tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150054762024-03-07T15:14:02.224-05:00Rationally Speaking<b>Rationally Speaking: an archived blog about science & philosophy, by Massimo Pigliucci</b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1202125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-7750620915450765102014-03-20T09:06:00.000-04:002014-03-20T09:06:19.332-04:00So long, and thanks for all the fish<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or, as the title of the last Star Trek: The Next Generation episode wistfully announced: “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111281/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">All good things…</span></a>”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is the last Rationally Speaking post, folks! It has been a long and fascinating ride. It began back in 2000, before blogs were a thing, with what at the time I called a (syndicated) internet column, and which became a blog in August 2005.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Since then, I published or edited a total of 1208 posts (this is #1209!), which have been commented upon 35,651 times and have been seen 3,880,694 times (not counting the one you are reading now, to be precise). Not bad for a one-man, one-editor (Phil Pollack), and a small number of collaborators (currently including Leonard Finkelman, Steve Neumann, and Ian Pollock) enterprise.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As you know, there has been plenty of controversy on these virtual pages, at at times it has been harsh. But there have been also many many incredibly thoughtful conversations, from which I’ve learned a lot, seriously. A number of readers of RS love to engage in dialogue with me, and I sincerely thank them for their patience and contributions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">However, I feel like I need a new project or two to re-energize my batteries, now that I have just celebrated half a century on this planet! Hence my decision to close Rationally Speaking (though the archives will remain available as long as Blogspot will host them) and open <a href="http://scientiasalon.org/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Scientia Salon</span></a> (which you can, of course, follow on <a href="https://twitter.com/ScientiaSalon"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Twitter</span></a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/scientiasalon"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Facebook</span></a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/118113493065187872373/118113493065187872373/posts"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Google+</span></a>).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“<a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scientia"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Scientia</span></a>” is the Latin word for knowledge, broadly construed – i.e., in an ampler fashion than that implied by the English term science. Scientia includes the natural sciences, the social sciences, philosophy, logic and mathematics. And <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering)"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Salons</span></a>, of course, were the social engine of the Age of Reason in France and throughout much of Europe.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The idea of Scientia Salon is to provide a forum for in-depth discussions on themes of general interest drawing from philosophy and the sciences. Contributors will be academics and non academics who don’t shy away from the label of “public intellectual,” and who feel that engaging in public discourse is vital to what they do and to society at large.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The initial concept was inspired in me years ago by Noam Chomsky’s famous contention that “Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy” (in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Necessary-Illusions-Thought-Democratic-Societies/dp/0887845746"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Necessary Illusions</span></a>: Thought Control in Democratic Societies). But more recently what spurred me into action was an article by City University of New York’s Corey Robin, on “<a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/kristof-academicswritingpublicintellectuals.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The responsibility of adjunct intellectuals</span></a>” (published in Al Jazeera America). It’s a must read, and it’s most definitely not just aimed at academic adjuncts.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The new outlet will inherit much from Rationally Speaking, especially initially. I will be the author of most of the first essays, though several colleagues and friends have already signaled their willingness to help out. It will be possible to submit essays for publication (2-3000 words, up to 5000), which will be edited and — if necessary — peer reviewed. (Interested? Here are <a href="http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/submissions/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the guidelines</span></a>.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Scientia Salon will also inherit some of the themes of Rationally Speaking, but there will be less emphasis on traditional skepticism and atheism, and more on philosophy, social science and natural science (with a bit of math and logic sprinkled throughout).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The tone, hopefully, will be civil, thoughtful, as jargon-free as possible, and occasionally gently ironic (as opposed to overly sarcastic, something I must admit of which </span></span>RS<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> was occasionally guilty).</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The site will welcome comments, but there too, there will be a push to increase open and constructive dialogue and curb name calling and trolling. Consequently, while access to the site for reading will be open to all, in order to post comments it will be necessary to register with name and email address. Not much of a burden in these days of NSA surveillance, and — I hope — well worth the trouble.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">So, expect the first essay at Scientia Salon within the next few days. In the meantime, </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojydNb3Lrrs" style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">so long, and thanks for all the fish</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">!</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-20886504293485669662014-03-16T13:40:00.000-04:002014-03-17T07:34:17.433-04:00David Silverman and the scope of atheism — Postscript<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Predictably, my <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2014/03/david-silverman-and-scope-of-atheism.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">recent post</span></a> on some remarks made by American Atheists President David Silverman has generated a firestorm on blogs and twitter, even though I thought the opinions expressed therein are actually quite mild. But such is the nature of debates in the age of social networking. There are several interesting points that have emerged from the thoughtful discussion that has taken place on this blog, for which I thank my readers. (No, I never check discussion threads on other blogs. Sorry, not enough time and energy!)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Some of these points have also been taken up by two of the most critical commentaries, one by <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/03/14/dont-tell-people-how-to-feel-about-abortion/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">PZ Myers</span></a> and the other one by (future Rationally Speaking podcast guest) <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2014/03/15/massimo-pigliucci-abortion-and-the-scope-of-tradition/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Greta Christina</span></a>. I will analyze these as representative of the discussion, and as an occasion to further clarify my own views.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Predictably, neither piece takes a kind view of my essay, nor, frankly, did the authors try to give it a charitable reading that may lead to fruitful discussions rather than name calling. But in the case of PZ’s sarcastic remarks, I richly deserved it. His entire (short) post takes me up for writing (in the original version of my essay) that “abortion should always be a very difficult and emotional step.” I did not mean that literally, as should have been clear from the context and the examples given. But it was certainly an instance of sloppy writing on my part. After some of my readers pointed it out, I revised the entry to read: “certain types of abortion (say, last trimester)” should always be a very difficult and emotional step,” and later added a footnote to call readers’ attention to it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This ought to take care of most of PZ’s remarks, though I’d like to hear from him directly. I say most because PZ (and surely Greta, as well as several of my readers) still objects to the “presumption” that someone might dare tell another human being how s/he ought to feel in certain morally salient cases.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don’t get it. We do this all the time, and it is a cornerstone of our moral education — in true virtue ethical-Aristotelian fashion, I might add. We begin with young children, trying to both explain to them the <i>reasons</i> why certain things (e.g., stealing) are wrong and how they should properly <i>feel</i> about those actions (shame, guilt). We do it to adults too, of course. We criticize the greed (emotion!) of big bankers, we call on our politicians to feel sorry (emotion!) about their misdeeds, and we are horrified by the lack of <i>emotional</i> response on the part of sociopaths when they show no regret (emotion!) at whatever crime they may have committed. And this goes for positive emotions as well, of course: we say that people <i>should</i> feel pride for this, happy about that, and so on. So, what exactly, is the problem with someone arguing that another person should (morally) feel troubled by a certain (ethically salient) decision?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But perhaps the idea is that I, as a man, should not dare tell a woman how to feel or think about something I couldn’t possibly have experienced myself. But that is also highly problematic. As one of my readers pointed out, we do this too all the time. We don’t think that only people who have relatives on death row have a right to express opinions about the emotions and ethical reasoning of people who do. And the same holds for pretty much <i>any</i> other ethical discussion: being a first-person participant is neither a requirement to engage in it, nor necessarily an unquestionable positive (the reason we don’t let families of victims of crimes render verdicts and hand out punishments is that they are too emotionally close to the events themselves).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moreover, as it happens, I have actually been very close to a painful decision about abortion, so I do have a very good (second hand, since obviously I wasn’t the pregnant one) sense of how complex and wrenching that decision was. It happened many years ago, and I have no intention of going into the personal details of it, but both people involved were definitely secular and were definitely weighing the issue from a non-religious perspective. That didn’t make it a slam dunk.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now let me turn to Christina’s, longer, much less charitable than even PZ’s, response. I am a bit at a loss to see how a fellow traveler in atheism, skepticism and critical thinking could so grossly misread what I wrote. Below are a few bits from Christina’s post, with my commentary.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> Thank you so much for dismissing the issue of the basic right to bodily autonomy of half the human race as a “tempest in a teapot.” <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I didn’t. That phrase referred to generic diatribes among atheists, not to the basic right to bodily autonomy of half the human race. This should have been clear both from the context and from much of what I’ve written about the New Atheism over the years.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> What a great way to make women in the atheist movement, and women who are considering joining the atheist movement, think that our issues are taken seriously by the movement’s leaders. <</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Except, again, that that sentence had nothing to do with any of that (and I’m no leader of any movement — more on this below). Christina might have missed that the post was about a very specific claim, that there are no reasonable secular arguments against abortion — it wasn’t a call to shut down abortion clinics around the country. My strong pro choice position ought to be clear, and I take women's issues very seriously.</span><span style="color: #ff2500; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But you’d hardly know the difference if you just read her post.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> By all means, let’s treat the right to abortion as a philosophical exercise in which both sides should be thoughtfully considered and given intellectual validity <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ah yes, the by now mandatory dig at philosophy as a useless intellectual exercise indulged in by mostly white (mostly dead) men. Except of course that we get much of our non-religious ethical discourse precisely from philosophy, and that to reject the need for rational discourse on ethics is a bizarre position to take for someone who is interested in reason and critical thinking. (And I would add that to refuse to grant intellectual validity to thoughtful opponents is precisely the tactic of the Religious Right, not to be imitated.) </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moreover, and importantly, Christina confuses a discussion about the ethical issues raised by abortion with support for curbing women’s access to the procedure. While the first is obviously relevant to the second, one can very consistently maintain that there is something to be debated about the ethics of abortion while at the same time staunchly defending a woman's right to have one.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> Stephanie Zvan has already masterfully taken apart your whole thing about how abortion should always be a very difficult and emotional step. <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m sure she has (I haven’t read the piece, see note above about limited time and energy). But Christina already knew of my correction to the above statement (she acknowledges it at the end of her post), which should have set things straight. Why didn’t it? Why did Christina go on with her diatribe even though I had already corrected my post and explained what I actually meant? No interest in being charitable, apparently, nor in actually engaging in a discussion. It’s all about rallying the Forces of Change against the Old Guard.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> Do you seriously think abortion has nothing to do with atheism? Are you aware that the fight against abortion rights has been waged, almost entirely, by the Religious Right? Are you aware that the case against abortion rights is almost entirely centered in religion? <</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I do seriously think about what I write, I’m not a comedian, I’m a philosopher. Being an atheist carries no logical (broadly construed, see below) connection whatsoever to a lot of political positions about social issues. And yes, I do read newspapers and I am aware of where the opposition to abortion (mostly) comes from. But, as usual, things are more complicated than that simple narrative. To begin with, there are plenty of religious people who are pro-choice. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There are also plenty of prochoice people who would not have an abortion themselves.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Second, my original post was much more narrowly focused: I was disputing the ill informed statement by Sarah Moglia that there are no secular arguments against (certain types of) abortion (not abortion rights). Of course there are. And even though I don’t find them convincing (as I said in my original post), they are neither irrational nor informed by bad science, as Moglia stated. We (the pro-choice camp) are right, rationally, morally and scientifically. But there is no reason to pretend that the other side is made up entirely of religious nuts and ignorant country bumpkins.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> What atheism has to say about abortion is, “There are no gods. You have no evidence that your god exists — and you certainly have no evidence that your god shares your political opinions.” <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the discussion I started had <i>nothing at all</i> to do with religiously motivated objections to abortion. It concerned the (alleged) lack of secular reasons against it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> First, and very importantly: Abortion access is a church-state separation issue. <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Psychologically, maybe, in the sense that most opponents are indeed religiously motivated. But not rationally, or even legally. No law aimed at restricting access to abortion procedures is couched in religious terms. Our opponents are doing precisely what John Rawls said people should do in a pluralistic society: they are <i>translating</i> their concerns into secular language, making this a secular debate. The terms of that debate are partly philosophical (ethics is a branch of philosophy after all), partly legal, and partly scientific (when does life begin? When do fetuses start to feel pain?). Just because someone has ultimately religious motives to take up a given position, that doesn’t make the debate itself an issue of church-state separation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> Second: You’re arguing that organized atheism should only work on issues that logically and directly descend from atheism itself. … There are literally no issues that logically ought to unite every atheist. <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here Christina is playing the card of taking my writing so literally (again, lack of charitable interpretation) to make it sound absurd. Yes, of course if we are talking about formal logical entailment (are we using Aristotelian logic or something else?) then atheism implies absolutely nothing other than a commitment to a negative epistemic or metaphysical claim, depending on how one interprets the meaning of the a-word.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But what I meant was that there is much more room for disagreement among atheists (and secularists more broadly) about all sorts of socio-political issues, and for substantial secular reasons. Which is why we have other types of secular movements (humanists, ethical culturists) who have articulated a specific, progressive, political agenda, which is coupled with their atheism.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Christina uses a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> argument against me, saying that — on strict logical grounds — there is no connection between atheism and church-state separation or the rights of unbelievers either. And she is right, if one adopts formal logical entailment as a criterion. But I didn’t. It seems to me that it is much easier to rally atheists to fight those fights than to embrace pretty much any other political cause, and for good reasons. Remember that this is in the context of David Silverman daring to go to a conservative political convention to make the argument that atheism isn’t necessarily a liberal issue. And it isn’t, and Dave was right in making the move. Humanism, however, is a liberal movement, and I would feel pretty uncomfortable if Debbie Allen, the President of the AHA were to make the same move.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Look at it from the point of view of a parallel between atheism and gay rights. The gay rights movement has rightly focused on the issues that are closest and most specific to it: the legal rights of gay people. It’s likely that a majority of gays also endorses other political positions (mostly liberal?), but since there are progressive gays and conservative gays and libertarian gays, it was wise to stick to the basics. And it worked, beautifully (though clearly the fight is not over yet). Moreover, the leaders of the gay movement also could have made Christina’s case for their issues being ones of separation of church and state, since most of the opposition to gay marriage, for instance, is religiously motivated. But they didn’t. On the contrary, they sought allegiances with progressive religious institutions, just like other minorities had done before them. And again, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in my opinion</span><span style="color: #ff2500; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">this was the wise and effective thing to do.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We finally get to what really seems to be bothering Christina:<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> What you’re saying is that the people who have traditionally been running organized atheism, the people who have been setting the agenda of organized atheism for decades, are the people who should continue to set the agenda. What you’re saying is that the old guard should get to keep running the show. <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And I assume she thinks I’m one of those people who have been “running the show.” She hasn’t done her homework. I’m not a formal member of any atheist organization (I do have a life membership with AA, but it was given to me as an honorary title, I didn’t join), nor have I ever served on the board of any atheist organization (except, briefly, NYC Atheists, and <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2008/08/excommunicated-by-atheists.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">look how that ended!</span></a>).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> You don’t get to help decide what we work on. … And you don’t get to set the agenda for all of us. <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And where, exactly, did I ever say that I “get to decide”? I have no power, and if I did I would simply nudge the agenda in my preferred direction (based on my disputable but nonetheless articulated reasons), just like anyone else (including Christina herself) does.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> At best, at the most charitable interpretation of your words, you’re making the argument from tradition — one of the worst, least rational arguments around. At an only slightly less charitable interpretation, you’re making the argument from privilege. You’re making the argument that the people currently running things should continue to run things. In fact, the argument from tradition is an argument from privilege. <</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Tradition? Privilege? I don’t recall making any argument at all that was based on something along the lines of “this is what atheists have done in the past, therefore…” And what privilege, exactly? As I said above, I have no position of power within the movement, and I’ve always refused to be involved in political disputes internal to any atheist organization.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But does that mean that I, as a somewhat rational human being who has been thinking and writing about atheism, secularism and related issues, get <i>no say</i> (“you don’t get to help”) in what I think is the best way for atheists to engage in the public square? Why? Is it because I’m old? White? Male? A university professor? A fan of AS Roma soccer club?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And isn’t Christina forgetting that American Atheists itself was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madalyn_Murray_O'Hair"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">founded by a woman</span></a>? And was run for 13 years by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Atheists#Presidents_of_American_Atheists"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">another woman</span></a>? Were they, too, the Old Guard who isn’t entitled to help in the debate?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">I have a pretty established record of critically engaging both the </span><a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2014/02/on-coyne-harris-and-pz-with-thanks-to.html" style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">New Atheists</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> and American Atheists, including </span><a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-thoughts-about-in-your-face.html" style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">David Silverman</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> himself. And of course I’ve had bones to pick with </span><a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/05/greta-christina-on-mission-drift.html" style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Greta Christina</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> too (after which I invited her to promote her new book on my podcast with Julia Galef). That’s what constructive debate within a movement looks like. We are supposed to engage each other, not to shut the opponent down by accusing him of wanting to keep his alleged and factually entirely non-existent privilege. Christina wants to steer atheism toward new directions? More power to her. But I do have a right to point out that in my opinion she is largely reinventing the wheel of secular humanism. We can have a lively discussion (as we did on the RS podcast) and then we can go have a beer together for some more back and forth. The ability to enter into vigorous yet thoughtful debate (and to drink beer) is what truly separates us from the religious fundamentalists. Let’s try to keep it that way.</span><br />
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Postscript to the postscript: apparently, "friendly atheist" Hemant Mehta is also in trouble now, according to a statement released by <a href="http://www.secularwoman.org/rending_the_tent">Secular Woman</a>. It is interesting that the statement makes the same confusion that Christina incurred in, mixing up the idea that there are secular arguments showing that some abortions are morally problematic with the idea that women's rights to control their bodies should be curbed. Once more: <i>they are not the same thing</i>!<br />
