fearing death

Instead of posting, I should be relaxing and thinking about fun things while on vacation on the north shore of Lake Superior...

Here’s a quick argument about death and fear in the spirit of Epicurus.

Epicurus writes in his Letter to Menoeceus, “Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience... when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

(1) Everything that is bad for us is embedded in our actual experiences.
(2) Death is the absence of experiences.
(3) The absence of experiences cannot be bad for us.
(4) Hence, death cannot be bad for us.
(5) It is irrational to fear something that is not bad for us.
(6) Hence, it is irrational to fear death.

The most contentious claims are (1) and (5).

Someone might argue that something can be both bad for us and fail to be embedded in actual experiences. For example, I wonder if being the victim of a nasty, false rumor (a) which one never discovers and (b) from which one never suffers any negative consequences is something that can be said to be “bad for that someone.”

Someone also might argue it is rational to fear something that is not bad. For example, I wonder if it’s rational at times to fear success or power, neither of which are bad in and of themselves. Response: Maybe it’s not the success or power that one may fear, but rather one may fear one’s own character and what one might do in a context of possessing such things. The real object of fear then is a possibility that is bad. So, the fear is rational after all.

How about social justice? I fear that, and social justice is not bad; in fact, it’s good. Response: Maybe I’ve confused rationality with overextended self-interest. My self-interest (sometimes) conflicts with the moral calling of social justice, but that conflict is one that is distinct from the domain of rationality.

Hey, maybe claim (5) has got more going for it after all. I would have never thought that I might end up agreeing with something so Platonic and ancient.

I’m still not sure about claim (1).

an old classic article by R. Jackson

Reginald Jackson argues in an old, classic article that secondary qualities are relations for Locke. Jackson starts with Robert Boyle, arguing that the power of a body to act on the senses by means of the mechanical qualities is called a “secondary” or “sensible” quality. Boyle slips between identifying secondary qualities with the primary quality bases and identifying them with sensations.

A similar slippage is allegedly reproduced in Locke, and much of it owes to his strictures on the knowledge of body. For Jackson’s version of Locke, there are two ways to come to knowledge of body. It can be known through its own qualities and through its relations to other things. To have full knowledge of a body is to know what qualities it has. Knowledge of its relations to other things serves as only a clue, since these relations are mere signs of the yet unknown qualities which are the terms of these relations.

Locke must then be interpreted as fundamentally concerned to maintain an absolute distinction between qualities and relations, even if he is not aware that this is his project. Therefore, it is important for Locke to isolate what are mistakenly thought to be qualities. The relation of “power” is a prime candidate for misunderstanding; it is likely to be taken for a quality. Instead, powers ought to be taken as signs of yet unknown qualities supporting the powers. Knowledge of powers is a sort of self-conscious ignorance. For Jackson, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is a special instance of the distinction between qualities and powers. Primary qualities are not distinguished by their status as a special class of qualities. Rather, they are the only qualities there are. They are to be distinguished from powers, which are not qualities but only mistakenly taken to be qualities. Secondary qualities are instead relations. Jackson’s strategy to test his interpretation is to see if it helps interpret the resemblance theses.

Is Locke really saying that?

To see whether Locke is saying that secondary qualities are relations requires a closer look at the context of II.viii. In the thought experiments, Locke is urging the reader to refrain from making a mistake in judgment. For example, suppose a perceiver sees a round, red apple. The mistake is to think that perception of the redness of the apple requires either (a) that a Scholastic-Aristotelian Real Quality of Redness in the apple itself be the corresponding, exact resemblance of something in the idea of redness in the mind or (b) that there is some real being in the apple, distinct from the primary qualities of the apple, that is causing the sensation of the apple’s redness. This is exactly what Boyle thinks is the grand mistake of the Scholastic-Aristotelians.

If these are his main concerns, then what he says in II.viii.17-19 is a powerful way of saying that the only real beings that are really in bodies are primary qualities. Ultimately, whatever is responsible for the having of simple ideas of sensation is traceable to items that can be exhaustively characterized by the primary qualities of bodies. It is the fundamental, privileged status of primary qualities that Locke is trying to highlight, and to dramatize their exalted status, he humbles the secondary qualities in the hopes that it becomes very hard to conceive of them as real qualities (in the Scholastic-Aristotelian sense) in bodies themselves.

To say in II.viii.17 that the simple ideas of colors, tastes, odors, and sounds cease to be if there were no sense organs is obviously to lay bare why perceivers tend to make a mistake in judgment. It is the very same mistake that Locke talks about in II.viii.24-25. For example, when a perceiver gazes at a red, round apple, both the ideas of the color and shape are caused by the insensible primary qualities of body. In the case of the idea of roundness, there is some account whereby the idea resembles the primary quality. It is then quite easy to ascribe a resembling quality to the body itself. Because perceivers do not immediately sense the primary qualities of body in their simple ideas of secondary qualities, they tend also to attribute resemblances to bodies corresponding to the ideas of colors, sounds, and tastes. This practice is more at home in a Scholastic-Aristotelian account of body (e.g., Real Qualities of Color, Sounds, and Tastes) as opposed to the corpuscularian account that explains all ideas ultimately by reference to the primary qualities of body. That the practice is more at home in Scholastic-Aristotelianism is a mark against its legitimacy for Locke. So in II.viii.17, when Locke says that “all colours, tastes, odours, and sounds, as they are such particular ideas, vanish and cease,” he should be interpreted with two things he himself bears in mind. First, he earlier writes in II.viii.8:

Thus a snow-ball having the power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and round, the power to produce those ideas in us, as they are in the snow-ball, I call qualities; and as they are sensations or perceptions in our understandings,

I call them ideas; which ideas, if I speak of sometimes, as in the things themselves, I would be understood to mean those qualities in the objects which produce them in us.

Later, then, in II.viii.17, he means the “ideas” of colors, tastes, odors, and sounds to refer to the qualities in body. Second, given the polemical context against the Scholastic-Aristotelians, what he is saying is that when perceivers cease to have sensations, the allegedly exactly resembling real qualities in bodies which are somehow physically distinct in body from the primary qualities yet thought to be “really in” bodies are exposed to be fictions that are not to be considered real constituents of body alongside the primary qualities. It is in that very qualified respect that he says in II.viii.17 that they (the alleged real qualities) are “reduced to their causes, i.e. bulk, figure, and motions of parts.”

Very similar things are going on in II.viii.18-19. Indeed, in II.viii.19, there appears to be some reason to believe that Locke does not take the being of secondary qualities to depend on their actually being perceived — that is, that Locke does not treat the secondary quality as a relation. He writes of the porphyry:

...but whiteness or redness are not in it at any time, but such a texture, that hath the power to produce such a sensation in us.

When he talks about texture and the power that this texture has, he appears committed to the thesis that this texture has this very power throughout all the alterations in the thought experiment. The power of this body is treated more like a relational or dispositional property. The actual alterations in porphyry involve no changes at all in the actual constitution of the porphyry and certainly no Real Alterations in respect of fictive real qualities. The alterations involve changes in ambient lighting which render the secondary qualities actually unperceived. If there was a relation between perceiver and the secondary quality, that relation fails to obtain when the lighting alters. Ultimately, the counsel that Locke is recommending is that the alteration in the sensibility of the body should not be analyzed by reference to Real Qualities but rather to powers in the bodies to cause those requisite sensations. What Locke wishes the reader to adopt is the very same policy he ordinarily would adopt with respect to the power of the sun to melt wax and so forth. However, with respect to the ideas of redness and other colors caused by porphyry, the failure of any relations to obtain between those secondary qualities and perceivers does not seem to affect negatively the persistence of the powers of the porphyry to cause red or white sensations. The texture has both powers even if the porphyry is not actually being perceived as white or as red. Why not? It may be that here Locke slides into treating powers more like dispositions. There is the implicit assumption that the perceiver is waiting in the wings, as it were, to gaze upon the porphyry when someone flips on the lights again. This is very close to affirming some sort of distinction between the categorical nature of the primary qualities and the dispositional nature of the secondary qualities of porphyry, such that the latter but not the former entails certain kinds of subjunctive conditionals — e.g., if someone were to flip the lights on, perceiver P would be appeared to red-ly.

But for argument’s sake...

In the interest of charity to Jackson, suppose that the argument above concerning textual context either fails or is inconclusive. Assuming that Locke really is committed to the thesis that secondary qualities are relations between the causes in bodies and effects (ideas) in minds, how exactly does this work? While Jackson attributes this view to Locke, he does not locate this view in II.viii in a way that would make it compelling. For example, II.viii is titled “Some farther considerations concerning our simple ideas.” Since the chapter is concerned with ideas, one way to explore the plausibility of the thesis that secondary qualities are really just relations is to see what it means to say that an idea of a secondary quality is an idea of a relation.

