to suffering more often than not. Some of this will be fairly direct. My father's muscular dystrophy leads to his falling down from time to time. This hurts. And some of the suffering is less direct, involving other people's attitudes and reactions. Falling in public is embarrassing, but would not be if people were better. So should we fix the physical and mental problems (i.e. conditions that lead to suffering) that people have when we can or should we fix other people, the ones who regard or treat the suffering badly? Surely so far as we can, other things being equal, we should do both. And medical advances are more dependable than moral ones.

We might argue at great length about what is and is not a disability, but that some people are more prone to suffering than most because of the condition of their bodies or minds is surely beyond doubt. Pretending to deny this isn't going to help anybody.    

I feel as though I've been rushing things towards the end of this post, but I also don't want to keep writing and writing without ever posting the results. One thing that encourages me to keep writing is the desire to be careful to avoid both genuine offensiveness (bad thinking) and causing offense by writing ambiguously or misleadingly (bad writing). But then I think that what I'm saying, or at least what I mean to say, is just so obviously right that no one could possibly disagree. What happened at New APPS shows that this is false. It also shows that this is very much a live (as in 'live explosive') issue, and one that brings questions about consequentialism, relativism, Aristotelian naturalism, and ordinary language together in ways that can be very personal and political. I don't mean that it's Anscombe versus the remaining New APPS people, as if one had to pick one of those two sides, but it would be interesting to see a debate like that.      

Understanding human behavior

A question that came up prominently during the seminar in Mexico has been discussed recently also by Jon Cogburn at NewAPPS. The question is about what is involved or required for understanding human behavior.

Jon Cogburn says that:

One could say that given a set of discourse relevant norms held fixed, understanding in general just is the ability to make novel predictions. For Davidson/Dennett, we assume that human systems are largely rational according to belief/desire psychology and then this puts us in a position to make predictions about them. We make different normative assumptions about functional organization of organs, and different ones again about atoms. But once those are in place, understanding is just a matter or being better able to predict.

I'm writing this as a post of my own rather than as a comment at NewAPPS partly because I suspect it will be too long for a comment and partly because I don't know what all of this means and don't want to appear snarky or embarrassingly ignorant. I genuinely (non-snarkily) don't know what it means to hold fixed a set of discourse relevant norms, nor what it means to put normative assumptions in place. But what I take Cogburn to be saying is, in effect, that "understanding in general just is the ability to make novel predictions." 

Winch says that being able to predict what people are going to do does not mean that we really understand them or their activity. He cites Wittgenstein's wood-sellers, who buy and sell wood according to the area covered without regard to the height of each pile. We can describe their activity and perhaps predict their behavior but we don't, according to Winch, really understand it. He surely has a point. Here's a longish quote (from pp. 114-115 of the linked edition, pp. 107-108 of my copy):

       Some of Wittgenstein’s procedures in his philosophical elucidations reinforce this point. He is prone to draw our attention to certain features of our own concepts by comparing them with those of an imaginary society, in which our own familiar ways of thinking are subtly distorted. For instance, he asks us to suppose that such a society sold wood in the following way: They ‘piled the timber in heaps of arbitrary, varying height and then sold it at a price proportionate to the area covered by the piles. And what if they even justified this with the words: “Of course, if you buy more timber, you must pay more”?’ (38: Chapter I, p. 142–151.) The important question for us is: in what circumstances could one say that one had understood this sort of behaviour? As I have indicated, Weber often speaks as if the ultimate test were our ability to formulate statistical laws which would enable us to predict with fair accuracy what people would be likely to do in given circumstances. In line with this is his attempt to define a ‘social role’ in terms of the probability (Chance) of actions of a certain sort being performed in given circumstances. But with Wittgenstein’s example we might well be able to make predictions of great accuracy in this way and still not be able to claim any real understanding of what those people were doing. The difference is precisely analogous to that between being able to formulate statistical laws about the likely occurrences of words in a language and being able to understand what was being said by someone who spoke the language. The latter can never be reduced to the former; a man who understands Chinese is not a man who has a firm grasp of the statistical probabilities for the occurrence of the various words in the Chinese language. Indeed, he could have that without knowing that he was dealing with a language at all; and anyway, the knowledge that he was dealing with a language is not itself something that could be formulated statistically. ‘Understanding’, in situations like this, is grasping the point or meaning of what is being done or said. This is a notion far removed from the world of statistics and causal laws: it is closer to the realm of discourse and to the internal relations that link the parts of a realm of discourse.

Winch talks elsewhere (see p. 89, e.g.) about what it takes for understanding to count as genuine understanding: reflective understanding of human activity must presuppose the participants' unreflective understanding. So the concepts that belong to the activity must be understood. Without such understanding all we will generate is (p. 88) "a rather puzzling external account of certain motions which certain people have been perceived to go through."
 
But does Winch get to say what counts as genuine understanding? This was a point we discussed when I was at the University of Veracruz. Several students there seemed to want less than what Winch would accept as true understanding of human behavior. They did not want to empathize. They wanted to identify patterns, and if they were able to do so well enough to be able to make accurate predictions then they would be very satisfied. A "rather puzzling external account of certain motions" is basically what they were hoping to produce, as long as it allowed them to make accurate predictions.

It looks to me as though Winch would resist or even reject such a desire, but can a desire be mistaken? And I don't know how to settle the apparent disagreement between Winch and others about what is and is not real understanding. Can we just say that as long as you see the facts you may say what you like? Or is that too easy?