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According to SW: "Entertaining anti-choice arguments delegitimizes women’s humanity and bodily autonomy," which essentially amounts to an exceedingly anti-freethought stand, seems to me. And here is more hyperbolic rhetoric from SW: "What seems to be lost on Silverman, Mehta and others is that debating women’s humanity is not an academic exercise." Debating women's humanity? Seriously? I'm appalled.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com93tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-3429780884653883992014-03-14T07:00:00.000-04:002014-03-16T08:18:12.470-04:00David Silverman and the scope of atheism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBHZt8Ag_r5KomqnRzxfb-3NtpwN5zpBxw3qC4YVbcQoEXLtLYXdD90jLJm6iDG2PIaUKTYIHyEiT1bpkC9reDP81r2RzwXzrttbYWFT7AoqdMKNt-038AUYpRJYju6o17O-iI/s1600/Tides-Devil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBHZt8Ag_r5KomqnRzxfb-3NtpwN5zpBxw3qC4YVbcQoEXLtLYXdD90jLJm6iDG2PIaUKTYIHyEiT1bpkC9reDP81r2RzwXzrttbYWFT7AoqdMKNt-038AUYpRJYju6o17O-iI/s1600/Tides-Devil.jpg" height="131" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You may have heard of the latest tempest in a teapot to hit the often tumultuous waters of modern atheism, this one surrounding American Atheists’ President David Silverman.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Before getting to the meat of the matter — such as it is — let me give you the capsule commentary: i) No, Dave did not (<a href="http://www.steveahlquist.com/2014/03/david-silverman-offers-up-womens-rights.html?spref=tw"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">contra Steve Ahlquist</span></a>) “offer [a] compromise on women’s rights” to appease participants to the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC]; ii) the idea that there are secular arguments against abortions has not been “debunked” by <a href="http://skepchick.org/2014/03/is-there-a-secular-argument-against-abortion/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Skepchick Sarah Moglia</span></a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s start with Ahlquist. He was very upset that Silverman went to CPAC to begin with, apparently under the misguided understanding that atheism is a special province of political progressivism (it isn’t). In particular, Ahlquist really didn’t like the following sound bite from the AA President: “I will admit there is a secular argument against abortion. You can’t deny that it’s there, and it’s maybe not as clean cut as school prayer, right to die, and gay marriage.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I find precisely nothing to object to in that statement, which seems to me obviously true. Not so, says Sarah Moglia over at Skepchicks: “If by ‘secular argument,’ you mean ‘a belief based on personal feelings,’ then, sure, there’s a secular argument against abortion. There could be a ‘secular’ argument against puppies, in that case. If you’re using ‘secular’ to mean ‘a logical, science-based, or rational’ belief, then no, there is no ‘secular argument’ against abortion. The supposed ‘secular arguments’ against abortion are rooted in misogyny, a lack of understanding of science, and religious overtones.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sarah, not everything you (or I, for that matter) dislike or disagree with is based in misogyny, stupidity, or religious fundamentalism, and it’s high time people stop using the m-word as the ultimate trump card to which one cannot possibly dare to reply.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Of course</i> there are logical, science-based, and rational arguments against abortion. They may turn out to be ultimately unconvincing, or countered by better arguments — as I believe they are — but they certainly exist. To start with, you may want to spend some time perusing a few entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (like <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy-medicine/#Abo"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">this one</span></a>, or <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-pregnancy/#ComPreWomAut"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">this one</span></a>, or <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parenthood/#ProAut"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">this one</span></a>), for instance (don’t forget to check the relevant references too).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Are these arguments sufficient to justify forceful state interventions on women’s bodily integrity, under any circumstances? Very likely not. But plenty of countries (including the US) do already regulate, for instance, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_termination_of_pregnancy"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">late term abortion</span></a>, noting the ethical complexity of the issue and of course making room for a number of special circumstances, usually having to do with the health of the mother. Morally, should the decision to abort not be the subject of serious consideration, at the least on the part of the mother? After all, Dave didn’t say anything about legislation, he simply stated that the case of abortion is ethically more complicated than that of minority rights or Church-State separation. Seems to me that this is a no brainer: since abortion involves more than one life, and there is a marked difference in the consequences of a given decision for the two parties, the issue is thornier than others, and it ought to be so for secularists </span></span>also<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">. To decide to get certain types of abortion* (say, last trimester) is always (or, at least, should always be) a very difficult and emotional step, precisely because it has significant ethical consequences. There is no equivalent to that in, say, deciding whether to allow gay couples to marry or not, as a moment’s reflection should make clear.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, does that mean that we should therefore advocate a restriction of women’s rights as they are currently defined in the US? Of course not, nor do I see any evidence that that’s what Dave meant to suggest. But to dismiss the complexity of the issue by suggesting that only irrational, science-illiterate country bumpkins could possibly think that there is reason for pause is either intellectually naive or dishonest.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now back to Ahlquist. He also doesn’t like a number of other positions Silverman took at CPAC. Apparently, Dave is “fiscally conservative,” “owns several guns,” is “a strong supporter of the military” and has “serious suspicions about Obama. [stating that] I don’t like that he’s spying on us. </span></span><span style="background-color: #fcfbf5; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; text-align: justify;">I don’t like we’ve got drones killing people…”</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, to be fiscally conservative isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although it depends on what one means by that. I, for instance, would rather save on a lot of the corporate welfare funds that the US Government has been handing out to big corporations and banks for decades now. I think that makes me fiscally conservative, in a sense. And I don’t like Obama that much either, in part for the same reasons that Dave listed. However, I do profoundly dislike guns and people who like them, and I am most definitely <i>not</i> a strong supporter of the military.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Silverman is quoted as saying that “the Democrats are too liberal for me.” You can quote me as saying that the Democrats are far too conservative for me.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The point is: so what? What does <i>any</i> of the above, including abortion, fiscal conservativeness (or not), support for the military (or not), owning guns (or not), and liking or disliking Obama have to do with atheism? Nothing, absolutely nothing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If there is a reason to criticize David Silverman, it is because he made the same mistake that a lot of progressive atheists make these days: thinking that atheism is somehow logically connected to one political position or another. It isn’t, and it can’t be, and it’s time to stop pretending it is.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You like progressive politics and are not religious? Great, join the <a href="http://americanhumanist.org/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">American Humanist Association</span></a>, or the local chapter of the <a href="http://aeu.org/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Ethical Union</span></a> (though they, bizarrely, do call themselves a secular religion — an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one). But, do recognize that there are libertarian atheists, and conservative atheists, and atheists who don’t give a damn about gun control, or women’s rights, or whatever it is you think should be at the top of the agenda of the “movement.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In fact, pretty much the <i>only</i> social issues that ought to unite every atheist are the separation of Church and State and the rights of unbelievers. Not even a defense of science and critical thinking are really “atheist” causes, since there is a good number of atheists who buy into all sorts of woo (just not the particular woo featuring a white bearded male who sits high in the sky and spends a lot of time watching people’s sexual habits) — trust me, I know a number of them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">And please do not dare comment on this post and characterize </span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">me</i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> as conservative, misogynistic, anti-feminist, and so forth. I’ve written enough about all the above mentioned issues that it ought to be crystal clear that I’m to the left of Jon Stewart when it comes to all of them. Thank you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">* The original wording here said "to decide to get abortions," which was meant to be understood in the context of the specifics I was giving. However, that was sloppy writing on my part. Clearly, plenty of abortions do not carry any moral problems at all (e.g., fertilized zygote, recently implanted embryo, and so on until a fuzzy line where the fetus is complex, responds to stimuli and most importantly feels pain). The current wording reflects my intended meaning.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com132tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-34779030587873933602014-03-12T07:00:00.000-04:002014-03-12T07:00:03.155-04:00This Isn’t the Free Will You’re Looking For<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Steve Neumann</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Star Wars: A New Hope</i></span></a>, Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi are traveling into the most “wretched hive of scum and villainy” that is the city of Mos Eisley in order to find a smuggler who can hide them, R2-D2, and C-3PO from the Empire. At one point, they are stopped at a checkpoint by Imperial Stormtroopers who are looking to recover the stolen technical plans of the Death Star that R2-D2 is carrying. Obi-Wan uses a Jedi mind trick to divert their attention, telling them “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a paper entitled “Freedom and Control,” philosophers <a href="http://philpapers.org/s/Stephen%20Mumford"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Stephen Mumford</span></a> and Rani Lill Anjum [1] have attempted to capture free will for those who are libertarian about it — those who hold that, since humans <i>do</i> have free will, determinism must be false. But what they end up doing, in my view, is arguing for a new species of compatibilism; except in this case, free will is compatible with <i>causation</i> (properly understood) and not determinism. And to paraphrase old Ben Kenobi, I don’t think this is the free will libertarians are looking for.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mumford and Anjum argue that the libertarian can have free will “without requiring that agents step outside of the causal laws.” If libertarians could achieve this, it’d be the Holy Grail of metaphysics. But I think the authors implicitly recognize that such a goal might not be possible when they write that they can “supply a variety of libertarianism <i>worth having</i>,” echoing Daniel Dennett. [Italics mine.]</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mumford and Anjum claim to have secured both freedom <i>and </i>control — or what are called Alternate Possibilities (the ability to have done otherwise) and Ultimate Authorship (one is the ultimate author of one’s own decisions that lead to actions, or “causal responsibility”), respectively — by arguing for a view of causation that is somewhere between “necessity and pure possibility,” where possibility can be understood as akin to randomness [2]. They maintain that a strict dichotomy between necessity and randomness is a false one, and they note that there is a third possibility that goes by the name of “causal dispositionalism.” In other words, they deny both causal determinism <i>and </i>causal necessitation. [3]</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here’s a <i>very</i> simplistic diagram of the basic background to the problem:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fixed Past => Present Possibilities/Choices => Future</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, surely most of us can agree that the past is fixed — we can’t change it; what happened, happened. And, all of us experience the fact that, at any given moment, we seem to have a near limitless number of possibilities available to us when making a decision. The problem, however, comes in when we try and figure out what to make of the future — is it fixed, or is it open? Do past events completely cause or determine our choices in the present, even though we may feel like we have many possibilities available to us?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mumford and Anjum argue, echoing Aristotle, that “a cause can be thought of as something that tends towards an effect of a certain kind,” that it is <i>disposed </i>toward a certain effect — hence the name. With this definition, they further claim that we can separate the ideas of causal production and causal necessitation by “drawing attention to the possibility of a particular variety of interference that applies to all natural causal processes.” In other words, causes don’t <i>necessarily</i> produce their signature effects. This idea of “interference” is where they hope to help the libertarian locate free will by showing that alternate possibilities really exist. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For purposes of my critique, I’ll use one of the examples Mumford and Anjum cite: philosopher J.L. Austin’s famous thought experiment of a <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/austin-jl/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">golfer</span></a> sinking a putt. They note that “the ball would not have sunk had a gust of wind come along just as it neared the hole, or a squirrel might have jumped on the ball, or a twig might have deflected it. These alternate possibilities are all real.” The wind, the squirrel, and the twig are all examples of the interference they refer to in the context of causal dispositionalism. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the case of Austin’s golfer, it’s easy to see how alternate possibilities could be secured: it’s true that <i>before </i>he attempts the putt it seems<i> </i>as though there are many possible outcomes: a sudden gust of wind could come along just as the ball nears the hole; a squirrel could run across the green, knocking the ball off its trajectory; or the golfer himself could have a heart attack just as he swings his club. These are all very real possibilities — interferers, in Mumford and Anjum’s lexicon. Additionally, the golfer is employing his best causal powers in his attempt to sink the putt, and these powers are disposed toward the outcome of the golf ball falling into the hole; so they also conclude that the golfer is the ultimate author of his actions. They summarize their position by saying that “in exercising our causal powers, we exercise our free agency.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But this doesn’t seem quite right. I’m ready to agree that we exercise our <i>agency</i> by exercising our causal powers — where agency means the ability to voluntarily act upon our own reasons and motives — but to me that still doesn’t mean we have <i>free</i> agency, at least not in the libertarian sense.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At the moment of an action, there may indeed be several possibilities available to an agent; however, these possibilities aren’t freely chosen in the sense the libertarian wants: for instance, each of these possibilities is itself subject to its own causal chain which no agent can step outside of — causal powers are still comprised of causes, deterministic or not. And if the interferers that contribute to these alternate possibilities originate <i>outside</i> the agent (a malicious squirrel), thwarting the agent’s expressed desire (of sinking a putt), then the agent has no ultimate control. And even if the interferers arise within the agent’s own mind, either as a counter-desire to his initial one, or as an external influence that works in his mind to alter the initial desire, then where is the freedom in that? The case of the external interferers doesn’t seem to pose much of a problem — I think most people can accept that a sudden gust of wind altering the trajectory of the golfer’s putt is something that is completely out of his control (and this is one of Mumford and Anjum’s arguments against causal necessitarianism). So let’s focus on the <i>internal</i> interferers. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s say Austin’s golfer decides to position his thumb a certain way on his club just as he’s about to make his putt. However, right before he swings the club, he has the thought to move his thumb into a different position; but what is the cause of that thought? The thought to change his thumb position simply <i>occurred</i> to him. Where is the freedom in that? The libertarian assertion that, even though our golfer can’t control the thoughts that come into his mind, he still has control of his actions once the thoughts occur, doesn’t seem to cut it — the golfer’s decision to change his thumb position <i>still</i> wasn’t freely chosen in the sense libertarians want. He may have had a subsequent thought that approved of the thought to change his thumb position, but then one can ask where <i>that</i> thought came from, and so on<i> ad infinitum</i>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think the line of reasoning that Mumford and Anjum pursue ultimately fails to secure the kind of freedom libertarians believe is possible — and which they really want. I think that to say there is “ample space for causation to occupy between necessity and pure contingency” makes sense, and it shows that an agent has alternative possibilities in the face of a decision. And the argument that one is the author of one’s own actions because one is the causal producer of the effects one desires is an accurate and workable conception of agency. But one cannot be the <i>ultimate</i> author of one’s actions, even if causal necessity is false, because the alternatives — dispositionalism and pure contingency — permit one to be only the <i>proximate</i> author of one’s actions. Compatibilists about free will are okay with this, but not the libertarians.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Pure contingency (randomness), I think everyone agrees, doesn’t allow one to be the author of one’s actions, so let’s return to the issue of causal dispositionalism. Here, even if one is acting according to one’s own singular character, to one’s own developed reasons and motives — those things that <i>dispose</i> the agent toward certain effects — that character, and those reasons and motives, still have their own causal history outside of which no agent can step. The reasons and motives that make up the agent’s character didn’t pull themselves up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness, to paraphrase Nietzsche’s <a href="http://www.lexido.com/EBOOK_TEXTS/BEYOND_GOOD_AND_EVIL_.aspx?S=2"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">take</span></a> on an agent being <i>causa sui</i>. The agent hasn’t freely chosen those reasons and motives, even if she has come to approve of them and take “ownership” of them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For a libertarian to feel that she has free will, she needs to feel that she has real alternate possibilities available to her when making decisions, and that she is the author or <i>originator</i> of her actions in a meaningful way. But the biggest obstacle to this has always been the perceived failure of libertarian models of agency to explain how an agent could have done otherwise in <i>exactly</i> the same conditions. Some have argued that the original set of circumstances will always obtain, every time you “roll back the film” of the action in question. Others have argued that, due to the inherent unpredictability of the universe, the original set of circumstances may not <i>always</i> obtain for the action in question. But even in the latter case, even if quantum indeterminacy obtains every time we roll back the film, ensuring a slightly different result, the agent can’t claim to have “freedom” then either: an agent can’t be the author or originator of a completely random event, at least not in the sense of having <i>willed</i> it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the concluding section of their paper, Mumford and Anjum write that the principle of Alternate Possibilities was “threatened by a world of necessity,” and that the principle of Ultimate Authorship was “threatened by a world of pure contingency,” and that the causal dispositionalist framework they use in their argument “provides a metaphysical basis highly conducive to the libertarian’s needs: one in which the agent has both freedom and control.” But unfortunately I have to resort to a <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/1998/09/bill_clinton_and_the_meaning_of_is.html"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">Clintonesque</span></a> parsing of the word “freedom” and say that what they have actually secured is a compatibilist’s freedom, not a libertarian’s. They correctly note that the “more empowered an agent is, the more freedom they gain,” but this is the kind of freedom that is conducive to the personal project of identifying, developing, and <i>expanding</i> one’s causal powers so that one can attain greater degrees of freedom in the sense of achieving real possibilities of life. It’s a valuable freedom, no doubt, and in reality the only one we have — and, in light of that, the only one worth having. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[1] I’ve invited Mumford and Anjum to comment on this post, if they have the time. Hopefully they can set me straight if I’ve misread their paper!</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[2] The actual formula used by the authors for the principle of Alternate Possibilities is stated as “for any free agent <i>x</i>, and action A performed by<i> x</i> in circumstances <i>C</i> at time <i>t</i>, then there was another action A’, where A does not equal A’, such that<i> x</i> could have performed A’ at <i>t </i>and not A.” Though they leave out “circumstances <i>C</i>” in the second clause, I’m assuming it is included for purposes of my analysis.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">[3] I haven’t read their book on causal dispositionalism, so I’m basing my critique on their summarized exposition of it in this current paper.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com70tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-76372966204839555282014-03-10T08:20:00.003-04:002014-03-10T08:20:55.283-04:00Rationally Speaking podcast: Neil deGrasse Tyson on Why He Doesn't Call Himself an Atheist<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-ItytalrWs6aSq8MzqZn9kyZVZYf9b9cQETQ6-3OnO1z7dN2PMn8nwAB0IhCHjgKH3PYEylyxMaHgbDSnwRHqpGl89prIelhdFTnU8M3iSdjrwUw0S3EjdX6fBmdIiVmiQJG-/s1600/tyson2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-ItytalrWs6aSq8MzqZn9kyZVZYf9b9cQETQ6-3OnO1z7dN2PMn8nwAB0IhCHjgKH3PYEylyxMaHgbDSnwRHqpGl89prIelhdFTnU8M3iSdjrwUw0S3EjdX6fBmdIiVmiQJG-/s1600/tyson2.jpg" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson returns for <a href="http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs103-neil-degrasse-tyson-on-why-he-doesnt-call-himself-an-a.html">this episode</a> of Rationally Speaking, with a particular question to discuss: Should he call himself an atheist?<br />
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The impetus is a recent dust-up over Neil's appearance on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzSMC5rWvos">Big Think</a>, in which he explained that he avoids the label "atheist" because it causes people to make all sorts of unflattering (and often untrue) assumptions.<br />
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Julia and Massimo reply with some counterarguments, and along the way delve into the philosophy of language.<br />
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Neil's picks: The movie "Gravity," "<a href="http://bit.ly/1fNdLfo">IFLS</a>," and the TV Shows "The Big Bang Theory," "CSI" and"NCIS."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com81tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-91152964123753025422014-03-07T09:55:00.000-05:002014-03-07T09:55:12.745-05:00Massimo's weekend picks!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVFeDiiY7sARQEJ2U1EKumjbjcPWNad6wLom0G4ZRE1L__FGcjV6M-fLmuIQymdEj7KdQZ52WlBYMSgKNhBNj3LKo8P1ujwz6pfBKXL-96AsEukXMsRd6Ncnahmds2QgxgwIJi/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVFeDiiY7sARQEJ2U1EKumjbjcPWNad6wLom0G4ZRE1L__FGcjV6M-fLmuIQymdEj7KdQZ52WlBYMSgKNhBNj3LKo8P1ujwz6pfBKXL-96AsEukXMsRd6Ncnahmds2QgxgwIJi/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" height="170" width="200" /></a></div>
* The difference between <a href="http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7815">academic freedom and academic justice</a>. (Hint: the former is far preferable...)<br />
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* The <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/the-philosophy-of-her/">philosophy of "Her"</a> (the movie).<br />
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* The <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116618/technologys-mindfulness-racket">mindfulness racket</a>.<br />
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* <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/arguments-against-god/">Louise Anthony talks to Gary Gutting</a> about the non-existence of god.<br />
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* <a href="http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2014/marapr/two-cultures-then-and-now.html?paging=off">The Two Cultures</a>, then and now.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-37621051754547026042014-03-04T07:00:00.000-05:002014-03-05T10:15:26.061-05:00What does it mean for something to be metaphysically necessary?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-missing-shade-of-blue.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I mentioned before</span></a>, this semester I’m teaching a <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/humethenandnow/home"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">graduate level seminar on David Hume</span></a>, and having lots of fun with it. During a recent discussion of sections 4 and 5 of the <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding</span></a> (“Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding” and “Sceptic al solutions of these doubts”) the concept of metaphysical necessity came up.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As is well known, Hume wasn’t very keen on metaphysics in general. One of the most famous quotes by him (in section 12 of the very same Enquiry) says: “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Ouch.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Anyway, back to metaphysical necessity. What might it mean for something to be metaphysically necessary, or — conversely — metaphysically impossible? Not surprisingly, there is a fairly large literature about this. The (far from comprehensive, but heavy on recent entries) section on metaphysical necessity of <a href="http://philpapers.org/browse/metaphysical-necessity?sqc=&cn=metaphysical-necessity&onlineOnly=&showCategories=on&newWindow=on&proOnly=on&new=1&limit=50&categorizerOn=&cId=5845&publishedOnly=&langFilter=&hideAbstracts=&sort=pubYear&filterByAreas=&freeOnly=&start=0&format=html&jlist=&ap_c1=&ap_c2="><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the PhilPapers archive</span></a> lists 74 papers, with some of the most recent entries having titles like “Hume’s Dictum and Natural Modality: Counterfactuals”; “Radical Non-Dispositionalism and the Permutation Problem”; “Soames’s Deflationism About Modality”; and so forth.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But we’ll proceed here by looking briefly at the basics. First of all, <i>metaphysical</i> necessity/impossibility as opposed to what other kinds of necessity/impossibility? Two immediately come to mind: logical and physical. It is logically necessary that I either am me or am not-me, for instance [1]; it is also logically necessary, though for different reasons, that there is no such thing as a married bachelor. It is physically necessary that objects with mass attract each other; it is also physically impossible for me to both be here in New York and simultaneously in Rome [2]. And so forth.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s see what we can glean from the above examples: in both instances concerning physical possibilities, and in one instance concerning logical possibility, the idea seems to be that there are certain “laws” that govern logic or physics, and that these laws are inviolable. Now, one could be skeptical about the <i>a priori</i> validity of the laws of logic (like <a href="https://archive.org/details/FromALogicalPointOfView"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">W.V.O. Quine</span></a> was), and one can even think of the laws of physics as simply empirical generalizations that could, in fact, admit of exceptions or have a limited domain of application (like, for instance, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Laws-Physics-Nancy-Cartwright/dp/0198247044"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Nancy Cartwright does</span></a>), but I won’t go there. As far as we are concerned, both logic and physics are solid enough, so to speak, to allow us to talk about things that are either possible or impossible given the respective sets of laws.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The remaining case (the impossibility of a married bachelor), of course, hinges on issues of definitions: since a bachelor is defined as an unmarried man, there simply cannot be any such thing as a married one, on penalty of (logical-semantic) contradiction. Definitions, of course, are tautological, and tautologies are often regarded with little interest in such discussions. But this is a mistake: think about the fact that mathematics (and much of logic itself) consists precisely in the working out of the tautological implications of certain axioms or premises.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, where were we? Well, the discussion so far hints at one promising way to look for metaphysical necessity: search for laws of metaphysics. Unfortunately, that’s not at all a straightforward quest, because it is not clear what counts as a metaphysical law, as distinct from either a physical law or a law of logic — which of course doesn’t help our predicament at all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps we should do what I’ve done above in the cases of logic and physics: look for examples first, then see what we can learn from them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you follow that route, one of the most commonly advanced examples of metaphysical necessity is… <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the existence of God</span></a>! Since that is <i>prima facie</i> (I love it when I get to write that!) ludicrous — or it should be at the dawn of the 21st century — we will ignore it and proceed otherwise.