Mercury and foam

The best works of art make their way to the commons and the public bars.  So while you nibble and gnaw on indigestible piles of useless fluff — who in the world carries all that is valuable in your discipline to share it out among the people?

Would you leave that sort of work to chemists and physicians?

How dare you sit in your tower, putting on airs like some didactic gnome — as if anyone near enough to hear you has anything to gain from your discourses!

Are you so right-headed?

Why then get up, and learn to have an ordinary conversation.  If you’re too unaccustomed to the practice, for all your mercury and foam, why don’t you train some of your students to the purpose?  Most of them are confused and intimidated by you, and easily led one way or another.

Or don’t you know your grand presumption is pinned down at the corners with snickers and chortling?

Is that the most we can do to speak order into the world?

On the reasonable discourse of rational animals (part two)

Hume illustrates his conception of animal rationality with commonplace examples.  For the most part his examples depict the function of learning on the basis of past experience:  A dog is readily accustomed to come to attention when humans call it by its given name, or to respond with apprehension of pain when humans “lift up the whip”.  An old greyhound much experienced in the hunt has learned where best to position itself as a member of a team of dogs, and horses, and humans cooperating to catch a hare.

Hume is rather myopically concerned with portraying such learning as endowing animals with new specific tendencies to “infer that the same events will always follow from the same causes”.  His discussion is thus bogged down in confused Gothic conceptions of causality, necessity, universality, and inference. Hume is extraordinarily sensitive to certain problems posed by those traditional conceptions.  Indeed his Enquiry is largely devoted to articulating and resolving those problems, though he only gets so far in that ambition.

In the present exercise, I attempt to extract and extend the most useful insights captured by Hume’s reflections on animal rationality by replacing his troubled talk in terms of causal inference with less burdened talk of behavioral dispositions, attitudes, and expectations.  The shift in idiom may be traced through Ryle’s Concept of Mind.  In my view, this transposition of Hume’s insight offers a richer conception of animal rationality while avoiding some of the philosophical problems associated with Hume’s treatment.  For the purpose of the present exercise, I’ll largely ignore the letter of Hume’s account. I plan to consider his particular claims, along with problems embedded in his account, in a subsequent exercise.

In keeping with Hume’s account in section IX of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, we may characterize human and at least many nonhuman animals along the following lines:

(1) The behavioral dispositions of intelligent perceptive agents tend to be informed by rational expectations acquired on the basis of experience.

(2) An animal who has acquired such expectations occasionally adopts, or undergoes occurrences of, what we might call attitudes of expectation, analogous to “propositional attitudes” (like hope, fear, wonder, doubt, belief) in human beings.

(3) Such attitudes of expectation tend to cooperate with other attitudes in the same animal we might characterize as attitudes of intention, impulse, or purposive action.

(4) Some of the dispositions acquired and exercised by these animals involve recognition and anticipation by one animal of relevant attitudes and behaviors of other animals.

(5) The exercise of capacities in one animal thus to recognize and anticipate the attitudes and behaviors of other animals is often a path or condition of coordination of attitudes and behaviors among individuals and throughout whole communities.

(6) The tendency of these animals to have their dispositions modified in this way seems to depend on their being constitutionally disposed:

(a) to distinguish various individual things in their environment on the basis of perception;

(b) to recognize a thing thus distinguished as the same thing encountered from various points of view and on various occasions; and

(c) to respond to various similar things thus distinguished as things of the same sort.

(7) At least some of these animals seem constitutionally disposed to develop particular social relationships with some individual animals thus distinguished.

 

It comes naturally to us to learn from experience along such lines.  It’s not something we choose to do. It’s not something we could choose to stop doing.  As Hume points out, our tendency to learn by trial and error is something like a “species of instinct” in us.  It belongs to the natural spontaneity of rational animals.

The expectations acquired and refined in us on the basis of experience are “rational” insofar as they tend to track historical correlations in relevant objective states of affairs.  The behaviors and intentions acquired and refined in coordination with these expectations are “rational” insofar as they tend to be informed by those expectations and to result in outcomes aligned with the motives and ends of the animal’s purposive behavior — for instance, catching hares and avoiding whips.

Such considerations inform a rich conception of what it means to speak of animal rationality, without getting bogged down in philosophical problems clustered around talk of sentience, and without getting involved in the “rope and pulley” problems that concern empirical scientists and artificial intelligence engineers.

I presume it’s not controversial nowadays to claim that the preceding characterization of rational animals applies to dolphins, dogs, and chimpanzees, as well as to humans.  I take it for granted this is an empirical hypothesis which in our times is confirmed every day. I’m not concerned here to sort out the whole animal kingdom, nor to address the distinction between the “intelligence” of animals and the “intelligence” of plants, slime molds, or computer programs.

For all I know, most or all animals satisfy most or all of the criteria I’ve listed.  The differences may be primarily matters of degree of complexity, variability, and scope.

[This essay is the second part of a series.  The series begins here.]

