Nutshell studies

"We make pictures of facts for ourselves."

"A picture is a model of reality."

"Take any action allow'd to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but 'tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object."

"Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial."

"If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition."

"The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone."

"Certainly the reading of this description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics."

"There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad."

More about these scenes here. And, if you're wondering, these are just pictures from an exhibition I visited recently accompanied by passages of philosophy that they reminded me of. I'm not trying to make a deep point.

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.

My gambling problem

This isn't going to be a confession, sorry. The problem is this: is gambling rational?

Very often people say that it is not rational to buy lottery tickets, even going so far as to call lotteries a tax on stupidity. I dislike that joke partly because I think it's more accurate to call it a tax on desperation, and jokes at the expense of the desperately poor aren't funny. Partly, also, because I buy lottery tickets from time to time (despite not being desperately poor), and jokes at the expense of me are never funny. There's also the fact that it is rational to buy a $1 lottery ticket if you get $1 worth of pleasure from it. And fantasizing about what you would do if you won can be very pleasant (much more pleasant if you have a ticket than if you don't). Or at least as pleasant as about a third of a latte. But, here's the problem, is that fantasizing rational? It isn't realistic. It's not like fantasizing about what you might do with money you know you are going to inherit or get from selling your business, say. It's not like fantasizing about spending money you know you have a realistic chance of getting either. It's sheer fantasy. It's not taking pleasure in an aspect of reality but in a kind of escape, or looking away, from reality. And 'irrational' might not be the right word for that kind of pleasure, but it's in the ballpark.

A related issue is the rationality of voting. It's often said that voting is irrational because the cost outweighs the likely benefits, much like gambling. Max Black, as I recall, argues that it can be rational if the stakes are high enough. He's right that the likely benefits need to be taken into account, and not just the odds of one vote being the decider, but I don't think this is enough. In many elections the good candidate is not so much better than the bad candidate that voting is rational on some kind of cost-benefit model. But the idea that voting is irrational immediately raises the question: what if everyone thought that way (and acted accordingly)? It would, most people agree, be bad. Can it really be rational to behave in a way that would be bad if universalized?

It depends, of course, on your conception of rationality. The dominant one is roughly Humean and the alternative I'm groping towards is roughly Kantian. The Humean one counts as rational any act that is an effective means to whatever your ends may be. The more effective, the more rational. So buying lottery tickets is irrational if your end is maximizing your expected wealth, but it might be rational if your end is maximizing your expected pleasure. There is no question, though, whether it is rational to have this or that end.

It is slightly amazing that that conception of rationality has caught on, given how counterintuitive it is. As Anscombe points out, it is irrational to want a cup of mud or to put all your green books on the roof (in the absence of something that makes it rational after all, of course). It is irrational--insane--to want to be killed and eaten. If we are going to distinguish the sane from the insane then I think we need this sense of rationality. The mentally ill are not just inefficient or wrong about the facts. Sometimes their ends make no sense. So I think we need something like the Kantian notion of rationality, and if we use this instead of the Humean one then problems about the rationality of voting go away, while the idea that buying lottery tickets is rational (except perhaps in odd circumstances) also goes away. This also speaks in favour of the Kantian notion.

The problem, of course, is that this notion is obscure. It is closely connected with a notion of humanity, of what it means to be human, and that is difficult terrain. It is also essentially normative, which complicates things. Those aren't reasons to give up on it though.        

The missing shade of blue

If, like me, you don't remember to check Arts & Letters Daily daily then you might have missed this essay in the Financial Times. In it Jennie Erdal asks whether it's still possible to write a philosophical novel, although I don't see why it wouldn't be, and she gives some examples in answer to her own question (including novels by Coetzee and All is Song by Samantha Harvey, which sounds quite good). It might not be easy to do it as well as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky did it, but then it probably never was.