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What else can be done? Well, there are some more intriguing examples of alleged metaphysical necessity, for instance “whatever is water is H2O” and “whatever is elemental gold has atomic number 79.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s look more closely: these are not examples of definitional necessity, like the bachelor. True, once we discovered that the molecular structure of water is H2O we could simply define water as that substance that has that chemical structure and be done with it. But this required an empirical discovery, it wasn’t true <i>a priori</i> from the get go, as is the fact that there cannot be a married bachelor. The reasoning is the same for gold being the element with atomic number 79.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Could it be that these two examples can be interpreted as instantiations of the laws of logic? Hard to see how. There is nothing logically contradictory in imagining a substance with the characteristics of water that is not made of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. But wouldn’t that contradict the laws of physics, at least? Ah, here things become tricky. Surely water behaves the way it is <i>in our universe</i> because the laws of physics are such that if a molecule has that structure then it will behave in that way. But it is hard to say which specific law of physics would be violated if something made of H2O actually behaved differently (say, it had a different freezing point at standard pressure).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Another way to think about this is to say that we can imagine a universe where the physics is (slightly) different and where, as a consequence, H2O doesn’t behave as <i>our</i> H2O. Of course, if that were the case, the H2O = water equation would <i>not</i> be a metaphysical necessity after all, but only a physical one. That’s because metaphysicians these days seem to make sense of the notion of metaphysical necessity by saying that something is metaphysically necessary if it is true in all <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">possible worlds</span></a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Talk of possible worlds is tightly connected with <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">modal logic</span></a> which, not surprisingly, is a set of logics that deal with expressions such as “necessarily,” “possibly,” etc. — which philosophers call modalities. There are a bunch of modal logics, including deontic (dealing with what is morally necessary or permissible), temporal, conditional and so forth. These have given origin to what is known as possible worlds semantics, the study of logical languages that make it possible for logicians to determine whether a given modal expression is inferentially valid or not (which, after all, is the whole point of any logic).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To return to our example: is it physically or metaphysically necessary that H2O = water? For this to be an example of metaphysical necessity, the equation would have to be valid in all possible worlds. But what makes a world possible to begin with? We could, again be talking about either logical or physical possibility (the former, should be clear, being much ampler than the latter). Let’s say we are talking about physical possibility: possible worlds are those worlds that could exist while instantiating a coherent set of physical laws.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our world, obviously, realizes one of these possibilities. Worlds that, say, were different from ours only with respect to the gravitational constant would be our possible-neighbors, the closer to us as a function of how similar their gravitational constant is to ours.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One can easily extend this concept to a multidimensional landscape of fundamental physical constants, each varying within whatever range is physically possible for them to vary (e.g., although logically the gravitational constant could take any of an infinite number of values, it is perfectly possible that only a small subset of these values would yield a physically realizable universe).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you smelled “multiverse” you are close. Despite <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Reality-Fairytale-Physics-Scientific-ebook/dp/B00CY2RB04/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390498537&sr=8-1&keywords=Farewell+to+Reality"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">some people’s reservations</span></a> about the scientific status of the multiverse theory (reservations with which I sympathize), it does seem to make philosophical sense to deploy it within the context of this discussion. But if you don’t like that particular take, then think of possible worlds as the set of worlds that are <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality-ebook/dp/B00DXKJ2DA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386714933&sr=8-1&keywords=max+tegmark"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">mathematically realizable</span></a> instead. While neither of these senses is the one normally used by philosophers who are interested in possible worlds semantics, I think they do help to get an intuitive grasp on the whole idea of “possible worlds,” because they give a fairly precise answer to the obvious question: possible in what sense?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, again, water = H2O would be a metaphysical necessity just in case it had to be true in all possible worlds, say in the entire multiverse. My hunch is that this isn’t the case. It seems that some change in one physical constant or another would yield a pocket universe (within the multiverse) where a substance had the molecular structure H2O and yet had different physical characteristics from <i>our</i> water.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Still, there may be things that are metaphysically necessary in all possible instantiations of the multiverse. Perhaps the inter-conversion between matter and energy? Or the existence of fields from which matter emerges (like the Higgs)?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am going to bet that most metaphysicians won’t like my analysis of metaphysical necessity as presented above, though. True, I have arrived at the conclusion that there can be such a thing as metaphysical necessity as smaller than logical necessity but ampler than physical necessity, thus legitimizing the concept. But I have also linked said concept operationally to either the multiverse as conceived by modern physics or its mathematical equivalent. If so, then discovering metaphysical necessities becomes either a matter for physics (because it is an empirical question) or for logicians-mathematicians (because it is a logical-mathematical thing). Which means that even our newfound way of thinking about metaphysical necessity either expands into logical necessity or collapses into physical necessity.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At the least, that’s the way I see it this week. Anyone out there have examples of metaphysical necessity that would rescue the concept from the Scylla or logic and the Charybdis of physics?</span></span><br />
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<b>Postscript on the role of metaphysics</b><br />
<br />
Interesting discussion so far. I wanted to add a few notes to further refine my thoughts about this issue. To begin with, I am leaning toward the conclusion that there is no such thing as metaphysical necessity. That’s in part because one cannot find metaphysical laws, and in part because I doubt there is such a thing as necessity, period. Nothing is physically or logically necessary - only possible or impossible.<br />
<br />
True, once we establish certain constraints - for instance the laws of physics in our universe - then certain things necessarily happen. (Indeed, if you are a determinist, everything necessarily happens.) But there doesn’t seem to be a reason to think that the laws of physics themselves are necessary (multiverse and all that), so…<br />
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The same goes with logical necessity: once we pick certain axioms or premises, a number of things necessarily follow. But we could have picked different axioms or premises, so that those very same things wouldn’t follow at all.<br />
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Where, then, does that leave metaphysics? I still think it has a role to play, in the same sense that philosophy in general has a role to play. I have come to see philosophy as a type of critical inquiry that bridges logic (broadly construed) and science (and other sources of empirical knowledge), in the sense that it applies rigorous reasoning to whatever the issue at hand may be (e.g., ethics) while taking into account empirical input. This is nothing new: it is a restatement of Kan’t compromise between rationalism (the idea that one can derive a priori truths about the world) and empiricism (the idea that all truths derive from sense experience).<br />
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Similarly for metaphysics: I see it as a bridge between the Scylla of logic and the Charybdis of physics: the role of metaphysics is to make reasoned sense of what the natural sciences tell us about the world (in this I’m with people like Ladyman and Ross), as well as to elucidate how that knowledge fits with our understanding of abstract objects, such as mathematical and logical relations. But there are no laws of metaphysics, just like there are no laws of philosophy, so this endeavor is one of critically making sense of things, not of discovering or dictating how things are.<br />
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At least (again), this is what I think this week...<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[1] For the purposes of this discussion I will assume standard classical logic. The details would be different, but the general arguments the same, if we were using other kinds of logics.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">[2] Non-locality does not apply to macroscopic objects of the size of a human being, for reasons that not even quantum physicists are particularly sure of.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com111tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-45366064247024056042014-02-28T07:00:00.000-05:002014-02-28T08:36:57.052-05:00Massimo's weekend picks!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieaCfzrU8xZVMxFBMB2gYonupQjGTx2LJBNBbRF_n8U1-lsONRDM-AOfmQUV3t19f9WLG3Q7vGfvMxaL7rU-ujc2D1lg1dXcr9avUaXB74J7d37OzGdbjLtiMj5Ri9HQQbS3ho/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieaCfzrU8xZVMxFBMB2gYonupQjGTx2LJBNBbRF_n8U1-lsONRDM-AOfmQUV3t19f9WLG3Q7vGfvMxaL7rU-ujc2D1lg1dXcr9avUaXB74J7d37OzGdbjLtiMj5Ri9HQQbS3ho/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" height="170" width="200" /></a></div>
* Facebook now allows users to pick among <a href="http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7812">50 genders</a>! (But why do users need to pick any??)<br />
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* Very good reasons why atheists should not call <a href="http://chrisstedman.religionnews.com/2014/02/24/5-reasons-atheists-shouldnt-call-religion-mental-illness/">religious people "mentally ill</a>."<br />
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* A philosophical-quantitative approach to decide <a href="http://philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1210">what to do with your life</a>.<br />
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* Whole Foods: America's <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html">temple of pseudoscience</a>? (Full disclosure: I shop there...)<br />
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* The inanity of "<a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/locke-and-load-the-fatal-error-of-the-stand-your-ground-philosophy/">stand your ground</a>" laws, and why you can't invoke John Locke to defend them!<br />
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* At least some <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129570.600-do-invertebrates-feel-pain.html#.Uw-JOHnirWY">invertebrates feel pain</a> (though others very likely don't).<br />
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* Why is <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/02/why-is-academic-writing-so-academic.html">academic writing so, ahem, academic</a>?<br />
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* <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/hit-the-road-philosophy/2011394.article">Philosophy should hit the road</a>, just like in ancient Greek times.<br />
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* <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/the-difficult-balancing-act-of-texting-while-walking/">Texting while walking bad for your health</a>, and not (only) for the obvious reasons.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com80tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-24817976134031662872014-02-26T07:00:00.000-05:002014-02-26T07:00:07.547-05:00(Psychological) Gravity’s a Bitch: On Addiction and Phillip Seymour Hoffman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4-yz_sB7tAgRqlPJ1ovJKEUgpNlBF6rlqYYmiRaerglybpYDRSYOye28iqdYCyd2YQYh9okLputzv9vxWjKtf_gZsKPWziiIOPjZLDDp2ebAM1ko4zyjHBgxqlrCh9IcKmllL/s1600/Comet-Elenin-coming-pass-earth-2011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4-yz_sB7tAgRqlPJ1ovJKEUgpNlBF6rlqYYmiRaerglybpYDRSYOye28iqdYCyd2YQYh9okLputzv9vxWjKtf_gZsKPWziiIOPjZLDDp2ebAM1ko4zyjHBgxqlrCh9IcKmllL/s1600/Comet-Elenin-coming-pass-earth-2011.jpg" height="143" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Steve Neumann</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You are a comet. You were formed by material and processes in the deeps of time, hurled from your home star system out into the wider universe. You’re able to travel for long stretches through vast swathes of space relatively unencumbered; but as you approach certain sufficiently large celestial bodies, you feel the drag of their gravitational pull. Sometimes you get pulled in so close you can never break free from their influence, and are forever caught in their orbit. There’s even a chance you could perish altogether. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These bodies are your weak spots — maybe even your blind spots — those areas in your life that cause you a good deal of what we normally consider an <i>excessive</i> amount of anxiety, stress and pain. You may see these bodies looming on the distant horizon, or you may never see them coming, realizing you’re under their control only after you’re already firmly in their grip. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gravity’s a bitch — psychological gravity, that is. And just like the gravity of physics, this type of gravity is pernicious, in that the closer you get to its field of influence, the harder it is to escape. But people can and do escape. Why is it that some people can, while others can’t? This question is as much philosophical as it is psychological, and deals with the always fun topic of freedom of the will. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Poor <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/movies/philip-seymour-hoffman-actor-dies-at-46.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">Phillip Seymour Hoffman</span></a>. It’s tough to see anyone succumb to drug addiction, even anonymous, complete strangers; but I always seem to get an extra pang of loss when that person is some type of exceptional talent, maybe because talent is so rare, and there’s a fear that it might not appear again. But that feeling usually subsides after a few minutes, because I realize again and again that life is a profligate spender. Clearly heroin was Hoffman’s greatest gravitational weakness. The Hoffman-comet got stuck in its orbit and eventually disintegrated, after flaunting its radiance across our skies for years. Almost immediately upon hearing the news that Hoffman died of a drug overdose, people generally fell into two camps on the matter: one, that addiction is a disease and he succumbed to it as if it were cancer; and two, he did it to himself and therefore has only himself to blame.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is one of these conclusions correct, to the exclusion of the other? Or is there a middle ground that lays blame on both — or neither? I don’t now remember where I first found it, but I came across a <a href="http://debbiebayerblog.com/2014/02/04/phillip-seymour-hoffman-did-not-have-choice-or-free-will-and-neither-do-you/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">blog post</span></a> from someone named Debbie Bayer who has “worked for 9 years as a psychotherapist in facilities treating addiction, mood disorders and eating disorders,” and who has “over 25 years experience working with 12 step communities.” The title of the post is “Phillip Seymour Hoffman did not have choice or free will and neither do you.” Coming from an expert in addiction, that would seem to settle the issue. Except that it doesn’t. It is, however, a clear cut example of the first opinion I mentioned above, and it may also be the prevalent one. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In talking about the few sorry souls out of the vast majority of us who haven’t succumbed to addiction, Bayer contends that their brains simply don’t respond in the same way that a hopeless addict’s brain does. This is undoubtedly true — and a tautology. <i>Of course</i> their brains responded differently; otherwise they wouldn’t have yielded to the narcotic temptation in the first place. But the stronger claim about addiction is that an addict is hardwired or genetically predisposed to it, with the implication that they are <i>fated</i> to be addicts, and nothing they do can commute that life sentence. Their comet-trajectory is fixed, and it’s just a matter of time before they fall headlong into a star of destruction, and their feathery ice-flame is forever extinguished.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But is this really true? Is it the case that someone born with a predisposition to addiction will inevitably become an addict, and likely die from it? Yes, gravity’s a bitch, but even comets get knocked out of their orbits every now and then. The universe is in motion — stars explode and die, jettisoning vast amounts of material into their environs; other stars are born and grow, greedily accumulating ambient material; other celestial bodies collide and spread debris in all directions. Space is awash in detritus. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Likewise, our friends and family die, and we feel the jolting psychic reverberations of these events; other friends and family are born or otherwise enter our lives, providing opportunities to alter our trajectories; and strangers collide, for good or ill, and the results of these collisions can send us careening far and wide. In other words, there are ample opportunities for life to change our direction. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But it could be argued that, even though we are constantly buffeted by events, by chance and circumstance, we still have to be cognizant enough to exploit them to our advantage. If I’m fated to be an addict, and to die at the hands of the dragon I’ve been <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_dragon"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">chasing</span></a>, then it doesn’t matter what life throws at me, right? If my best friend tragically dies from a heroin overdose, what is that to me? If my partner gives birth to a beautifully delicate little girl, what do I care whether or not I’m around to see her grow up and have a family of her own? If a shady dealer holds a knife to my throat or a gun to my head and robs me of all my money, what do I care if I have to steal in order to get my next fix? </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m sure many people cringe at the thought of these scenarios, but nevertheless they continue to believe that the addict has no choice in the matter. But if we take a look at what Bayer considers to be some of the mechanisms involved in the etiology of an addict’s fix, we might find <i>some</i> room for choice. She says that when withdrawal symptoms (e.g., physical distress, anxiety caused by emotional stress, etc.) reach a certain critical mass in the brain, then “the brain automatically cuts off the access to the frontal lobes (in a manner of speaking) and begins to direct the body to rebalance the stress, to find equilibrium.” But what happens <i>before</i> this point of no return is reached? Aren’t there opportunities for the trajectory of the addict’s comet to be redirected? Just because the addict is experiencing those negative emotions doesn’t mean that he <i>must</i> feel them, or at least that he must <i>continue</i> to feel them — why can’t those feelings change before it’s too late, before the addict texts his dealer? </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is some <a href="http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-02-mindset-future-impact-habits.html"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">research</span></a> that shows that bad moods and good moods can lead to preferences for different kinds of foods. An example from the research shows that, “if given the choice between grapes or chocolate candies, someone in a good mood may be more inclined to choose the former while someone in a bad mood may be more likely to choose the latter.” Personal experience seems to bear this out. I’m usually stressed out by the end of the week, but instead of making a rejuvenating fruit smoothie packed with vitamins and minerals, I’ll grab my <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glencairn_whisky_glass"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">glencairn</span></a> glass and fill it with a dram of bourbon, preferably Mr. Hayden’s amber restorative. [1] Surely the same forces are in play when it comes to a narcotic like heroin. [2]</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So the crux of the research is that “individuals in a positive mood, compared to control group participants in a relatively neutral mood, evaluated healthy foods more favorably than indulgent foods,” and that “individuals in positive moods who make healthier food choices are often thinking more about future health benefits than those in negative moods, who focus more on the immediate taste and sensory experience.” As a result, the researchers recommend what they call “mood repair motivation,” or getting the individual to focus their attention on more harmless ways to alter their mood. They suggest talking to friends or listening to music as mood boosters. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Engaging with friends, listening to music — these and ten thousand other activities are the forces that present themselves as raw materials for us to exploit to our advantage. But it’s up to each individual to come up with the right recipe that will generate the desired changes to his trajectory. An addict’s choices are just as productive as the unchosen forces that have shaped him hitherto. And even though some of his key choices thus far have been determined by his predisposition to addiction, there still remains available to him the capacity to choose differently the next time. [3]</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ah, but that’s the rub, isn’t it? How does the addict go about making choices that will change the orbit of his suicidal comet? In a word, influence. He has to be able to be influenced by people and events. It’s certainly not easy, even for someone “addicted” to chocolate, much less heroin. But it’s <i>possible</i>. Psychological gravity’s a bitch, and it’s not going away; but, just like with the physical world where we can achieve escape velocity of our planet’s gravitational pull, we can achieve escape velocity from the gravitational fields that populate our psychology. It takes conscious effort on the part of the addict and, yes, some luck; but even the smallest effort may have substantial repercussions, strong enough to jostle him onto a different path. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In her post about Hoffman, Bayer says that it’s “time for all of us who got through unscathed to stop patting ourselves on the back for our genetic good luck, and it is time to stop judging those who were not born with the same good genes as defective.” I couldn’t agree more. Our American culture needs more of this kind of sensibility, which jibes nicely with the <a href="http://naturalism.org/conseque.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">consequences</span></a> that can be derived from <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2008/11/worldview-naturalism-in-nutshell.html"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">Worldview Naturalism</span></a>. So I would just add one thing: knowing what we know about the power of genetics and the causal web in which each of us is ensconced, those with better genetic good luck should make an extra effort to share responsibility with those who are struggling with the gravity of their hazardous situations. When we see their comet getting caught in a dangerous gravitational field, we should offer our best help and not fall victim ourselves to the fallacy of fatalism, the idea that <i>no matter what we do</i> the outcome will be the same. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We can find strength and maybe even solace in the knowledge that, even though the future is fixed, we don’t know what that future will be, and only in the unfolding of our own choices does the future take shape. So it behooves us to make the best choices we can, for ourselves and others.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">———</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[1] My nod to Christopher Hitchens.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[2] Yes, this “surely” marks a weak spot in my argument — release the <a href="https://medium.com/science-and-technology/83dacb1fe14c"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">Hounds of Dennett</span></a>!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">[3] When I say that the addict can “choose differently,” I don’t mean to say that he can choose to do other than he did </span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">in the exact same circumstances</i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">. That’s why I added the “next time.”</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-1187360412924486842014-02-24T08:18:00.001-05:002014-02-25T08:20:53.564-05:00Rationally Speaking podcast: Zach Weinersmith on His "SMBC" Webcomic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Jo3aBtsWvDFd02DZ52RkejhuZ3ciB4ioF674rGCgdcuZ6zjL7RTc2_UQS8nrpYg9qospANXBtzsO0MTg3RDZeDxWdZkftHwvv1XsXbztRKPtkFPKNEh9qT7Nzv-THbaXhJ0J/s1600/smbc1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Jo3aBtsWvDFd02DZ52RkejhuZ3ciB4ioF674rGCgdcuZ6zjL7RTc2_UQS8nrpYg9qospANXBtzsO0MTg3RDZeDxWdZkftHwvv1XsXbztRKPtkFPKNEh9qT7Nzv-THbaXhJ0J/s1600/smbc1.png" height="194" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs102-zach-weinersmith-on-his-smbc-webcomic.html">This episode</a> features special guest <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Weiner">Zach Weinersmith</a>, author of "<a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/">Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal</a>," a popular webcomic about philosophy and science.<br />
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Zach clarifies his position in the ongoing "philosophy vs. science" fights, poses a question to Julia and Massimo about the ethics of offensive jokes, and discusses <a href="http://bahfest.com/">BAHFest</a>, his "Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses" conference lampooning evolutionary psychology, not to mention his movie, "<a href="http://starpocalypse.vhx.tv/">Starpocalype</a>."<br />
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Somehow along the way, the three take a detour into discussing an <a href="http://bit.ly/1he75oU">unusual sexual act</a>.<br />
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Zach's pick: "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Solaris-Stanislaw-Lem-ebook/dp/B006JWE0MC">Solaris</a>" by Stanislaw Lem.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-87791160379398816032014-02-21T13:55:00.000-05:002014-02-21T13:55:56.035-05:00Massimo's weekend picks!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2uyrAQDwwCaCczSNvGJfJ2lFWitIR7Y7xfv7GEXr1lUN_V131ILYte2kvGo4ThmjiidcfhvUtl6AuMIynkZW9ZEJ1a-qYtQ6tLFVpTsCn1-8HbB4_En1vQLN4ixVo1wnfYH3a/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2uyrAQDwwCaCczSNvGJfJ2lFWitIR7Y7xfv7GEXr1lUN_V131ILYte2kvGo4ThmjiidcfhvUtl6AuMIynkZW9ZEJ1a-qYtQ6tLFVpTsCn1-8HbB4_En1vQLN4ixVo1wnfYH3a/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" height="170" width="200" /></a></div>
* <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/03/the-war-on-reason/357561/">The war on reason</a>, by Paul Bloom - a piece that tries to put all the science-based skepticism about humans as reasoning creatures into a, ahem, reasonable perspective.<br />