Hostility to Wittgenstein

There have been some heartening calls for niceness in philosophy lately (here and here, for instance). Which is perhaps why I'm so struck by the apparent animus in some of Charles Pigden's remarks on Wittgenstein here and here. Pigden does not just disagree with Wittgenstein, he characterizes his "polemical practices" as "dishonest and authoritarian." I don't know which practices he has in mind, but he does mention Wittgenstein's interactions with Turing at one point. The only record we have of those, however, is notes taken by students, so they are hardly a reliable basis for making accusations of this kind. What I recall of these notes doesn't seem all that polemical, either. It certainly doesn't seem dishonest and authoritarian. Pigden is too young to have seen Wittgenstein in action, and Wittgenstein's work generally does not seem polemical. I don't know where the accusation of dishonesty comes from either. It's odd. But Pigden is by no means alone. Tom Hurka's "Wittgenwanker" moment comes to mind, which I remembered as occurring after dinner but which is time stamped as 8:05 a.m. Not enough coffee rather than too much wine, perhaps. (There's a nice response here.) Someone once told me that Peter Hacker's combative style had put people at Oxford off Wittgenstein. I don't know whether that's true, but I wonder whether Pigden is perhaps reacting in part against one or more followers of Wittgenstein rather than Wittgenstein himself.

Michael Kremer provides some good responses, but he hasn't yet answered Pigden's last move, which begins like this:

Like Wittgenstein himself, you have a wonderful way of insulating yourself from refutation. I say Wittgenstein employs implicit criteria for what is and is not meaningful, a claim I could back up by quoting chapter and verse. You say that he often says things which suggest this, but that if we look at the Investigations as a whole we see that this is not so. I recommend this hermeneutical tactic to any interpreter whose interpretation might be falsified by inconvenient quotes.

But you don't falsify an interpretation by quoting remarks out of context, as Pigden surely knows. And all Kremer said was that the context, the book as a whole, needs to be taken into account. Pigden continues:

My real point however is that unless Wittgenstein has such a set of criteria and unless they are correct his therapeutic procedures are simply a set of rhetorical tricks designed to impose a restricted Oldspeak in which the ideas that Wittgenstein disapproves of cannot be expressed. Your defense make him far less honest and much more of an authoritarian than his positivist contemporaries who at least had a theory to back their prohibitions.

According to you, Wittgenstein presumes to tell his interlocutors what is and is not meaningful even though

1) he does not have a theory about what makes utterances meaningful or otherwise (because he does not have ANY theories) 

and 

2) he has no criteria (not even vague ones) to determine whether something is meaningful or not.

If there is no theory or criterion for what is and is not meaningful then it seems to me we have two possibilities with respect to Wittgenstein’s therapeutic procedures.  

These two possibilities, of course, turn out to be bad for Wittgenstein.

And equally of course it is not the case that according to Kremer Wittgenstein presumes to tell his interlocutors what is and is not meaningful . What Kremer says is that:  

As for Wittgenstein, I do not think he employs even a vague set of criteria designed to rule out what he doesn't like. What he does is to use a series of methods for trying to bring his interlocutor to see the meaninglessness of his or her words, when the use of those words leads to seemingly intractable problems. Insofar as these methods do not persuade the interlocutor (lead the fly out of the fly-bottle), they are not successful by Wittgenstein's own lights

So Kremer's Wittgenstein does not presume to tell anybody anything. He presumes to try to bring people to see that their words are meaningless. And if they cannot be so brought then the Wittgensteinian either keeps trying or admits defeat. Agreement is essential to the method, which is why there is no telling and no authoritarianism. Nor does Wittgenstein have any criteria because so far as criteria of meaningfulness are needed these must be shared with the interlocutor, who might be anybody, so they can't be criteria specific to Wittgenstein.

Kremer quotes this passage from the Big Typescript to illustrate Wittgenstein's view and method:

One of the most important tasks is to express all false thought processes so characteristically that the reader says, 'Yes, that’s exactly the way I meant it'. To make a tracing of the physiognomy of every error. 
Indeed we can only convict someone else of a mistake if he acknowledges that this really is the expression of his feeling. [if he (really) acknowledges this expression as the correct expression of his feeling.]
For only if he acknowledges it as such, is it the correct expression. (Psychoanalysis.)
What the other person acknowledges is the analogy I am proposing to him as the source of his thought.

How this could seem authoritarian is beyond me. I can only think that Pigden is talking about something, and perhaps someone, else. This someone else, though, appears to have treated people so badly that talk of Wittgenstein now raises a red mist before some people's eyes. Which is perhaps another reason why philosophers should try to be nice. 

Punk leads to Putin?

Jon Cogburn:

Punk is great art, but the nihilism leads to Putinism. Again, consider the United States. We had two punk eras, punk proper and grunge. Analogous  to Russian punk and Putinism, punk proper led to Thatcher/Reagan and grunge to Bush the younger.

Robert Paul Wolff:

All societies exist for the purpose of transferring wealth from those who create it -- the poor -- to those who do not -- the rich.  The academic professions exist for the purpose of rationalizing this transfer, the churches exist for the purpose of blessing it, and the arts exist for the purpose of decorating the transfer so as to make it as charming as possible [even though this often comes to nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.]

Cogburn is always right (in the sense that he is always edifying) even if some of his individual points are wrong (and he sometimes retracts things he's said, so he must be wrong sometimes). Here he looks wrong, but I think we have to go with the "nihilism leads to Putinism" part of the quote above rather than the "punk proper led to Thatcher" bit. Earlier on he says this:

For rock to be rock, there must be an audience base that believes in the possibility of liberation. Once that is gone, rock isn't really possible. And when rock stops being rock, its parents (blues and country) get a divorce. And, like a lot of children of divorce, rock gets angry and starts acting out. It becomes punk.