In II.xxviii.18, Locke is concluding his reflections on relations. He begins to sum up by writing:

First, That it is evident, that all relation terminates in, and is ultimately founded on those simple ideas we have got from sensation or reflection; so that all we have in our thoughts ourselves (if we think of any thing, or have any meaning) or would signify to others, when we use words standing for relations, is nothing but some simple ideas, or collections of simple ideas, compared one with another. This is so manifest in that sort called proportional, that nothing can be more: For when a man says, honey is sweeter than wax, it is plain that his thoughts in this relation terminate in this simple idea, sweetness, which is equally true of all the rest...

If secondary qualities are relations, then the having of ideas of them ought to be consistent with the way Locke treats ideas of relation generally.

In the case of secondary qualities, then, the relata out of which the idea of relation is constructed by the mind are as follows: (a) the causal basis, whatever it turns out to be, in natural bodies responsible for (b) the sensations produced by the action of the causal basis in bodies on the sense organs. There is a distinction between the materials out of which the idea of a relation are formed and the resulting content of that idea of relation. The content need not be of both the relata out of which the idea is formed. For example, one can think of a father, and the idea of a father is certainly an idea of a relation, that between begetter and begotten. When one thinks of a father, however, the content of that idea need not be of both the begetter and begotten. In fact, in most cases one thinks only of the begetter, the individual referred to by means of an idea of relation.

Similarly, when entertaining an idea of a secondary quality (which is an idea of relation), the content need not be of both the relata. One can think of the sensation of, say, redness, and the sensation is certainly caused by a causal basis in the body impacting the sense organs. When one entertains a sensation, however, the content of that sensation need not be of both the causal basis and the red-sensing. In fact, in most cases, one thinks only of the sensation as it is presented in consciousness and not usually of the causal basis of the sensation. Similarly, when one sips a cup of coffee and is presented with a taste sensation, one thinks about the taste and not usually of the causal basis in the liquid which activates the taste receptors on the tongue.

Yet how is it an idea of relation according to the analysis given by Locke? Supposedly, the materials out of which the idea of relation are the aforementioned relata. The mind, somehow in gazing upon the relata, forms an idea of relation, but how does this occur?

Locke’s general characterization of an idea of relation is as follows:

When the mind so considers one thing, that it does as it were bring it to and set it by another, and carry its view from one to the other: This is, as the words import, relation and respect; and the denominations given to positive things, intimating that respect, and serving as marks to lead the thoughts beyond the subject itself denominated to some thing distinct from it, are what we call relatives: And the things, so brought together, related.

Does it make sense, however, to think that when a subject entertains a sensation of, say, redness, that he is brought to consider a causal basis for the sensation? This does not always happen, but it may.

The reasons that it may happen only infrequently are at least two-fold. First, a language in which sensations are spoken of as causal effects and bodies as causal bases is not part of customary usage. Locke says:

But where languages have failed to give correlative names, there the relation is not always so easily taken notice of. Concubine is, no doubt, a relative name, as well as wife: But in languages where this, and the like words, have not a correlative term, there people are not so apt to take them to be so, as wanting that evident mark of relation which is between correlatives, which seem to explain one another, and not to be able to exist, but together. Hence it is, that many of those names, which, duly considered, do include evident relations, have been called external denominations.

If Locke were to apply this reasoning to why the common person does not automatically and ordinarily think of his sensations as causal effects, he would certainly be close to the truth. As it happens, there is a linguistic apparatus in the domain of natural philosophy that perfectly is suited to the treatment of the names of sensations as names of causal effects. That domain of linguistic discourse, however, is not part of the common person’s verbal universe. It is rather part of the customary language of the natural philosopher. There is, however, a shadow of that precision in the common person’s customary usage. It seems that the common person’s ordinary, pre-scientific conception of body does include some intuitions about bodily nature and causation. If so, then the seeds of such customary usage are already embedded within ordinary language. Still, the Lockean insight about customary usage may explain why, in most cases, customary usage for the common person does not include conceiving of sensations ordinarily as causal effects of causal bases in bodies. Furthermore, there may be linguistic terms that do not make it obvious that a relation is involved. For instance, the term “scissors” refers to an artifact that satisfies a particular function, which cannot be specified but relationally. Nevertheless, since the term itself does not have a well-defined complement term (i.e., the best complement terms would be unified only by a disjunctive set of terms such as “paper, seaweed, skin, yarn,” etc.), “scissors” does not wear its relational nature on its sleeve. A secondary quality of redness may similarly behave in this covert fashion.

Second, sensation-language appears to signify something non-relational and intrinsic to the sensation itself. Again, Locke says:

Another sort of relative terms there is, which are not looked on to be either relative, or so much as external denominations: Which yet, under the form and appearance of signifying some thing absolute in the subject, do conceal a tacit, though less observable, relation. Such are the seemingly positive terms of old, great, imperfect, etc. whereof I shall have occasion to speak more at large in the following chapters.

Perhaps Locke would count sensations of redness in this category. If so, then such would also help explain why the common person does not ordinarily call to mind causal bases in bodies when he entertains a red-sensing.

While this explains why perhaps the common person does not ordinarily analyze the sensational content of an idea of a secondary quality as a relation, it does not explain how that idea of a sensation can be an idea of a relation. Locke’s canonical statement requires that an idea of a sensation, in order to count as an idea of a relation, be one in which the mind can be carried from the sensation to the causal bases in the body. Is there evidence that Locke can think of sensation this way? Locke says:

In the notice that our senses take of the constant vicissitude of things, we cannot but observe, that several particular, both qualities and substances, begin to exist; and that they receive this their existence from the due application and operation of some other being. From this observation we get our ideas of cause and effect. That which produces any simple or complex idea we denote by the general name cause; and that which is produced, effect.

He is discussing the ideas of cause and effect that observers acquire by observing relations between substances. Particularly, he is focusing on creation in rerum natura, generation, making, and alteration (II.xxvi.2). It is this final mode of “alteration” that is of interest here. Locke says:

When any simple idea is produced, which was not in that subject before, we call it alteration. Thus a man is generated, a picture made, and either of them altered, when any new sensible quality or simple idea is produced in either of them, which was not there before: And the things thus made to exist, which were not there before; are effects; and those things, which operated to the existence, causes. In which, and all other cases, we may observe, that the notion of cause and effect has its rise from ideas, received by sensation, or reflection; and that this relation, how comprehensive soever, terminates at last in them. For to have the idea of cause and effect, it suffices to consider any simple idea, or substance, as beginning to exist by the operation of some other, without knowing the manner of that operation.

Two observations are in order. First, a man may be altered when a new simple idea which was not present before is produced in him. For instance, a subject is altered when he sees an apple which produces in him a red sensation. That is a genuine case of alteration. Second, from merely undergoing that alteration, the man acquires not only the sensory idea but also the ideas of cause and effect. A subject can acquire the ideas of cause and effect even if he is ignorant of the precise manner in which the bodily substance of the apple caused this alteration in the substance of his sense organs and animal spirits. He knows there was an alteration, and ipso facto acquires the ideas of cause and effect.

A question was posed earlier. Locke’s canonical definition of an idea of relation requires that the entertaining of one idea lead one to think of another idea. Can an idea of a red sensation do that? If the idea of a red sensation can be thought of as an idea of an effect, the answer is “yes.” The ideas of cause and effect satisfy the canonical conditions of the idea of relation in II.xxv.1. Just as when a subject thinks of husband, he may be led to think of a wife, so also a subject who thinks of an effect may be led to think of the causal basis of that effect. Similarly, just as when a subject thinks of husband, he need not think of the wife but only of the man himself, a subject who thinks of the sensation need not think of the sensation qua effect and hence as related to the cause. He may simply think of that sensation as an experience. However, this is consistent with the real nature of that idea of sensation being an idea of a relation, just as it is consistent to treat the idea of husband similarly.

There are other sorts of sensations which wear their cause-effect relational status more on the sleeve. For instance, consider a sensation that one might describe as “painfully bright.” Even the common person may be led to think pre-theoretically about the causal basis in the body causing that sensation when undergoing an episode of “painful brightness.” The extreme example may simply bring out into the open the real nature of sensations, even for the common person. Additionally, even the common person, if ever he were a child or an inquiring psychology textbook browser, would have acquired some experiences of after-images, whether the acquisition be from staring dangerously at the sun or experimenting with the color illusions in introductory psychology textbooks. Those after-images are sensations, but they are ones which present the cause-effect relational nature of sensation. Something in the body of the sun or the picture causes in the perceiver an after-image of some sort, glaring spots or color sensations, respectively. This leads very naturally to the supposition that the sensation is an effect of a causal basis in the relevant body, just as Locke characterizes ideas of relation in II.xxv.1.

An idea of a secondary quality amounts to this whole relational complex. The having of an idea of a secondary quality is inter alia the having of a sensational experience. The two, however, are not the same. The having of an experience is an essential component of the relational complex, but it itself is non-relational. It is one of the relata. Jackson’s thesis that secondary qualities for Locke ultimately turn out to be relations can be made to fit within the epistemic context of II.viii with some degree of plausibility.

Still, even despite the defensibility of Jackson’s view, I’m not convinced. I do not think that secondary qualities are to be identified with relations for Locke. I think there are better reasons to take them to be elliptical references to the plain old primary qualities of body under a different mode of presentation, but that’s not the subject at hand.