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* Regret is the <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116621/youre-regretting-wrong">perfect emotion for our self-absorbed times</a>, writes Judith Shulevitz in the New Republic.<br />
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* Newspapers are still the <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/02/how-newspapers-have-failed-us">most important medium for understanding the world</a>, says Peter Wilby in New Statesman.<br />
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* Perhaps we shouldn't insist on <a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/02/do-our-moral-beliefs-need-to-be-consistent.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed">complete consistency for our moral beliefs</a>, suggests Emrys Westacott at 3QuarksDaily.<br />
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* We should cultivate the ability to <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/in-praise-of-disregard/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0">disregard things we can't do anything about</a>, according to Christy Wampole in the New York Times.<br />
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* <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/46162-pursuits-of-wisdom-six-ways-of-life-in-ancient-philosophy-from-socrates-to-plotinus/?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PhilosophicalReviews%2FNews+%28Notre+Dame+Philosophical+Reviews%29&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner">Pursuits of Wisdom</a>: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus, a book review by Rachana Kamtekar in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.<br />
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* Joseph Stromberg (in the Smithsonian) arrives at a list of just <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-vitamins-and-supplements-are-actually-worth-taking-180949735/">five vitamins and supplements that are actually worth taking</a>.<br />
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* <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/46160-string-theory-and-the-scientific-method/?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PhilosophicalReviews%2FNews+%28Notre+Dame+Philosophical+Reviews%29&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner">String Theory and the Scientific Method</a>, another review in the NDPR, by Nick Huggett.<br />
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* <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/art-books/quantified-self-the-algorithm-of-life/#.UwegGHnirWY">Forget about quantifying your self</a>, says Josh Cohen in Prospect Magazine, and live your life instead.<br />
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* <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/scientific-pride-and-prejudice.html">Scientific Pride and Prejudice</a>, by Michael Suk-Young Chwe in the New York Times.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-29299330150880937882014-02-18T10:15:00.000-05:002014-02-18T10:15:00.729-05:00The missing shade of blue<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj0vlnWR18MVE2ykP1KiiPZ731gIKD2a6_d5AyGc19WdLro-aBZZ82c2_SdSZJlLCfwAY4PldwehltZJzg7wRDlkN84Gpn7XA1wAG7s8PgPLkkGtv7z_LhlyYUFW1v1CzX6h4b/s1600/shades-of-blue-wallpapers_35201_1280x800.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj0vlnWR18MVE2ykP1KiiPZ731gIKD2a6_d5AyGc19WdLro-aBZZ82c2_SdSZJlLCfwAY4PldwehltZJzg7wRDlkN84Gpn7XA1wAG7s8PgPLkkGtv7z_LhlyYUFW1v1CzX6h4b/s1600/shades-of-blue-wallpapers_35201_1280x800.png" height="125" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This semester I’m teaching a graduate level course on “<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/humethenandnow/home"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Hume Then and Now</span></a>,” which aims at exploring some of the original writings by David Hume, particularly the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and contemporary philosophical treatments of Humean themes, such as induction, epistemic justification, and causality.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I want to talk here about a particular episode belonging to Section 2 of <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9662/9662-h/9662-h.htm#section2"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the Enquiry</span></a>, where Hume introduces the famous problem of the missing shade of blue, which is still discussed today in philosophy of mind. I think reflection on the problem itself, as well as some attempts to reconcile what appears to be a glaring contradiction in Hume’s own treatment of it, tells us something interesting about how philosophy is done, and sometimes overdone.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To set the stage, let me tell you a bit about the broader Humean project first. Hume proposed nothing less than an overhaul of the way we do philosophy, largely in reaction to what he (correctly, in my mind) perceived as the useless and obscure musings of “the schoolmen” who preceded him and who were still influential at the onset of the 18th century.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A cardinal point of Hume’s novel approach to philosophy was going to be to conduct, as the title of the book clearly states, an inquiry into how human beings understand things, because only by appreciating human epistemic limits can we produce sound philosophical reasoning. (This approach still inspires plenty of philosophers today, and even a number of scientists, such as social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hume explicitly and very clearly sets out his program for his readers in Section 1 of the Enquiry, appropriately entitled “Of the different species of philosophy.” But it is Section 2, “Of the origin of ideas,” that concerns us here.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It begins with the introduction of Hume’s famous distinction between ideas and impressions. Ideas are thoughts, while impressions are sensations. The first are derived from memory and abstract thinking, the second from the senses. Ideas, Hume argues, are (weaker) “copies” of impressions, and impressions are obtained directly from experience.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For instance, we can feel love for someone (an impression) and we can think about the concept of love (an idea). Clearly, says Hume, the feeling is much stronger than the concept, as expected if it were derivative. Ultimately, according to Hume, all knowledge comes from experience, which is why he is classified among the British empiricists, like Locke (as opposed to the continental rationalists, like Spinoza and Leibniz) — even though Hume actually had a fairly low opinion of Locke, whom he saw as still confused by the influence of the schoolmen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hume acknowledges that it would seem that human imagination is boundless, as we can think about all sorts of things that don’t actually exist (and cannot therefore be experienced), such as unicorns and gods. But he then argues that no matter how apparently fanciful our imagination is, all our complex ideas are in fact combinations of simpler ones, and those in turn can be traced to our experience.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Take god, for instance: “The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hume gives two arguments in support of his thesis: first, whenever we analyze a complex idea — such as that of god — we find that it is, in fact, traceable to a combination of simpler ones, of which we ultimately have direct experience (we have all seen intelligent, wise, and good people). Second, we know that when people have a defect in their sensorial perception they are incapable of forming the corresponding ideas: a blind man has no concept of color, because he has never had an impression of what a color feels like through his senses.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And now we come to the problem caused by the missing shade (for those of you who are following the original text, this is #16 of Section 2 of the Enquiry). I’ll let Hume’s beautifully clear prose speak for itself here (the italics are mine, and they will come in handy during the discussion below):</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“There is, however, one contradictory phenomenon, which may prove that it is not <i>absolutely</i> impossible for ideas to arise, independent of their correspondent impressions. ... 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. ... 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: and this may serve as a proof that the simple ideas are <i>not always</i>, <i>in every instance</i>, derived from the correspondent impression; though this instance is <i>so singular</i>, that it <i>is scarcely worth our observing</i>, and does not merit that <i>for it alone</i> we should alter our general maxim.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Okay, so what’s the big deal, you say? Well, it doesn’t take a sophisticated Hume scholar to figure out that our hero here goes through the following strange sequence: 1. He comes up with what he says is a general principle concerning human understanding; 2. He finds an exception to that principle; 3. He the discards that apparently damning finding as not worthy of consideration. And this despite the fact that Hume had told his readers a bit earlier that the new philosophy he is proposing is subject to empirical disconfirmation, just like the natural philosophy (aka, science) by which it is inspired! What’s going on here? Plenty of commentators have tried to figure it out, attempting to rescue Hume from an embarrassing self-contradiction. After all, this is arguably the most influential philosopher ever to write in the English language. Could it be he didn’t notice that he had successfully refuted his own cardinal doctrine, on which his entire philosophical work is based?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the following we will look at three of several possible solutions to Hume’s blue dilemma, as summarized in a nice paper by John Nelson (published in 1989 <a href="http://www.humesociety.org/hs/issues/v15n2/nelson/nelson-v15n2.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">in Hume Studies</span></a>). I will then argue that there is a good chance that Nelson (and others) over-analyzes things, which is typical of, ahem, analytical philosophy. The answer may be much simpler, more satisfying, and more in synch with Hume’s own conception of “moral” philosophy as analogous to natural philosophy (“moral” at the time indicated all of philosophy other than science, not just ethics). And I will accomplish all of this while at the same time showing just how sensible Hume really was!</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The first suggestion advanced by Nelson (rather informally, since he says he overheard it from a colleague…) is that Hume deliberately weakened his empiricist position, giving an opening to the rival rationalist approach through a sort of self-created Trojan horse. Admitting that the missing shade of blue could be conceived a priori, i.e. without recourse to experience, would, in fact, do just that. Now, why would Hume shoot himself in his philosophical foot? Because Hume’s philosophy also includes an important role for instincts (which in fact he discusses right after the section we are concerned with here), and instincts are innate, i.e. they precede direct sense experience. Nelson, however, immediately discards this possibility for the explanation of the missing shade’s problem. If that were really Hume’s intent then he would have constructed his subsequent arguments in the Enquiry in a much more rationalist-friendly fashion, which he most certainly didn’t do.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Option two, then. This one comes from R. Cummins, who proposed it back in 1978 (in philosophy things move slowly, as you know). Essentially, the suggestion is that one can reasonably interpret Hume’s “having an idea of X” (say, the missing shade of blue) as meaning “having a capacity to recognize X,” in which case the apparent contradiction would instantly disappear, since Hume wouldn’t be providing an example that potentially undermines his main thesis, he would simply entertain the possibility that people are capable of recognizing that there is a missing shade of blue among a range of colors offered to them. The problem with this “solution,” as Nelson quickly points out, is that Hume himself is very clear that he considers the missing shade to be a “contradictory phenomenon,” which is entirely inconsistent with Cummins’ way out of the dilemma.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What then? Nelson has his own theory, of course. (Are you still with me? I promise, there will be a pay off, coming up shortly…) This one is subtle and clever. Indeed, I think, <i>too</i> subtle and clever. Nelson essentially suggests that Hume’s bringing up of a possible contradiction to his main thesis about how people form ideas (ultimately, from experience) is in perfect harmony with his even more general thesis that human understanding of “matters of facts” (i.e., everything outside of math and logic) is only probable, never certain. You see the twist? Hume, according to Nelson, is providing a (possible) example of how his own theories about a particular matter of fact — the ultimate origin of human ideas — could be mistaken, which proves his meta-point about there being no such thing as certainty about anything empirical. Very clever, very elegant, and very likely an unnecessary overreach on Nelson’s part.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My humble opinion — since I’m not a Hume scholar — is simply that we need to take Hume at his words. Re-read, if you please, the passages by him that I quoted above, and pay particular attention to the italicized parts: “it is not <i>absolutely</i> impossible,” “simple ideas are <i>not always</i>, <i>in every instance</i>,” “this instance is <i>so singular</i>, that it <i>is scarcely worth our observing</i>,” “does not merit that <i>for it alone</i> we should alter our general maxim.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Did you see it? Hume simply found a hypothetical example (it would actually be very difficult to do the experiment, if you think about it) that doesn’t go well with his general account. But he thinks that the alleged exception is so contrived as to fail to make a general point, and he therefore (wisely) proceeds to ignore it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This attitude is similar to the one unreflectively adopted by practicing scientists, and philosophers in general — especially those of <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/12/dogmas-of-analytic-philosophy-part-22.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the analytic tradition</span></a> — could benefit from imitating Hume more often. Too many philosophers seem to think that when they find an apparent exception to a general concept, no matter how unlikely or artificial, they have “defeated” the general notion, that exotic counter-examples provide knock-out arguments against a given thesis. But in reality this is generally not the case, and philosophers should just relax about it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For instance, you may recall my discussion of so-called “<a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/07/progress-in-philosophy-gettier-case.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Gettier cases</span></a>” in the context of a treatment of the concept of knowledge. Ever since Plato, knowledge has been defined as justified true belief. Then came Edmund Gettier, who in 1963 published a paper showing that there are instances of what one should consider knowledge and that yet do not seem to agree well with Plato’s definition (read my original post if you are interested in the details). I do consider this an example of (minor) progress in philosophy, because as a result of Gettier-type cases we now have a more nuanced understanding of what counts as knowledge and why. But it can easily be shown that all Gettier-type exceptions to Plato’s concept of knowledge fall into a very narrow category, and they are all very highly contrived. What would a good scientist do, when faced with such narrow anomalies? Very likely precisely what Hume did: ignore them, at least provisionally, and focus instead on the general account to see just how much it can explain before having to be refined or expanded.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">It should not come as a surprise, then, that the highly sensible David Hume, whose project was precisely to turn “moral” philosophy into something more akin to natural philosophy (i.e., science) would adopt the pragmatic approach that is so effective in the latter practice. If only more contemporary philosophers were more Humean in spirit I think the whole discipline would greatly benefit. As Hume himself put it, when he happened to be temporarily overwhelmed by a hopelessly complex philosophical problem, “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d re turn to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.” Cheers!</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com61tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-49699837189271394422014-02-13T17:12:00.000-05:002014-02-14T10:36:08.661-05:00Is Alvin Plantinga for real? Alas, it appears so<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I keep hearing that Notre Dame philosopher and theologian Alvin Plantinga is a really smart guy, capable of powerfully subtle arguments about theism and Christianity. But every time I look, I am dismayed by what I see. If this is the best that theology can do, theology is in big trouble. (Well, to be fair, it has been at least since David Hume.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Recently, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/is-atheism-irrational/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Plantinga has been interviewed</span></a> by another Notre Dame philosopher with theistic leanings, Gary Gutting, for the New York Time’s “Stone” blog. I often enjoy Gutting’s columns, for instance <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/should-pope-francis-rethink-abortion/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">his argument</span></a> for why the Pope should revisit the Catholic’s Church position on abortion. Then again, whenever Gutting veers close to theism I have no problem <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/04/gary-gutting-on-being-catholic.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">taking him to task</span></a> either.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In this case, Gutting’s interview is reasonably well structured, and he did ask some serious questions of Plantinga. It is the latter’s performance that left me aghast. Here is why.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The first question was based on recent surveys that put the proportion of atheists among academic philosophers at around 62%, slightly above what it is for scientists (it varies from sub-discipline to sub-discipline, too). Plantinga concedes that this is problematic for theism, considering that philosophers are the ones who are most familiar with all the arguments for and against the theistic position. So what does he do? He quotes Richard Dawkins, quoting Bertrand Russell, who famously said that if he found himself in front of god after his death he would point out to him that there just wasn’t enough evidence.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And here comes Plantinga’s first <i>non sequitur</i>: “But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.” Right, except for the not-so-minor detail that the priors for there to be an even or odd number of stars are nowhere near the priors for there to be or not to be a god. More on this in a second, when we come to teapots.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Following up on the above (puzzling, to say the least) response, Gutting pointed out that the analogy with “even-star-ism” is a bit odd, and that atheists would bring up instead Russell’s famous example of a teapot orbiting the sun. Should we be agnostic about that? No, says Plantinga, because we have very good reasons to reject the possibility based on what we know about teapots and what it takes to put one in orbit around the sun. Precisely! Analogously — and this was Russell’s point — we have very good reasons not to take seriously the concept of a supernatural being (see comment above about priors). To see why, let’s bring in my favorite analogy. My Facebook profile (reserved for friends and family, please <a href="https://twitter.com/mpigliucci"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">follow me on Twitter</span></a>…) includes the usual question about religion, to which my response is that I’m an a-theist in the same way in which I am an a-unicornist: this is <i>not</i> to say that I know for a fact that nowhere in the universe there are horse-like animals with a single horn on their head. Rather, it is to say that — given all I know about biology, as well as human cultural history (i.e., where the legend of unicorns came from) — I don’t think there is any reason to believe in unicorns. That most certainly doesn’t make me an <i>agnostic</i> about unicorns, a position that not even Plantinga would likely feel comfortable endorsing. (I am, however, for the record, agnostic about even-star-ism. So, there.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gutting then brings up the usual trump card of atheists: the problem of evil (which, to be precise, is actually a problem only for the Judeo-Christian-Muslim concept of god, and therefore not really an argument for atheism per se). Plantinga admits that the argument “does indeed have some strength” but responds that there are also “at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments” so that on balance it is more rational to be a theist.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gutting, however, had to do quite a bit more prodding to get at least one example sampled from the alleged couple dozen on offer. First off, Plantinga states very clearly that the best reason to believe in (his) god is not a rational argument at all, but the infamous <i>sensus divinitatis</i> of Calvinistic memory, i.e. the idea that people experience god directly as a result of “an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is so weak that it is hardly worth rebutting, but let’s elucidate the obvious for Prof. Plantinga anyway. To begin with, it is not clear even what counts as a <i>sensus divinitatis</i> in the first place. Does it equate to simply believing in god? If so, the “evidence” is circular. Or does it mean that some people have had some kind of direct and tangible experience of the divine, like witnessing a miracle? In that case, I’m pretty sure the number of such experiences is far less than Plantinga would like, and at any rate plenty of people claim to have seen UFOs or having had out-of-body experiences. Neither of which is a good reason to believe in UFOs or astral projection. Lastly, we begin to have perfectly good naturalistic explanations of the <i>sensus divinitatis</i>, broadly construed as the projection of agency where it doesn’t belong. The latter truly seems to me a near-universal characteristic of human beings, but it is the result of a cognitive misfire, as when we immediately think that <i>someone</i> must have made that noise whose origin currently escapes us (ghosts? a lurking predator?). It is sensible to think that this compulsive tendency to project agency was adaptive during human history, probably saving a lot of our ancestors’ lives. Better to mistake the noise made by the wind for a predator and take cover than to dismiss the possibility out of too much skepticism and end up as the dinner entree of said predator.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So Gutting pushed a bit more: could Plantinga please give us an example of at least one good theistic argument among those several dozens he seems to think exist? Well, all right, says the esteemed theologian, how about fine tuning? That does move the discussion a bit, as the fine tuning problem is a genuine scientific issue, which has by no means been resolved by modern physics (see recent <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2014/01/sean-carroll-edge-and-falsifiability.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Rationally</span></a> <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/09/calculating-god.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Speaking</span></a> entries on related topics).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course invoking fine tuning in support of theism is simply a variant of the old god-of-the-gaps argument, one that is increasingly weak in the face of continuous scientific progress, an obvious observation that Gutting was smart enough to make. Besides, even if it should turn out that fine tuning is best seen as evidence of intelligent design, there are alternatives on offer, some of which are <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/04/simulation-hypothesis-and-problem-of_16.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">particularly problematic</span></a> for Christian theists.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Plantinga does concede that god-of-the-gap arguments are a bit weak, but insists: “We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified.” Wow. I think I’m going to leave this one as an exercise to the reader (hint: consider the obvious disanalogy between the moon — which everyone can plainly see — and god, which…).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eventually, Plantinga veers back toward the (alleged, in his mind) problem of evil, and takes it head on in what I consider a philosophically suicidal fashion: “Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story. … [insert brief recap of “the Christian story”] … I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Seriously? The argument boils down to the fact that Plantinga, as a Christian, finds the Christian story “magnificent,” that is, aesthetically pleasing, and that’s enough to establish that this is the best of all possible worlds. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find a world with so much natural and human imposed suffering “magnificent” at all, and it seems to me that if an all-powerful, all-knowing, and <i>all-good</i> god were responsible for said world he ought to be resisted at all costs as being by far the greatest villain in the history of the universe. But that’s just me.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moving on, Gutting at one point asks Plantinga why — if belief in atheism is so questionable on rational grounds — so many philosophers, i.e. people trained in the analysis of rational arguments, cling to atheism. Plantinga admits to not being a psychologist, but ventures to propose that perhaps atheists reject the idea of god because they value too much their privacy and autonomy: “God would know my every thought long before I thought it. … my actions and even my thoughts would be a constant subject of judgment and evaluation.” Well, I’m no psychologist either, but by the same token theists like Plantinga (and Gutting, let’s not forget) delude themselves into believing in god because they really like the idea of being judged every moment (especially about what they do in the non-privacy of their bedrooms) and much prefer to be puppets in the hands of a cosmic puppeteer. Okay, suit yourselves, boys, just don’t pretend that your psychological quirks amount to rational arguments.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And we then come to “materialism,” which Gutting thinks is a “primary motive” for being an atheist. Here things get (mildly) interesting, because Plantinga launches his well known attack against materialism, suggesting that evolution (of all notions!) is incompatible with materialism.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Come again, you say? Here’s is the “argument” (I’m using the term loosely, and <i>very</i> charitably). How is it possible, asks the eminent theologian, that we are material beings, and yet are capable of beliefs, which are clearly immaterial? To quote:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures. But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This, of course, is an old chestnut in philosophy of mind, which would take us into much too long a detour (but in case you are interested, <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">check this</span></a>). There are, however, at least two very basic things to note here. First, a materialist would <i>not </i>say that a belief <i>is</i> a material structure in the brain, but rather that beliefs are <i>instantiated</i> by given material structures in the brain. This is no different from saying that numbers, for instance, are concepts that are thought of by human beings by means of their brains, they are <i>not</i> material structures in human brains. Second, as the analogy with numbers may have hinted at, a <i>naturalist</i> (as opposed to a materialist, which is a sub-set of naturalist positions) has no problem allowing for some kind of ontological status for non-material things, like beliefs, concepts, numbers and so on. Needless to say, this is not at all a concession to the supernaturalist, and it is a position commonly held <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized-ebook/dp/B001DWGDWI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392302650&sr=8-1&keywords=ladyman+everything"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">by a number of philosophers</span></a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Plantinga goes on with his philosophy of mind 101 lesson and states that the real problem is not with the existence of beliefs per se, but rather with the fact that beliefs cause actions. He brings up the standard example of having a belief that there is some beer in the fridge, which — together with the desire (another non-material thingy, instantiated in another part of the brain!) to quench one’s thirst — somehow triggers the action of getting up from the darn couch, walk to the fridge, and fetch the beer (presumably, to get right back to the couch). Again, the full quote so you don’t think I’m making things up:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But <i>of course</i> the content of the belief is <i>also</i> such in virtue of particular electrical signals in the brain. If those signals were different we would have a different belief, say that there is no beer in the fridge. Or is Plantinga suggesting that it is somehow the presence of god that gives content to our beliefs? And how, exactly, would that work anyway?