Disciplinary distinctions

If you like that sort of thing (and if you don't) I've posted something about empirical versus non-empirical subjects over at philpercs.

Marxists as motorists

I've been reading the notes taken by Rush Rhees after conversations with Wittgenstein that Gabriel Citron has edited and published in Mind. It's lovely stuff, but I can't quote it all here. Here are some short bits on the difference between philosophy and science (from 1947, pages 36 and 38):

Philosophy is contemplative; and so not scientific. It is concerned with pointing out other possibilities; other ways in which it might be done. 'Vielgestalt'.

When a scientist is doing science, he isn’t contemplating science; and he is never in a position to do so.

Compare [...] a racing motorist like Sir Malcolm Campbell. If you are to make speed records like that, it’s a life’s work. Constant preoccupation with questions of how the car and the motor may be improved, and so on. Such a man cannot take the point of view: “Oh yes, you can go on trying to make speed records. This is something that may be held to be important. But perhaps it doesn’t make so very much difference. We might have no attempts at speed records, etc.” That sort of consideration must be foreign to the racing motorist. And to the scientist in the same way.

(The scientist would regard it as reactionary. So the Marxists would regard it too. For the Marxists are racing motorists.)

That last line reminds me, irrelevantly, of Alexei Sayle. The reference to Malcolm Campbell also reminds me of this poem about his son.

That's about all the response I have so far though.

Social science

OK, I have to give a talk on Wittgenstein and social science, so I'd better get started. What is there to say that can be fitted in a 50-minute lecture? One issue is free will. Hume writes:

Would you know the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the French and English: You cannot be much mistaken in transferring to the former most of the observations which you have made with regard to the latter. Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour. These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them. Nor are the earth, water, and other elements, examined by Aristotle, and Hippocrates, more like to those which at present lie under our observation than the men described by Polybius and Tacitus are to those who now govern the world.

Hume notes that history is a guide to human behavior only for the most part, but puts this down to "the diversity of characters, prejudices, and opinions". He goes on:

The vulgar, who take things according to their first appearance, attribute the uncertainty of events to such an uncertainty in the causes as makes the latter often fail of their usual influence; though they meet with no impediment in their operation. But philosophers, observing that, almost in every part of nature, there is contained a vast variety of springs and principles, which are hid, by reason of their minuteness or remoteness, find, that it is at least possible the contrariety of events may not proceed from any contingency in the cause, but from the secret operation of contrary causes. This possibility is converted into certainty by farther observation, when they remark that, upon an exact scrutiny, a contrariety of effects always betrays a contrariety of causes, and proceeds from their mutual opposition.

If we agree with Hume then we might wonder whether any social science beyond history could possibly be needed. Psychology, economics, and history would all seem to blend into one science of human behavior, based, of course, on observation of past behavior. There is some evidence of this happening, in fact, with economists offering to explain more and more kinds of behavior and the emergence of "behavioral economics," which looks a lot like psychology but pays better. (Of course it can also be argued that economists don't always pay as much attention to history as they should.)

On the other hand, we might dispute Hume's implication that human behavior can be explained by discovering hidden springs and principles. Are we really as machine-like as this image suggests?

Hume does not say that we are machines:

Thus it appears, not only that the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as regular and uniform as that between the cause and effect in any part of nature; but also that this regular conjunction has been universally acknowledged among mankind, and has never been the subject of dispute, either in philosophy or common life. Now, as it is from past experience that we draw all inferences concerning the future, and as we conclude that objects will always be conjoined together which we find to have always been conjoined; it may seem superfluous to prove that this experienced uniformity in human actions is a source whence we draw inferences concerning them. But in order to throw the argument into a greater variety of lights we shall also insist, though briefly, on this latter topic.

The connection between motives and actions is said here to be merely like the connection between cause and effect. But Hume does go on to say that human actions are just as governed by necessity as any other event. This is partly because we are more predictable than we might like to admit, and partly because causation in other parts of nature has less to it than we might imagine. There is, he says, no idea of causation and necessity other than "the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of the mind from one to another." Since we find the same constant conjunction and inference from one to the other with motives and actions (other things being equal) there can be no justification for denying that human behavior is just as predictable as the behavior of inanimate objects. 

It is hard to disagree with Hume here. But not impossible. Wittgenstein questions the idea of causation as constant conjunction on the grounds that it might be quite clear from just one case that one thing was causing another. For instance, if I see a string moving across the floor I might investigate and find that someone is pulling it. Is there, must there be, experience of pulling events being constantly conjoined with being-pulled events? As I recall Bill Brenner has used the example of cutting a cake. The cutting is not conjoined with the being cut as one event might be conjoined with another, distinct event. 

There seem to be two points here. One is that cause and effect are not always as distinct as they are in the cases that Hume apparently has in mind. The other is that we seem to be able to identify something as a cause from just one experience. This is most obviously true in cases where the effect is not distinct from the cause.       

