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Ratiocination

Advice


In this short interview [HT], Peter van Inwagen opines:

I think it's better for people to read only genre fiction like science fiction any murder mysteries (if those are the only books they really enjoy) than for them to try to slog through The Divine Comedy because they think they should — and then give up halfway through the Inferno and turn the television set on. One hopes that a person who has developed the habit of reading a lot and who has started with genre fiction will one day move on to Dante (or Plato or Tolstoy or T. S. Eliot). But for someone who is prepared to “move on” I have no particular advice about authors or titles. I'd say to them, “Don't worry about it. If you are dissatisfied with the kinds of books you have been reading, if you are looking for “something more,” the books you are looking for will find you.”

This is good advice, I think. van Inwagen offers much more advice in this paper; while most of it pertains specifically to working in free will, I found this bit particularly sound:

Here’s a second piece of advice about framing definitions: define sentences, not terms. Do not, for example, define ‘cause’ or ‘causation’ or ‘causality’; rather, define ‘x is the cause of y’ or ‘x is a cause of y’ or ‘x causes y’. Do not define ‘knowledge’; rather, define ‘x knows that p’. And a definition of, e.g., ‘x causes y’ should take this form: a sentence that can replace ‘x causes y’ at all its occurrences, a sentence in which ‘x’ and ‘y’ and no other variables are free, together with a specification of the kinds of object over which ‘x’ and ‘y’ range. A definition of ‘x knows that p’ should contain the free variable ‘x’ and the schematic sentence-letter ‘p’ and no other free variables or schematic letters.

This stern requirement—the “Chisholm requirement” so to call it—can be softened in one way: it is permissible to define nouns and noun-phrases (“terms” in the proper sense of the word) if they are the names of theses or propositions. Thus, a proper definition can consist of the phrase, ‘Ethical naturalism is the thesis that’ followed by a declarative sentence, or a series of them, that spells out what the philosopher offering the definition takes to be the content of the thesis called ‘ethical naturalism’. This is a softening of the Chisholm requirement, and not a contradiction of it, because, like the pristine Chisholm requirement, it demands a definition whose definiens contains a complete declarative sentence (or a series of them). Why, you may ask, do I “privilege” declarative sentence over the many other syntactic categories in this way? Because the declarative sentence is the natural unit of clear statement; because (as philosophers have known at least since Frege) words have meaning only in the context of a sentence.

Philosophical Insults


Over at Knowability, Bryan Frances documents some philosophical insults one can find in the literature. Clever jabs are a cottage industry of sorts (what else are academic philosophers to trade in?). But in particular, I liked this one posted in the thread comments:

The subject of infinite numbers is a technical and not very easy branch of mathematics, and those who have not studied it cannot hope to say anything sensible about it. It is quite clear from Mr. Emmet's discussion that he does not know this theory. The consequence is that some of the things he says are just as foolish as the opinion once held by common-sense philosophers that there could not be people at the Antipodes because they would fall off. [...] I should advise Mr. Emmet, before he again ventures to write on the subject, to study Georg Cantor's articles in Mathematische Analen, vols. XLVI and XLIX, and also Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik [...] His only reason for thinking them nonsensical is that he is ignorant of the mathematical arguments in their favour. I do no suppose that Mr. Emmet would accuse geneticists or radiologists of talking nonsense merely because they use words he does not understand. I fail to see why mathematicians should be treated differently.

(Bertrand Russell, "Mathematical Infinity," Mind, Vol 67)

I generally like scathing reviews, so I checked out the original Russell note and the paper he was replying to ("Infinity" by E.R. Emmet, Vol 66). My conclusion? Emmet was every bit the fool Russell claimed he was.

A Little Paper


I'm in the midst of writing a paper on the Kantian Maxim that 'ought' implies 'can.' I got distracted by a number of side-issues related to this debate. Instead of dropping these projects altogether, my goal is to turn each of them into a little paper, perhaps suitable for submission as a discussion note or whatnot. Here's such a little paper.

A brief summary: Frances Howard-Snyder has recently come to the defense of one formulation of the maxim that 'ought' implies 'can.' In this short paper, I argue that the formulation Howard-Snyder favors is false. But there is a fix, once we countenance the addition of a "tracing" condition to our formulation of the maxim.

From Metaphysics to Ethics


I have posted a short review of Frank Jackson's 1995 John Locke lectures, which touch on issues in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophical method.

A Game


I've asked a number of the grad students at Notre Dame for an "all time top 3" list of philosophers. Interestingly, Aristotle has been listed by all; Kant by most, Plato by none. I favor Aristotle, Descartes, and x, where x is some deserving twentieth century analytic philosopher (David Lewis, perhaps, but it'll take a hundred years to know this with any certainty).

I thought about such a listing some time ago, and I was then inclined to name Descartes, Plantinga, and Aristotle as all time my top 3. I hadn't read enough Lewis, I suppose. =)

"Intuitively, Determinism is False"


I sometimes hear people say things like, "I can just see that I have libertarian free will." Now I take it that someone has libertarian free will just in case someone has free will, and that free will rules out determinism; so the claim implies that some of us can just see that determinism is false.

I don't know how to respond to these intuition reports. Here's why.

I can conceive of someone thinking something like this: "It's just obvious to me that I am morally responsible for some things, and I couldn't possibly be morally responsible unless I have alternate possibilities available to me. But if determinism is true, I couldn't have alternate possibilities available to me, so determinism is false." This line of thinking makes sense to me. To be sure, I reject one of the premises, but I could concieve of myself thinking along these lines; indeed, many of the great thinkers in the free will literature have done just this.