Merely Verbal Disputes and the Origin of Ideas

Re-reading Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding for the umpteenth time, I am struck (again) by just how many perennial disputes in philosophy are dismissed by Hume as merely verbal disputes. Once we get clear on what we mean by our words, we can swat away pesky problems like the compatibility of liberty and necessity or the nature of causation. Other than Wittgenstein, has any other philosopher been so dismissive of so many "classic" problems in philosophy?

I think it should be noted, though, that Hume's rhetoric is a bit loftier than his (usually very careful) arguments. As he is quite clear to say, when not in high-literary mode, his principle that every idea comes from a corresponding impression plays a large role in dismissing these debates. When pressed with an alleged idea in metaphysics that must be accounted for, Hume presses us to consider the origin of this idea, and if the original impression cannot be produced, the idea is discarded. When dealing with philosophy problems, this (controversial) strategy helps clear the field quite quickly.

I have to admit to being almost completely unmotivated by this line of argument that occurs so regularly in Hume. For even if I were to grant Hume's controversial premise that every idea comes from a corresponding impression ("the Copy Principle"), I see absolutely no reason why I should have to provide that impression whenever someone questions the legitimacy of one of my ideas. Of course, it may help to get clear on an idea to ferret out the original impression, but that I must provide some sort of Certificate of Authenticity for each and every one of my ideas strikes me as an unhelpful and counterproductive test. I'm not one to think I have a great deal of insight into my own soul or my own ideas, but I do think that I can sometimes have a particular idea without being able to say where this idea originated. And I think I am fully within my philosophical rights (were there such a thing) to cling to an idea for which I cannot produce the original impression, even if I were to accept Hume's claim that every idea comes from an impression.

Even if one accepts the Copy Principle, that does not seem like enough to motivate the test of authenticity that Hume wields throughout the Enquiry (and Treatise). But at least it gives us some reason to think that many of our disputes might be dissolved by getting clear on our terms. Which is more than motivates most claims of verbal disputes. One of the most irritating expressions tossed about by students and other would-be disputants is that a problem is really "just semantics." Besides denigrating the worthy field of semantics, it is often misused for problems that are not really about the meaning of words but about concepts. And, most frustratingly, it seems motivated by the twin evils of carelessness (in the use of terms) and laziness (in working through an issue under debate). I've said many times that if I could pass one requirement for students receiving a B.A. it would be that they never, ever dismiss a problem as "just semantics."

Okay, end of grumpy old-man rant.

end of year lunch

Earlier this week, the department took our teaching assistants out to an end of year lunch to thank them for their hard work. The food was lovely.

Ray and Dan


Dan and Carrie


graduating senior


yummy bread

graduating seniors


graduating seniors


Eric and some graduating seniors

graduating senior, Paul, and Gary (colleague from another department)

Good times were had by all.

a bit of religious confusion

Please allow me to share my religious confusion with you.

First, the good news: There was a heart-warming story about a 3 year old toddler in Missouri who wandered away from home. He was lost for about three days, and he was found by search and rescue volunteers. He’s a tough kid who survived in the woods for three days. That’s pretty cool.

Here’s what the father said: “It’s indescribable how grateful we are. I mean, you doubt if God’s actually with you for awhile, and then something like this happens, and you know he’s there.”

Okay... I understand the sentiment. In fact, as a person of religious faith (or, for that matter, as simply a decent human being, religious or not), I share in his joy.

But I find myself utterly ambivalent about these kinds of proclamations.

There is another story of a 3 year old toddler who went missing in Montana. He also was found, but in this case, he was found dead in a septic tank three days after he went missing. He drowned in filth and refuse.

So, I guess what I’m saying is I don’t understand what it means to proclaim things like “God is there.” It cannot be the case that the expression “God is there” implies that “God saves me (us) from calamity.” Is that what the father of the rescued boy believes? Maybe he means something more subtle, such as “God is there” implies that “Sometimes God saves me (us) from calamity.” But then, what are the conditions that govern the “sometimes” qualifier? Or, perhaps it’s the case that dumb luck (bad or good) plays some determinative role. But then, is that kind of chance consistent with the traditional view of God that we find in the Christian religion? Do you see why I’m confused? I just don’t know.

At the end of the day, I haven’t said anything profound or new. All I’ve done is articulate in a somewhat plebeian way the problem that evil (both moral and natural) poses for anyone who claims to believe that there is a good, powerful, and intelligent (or at least competent) deity governing our world. Nevertheless, even though I haven’t really said anything new, I at least acknowledge a fundamental tension that some of my religious friends would rather either ignore or paste over with wafer-thin theodicies.

Another thought occurs to me... I truly marvel at the generations of past Jewish and Christian peoples (sidenote: I focus on these religions only because of my familiarity with them, not for any intentional slight on the saints of other religious traditions) who endured unspeakable hardship in the midst of their faith. In the 18th and 19th centuries of America, for example, the notion that one would lose a child was almost a matter of course given the prevailing public health conditions, and persons of faith did not automatically find that tragic phenomenon to compete against their notions of God’s governance of this world. Strange... I can’t get in that mindset. Perhaps the persons of faith in those generations would say of me that I’ve been warped by the fact that I can take a Tylenol when I have the slightest headache, and this has been transposed by me into my conception of “oughts” and “shoulds” that I then apply to how God should govern the world.

Maybe so... But I confess that I’m still religiously confused.

Bethel philosophy students' poll

We invite you to take this short poll. If you select "other," please feel free to write in your alternate response in the text box below the "other" button.

Philosophy
by Billy Collins

I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,
lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,
contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman
might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandyglass.

I used to hunger to be engaged
as I walked the long shaded boulevards,
eyeing women of all nationalities,
a difficult paperback riding in my raincoat pocket.

But these days I like my ontology in an armchair,
a rope hammock, or better still, a warm bath
in a cork-lined room --- disengaged, soaking
in the calm, restful waters of speculation.

Afternoons, when I leave the house
for the woods, I think of Aquinas at his desk,
fingers interlocked upon his stomach,
as he deduces another proof for God’s existence,

intricate as the branches of these bare November trees.
And as I kick through the leaves and snap
the windfallen twigs, I consider Leibniz on his couch
reaching the astonishing conclusion that monads,

those windowless units of matter, must have souls.
But when I finally reach the top of the hill
and sit down on the flat tonnage of this boulder,
I think of Spinoza, most rarefied of them all.

I look beyond the treetops and the distant ridges
and see him sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight
slowly stirring his milky tea with a spoon.
Since dawn he has been at his bench grinding lenses,

but now he is leaving behind the saucer and table,
the smokey chimneys and tile roofs of Amsterdam,
even the earth itself, pale blue, aqueous,
cloud-enshrined, titled back on the stick of its axis.

He is rising into that high dome of thought
where loose pages of Shelley float on the air,
where all the formulas of calculus unravel,
tumbling in the radiance of a round Platonic sun—

that zone just below the one where angels accelerate
and the ampitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.
And now I stand up on the ledge to salute you, Spinoza,
and when I whistle to the dog and start down the hill,

I can feel the thick glass of your eyes upon me
as I step from the rock to glacial rock, and on her
as she sniffs her way through the leaves,
her tail straight back, her body low to the ground.

Can I Enjoy a Good Night's Sleep?

I've been wondering recently whether it is possible to enjoy a good night's sleep, or to enjoy sleeping at all.

Here's the problem: It seems that in order to enjoy something, I have to be conscious while it is taking place. I enjoy a film only if I experience a film. I enjoy a good meal only if I experience a meal. If I do not consciously experience these events, it seems I can't enjoy them.

However, there is something unusual about enjoyment: I can enjoy things that haven't happened yet and things that already happened. The first we call anticipation and the second we call remembering (or reminiscing). So when I enjoy a good meal, I can enjoy three things: I can anticipate how the meal will be and my eating it (my mouth may even water as I imagine it), I can experience the meal in all its goodness, and I can remember enjoying the meal (I may even recreate the tastes and smells).

Turning to sleep, even if I can't experience (consciously) sleeping, I can still anticipate sleeping. (I'm not sure that I can remember sleeping, since in order to recall it, it seems that I would have to have been conscious the first time through). I don't think that when people say they enjoy sleeping, though, they mean the anticipation of sleeping. And I don't think they mean remembering sleeping. But it does still seem right somehow to say that I enjoy sleeping or I enjoy getting a good night's sleep, doesn't it?