 

WORKS CITED:

DAVID HUME, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

GILBERT RYLE, The Concept of Mind

If nature enclose belief

“If nature enclose within the bounds of her ordinary progress the beliefs, judgments, and opinions of men, as well as all other things; if they have their revolution, their season, their birth and death, like cabbage plants; if the heavens agitate and rule them at their pleasure, what magisterial and permanent authority do we attribute to them?”

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays, Book II Chapter XII, “Apology for Raimond Sebond“

On the reasonable discourse of rational animals (part one)

We trace the origin of the term “rational animal” in our tradition through the translation of the Aristotelian conception of the zoon logikon, the animal that “has logos”, into Western languages by way of the Latin animal rationale.

The term logos is notoriously problematic for translators.  In its original cultural context, it seems to have had a wide range of applications in ordinary language, and to have functioned as something like a technical term in philosophical discourse — a term of art spun in various ways according to the purposes of a philosopher or a passage.

The Hellenic term and its cognates have been translated into English terms such as:

i) saying, statement, phrase, word

ii) oration, speech, conversation, discourse

iii) report, story, history, fable, reckoning, account

iv) assertion, promise, maxim, command

v) thought, opinion, reason, ground, principle

vi) language, power of speech, right to speak

Given that broad range of uses, it seems the selection of the Latin ratio imposes a bias in the translation of logos, if the distinction between ratio and oratio divides thought and reason (ratio) from language and speech (oratio).  An Aristotelian conception of human beings as speaking-and-reasoning animals would be thus modified through the act of translation to become a medieval conception of human beings as thinking-and-reasoning animals.  The translation brushes aside the role of language, which was arguably crucial and primary in the original context. The translation emphasizes, or leaves room to emphasize, the role of “inner” thought, characterizable as not necessarily or not intrinsically linguistic thought.

Application of this modified definition as a criterion that distinguishes human animals from other animals would seem to entail that humans “think-and-reason” while nonhuman animals do not “think-and-reason”.

This act of translation may have suited the purposes of Christian interpreters who substituted ratio for logos, but does not seem to reflect Aristotelian intentions.  What’s worse, it seems a false and unwarranted assumption that no nonhuman animals “think”.  By contrast, the claim that no nonhuman animals (observed to date) have language or linguistic capacities like ours seems a reasonable evidence-based report.

Of course animals without a capacity to speak like we do cannot think in linguistic terms like we do, and thus cannot have habits of thought and action organized in part by their own exercise of such linguistic capacities.  This does not entail that such animals do not “think” in any relevant sense of the term. It does not entail that they do not have minds, awareness, sentience, perceptual experience, intentions, intelligence, or conceptual capacities.  It does not entail that they do not communicate.

It seems there are some among us who tend to speak about the difference between human and nonhuman animals in ways that still reflect the prejudices of the medieval interpreters of Aristotle.  Some of these contemporary speakers even appeal to the authority of that troubled old conception of rationality as if it were a sort of justification for their views. I’m not alone in saying that sort of bias seems an offshoot of ignorance, error, and confusion.  It seems reasonable to expect the persistence of such bias to amplify the risk of compounding inherited philosophical problems instead of resolving them. I suggest a review of the history of relevant usage may be one beneficial treatment in pursuit of a corresponding remedy.

Perhaps by now many of us have no need for that particular correction.  I suspect more subtle problems and prejudices lurk in our inherited conception of rationality nonetheless.  Consider for instance the way that divergent attitudes about rationality, and divergent attitudes about what counts or does not count as a reasonable attitude about evidence, plague conversations between atheists and theists, or between metaphysical materialists and metaphysical idealists.  Consider the way that psychologists presume to have authority in deciding what counts and what does not count as a subculture or a community, what counts and what does not count as a culturally or communally sanctioned norm of behavior or belief — as if cultures and communities and norms do not in fact diverge in history due to changes in the attitudes and behaviors of individuals.  Consider the ways that choices made by economists, CEOs, marketers, and politicians inform our attitudes about what counts and what does not count as “rational self-interest”.

It seems that all the empirical and formal sciences put together aren’t sufficient to completely determine our attitudes and judgments about the rational and the irrational, or the reasonable and the unreasonable, any more than they can completely determine our attitudes and judgments about the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the desirable and the undesirable, the tasteful and the distasteful.

Of course empirical science informs us about biological bases and historical trends, and about biological and socioeconomic implications, of our attitudes, judgments, and decisions in such matters.  And formal science helps us sort and extend our thoughts in all matters. But it seems our attitudes about the rational, the reasonable, the good, the just, the desirable, the tasteful, and whatever we should name among such things, are not sufficiently determinable on scientific grounds.  These are matters of persuasion.

It belongs to our nature spontaneously to modify the attitudes and behaviors we inherit — not to apply the norms we receive from cultural and institutional authorities like insensate and unwitting rule-followers.

It seems this transformative process is ceaseless in beings like us, that it continues even while we sleep, that it belongs to our nature as speaking animals and contributes to the freedom we have in fact.

One way to take responsibility for this process is to engage in careful philosophical discourse about matters of persuasion, for instance by examining our thoughts and attitudes about the rational and the irrational.  I expect such conversations have significant personal and political implications in the long run, and that philosophical prejudice and confusion in such matters, compounded over generations and centuries, may tend to multiply personal and political problems and to disrupt communities and ways of life.