Erdal's own novel is called The Missing Shade of Blue, and its title reminds me of this famous passage from Hume:

I believe it will readily be allowed, that the several distinct ideas of colour, which enter by the eye, or those of sound, which are conveyed by the ear, are really different from each other; though, at the same time, resembling. Now if this be true of different colours, it must be no less so of the different shades of the same colour; and each shade produces a distinct idea, independent of the rest. For if this should be denied, it is possible, by the continual gradation of shades, to run a colour insensibly into what is most remote from it; and if you will not allow any of the means to be different, you cannot, without absurdity, deny the extremes to be the same. Suppose, therefore, a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly acquainted with colours of all kinds, except one particular shade of blue, for instance, which it never has been his fortune to meet with. Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be placed before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest; it is plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, and will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place between the contiguous colours than in any other. Now I ask, whether it be possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, though it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there are few but will be of opinion that he can

I think I have to count myself among the few here. We can conjure up ideas in the usual sense of 'idea', but Hume is talking about ideas as things that can "enter by the eye," which can only be something like bits of light. And there's no conjuring those up. Presumably he means the experience of seeing, say, some particular shade of blue, but that doesn't enter by the eye, and it also can't be conjured up. We can dream we see it, or imagine we know what it would be like, but we surely can't actually create the experience by thinking or willpower. If we think we can it's because the grammar of color seems to intimate it to us, showing the hole in our experience where it ought to go. But this via negativa is no substitute for the real thing. Experiences are events, and ideas are public. The idea of private objects as something like a cross between an experience and an idea is a myth. But not one I expect to go away any time soon, or as a result of reading this post. And I expect I am being much too dogmatic here, hoping for a shortcut to avoid real work.

Hume on drugs

I haven't tried relating many topics in the history of philosophy to current affairs with my students, but perhaps I should. Anyone who teaches Hume on causation might want to look at this article by Jonah Lehrer on biomedical research, for instance. Here's the conclusion:

For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.

I don't love Lehrer's account of what Hume says ("a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts"), and other objections are raised in the comments at the end of the article, but he might help students see some ways that philosophy could be relevant to the real world. He also suggests ways that a naive view of science can be misleading (see the comments again for discussion of whether he attacks a strawman--even if he does, I'm sure there are plenty of non-scientists who are that naive). And then there's the nice metaphysical/ethical claim at the very end, that it's "mystery all the way down." It isn't easy reading, but it might provide some good discussion material or examples to make the abstract seem less distant.

There is interesting material also here, here, and here (if you read one it's worth reading all three) about practical difficulties relating to causation and correlation in mental illness and its treatment. If I ever teach philosophy of mind/psychology again I might try bringing stuff like this in and see how it goes. Watch this space.  

Hume and reasons

Simon Blackburn was the first person to teach me philosophy when I was an undergraduate, and I'm sure he has influenced me more than I realize. He was a brilliant teacher, managing to make Hume seem all at once very clear, very controversial, and indisputably correct. He also helped me enormously when I was applying to graduate schools, going far beyond what I might reasonably have asked of him. It's good to remember what I owe him. But I can't resist quibbling with some of what he writes in his defense of  Hume in The Stone. According to Blackburn, Hume is misunderstood by his critics:

The most visible example of this is the rumpus surrounding the famous passage in which Hume declares that reason by itself is inert, and has no other office than to serve and obey the passions. The mountains of commentary this has excited include accusations that Hume is a skeptic about practical reasoning (whatever that might mean); that he is a nihilist who cannot have any values; that in his eyes nothing matters; that he is too stupid to realize that learning that a glass contains benzene instead of gin might extinguish your desire to drink from it; that he constantly forgets his own theory; and indeed, in the words of one contemporary writer — the frothing and foaming and insolence here reach a crescendo — that philosophers like Hume only avoid being “radically defective specimens of humanity” by constantly forgetting and then contradicting their own views. 