On p. 373 of Philosophical Occasions Wittgenstein says:

We react to the cause.

Calling something 'the cause' is like pointing and saying: 'He's to blame!'

On p. 387 we find the case I had in mind above:

There is a reaction which can be called reacting to the cause.-- We also speak of 'tracing' the cause; a simple case would be, say, following a string to see who is pulling at it. If I then find him--how do I know that he, his pulling, is the cause of the string’'s moving? Do I establish this by a series of experiments? 

If I were to try to use this as the basis of an argument against Hume he might say that I see this as a case of causation because I am familiar with a general pattern of which this case is an instance. But, Wittgenstein might counter, how did I ever become aware of this general pattern?

The origin and the primitive form of the language is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop.

Language--I want to say--is a refinement. "In the beginning was the deed." (p. 395)

The difference between Hume and Wittgenstein here is quite subtle. Both see a reaction as essential to the development of the concept of causation. Hume emphasizes the reaction to a pattern, Wittgenstein just the reaction itself, which need not (although he does not insist on this) be to a pattern or series.

Hume's hypothesis that we identify events of type x as causes of events of type y after some habituation is plausible, but I don't know how this would be proved. How long must the series of conjunctions be? Could it consist of just one instance? That does seem possible. Something hurts your hand and you turn and look in that direction. Doesn't that happen, even with babies and animals? Isn't this a kind of association of cause (something over there) and effect (this pain)? If we want to investigate the psychological foundation of the concept of causation, as I think Hume does, then this kind of thing is surely relevant. It might not be rational to think that x causes y after just one episode of y's following x, but we are not that rational, as Hume showed. And of course we might be wrong. But we do sometimes behave and think as if x causes y after just one case of the two being conjoined. And in some cases it is hard even to divide cause and effect into two in the first place.

The point about reacting in a blaming-like way is important too. there is a kind of judgement, or something like judgement, involved in identifying one thing as the cause of another. David Cockburn is good on this in his book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. As I recall one of the points he makes there is that to judge that a particular event or set of events is the cause of some other event is, in part, to judge that event or those events to be the relevant factor in understanding why the event in question occurred. This kind of judgement of relevance is not a simple reading of the facts presented by the world.

What are the implications for social science? Hume suggests that we can find patterns in human behavior, and that doing so might/would constitute a science. Wittgenstein seemingly thinks that we might not even find patterns and that what we find will depend on some judgments on our part.

I have not shown at all conclusively that Wittgenstein is right. But whether it matters depends on what we want from a social science, and I think that is the question to try to answer before worrying about whether we can have it.

Pinker is wrong

A bit late, I know, but I just read Steven Pinker's "Science is Not Your Enemy," and I have to say I think he is badly wrong. Not that science is your enemy, but much, perhaps most, of what he says in defence of the thesis in his title is false.

He begins with the claim that the "great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists." In the next paragraph he names them, and they are all philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith. Now Descartes certainly was a scientist as well as a philosopher, Leibniz was a mathematician, and Hume a historian who wanted, in his philosophical work, to be a second Newton of the moral sciences (i.e., roughly, a psychologist), but they are all philosophers, and their philosophical work is not the same kind of thing as their work on optics, calculus, etc. Pinker seems to be blurring this distinction from the start. He claims that methods and insights from the sciences are shedding light on ancient problems and that "writers in the humanities" should be delighted about this. So now philosophy is all the humanities, and the fact that some philosophers also did science means that distinctions between science and the humanities are artificial and bad. He doesn't quite say that, but it seems to be the idea. When you do say it explicitly it is clearly a bad idea.

From here he moves on to defend 'scientism,' reclaiming the word from those who use it in an allegedly vague and certainly pejorative sense. As he redefines it, 'scientism' is distinguished by commitment to the beliefs that the world is intelligible and that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The intelligibility claim is connected to the belief that phenomena can be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. 

One immediate problem with this is that understanding comes in different forms. It is one thing to understand a thing in terms of some general principle, another to understand something particular in its particularity, i.e. not as an instance of a general rule. I need to give examples or this idea will be very obscure. Say my mild-mannered neighbour turns out to be a serial killer and I struggle to understand how this could be, how he could have killed all those people. Perhaps all I need is statistical information about the correlation between mildness of manner and violent behavior. But perhaps that will not help me at all. Perhaps what I don't understand is how this man's particular mildness could coexist with the brutality of these crimes. I need some way to see the gentle neighbour as the same person as the serial murderer. One thing that might help here would be if he is like some character in a novel and you point this out to me. Then I can read the novel and, if you are right, I might gain the insight, the understanding, that I need. But novelists are not scientists. They don't offer general principles. Another example would be if I want to understand how Hamlet or a painting by Jackson Pollock works. I might want to know things about the brain and the effects on it of certain patterns of sound or colour, but what I want is probably something quite different. I don't want general laws. I want to know how this work is put together, how its various parts rhyme or contrast. To understand Hamlet, for instance, I need to know the plot, the characters, and the language of the play. I need to understand how these things work together in the play, in this play. What I want to understand is essentially particular. General principles can help at most only a little.