Here's my suggestion as to what is going on. Another kind of appreciation that we have (a kind of appreciation I think can be classified as enjoyment) is appreciation of a thing as constitutive of a larger whole. I can enjoy a tragic death in a novel not because I enjoy tragic deaths but because I can enjoy how the tragedy fit into the novel as a whole - how it made that novel better. I can also enjoy a meal as a part of a well-lived life. I can appreciate having a body that needs food, and the wonderful ways that people work toward making that experience as enjoyable as possible. I can appreciate having the opportunity to eat for pleasure's sake as well as for need's sake. I can take enjoyment from the role that eating a good meal has in my life as a whole. And this is what I think we enjoy when we enjoy a good night's sleep. We enjoy the way we feel refreshed afterwards, we can appreciate those hazy moments at the edge of consciousness when we realize we can fall back asleep for another hour, and we can find joy in going to sleep after a full day well lived. So even if it's not possible to enjoy sleep as it is happening, I can still enjoy sleep in a way that goes beyond anticipation and remembering. I enjoy the role that getting a good night's sleep plays in my life as a whole.

MacLaurin, Clarke Velocities, and Powers

I've been reading various obscure sources recently as I investigate early interpretations of Newton and how they might have influenced Hume's understanding of space, time, body, souls, and scientific method. I came across this (to me) rather surprising passage from Colin MacLaurin's A Treatise of Fluxions in Two Books (1742). MacLaurin was a friend of Hume in Edinburgh, a key figure in the "Scottish Englightenment," and one of the premier mathematicians of his day. This passage comes from the book in which he attempts to explain recent developments in mathematics (especially in differential calculus) to an educated non-sophisticate.

It is indeed generally allowed, that if a body was to be left to itself from any term of the time of its motion, and was to be affected by no external influence after that term, it would proceed for ever with an uniform motion, describing always a certain space in a given time: and this seems to be a sufficient foundation for ascribing, in common language, the velocity to the body that moves, as a power. It is well known, that what is an effect in one respect, may be considered as a power or cause in another; and we know no cause in common philosophy, but what is itself to be considered as an effect: but this does not hinder us from judging of effects from such causes. However, if any dislike this expression, they may suppose any mover or cause of the motion they please, to which they may ascribe the power, considering the velocity as the action of this power, or as the adequate effect and measure of its exertion, while it is supposed to produce the motion at every term of the time. (Book 1, p. 54)

What interests me in this passage is his seeming indifference to whether something counts as a cause or an effect. On first reading, I thought MacLaurin was making the relatively uninteresting point that one thing (B) can be both an effect (of A) and a cause (of C). This is suggested when he says "what is an effect in one respect, may be considered as a power or cause in another." But his next sentence is more revealing. He offers that an unhappy reader may "suppose any mover or cause of the motion they please to which they may ascribe the power." This echoes his earlier line that the velocity of a moving body is "a power."

This is interesting because it is a break from a particularly influential reading of Newton that was popularized by Samuel Clarke. Clarke argued that since matter was incapable of self-motion, it had no power of its own. Therefore, to explain the introduction of motions into the world, we have to posit the existence of non-material souls. These souls can't be merely human, since motion shows up where humans aren't, so we have an argument for the existence of God (or at least other non-human souls; we get to God in needing to explain the existence of non-necessary matter). According to Clarke, Newton's world can't exist without God pushing matter around (or appointing lesser souls to do the pushing). (There is evidence to suggest that this was Newton's preferred hypothesis, when he felt like positing hypotheses.)

What MacLaurin is suggesting is quite radical in saying that one needn't invoke God to explain the power of motion. It's just as good from the perspective of Newtonian philosophy to refer to the powers of the bodies as it is to say that the bodies' motions are the effects of some other being. Whether velocity is the cause of the motion or the effect of the true cause of the motion makes no difference to studying velocity. This idea, which would not have been missed by Hume, not only does away with the need to posit "powers" in nature, it also does away with the need to invoke God to explain the Newtonian world. MacLaurin isn't suggesting here that one can do away with both of these hypotheses; he may have thought either one worked just fine, so he wouldn't push for either (in this place). It wouldn't be until Hume that we get a suggestion that one could do away with all these hypotheses and proceed in science and philosophy with mere regularity.

(Note: I'm not suggesting that it was Hume's reading of MacLaurin's Treatise of Fluxions that influenced his writings; Hume's Treatise, after all, was published first. But it is likely that MacLaurin was an important source of Hume's ideas about natural philosophy, if not while a student then at least in their friendship.)

how to explain the two Euclids

On occasion, I find myself talking about axioms and the notion of a paradigm-relative axiom.

The standard example I use is Euclidean geometry... which usually elicits judgmental stares from my students. (*sigh* Public school isn’t what it used to be, eh? But I digress...)

One of the axioms (forgive the loose description) is that if you draw two straight lines diverging from a single point, those lines will continue to diverge forever.

This is one of those propositions that seems so self-evident that the glow of its (alleged) necessity is like philosophical fairy dust... magical and dependable to boot!

But alas... the view is false.

Suppose that Euclid were born in a very different world, and by “world” I mean only a very small difference. Hold fixed all of the most fundamental laws of the cosmos. Change only one thing: the size of our earth. Imagine that our earth was only 500 feet in diameter. Euclid, had he been born on such a small planet, might have formed his conceptions of spatial representation on the basis of curved lines.

(To those careful readers out there who accuse me of an implicit (well, maybe explicit) empiricism... guilty as charged.)

If such had been the case, it would be very easy to see that two straight lines that diverge do not diverge forever. They actually converge again, say, at the south pole, which happens to be very close by. In this scenario, two straight lines can contain an area.

To the careful reader who thinks that I’m cheating a little bit in my characterization of straight lines...

Just conceive of a straight line as a line on which the shortest distance between two points on that line runs through that line. That’s true of traditional Euclidean lines as well as curved lines.

But... it’s also true of the lines on the alternate Earth that is only 500 feet in diameter. Let’s go back to the Euclid of this world... His geometry would consist of geometric figures such as squares and triangles whose angle sums would vary with the size of the figure.

Flat surfaces are one thing; curved surfaces are an entirely different matter. On the curved surface of a sphere, you can have a finite and endless line, and that requires a different kind of geometry.

Here’s the crazy cool reality: Our universe is composed of curved space(s).

Well, that’s a rather imprecise but free-of-jargon way of explaining this stuff.

two wacky ideas

Here are two quick thoughts about Spinoza before dinner.

The students find Spinoza both interesting and wacky.

I’ve posted a few other items in this blog about what I find interesting in Spinoza.

Here’s something I find wacky... Spinoza is a necessitarian, which is to say, he believes that all events that occur are not only necessitated by the past but also necessary.

Take any proposition P about an event where some attribute is exemplified by a particular. What explains P? If you’re a red-blooded rationalist, then you’re going to cite another proposition Q that explains P. “Explains” means.... what? Maybe it means that given the history of the world, including the physical laws up to that point, P is necessitated by Q, plus the operative laws at that slice of the universe. “Necessitated” means... what? If we limit the description to the previous sentence, then it just means that P was inevitable given the history of the world. So... “necessitated” in this context means inevitable.

But... to say that P is necessitated is not the same as saying P is necessary.

Spinoza is really clear that he believes P, along with any proposition describing an event, is necessary.

Here’s one way to get to the necessity of P. Take the entire series of explanatory propositions of any given event: R, S, T1...Tn, where each in the series explains the prior one. Then, make a massive conjunction of them all; call it C.

Ask yourself, what explains C? Or alternately, why did C obtain?

Nothing from inside the series can do so. For Spinoza, nothing contingent outside of the series can explain C, since there aren’t any contingencies.

The question cannot be answered. This, however, is a fate worse than death to a red-blooded rationalist like Spinoza. The only other alternative is that somehow the very nature of the series is such that it is self-necessitating.

So... on to the first wacky thing: This is wacky in exactly the same way that it’s wacky to say that it’s God’s nature to be a necessary being. What’s wacky is to think that this delivers some item of meaningful knowledge (my empiricist tendencies shine through, eh?). Musing on this in this way, however, does help me see another angle on why Spinoza would (refer to previous post) use a locution like: “God, or in other words, Nature.”

On to the second wacky thing: Even really dull students of philosophy get what I’m about to say, and so I’m almost ashamed to put it to paper, since it’s rather like pronouncing that “water is wet.” But here goes... Believing that this is the only possible world is tantamount to claiming that nothing (that is in fact) false is possible (or possibly true). Wow, that’s nuts.

Regardless, I still love Spinoza and wish I had one-hundredth of his intellect.

Spinoza the mystic

Recently in class (and hopefully again this week), we talked about whether Spinoza should be considered a strange theist (e.g., a pantheist or panenthiest) or an atheist. Either is consistent with his monistic metaphysics.

Hard to say...

He’s got this great way of referring to his view of reality: “God, or in other words, Nature.”

Recall that Descartes was a substance-type dualist and a substance-token pluralist. Spinoza is a substance-type monist and a substance-token monist! There is only one kind of thing, and there is, in fact, only one thing.

This one thing is “God, or in other words, Nature.”

So... what is this God like? The Appendix to Ethics part I is a wonderful tirade against traditional notions of a personal God.

He gives an argument against taking God to be a personal agent. If God is perfect, then it follows that he lacks nothing. If something intervenes owing to intentional purposes, the reason that such intervention occurs is due to a lack in the something that intervenes. The idea is that one could only hold a view of an interventionist God if one gives up the view that such a God is perfect. So, Spinoza preserves perfection at the price of God having one of the marks of personhood — viz., intentional, purposive action. The real target obviously is any traditional notion of God that is drawn from religions.