It seems fitting to proceed in such conversation by developing a conception of animal rationality and a conception of human beings as speaking animals.

[This essay is the first in a series.  The series continues here.]

Let death take me planting my cabbages

“I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings”.

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays, Book I Chapter XIX, “That to study philosophy is to learn to die“

First Welcome Sign Appears On The Cabbage Farm

A few days ago I placed this Welcome sign near the entrance to the Cabbage Farm.

It seems fitting to insert this announcement in the blog roll to commemorate the occasion.  Perhaps on some future occasion, if I replace that sign with a new one, I’ll return to this spot in the log to paste the copy.

On “cabbages and kingdoms”

“For how could something count as a language that organized only experiences, sensations, surface irritations or sense data?  Surely knives and forks, railroads and mountains, cabbages and kingdoms also need organizing.”

—DONALD DAVIDSON, “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme”

 

“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

‘To talk of many things:

Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–

Of cabbages–and kings–

And why the sea is boiling hot–

And whether pigs have wings.'”

—LEWIS CARROLL, “The Walrus and the Carpenter“

The Doubt Of All Doubt

From time to time I have awakened from a sort of dream or brain fart in which it seems to me I have acquired a solution to some impossible problem along the lines of the square circle, or in any case come to possess some seemingly significant intention — which unravels into nothing as I awake in the attempt to jot down or otherwise discharge that impulse to an impossible deed.

What if all my understanding — including my grasp of the least dubitable things — is another one of those illusions?

We may call puzzlement of this form the Doubt Of All Doubt.

Doubt of this form directs the skeptic to a limit of coherence, and in this respect promises to cut deeper than more customary arguments from dream and hallucination, which may be said to take for granted the coherence and utility of a language, and a logic, and a worldview.

To press on the borders of coherence in this way is to cast shades of doubt on every judgment.

Sense flickers on the horizon of reason.  The right-thinking skeptic merely notes that doubts of this form seem marginally rational to him, and in this respect he can’t entirely rule them out.  To the right-thinking skeptic, an attempt to refute, to deny, or to wave off in principle all consideration of such doubts is an arbitrary act of insincerity or confusion inconsistent with the practice of discursive austerity — no less than an attempt to affirm any of the vaguely and marginally conceivable alternatives indicated in these doubts.

As Wittgenstein suggests:

“To be sure there is justification; but justification comes to an end.”

“The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.”

“At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.”

(On Certainty, 192, 166, 253)

 

Of course the right-thinking skeptic agrees that doubt of this form seems of extremely limited utility.  It seems this doubt acquaints us with hard boundaries between the conceivable and the inconceivable, between the coherent and the incoherent, between the demonstrable and the indemonstrable, between genuine certainty and Absolute Certainty.  Accordingly it seems to reveal something of the character of the rational imagination, the character of rationality and irrationality, for creatures like us. Perhaps no more than this.

Among dogmatists, the Radical Skeptic jumps to the conclusion that the Doubt Of All Doubt is another support for his absurd denials.  The Gothic Philosopher who disfigures his own power of reason with unwarranted faith in Absolute Certainty wages eternal war against the Radical Skeptic, and attempts to refute the Doubt Of All Doubt along with all the arguments of his imaginary nemesis, as if those arguments were not absurd and readily dismissed.

Limits of Modal Judgment

It seems to me any claim of the form “p is necessarily true” boils down to a claim that p is a logical consequence of the way a community of free speakers have chosen to restrict their language in defining terms, objects, concepts, premises… rules of inference.

Along those lines, I might distinguish four “modes of possibility” for judgments in ordinary language (or “modes of conceivability” — I’m not sure what in general is supposed to be the difference):

Of course that’s not to say one knows (or can know) that terms have been defined and used correctly, nor to say one has determined (or can determine) the corresponding range of putative facts correctly.

How does the discourse on necessity and modal logic help me to correct or refine this knucklehead account of modal concepts and judgments?  I mean broadly speaking, what sort of corrections and refinements should I anticipate?

Given a corrected and refined account:  Doesn’t it remain the case that all our claims of necessity have at most hypothetical force?

Do the skeptics abolish appearances?

“Those who say that “the Skeptics abolish appearances”, or phenomena, seem to me to be unacquainted with the statements of our school.  For, as we said above, we do not overthrow the affective sense impressions which induce our assent involuntarily; and these impressions are “the appearances”.  And when we question whether the underlying object is such as it appears, we grant the fact that it appears, and our doubt does not concern the appearance itself but the account given of that appearance — and that is a different thing from questioning the appearance itself. […] And even if we do actually argue against the appearances, we do not propound such arguments with the intention of abolishing appearances, but by way of pointing out the rashness of the dogmatists; for if reason is such a trickster as to all but snatch away the appearances from under our very eyes, surely we should view it with suspicion in the case of things nonevident so as not to display rashness by following it.”

—SEXTUS EMPIRICUS, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Bk I Ch X, “Do the skeptics abolish appearances?”