Maybe that's still too obscure. One way to understand something is to see it as an instance of a general rule, and science does a good job of providing these rules. But sometimes what we want is to understand a particular person or thing not as an instance of a general rule but as the particular thing it is. Why do the particular features of this work go so well together? It can't be because of some general rule because only this work has these features in just this relation, and telling me that any work that has these features in this relation is good is telling me nothing helpful. "Hamlet is good because of its Hamlet-iness" is not illuminating. Nor is, "When you watch Hamlet blood flows to these parts of your brain." If I want to understand a person, similarly, it might help if I know that all teenagers are like that or that such-and-such behaviour is common in old men, but equally this might just make me puzzled about all old men, or simply be no help at all. If I want to make sense of x it might be that I need to find a way to relate various things about x to various other things. Putting things in context is a way of understanding that does not involve applying general rules to particular cases.  

A second problem with Pinker's benign scientism is that according to it "the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world's traditional religions ... are factually mistaken." At most this applies to literalist versions of religious belief, and even there it is hard to believe that there isn't something else going on, that the people who insist we could get to heaven in a rocket or find hell by digging in the right place would at some point in the experiment reveal that they had not meant all of it, including the 'literally' part, literally. Maybe I'm over-optimistic there, but the idea that science could prove that God did not create the world, or become a man, or send his messenger to us, shows an outstandingly crass conception of religious belief (at least for someone who wants to be taken seriously as a critic of religion). This is a point that has been made repeatedly in response to people like Dawkins, but Pinker seems to be ignoring it. 

He then moves on to ethics:

in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings.   

Science, or facts combined with "unexceptionable convictions", supports utilitarianism! Incredible that seemingly intelligent people would still bother to think about ethics any other way! Who needs philosophy? Incredible also that Pinker would come so close to endorsing Mill's version of utilitarianism without, apparently, having read what Mill has to say on the subject. Mill offers a reasonable defence, of course, but he is far from claiming that the issue needs no argument. Indeed he brings out just how much room for debate there is on, for instance, the nature of flourishing.

When Pinker moves on to politics it is hard not to see shades of Jonathan Haidt:

The new sciences of the mind are reexamining the connections between politics and human nature, which were avidly discussed in Madison’s time but submerged during a long interlude in which humans were assumed to be blank slates or rational actors. Humans, we are increasingly appreciating, are moralistic actors, guided by norms and taboos about authority, tribe, and purity, and driven by conflicting inclinations toward revenge and reconciliation.

There is more wrong with Haidt's thinking than I can go into now, but for an introduction see here. Pinker has a lot of the same flaws, especially ignorance of the philosophical work on the topic he is discussing and ignorance of the fact that what he is getting into is philosophy.

I largely agree with all the criticisms of Pinker's essay made here, here, and here, but let me try to add a brief point of my own. Ignorance of philosophy is certainly a big part of Pinker's problem, but so is the difference between matters of fact and matters of value. If I want to know what makes a poem so good science won't help me. If I want to know in what circumstances if any abortion is OK science won't help me. If I want to know how best to relate one thing to another science will often be of limited use to me. This is not to deny that science has great value, or that open debate and hard work are valuable. It is, though, to push back against the idea that science is the way to solve all problems, i.e. to push back against scientism.

Let me end with some points made by others I agree with to save you from having to click on all the links above. First, Massimo Pigliucci:

Yes, quantitative methods can (and should) be used by historians, though this will always likely be complementary to, rather than substitutive of, classical historical methods. And yes, the fruitful collaboration between philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists is a shining example of how to bridge the divide between the two cultures. But no, quantitative analyses of Jane Austin novels interpreted in evolutionary psychological key are frankly ridiculous (I've seen it done), and while clearly the study of the physiology of visual or auditory perception are fascinating fields in their own right, they are far less useful to my enjoyment of a Picasso or a Beethoven sonata than knowledge of the history of art or of music.

Next, P. Z.Myers:

Science is a fantastic tool (our only tool, actually) for probing material realities. Respect it for what it is. But please, also recognize that there’s more to the human experience than measurement and the acquisition of knowledge about physical processes, and that science is a relatively recent and revolutionary way of thinking, but not the only one — and that humans lived and thrived and progressed for thousands of years (and many still do, even within our technological culture!) without even the concept of science.

Scientism is the idea that only science is the proper mode of human thought, and in particular, a blinkered, narrow notion that every human advance is the product of scientific, rational, empirical thinking. Much as I love science, and am personally a committed practitioner who also has a hard time shaking myself out of this path (I find scientific thinking very natural), I’ve got enough breadth in my education and current experience to recognize that there are other ways of progressing.