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whatever, you may say, didn’t I mention something about evolution above? Yes, I’m coming to that. Here is Plantinga again, after Gutting suggested that perhaps we get a reasonable correspondence between beliefs and action because natural selection eliminated people whose brains were wired so to persistently equip them with the wrong belief (i.e., believing that the beer is in the refrigerator, when it’s not because you already drank yourself into oblivion last night):</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The first part of this is true enough, and consistent with the fact that we do, indeed, get a lot of our natural beliefs wrong. To pick just one example among many, most people, for most of human history, believed that they were living on a flat surface. It took the sophistication of science to show otherwise (so much for the “science is just commonsense writ large” sort of platitude). It is the last part of Plantinga’s statement that is bizarre: 50-50 chances that our beliefs are true or false, <i>given</i> materialism and evolution? Where the heck do those priors come from?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But it gets worse: “If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like 0.0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Again, wow. Just, wow. This is reminiscent of the type of silly “calculations” that creationists do to “demonstrate” that the likelihood of evolution producing a complex structure like the human eye is less than that of <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hoyle's_fallacy"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">a tornado going through a junkyard</span></a> and assembling a perfectly functional Boeing 747 (the original analogy is actually due to physicist Fred Hoyle, which doesn’t make it any better).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The chief thing that is wrong with Plantinga’s account is that our beliefs are far from being independent of each other. Indeed, human progress in terms of both scientific and otherwise (e.g., mathematical) knowledge depends crucially on the fact that we continuously build (and revise, when necessary) on previously held beliefs. In fact, there is an analogous reason why the tornado in the junkyard objection doesn’t work: natural selection too builds on previous results, so that calculating the probability of a number of independent mutations occurring by chance in the right order is a pointless exercise, and moreover one that betrays the “reasoner's utter incomprehension of the theory of evolution. Just like Plantinga apparently knows little about epistemology.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">So, to recap, Plantinga’s best “arguments” are: we don’t have a scientific explanation for the apparent fine tuning of the universe (true, so?); we don’t have a philosophical account and/or a scientific explanation of the problem of “aboutness” in philosophy of mind (again, true, so?); some people claim to have a mysterious </span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">sensus divinitatis </i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">(oh boy). Therefore, not only god, but the Christian god in particular, exists. Equipped with that sort of reasoning, I’m afraid Plantinga would fail my introductory critical thinking class. But he is a great theologian.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com265tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-26782343879170996482014-02-10T08:31:00.001-05:002014-02-10T08:31:50.534-05:00Rationally Speaking podcast: Max Tegmark and the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ4cxzFBMnmpQ21ElAX8_FDE8Y4KJ_Rq10k5qsPRB_Hxlhp36CfPuZ4xsX_CMBhkaaClfmk1vZTZRfMfI_rhNFAKGe0-QIUDTjWHQ_kpsjiL7VtkPLuWnurLDRZk82X3GnqO2h/s1600/tegmark_max.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ4cxzFBMnmpQ21ElAX8_FDE8Y4KJ_Rq10k5qsPRB_Hxlhp36CfPuZ4xsX_CMBhkaaClfmk1vZTZRfMfI_rhNFAKGe0-QIUDTjWHQ_kpsjiL7VtkPLuWnurLDRZk82X3GnqO2h/s1600/tegmark_max.jpg" height="200" width="142" /></a></div>
Those among us who loathed high school calculus might feel some trepidation at the premise in <a href="http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs101-max-tegmark-on-the-mathematical-universe-hypothesis.html">this week's episode</a> of Rationally Speaking. MIT Physicist Max Tegmark joins us to talk about his book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality-ebook/dp/B00DXKJ2DA">Our Mathematical Universe</a>: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality" in which he explains the controversial argument that everything around us is "made of math."<br />
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Max, Massimo and Julia explore the arguments for such a theory, how it could be tested, and what it even means.<br />
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Max's pick: "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Youre-Joking-Mr-Feynman-ebook/dp/B003V1WXKU">Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!</a> Adventures of a Curious Character."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com155tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-38341480447016515182014-02-07T07:00:00.000-05:002014-02-07T07:00:05.498-05:00Massimo's suggested readings for the weekend<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgub7rrRa06mwuP5ZKEwYVdQ1ZrhZpzqD7PN0A9MVP2-5mOIjd_bxBciikbKvo3e0XIKgh7H2-hyigdxjF6rT5JPSffKSTyVw_grohkqXHyAjVy9a4NfcmpraLoDwSRouTw8UVT/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgub7rrRa06mwuP5ZKEwYVdQ1ZrhZpzqD7PN0A9MVP2-5mOIjd_bxBciikbKvo3e0XIKgh7H2-hyigdxjF6rT5JPSffKSTyVw_grohkqXHyAjVy9a4NfcmpraLoDwSRouTw8UVT/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" height="170" width="200" /></a></div>
* The <a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/our-quantum-reality-problem/">fascinating mess</a> that is contemporary fundamental physics.<br />
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* Are we close to an awful <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/2013/10/28/are-we-too-close-to-making-gattaca-a-reality/">Gattaca-type scenario</a> for the future of humanity?<br />
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* How to pick among <a href="http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7755">experts who disagree</a>.<br />
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* <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/jan/23/psychological-therapies-mental-illness-dodo-bird-verdict">CBT beats the crap out of psychoanalysis</a>, at least in the case of bulimia.<br />
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* <a href="http://aremonstrantsramblings.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/in-defense-of-pigliucci/">In defense of... me!</a> By a theist!! (Oh boy, the New Atheists are really gonna be pissed off now.)<br />
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* Julian Baggini on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303947904579336641514410358">the philosophy of food</a>.<br />
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* <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/the-age-of-infopolitics/">The age of infopolitics</a> and our digital selfs.<br />
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* The Pope should rethink the Catholic <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/should-pope-francis-rethink-abortion/">Church's stand on abortion</a>, says Catholic philosopher.<br />
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* <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/kiss-me-i-m-an-atheist.html">Kiss me, I'm an atheist</a>. The type of PR the atheist movement really needs.<br />
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* <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/HappinessIts-Discontents/144019/">Happiness and its discontents</a>, a critique of our obsession with it.<br />
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* <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/fifty-states-of-fear/">Fifty States of Fear</a>: why Americans are being encouraged to being afraid of the wrong things.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-10534763529102678932014-02-05T07:00:00.000-05:002014-02-05T07:00:01.952-05:00On Coyne, Harris, and PZ (with thanks to Dennett)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Oh dear, I pissed off the big shots among the New Atheists — again. If you are on Twitter or happen to have checked a couple of prominent NA blogs recently, you will have noticed a chorus comprised of none other than Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, PZ Myers and, by way of only a passing snarky comment, Richard Dawkins — all focused on yours truly. I’m flattered, but what could I have possibly done to generate such a concerted reaction all of a sudden?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Two things: I have published <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2014/01/rationally-speaking-cartoon-sam-harris.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">this cartoon</span></a> concerning Sam Harris, just to poke a bit of (I thought harmless, good humored, even!) fun at the guy, and — more substantively — this <a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/PIGNAA"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">technical, peer reviewed, paper</span></a> in a philosophy journal devoted to a conceptual analysis and criticism of the NA movement, from the point of view of a scientist, philosopher, and, incidentally, atheist. (The same issue of that journal carries a number of other commentaries, from theists and atheists alike.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I watched the Twitter/blog mini-storm with some amusement (decades in the academy have forced me to develop a rather thick skin). The event was characterized by the usual back and forth between people who agreed with me (thank you) and those who don’t (thank you, unless your comments were of the assholic type). I thought there was no point in responding, since there was very little substance to the posts themselves. But then I realized that the mini-storm was making precisely my point: the whole episode seemed to be a huge instance of much ado about nothing, but nasty. So I decided a counter-commentary might be helpful after all. Here it is, organized by the three major authors who have lashed out at me in such an amusing way. I’ll start with a point-by-point response to Coyne’s longest blog post, followed by a more cursory commentary on PZ (who actually makes most sense out of the whole bunch, and indeed was himself mentioned only in passing in my paper), and ending of course with Harris, in whose case I will simply let Dan Dennett (another NA, did you know?) do the job for me. (If, however, you are tired of the somewhat childish back and forth, however, by all means skip to part IV below.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Part I: Coyne</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/pigliucci-to-all-new-atheists-were-doing-it-wrong/">Jerry begins</a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> thus: “when I have read Massimo’s site, Rationally Speaking, I’ve been put off by his arrogance, attack-dogishness (if you want a strident atheist, look no further than Massimo), and his repeated criticisms of New Atheists because We Don’t Know Enough Philosophy.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">While I plead guilty to the latter charge, to be accused of arrogance, attack-dogishness and stridency by Jerry Coyne, of all people, is ironic indeed. Please, go ahead and read my critical paper, compare it with what Jerry wrote, and then measure the two against your own scale of arrogance, attack-dogishness and stridency. Let me know the results.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“He has just published a strong attack on New Atheists (mentioning me, albeit briefly)” — It wasn’t an “attack,” Jerry, it was a criticism, though apparently you and other (though not all) NA's can’t see the difference anymore. And were you disappointed that I mentioned you only briefly? I apologize, I’m trying to make amends now.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“It’s a nasty piece of work: mean-spirited and misguided. It’s also, I suspect, motivated by Pigliucci’s jealousy of how the New Atheists get more attention and sell more books than he does” — First, see my comment above along the lines of the pot calling the kettle black. Second, accusing someone of jealousy is surely a despicable type of <i>ad hominem</i>, and it is easily refuted on empirical grounds. If the motivation for my criticisms truly was jealousy of people who sell more books than I do, why on earth would I praise Dennett, or Sean Carroll, or plenty of other best selling authors I write about on my blog or interview on <a href="http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">my podcast</span></a>? Could it be that my focus on Harris & co. is the result of actual, substantive, disagreements with their positions, and not stemming from personal rancor?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“I have to say that the paper just drips and seethes with jealousy and the feeling that Pigliucci considers himself neglected because philosophy is marginalized by New Atheists.” — Another example of just how dripping and seething Coyne himself can be, though I’m pretty sure he isn’t jealous of me, at least.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Jerry notes that I mention Hitchens, another prominent NA, only in passing, adding “why did he mention Trotsky and Iraq rather than, say, Mother Teresa or the Elgin Marbles? And of course the phrase ‘notoriously excelled’ is simply a gratuitous slur.” I mentioned Trotsky and Iraq because I wanted to make the point that someone who swings that far in opposite directions on political grounds is more of a (incoherent) polemicist than anything else, and Mother Theresa simply had nothing to do with it. As for my phrase being a gratuitous slur, I can certainly see how it could be interpreted that way. Or it could be taken as an accurate description of Hitchens’ writing career.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Commenting on a specific paragraph from my paper Jerry then adds: “it’s simply wrong to claim that a) believers don’t see God as a real entity who interacts with the world in certain ways (making that a hypothesis), and b). that one can’t test the supernatural, an old and false argument often used by Eugenie Scott. In fact, believers are constantly adducing ‘evidence’ for God, be it Alvin Plantinga’s claim that our senses couldn’t detect truth without their having been given us by god.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I had made <i>neither</i> claim, as ought to be crystal clear to anyone reading the paragraph that Jerry quoted before proceeding to completely misunderstand it. I had simply said that Dawkins et al. are wrong to consider “the God hypothesis” as anything like a <i>scientific</i> hypothesis (as opposed to a semi-incoherent ensemble of contradictory statements easily failing the test of reason and evidence). That is, my complaint was, and has always been, that NAs simply give too much credit to their opponents when they raise religious talk to the level of science. Coyne simply, willfully it seems to me, misread what I wrote and very plainly intended.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Along the same lines, Jerry later on adds: “they have reasons for being Christians, Jews, etc., even if those reasons are simply ‘I was brought up that way.’” Indeed. And how does that amount to a scientific hypothesis, as opposed to self-evident cultural bias?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">More: “If you think the Moral Law is evidence for God, you can examine whether our primate relatives also show evidence for morality, and whether and how much of human morality really is innate. That’s science!” No, it ain’t. Does Jerry truly not see that the believer can simply say that the observation of prosocial behavior in other primates is no contradiction of the statement that God gave us the Moral Law? And does he truly not see the difference between morality (a complex set of behaviors and concepts that require language and cultural evolution) and mere prosociality (which we share with a number of other species, including several non-primates)? Incidentally, the fact that the latter was likely the evolutionary antecedent of the former (which I think is very reasonable to believe) in no way undermines the idea that there is an important distinction between the two.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Science deals with the supernatural all the time. What else are scientific investigations of ESP and other paranormal phenomena, or studies of ‘spiritual healing’ and intercessory prayer?” Yes and no. First of all, there is nothing inherently supernatural in claims of telepathy and the like. The occurrences, if real, could simply be the result of unknown natural phenomena. Second, yes, we have tested the effects of intercessory prayer, and of course have come up empty-handed. But what always struck me as bizarre about such experiments is how ill-conceived they are. They couldn’t possibly be testing for supernatural effects mediated by a God who would presumably know that we mere mortals are about to test His power. Why would He lend himself to such games? And if we had, in fact, discovered an effect, I bet atheists (myself and Jerry included) would have immediately offered alternative, naturalistic explanations, along the lines of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Arthur Clarke’s famous Third Law</span></a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Next: “‘most of the New Atheists haven’t read a philosophy paper’? I seriously doubt that. I won’t defend myself on this count, for I’ve read many, and so, I suspect, have Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, and others seen as important New Atheists.” Well, I take Jerry at his word, though his philosophy readings surely don’t seep through his blog in any clear way. I know Harris has read <i>some</i> philosophy as an undergraduate, but has clearly not understood it (this isn’t a gratuitous statement, just a conclusion derived from having spent far too much time reading what Harris has wrritten. As you’ll see below, Dan Dennett agrees with me, and then some!). As for Dawkins, I’ve met him several times, the last time at the <a href="http://preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">naturalism workshop</span></a> organized by Sean Carroll and he has plainly told me that he doesn’t read philosophy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“The charge of anti-intellectualism is snobbish, and what Pigliucci means by it is that New Atheists harbor a ‘lack of respect’ for his field: philosophy.” — This constantly amazes me, especially coming from Jerry, who really ought to know better. I would perhaps understand his comment if I were a philosopher with no science background, presumably just envious of the prestige of science. But I am <i>also</i> a scientist, indeed with a specialization in Jerry’s own discipline of evolutionary biology. How, then, could it possibly make sense to accuse me of wanting to defend “my” field from encroachment from, ahem, “my other” field??</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, not all this sniping is entirely wasted, for Jerry and I certainly agree on the following: “What’s important is to distinguish those disciplines that enforce reasons for believing in things (disciplines like science, math, and philosophy) from those that don’t (postmodern literary criticism, theology, etc.),” which you would think ought to be more than enough for the two of us to find common ground. It’s really unfortunate that it isn't.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Jerry continues by giving me some credit for a broader view of knowledge — what used to be called <i>scientia</i>, which would actually go a long way toward reconciling our diverging views. But then says: “This is pretty much o.k. except that Pigluicci [sic] includes ‘arts’ and ‘first- person experience,’ with ‘scientia’ as ways of understanding. ‘First-person experience,’ of course, includes the many forms of revelation used to justify the existence of God, and while ‘arts’ are ways of ‘feeling,’ it’s arguable about whether the kind of understanding they yield is equivalent to the kind of understanding produced by physics and philosophy, or, for that matter, by revelation.” Except that I most explicitly do no such thing! In a <a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/massimo-pigliucci-on-consilience/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">long essay in Aeon</span></a>, where I expand on this, I make a distinction between knowledge and understanding, and very clearly say that scientia is about knowledge, while the arts, the humanities and first-person experience — together with knowledge — form understanding. How could Jerry so blatantly confuse the two, or fail to get the not at all subtle distinction I was trying to make?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Toward the end of Jerry’s rant we get to a downright surreal turn: “I was once favorably disposed to Pigliucci.” Seriously? When, exactly? Either Coyne is lying or he has a very short memory. Indeed, our disagreements and discord date from way before either of us started writing publicly about atheism and related matters. It goes back to Jerry’s conservative take on the state of evolutionary theory, where he is a staunch defender of the so-called Modern Synthesis (of the 1920s through ‘40s), while I and others have advocated what we refer to as an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Extended-Synthesis-Massimo-Pigliucci-ebook/dp/B008H5PZZA/ref=la_B001IU0D3K_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391547557&sr=1-3"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Extended Synthesis</span></a> that takes seriously the many empirical and conceptual advances in biology over the past six decades (instead of treating them as cherries added as decorations onto the already finished cake).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the problem is that Jerry is obviously just not reading very carefully what I’m writing, reaching for his keyboard instead as a straight result of a knee-jerk reaction. Otherwise he wouldn’t complain: “if New Atheism has been such a miserable failure, why does Pigliucci admit this?” going on to cite me as saying that NA books have been very successful. Does Coyne not realize that number of books sold isn’t the only, or in some cases the most important, measure of “success?” Because if he doesn’t, then he ought to wake up to the realization that Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey have probably outsold all the NAs combined. I was talking about what I see as a conceptual failure of the NA movement (remember, the kerfuffle is about a <i>technical</i> paper published in a somewhat obscure philosophy journal!), not whatever it is Jerry thinks I was talking about.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The last thing to notice is that Jerry managed to misspell my name a whopping eight times. He <i>really</i> doesn’t like me!</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Part II: PZ</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let us now turn to the far shorter (and much less nasty) <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/01/24/philosophism/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">post by PZ</span></a>, rather amusingly entitled “Philosophism,” which is PZ’s counter to the accusation of scientism. And he is, of course, right. Some philosophers are surely guilty of philosophism, just like some scientists are guilty of scientism. The irony here is that when I got into this business I </span></span>thought <span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">(very naively, as it turned out) that my new colleagues in philosophy would be glad to have a member of their profession who was also a scientist, and that my colleagues in science would regard me as one of their own who might be a trusty bridge to the “other culture” (as </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Two-Cultures-Canto-Classics-ebook/dp/B00E3URDN0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391547818&sr=8-1&keywords=cp+snow+the+two+cultures" style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">C.P. Snow famously put it</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">). What happened instead, with a few exceptions, is that philosophers tend to consider me too much of a scientist, while scientists consider me too much of a philosopher. </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JubaAS1v-w" style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Life, don’t talk to me about life</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">…</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At any rate, on the issue of scientism — and of the role of philosophy — there is much that PZ and I agree on. He correctly notes his criticisms of people like Krauss, Hawking and Pinker, for instance. It is not, however, correct to say that “Krauss has retracted his sentiments,” as anyone can plainly see by reading <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/09/krauss-does-it-again-so-soon.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">his non-apology</span></a> (prompted by Dan Dennett) in Scientific American. PZ also wonders why I don’t mention Pinker in my NA paper, which is strange, since the paper is about the foremost figures who have initiated and defined NA, and Pinker — as brilliant and controversial a writer as he is — is simply not among them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">PZ more generally accuses me of cherry picking, sparing from my criticisms in the paper people like Susan Jacoby, David Silverman, Hemant Mehta, Greta Christina, Ibn Warriq, Ophelia Benson. But, again, with all due respect to all of these people, they aren’t the founding fathers (yeah, they were all old white men) of NA, nor have they been quite as influential in terms of the public face of the movement — at least in terms of the Coynian ultimately meaningful measure of number of books sold.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">PZ is correct to point out that there is indeed a range of attitudes toward philosophy among atheists, and he is a prime example. But, again, this is simply not the case, by and large, where my big targets are concerned, despite his contention that Stenger's (again, not one of the founding fathers) work is full of history and philosophy. History yes, philosophy, not really.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Toward the end of his post PZ tells his readers that I have two criteria for criticism in mind: “1) We’re popular. That’s an accusation that has me stumped; would we be more respectable if nobody liked us at all? 2) We’re scientists and take a scientific approach. Well, we’re not all scientists, and what’s wrong with looking at an issue using evidence and reason?”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(1) is, of course, another example of Coyne’s confusion between popularity and soundness of ideas. I’m not accusing the NAs of being popular. They obviously are, and good for them. I’m accusing (some of) them of being sloppy thinkers when it comes to the implications of atheism and of a scientific worldview.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As for (2), I never said that all the NAs are scientists (indeed, my paper <i>explicitly</i> excluded Hitchens from the analysis on precisely those grounds — which as we’ve seen didn’t please Coyne). But a major point of the paper was to discuss what I see as a tendency of NA <i>qua</i> movement (i.e., founding fathers and many followers) toward scientism, a tendency that has been codified precisely by the sciency types among the NA (it surfaces very clearly in the many comments that both Coyne and PZ got to this latest round of posts). Finally, of course there is nothing at all wrong with looking at an issue using evidence or reason, nor am I aware of ever having written anything to that effect.