So the real problem, as he sees it, is the possibility of liberation, or the ability to believe in this possibility. And that ability apparently declined in the 1970s. Hence both David Bowie's "We never got it off on that revolution stuff/ What a drag--too many snags" and Hawkwind's "We used up all of our magic powers trying to do it in the road," in their rejection of Beatles politics in favor of violent revolution (the lines are from the song "Urban Guerrilla"). Bowie, too, rejects the Beatles and the Stones in favor of glam rock, which involves dressing like a queen but also kicking like a mule and drinking a lot of wine. Punk is roughly a combination of the would-be terrorist strain of hippiedom and the gaudy hooliganism of glam rock. It doesn't lead to Putin or Thatcher or Reagan, but the same despair that fuels it also opens the door to the likes of them. In short, Cogburn is right.

What about Wolff? It's not plausible that societies are a sort of con job that the poor are tricked into in order for the rich to be able to either take from them or use them to take from other poor people. Societies exist in the same kind of way that schools of fish and swarms of bees exist. That's just how human beings come: in packs. It's also relevant that we would struggle to survive otherwise.

But once we are in a society (which we are, as they say, always already) what then is the guiding mission of the society? Wolff's claim about the purpose of all societies looks plausible as an answer to this question. And the rest of what he says seems about right too. Except that there are norms internal to academia and the church and the arts that go against this idea. Academia might be allowed and even encouraged because it helps the rich get richer, but the norms of academia don't themselves directly promote this kind of useful idiocy. Nor, of course, do those of the churches or the arts. So I think views like Wolff's are true a lot of the time, maybe most of the time, maybe 90% of the time, but I don't think they are entirely true. Comically or not, I think he's exaggerating (and presumably he knows it, since I doubt he really thinks of himself as rationalizing the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich).

Does punk then put lipstick on the pig? Real punk doesn't. This was always the complaint about disco and other kinds of mainstream pop music: they are and were a distraction from political reality, or perhaps just reality in general. Pretty much the definition of alternative music, which includes punk, is that it doesn't do this. The hard part is to be true to this ideal while not being godawful musically. It can be done, but the audience is always going to be relatively small. The Red Wedge tactic is never going to work. Which sounds like despair but only means that the goals of academia, religion, and the arts must be academic, religious, and artistic, not political. Art for art's sake, in other words.

Methodological fetishism

Taking a break from the idea of social science I read a bit more of McManus's Heidegger and the Measure of Truth only to find him talking about social science too. On pp. 156-158 McManus talks about "methodological fetishism" in connection with psychology. (The idea is similar to what Jon Cogburn calls the quantitative fallacy.) Such fetishism involves imposing a model, perhaps a mathematical one, on factors "not obviously capturable in those terms" (p. 157). The result is that what most lends itself to enumeration (in the case of a mathematical model) is then treated as being of greatest importance just because it lends itself to the model being insisted upon. McManus then voices a "routine worry" (p. 157) about whether personality traits as measured by numerical scales of introversion/extroversion, etc. actually tell us anything useful about people in the real world. He connects this general problem also with behaviorism:

In one sense, behaviourism succeeded in describing human conduct using variables that could be handled mathematically. The sense in which it failed was that the variables it used captured aspects of conduct in which no one was interested: what we could measure quantitatively repeatedly turned out to be nothing more than weakly associated with what we wanted to have measured. This realization took a long time to emerge, and its precise significance is still disputed. (p. 158)

There is nothing inevitable about this, as McManus and McManus's Heidegger agree. There is no reason a priori why mathematics and science cannot be used to discover truths about reality. But there is equally no guarantee that they will prove useful every time we try to apply them. They are tools that might not be useful for every job. And human behavior looks like being something they are not all that well cut out for.

The problem of other minds

There's nowt as queer as folk, as the saying goes. This can make communication difficult, especially online (where you can't use non-verbal cues and are often talking to people you don't know very well). So it was with some trepidation that I attempted a light-hearted comment over at Philosophical Investigations. The thought of (possibly quite small amounts of) drink leading to someone's being banned from the pubs a philosophical forum struck me as funny. If I could draw I'd try to combine this:

With this:

But does my comment come across as friendly banter or as condescending and insulting? I think I got away with it, but it can be hard to know. And if philosophers are autistic then I might never know. (You can take a 'fun quiz' here to find out whether you might be autistic. The average score is about 16, problem scores seem to start at 32, and I got a worrying 28.)

I wasn't going to blog about any of this (perhaps for obvious reasons--it's Twitter-worthy at best), but then I read Mohan Matthen quoting Wittgenstein and commenting as follows:

We think there must be something going on in one's mind for one to understand the word 'plant'. We are inclined to say that what we mean by one's understanding the word is a process in the mind. ... There is a way out of the difficulty of explaining what understanding is if we take 'understanding a word' to mean, roughly, being able to use it. The point of this explanation is to replace 'understanding a word' by 'being able to use a word', which is not so easily thought of as denoting an [inner] activity. 

Apparently, according to him, there is nothing going on in one’s mind when one comes to understand a word.

How can an intelligent and philosophically sophisticated person misread so badly? It's true that the first sentence here suggests that Wittgenstein might be open to the possibility that there might not be something going on in one's mind when one understands the word 'plant'. (And that does sound odd, though not necessarily wrong.) But he doesn't say this. What he says (or implies) is that there is a problem if we go from this thought to saying (or thinking) that what we mean by understanding a word is a process in the mind. And he suggests a cure for this problem.