And finally, Ross Douthat:

Like Sam Harris, who wrote an entire book claiming that “science” somehow vindicates his preferred form of philosophical utilitarianism (when what he really meant was that if you assume utilitarian goals, science can help you pursue them), Pinker seems to have trouble imagining any reasoning person disagreeing about either the moral necessity of “maximizing human flourishing” or the content of what “flourishing” actually means — even though recent history furnishes plenty of examples and a decent imagination can furnish many more. Like his whiggish antecedents, he mistakes a real-but-complicated historical relationship between science and humanism for a necessary intellectual line in which the latter vindicates the former, or at least militates strongly in its favor. And his invocation of “the scientific facts” to justify what is, at bottom, a philosophical preference for Mill over Nietzsche is pretty much the essence of what critics mean by scientism: Empirically overconfident, intellectually unsubtle, and deeply incurious about the ways in which human beings can rationally disagree. 

P.S. Then there's Ray Monk on Wittgenstein and scientism:

Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.

There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better. There is a widespread feeling today that the great scandal of our times is that we lack a scientific theory of consciousness. And so there is a great interdisciplinary effort, involving physicists, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, to come up with tenable scientific answers to the questions: what is consciousness? What is the self? One of the leading competitors in this crowded field is the theory advanced by the mathematician Roger Penrose, that a stream of consciousness is an orchestrated sequence of quantum physical events taking place in the brain. Penrose’s theory is that a moment of consciousness is produced by a sub-protein in the brain called a tubulin. The theory is, on Penrose’s own admission, speculative, and it strikes many as being bizarrely implausible. But suppose we discovered that Penrose’s theory was correct, would we, as a result, understand ourselves any better? Is a scientific theory the only kind of understanding?

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones

Two striking examples of the terrible (I would say chilling, but that's too weak) effects that incivility can have, one in connection with climate change and one in philosophy. I've said nothing about the McGinn case because I have nothing to say that hasn't been said before, but his threat to write a book about the case makes me wonder whether everybody shouldn't say something, so that there is a chorus of opposition that makes any such manuscript unpublishable. Sadly it would just as likely have the opposite effect. Anyway, the New York Times has a story about it (not the possible book, but the case and sexism in philosophy generally), which quotes Jennifer Saul:

In an essay on implicit bias in the forthcoming book “What Needs to Change: Women in Philosophy,” Ms. Saul recalled the terror of overhearing faculty members at Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D., casually sort graduate students into “smart” versus merely hard-working — or worse, “stupid.”

Women, she said, are more likely to be categorized as “stupid,” to the detriment of the field as a whole.

Fear of being labeled not smart “is bad for philosophy,” Ms. Saul said. “It makes you not want to take risks.”

Of course in a free country people can express such views as that this or that student is stupid. But they ought not to do so, especially when there is a chance they might be overheard. And one reason why they ought not is that, as Saul says, it is bad for philosophy. (There are words people can use other than 'stupid,' I mean, and a Princeton graduate student is unlikely to be stupid in fact.)

The second example is from a Financial Times article on climate science. The whole thing is well worth reading, but this part stood out to me:

In the wake of the “Climategate” and “Glaciergate” controversies four years ago, a raft of inquiries eventually found no evidence of serious wrongdoing, let alone anything to raise doubts about the IPCC’s conclusions. But the scientists remain the target of a vigorous group of critics sceptical about their work. They have been branded “criminals” (Britain’s Lord Monckton) guilty of “massive international scientific fraud” (US senator James Sensenbrenner) who should commit “hara-kiri” (US pundit Glenn Beck) for duping the world with “snake oil” (former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin).

This has had an impact on the people doing this latest IPCC assessment, according to several of the scientists interviewed for this article. “I see it in the tension in the author team,” as they check, recheck, then check again all their work, said David Vaughan. “I think there is a point at which that kind of stress can become difficult to manage,” he added, explaining it has made IPCC work “a very cumbersome, slow process”.

Free speech is one thing, but the free market in opinions has an ugly downside (although I don't know that Beck's and Palin's positions can even be called opinions, i.e. things they actually believe). It might be the least bad way to do things, but there is a lot to be said for rational and civil debate (and for good old-fashioned shutting up) rather than the (conscious or otherwise) manipulation of opinion through rhetoric and the abuse of access to a large audience.

Origins

Somehow this fantasy curriculum has become the most viewed post I've ever written (apart from a couple I deleted because they weren't what they sounded like and were attracting people to the blog who were looking for something else). One of the courses I imagined was called Scientific Origins, and now I see that someone else has had the same idea, except on stage and online as an event rather than a course. I haven't watched the video yet, but I'm glad to see it being done.

Wittgenstein Among the Sciences

I don't know how long this link will remain functional, but for now you should be able to see my review of Rupert Read's latest book here. The book is Wittgenstein among the Sciences: Wittgensteinian Investigations into the “Scientific Method,” edited by Simon Summers (London: Ashgate, 2012). 