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Part III: Harris</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And now let’s get to Sam Harris. Readers of this blog know exactly what I think of him as an intellectual (I have no opinion of him as a person, since I’ve never met him). But what follows is a (long, apologies) list of quotes from a single review of Harris’ latest effort, his booklet on free will, penned by non other than <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/Dennett_reflections_on_Harris's_Free_Will.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dan Dennett</span></a>. While I have to admit to being human and having therefore felt a significant amount of vindication reading what Dan had to say on this, I reprint representative passages below to make three points:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am clearly not the only one to think that Harris’ philosophical forays are conceptually confused, to say the least. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Please notice the mercilessly sarcastic tone adopted by Dennett throughout. This is </span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">at least</i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> as heavy an attack as anything I’ve written about Harris, and arguably much more so. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">But, do you think Dennett has therefore been excoriated by Harris, Coyne & co. for his message or the form in which it was delivered? (Yeah, that was a rhetorical question, glad you got it.)</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These quotes, of course, do not constitute Dennett’s <i>argument</i> (for that you’ll have to read his full, long, essay). But they are representative of why I think Dan has been much harsher than I have been with Harris (for good reasons, in my mind). Incidentally, Dennett includes the following people as others who hold ideas similar to Harris’ and are equally misguided: Wolf Singer, Chris Frith, Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein (!), Jerry Coyne, and Richard Dawkins. Here is the man himself:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think we have made some progress in philosophy of late, and Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">I would hope that Harris would pause at this point to wonder—just wonder—whether maybe his philosophical colleagues had seen some points that had somehow escaped him in his canvassing of compatibilism. As I tell my undergraduate students…</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are mad dog reductionist neuroscientists and philosophers who insist that minds are illusions, pains are illusions, dreams are illusions, ideas are illusions—all there is is just neurons and glia and the like.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Again, the popular notion of free will is a mess; we knew that long before Harris sat down to write his book.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">These are not new ideas. For instance I have defended them explicitly in 1978, 1984, and 2003. I wish Harris had noticed that he contradicts them here, and I’m curious to learn how he proposes to counter my arguments.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Harris should take more seriously the various tensions he sets up in this passage. It is wise to hold people responsible, he says, even though they are not responsible, not really.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are complications with all this, but Harris doesn’t even look at the surface of these issues.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">The rhetorical move here is well-known, but indefensible.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Even the simplest and most straightforward of Harris’s examples wilt under careful scrutiny.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">If this isn’t pure Cartesianism, I don’t know what it is. His prefrontal cortex is part of the I in question. Notice that if we replace the “conscious witness” with “my brain” we turn an apparent truth into an obvious falsehood: “My brain can no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than it can cause my heart to beat.”</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are more passages that exhibit this curious tactic of heaping scorn on daft doctrines of his own devising while ignoring reasonable compatibilist versions of the same ideas.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">If Harris is arguing against it, he is not finding a “deep” problem with compatibilism but a shallow problem with his incompatibilist vision of free will; he has taken on a straw man, and the straw man is beating him.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Once again, Harris is ignoring a large and distinguished literature that defends this claim.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">His book also seems to have influenced his own beliefs and desires: writing it has blinded him to alternatives that he really ought to have considered.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have thought long and hard about this passage, and I am still not sure I understand it, since it seems to be at war with itself.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Harris notes that the voluntary/involuntary distinction is a valuable one, but doesn’t consider that it might be part of the foundation of our moral and legal understanding of free will. Why not? Because he is so intent on bashing a caricature doctrine.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here again Harris is taking an everyday, folk notion of authorship and inflating it into metaphysical nonsense.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Entirely missing from Harris’s account—and it is not a lacuna that can be repaired—is any acknowledgment of the morally important difference between normal people (like you and me and Harris, in all likelihood) and people with serious deficiencies in self-control.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">I cannot resist ending this catalogue of mistakes with the one that I find most glaring: the cover of Harris’s little book, which shows marionette strings hanging down. … Please, Sam, don’t feed the bugbears.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think I've made my point. Or, rather, Dennett did.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Part IV: <i>Pars Construens</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Francis Bacon, arguably the father of modern philosophy of science, wrote in his New Organum (1620, a polemical response to Aristotle’s famous Organum) that every philosophical project better have two parts: the <i>pars destruens</i>, where you should clearly state what is wrong with some other position you want to overcome, and the <i>pars construens</i>, where you present your own alternative views.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Much of what you’ve read so far is, of course, <i>pars destruens</i>. My <i>pars construens</i> has actually been presented before, in a number of essays on this blog, as well as in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nonsense-Stilts-Tell-Science-Bunk-ebook/dp/B003QHYZ1E/ref=la_B001IU0D3K_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391547557&sr=1-2"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">a couple</span></a> of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Answers-Aristotle-Science-Philosophy-Meaningful-ebook/dp/B0092WWZQY/ref=la_B001IU0D3K_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391547557&sr=1-4"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">my books</span></a>, and in the Aeon piece mentioned above. Still, it may be worth summarizing:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">On science and/vs philosophy</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">: I consider both science and philosophy to be intellectually serious disciplines, with much to tell to each other. Just in the way I have little patience for scientists who are ignorant and/or dismissive of philosophy, I have little patience for philosophers who are ignorant of and/or dismiss science.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">On what counts as knowledge</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">: I distinguish between disciplines / approaches that contribute to our knowledge (in the intellectual sense of the term) and those that contribute to our understanding (both of that knowledge and of life in general). The first group includes science, philosophy, logic and math, and I use the above mentioned umbrella term <i>scientia</i> for it, from the Latin word meaning “knowledge” in the broad sense. The second group includes literature, the arts and other humanities. The relationship between the two groups is helped / mediated by bridge areas, such as history and social science. I don’t pretend this to be the ultimate model of human knowledge / understanding, it is simply my constructive way to push for what I see as a healthy disciplinary pluralism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">On ethics and morality</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">: I think ethics is a branch of philosophy that has to be informed by factual evidence (“science”) as much as possible, but I do think there is a pretty serious distinction between “is” and “ought” (despite some permeability of that famous boundary). I do think science can and does illuminate the origins (evolution) and the material basis (neurobio) of ethical thinking. Just like it can illuminate the origins and neural basis of mathematical thinking, without this resulting in the treatment of mathematics as a branch of evolutionary or neuro-biology.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">On the nature of science</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">: I think science is a particular type of historically situated epistemic-social enterprise, and that to attempt to enlarge its domain to encompass “reason” as a whole is historically, sociologically and intellectually misguided, and it does a disservice to science itself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">On religion and the New Atheism</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">: I am an atheist, and I am not shy about criticizing religion. But I like to do that in what I perceive as an intellectually honest and rigorous way. I am clearly not above harshly criticizing other people’s positions, but I try to do it constructively. My problem with the New Atheism is that there is little new in it, that it tends to be more loud than constructive, and that it has a tendency toward science-worshiping. Oh, and I think I have a right (perhaps even an intellectual duty) to criticize big boys who I think need to be criticized.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">On atheism and social issues</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">: I do not believe that atheism entails much else other than a (eminently reasonable!) negative metaphysical position (i.e., the denial of the idea that we have good reasons to believe in supernatural entities). As such, I am skeptical of “<a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/08/on-with-comment-about-richard-carriers.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Atheism+</span></a>” sort of efforts when they go beyond the obviously germane issue of separation of Church and State and the like. Of course, I do agree with many of the progressive social goals that are pushed by PZ, Coyne and others. I just think we have already been doing that for a long time under the banner of (the philosophy of) secular humanism — so it's another example of people appearing to think they’ve come up with something new while they are in fact simply placing their label onto something that others have been doing (quite well) for a long time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">This has been far too long. ‘Till the next one, folks.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com93tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-16061999012353114662014-02-01T07:00:00.000-05:002014-02-01T07:00:01.293-05:00On the New Atheism & Philosophy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8bWAf-jaXWZFShXvFhxwm2lzAU9eF8UTv8s36fR1540iMuOIIiJ7GzNAVsTjkTM5TH5nh9QyLm-8C47tPtBVQmoiJ6M3_rELLH4-utWxGzIxwygJk4SRsNTReb2Pi8cZwUxZ7/s1600/photo.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8bWAf-jaXWZFShXvFhxwm2lzAU9eF8UTv8s36fR1540iMuOIIiJ7GzNAVsTjkTM5TH5nh9QyLm-8C47tPtBVQmoiJ6M3_rELLH4-utWxGzIxwygJk4SRsNTReb2Pi8cZwUxZ7/s1600/photo.JPG" height="112" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Steve Neumann</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is an ongoing battle between some of the New Atheists and, well, I’m not sure what to call the rest of us; but the main point of contention has been that the New Atheists — most of whom are scientists of some sort — either don’t understand philosophy or intentionally ignore it. This has come to a head recently with Massimo’s Twitter War with Sam Harris, as well as Jerry Coyne’s <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/pigliucci-to-all-new-atheists-were-doing-it-wrong/"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">critique </span></a>of Massimo’s recent <a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/PIGNAA"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">paper </span></a>entitled, “New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement.” Harris didn’t engage Massimo’s paper directly; he was just simply dismissive of Massimo’s relevance in general. But Twitter really isn’t the proper platform for thoughtful discourse anyway. Coyne, on the other hand, wrote at considerable length about what he believes is Massimo’s jealousy over the alleged usurpation of philosophy by science. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am a very sarcastic person, and one of the things I like about Massimo, which I’ve learned from reading his posts here as well as interacting with him socially, is his own sarcasm. However, the paper Coyne excoriates isn’t as full of Massimo’s sarcasm as he thinks it is. If you really want to read something that “just drips and seethes” with sarcasm, as Coyne characterizes Massimo’s paper, then read fellow New Atheist <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/Dennett_reflections_on_Harris's_Free_Will.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dan Dennett’s review</span></a> of Sam Harris’s book <i>Free Will</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/Harrisreview.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc; letter-spacing: 0px;">reviewed </span></a>Harris’s book when it first came out, and I was less harsh than both Massimo and Dennett. The worst thing I said was, “Harris admits as much toward the end of his book, which makes his mid-essay tangent all the more baffling,” in reference to his quibble with the free will compatibilists, most notably Dennett. But let me list a few of the sentences from Dennett’s review that one could argue “just drips and seethe” with sarcasm:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I think we have made some progress in philosophy of late, and Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Harris has considered compatibilism, at least cursorily, and his opinion of it is breathtakingly dismissive.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are more passages that exhibit this curious tactic of heaping scorn on daft doctrines of his own devising while ignoring reasonable compatibilist versions…</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Harris...is not finding a “deep” problem with compatibilism but a shallow problem...he has taken on a straw man, and the straw man is beating him. </span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These are just the ones that I think can be construed as having a sarcastic tone about them. The main thrust of Dennett’s review, which is quite long, is the failure of New Atheist scientists like Harris to either take seriously or to really engage with the vast philosophical literature on a topic such as free will. And that is precisely one of Massimo’s criticisms as well. Dennett repeatedly says that Harris underestimates and misinterprets the compatibilist position on free will; or that Harris “doesn’t even consider” some other possibilities; or that Harris should have noticed “that he contradicts” some of Dennett’s own examples and ideas; or that Harris “should take more seriously the various tensions he sets up” in some passages, etc.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In addition to the charge that the New Atheists who are scientists and not philosophers disparage philosophy, or don’t take the time to really engage with it, there are two other claims I’d like to address. One is that the New Atheist scientists are injurious to the atheism movement itself; and the other is that they are unjustifiably overreaching in their broadening of the definition or scope of science.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Massimo and I agree on many things, but I disagree with him about the impact of the New Atheists. Like Dennett, I believe the popular New Atheists (with a few notable exceptions) are important precisely because of their visibility: I suppose you could call this “any publicity is good publicity.” At a minimum, it raises awareness of the atheism movement. Additionally, it lets the opposition — in this case, Christianity — know that there is a vigorous and determined community of nonbelievers. And, finally, I think the discussion that is generated by the popular books put out by the New Atheists is really priceless. I mean, this is classic dialectic — at least when the <i>ad hominem</i> rhetoric of the likes of Coyne, et al., don’t muddy the waters. Positions, even extreme ones, need to be staked out and attacked; and the attacks need to be counterattacked, and the result of all this discursive fencing will be to get us closer to more clarified positions that more moderate others can present to the believing community. What are we, as atheists, trying to accomplish anyway? Is it not a reduction in the influence of Christianity in particular and religion in general? [1]</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With regard to the scope or definition of science, I also disagree with Massimo somewhat. Jerry Coyne says that science is “any endeavor to find out truths about the universe using observation and reason.” Sam Harris says “When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and evidence, you are thinking scientifically.” I don’t have a problem with these claims <i>per se</i>; as I think Massimo and others would agree, there is often a fine line between what counts as philosophy and what counts as science proper. Or, to put it another way, it’s like looking at a brand new metal alloy and trying to identify the individual metals that constitute it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And maybe that’s the best way to look at the problem: if we can no longer distinguish between science and philosophy in some areas, maybe it’s time to come up with a different way of talking about this new phenomenon. After all, what used to be called “natural philosophy” eventually evolved or split into the two distinct disciplines of “science” and “philosophy” at some point; maybe it’s time we acknowledged there is a third thing now, a third discipline that can’t properly be called science or philosophy — it’s a new alloy that is just too difficult to characterize using our old categories.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Back before natural philosophy split into science and philosophy, Nietzsche characterized “science” or “physics,” as he often referred to it, as any endeavor that involved serious, rigorous discipline and scholarship. One of the things Nietzsche thought we needed back then (and what I think we still need now) was a re-naturalization of the human being; and to do that, you need to have a passion for knowledge, and a courageous and honest assessment of the knowledge of the world and human nature that turns up in our “science.” In his <i>The Gay Science</i>, he wrote an aphorism that talks about obtaining the freedom (i.e., autonomy) to legislate values for ourselves and create ourselves; and the title of the aphorism is “Long Live Physics!” Again, “physics” for Nietzsche wasn’t what we think of as “physics” today. Interestingly, the physicist Sean Carroll wrote on his website that Nietzsche scholars are quick to point out that he</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">certainly wasn’t talking about what we ordinarily mean by “physics.” But I’m not so sure. The substance of physics (experimental results, theoretical understandings) is of no help whatsoever in leading a moral life. But the method of physics — open-minded hypothesis testing and scrupulous honesty in confronting what Nature has to tell us — is a pretty good model for other aspects of our lives.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nietzsche believed that the philosopher’s main job, and main value to humanity, was as a value-creator, not as someone merely concerned with discovering the “facts,” or of providing descriptions or even explanations of the phenomena of the world. So I tend to take my cue from Nietzsche and say that scientists are those who are in the business of describing the physical world, of coming up with explanations of physical phenomena. Of course they must utilize and adhere to the “highest standards of logic and evidence,” but a scientist is still distinct from a philosopher, someone who traffics in “oughts” and not “is’s,” someone who is better positioned to speak about meaning and morals, even if they exploit the discoveries of science in order to inform and ground their reasoning about meaning and morals. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve said before that science involves description and diagnosis, whereas philosophy involves prescription and prognosis. That, to me, is where the line between our perhaps out of date categories of science and philosophy will forever reside. Let’s come up with a third term to denote the scientific-philosophical alloy that has emerged. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">[1] I have another post in the works that will deal more with the relationship between philosophy, science and atheism, and that will go into more detail about both the impact of the New Atheism and religious trends in general.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-37731665225751921062014-01-30T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-30T07:00:01.236-05:00Sean Carroll, Edge, and falsifiability<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirhaLD94fJBY5jqU-AHH_DCHRUq6OUqhqJMbkpJ9QWCSXRweuGJczbtDd02ZOmLylgqzH3VncIz9T1R3uInDP0GBJH8zWkc2IDtybRh5PxRPiYPXvyT3LJeMPw0A3R9MakHeC8/s1600/multiverses1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirhaLD94fJBY5jqU-AHH_DCHRUq6OUqhqJMbkpJ9QWCSXRweuGJczbtDd02ZOmLylgqzH3VncIz9T1R3uInDP0GBJH8zWkc2IDtybRh5PxRPiYPXvyT3LJeMPw0A3R9MakHeC8/s1600/multiverses1.jpg" height="161" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Cosmologist Sean Carroll is one of many who have recently answered the annual question posed by <a href="http://edge.org/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Edge.org</span></a>, which this year was: What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Sean, whom I’ve met at the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxYQuZ5T6CSdS8uafdh0kmDL"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Naturalism workshop</span></a> he organized not long ago, and for whom I have the highest respect both as a scientist and as a writer, picked “falsifiability.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Which is odd, since the concept — as Sean knows very well — is not a scientific, but rather a philosophical one.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, contra some other skeptics of my acquaintance, at least one of whom was present at the above mentioned workshop, Sean is actually somewhat knowledgable and definitely respectful of philosophy of science, as is evident even in the Edge piece. Which means that what follows isn’t going to be yet another diatribe about scientism or borderline anti-intellectualism (phew!).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rather, I’m interested in Sean’s short essay because he deals directly with the very subject matter I just covered in <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2014/01/is-information-physical-and-what-does.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">my recent post</span></a> based on Jim Baggott’s thought provoking book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Reality-Fairytale-Physics-Scientific-ebook/dp/B00CY2RB04/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390498537&sr=8-1&keywords=Farewell+to+Reality"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Farewell to Reality</span></a>: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Before we proceed, I should also point out that I’m not interested in debating physics with Sean, since he is the expert in that realm (if Jerry Coyne wants to debate evolutionary biology with me, that’s another matter…). Indeed, I’m happy to watch the ongoing conversation between Carroll (and others) and critics of some trends in contemporary theoretical physics (like Baggott, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science-ebook/dp/B003WUYP56/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390926696&sr=8-1&keywords=smolin+trouble"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Lee Smolin</span></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/0465092764/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390926720&sr=8-1&keywords=Peter+Woit+wrong"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Peter Woit</span></a>) from the outside — which is actually a pretty good job description for a philosopher of science.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rather, I’m interested in the philosophical aspects of Sean’s Edge essay and in what they say about his conception of science. I have, of course, invited Sean to respond to this post, if he wishes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sean begins the essay by attributing the idea of falsificationism to philosopher Karl Popper, correctly framing it within the broader <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Pseudoscience-Reconsidering-Demarcation-Problem-ebook/dp/B00EARH246/ref=la_B001IU0D3K_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390927579&sr=1-1"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">issue of demarcationism</span></a> (in this case, between science and pseudoscience). Sean immediately points out that demarcationism, while “a well-meaning idea” is “a blunt instrument” when it comes to separating scientific from non-scientific theorizing, and he is right about that.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Indeed, trouble for Popper’s view began even before it was fully articulated, by means of physicist-inclined-toward-philosophy <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duhem/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Pierre Duhem</span></a>, who raised exactly the same objections that Sean summarizes in his Edge piece. Fundamentally, Duhem noted that in actual scientific practice there is a complex relationship between theory and observation or experiment (what philosophers refer to as the theory-ladeness of empirical results), so that any given set of empirical data (say, from a particle accelerator experiment) doesn’t strictly speaking test the theory itself, but rather a complex web of notions that comprise the focal theory (say, the Standard Model), a number of corollary theories and assumptions needed to build it, as well as assumptions about the correct functionality of the measurement instrument, the way the data are analyzed, and so on. If there is a mismatch, Duhem argued, scientists don’t <i>immediately</i> throw away the theory. Indeed, the first thing they are likely to do is to check the calculations and the instrumentation, moving then to the auxiliary assumptions, and only after repeated failures under different conditions finally abandon the theory (<i>if</i> they had strong reasons to take the theory seriously to begin with).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Later on during the middle part of the 20th century, influential philosopher <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">W.V.O. Quine</span></a> expanded Duhem’s analysis into what is now known as the Duhem-Quine thesis: scientific (or really, any) knowledge is the result of a complex web of interconnected beliefs, which include not just the elements mentioned by Duhem (i.e., those most closely connected to the theory under scrutiny), but also far removed notions about the world and how it works, up to and including mathematics and logic itself.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This should not be taken as counsel for despair: scientific theories still can, and regularly are, tested. But if we are to speak precisely, what we are testing every time is our entire web of knowledge. If something goes wrong, the problem could in principle reside <i>anywhere</i> in the web. It is then up to clever and creative scientists to focus on the most likely culprits, eliminate the ones they can, and eventually reach a consensus as a community regarding the soundness of the theory being “tested.” That’s why science is just as much an art as a logical pursuit.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So far so good. Sean then proceeds to state that “String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity involve phenomena that are likely to manifest themselves only at energies enormously higher than anything we have access to here on Earth. The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms that are impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on Popper, have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they are not falsifiable.