What doesn’t appear very defined at the end of this argument is the notion of perfection that he attributes to God. And here is where it begins to become clearer why he says of reality that it is “God, or in other words, Nature.”

If God were to exist as religions proclaim, it would make impossible any type of explanatory rationalism, whereby all events that occur in the spacetime world could be explained by reference to a (hopefully) small class of deterministic laws. I think that the real awe-inspiring prospect of a completed explanatory rationalism is what Spinoza has in mind when he attributes perfection to God (or Nature). For us today, I imagine it’s the same sensation of awe and hints of viewing perfection when we think about the prospects of a completed physics.

It’s not really a coherent merging of the concepts of God and Nature, since the conceptual hangover of traditional religious notions of God (e.g., the inspiration of awe) begin to obscure the impersonal but also awe-inspiring, even terrifying, aspects of the Natural world. Something that seems correct gets transposed, but can you really transpose the thing you want without also dragging along some residue of the other thing you don’t want?

Still, there’s a tense resonance that Spinoza was onto, and I probably would be where Spinoza is if I did not hold onto some of my more traditional religiously-inspired beliefs about God being personal.

I asked the students why Spinoza’s treatise is called Ethics. Here again is another tense and incoherent resonance between two views that seem right in their own ways. If something happens according to the will of (a traditional religious) God, then it follows that, in some respect, the thing that happens is “good” (though maybe not “good” for the collection of things implicated in that one event). In the same way, if something occurs by the will of Nature (that is, according to laws of determinism... Spinoza would go further and argue fatalism), and if one conjoins this alleged fact with the view of Nature as being perfect, then it follows, in some sense, that this occurrence is “good” or “fitting” or “perfect.”

The lesson drawn for agents is the same in both cases: contentment is the correct response.

In the first case, it’s pious contentment as a way of surrendering to the will of God. In the second case, it’s rational contentment as a way of surrendering to the perfect, law-like, and inevitable workings of Nature. Thus it makes sense why Spinoza’s musings, though totally saturated with metaphysics, are actually for him an investigation into ethics. It amounts to Stoicism for the seventeenth-century.

In the end, his use of “God” and “nature” may be an incoherent juxtaposition of vocabularies that are too different in their semantic histories. It is nevertheless a gem of linguistic play that makes progress in the way a pinball makes progress through a series of bumpers. It’s almost never a straight line and it’s not clear that the ball is going anywhere but you’ll play every time.

Cartesian heresy

In Descartes’ philosophy, there is a thread that ties together his epistemic concerns in a way that is shockingly similar (in one respect) to the kinds of concerns of those ancient epistemologies adopted by Stoics and Pyrrhonians.

Those ancient philosophers were wildly obsessed with ethics and the good life. I say that with tongue-in-cheek, partly in the mode of satire and partly in the mode of (imagined) nostalgia. I qualify with “imagined” because I do not know what it must have been like to be always connecting one’s metaphysics and epistemology to concerns about the good life. There was a time, not too long ago even, when the very term “metaphysics” connoted also a treatment of philosophical cosmology wherein one would naturally discuss the place of humanity in the wider order of the structured cosmos. That conversation is largely dead, as far as I can tell. It was of course alive and well, for example, in a medieval philosopher such as Boethius who went so far in his Consolation to identify (well... maybe that’s too strong) or at any rate closely relate his own flourishing to that of the cosmos. What’s good for the cosmos must in some sense be good for him, and as such, his intense suffering must be justified. In his mind, a metaphysics that combined Stoic and Christian categories seemed right. (I suppose that I too would cling to almost anything that made sense of my impending death-by-bludgeoning.) But I digress...

Much as the Stoics (who pursued apathia) and Pyrrhonians (who pursued ataraxia) were concerned about a peaceful existence that comes from ordering one’s beliefs in the right way, Descartes also has designs on an epistemic system that will stay put. The possible heresy about which I am wondering: What if Descartes, unlike the ancient epistemologists, had truth in the backseat in his concerns? What if Descartes is really more interested in the calm, intellectual peace that comes with a stable system of beliefs that is psychologically unassailable, independent of the truth question?

If this is the case, then the Cartesian project is non-normative from an epistemic point of view. Descartes is actually like Quine.

An obvious rejoinder is to suggest that Descartes is after both: (i) an efficient, stable superstructure of beliefs that (ii) is actually true!

Granted that he could be after both... But I’m playing with an idea here...

Are there reasons to think that he could be after (i) by itself independent of any concern for (ii)? I think there is. When Descartes begins to deal with his modal notions of what is and is not possible, he adopts a shockingly blunt psychological criterion about the limits and constitution of human noetic structures. This is fascinating. It suggests that he thinks clear and distinct modal notions are brokered not so much by truth/falsity but by dubitability, where the latter is not a reliable indication of the former.

That’s dynamite.

interesting interview with Gwen Ifill

Gwen Ifill talks about her book on Obama on Minnesota Public Radio:

Descartes and Plato

In re-reading Descartes’ Meditation Two, I was struck again by how similar he is to Plato. The famous passage about the wax is a nice place where Descartes plays his Platonic hand.

Plato famously makes a distinction between the realm of the sensible (Becoming) and the intelligible (Being). The sensible realm is the one whose general determinable attribute is alteration. The intelligible realm is the one whose particular determinate attribute is an utter, mystical sameness. This latter realm is where Plato places Form (contentious view: not Forms), and this realm can only be accessed by a pure intellection that is supposed to transcend perceptions of the sensible alterations in the realm of Becoming.

Cue Descartes over a millennium later as he famously ruminates on the piece of wax...

“I now know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood; and in view of this I know plainly that I can achieve an easier and more evident perception of my own mind than of anything else.” (Meditation Two)

According to Descartes, even though the sensible qualities of the wax may change when I heat it, I still judge that the same wax remains through all the alterations. My distinct conception of the wax as an enduring material substance is not based on its changeable sensible qualities.

Rational reflection moves me to judge that the wax as a material body is “merely something extended, flexible and changeable.” (Meditation Two)

Since the wax is potentially infinitely flexible and changeable, my adequate conception of the wax could not be a function of my sensory imagination but rather of my rational understanding.

It’s obvious that Descartes is shopping for a general definition that is aimed to be “essence-tracking” with respect to not only the wax but of material substance as such. He’s looking for the Form.

This is his way of articulating the Socratic/Platonic search for answers to the “What is X?” question (e.g., What is dikaiosune? What is arête? etc.)

Buying Less

It's January, 2009, and the USA is in one of the worst recessions anyone can remember. Comparisons are made to the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, the awfulness of the early 1980s, and all the way back to the Great Depression itself in the 1930s.

This all leads to my question for the philosophers: Should you intentionally spend less money in a recession?

Of course, if you've lost your job or some of your income, you'll have to make tough choices. But I'm imagining a person who hasn't had their income affected at all. (Presumably their savings have dwindled, but let's say they don't live off that savings and can reasonably expect to wait out the recession before they plan to retire or otherwise draw on their savings. Let's also assume that have a high degree of job security.) If you are making exactly as much money as you were last year, why should you spend any less? Why should the fact that other people are buying fewer things lead you to buy fewer things?

There's one easy way to spend less without making any sacrifices. As retailers work to move their merchandise, they're having greater sales than past years. So if you buy a sweater for $40 that would have been $50 a year ago, you are spending less. So that's easy to do. But I take it that people have stopped buying sweaters (or cars or most non-necessities). But is this rational? If you are making just as much money as you were before, why would you spend less now? Perhaps you are a super-saver and think this is a good time to invest, but I don't think that's why most people are holding onto their money.

Besides the usual reasons to save money and be thrifty that apply at all times, and the ways one can easily spend less, and the greater need to be generous, should you buy less in a recession?

Locke and the idea of the void

In the seventeenth century, the two dominant forms of mechanistic philosophy were Cartesianism and corpuscularianism. The former denied the possibility and hence existence of the void, and the latter affirmed the existence of the void, since matter was ultimately discrete.

Locke, being much in favor of corpuscularianism over Cartesianism (though withholding belief about whether corpuscularianism delivers scientia about natural bodies), surely must have wondered how it is that one can have an idea of a void.

I’ve wondered whether this passage from the Essay could have been deployed by Locke to explain the idea of a void.

“If it were the design of my present undertaking to enquire into the natural causes and manner of perception, I should offer this as a reason why a privative cause might, in some cases at least, produce a positive idea, viz. that all sensation being produced in us only by different degrees and modes of motion in our animal spirits, variously agitated by external objects, the abatement of any former motion must as necessarily produce a new sensation, as the variation or increase of it; and so introduce a new idea, which depends only on a different motion of the animal spirits in that organ (II.viii.4).”

alchemy...

Well, not quite, but still pretty cool...

small pot of boiling water + very cold day =



Source

not even God...

... could bring about the satisfaction of this condition:

Socratic ignorance

Okay, I’m going out on a limb here...