The first and last paragraphs should give you the gist (and I think it's OK for me to reproduce them here):

Rupert Read's new book argues that the so-called social sciences ought to be understood as social studies instead. At least, this is how the book is likely to be read, despite Read's insistence that he is not really arguing so much as he is providing reminders to help the reader decide for herself whether the social sciences are best thought of as genuine sciences. He does this in two stages. In the first, he makes the case that Kuhn is not the relativist he is often taken to be and can usefully be thought of as a Wittgensteinian philosopher. In the second, he goes through one social science, or group of social sciences, after another in order to question their status as sciences and to suggest that they are actually more philosophical than is generally recognised. The book also includes lecture transcripts, an “inter-section,” and an interview with Read conducted by Simon Summers, but the bulk of the book consists of “Part 1: Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Natural Science” and “Part 2: Wittgenstein, Winch and ‘Human Science’.”

[...] 

Is economics therefore not a science? Well, as Read somewhat surprisingly does not dwell much on, it depends what you mean by science. If some economists, for instance, seem to want to claim something false about their discipline by calling it a science, one response is to contradict them. Read leaves it to the reader to decide what to say, but it is clear enough where his sympathies lie. Another approach, however, is to agree with the economist and to be more liberal with what is called a science. Terms such as “scientia” and “Wissenschaft” (as Read notes) have a wide scope, after all, wide enough to cover philosophy (although he rejects calling philosophy science as “a disastrous and self-deceptive manoeuvre” on page 130). As Wittgenstein and Read might say, we can say what we choose, so long as it does not prevent us from seeing the facts. And Read's rich work presents a great many facts and insights that do indeed incline the reader to see much of the social sciences as infected with scientism. 

Science vs philosophy

A somewhat interesting, though also depressing, dialogue between Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss here.   Krauss says the following things:

If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs.

Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong".

The fact that infidelity, for example, is a fact of biology must, for any thinking person, modify any "absolute" condemnation of it.

If the first two quotes don't seem problematic to you, the third ought to make clear what's going wrong here. Baggini battles gamely, but I'm not sure he really gets through to his opponent.  

Nature

Allen Buchanan says:

The fact that something is natural doesn't make it good. To say that something's natural is simply to say that it accords with the way we happen to be as a result of evolution. 

It depends what you mean by natural. I'm not sure that anyone has ever really explained what 'natural' means, but it certainly does not always mean what Buchanan says it means. Anscombe, as I recall, says that in Catholic thinking (or perhaps in Aquinas) 'natural' sometimes just means good or not wrong. But I think some people use it to mean a sort of cross between the positive (or Humean) conception Buchanan has in mind and the purely normative sense that Anscombe describes. There is a sense I find in people such as Leon Kass and Michael Sandel that the source of life, call it God-or-nature, is good. Jonathan Haidt describes people trying to justify moral reactions by imagining the harm that could come from this or that odd situation (incest where pregnancy is impossible, a man having sex with a frozen chicken, etc.). Basically, when we disapprove of something we will (often) claim that we do so because we foresee bad consequences. Pointing out that such consequences are highly unlikely shows not so much that we are wrong to disapprove but that we disapprove for some other reason.

In these cases we need to dig a bit, or just think more. Ronald Dworkin does this kind of reconstructive moral psychology in Life's Dominion (I think he does a good job, others disagree), as does Jonathan Haidt in his most recent work (not well in my opinion, but others no doubt differ). In Better Than Human Buchanan unhelpfully politicizes the issue of biological enhancement, mentioning George W. Bush as often as possible (so that conservative moral positions are associated with conservative political positions) and even bringing in Patrick Devlin (think nature is a seamless web? well you know who else talked about seamless webs...). The issue is already controversial enough without bringing in guilt by association. Other than this Buchanan's arguments are good (so far--I'm only halfway through the book), but he seems blind to the possibility that respect for nature and/or life might be a value. He points out that nature isn't always nice, even quoting the old "red in tooth and claw" line and committing what I think of as the Black Corridor fallacy, namely treating the amorality of something impersonal as if it were a kind of cruelty. Jonathan Balcombe combats this attitude with a chapter in Second Nature about the warm and fuzzy side of nature. But I think this is not enough.

How can one possibly live as if nature were an enemy to be struggled against? That seems so wrongheaded to me that even neutrality seems close to impossible. Something like Chesterton's primal loyalty, along with his hating the world enough to change it and loving it enough to want to change it, seems not only good but practically necessary to me. How can we live sanely without thinking of the natural world, or just the universe, as our home? And how can we (again: sanely) avoid warm feelings about home? Buchanan shows no loyalty to nature, happily suggesting that we re-engineer mice, for instance:

the post-mouse future will arrive considerably ahead of the post-human future, and that's a good thing. Let them be the risk-pioneers. (p. 94)

The post-mouse future referred to is one in which mice have been so changed as to no longer be what we know as mice. How is this good? Buchanan writes in this passage as if it's good for us, because the risks involved will fall on the mice. To be fair to him, though, we should consider that he might also mean that it's good for the mice, because they will become post-mouse by being enhanced, not just changed but improved.  This raises the question what constitutes improvement. A better mouse-trap does its job better, but mice don't have a job (unless they were built for a purpose by the Creator, in which case Buchanan is wrong). Better mice might be happier mice, but we ought not simply to assume that happiness is the only relevant value. Or we might think of mice in more or less Aristotelian terms, as having not so much a job but a function, or multiple functions. There are things mice do: see, hear, run, avoid cats, etc. If we make them better at some or all of these things then they will be better mice. Perhaps. But there's also the idea that mice are something like works of art. And then improving them no longer makes much sense as an idea, except in cases where sick or handicapped mice are made more like standard mice.