The contemporary writer in question is Allen Wood. Here Blackburn quotes Wood at greater length, writing that, as Wood sees it:

Humeans must say that there are no reasons for anything—nothing matters. They are rank nihilists! Nicely illustrating how to combine poverty of imagination with vulgarity of tone, one of the commentators included here, Allen Wood, describes them as ‘either radically defective specimens of humanity who are incapable of feeling respect for anyone or anything, or else every time they do feel it they commit themselves to contradicting their own metaethical theories’. Golly.

It seems to me that Wood is saying that the Humean theory would only be true if people were much worse than they actually are. Whether that's true or false, I don't think that saying it is so vulgar, insolent, frothing, or foaming.

Reasons are tricky things because they can be thought of as motives or as justifications. Hume's claim that reason is the slave of the passions covers both these ideas: reason does not move us to action without some accompanying emotion, and reason ought not to move us unless in the service of some (presumably good) emotion, according to him. The 'ought' that follows the 'is' (in "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions") is a little odd, but not disastrously so. If reason cannot be anything else then why say that it ought not to be anything else? If it could be something else then how can Hume be so sure that it isn't? I assume he means that it isn't and we shouldn't pretend, or try to act, otherwise.

It depends what you mean by 'reason' though, surely. Hume seems to mean something like 'the calculative faculty,' and I suppose that is a slave of the passions. But if by 'reason' we mean something closer to sanity, then reason is not such a slave. It isn't rational in that sense of 'reason' to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one's finger.

Schopenhauer says that all actions are the result of the agent's character combined with a motive, where I think the motive is taken to be something like a carrot and a relevant feature of one's character might be loving carrots. The carrot alone does not cause my movement towards it, but then neither does reference to my love of carrots unless we know (that I believe) there is a carrot there. This picture seems all right as far as it goes, but it seems to rely on the fact/value distinction perhaps a little too much. If I avoid pain do we need to add that my character happens to have aversion to pain as one of its features? Or if I do the right thing do we need to add that I happen to be the kind of person who values rightness in order to make sense of my behavior?

It's tempting to say that we only don't need to because it goes without saying. But I wonder. Can we really understand something's being painful without understanding it as to-be-avoided? Or something's being right without understanding it as desirable? If something is desirable other things being equal, we don't need to add "and other things are equal in this case." It is analytic that the painful is to be avoided (other things being equal) and the right (if there is such a thing) is to be done, isn't it? Which I suppose is just a way of saying that some concepts are normatively loaded. "Because there were carrots in it" is not an intelligible reason for running into a burning building, unless I know that the runner really loves carrots. But "Because my daughter was in it" is a perfectly intelligible reason. And not because we add an unspoken "And people love their daughters."

If, as Blackburn says, "reasons have become the Holy Grail of contemporary philosophy," then it seems that philosophers would do well to pay more attention to grammar, to the definition and use of words like 'reason'. But I suppose I would say that.

[UPDATE: when I first conceived this post I thought I had something to say. Now I'm less sure that that's the case, especially given how vast the literature on this subject is and how little I even try to say about it here. But my sense is that a lot of time has been spent arguing about what reasons really are and whether reason is really the slave of the passions, and so on. If the answer to these questions is "It depends what you mean by 'reason'," or "In this sense/these cases Yes, but in that sense/those cases No," then much of this energy might have been wasted.]

The destruction of the world

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

Hume famously declaims, “'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg'd lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than for the latter.” (2.3.3.6)

I've always thought that Hume was choosing extreme examples just to make the point. But Samuel Fleischacker discusses the saying "Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus" (Let justice be done, though the world perish) the motto of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I (1503-1564), and, reading this, it seems at least possible that Hume had that motto in mind. If someone else were to scratch Hume's finger against his will, after all, then this would be unjust. The example of the Indian or stranger might be based on the story of the Good Samaritan. The third example is harder to relate to some satirical parallel, but perhaps Hume has in mind either the kind of rejection of worldly goods suggested by the Sermon on the Mount or else the more worldly phenomenon of loving what is not good for one, such as eating lots of veal. None of this changes the point, but it's fun to think what Hume might have been hinting at.

