Miranda Fricker at Washington & Lee

Yesterday Miranda Fricker spoke at Washington & Lee University about "Epistemic Equality as a Condition of Well-functioning Blaming and Forgiving." It was a strange experience for me because we were contemporaries as undergraduates, not just at the same university but at the same college within the university, although I don't think we've ever had a conversation. She has achieved rather more than I have since then. I'm not sure that her promise was recognized as much as it should have been at the time.

She talked her talk rather than reading it, which was impressive and more engaging than the usual philosophy presentation, but it also led to a problem with timing and, unless I missed something, she didn't get to finish saying what she meant to say, even in abbreviated form. It didn't help that a man in the audience interrupted the talk to ask a question. What she did say was a kind of (necessarily very brief) summary of her ideas about epistemic injustice, followed by some application of these ideas to blame (I don't think she got to forgiveness, except perhaps very briefly).

Epistemic injustice occurs when someone either is not listened to, or is not taken fully seriously, when they make a statement because of unjust prejudice against them or some group to which they belong, or when their participation in "practices of shared social understanding" is limited. These ideas of Fricker's are relatively well known.

What was new in this talk, as far as I know, was the application to blame. I was slightly confused by some of this, so I may be presenting the ideas inaccurately, but here's what I think she said. One kind of blame (and by 'blame' she seems to mean the public act of accusing someone of having done wrong, not just holding a grudge or privately judging someone to be in the wrong) is fairly straightforward: your friend is late to meet you, say, and you point this out (perhaps she had thought the arranged time was later than it really was), whereupon she acknowledges the badness of her behavior, apologizes, and life goes on as normal. Another kind, though, is more complicated. This is the part I struggled with, especially in terms of imagining an actual example of the phenomenon in question.

This kind of blame involves someone who does not see anything wrong with their behavior, who sees no reason why they should have behaved differently. Here pointing out what they did will make no difference to them. Perhaps they acknowledge that they were late but see no reason why they should ever be punctual, for instance. Fricker's handout says:

Treat someone as if she already recognizes a reason to have acted differently, and (given she has sufficient base-line respect or care for you) you may thereby cause her to come to recognize the reason.

I'm speculating here, but maybe the idea is something like this. I tell my friend not to worry about her lateness since the time flew by as I waited for her because I was enjoying reading and rarely get a chunk of time like that in which to read; she is initially puzzled because she doesn't expect people to care about lateness, but realizes that I obviously take it to be something one might well care about; putting two and two together, she comes to see that even if she never minds when others are late, she had better be more careful with other people's time in future.

If she goes through a process of reasoning like this then the value of punctuality has now become more widely entrenched in our social world. But whether his happens, or to what extent it happens, will depend in part on how seriously she takes what I say and on how well she is able to understand what I am saying. So there is room for problems of epistemic injustice to make a difference here.

That, at least, is what I think she means. And it seems right to me.

Truth with a capital T

Does anyone ever defend this idea? I can't think of a time when I've heard someone refer to "truth with a capital T" except to reject the idea. And if that is always the case, if no one ever claims to believe in truth with a capital T, why does anyone bother to reject the idea? What is being rejected?

Attention to particulars

Nietzsche seems to think that we should say Yes to everything, even the terrible. And this Yes, I take it, is not equivalent to "OK then," but is more like a "Yes!", an enthusiastic embrace, Larkin's enormous yes that falls as love is supposed to. We should love it all, the whole world. But not dishonestly or distortedly. The terrible is to be loved but still recognized as terrible. It's hard to see how this could be done. As Tal Brewer says of The Gay Science section 341: "The problem is that one's life can be marred by tragic events such as the early death of a child, and it would hardly show one to be living well if one would consent gladly to the precise eternal recurrence even of these elements of one's life" (p. 149). You could only embrace the whole of your life (if something like this had happened) or the whole world (where things just like this have happened), it seems to me, if you abstracted away from these things. It would be dishonest to focus instead on some good thing, so the only thing is to not focus on anything. To look into the middle distance or, as it were, to take off one's glasses. But isn't loving a blur like this sentimentality?

The same kind of thing might be said about Schopenhauer when he suggests a choice between seeing the world as nothing and Nirvana as everything or vice versa. I think this is at least roughly what I was trying to get at when I expressed doubts about a generalized reverence for life. But I don't mean that we can or should just write off Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and, while we're at it, perhaps the whole of Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions too. What I mean (for what it's worth) is that the only honest, non-sentimental way to love the world (or life, or anything else as general as that) is to do so as these things are incarnated in particulars. Without attention to particulars there is no true love. (Can I get away with a grand claim like that?) And I think that this means there are (speaking broadly) two ways to be un-loving: to pay attention to particulars in the wrong way (e.g. callously or sadistically) and to disregard particulars and focus instead on abstractions or generalizations.