I’m not an Ancient Philosophy scholar, nor do I claim to have any special insight on Socrates/Plato.

But I can’t resist musing about Socrates on this fine, unseasonably warm Fall evening in late October, especially inspired by some thought-provoking conversations with my colleague Eric Snider (our local ancient philosophy aficionado).

Socratic Duplicity

Socrates is famous for claiming that he does not posses knowledge. Does he mean what he says?

Most say that Socrates is not being sincere. He is being duplicitous with good intentions. By feigning ignorance, he is trying to inspire his conversation partners to pursue after the truth with all that much ardor. In order to get them to pursue the truth, however, Socrates must knock out their false foundations of confidence.

I’ve heard (through the philosophy grapevine) that there are pretty unambiguous texts in Plato that suggest this interpretation is not right.

Merely True Belief

The other main interpretation is to deny that Socrates is playing ignorant. This would mean that Socrates is being sincere when he claims that he lacks knowledge. What he has, however, is still pretty good. He possesses true belief. This falls short of knowledge, but it’s better than nothing.

This would require that we view the pursuit of Socrates as a search for true beliefs but not knowledge. This doesn’t sound quite right either. One thing that I think is true of Socrates is that he equated virtue with knowledge. If Socrates must be taken to have given up on the project of knowledge, then he must also be said to have given up on the project of virtue and happiness. For a guy like Socrates, this is tantamount to saying that he has given up on the hope of becoming good (which for him was the task of philosophy). That sounds distinctly un-Socratic.

The Problem

On the one hand, Socrates’ claim of ignorance is sincere. He is not pretending when he claims that he lacks knowledge. On the other hand, Socrates claims that he pursues after knowledge. He is not satisfied with true belief. Socrates is not only dissatisfied with true belief, but he actually takes himself to possess knowledge.

Socrates the contextualist?

It’s possible that claims to knowledge might mean different things in different contexts for Socrates. Does this help illuminate what’s going on with the alleged Socratic duplicity? Maybe... but I’m just musing out loud (or whatever the equivalent is when applied to free-flow typing).

Think about the way we ordinarily use language, especially the word “know.” I drove my car to campus today. If someone asks me about the location of my car, there’s a perfectly natural context in which I would say, “I know my car is parked outside.” [In more precise jargon, the appropriate contrast-class of defeaters that needs to be eliminated is set by the appropriate features of the context.]

Suppose, however, that some annoying philosophy student fresh out of an introductory level epistemology class and drunk on his newfound insights, presses me by asking, “Do you really know that your car is parked outside?” (Or perhaps he just shouts “Cartesian Demon!”) This alters the context of inquiry. The conditions for confidence are now higher and more demanding. Maybe I might answer, “Well, ask Rita the Meter Maid; she’s outside standing next to where my car ought to be parked. She knows, and perhaps I don’t know after all.” [Philosophical aside: I think it’s fascinating that “knows” doesn’t appear to admit of degrees under analysis. For instance, strictly speaking, I don’t say “she knows better than I do” as a way of describing a degree of knowing, but rather to express that she’s in a better position to know simpliciter. Does this compete with contextualism? I don’t think it does.]

My saying this, however, does not thereby imply that my earlier claim to knowledge was inappropriate when I uttered, “I know my car is parked outside.” It is perverse to think that what I ought to have said in that context is, “I have a merely true belief that my car is parked outside.” Why? Arguably, the context of inquiry, while not wholly determinative of the conditions for justification, contributes something to those conditions. So, my original claim is appropriate in one context and less appropriate in another. One is less strict and the other stricter.

What this illustrates is that there is an acceptable practice of claiming knowledge in different contexts. [Philosophical aside: I know this is controversial, and I have colleagues who think this is just nuts.] The different contexts fix the rules for when a knowledge claim is legitimate and when it is less legitimate.

Something like this flip-flopping between a strict versus looser contexts of knowledge claims might be going on with Socrates.

I don’t think this is any brilliant insight. I’m sure there’s some Plato scholar who has mapped this territory already.

Did Plato Have a “theory” of Knowledge?

Here’s the standard view of Plato: A condition for a claim to count as knowledge is that the claim must be infallible and therefore certain. This sounds like such a strong condition—infallible certainty! Can it really be what Plato wishes as the distinction between, say, opinion and knowledge? A moment’s reflection indicates that it does. If Plato were to soften the infallibility criterion to something like a simple truth condition—viz., that one of the conditions on knowledge is that a claim must be true—he loses the distinction between opinion and knowledge, since there are such things as true opinions.

That’s the pipe dream of epistemology, and it has lured great minds into it for as long as recorded history. This is no less than the Cartesian project. Descartes had his own reasons for pursuing this, but for those of you who have familiarity with the continental rationalists, you will see the obvious connections to the ancient fascination with infallible certainty.

Satisfaction of this condition would enable one to say of a knowledge claim that one knows it, but also that one knows that one knows it. To claim that one knows that-K requires that one knows-that-one-knows-K (the so-called “K-K thesis”). Let’s call this gussied-up knowledge.

Loosey-Goosey Condition

Let’s recall that knowledge might function differently in different contexts from the perspective of ordinary linguistic practice. Is there a loosey-goosey context that might be appropriate for Plato, a context in which he would be amenable to having Socrates claim that he knows even if he does not know that he knows?

This is hard to say. It is worthwhile to ask if we today have a conception of knowledge that does not require infallible certainty. Indeed we do. We think we have made philosophical progress over a few millennia, and we by and large think it perverse to require infallible certainty for knowledge claims.

We take it to be consistent that we are both fallible and knowledgeable. Here’s how it works. [Philosophical aside: This is why we can also claim to be epistemic foundationalists about the structure of epistemic justification without having to be embarrassed by the crazier forms of foundationalism that tie themselves to further criteria about the nature of the foundations.]

Consider again my belief that my car is parked outside. Call that p. I have evidence for p. My evidence is my memorial belief that I parked my car outside, my memorial belief that I glanced at my car about five minutes ago, my belief based on testimonials from friends who told me that they saw my car parked outside, etc. Call that conjunction of evidence q.

I believe p on the basis of q.
p is true.
q counts as “good enough” evidence for p.
q, however, does not entail p.

Do I know that my car is parked outside? Sure I do. So long as all the conditions are satisfied, then I can be said to know that my car is parked outside. Do I know that I know that my car is parked outside. Clearly not. But the failure to satisfy the very strong condition for a second-order knowledge claim does not by itself show that my first-order knowledge claim is in jeopardy.

From here, epistemology gets very contentious; so I think it is good enough to leave it at that for our purposes.

Okay... the question is whether Plato has available something like this looser-goosier conception of knowledge.

I think the answer is “yes.” Call it Socratic elenchus.

Recall that the main obsession for Plato (and hence of Socrates) is knowledge in the domain of ethics, of “the Good.” On what basis does he and could he claim to know? In actual practice, it is usually through the dialectic of question and answer.

Could something like the model I used to analyze my knowledge that my car is parked outside be adapted to explain Plato’s knowledge by elenchus?

The essence of a fallibilist epistemology is that there is always a strictly logical gap between P and Q, where P is the object of an alleged knowledge claim and Q is the evidence.

When Socrates claims (dialectically) to know P, he must base it on Q.

Maybe Q is the evidence garnered from Socratic badgering, where no contradiction is uncovered after a lengthy, exhaustive inquiry and cross-examination.

So, in essence, it’s a negative condition: We did not uncover any contradictions.

If that’s true, then maybe Socrates is satisfied to claim that he knows (dialectically). To be sure, this is a looser-goosier claim than a claim about infallible certainty. It falls short of infallible certainty. After all, Socrates via the elenchus never claims to have perceived The Forms. Only the gods of Olympus get that honor.

Hence it is not the same as gussied-up knowledge. It’s just plain old “loosey-goosey knowledge.”

Socrates is saying that there is a kind of wisdom or knowledge that is appropriate only for the gods, because they have gussied-up minds. Human minds are loosey-goosey and so can contain only loosey-goosey content. He very clearly owns his human wisdom, but he denies that he has godly wisdom.

What Socrates is rewarded for as well as cursed with is his humble acceptance of the human condition. It is ultimately a religious, pietistic epistemology which disciplines human pretension. It is as if Socrates is saying, “I am not a god, and neither are any of you.”

At the end of it all, when Socrates denies that he has knowledge, he is denying that he has the mind of a god. He is denying any access to gussied-up knowledge.

When he claims that he possesses knowledge, he is claiming merely human wisdom which comes from the humble exercise of the elenchus which delivers loosey-goosey knowledge.

Socrates turns out to be a contextualist, which for him is an ethical epistemology.

Compared to gussied-up knowledge, loosey-goosey knowledge is a pauper. But what do you expect? We do not number among the children of the Titans.

musing on "disagreement"

A brief musing about the concept of “disagreement”...

There is an obvious difference between the confidence we have (both psychologically and epistemically) when we assert that “2 and 2 makes 4” versus when we assert that “it is wrong to lie no matter what” (assuming we think it is).