The problem, I take it, is that any 'process in the mind' that is supposedly what we mean when we talk about understanding would be very obscure. What is the mind? What might a process in it be? How have we managed to refer to such a process without knowing what it is or ever experiencing it? I have experienced understanding, but not as an internal process. Wittgenstein proposes that we focus less on what we apparently must be talking about and more on what we actually do. Matthen resists doing this, instead relying on appeal to standard views and rhetorical questions ("Such a categorical change must be a mental change—what else could it be?"), along with an apparent presupposition that "understanding a word" must refer to this mental change.  All very odd.     

My point is not that Matthen is wrong. Several people have already pointed that out. What's interesting is the way he has gone wrong, which appears to involve taking several specific ideas for granted but also a general kind of approach to reading an unfamiliar text. I'm not sure that I could characterize that approach, but I'm reminded of it when I read Denis McManus's new book on Heidegger (which, as far as I can tell, being neither an expert nor farther in than p. 30, is excellent) and his discussion of the Theoretical Attitude. It's an approach that takes an awful lot for granted: Wittgenstein, like anyone else, can be understood easily enough even when quoted out of context; there is no need to read sentences carefully because it's obvious what kinds of things someone might say; it is also obvious what questions matter and what don't; it's obvious what kind of thing might be true (the range is limited by science and the current consensus among philosophers); of course there is no point in thinking about whether what seemingly must be true really is true; and so on. In a word: science. And in two words: not philosophy. When continental philosophers talk as if analytic philosophy has not really moved on from logical positivism I suspect it is this kind of thing they have in mind. Not that this is logical positivism, but the scientistic spirit seems much the same. (I don't mean that continental philosophy is better than analytic philosophy, if that needs to be said.) The desire to get on, to make progress (e.g. to figure out what understanding is, and to be impatient with people like Wittgenstein who seem to want to obstruct your project), works against the desire to stop and think. It strikes me as both unphilosophical and characteristic of a mentality that is dangerous. It's easy to think you're making progress just because you keep moving. (And easy, too, to think you are benign just because you are too inert to be malignant.) 

An emotion in need of further study

This post by Helen De Cruz at NewAPPS rubs me the wrong way, but I'm not quite sure why (or whether) it should. I've been asked to give a lecture next year on Peter Winch and the idea of a social science, so I'm starting to think more about psychology's status as a science, and this seems like a good opportunity to get some practice.

De Cruz asks:  "Why do we sometimes delight in natural disasters? And is it morally appropriate to do so?"

My initial response is something like the following: We don't, and of course not. But that on its own won't really do. Why does De Cruz think that we sometimes delight in natural disasters? She mentions Miyazaki's Ponyo (which I don't remember well enough to comment on) and says that several times in the movie he expresses his "aesthetic delight in natural disasters." She also links to this article which talks of the Japanese as celebrating nature in spite of (my emphasis) its destructive power (not quite the same thing as delighting in disaster) and quotes Miyazaki saying that natural disasters such as typhoons and earthquakes are a given in Japan and must be accepted as part of life. Again, this is a long way from celebrating disaster. De Cruz also says that Turner's painting of a steamboat in a storm is done "with gusto," which strikes me as an inaccurate description of the painting. Turner has a sense of awe, an important concept for De Cruz, but I don't sense any relish in his portrayal of the boat's fate. If he is enthusiastic at all it isn't about what is happening to the boat, let alone to the people on it, but about the amazing power of the storm.       

De Cruz goes on to discuss the sublime and awe:

The prototype model of awe by Keltner and Haidt suggests that awe - the emotion most commonly associated with the sublime - is elicited by stimuli that are vast and that prompt a need for psychological accommodation. Keltner and Haidt see awe as an adaptive emotion that arose in our primate ancestry, in particular, in the need for lower-status individuals to recognize the status of higher-status individuals within the group: by feeling awe for an alpha individual, one would desist in fruitlessly trying to challenge his or her authority, which would have been adaptive. Keltner and Haidt propose that the primordial form of awe is the emotions a low status individual feels towards a powerful one.

As she says, "To me, this is quite a stretch." 

Rather than propose an alternative theory she raises the questions: why do we feel awe, and is it morally objectionable to do so? Here's an example (from Job) of which she says that, "One cannot help but feel how insensitive and morally objectionable Elihu is when he says this":

God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways;
    he does great things beyond our understanding.
 He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth,’
    and to the rain shower, ‘Be a mighty downpour.’
 So that everyone he has made may know his work,
    he stops all people from their labor.
 The animals take cover;
    they remain in their dens.
 The tempest comes out from its chamber,
    the cold from the driving winds.
 The breath of God produces ice,
    and the broad waters become frozen.
 He loads the clouds with moisture;
    he scatters his lightning through them.
 At his direction they swirl around
    over the face of the whole earth
    to do whatever he commands them.
 He brings the clouds to punish people,
    or to water his earth and show his love.
Listen to this, Job; stop and consider God’s wonders.
Do you know how God controls the clouds
     and makes his lightning flash?
Do you know how the clouds hang poised, 
     those wonders of him who has perfect knowledge?
You who swelter in your clothes 
     when the land lies hushed under the south wind,
Can you join him in spreading out the skies, 
     hard as a mirror of cast bronze?   

One can help feeling that this is insensitive and morally objectionable, even if one knows that Job's house and children have been destroyed by the storms and floods being described. I agree that it could be very objectionable to tell sufferers that their loss is all part of God's plan or that whatever doesn't kill them will make them stronger. But Elihu's words are powerful, and spoken to a man who does not want to give up his faith in God. I don't see things the same way, but I don't find these words objectionable. Delighting in disaster qua disaster is obviously no good, but seeing a disaster under some different aspect and delighting in, or just being impressed by, that is surely OK. Imagine you see a volcano erupt and enjoy the spectacle, but later find out that someone was killed by it. Your previous enjoyment doesn't suddenly become wicked (assuming you weren't reveling in the thought of someone's possibly being killed by the lava or a hail of rocks).