The cosmic patriot or jingo of the universe, as Chesterton puts it, would love mice just as they are, and would want no part in trying to enhance them. The very idea of improving mice would be like the idea of improving Hamlet (perhaps by adding a sex scene). The same, only more so, would go for human beings. You can't really think (can you?) both what a piece of work is man and we can make him better. Not without a dismissive "yeah, yeah, I get it" after the 'what a piece of work' part anyway. And it's resistance to the "yeah, yeah" attitude that I think Buchanan doesn't get. Otherwise, as I say, I think I agree with him. But I haven't finished the book yet, and I worry that there might be a kind of no true Scotsman problem lurking for someone who takes my position. For now, though, I must stop blogging and enhance my back garden by weeding it before it gets too hot.

  

Moral expertise

Linking to a paper on the moral intuitions of philosophers, Brian Leiter asks whether there are expert moral intuitions and answers "probably not." I agree with what I think he means, that philosophers cannot be relied upon to have better intuitions than other people. In that sense there are no moral experts. But I think there are such experts in two other senses.

There is, I believe, such a thing as wisdom, and this is often concentrated in religious traditions. So I would expect the Dalai Lama and the Pope to have better moral intuitions than people picked at random. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, and perhaps it would be easy to find religious leaders who are bad people. But my point is really just that not everyone is equal when it comes to wisdom, and that this is relevant with regard to mortal intuitions. The wise are likely to have better intuitions than the rest of us. In that sense there are expert moral intuitions.

Possibly related to this is the fear I feel when I find out that courses on ethics are being taught by people with no philosophical training. Philosophers can certainly develop and encourage bad ways of thinking about ethics, but there are at least some pits that they are unlikely to fall into, and that can be hard for others to avoid, e.g. crude forms of relativism and subjectivism. In that sense I think philosophers do have a kind of expertise.

Following the link Leiter provided led me to this paper on human rights, which looks misguided in a way that I think most philosophers would avoid. The abstract, in part, reads:

A striking feature of contemporary human rights scholarship is the extent to which it has turned its back on the idea that human rights can grounded in a theory of human nature. Philosophers, social scientists, and political and legal theorists thus frequently assert that the classical Enlightenment project of supplying a naturalistic foundation for human rights is dead. The main purpose of this contribution to a new book of essays on human rights is to rebut this pervasive skepticism. Drawing on recent work in the cognitive science of moral judgment, I defend one of the critical premises of ancient philosophy, Enlightenment Rationalism and the modern human rights movement alike: that human beings are moral and political animals, who are endowed with a moral faculty or sense of justice. The chapter thereby seeks to offer a new perspective on an old and venerable argument about the naturalistic foundation of human rights.

This new perspective begins from the observation that whether human beings possess a common moral faculty is not primarily a philosophical, political, or theological question, but an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed. The confident assertions of skeptics such as Michael Ignatieff, Richard Rorty, Gilbert Ryle, Alasdair MacIntyre, Sigmund Freud, Ruth Benedict, Richard Posner, Robert Bork, and many other writers notwithstanding, one cannot therefore simply decide the matter from the armchair. On the contrary, probative evidence and sound scientific argument must be brought to bear. [...]

... classical accounts typically rest on the claim that an innate moral faculty and with it principles of justice, fairness, empathy, and solidarity are written into the very frame of human nature. These themes were particularly influential during the Enlightenment, when the modern human rights movement first emerged. It is precisely this set of ideas that modern cognitive science, liberated from the crippling methodological restrictions of positivism, behaviorism, historicism, and other discredited theoretical frameworks, has recently begun to explicate and to a substantial extent verify. This new trend in the science of human nature, I suggest, has potentially profound implications for the theory and practice of universal human rights.    

One mistake that might be here (I'd have to read the whole paper to tell) is that of thinking that a common faculty of moral judgment would give human beings a special moral status. But surely having the ability to discern moral value is not the same thing as having moral value itself. So if human beings have rights it can't (simply and straightforwardly) be because we have a moral faculty.

Another apparent mistake is the idea that anything about ethics, anything normative, would follow from a discovery about human brains, such as a discovery that they have an innate sense of fairness. From "human beings have an innate tendency to x" it does not follow that x is good. What we naturally consider fair or just might not be fair or just. Mill points this out, I think, in Utilitarianism. Familiarity with that kind of insight is the kind of expertise that moral philosophers have, and that others often appear to lack.