It’s hard to disagree with the first assertion, but it’s not that hard to disagree with the second (personal note: I disagree with the second statement). In fact, one might make the stronger claim that the kinds of disagreements that attach to the latter kind of statement (and in fact to that very particular statement itself) are perennial.

I’ve seen this asymmetry in disagreement deployed to argue that the best explanation is that there is a fact of the matter about the first kinds of judgment (e.g., “2 and 2 makes 4”) but likely not one about the latter kinds of judgment (e.g., moral).

I have two queries...

First, it is interesting to note that the asymmetry is deployed against moral judgments. I wonder why this kind of asymmetry is not also deployed against other kinds of judgments that appear to elicit perennial disagreements. I have in mind the various theses that one finds in metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, political philosophy, history, cotemporary physics, psychology, etc. In short, nearly every domain of inquiry... Isn’t this just the specter of logical positivism making another appearance?

To be sure, I am aware of the various context-sensitivities that are part and parcel of moral judgment. I’m keenly open to forms of non-Absolutism (which should not be conflated with anti-objectivity). However, I’m curious as to why those who deploy the aforementioned asymmetry aim only or most prominently at moral judgment. Why not level the playing field en toto. At least the Pyrrhonian skeptics were consistent in their adoption of skepticism across the board with their disagreement criteria.

Second, as I look at some of the world-crushing events of only the past century, I think of World War II. I think that persons deeply involved in the Nazi and anti-Nazi war campaigns vigorously disagreed about the moral status of Jewish persons. I don’t think this stands as some kind of special evidence that there isn’t a fact of the matter about the moral value of Jewish persons.

Multiply instances of moral disagreement on the contemporary political and moral landscape, just in the United States, and I think we see a dazzling array of disagreement over all sorts of critical issues, none of which obviously can be said to be populated by participants who think the issues do not trade in cognitively contentful statements with truth value.

In fact, one might even say that the very existence of disagreement, more often than not, solidifies our belief that there are facts about which we disagree (where values are numbered among these facts that describe a situation). The old fact-value dichotomy that has been exploded numerous times over is still a kind of specter that just doesn’t get the hint that it’s been effectively exorcised in theory and definitely in practice!

So, I guess at the end of it all, I don’t get what’s supposed to be so significant about the phenomena of disagreement.

a brief meditation about open-theism

A quick and easy route to open-theism or something near enough...

A few years ago, Hilary Bok wrote a really fun book titled Freedom and Responsibility. Essentially, she articulates a compatibilism that is deeply Kantian in spirit. The book is definitely worth reading.

In her book, she uses a marvelously fictive device called “the pocket oracle.” The pocket oracle is a perfect predictor of your own future actions (where your choices number among your actions).

Well, what would happen if one consulted such an oracle?

Consultation of such an oracle, I think, would almost completely, if not completely, rob one of ignorance. If one takes ignorance (or some degree of ignorance) to be a crucial ingredient of genuine deliberation, and if one takes deliberation to be a crucial ingredient of intentional action, and if one takes the intentional component of action to be a crucial ingredient of anything that deserves the name “action,” then anyone who knows his/her own future cannot be a genuine actor.

This little chain of inferences is totally general with respect to the nature of the agent. The agent could be human or divine. It doesn’t appear to change the dynamic of the inferences one bit.

So, take these notions and apply them to God. I think it becomes really clear why one would be motivated towards something like an open-theism. If one would like to preserve the view of God as a genuine agent, a divine personage who is creatively active in the space-time world, then it makes perfect sense to deny that future contingent propositions have a truth-value (which implies that even an omniscient being could not know them).

Notice that this doesn’t really have any direct tie with the kinds of considerations that normally move persons to adopt open theism—viz., worries about God having an alibi for the problem of evil. Instead, the present considerations have to do with the metaphysics and psychology of agency, not with any worries about theodicy.

The options are pretty clear for the theist: (a) affirm something like open-theism, (b) deny that the little chain of inferences is true, (c) middle way: grant that the chain is true for human agents but deny that it is true for divine agents (why the asymmetry?), or (d) punt the whole discussion to one of “mystery” yet continue discussion as an interesting and philosophically fruitful intellectual exercise.

I’m sure I’m missing some other options (e.g., Classical inclusions of premises about time and timelessness... which would actually be a way of articulating option (c)), but these are the ones that are most obvious to me.

understanding others

Some philosophers (maybe Quine; Fodor seems to accuse him of this) hold that in order to understand what another is saying, you need to understand all the other's beliefs and concepts. For to understand what another is saying or believing, you need to understand what they mean, what their whole set of concepts and beliefs are, so you can accurately place their currently expressed belief in the whole package of beliefs and thus adequately understand it. This is a full or maybe even extreme holism. It seems a holism adapted to an overly idealized enlightenment conception (or misconception) of certainty.

I wonder if a moderate holism might allow that in order to understand another, understand reasonably well enough, you need to understand some of the other's closely related beliefs, but not the entire package of the other's beliefs (an impossible standard to achieve, thus leading to skepticism about ever understanding another). Example: if you say "I have a lot of reading to do for tomorrow, before class" I can assume we share similar beliefs about reading (what it involves, even if we disagree to some extent upon the level of comprehension needed to actually judge it as reading as opposed to simply skimming words) and the notion of a lot (even if there are relatively minor agreements about details) and the notion of class (I would be assuming, depending on who told me this, it would be a college class). But I do not need to assume beliefs about your theory of planetary or celestial motion (for the concept of "tomorrow"), or your beliefs about mental processes (for the concept of reading), or your beliefs about person identity (for the concept of I) in order to engage in sensible communication with you.

I worry that if you need to understand the entire package of another's beliefs in order to understand anything whatsoever that another asserts, understanding would be impossible. I also wonder if Derrida affirms the antecedent of my previous sentence, and so affirms also the consequent.

great question

I was asked recently whether the study of philosophy makes one more skeptical.

I didn't know how to answer for at least a couple of reasons.

First, I really don't know how to answer questions at that level of generality.

Second, I still haven't figured out what the study of philosophy has done to me.

Thoughts from those who've been made skeptical or otherwise by philosophy?

strange bedfellows

I can’t speak for everyone, but for myself I do not believe in substantial forms and hence find myself rejecting all types of hylomorphism in ontology.

Many of my friends share this rejection of hylomorphism as either a description or an explanation of phenomena.

What I find interesting and puzzling is that many of my religiously serious friends (and I count myself as religiously serious) who reject substantial forms with all the hylomorphic implications nevertheless retain it in their dualistic view of human persons. I should be a little more precise: either their substantial dualistic views of human persons or their advert of the medieval “soul is the form of the body” views.

I will not go so far as to say that this is inconsistent. It’s not. But it does strike me as odd.

Perhaps there are independent reasons to think that something like hylomorphism is required in the case of human beings but not so in the case of all other natural phenomena. (Human beings are supernatural phenomena? I don’t quite get that if that is indeed a possible response.)

make-believe

I have several friends who blog about their kids.

One of my friends has a son who’s lately been entering the phase of make-believe and pretend. His latest obsession is pretending to cook muffins with materials like leaves, dirt, sand, etc.

It’s interesting how while it’s certainly true that nearly all animals with more evolved forms of intelligence/consciousness engage in play, very few if any besides human beings engage in make-believe, pretending, or counterfactual thought, where the make-believer plays through a scenario in which something that is not actually the case is pretended to be the case for the sake of the playtime.

This is so ordinary an experience that it seems like it hardly merits attention. Children pretend that reality is other than it actually is for the sake of play, and many times they even pretend that they are other than they actually are in terms of their identities. (Adults do this too, obviously, but at different levels.)

What’s so cool is that this most mundane of human behaviors is what seems to underlie all of the complex skills involved in fully functional adult life: mature empathy and problem-solving of all kinds (e.g., practical, business-related, moral, etc.) where the requisite skill requires one to imagine what would be the case in any number of contingencies. It also seems to me critical for our ability to regret the past, since regretting the past requires imaginatively reconstructing a picture of what could have been but in fact was not.

So, in a really nifty way, the playtime of children, especially the make-believe stuff, is all of a piece with the deepest essence of moral and cognitive formation.

why Descartes' criterion of doubt is awesome

I don’t know how many times I’ve read Descartes’ Meditations. I’ve definitely read it more than any other philosophical text so far, and I love it (and hate it) every time. It’s amazing to think about how much of an impact that short treatise has made on academic philosophy in particular and on intellectual culture in general.

The criterion of doubt continues to capture my interest, as well as I think any epistemologically minded reader of Descartes.

I think Descartes tied it to a completely implausible theory of mind, whereby the cognizer is endowed by God with an extremely powerful doxastic will. Perhaps Descartes was able to exercise his will such that he was able to disbelieve obvious perceptual appearance propositions or even mathematical propositions. I can’t.

See this post for what I think motivated Descartes to affirm such a strong doxastic voluntarism.