One way to understand the question "Why do we feel awe?" is to take it as asking what it is about a particular phenomenon that is awe-inspiring. This calls for aesthetic criticism and careful attention to the phenomenon in question. De Cruz means something else though. She wants to know why human beings evolved to feel awe. This calls for little attention to particular phenomena (although examples and counterexamples must be considered) and requires us to try to fit awe into an existing framework that accounts for emotions. What could be wrong with that?

There are several possibilities. One might reject the framework (evolutionary psychology). One might reject the project of trying to fit emotions (or 'mental states' in general) into that framework. Or one might reject the idea that this emotion, awe, fits the framework. Or all of the above. And perhaps more as well.

I'm not qualified to comment on the merits of evolutionary psychology, but it certainly has its critics, and Wittgenstein's skepticism about psychology as a science might be a source of additional criticisms. As far as I know psychologists today mostly study brains and behavior. Presumably brains evolved: animals with brains that helped them survive would tend to survive longer and reproduce more, and their offspring would be expected to have somewhat similar brains. Behavior seems like a different matter. I don't inherit my parents' behavior in the way that I might inherit their curly hair or straight teeth. But we're talking about emotions, so perhaps behavior is not really relevant. Wittgenstein thinks of emotions as something like aspects of human life or modes of our complicated form of life. Does it make sense to think of such things as evolving? In some sense it must, I think. Anything self-destructive is likely to die out, and anything life-preserving is likely to thrive. But, again, I don't inherit emotions from my parents in the way that I inherit purely biological traits. And if an emotion or form of behavior dies out it does not do so in the same literal way that a species of animals dies out. Animals die, behavior does not. Nor do emotions. So there are questions to be asked about the very idea that emotions are part of evolution. That's all I'll say about that for now. (By which I don't mean to imply that there is no more to be said.)

What about the project of fitting emotions into the evolutionary psychology framework? Part of me thinks this cannot possibly be wrong. It's like a game, and if you don't want to play it you don't have to. But it's possible to disapprove of certain games. And this one asks us to adopt a certain perspective on such things as awe, wonder, and love. This could be regarded as a kind of blasphemy. It could also be regarded as dangerous, as likely to undermine ways of thinking, feeling, and living that are important. It might, for instance, trick us into thinking that we understand more than we do (e.g. what love really is), or that what we value is actually not so special after all. A dangerous game is not wrong per se, of course, (it's possible to gamble and win) but we still might object to its being played.  

And in the particular case of awe we might well feel that there is something both misguided and dangerous about the attempt to fit it into a pre-existing theoretical framework. For one thing, the fact that we have a word does not mean that we have a thing for which that word stands. And awe seems like an especially pronounced case of this. It surely isn't a Cartesian entity, and I can't really imagine someone feeling awe except in the presence of something properly awe-inspiring. Drug-induced awe, for instance, would not (it seems to me) be real awe at all. It only make sense to talk of awe in certain kinds of context, and that makes awe unlike standard objects, including heritable biological traits. Perhaps the biological basis that gives us the ability to feel awe is heritable, but that's a different matter. We might have evolved to have this capacity for reasons that have nothing to do with awe.

Why do we feel awe? What evolutionary advantage might it have given us? If awe combines fear of dangerous things (which sounds like a useful emotion) with a funny kind of pleasure at the thought of great power then this doesn't seem so mysterious. Power is a useful thing, so contemplating power that does us no harm might well trigger a positive reaction. But all this seems like a strange line of inquiry. Why turn away from the awesome to think about the evolution of awe? It's like pointing to some fantastic sight and finding your audience looking at your pointing finger. I think that's what feels wrong about De Cruz's questions. It shows a preference for the uninspiring over the inspiring, like a student choosing to major in something 'practical' rather than something that really interests them. It's a bit depressing. And the question doesn't only show an interest in the wrong things. It also directs our attention towards those things (our awe or its biological basis) and away from the awesome. And that seems not just depressing but bad.

I don't mean to exaggerate. De Cruz is not a monster, and her questions are in some sense legitimate (how generous of me!). But I think it is thoughts along the lines that I have sketched above that make me less than enthusiastic about her project. If we're going to study psychology I much prefer this kind of approach (h/t dmf). It may not be about the awesome directly, but it is about people behaving in interesting ways, and it's quite different from the evolutionary psychology approach to explanation of such behavior. It keeps everything within the human sphere. Attempts to explain the human in terms of the non-human seem to leave out everything that really matters. Which I suppose is the kind of point Winch might make.

Creepy philosophy

Over at NewAPPS Jon Cogburn says:

I never got that into Radio Head's later stuff or anything else on Pablo Honey (the other songs were actually produced by a person that didn't produce "Creep"), but there's something wrong with you if Creep doesn't give you goose bumps or help you get through a rough night. I mean, it's one of the few archetypal songs for a certain feeling that I associate centrally with philosophy. Novalis said this best (if I remember right Heidegger endorsed it wholeheartedly); philosophy starts with a feeling of homesickness, a feeling that you don't belong here.

(What follows is inspired by, and not meant as a criticism of, the above. I should also note that I'll be out of town for a few days, and unlikely to be able to respond to any comments until I get back.)

Homesickness is feeling that you belong somewhere else, not just that you don't belong here. And "Creep" is also about feeling like a creep, of course, inferior ("I wish I was special, You're so fucking special, But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo"). So this isn't exactly homesickness. It's more like homelessness. A weirdo has no home, no place where he belongs.