This point might seem to be the same as the point in the paragraph before it, but it's not. Even if we have the ability to tell what really is just I don't think it follows immediately that we have any moral value ourselves. The ability to tell what is right is a good thing, of course, so we might have value just as possessors of this ability. But this value might not be very great, for instance if we never use our ability for good, or if telling what is right and what is wrong is supremely easy for every being, so that beings that have the ability to do so are nothing special. Perhaps more to the point, from the fact that a being can tell what is just it does not follow that one must not, say, beat or enslave that being.

Well, that's probably enough for a critique of a paper that I haven't read. The key mistake I think is here:

whether human beings possess a common moral faculty is not primarily a philosophical, political, or theological question, but an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed

The empirical question is whether human beings possess a "moral faculty," i.e. something that scientists call a moral faculty.  Whether they possess a moral faculty (i.e. whether this faculty, if it exists, actually identifies what is right) is a question for ethicists, i.e. moral philosophers, i.e. philosophers. These philosophers might well include scientists. Indeed, they include everyone who thinks about what is right and what is wrong. But doing that is not "an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed." 


The author of the article wants to bring together work in several disciplines, "including experimental philosophy, developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, primatology, anthropology, comparative criminal law, and other fields." Good reason to be suspicious of experimental philosophy is given by Lars Hertzberg here. 

Faith and grammar

Neuroscience proves Wittgenstein right! Well, no, but this is an interesting story all the same.

The study found that "sacred" values – those the participants would not sign away for cash – prompted greater activation of the part of the brain associated with evaluating rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes: the same neural systems used for processing rules of grammar, syntax or street signs.

Reasons and knowledge

Jean Kazez posts an interesting passage from Derek Parfit's On What Matters:

It is sometimes claimed that we have reasons to enjoy, or be thrilled or in other ways moved by, great artistic works. In many cases, I believe, this claim is false. We can have reasons to want to enjoy, or be thrilled or moved by, these artistic works. But these are not reasons to enjoy, or to be thrilled or moved by, these works.  We do have reasons to admire some novels, plays or poems, given the importance of some of the ideas that they express. But poetry is what gets lost in the translation, even if this translation expresses the same ideas. And we never have reasons to enjoy, or be moved by, great music.   If we ask what makes some musical passage so marvellous, the answer might be ‘Three modulations to distant keys’. This answer describes a cause of our response to this music, not a reason. Modulations to distant keys are like the herbs, spices, or other ingredients that can make food delicious. When someone neither enjoys nor is moved by some great musical work, this person is not in any way less than fully rational, by failing to respond to certain reasons.

This seems an odd way to talk about literature. Let's say a novel expresses the idea that racism is evil. Is that a reason to admire the novel? If the book is badly written then I think it might be a reason to it, or at least not to be too harsh in our criticism of it. "Although the author plainly means well, I'm afraid that I cannot recommend..." Is that admiration? I think that what I admire in a case like this is the author's intention or sentiments, not the novel itself.

It's also an odd way to talk about music. We never have reasons to enjoy great music? I imagine that Parfit would agree we have reasons to listen to great music. What would a reason to enjoy it be? Maybe that is Parfit's point. But I think a reason might be "this bit" or "the bit with the flute" or "the way the guitar sounds like a bagpipe." Then Parfit might say that those are the reasons why someone likes the music, they are what someone likes in it, but they are not reasons for liking it or to like it. The bit with the flute, or the flute playing, is the bit you like best, just as someone might like the cilantro most in a dish of food. So "it's got cilantro in it" might be one's reason for liking a dish, but it is not a reason to like it. It is more like a cause than a reason in the relevant sense. I wonder though. Can I know what causes me to like things, necessarily? Or rather, is my knowing what I like about something the same as knowing what causes me to like it? It doesn't seem like it to me. You can know what you like without having a clue why you like it.

The important idea for Parfit, I think, is that it is not irrational to dislike cilantro or the flutey bit or whatever. But I'm not sure it is as simple as that. Is it rational to admire great ideas? Is it more rational to do so than it is to admire great musicianship or composition or cooking or any kind of artistry? Anyone who does not enjoy or feel moved by these things is missing something. If they are, say, deaf then this has nothing to do with their rationality, but otherwise I think it does. What the connection is, exactly, I am deliberately leaving vague. But I think there is one.

I was reminded of all this by Alex Rosenberg's piece in The Stone, in which he suggests that neither literary criticism nor fiction (nor history!) provides knowledge. He ends with an interesting use of what I will call the second-person 'we':

What naturalists really fear is not becoming dogmatic or giving up the scientific spirit. It’s the threat that the science will end up showing that much of what we cherish as meaningful in human life is illusory.