Military crimes tend to be of the former sort, as when they show or embody indifference to the innocent people killed along with the target (in a clumsy drone strike, for instance), or when they deliberately aim at inflicting pain (in the use of torture). Terrorism seems to be of the latter sort. Real targets are attacked, but as symbols, not because of what they actually are. The best example I can think of is the attack on time itself in the form of the Greenwich Observatory in Conrad's The Secret Agent, but the 9/11 attacks come to mind also, given their symbolic date and targets. The recent atrocity in Norway is another example, if the children killed were targeted because of what they were considered to 'represent' (i.e. their political views).

Terrorism can seem to be (and perhaps sometimes is) a combination of symbolic thinking (abstracted from the particular people involved) and consequentialism, breaking a few symbolic eggs in order to make some mythical omelet. But there can be also what I hesitate to call an aesthetic aspect to it too. The goal is to create terror, after all, which is roughly the goal of horror movies (and books and music and whatever else can share that general form). Terrorists want to make nightmares reality, even if this is not their ultimate goal. It wouldn't be surprising if Breivik had seen Battle Royale. But I don't mean that it is necessarily bad to enjoy such films, or shock rock, or scary stories. My point is just to recognize that terrorism is more complicated than I might have suggested if I had left out this aspect of it.

I have some sympathy with the views of Chris Bertram and dsquared here, especially the latter's complaint about "failure to own one's own bullshit." But there is, I feel, a tension in Bertram's worrying about people selecting themselves into groups while criticizing a rather vague range of people he disagrees with (albeit rightly) and throwing out the word 'fascist' (which he then neither applies to these people nor really declines to apply: he explicitly rejects throwing this kind of mud as "not particularly useful," but he puts them all in the vicinity of the mud anyway, perhaps hoping they will fall in without his having to get his hands dirty). It is the thinking in terms of groups that is the real problem, I think. But let me immediately qualify that.

If we're talking about the mass murder of children then that is the real problem. But if we're talking about something more intellectual like an "epistemic environment" then the problem is not hatred of terrorism or "honor killings" or war crimes or imperialism. The problem is failing to distinguish between terrorists and Muslims, or between war criminals and Americans. The problem is thinking in terms of large and ill-defined groups. It is true that this tends to be a problem more on the right than anywhere else these days, at least in the USA, but there is nothing necessary about this truth, and it is dangerous for people not on the right to consider themselves thereby immune to it.

Perhaps philosophy can help here. As Frege said:

The logic books contain warnings against logical mistakes arising from the ambiguity of expressions. I regard as no less pertinent a warning against apparent proper names having no reference. The history of mathematics supplies errors which have arisen in this way. This lends itself to demagogic abuse as easily as ambiguity -- perhaps more easily. 'The will of the people' can serve as an example; for it is easy to establish that there is at any rate no generally accepted reference for this expression. It is therefore by no means unimportant to eliminate the source of these mistakes, at least in science, once and for all.

It might be helpful to challenge on similar grounds references to "the liberal elites," "the gay agenda," perhaps even "Islam," but also "fascists" and perhaps also "elite scribblers of this [right-wing] spectrum." At any rate we should be careful about making such generalizations (even if it is sometimes very hard to avoid using them).

But I doubt that philosophy can do very much to change the world. I'm tempted to think that terrorism will become more a feature of life because people despair of the world being a genuinely democratic place. If it is ruled by multinational corporations and people like Rupert Murdoch, or some combination of money and stupidity, then how can anyone hope to achieve any political objective without using wealth (which we don't all have) or violence (which is much more accessible)? Or so, I imagine, some people think. Really, though, democracy is probably about as alive and well as it has ever been. Terrorism will continue because the means to create terror are widely available and there are a lot of crazy people out there.

It can't hurt to try to create a less hate-filled and more nuanced appreciation of reality though. I think we owe it to the victims of these crimes to do so. And in some sense, although this is probably the wrong language to use, we owe it to ourselves and to reality too. .

Cartesian idol

Over at New APPS, Mohan Matthen writes:

You are standing in a large room. Above you, there looms a large red sphere suspended from the ceiling. When you look at the sphere, you are subject to a certain visual experience: call this experience E. For the sake of simplicity, think of E as an event in the Cartesian soul. E has certain phenomenal properties: it is an instance of phenomenal RED, of phenomenal LARGE, and so on.  To be clear, these phenomenal properties are characteristics of E. Traditionally, empiricists take experiences such as E to be the ultimate source of empirical knowledge. This is the infamous Myth of the Given.

When a human subject has an experience like E, s/he tends to arrive at the belief that there is a large red sphere above. What explains this? A legitimate question, surely. There are two mental events here: an experience E, followed by the onset O of a belief. Moreover, there is a pattern: experiences of the same phenomenal type lead to beliefs with the same type of content. Why?

According to Donald Davidson, E causes O.