Homesickness is more what Van Morrison expresses in "Astral Weeks" ("I ain't nothing but a stranger in this world, I got a home on high"). That might inspire a kind of platonic philosophy (or suicide), but doesn't seem typical of what drives most of us.

The view of Plato and Aristotle that philosophy begins in wonder is something else again. Actually I don't know what they meant (so maybe it isn't something else). Aristotle wanted to understand the world in a seemingly familiar, rational way. Plato seems quite different, and yet (apparently) they belonged to the same world.

Wittgenstein contrasts the attitude toward a miracle and the scientific attitude (in his Lecture on Ethics), with science beginning almost exactly where astonishment ceases. We might regard someone's head's turning into a lion's as a miracle, but once we start investigative surgery we are into the realm of science instead. Science can be done in a spirit of wonder and reverence, but it is an attempt to investigate and understand so: a) it is not reverence alone, and b) it requires that one not be paralyzed by wonder.

And then there's Heidegger:

Das Erstaunen ist als pathos die arche der Philosophie. Das griechische Wort arche muessen wir im vollen Sinne verstehen. Es nennt dasjenige, von woher etwas ausgeht. Aber dieses "von woher" wird im Ausgehen nicht zurueckgelassen, vielmehr wird die arche zu dem, was das Verbum archein sagt, zu solchem, was herrscht. Das pathos des Erstaunens steht nicht einfach so am Beginn der Philosophie wie z. B. der Operation des Chirurgen das Waschen der Haende voraufgeht. Das Erstaunen traegt und durchherrscht die Philosophie.

(Something like this: The feeling of astonishment is the arche of philosophy. We must understand the Greek word arche in its complete sense. It names that whence something emerges. [...] The feeling of astonishment does not simply stand at the beginning of philosophy as, for instance, hand-washing comes before a surgeon's operating. Astonishment carries and pervades philosophy.)

Maverick Philosopher comments:

Heidegger's point is that philosophy's beginning, the pathos of astonishment, is also its principle. As such, it is not something left behind as philosophy progresses, but something that pervades and guides her at every step. This, I would add, is one of the differences between philosophy and (positive) science. The aim of the sciences is to dispel wonder, perplexity, astonishment and replace them with understanding, an understanding that makes possible the prediction and control of that which is understood. Philosophy, by contrast, not only begins in wonder but is sustained by it and never succeeds in dispelling it.

I'm not sure about this. Not as an interpretation of Heidegger but as a matter of fact. Not all science aims to dispel wonder. And I wonder about the claim that philosophy is sustained by wonder. Heidegger's philosophy might be. But how much philosophy in the empiricist tradition, for instance, is like this?

Then there's Wittgenstein's saying that a philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about. This isn't wonder exactly, and Wittgenstein (who I think wanted to revive wonder) wanted to dispel this kind of confusion, not to be pervaded or guided by it.

Astonishment does not lead me to philosophize, at least not directly. The thing that astonishes me most is human life or, to be more accurate, my children. But I have no inclination whatsoever to investigate scientifically or philosophically as a result of this astonishment. I sometimes also have the feeling that I live in paradise, and I can't imagine tackling this intellectually (unless re-reading Father Zosima counts). In case this makes me sound insane let me clarify. What I mean is that I live in a place that is very green (slightly overgrown, in fact), in which wild animals are a frequent sight (every time I see deer I want to take a picture to capture the experience, which is Gollum-like of me), and that this makes me very happy. These feelings don't incline me to religion or prayer. They just make me smile. Or not just that. They also make me curious about reading works by people who have had similar feelings, and think about trying to work out some sort of ethical theory or "philosophy of life" based on the recognition of the importance of stuff like this (roughly speaking, life or (environment + family)). But I can't help feeling that developing a philosophical theory of anything would be the wrong response to the feelings I'm talking about. I don't want to express or articulate these feelings. I want to have them, to live in them as much as possible. And it's not as if I have realized something about nature or my children that other people have not realized about theirs. There isn't any news that I have to share with other people. Although I do think we all tend to forget what matters most to us a lot of the time. It might even be necessary to forget from time to time, to be distracted from paradise. Such distraction seems inevitable, anyway, but I also feel obscurely that it might be needed, too. That the way in to paradise is to return, through the door marked 'Exit.'

What distracts us, for the most part, is people, human affairs. Which might be why hell can seem to be other people. It isn't the people, it's the games they involve us in. (Eat this apple, apply for this position, fill out this form...) I don't see any way to avoid all of these games, but it might help to remember that this is all they are, i.e. human institutions of no cosmic significance even if people die because of them. (What does "cosmic significance" mean though? I don't know. Perhaps something it could make sense to worship. A tree or an animal, perhaps, but certainly nothing institutional or conventional.) Politics is part of this, although bad politics are so bad that good politics might be necessary. Even at best, though, I can't help thinking that politics are a necessary evil.

Philosophy seems to me to come from two sources: idle speculation and a certain sense of impossibility or paradox, to which speculation might lead you. Feeling weird and unspecial has nothing directly to do with these, but the people who don't (feel as though they) fit in are probably more likely to have time to speculate (and to be less caught up in social stuff). Speculation might lead to all kinds of creation but it also seems vain. It is, I think, what a lot of people think philosophy is all about. More powerful, though, is the gravitational pull on the attention of things that seem both necessary and impossible: how can this grey lump be the seat of consciousness?, how can these physical objects have free will?, how could the universe have a beginning and yet how could it not? These questions are not institutionalized. (They don't belong here.) They are not scientific. We only sort of, at best, have any methods for dealing with them. They look like expressions of wonder but they feel like scientific questions. That is, someone might hold a brain and say "So this is the seat of consciousness? Wow!" but that isn't what happens in philosophy. Philosophical questions are not rhetorical. We want answers. But we don't really get any. At most we get candidates for answers, maybe candidates we like very much. But no hands-down winner as long as the question remains within philosophy. The questions of philosophy are weirdos.