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If some scientists have indeed leveraged Popper in order to criticize string theory, the multiverse and all the other speculative ideas of modern theoretical physics, those scientists really ought to take my Philosophy of Science 101 course before they write another line on the subject. But I think the problem is actually a bit more complex and nuanced than Sean leads his readers to believe.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He continues: “The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a priori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, not exactly. To begin with, I sincerely doubt that critics of those theories refuse to contemplate the existence of strings, branes, and the like. Their point, rather, is that these hypothetical entities (“unobservables” in the lingo of philosophy of science) <i>have</i> in fact been contemplated, for decades, and so far nothing much has come out of it, empirically speaking. After all, Smolin, Woit, and Baggott observe, physics is a science, and science is supposed to make contact with the empirical world, at some point. The longer a theory fails to do so, the more problematic it ought to be considered. That’s all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sean does provide his own rough alternative to falsifiability. He claims that two central features of any scientific theory are that they are <i>definite</i> and that they are <i>empirical</i>. While there is a <i>lot</i> more to be said about the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">nature of scientific theorizing</span></a> (and yes, I understand that Sean is not a philosopher of science, and moreover that Edge probably strictly limits the length of the responses it seeks) let’s go with it for a moment.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sean says that “by ‘definite’ we simply mean that they say something clear and unambiguous about how reality functions.” He argues that string theory does precisely that, insofar as it says that in certain regions of parameter space particles behave as one-dimensional strings. He is right, of course, but the criterion is far too inclusive. For instance, someone could argue that the statement “God is a conscious being or entity who exists outside of time and space” is also quite “definite.” We all understand what this means, ironically especially after modern physics has actually helped us make sense of what it may mean to be “outside of time and space.” Whatever “was” “there” before the Big Bang was, from the point of view of our universe, outside (our) time and (our) space. So, to say something definite (as opposed to something <a href="http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">postmodernistically nonsensical</span></a>) is certainly a good thing, but it ain’t enough to pinpoint good scientific theories.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What about the empirical part? Here is, according to Sean, where the smelly stuff hits the fan. As mentioned above, he rejects a straightforward application of the principle of falsifiability, for reasons similar to those brought up so long ago by Duhem. But what then? Sean mentions some examples of what Baggott calls “fairy tale physics,” such as the idea of a multiverse. His strategy is interesting, and revealing. He begins by stating that the multiverse offers a potential solution to the <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFine-tuning&ei=owDpUoXVBumqsATwhoDQBA&usg=AFQjCNGU4vQX6zRDLe55slXsVFqV3IUx5Q&sig2=L6ahoZBOJ4NPMxbnz96-Lg&bvm=bv.60157871,d.cWc"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">problem of fine tuning</span></a> in cosmology, i.e. the question of why so many physical constants seem to have taken values that appear to be uncannily tailored to produce a universe “friendly” to life. (I actually think that people who seriously maintain that this universe is friendly to life haven’t gotten around much in our galactic neighborhood, but that’s a different story.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He continues: “If the universe we see around us is the only one there is, the vacuum energy is a unique constant of nature, and we are faced with the problem of explaining it. If, on the other hand, we live in a multiverse, the vacuum energy could be completely different in different regions, and an explanation suggests itself immediately: in regions where the vacuum energy is much larger, conditions are inhospitable to the existence of life. There is therefore a selection effect, and we should predict a small value of the vacuum energy. Indeed, using this precise reasoning, Steven Weinberg did predict the value of the vacuum energy, long before the acceleration of the universe was discovered.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Notice two problems here: first, according to Baggott, Weinberg’s prediciton was a matter of straightforward (if brilliant) physics, and it was conceptually independent of the fine tuning problem. The same goes <i>a fortiori</i> for another famous prediction, by Fred Hoyle back in the ‘50s, about the cosmic production of carbon. That one, which is nowadays often trumpeted as an example of how science has advanced by deploying the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">anthropic principle</span></a>, was actually put forth (and confirmed empirically) before the very idea of an anthropic principle was formulated in the ‘60s.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">More crucially, again as pointed out by Baggott, the reasoning basically boils down to: we have this empirically unsubstantiated but nice theoretical complex (the multiverse) that would very nicely solve this nagging fine tuning problem, so we think the theoretical complex is on the mark. This is dangerously close to being circular reasoning. The fact, if it is a fact, that the idea of a multiverse may help us with cosmological fine tuning is not evidence or reason in favor of the multiverse itself. The latter needs to stand on its own.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And yet Sean comes perilously close to proposing just that: “We can't (as far as we know) observe other parts of the multiverse directly. But their existence has a dramatic effect on how we account for the data in the part of the multiverse we do observe.” I truly don’t think I’m reading him uncharitably here, and again, I’m not the only one to read some cosmologists’ statements in this fashion.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">None of the above should be construed as suggesting that ideas like the multiverse or string theory are somehow pseudoscientific. They are complex, elegant speculations somewhat grounded in well established physics. Nor is anyone suggesting that barriers be put around the work or imagination of cosmologists and string theorists. Go ahead, knock yourselves out and surprise and astonish the rest of us. But at some point the fundamental physics community might want to ask itself whether it has crossed into territory that begins to look a lot more like metaphysics than physics. And this comes from someone who doesn’t think metaphysics is a dirty word…</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com115tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-43824668335895047072014-01-24T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-24T07:00:00.613-05:00Is information physical? And what does that mean?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve been reading for a while now Jim Baggott’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Reality-Fairytale-Physics-Scientific-ebook/dp/B00CY2RB04/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390498537&sr=8-1&keywords=Farewell+to+Reality"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Farewell to Reality</span></a>: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth, a fascinating tour through cutting edge theoretical physics, led by someone with a physics background and a healthy (I think) <a href="http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs07-peter-woit-discusses-whether-string-theory-is-not-even.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">dose of skepticism</span></a> about the latest declarations from string theorists and the like.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Chapter 10 of the book goes through the so-called “black holes war” (BHW) that stretched for two and a half decades between Stephen Hawking on one side and Leonard Susskind, Gerard ’t Hooft, and others. The BHW is interesting because Baggott turns it into an illustration of what he thinks is the problem with current theoretical physics, a problem that has much to do with philosophical theories of truth and with the difference between physics and metaphysics.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The BHW began with a challenge issued by Hawking at a scientific gathering back in 1981. Quantum theory maintains that information carried by the wave function of a quantum object cannot be destroyed, it must be preserved because it connects past and future. But Hawking (who is a relativist, not a quantum theorist) had arrived at the conclusion that black holes evaporate over time, emitting what is now known as Hawking radiation. Since everything that ends up inside a black hole’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">event horizon</span></a> can be thought of as representing bits of information, Hawking concluded that while the black hole is evaporating information is not just scrambled — as previously thought — but actually destroyed, thereby contradicting a crucial tenet of quantum theory. Oops!</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You can see why Susskind and ’t Hooft, who are quantum theorists, didn’t like this thing, ahem, a single bit. The BHW was on.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It took Susskind, ’t Hooft and Don Page a number of years to do it, but they finally came up with a serious counter to Hawking’s challenge, indeed one that led Hawking to admit defeat in 2007. The best known visual metaphor that captures the response is Susskind’s famous “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">holographic universe</span></a>.” The principle essentially states that the information contained in an n-dimensional space (let’s say, a three-dimensional black hole, for instance) is equivalent to the information found on its n-1 dimensional boundary (for example, the surface of said black hole).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Susskind boldly proposed that the universe itself behaves as a hologram, i.e., that all the information that constitutes our three-dimensional world is actually encoded on the universe’s equivalent of a black hole’s event horizon (the so-called cosmic horizon). If true, this would mean that “reality” as we understand it is an illusion, with the action actually going on at the cosmic horizon. Baggott ingeniously compares this to a sort of reverse Plato’s cave: it isn’t the three-dimensional world that is reflected in a pale way on the walls of a cave were people are chained and can only see shadows of the real thing; it is the three-dimensional world that is a (holographic) projection of the information stored at the cosmic horizon. Is your mind spinning properly? Good.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What does any of this have to do with the BHW? That became clear in 1998, when Juan Maldacena (theoretically) demonstrated a “superstring duality”: it turns out that the physics of an n-dimensional spacetime described by a particular type of superstring theory (which one doesn’t really matter for our purposes here, but you’ll find all the details in Baggott’s book) is equivalent to the physics described by a quantum field theory applied to the n-1 dimensional boundary of that same spacetime. This result has deep connections with the idea of a holographic universe, so much so that Susskind eventually wrote in triumph:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whatever else Maldacena and Witten had done, they had proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that information would never be lost behind a black hole horizon. The string theorists would understand this immediately; the relativists would take longer [ouch!]. But the war was over.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Indeed, as I said, Hawking conceded in 2007, thus ending the BHW, despite some rather large caveats attached to the Maldacena-Witten results, such as that, you know, they actually describe a universe that is not at all like our own.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And now comes what Baggott properly refers to as the reality check. Let us start with the obvious, but somehow overlooked, fact that we only have (very) indirect evidence of the very existence of black holes, the celestial objects that were at the center of the above sketched dispute. And let us continue with the additional fact that we have no way of investigating the internal properties of black holes, even theoretically (because the laws of physics as we understand them break down inside a black hole’s event horizon). We don’t actually know whether Hawking radiation is a real physical phenomenon, nor whether black holes do evaporate.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To put it another way, the entire BHW was waged on theoretical grounds, by exploring the consequences of mathematical theories that are connected to, but not at all firmly grounded in, what experimental physics and astronomy are actually capable of telling us. How, then, do we know if any of the above is “true”? Well, that depends on what you mean by truth or, more precisely, to what sort of philosophical account of truth (and of science) you subscribe to.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are several theories of truth in epistemology, but the two major contenders, especially as far as the sort of discussion we are having is concerned, are the correspondence and the coherence theories. Roughly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is what scientists (usually without explicitly thinking about it this way) deploy: in science a statement, hypothesis or theory is considered (provisionally, of course) true if it appears to correspond with the way things actually are out there. So, for instance, it is true that I wrote this essay on an airplane on my way between Rome and New York, because this statement corresponds with reality as ascertainable via a number of empirically verifiable facts (e.g., my airplane tickets, witnesses who saw me boarding, deplaning and writing on my iPad in between, time stamps encoded in the file I generated, and so on). </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A coherentist account of truth seems to me to be more appropriate for fields like mathematics, logic, and perhaps (to a point) <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-ethics-part-vii-full-picture.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">moral reasoning</span></a>. Coherentism is concerned with the internal consistency of a given account, eschewing any reference to correspondence with a reality that, by definition, we can only access indirectly (after all, if you wish to measure the degree of correspondence between your theories and the way things really are, it would seem that you need some kind of direct access to the latter; but you don’t have it, that’s why you need theories to begin with; there <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Perspectivism-Ronald-N-Giere-ebook/dp/B00378KF3Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390494742&sr=8-1&keywords=giere+perspectivism"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">are ways</span></a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">around this</span></a>, but they would lead us too far from the matter at hand).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Back to the outcome of the BHW: in what sense is the holographic principle “true,” given our short discussion of theories of truth? As Baggott reminds his readers, the principle hasn’t been established by way of empirical observations or experiments, so it cannot possibly be true in the sense of the correspondence theory. Rather, it has been arrived at by way of superstring theory, which itself is a theoretical structure which has, so far, not been empirically tested either. The holographic principle, therefore, is true — at best — in the sense of the coherence theory of truth. But the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science-ebook/dp/B003WUYP56/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390495080&sr=8-1&keywords=smolin+trouble"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">history of physics</span></a> is littered with examples of beautifully coherent theories that turned out to be wrong when the empirical verdict finally came in. Perhaps Hawking conceded a bit prematurely, after all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Finally, back to the idea that “information is physical.” What does that mean? Baggott summarizes the two possibilities thusly: “The scientific interpretation acknowledges that information is not much different from other physical quantities [like, say, temperature]. But, as such, it is a </span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">secondary quality </i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">[italics in the original] … The metaphysical interpretation suggests that information exists independently of the physical system, that it is a </span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">primary</i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> quality [original italics].” He concludes that he has no problem with either interpretation, as long as nobody is going to attempt to pass the second one as science. I couldn’t agree more.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-71712237724313498552014-01-17T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-17T07:00:09.099-05:00Rationally Speaking cartoon: Sam HarrisThis is in response to <a href="http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/our-narrow-definition-of-science/">the latest Sam Harris</a>, ahem, I don't even know what to call it, at this point... At any rate, I figured it wasn't really worth 2000 words. (Though, come to think of it, since a picture is worth 1000 words, the cartoon below amounts to an 8000 words commentary. Hmm...)<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com59tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-19036445790425723242014-01-15T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-15T07:00:02.061-05:00The sciphi of gay adoption<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9oS4DP6UXuZ37Ue_XBDOl7yd-2Y4mxs0BtNB66NUlsSo30e62eu3cVCzCZKOVEqh5Z-x2SkxEzFkSeGkG7Vr8GFsWmRb7EpsGGBjnojl3y4kWWXE5l_ImGqmHTq3eS7ttorLd/s1600/gay-parents-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9oS4DP6UXuZ37Ue_XBDOl7yd-2Y4mxs0BtNB66NUlsSo30e62eu3cVCzCZKOVEqh5Z-x2SkxEzFkSeGkG7Vr8GFsWmRb7EpsGGBjnojl3y4kWWXE5l_ImGqmHTq3eS7ttorLd/s200/gay-parents-3.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gay marriage is rapidly becoming less and less controversial, at least in the Western world. Yes, the battle hasn’t been won just yet, both in Europe and in the US, but we are getting there at a pace that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The next frontier, it seems, is adoptions by gay parents. When I talk to even some of my somewhat progressive friends and relatives, including those in the Old Country, they seem to resist the idea of gay couples adopting children much more than they resisted (if they ever did) the idea of gay marriage. Why?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Time to deploy some good SciPhi, as I termed a hybrid of science and philosophy to be used to address practical personal or societal questions (rather than relying, say, on “common wisdom” or, worse, religious authority). For more on the sciphi approach, how it works, and a number of examples and applications, you may of course take a look at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Answers-Aristotle-Science-Philosophy-Meaningful-ebook/dp/B0092WWZQY/ref=la_B001IU0D3K_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389717134&sr=1-2"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Answers for Aristotle</span></a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">SciPhi is relevant because opponents and proponents of these types of societal changes rely on a mix of (hopefully) logical arguments and (sometimes alleged) empirical evidence to make their respective cases. And as is well known to readers of this blog, I think the best way to build (or debunk) logical arguments is via philosophical analysis, while the best way to assess factual evidence is through the methods of the natural and social sciences. So let’s proceed and see where SciPhi gets us in the specific case of gay adoptions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To begin with, let’s agree that the issue of gay adoptions is, in fact, intrinsically more complex than that of gay marriage. This is simply because the latter involves only consenting adults, while the former affects the (physical and psychological) welfare of children. Which is, of course, precisely why the notion is more controversial to begin with.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Consider two standard arguments opposing gay adoptions, one a priori, the other one empirical: the a priori argument is based on the idea that children have a right to mixed parents (i.e., a man and a woman). The empirical one alleges that children will be at a psychological disadvantage if they are reared in a single-sex family.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The a priori (i.e., philosophical) argument suffers from a number of — in my opinion fatal — flaws, depending on how the idea is cashed out. If it is a matter of children having a right to a mixed sex family because that is the natural state of affairs for human beings, then this is an argument based on an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">appeal to nature</span></a>, which immediately runs afoul of the obvious objection that we do all sorts of other things to children (from education to vaccination) that is not natural at all, and yet to which only lunatics and Jenny McCarthy would object to. Not to mention, of course, that there are plenty of perfectly natural situations where children either have only one parent or no parent at all around during their upbringing. While the latter case is usually precisely why we allow adoptions, should we also put children of single mothers or fathers up for adoption on the grounds that they have a right to two parents of different sex? I doubt anyone would seriously pursue that logic, and yet it seems to follow from the way the objection is formulated. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moreover, of course, there is no such thing as a natural right to anything (<i>pace</i> the <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2009/09/problems-with-libertarianism.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">libertarian myth</span></a> to the contrary). Rights are stipulations of a society, so society is perfectly entitled to change them if better ideas come along and are accepted by the members of that society. After all, until not long ago residents of some US states had a “right” to own slaves, and until even more recently women did not have a right to vote, in any state. Both those rights have been altered, thankfully, so that the first one has been abolished and the second one has been accepted.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What about the empirical (i.e., science-based) argument, then? It is of course perfectly possible in principle that children raised by gay couples turn out to be on average worse off than children raised by mixed sex parents — <i>other things being equal</i>. That last clause is often left out of the discussion, but it is, of course, crucial. There are plenty of situations in which children are faced with psychological or physical abuse while growing up within a two-sex household; and of course there are plenty of children who are orphan and it is difficult to find a two-sex couple willing to adopt them (for instance because they are too old, or have already developed significant behavioral issues). In these instances “other things” are definitely not equal, so it would seem that even in the worst case scenario there is room for sensible gay adoption (gay couples rarely have children by chance, and are often willing to take on problematic kids: <a href="http://www.livescience.com/17913-advantages-gay-parents.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">see here</span></a>).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But what about hard empirical evidence concerning the more general case of gay vs straight adoptions? Isn’t it too early to say anything about it, since gay adoptions are a recent phenomenon? Not exactly. There is mounting evidence that children adopted by gay parents do well compared to those adopted by straight parents according to a variety of psychological, social and educational indicators.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.bu.edu/today/2013/gay-parents-as-good-as-straight-ones/">This article</a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, for instance, comments on a report co-authored by Benjamin Siegel of Boston University’s School of Medicine. In part it says: “Many studies have demonstrated that children’s well-being is affected much more by their relationships with their parents, their parents’ sense of competence and security, and the presence of social and economic support for the family than by the gender or the sexual orientation of their parents.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are, of course, caveats. To begin with, these are not randomized controlled trials. Those are pretty much impossible to do (for practical as well as ethical reasons) for this sort of issue. And the sample sizes are rather small, again by necessity (though this will improve with time). Here is Siegel again: “we’re never going to get the perfect science, but what you have right now is good-enough science. The data we have right now are good enough to know what’s good for kids.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then there is the <a href="http://www.nllfs.org/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study</span></a>, which began as far back as 1986. And the good (or bad, depending on your ideological standpoint) news is that “the self-reported quality of life of the adolescents in this sample was similar to that reported by a comparable sample of adolescents with heterosexual parents.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/children-in-gay-adoptions-at-no-disadvantage-8518004.html">Another recent study</a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, conducted at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research, found that gay parents are “at least” as good as straight ones at coping with the demands of being a parent. And just in case you are worried about homosexuals imposing their agenda on the human race and turning everyone into gays, there was also no evidence that having a gay parent in any way affects the children’s own gender conception in ways that depart from what is expected for their sex.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, there are even good reasons to think that gay parents actually have <a href="http://www.livescience.com/17913-advantages-gay-parents.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">parenting skills that are uncommon</span></a> among straight parents. As mentioned above, they are willing to adopt the neediest children, and of course they are in a good position to instill the value of tolerance in their kids.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are, naturally, dissenting studies, usually to be found only on the web sites of <a href="http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/homosexuality/ho0097.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Catholic organizations</span></a>. One such study conducted by a researcher at the University of Texas has been discredited after the author admitted that he could not separate his (Catholic) faith from his scientific research.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, we are talking empirical evidence here, and moreover evidence concerning long-term effects on complex human behaviors, likely to be the result of countless environmental and genetic interactions. So it is conceivable that the preliminary findings accumulated so far will be overturned by research conducted with more rigorous protocols and on much larger samples. But the most reasonable evaluation of the <i>current</i> evidence clearly weighs against the empirically-minded objection to gay adoptions. And social policy cannot afford to wait for decades of further studies, it has to be based on the best current understanding of any given issue, provided we are willing to alter our policies if and when contrary evidence comes in. Moreover, even if our understanding of these matters should change dramatically (indeed, reverse) in the future, it would still be difficult to argue against gay adoption at the least in those far less than ideal cases that don’t meet the <i>ceteris paribus</i> condition.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">So to recap: a SciPhi analysis of the issue of gay adoptions pretty much demolishes the a priori argument (by philosophical analysis), and preliminarily rejects the empirical argument (by scientific analysis) against the practice. It seems therefore reasonable to conclude that, at the moment, objecting to gay adoptions is not rational and it is more likely to be the result of (largely religiously instilled) prejudice. Not that that’s going to change the minds of some of my relatives, or of the Pope, of course.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com106tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-18340435101303130792014-01-12T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-12T07:00:05.444-05:00Rationally Speaking cartoon: Metaphysics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEippO2tMxaYEGTQ5iZ7kXWjLQibW6Wgf7xOnwsrHjN5qTkCt8g_XWeY40gkUagP2Gww44FoCJ545Tgku4LN1dhshU7xOb_-2tji1eA3uQM2wJ8c3blYQ0QIChrEacTvezXb84Lv/s1600/14-1-10-Metaphysics-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEippO2tMxaYEGTQ5iZ7kXWjLQibW6Wgf7xOnwsrHjN5qTkCt8g_XWeY40gkUagP2Gww44FoCJ545Tgku4LN1dhshU7xOb_-2tji1eA3uQM2wJ8c3blYQ0QIChrEacTvezXb84Lv/s1600/14-1-10-Metaphysics-1.png" height="281" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com45tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-66941144280627521042014-01-10T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-10T07:00:01.115-05:00Massimo's Picks!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ1iG6CGaR1GqJBl3hScUPIo1j3ixk3ABfrNmhwsoau8TrTeoxvuO3NOt_LQ76ohWooVhyRfUP-4GvkvoU2nG-8xVCDHBDmf6JYT-V-muONHv-RPIn29MVsf8CktLc58asiGdw/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ1iG6CGaR1GqJBl3hScUPIo1j3ixk3ABfrNmhwsoau8TrTeoxvuO3NOt_LQ76ohWooVhyRfUP-4GvkvoU2nG-8xVCDHBDmf6JYT-V-muONHv-RPIn29MVsf8CktLc58asiGdw/s1600/photo-mysterious+me.jpg" height="170" width="200" /></a></div>