That is, I'm not suggesting that if Hume had these (or other) specific examples in mind that it would make a difference to the meaning of the passage. But it would add some rhetorical complexity. The very people who might object that of course it's irrational to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of someone's finger might be the same ones who insist that justice be done though the world perish. They might, in other words, support the very idea that they want to insist is irrational. It certainly wouldn't be beyond Hume to be wily in this way.

Hume on miracles

More shooting from the hip, but it seems to produce interesting results (at least for me) and this is only a blog after all.

The last time I discussed Hume on miracles with other real philosophers the majority of the group seemed to think his argument was pretty hopeless. I think that view goes something like this:

Hume says it's irrational to believe in miracles because, by (his) definition, a miracle violates a law of nature. But Hume of all people shouldn't be saying that it's rational to believe that laws of nature are never violated! The evidence for each alleged miracle is some kind of testimony, the evidence against, he says, is universal experience. But experience does not tell us that what usually happens must always happen, nor even that it probably always happens. So the evidence against is very weak, perhaps even non-existent.

The Bible says that the Red Sea parted. Evidence for this being true: the Bible says it happened. Evidence against: seas don't part. But, according to Hume, it is not rational to believe that seas don't part. It is only rational to believe that  observed seas don't part (and not because they are observed). Or even: observed seas with the possible exception of the Red Sea on one occasion don't part. But that tells us nothing about what the Red Sea did when none of us was there to observe it. Hume has blundered!

I don't think that's right. For one thing, if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature and there are no laws of nature, then there cannot be any miracles. If there are laws of nature but it is not rational to believe in them, then it is also not rational to believe in miracles thus defined. No laws of nature violated without laws of nature. This might be cheating, but it isn't a blunder.

Secondly, although Hume does not believe it is rational to believe in laws of nature he does think it is normal, natural, and pretty much inevitable (for human beings, at least). So we can take laws of nature as given. Once we do this miracles are possible after all. But is it ever wise to believe in any given miracle? That is his question. We have some evidence in favor of each alleged miracle, namely the allegation or claim that it happened. Against this we have not so much evidence that it didn't as a kind of posit or presupposition that it could not have happened. Can it be wise to reject this dictate of human-nature-plus-experience? Hume thinks not.

As he sees it we cannot help but think inductively, so belief in the violation of a natural law is almost impossible. If it is possible, it comes at a price. Wittgenstein asks whether we would still stay in the saddle no matter how much the facts bucked (his love of Westerns showing through?) and Hume's concern is with something like staying in the saddle, holding on to our natural common sense. If miracle stories are facts then they are bucking facts, and it cannot (he thinks) be wise to let them unseat us.

It seems to me that Christians might agree with this. Some of them accept that their beliefs are not prudent or strictly rational. Kierkegaard and Chesterton, for instance, are more passionate than that. Hume is presumably teasing when he talks of faith in miracles as a miracle, but believers might say that this is exactly what it is.        

I could have been wild and I could have been free, but nature played this trick on me

This is part III of an irregular series of posts in which I take a famous passage from a work of philosophy and talk about it without taking its context much into account or doing more than glance at a tiny fraction of the secondary literature on it. That's pretty inexcusable, but I enjoy it and the results have been OK so far. (This is the kind of thing people say before a terrible crash.)

Today my victim is Hume. He is famously a compatibilist, believing that free will is compatible with determinism. But is this really what he believes? It isn't clear to me that he believes in either free will or determinism, and 'neither...nor' is not 'both...and.' If we define determinism, as I believe Tommi Uschanov once did, as the theory that every event has a cause, then Hume would not be a determinist if he did not believe that any event has a cause. And surely some people read him this way. Certainly some people read him as denying that we have free will, since he talks about the liberty of not being in chains rather than freedom of the will, and this (our not being in chains) is not what defenders of free will typically have in mind.