Those are not the questions that interest me primarily though. I don't work on metaphysics or epistemology. I'm more interested in the nature of these questions than in the questions themselves. Perhaps because I've learned that staring at them gets you nowhere and hurts (my brain, not my feelings). And because as far as there is any solution to these problems, or a method for solving them, I think it lies somewhere in the Kant-Schopenhauer-(Nietzsche-Heidegger)-Wittgenstein-... tradition, and I'd rather look for it there than try to find it by myself. And because these questions seem like another form of distraction, a human creation irrelevant to the question of how to live. And that's not really a question, of course, but an assignment, and what matters is doing it well, not knowing how to do it. It's a puzzler, though, a bit like being lost or finding oneself in a place with no marked paths. The question is not so much "What the hell am I doing here?" as it is "What the hell am I doing here?" To the extent that you don't simply follow convention there are no rules to tell you what to do. And it is obvious to everyone that simply following conventions is not the best possible response to the assignment. But that's about all that is obvious.

In favor of charity

Brian Leiter links to this piece in the New York Times and encourages "philosophers who seem to think charitable giving is an ethical imperative" to contemplate it. The author, Peter Buffett, makes some odd complaints about charity. Here's one:

Often the results of our decisions had unintended consequences; distributing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS in a brothel area ended up creating a higher price for unprotected sex.

How is this bad? If unprotected sex with prostitutes costs more than it used to then, other things being equal, there will be less of it than before. That's a good thing. The problem, or problems (the spread of AIDS and the existence of prostitution), isn't completely solved, but progress has been made. I suppose raising the price of unprotected sex incentivizes it for prostitutes, but if the price is raised by distributing condoms (thereby making unprotected sex rarer) then this distribution is not going to lead to more unprotected sex than before. At worst it will make no difference at all, but that isn't what Buffett describes happening.

But that isn't his main point. Here is something closer to that:

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

The first sentence of this paragraph has a paradoxical sound to it. Too much commercialism? Let's spend money on fixing that! Maybe that would produce good results, but I doubt we'll find a better alternative to those currently available any time soon. There are already ideas other than neoliberalism and universal commodification out there. They need more political support, and I'm sure their supporters would welcome money from people like Buffett to spend on promoting them. (This is what Leiter seems to want, and I agree with him.) Buffett's next two sentences are false. Wi-Fi on every street corner (again, other things equal) is progress. I agree that the forced prostitution of children is worse than a lack of Wi-Fi. So would everyone. That's why we need to get our priorities straight. But progress in a relatively unimportant area is still progress. Increasing access to technology, education, or safer living conditions is not going to cause people to have worse lives (as measured by such things as how many of them are forced into prostitution).

In short, charitable giving done intelligently is far more likely to do good than harm, and almost certainly is an ethical imperative for most of the people who read Leiter's blog.

More (and better) from Neil Sinhababu at NewAPPS.

Some things are better than others

Various things have led me to think about judgments of relative quality recently. Today it's Gary Gutting comparing the Beatles and Mozart. As usual, I mostly agree with him, but not entirely. Here's a key part of his article:

fans of popular music may respond to the elitist claims of classical music with a facile relativism. But they abandon this relativism when arguing, say, the comparative merits of the early Beatles and the Rolling Stones. You may, for example, maintain that the Stones were superior to the Beatles (or vice versa) because their music is more complex, less derivative, and has greater emotional range and deeper intellectual content. Here you are putting forward objective standards from which you argue for a band’s superiority. Arguing from such criteria implicitly rejects the view that artistic evaluations are simply matters of personal taste. You are giving reasons for your view that you think others ought to accept.

Further, given the standards fans use to show that their favorites are superior, we can typically show by those same standards that works of high art are overall superior to works of popular art. 

The view roughly is that some things are better than others because they are more interesting, from which Gutting apparently draws the conclusion that the more interesting something is, the better. But what if it's too interesting? That sounds paradoxical, but by 'interesting' here I mean having the kind of features Gutting mentions: complexity, originality, emotional range, and intellectual content. It is surely possible for art to be too complex, too original, too emotionally ranging, and too intellectual. I can prefer this dessert to that because this one is sweeter without its being the case that the best dessert of all would be pure sugar.

How original or complex a work should be seems to be relative to the audience or the context: to what extent is the relevant scene tired and in need of something new?, how much intellectual content can we handle? We don't want Zizek references in a Sesame Street song. Complexity and emotional range also depend on the general context, and on personal taste too, I would think. If everything is complex, simplicity might be a breath of fresh air. But it's also true that different people will be happier with different levels of complexity. I like a certain straightforwardness, a rawness of emotion. But something above the level of the moronic. I can also imagine liking a song, say, that is purely sad, or purely happy, but if too many songs are like this then I will crave emotional range. Other people are likely to be roughly similar, but their preferred ranges of complexity and emotion will vary at least somewhat, as will the background of what they have been reading or seeing or hearing lately. The relative absence of a common culture makes universal judgments of quality difficult. If the scene is Broadway or the Vienna State Opera then we can be fairly objective about what is stale and what is refreshing, what builds on recent trends cleverly and what is merely derivative, but when the scene is your cable package or my iPod then it's much harder to speak to a general audience about what is an exciting new TV series or just the same old rubbish. That is, The Wire was a great TV series, but if you are five years old it will not be much fun for you. Nor will it be if you are fifty but have been fed such a diet of unsophisticated televisual gruel that you cannot handle something so complex. When we all watched the same TV, listened to the same radio, went to the same plays and concerts, it was much easier to talk about what was good or bad, because there was one audience for whom it might be too much or not enough in one way or another. (Of course there never was such a time, but some times have approximated it more than others. We are far from it today.)