This all seems horribly wrong to me, but maybe it's another case of my needing to read Davidson. Here are the protests I want to make while reading this:

1. This is a very unlikely scenario. Why not pick a more normal experience, if it is ordinary experience that we want to understand?
2. Why say that "you are subject to a certain visual experience" rather than, say, "you see something"?
3. The Cartesian soul is introduced "for the sake of simplicity"!?
4. The experience has phenomenal properties?
5. Seeing a red ball leads to, or is followed by arrival at, belief that there is a red ball. Really? How long does this take?
6. "Surely" it is legitimate to ask for an explanation of this alleged process or sequence of events?
7. There are two mental events here. Says who?
8. And one is supposed to cause the other. Is that true? And in what sense of 'cause'?

Here's a different, hopefully more realistic, example. Several times a day at this time of year I look outside to see whether there are any animals in the backyard. Let's say I see a groundhog. Let's say that I now believe there is a groundhog in the backyard. Are there really two mental events here? There are two verbs: see & believe. But is my believing a separate event from my seeing? I don't think so. I see, and I don't doubt my seeing. Why not say that it is my sanity that causes me to believe what I see? Or common sense?

Talk of experience might be meant to allow for possible hallucinations. Let's say that I find some mushrooms in my backyard and decide to eat them. I feel funny, and wonder whether they might be hallucinogenic. Now I look outside and, as well as a groundhog, I see that the ground appears to be moving like the surface of the sea. Is the groundhog real? I can't be sure, but real or not, I have an experience as of a groundhog that is plump, furry, etc. So is talk of phenomenal properties of the experience OK now? It still seems misleading to me, as if there were something that I see but this something might be physical or merely mental. Which implies that there are mental objects, which in turn implies that dualism of some kind is true. I don't want to imply that. If I'm seeing things, i.e. hallucinating, then I'm not seeing things, i.e. there are no things that I am seeing. Describing what I see is reporting on my symptoms, not describing the properties of some non-physical object. Or at least, I think that way of putting it is very misleading. A merely hallucinated groundhog cannot cause anything, including my belief in its existence.

I assume that Matthen is using Cartesianism as a way to make the debate clear, but perhaps in doing so he has revealed a dangerous flaw in its foundation. On the other hand, wouldn't Davidson and/or McDowell have spotted this? So I'm not sure what is going on. Matthen goes on to say:

I may experience the world as containing a large red sphere above and in front of me, but I am not forced to believe that the world is actually this way. My experience gives me reason to believe so, but I must evaluate this experience before I form a belief. Moreover, I am not forced to operate with the repertoire of concepts that experience provides: I may modify these or construct new ones.

I disagree. I think (and here I am theorizing, so I am extra likely to be wrong) that we believe what we experience by default. These beliefs can then be evaluated, as when I have eaten dodgy mushrooms and suspect an hallucination. But I don't think experience can be evaluated in that sense. It can be evaluated, I think, in these two senses: i) some part of my experience stands out as odd in some way, it doesn't fit, and I think about how to make sense of it (e.g. the strange object I see through the window might turn out to be a reflection in the window), ii) someone asks me what something was like and I give an evaluative account of the experience (this would not involve describing the phenomenal properties of the experience, it seems to me--I'm thinking of something like this: "You met the President! Wow, what was it like?" If I say it was exciting or no big deal or whatever then I am describing what the experience was like, but not by listing its phenomenal properties). Realizing that something is a reflection is not like realizing that the ground is not really moving like waves though. The former is finding how to see what is in front of you, while the latter is realizing that you cannot properly see what is in front of you. You then see the reflection as a reflection, whereas the apparent motion of the ground is something you simply have to remind yourself is not real.

In short I think that beliefs are not caused by perceptions. They are (trusted) perceptions. What if I get my belief not from direct perception (i.e. seeing it with my own eyes) but from a report on the evening news? A graphic shows the Dow Jones index gaining 50 points while the newsreader reports the same thing. I believe the report (without evaluating or thinking about it). Does seeing the graphic cause my believing it? Does hearing the newsreader cause me to believe what she says? Believing is something like a disposition to behave in certain ways (hmm--is this a sign that I'm going wrong?), but I would rather say that the news report disposes me to behave in those ways than that it causes such a disposition in me. My pension fund is related to the Dow, so if it goes up I might say "Oh good." But there isn't some thing (a belief) that causes such utterances and that is in turn caused by my hearing that the Dow has gone up, I think. Rather, I say "Oh Good" because I  hear and see the report. There is one step too many in the causal chain that has beliefs caused by perceptions or experiences, unless I am misunderstanding the notion of causality that is supposed to be involved.  

My problem is not really with Matthen, which is one reason why I'm not posting some version of this as a comment on his post (the other is consciousness of my ignorance of the literature in this area). His presentation of the issue seems fairly standard (judging by this, for example). It's the standard conception of the issue, or perhaps just the issue itself, that seems off to me. But that is quite possibly because I'm judging by simplified, introductory accounts of the issue.