So, what does he actually say? This sounds pretty deterministic:

Everyone agrees that matter in all its operations is driven by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so exactly settled by the energy of its cause that in those particular circumstances no other effect could possibly have resulted from that cause.

But he also says this:

The necessity of any physical or mental action is not, strictly speaking, a quality in the agent; rather, it resides in the thinking or intelligent onlooker, and consists chiefly in the determination of the onlooker's thoughts to infer the occurrence of that action from some preceding events

Which sounds as though he is denying that there is any necessary force in any matter that drives its operations. The necessity is in the mind of the beholder, much as the badness of murder lies not in the act, according to Hume, but is a kind of function of the heart of those who contemplate the act. Because we all have much the same minds we all agree that murder is bad and that determinism is true. But it isn't really. (Kant then tries to solve this problem by claiming that the matter in question also exists only in the mind.)

And what of liberty or free will? Everyone knows that Hume says this:

By ‘liberty’, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will; i.e. if we choose to stay still we may do so, and if we choose to move we may do that. This hypothetical liberty—·‘hypothetical’ because it concerns what we may do if we so choose·—is universally agreed to belong to everyone who isn’t a prisoner and in chains. There’s nothing to disagree about here.

I think less attention is paid to this passage:

liberty, when opposed to necessity, is nothing but the absence of that determination ·in the onlooker’s thought· and a certain looseness or indifference which the onlooker feels in passing or not passing from the idea of one event to the idea of a following event. 

Liberty, too, is in the mind of the beholder, according to this. Hume seems to think it is rather illusory, but that is what he says it is. If this is right then liberty is not compatible with necessity at all. The onlooker's thoughts either have the determination in question or they don't. If they do, the agent's actions are necessary. If they don't, they are free.

I'm sure this has all been said before unless it is just badly wrong. But I wonder whether it relates to why (as I recall) Wittgenstein, in writing about free will, focuses so much on predictability.  

Prejudice and fun

Not the fun of prejudice, but two separate notes about recent posts at New APPs.

In this post, I was struck by the quotation from Hume (it's from Book I, part III, section XIII of the Treatise, according to a quick Google search):

to use another of Hume’s examples, common prejudices such as an “Irishman cannot have wit, and a Frenchman cannot have solidity.” 

If wit means intelligence then these exact prejudices are still around (or were when I was growing up) almost three hundred years later. (I assume that having solidity is the opposite of being a cheese-eating surrender monkey.) Which all ties in with the idea here that "we still seem to be up to our necks in the slavery heritage." That kind of heritage dies hard. 


And now for some good news: fun. Or funsterism. Here is a defense of philosophers who boldly go against common sense. It's weird (not exactly unusual, but disorienting) to see things from that point of view. In comments there, dmf writes that "If memory serves Rorty reads Davidson, after Kuhn, on "living" metaphors as non-sensical creations (perhaps provoked by encounters with the unassimilated)that evoke paradigm shifts and then are slowly incorporated into everyday use and slowly “die”."  I don't know whether Rorty would have liked calling such things nonsensical (maybe that's just the word that Davidson uses, I don't know), but otherwise this idea sounds fine to me. It's hardly the same thing as philosophers claiming that possible worlds are real, though, or that nothing is a part of anything. Or so it seems to me. If only because this kind of metaphysics is not likely to appeal to the people who turn nonsense into dead metaphors.

That post links to this one, which says that philosophers create concepts. Of course this is true (qualia, anyone?), but it's hard to think of any good concepts that philosophers have created, or ones that have caught on with non-philosophers. Newton and Einstein have been influential in fruitful ways, but have any philosophers? I suppose they have, but the names that come to mind are either hundreds of years old or else in the continental tradition. If contemporary analytic philosophers think that what they are doing is being creative in the way that, say, Einstein was, then I suspect they are mistaken. But even as I type I'm becoming more and more aware of how ignorant I am about the subject.  

Finally, speaking of lumping things together, here's a new blog to check out: Lump and Split, by J. Jeffers.