Another thing that led me to think about all this (or to want to blog about it, which, alas, is not the same thing) is the debate about the relative quality of philosophy journals and areas of philosophy. In this discussion at NewAPPS, for instance, some people claimed that the general standard of originality and rigor is lower in aesthetics and applied ethics than in other areas of philosophy. These people work in aesthetics and applied ethics, as well as in other areas, so they aren't simply attacking other people by attacking their territory. And their expertise gives a lot of credibility to what they say. And it surely is possible to distinguish good work in philosophy from bad, otherwise how would we grade student papers or conduct peer review?

On the other hand, it would be odd if someone said that, say, History is better than English. That more original work and greater rigor were to be found in one discipline than the other. Such claims might be defensible (perhaps English has been taken over by trendies spouting pomo nonsense), but they would still sound odd, like a claim that jazz is better than medieval music. How can you compare the two? This is (at least one reason) why it is important that the people on the NewAPPS thread stuck to words like 'rigor' and 'originality' rather than using the less helpful word 'better.' There probably isn't much originality in applied ethics. There would be a risk of absurdity otherwise. "Surprise! The ethics of assisted suicide is actually a pseudo-problem after all." We don't, most of us, want that kind of originality. And the kind of rigor that is possible and desirable in such a field is going to be different from that in, say, logic. Judgements about what is better than what else just don't seem helpful, or even very meaningful, in such contexts. (The relative ease with which a given person can knock out a publishable paper in one area but not another is irrelevant, it seems to me. This could just reflect that person's strengths and weaknesses rather than the easiness of the discipline or area in which she finds it easier to work.)

Statements like "Mozart is better than the Beatles" or "work in the philosophy of language is better than work in aesthetics" seem pretty useless to me, except as revealing or expressing the speaker's preferences. Expressing such preferences is perfectly reasonable. It would be weird not to have any, and there is something to be said for acknowledging them. Be true to your school, as the Beach Boys said, and the sentiment is more defensible, I think, when applied to, say, the Frankfurt School or Antirealism, than when applied to a literal school. Within a specific context one can accurately and valuably make distinctions of quality. The new Camera Obscura album is not their best work. That's pretty much just a fact, just as the Philosophical Investigations is better than the Brown Book. But is analytic philosophy better than continental philosophy, or ethics better than metaphysics, or Kant better than Nietzsche? On their own those are silly questions. Not because they cannot be answered, but because a simple Yes or No answer is no use. We need to get into the details. And after a detailed answer a summary thumbs up or down would make a mockery of the thought that preceded it.

Make the madness stop

We have informal discussions among the faculty at VMI every Friday at lunchtime, and last week we talked about student writing (among other things). I was asked what I look for in student writing and, without having really thought about it much, I mentioned a list of things, including accuracy in spelling and grammar, and an absence of bull. This article puts verbiage and cliché in the same category (although surely the only thing to do with cliché is to mock it, since complaining about it is itself unoriginal and overdone). Avoiding verbiage should lead one to ordinary language, but then that is likely to be populated by clichés. It can also be hard to understand, as we see in the discussions at New APPS of the sign "Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit." 

For what it's worth, my reading of the sign is much the same as Mark Lance's (see below). To my mind, this is the language of The Wire, and it translates as The situation [or: system] is a dysfunctional sham, "shit" meaning this, "fucked up" meaning broken, and "bullshit" meaning fraudulent. This is a pretty accurate expression of what the protesters believe, but it isn't really effective communication if others struggle to make sense of it. 

Here's what Lance writes about it in response to John Protevi's implication that the sign's syntax is mangled:

I've been trying to decide for a while, and I guess I don't think the syntax is mangled. The subject 'shit' is colloquial for 'stuff' - implied salient and important stuff. And he is saying both that it is fucked up and that it is bullshit. If we take the relevant stuff to be policies of wall street, can't those policies be both fucked up and bullshit?

Clearly I'm avoiding reading grad student papers here, but the other interesting thing is how essential it is to the message - the content, not just the affect of the message - that it employ obscenities. One just can't say that without those sorts of words.

Also really funny.   

He doesn't say why it's funny. I think it's funny because most of the characters in The Wire, the only people I know of who talk this way, are both African-American (the sign-holder is not) and unlikely to be politically engaged enough to join in this kind of protest. It is not the language of political signs or banners, in other words. But it is the language of very direct speech, with no verbiage or bullshit about it. Part of the comedy value comes from the contrast between the language used and the occasion of its use. Part of it comes from its truth, openly acknowledging something that generally goes unsaid. And the something in question is not that the system is in need of reform (although I think it is), or that the theory that wealth at the top of society will trickle down to everyone else is open to question. The something in question is that that 'theory' is a lie and that the system is obscene. Part of the obscenity has to do with the world that The Wire shows, or the contrast between this world and the world of Wall Street. The wealth of the top 1% is supposed to be justified by their superior hard work and intelligence, and by its inevitably trickling down to everyone else. A realistic look at the world shows this to be a myth. We don't all have the same opportunities and we don't live in a meritocracy. What to do about this is a tricky question, of course. (Although see here for some ideas.) The least we can do, though, is to notice myth and fantasy, and see them for what they are. We need, as they say, to call bullshit.