It is clear enough that Rosenberg does not exactly cherish the work he describes as "fun, but not knowledge." At least this is clear to anyone who reads the post and comments on this at New APPS. As Jon Cogburn says there:

Has Rosenberg ever even read the Times Literary Supplement or the New York or London Reviews of Books? When did this casual philistinism combined with such unjustified, blanket dismissals of the life works of others become acceptable enough for one of our brethren to manifest it in the New York Times of all places? Has he even ever seriously read an issue of the Sunday Times, which includes its fair share of literary criticism? How could, barring radical skepticism which would entail that science doesn’t deliver knowledge, one possibly say that the epistemic standards of these publications don’t deliver knowledge? And the same holds for the parade of intellectual bogeymen that precedes his idiotic statement about literary criticism. Shame!

My suspicion is that behind Rosenberg's apparent philistinism and Parfit's obscure thoughts (obscure to me, not having read his very long book in which, perhaps, he explains them very well) is a vestige of the old distinction between the cognitive and the emotive. So poetry, as Parfit seems to see it, can contain ideas, but these are expressible in prose and what gets lots in the translation is only the poetry, not the ideas. (He doesn't quite say that, but that's what I suspect he means.) And Rosenberg distinguishes science, which gives us knowledge, from the cherished fun of literature or rather what sounds an awful lot like continental philosophy (frighteningly referring to all the liberal arts while having the emotive meaning: Boooo!!!).

Here, as elsewhere, we seem to me to have the phenomenon of one group looking at the ends of the spaghetti (or the heads of the hydra) and seeing their obvious distinctness while another group looks further down, perhaps missing the ends or heads completely, and insisting that the distinction is illusory. Less metaphorically, there is an obvious difference between straightforward expressions of facts, on the one hand, and music or highly poetic language on the other, but seeing this difference should not blind us to the similarities and connections that might nevertheless exist and even matter. It might not even be possible to separate the two completely without killing the beast we want to understand.

Not getting a fact or not seeing is truth is missing something about the world. So is not seeing what is good about a piece of music. (And so is thinking you're hearing a flute when perhaps it's just a man going "woo woo".)

Winch and Lerner

In the 1958 edition of The Idea of a Social Science (which is the only edition I have to hand), Winch says on p. 1 that his topic is a certain idea about the relation between social science, natural science, and philosophy. Basically it's the idea that the social sciences are just like the natural sciences, only younger. It is this idea that he wants to attack.

On p. 43 he identifies "giving an account of the nature of social phenomena in general" as "the central problem of sociology." I think this gives some idea of what he means when he talks about social sciences wanting to be (or being wanted to be) like natural sciences: the goal is general laws or the identification of general patterns.

On p. 88 he says that "a historian or sociologist of religion must himself have some religious feeling if he is to make sense of the religious movement he is studying." This might sound controversial, but he goes on to use the example of a historian of art needing to have some aesthetic sense in order to understand "the problems confronting the artists," which seems reasonable, if perhaps a little vague, to me. Without such a sense, he says, the historian would only provide "a rather puzzling external account of certain motions which certain people have been perceived to go through." He does not deny that it is possible to give this kind of account. All he denies is that it would be a history of art.

The last passage I want to quote is on p. 93:

I am not denying that it is sometimes possible to predict decisions; only that the evidence on which such predictions are based must be different in kind from that on which scientific predictions are based.

Historical trends are in part the result of intentions and decisions, he explains.

It seems to me that Winch denies that meaningful behavior can be studied simultaneously qua meaningful and in just the same way that scientists study the meaningless behavior of atoms or cells. And that seems right to me. (It also seems to me that his work might usefully be read alongside Anscombe's work on intention, but that's probably another story.)

Now, what does Lerner say about Winch? He gathers together and discusses a range of criticisms of Winch's work, which seems valuable in itself to me. He also makes a strong case that Winch has got the Azande wrong. But what seems to me to be his key claim is, as he summarizes it on pp. 3-4, this:

I criticize Winch (and Norman Malcolm) for not appreciating that a naturalistic inquiry into the human cognitive capacities that underlie rule following could serve as the subject of an explanatory science of uniquely human behavior. Furthermore, I point out that the application of a rule to substantially unfamiliar circumstances is precisely the situation in which "meaningless" causal factors are most likely to determine human behavior.

This is a fair point, I think, but the study of meaningless causal factors and human cognitive capacities would not, it seems to me, count as social science as Winch understands it. That kind of thing would be natural science, which Winch has nothing against.

What about the usefulness of social science for policy-making? A friend of mine is an expert on African politics and sometimes shares his expertise with people in Washington, DC. Winch says nothing against the idea that this might be a good thing. All that I think he would deny is that this kind of expertise is scientific expertise, rightly understood. Much that goes by the name of "social science" might be very useful, as Lerner rightly points out, but I don't read Winch as meaning to deny this. So, although I'm aware that I might be chickening out of an unwelcome confrontation, I think it's possible to agree with Winch and Lerner to a large extent. Winch explains what social science cannot be, while Lerner points out what it nevertheless can be. Both are, for the most part, right.

OK, what have I missed or got wrong?