* <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/39a015c6-6bc7-11e3-85b1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2podLwGXz">Three new books</a> about humans as social animals. Apparently, none of them too good.<br />
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* The complexities of the relationship between <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/does-immigration-mean-france-is-over/?_r=0">immigration and cultural identity</a> (of both the immigrants and the "natives").<br />
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* <a href="http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/the-confidence-of-jerry-coyne/">Ross Douthat</a> criticizes Jerry Coyne's metaphysics, and rightly so, unfortunately.<br />
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* The <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/social_darwinism_and_class_essentialism_the_rich_think_they_are_superior.html">rich think they are superior</a>. How convenient.<br />
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* <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/cura-te-ipsum/">Alex Rosenberg</a> on the humanities (but not philosophy) shooting themselves in the foot.<br />
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* From Obamacare to truly <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/opinion/moore-the-obamacare-we-deserve.html">social-democratic medicine</a>?<br />
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* Has the (massive) <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education-revolution-drifts-off-course">online education</a> "revolution" already at a stand still?<br />
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* Some much needed <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted">reassessment of TED</a>.<br />
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* Can you be <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/28/can-you-be-too-intelligent">too intelligent for your own good</a>? Apparently, yes.<br />
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* What it's really like to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military">work on the drones program</a>.<br />
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* New study exposes <a href="http://m.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/New-Study-Exposes-Acupuncture-As-Pseudoscience-5094637.php#src=fb">acupuncture as pseudoscience</a>. Again.<br />
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* Kant and <a href="http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7709">the morality of sexbots</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-400918495909583012014-01-08T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-08T08:18:37.975-05:00What virtues, and why?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht1ENU3pnYhO1ru24mbIBQCPEu9XtVMtxY5FHOe6Xbc8k_sCWMIrtf485y1Eje0hdURWKQyPrO_dIO6b91vBHHSHNtka4FifM3nhsj_x5aDxwGkKZ_2Cn6VoIITTW9-LDOI13i/s1600/aristotle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht1ENU3pnYhO1ru24mbIBQCPEu9XtVMtxY5FHOe6Xbc8k_sCWMIrtf485y1Eje0hdURWKQyPrO_dIO6b91vBHHSHNtka4FifM3nhsj_x5aDxwGkKZ_2Cn6VoIITTW9-LDOI13i/s1600/aristotle.jpg" height="200" width="148" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here comes another post on ethics! This one is, I must admit, somewhat meta-ethical, despite my <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-meta-itch.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">recent post</span></a> about the limited value of meta-ethical discussions <i>when it comes to debates in first-order ethics</i>. As I pointed out in the discussion that followed that essay, it’s not that I don’t think that meta-ethics is interesting, it’s just that it shouldn’t be used as an excuse for refusing to get down and dirty about actual everyday moral questions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At any rate, what I’d like to do here is to explore a bit more of my own preferred framework for ethics, neo-Aristotelian <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-ethics-part-iv-virtue-ethics.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">virtue ethics</span></a> (the “neo” prefix should alert the reader that I’m not about to defend <i>everything</i> Aristotle said, but rather discuss an updated version of the idea, based of course on his original insights). Specifically, I want to focus on the concept of virtue and the work that it can do in moral philosophy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Before we get into the details, however, let me remind you of the basic stuff. First off, for the ancient Greeks the fundamental ethical question was <i>not</i> “what is right or wrong?” but rather “what sort of life should I live?” This shifts the emphasis from a societal, universalist, conception of ethics to one that is more personal (although the social context is always very much in sight); it also changes the sort of answers that are acceptable, since we are moving away from ethical judgments about individual actions and toward ethical consideration of one’s character and entire life. This different approach is based on the idea that if one has a right character then one will (likely) do the right things, which seems plausible to me, if there is any content to what the ancients referred to as <i>phronêsis</i>, or practical wisdom.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Aristotle was a keen observer of human nature, so he realized that being able to live a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">eudaimonic</span></a> (i.e., morally virtuous) life is not just a matter of personal effort, but also of circumstances: one has to be lucky enough to be generally healthy and of sound mind, grow up within a supportive family, and be nurtured and educated early on by society at large. Failing any or all of this it will be impossible, or at the least extremely difficult, to be virtuous. This, again, strikes me as about right, and much more reasonable than the kind of impersonal view of morality that is embedded in systems such as utilitarianism and, particularly, Kantian deontology.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That said, what did Aristotle (and his more recent followers) mean by virtue? Certainly <i>not</i> what, say, Christians typically mean by that word. Concepts like purity and faith just don’t enter into the virtue ethical framework. Rather, for Aristotle a virtue is a character trait that, if cultivated, leads to a eudaimonic life. Typically, virtues are defined as a balance between extremes. For instance, courage is somewhere between rashness and cowardice. It has to be noted immediately that “somewhere between” doesn’t mean exactly in the middle. This isn’t an exercise in arithmetic. <i>Where</i> is the virtuous middle, then? It is a matter of commonsense, and the more wise a person is the more s/he will be able to find the right way. If this sounds vague, get used to it. A major criticism — but also a major advantage — of virtue ethics is precisely that it is flexible, leaving room for maneuvering around the complexities of human nature and circumstances.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, here is the complete table of Aristotelian virtues, each characterized by the domain of action or feeling to which it refers, and accompanied by the two extremes between which one finds the virtuous compromise (unlike the usual version, these are in alphabetical order, for ease of consultation):</span></span><br />
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<td style="background-color: #bec0bf; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 13.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Domain</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #bec0bf; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 13.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Mean</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #bec0bf; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 13.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Excess</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #bec0bf; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 13.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Deficiency</b></span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Anger</b></span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Patience/Good temper</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Irascibility</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Lack of spirit</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Conversation</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Wittiness</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Buffoonery</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Boorishness</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 13.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Fear and Confidence</b></span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 13.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Courage</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 13.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Rashness</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 13.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Cowardice</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Getting and Spending (major)</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Magnificence</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Vulgarity/Tastelessness</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Pettiness/Stinginess</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 24.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Getting and Spending (minor)</b></span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 24.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Liberality</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 24.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Prodigality</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 24.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Illiberality/Meanness</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Honour and Dishonour (major)</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Magnanimity</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Vanity</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Pusillanimity</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Honour and Dishonour (minor)</b></span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Proper ambition/pride</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Ambition/empty vanity</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Unambitiousness/undue humility</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Indignation</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Righteous indignation</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Envy</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Malicious enjoyment/Spitefulness</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 24.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Pleasure and Pain</b></span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 24.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Temperance</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 24.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Licentiousness/Self- indulgence</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 24.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Insensibility</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Shame</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Modesty</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Shyness</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Shamelessness</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Self-expression</b></span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Truthfulness</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Boastfulness</span></td>
<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Understatement/mock modesty</span></td>
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<td style="background-color: #e3e4e4; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Social Conduct</b></span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Friendliness</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Obsequiousness</span></td>
<td style="background-color: #efefef; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; height: 23.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px; width: 108.0px;" valign="top"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Cantankerousness</span></td>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course, one doesn’t have to buy into this particular list, and indeed several others have been proposed. There is a useful <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Wiki entry</span></a> on the history of the concept of virtue that I think makes clear two apparently contrasting things: on the one hand, there is (predictably) cultural and historical variation about what counts as a virtue (as the above mentioned case of Christianity clearly shows); on the other hand, there is surprising, shall we say, meta-convergence on the very idea of a virtuous character, and even on several of the traits that count toward that goal.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For instance, Plato (Aristotle’s teacher) only listed five virtues: courage, justice, piety, wisdom, and temperance. With the exception of piety — if you don’t believe in god-given morality — the list is hard to object to. The Stoics, however, seem to espouse what today is referred to as the doctrine of the unity of virtues, i.e. the idea that all virtues are really subsumed into a single fundamental one, which for them was prudence, meant as general wisdom.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Skipping the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, because of its emphasis on things like faith and purity, let’s move Eastward: according to the Hindu, virtues lead to a dharmic (i.e., ethical) life, the clear equivalent of a eudaimonic existence in Greek parlance. Hindus have different lists of virtues, the shorter one being: non-covetousness, inner purity, self-restraint, truthfulness, and non-violence. Again, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be too difficult to build a correspondence map with Aristotle’s desiderata.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Buddhism, the Noble Eightfold Path can be thought of as a list of virtues, although the <i>brahmavihara</i> sound more like what Westerners think of virtues: altruistic joy (i.e., being glad about the accomplishments of another person), compassion, equanimity, and kindness toward all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Going even further East, in Taoism the term <i>De</i> actually meant precisely virtue in the sense of integrity of personal character, and was later re-conceptualized as moral virtue. It is also good to bear in mind that Confucianism has a lot in common with Aristotelian virtue ethics, though it put more emphasis on family and socially-oriented rules of conduct than Aristotle did.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, in Japan the Bushidō code was based on a list of virtues: benevolence, care for the aged, courage, filial piety, honesty, honor, loyalty, rectitude, respect, and wisdom.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, if you expect to see my own version of the list of virtues, I’m about to disappoint you. I think many of the above are actually interchangeable, and that it doesn’t matter very much which specific list one subscribes to, if any. The point of the whole exercise is the general idea that certain character traits identify some people as worthy of our respect, and that we wish to cultivate those traits in ourselves and in our children.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Lest you be left with the impression that this is all so much philosophical masturbation, let’s bring in some science. Psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman (yes, yes, I’m a bit skeptical of “positive” psychology too) did research on virtues across human societies (see their <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Character-Strengths-Virtues-Handbook-Classification-ebook/dp/B0054WFG4Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1389043292&sr=8-1"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Character Strengths and Virtues</span></a>: A Handbook and Classification, published in 2004 by Oxford Press). They grouped their findings into classes of virtues (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_Strengths_and_Virtues"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Wiki version here</span></a>): regarding wisdom and knowledge (e.g., creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness), courage (e.g., bravery, persistence, integrity), humanity (e.g., kindness, social intelligence), justice (e.g., citizenship, fairness), temperance (e.g., forgiveness, humility), and transcendence (e.g., appreciation of beauty, hope, humor). The result highlights “a surprising [not to me, or Aristotle!] amount of similarity across cultures and strongly indicates a historical and cross-cultural convergence [in the concept of virtue].” [If you don’t want to shell out the bucks for the book, <a href="http://precisionmi.com/Materials/UniveralVirtuesMat/Shared%20Virtue%20The%20Convergence%20of%20Valued%20Human%20Strengths.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">here is a paper</span></a> on the same topic, co-authored by Dahlsgaard, Peterson, and Seligma. And here is a <a href="http://h24-files.s3.amazonaws.com/80877/189221-jJ46M.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">comparative study</span></a> across nations and across American states.]</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">So, at the very least it seems like the concept of virtue (and, to a lesser extent, its specific content) is widespread across human cultures, both temporally and spatially. It can be studied by the social sciences, and it can be unpacked and — arguably — improved upon by philosophical reflection. Will any of this help you the next time you face a moral dilemma? And, more to the point, will it lead you to a satisfying, eudaimonic life? The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. But I’m tempted to wear a bracelet with the initials WWAD, rather than the more popular WWJD.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com79tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15005476.post-28026863664126376972014-01-03T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-03T07:00:02.671-05:00The “meta” itch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx-esh83RITMv0q-Ng8D2KNtJnWPZ7cA3XyGYj8QB5RRzj49TB_DAgXcf3gMqU9jIEEXC_Uw3mFAz_2hvyOLOUjAyXKQwXk6vTtIdY2hpk9mPx0Xnt6c2Pl1r2xRAf_85iwO0F/s1600/spider_web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx-esh83RITMv0q-Ng8D2KNtJnWPZ7cA3XyGYj8QB5RRzj49TB_DAgXcf3gMqU9jIEEXC_Uw3mFAz_2hvyOLOUjAyXKQwXk6vTtIdY2hpk9mPx0Xnt6c2Pl1r2xRAf_85iwO0F/s200/spider_web.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I used to have the “meta” itch, but I learned to live with it and stop scratching it. It only irritates anyway, without doing much good work. Let me explain. If you are a regular (or even occasional) reader of Rationally Speaking you know that we often publish essays that have to do with <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-ethics-part-vii-full-picture.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">ethics and moral philosophy</span></a>. That's because ethics is one of those things that always lurks in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of our lives, whether we reflect on it or not. And I of course think it is better to reflect on it, at least from time to time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But invariably, regardless of what the specific impetus is for a given post, one or more of our readers brings up the “meta” question, i.e. the question of what could possibly ground our ethical judgments to begin with. Of course, meta-ethics is a legitimate branch of philosophy, and philosophers in general are properly concerned — at least from time to time — with meta-issues. But meta-issues are notoriously difficult, especially when they are approached from a so-called foundationalist perspective.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A foundationalist in ethics, for instance may reasonably ask what <i>grounds</i> (notice the metaphor!) our ethical judgment in general (as opposed to asking what reasoning has brought one to a particular ethical judgment about whatever matter happens to be under discussion). There are, of course, a number of <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">different approaches on offer</span></a>: from divine law (yeah, I know) to conventionalism, various forms of moral realism and anti-realism, and so forth. I happen to be both a naturalist and a <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-ethics-part-iv-virtue-ethics.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">virtue ethicist</span></a>, which meta-ethically speaking means that I think the ability to experience moral sentiments evolved in our social primate ancestors and has then developed culturally into a number of principled and practical ways to conduct one’s own life, as well as to deal with other people in a way that leaves as much room as possible for individual flourishing while also improving social justice. This way of looking at meta-ethics, of course, will not satisfy everyone, and perhaps for good reason. Nevertheless, pretty soon one needs to move away from the “meta” analysis and get down to everyday ethical judgments. Why? Because life demands it, darn it!</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, what strikes me as bizarre is how much resistance this obvious move from “meta” to ordinary ethics encounters, while the same people who so staunchly resist it appear to be little (or not at all) bothered by very similar “meta” questions one could reasonably ask about all sorts of other areas.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Take science, for instance. Ever since Hume formulated his famous <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">problem of induction</span></a> — and despite much philosophical literature concerning it — we have known that we do not have a logical foundation for inductive reasoning. If that doesn’t bother you, it should. Induction, in its varied forms, is the basis of both commonsensical and scientific reasoning. So if we have no logical justification for induction it means we have no logical justification for pretty much any of our empirical knowledge, all scientific knowledge included! Oops.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now you might be tempted to scoff at the Humeans amongst us and respond that we know induction works because it has worked so far. I sincerely hope you’ll refrain from such quick answer, though, because that would simply show that you haven’t understood the problem: you see, invoking the fact that induction has worked in the past to justify future inductions is itself an inductive move, which means that you are using induction to justify induction, which means that you are engaging in circular reasoning, which is no good at all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A more defensible response would be the pragmatist one: well, we may not have any logical foundation for using induction in everyday life and in science, but it seems to work, and we really have no alternative but to use it. If you went that route you would be in good company, beginning with Hume himself! But notice what you’ve just done: you have acknowledged the “meta” issue and promptly set it aside, because after all you’ve got a life to live, or a grant proposal to write. Why, then, can’t you do the same with ethics? Why does the meta-ethical hitch bother you so much, while you seem to be able to gingerly ignore the meta-scientific one?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or consider an even more disturbing case: mathematics. Up until the early part of the 20th century people thought that it would be possible to establish mathematical knowledge on an entirely logically tight foundation. Russell and Whitehead famously made the most valiant attempt in that direction, resulting in their colossal Principia Mathematica, a book that many like to cite, but very few have ever read (including yours truly, though I did at least start it, once!). That entire intellectual project was smashed into pieces by Gödel’s famous <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">incompleteness theorems</span></a>, and that was the end of that. But it wasn’t the end of mathematics, was it? It’s not like people stopped doing it because they thought “oh my god! We can’t find a complete logical foundation for mathematics! It must all be rubbish!”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Indeed, things get even worse than that, if possible. I just came back from the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Baltimore. The last session I attended was comprised of a single paper (accompanied by two detailed commentaries). The paper, by University of New Mexico’s Matthew Carlson, was entitled “What’s basic about basic logical principles?” and of course took its starting point from the known failure to foundationally justify some of the, ahem, basic principles of logic, such as the law of the excluded middle, or <i>modus ponens</i>. So, really, not even logic itself has a (logical?) grounding in something solid. Even <i>that</i> “meta” question seems unanswerable! But do you see logicians fretting too much about it, throwing logic away and going home? Not at all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Indeed, Carlson’s paper and the ensuing discussion reminded me of what these days (in philosophy) is a very acceptable and very decent way out of foundational conundra: the Quine gambit. <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">W.V.O. Quine</span></a> was one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the 20th century, though I think he was off the mark on a thing or two (aren’t we all?). But one of his most famous moves was to introduce the metaphor of a “web of knowledge” to replace the commonly used one of an “edifice of knowledge.” Unlike buildings, webs don’t have foundations, they have (many) threads. And even though some of these threads are more important than others (at the risk of pushing the analog too far, some of those threads attach the whole web to a tree), none of the individual threads is irreplaceable. There is, in a web, no keystone you can take out and make the whole thing fall down. Rather, each and every thread can be replaced by other threads, if need be, without dramatically altering the structure of the web. For Quine, every scientific theory, all of mathematics, and even logic itself are threads in the human web of knowledge. They all contribute to the structural integrity of the web, they reinforce each other, and if necessary they can all be replaced (though only a few at a time, just like in a spider web). Isn’t that a powerful picture? Don’t you feel the foundational hitch gradually lose its lure?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">So here is my advice, people. If you are not bothered (too much) by the lack of foundational grounding of commonsense, science, mathematics and logic, give the ethics’ “meta” itch a rest too, and focus instead on whatever pressing moral question is at hand. It’s going to be so much more useful, really. (But if you are a true glutton for punishment, try </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Metametaphysics-New-Essays-Foundations-Ontology/dp/0199546002/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1388446194&sr=8-4&keywords=metaphysics+Chalmers" style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">meta-metaphysics</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> instead!)</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com101