Performing a deduction and arriving at indeterminism is one thing. But how could someone's having free will of the sort that rules out determinism be immediately obvious? What is it like to have such free will?

Here is an inadequate response: "I lift one hand. But it seemed to me at the moment of decision that I could have decided to, and in fact lifted the other. Nothing I know rules out my lifting either hand. So determinism is false." In response, I note that even if determinism were true, we would not expect an agent to know which unique future is determined. Given this ignorance, of course it feels like "anything is possible" given the state of the world and the laws of nature. We don't know what the state of the world at a time really amounts to, nor do we grasp the laws, so of course every manner of things seem compossible with them!

The intuitive indeterminist has a challenge, then, and it is to present a positive phenomenological case for there being free will: to pick out some feature of qualitative experience (and not a mere lack of experience) that indicates the falsity of determinism.

I don't know what such a quale would be.

After Virtue


I saw Stranger Than Fiction the other night. When Harold Crick (played by Will Farrell) visited the office of a local English literature professor, a copy of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue can be seen on one of the shelves (to the left of the professor's TV).

Learning


Excuse some navel-gazing, if you will. I have, since I was a sophomore, posted papers to the web, and some have thus survived various data losses along the way. Just for kicks, I read through a couple of the early ones tonight.

I think I’ve learned a thing or two since then. I had no idea what supervenience was (and mentioned it anyways), I clearly didn’t understand the difference between implication and entailment, and I regularly attempted to make use of formulas in first order logic without binding variables or minding my parentheses. All of these are, shall we say, sophomoric mistakes. I was attempting to write like a professional philosopher without sufficient background knowledge and training, learning by trial and error. Or just error.

Another sort of mistake amuses me in particular, though, and this is the rhetorical overkill. For example, I wrote that “Young argues that aesthetic value is a species of extrinsic value, and, as such, is not objective, but instead is viewer-dependent. I use “argue” in the loosest sense of the term, since, as we shall see, Young commits the most basic of errors.” I wonder now how my professors ever took me seriously in the seminar room when I read sentences like this in front of the class. Then again, perhaps they never did, seeing that I took (take?) me seriously enough for the lot of us.

All in all, a fun diversion from writing my end-of-semester papers. It could be a mortifying one too, but it seem like long enough ago to distance myself from the person who wrote all that nonsense. In the end, I like learning, even when I have to make stupid mistakes along the way.

Free Will and Moral Responsibility


Eddy Nahmias started an interesting thread some time ago. His project is to count heads, and thereby discover whether compatibilism is the majority position or not among specialist philosophers. On Nahmias's first count, the compatibilists come out ahead.

The exercise is an interesting one, but I think a clarification is in order (and Fritz Warfield points this out early on in the thread): compatibilism with respect to what? -- Free will and determinism? Moral responsibility and determinism?
This distinction is important to mind. First, there are philosophers who affirm different answers to the two compatibility questions, and any classification worth its beans needs to account for them (ie, John Martin Fischer and Company). Second, there just is a distinction between free will and moral responsibility. An agent acts freely just in case she has certain metaphysical abilities, while an agent acts in the morally responsible way just in case she is an apt candidate for moral appraisal (praise, blame, etc.).

Further, notice that free will and moral responsibility are not coextensive. Even if free will is a necessary condition of acting in the morally responsible way (I deny this), it is not sufficient. Assume that there are morally neutral acts, acts which do not have attached to them any duties, superduties, or subduties. Such neutral acts are just not worthy for moral appraisal. Now see that one can, with all the free will in the world, perform such a morally neutral action (raising one's hand, say). No matter how freely the agent performed the action, it is not one for which she is morally responsible. Free action, causal responsibility, and perhaps even such things as legal responsibility do not suffice for moral responsibility.

Back to the counting heads discussion. There are two relevant sets of experts we must consult, then, to find a useful generalization about what specialists believe about compatibilism. And the camps are distinct; there are experts on free will, and there are experts on moral responsibility, and a much smaller group that specializes in both.

My sense is that the van Inwagen/Warfield claim is dead on with respect to the first camp; the majority of philosophers who specialize in free will are incompatibilists with respect to freedom and determinism. My initial guess is that this is not true about the second camp; specialists in moral responsibility seem by and large to be compatibilists. Many find Frankfurt-style counterexamples persuasive, for example, and on this basis reject both Direct and Indirect arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility.

Sad Day


Milton Friedman, winsome and influential economist (and libertarian too) died yesterday.

Google Search


Someone found my blog yesterday by searching for "the monster argument for incompatibilism." If the searcher didn't have something like this in mind, I'd like to know what it in fact was. =)

Kerry's Joke


The quotation in question: "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Suppose we don't take Kerry (or his aides) at their word; that is, suppose that he really was making a jab at the intelligence of those in the US military.

In all the talk about whether Kerry's remark is offensive or not, there's one point I've yet to see addressed; is it true? It seems to me that if it isn't, then perhaps some have the right to be outraged. If it's true, though, then I think the most we can say is that it was unwise of Kerry to assert it. I'd be curious to see any commentary or data addressing this de facto question.

Links, thoughts, anyone?

Too Long


I've been without a computer for half a month, and it's been no fun. The long and short of it is as follows: a TSA inspector stole my iBook at an airport. I've filed a claim, but don't really expect to see a penny. This sort of theft happens rather often, it turns out. I went ahead and bought a brand new MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo). It feels good to once again have a laptop to call my own: and a sweet one at that.

The Notre Dame campus is beautiful these days, incidentally, and very much in line with that classic "college in the fall" look:


Malloy Hall (home of the ND philosophy and theology departments):