However, I think it would be premature to jettison the criterion of doubt on the implausibility of the overly strong Cartesian will. There’s a way to think about and deeply appreciate the criterion of doubt that has lasting salutary effects on one’s philosophical temper.

Here’s how it goes. Even though, pace Descartes, I am not able to disbelieve at will some of the beliefs that are forced upon me (such as ordinary sense perceptual beliefs), I can nevertheless engage in epistemic empathy combined with a little make-believe. I can imagine what it would be like to fail to hold a belief in question. A little further, I can imagine what it would be like for me to live without a belief in question.

Perhaps an example is in order.

I currently believe that there is a God. This is a fairly strong belief over which I do not exercise direct control, either to believe or disbelieve. There are things that could happen to me (some of which I might be able to initiate in some sense which might qualify as very indirect control) that would alter the strength of the belief or perhaps vanquish it altogether, but the important point to note is that these scenarios involve something happening to my beliefs.

Even though I do not exercise direct control over this belief, I can nevertheless imagine myself and my life without belief in the existence of God. Many things would change; many would remain exactly as they are. In this respect, I can bring about a kind of empathy and identification with that version of myself. I prefer the way I am now (and the way reality is, if my current representation is true), but I also don’t recoil at the picture that is formed on the basis of the thought experiment of the alternative.

Back to the criterion of doubt and the possible salutary effects...

Even though Descartes is wrong to connect the criterion of doubt with his view of the cognitive will, the criterion is useful in that it is an aid towards epistemic humility.

If one can imagine, consider, and form a lively picture about the alternative epistemic commitments one might bear (and manage not to recoil), I think one is better off, on the whole, in terms of one’s intellectual virtues of fair-mindedness, intellectual charity, and accurate self-assessment of one’s own epistemic justification. This becomes important and evident when one actually encounters someone else whose beliefs differ markedly on a range of issues, some of which might be quite important. If one has already exercised this practice of “otherness” on oneself and also found that imaginary “self-other” not to be so foreign after all, then the extension of charity should be one of degree, not of kind, when one encounters another person who might initially strike one as “other.”

I guess in a weird kind of way, the criterion of doubt can be mobilized into an epistemic counterpart of the Golden Rule.

All of this is consistent with having epistemic commitments. This need not be an inevitable precursor to skepticism, relativism, anti-realism, or fill-in-your-favorite-bad-blank-ism (though I have to admit that I really like skepticism).

And if the criterion is one aid, one type of exercise, in forming the habits and dispositions of epistemic humility, then I’m all for it.

from the "This, I Believe" Series on NPR

Finding Equality Through Logic

Weekend Edition Sunday, August 3, 2008

“This, I Believe” Series

by Yvette Doss

[Yvette Doss works in fundraising for Indiana University Northwest in Gary, Ind. A native of Los Angeles, she was founding editor of an alternative paper and a Latino zine. Doss has written for the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine and NPR.]

I believe that you can take control of your destiny through the power of philosophy.

The turning point for me was the day I learned that the questions I had about religion, morals, inequality and injustice in the world were not only acceptable questions, but questions to be encouraged. Great minds — like Plato and Descartes — had spent countless hours pondering life’s mysteries throughout the ages.

I realized that my mind, the mind of a misfit half-Mexican teenage girl living in an immigrant neighborhood in L.A., could ponder those mysteries, too. The fact that my best friend dropped out of school at age 16 to have a baby, or that few of my neighbors had college educations, did not exclude me from the conversation of the ages.

I believe the act of philosophical thinking is not the exclusive domain of the privileged, the moneyed, the old or the accomplished.

I lived in a household run by a single mother, and I moved around from neighborhood to neighborhood, from new school to new school. There were gangs, crime and substandard schools to contend with in my pocket of southeast Los Angeles. I struggled with finding my place in a world that, though imperfect, was the closest thing I had to home. But I had big questions on my mind, too.

Did my challenging circumstances mean that I should only think about the difficulty of day-to-day existence? Why couldn’t I wonder about the larger questions in life, like, “Why are we here? Does it have to be this way? What if there isn’t a God?” And most importantly: “Was I destined to accept my lot in life just because I was born with fewer advantages than those luckier than I?”

The crisp pages of the books I cracked open each night and read until I fell asleep with a flashlight tucked under my arm told me otherwise.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said.

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Simone de Beauvoir shared: “I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and the truth rewarded me.”

Descartes and Hume validated my questioning of dogmatic religious belief. I was connected to the larger world of ideas through the simple act of opening those books.

Thanks to philosophers, my new friends, I considered my thoughts worth expressing. And later, when I tried my hand at writing, I experienced the joy of seeing my thoughts fill a page.

I believe the wisdom of the ages helped me see beyond my station in life, helped me imagine a world in which I mattered. Philosophy gave me permission to use my mind and the inspiration to aim high in my goals for myself. Philosophy allowed me to dare to imagine a world in which man can reason his way to justice, women can choose their life’s course, and the poor can lift themselves out of the gutter.

Philosophy taught me that logic makes equals of us all.

[Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.]

academic philosophy

We've had family visiting us from Los Angeles for the past month or so. The latest visitors are my brother, his wife, and his daughter.

Having my 18 month old niece here for the past several days has temporarily put much of my abstract thinking on the back burner.

And in fact I have absolutely no complaints. I'm not saying that academic philosophy is not important... not by any stretch... I'm just saying that having an 18 month old kid around puts academic philosophy in perspective.

Here we are in the "amber box" at the Guthrie Theatre.

here and now

There are many analogies between space and time.

I’d like to point out an alleged disanalogy between the import of two essential indexicals: “here” and “now.”

One way to display the (alleged) difference is to ask of “here” whether it is privileged or unique. Of course, there is an obvious sense in which it is unique or privileged. It is both to the one who uses the indexical in the context of locating oneself at a particular spatial place.

However, there is a sense in which “here” is completely generic and promiscuous. There are as many instances of “here” as there are ones who utter (or think) or possibly utter (or possibly think) things such as “I am here.” In an of itself, “here” does not point out any one privileged, particular place independent of users of the indexical. In other words, “here” or the property of hereness is user dependent.

It isn’t at all strange to the ears to hear something like: “If there were no persons, there would be no instances of ‘here,’ since ‘hereness’ is in some sense strongly experience-dependent.” (This is NOT to say that there would be no space or spatial locations minus perceivers.)

The situation appears different concerning “now.”

I think that it’s not too much of a stretch to say that many (perhaps most?) people think that “now” is special in a way that “here” is not. It is NOT merely perspectival as is the case with the utterly perspectival “here.” Instead, “now” seems to refer to a special property that time qua time has independently of persons or their language. My colleagues on the other side of Minneapolis (indeed, my friends as well on the other side of the globe) are certainly experiencing many different instances of “here” than I am, but they are surely experiencing the very same, one and only “now.” Our different perspectives do not appear to affect “now,” and thus the disanalogy.

It isn’t at all strange to the ears to hear something like: “If there were no persons, there would still be a privileged ‘now’ even in the absence of anyone to experience it.”

The importance of “now” is deployed to help make sense of the privileged uniqueness of the present, as opposed to the past and future, and the transition between past, present, and future. It seems undeniable that time passes, for lack of a better term. It also seems that once we leave the past behind, there’s no going back, because the “now” keeps chugging along (at its own pace, interestingly). Again, that’s different than “here,” where I can revisit previous “heres.” I can walk upstairs to the bedroom that used to be a place that I referred to as one of my instances of “here.”

While according well with everyday experience, this commonsense view (about the specialness of “now”) is probably wrong, and the disanalogies are not as deep as they might initially appear.

More on that (a) at a later time or (b) in the future [temporal expressions (a) and (b) do NOT mean the same thing]...

Jonathan Edwards on original sin

Well, I just sat down to re-read Jonathan Edwards’ defense of the doctrine of original sin. [Philosophical aside: Personally, I think the doctrine of original sin is philosophically confusing. I don’t quite understand it.]

His treatment is even more radical than I had remembered. His project is to answer objections about the alleged injustice of imputing Adam and Eve’s sin/guilt to their posterity. [Philosophical aside: I think this question is interesting regardless of whether one takes the Adam and Even story to be historical, allegorical, mytho-poetical, whatever. I could care less which of these one adopts.]

He does have some stuff in there that intimates something like a four-dimensionalism (though not strictly so), applied to the entire human species. Each alleged individual is, in a sense, a slice of the human species.

He writes:
“I think, it would go far towards directing us to the more clear and distinct conceiving and right stating of this affair, if we steadily bear this in mind; that God, in each step of his proceeding with Adam, in relation to the covenant or constitution established with him, looked on his posterity as being one with him. (The propriety of his looking upon them so, I shall speak to afterwards.) And though he dealt more immediately with Adam, yet it was as the head of the whole body, and the root of the whole tree; and in his proceedings with him, he dealt with all the branches, as if they had been then existing in their root. From which it will follow, that both guilt, or exposedness to punishment, and also depravity of heart, came upon Adam’s posterity just as they came upon him, as much as if he and they had all coexisted, like a tree with many branches; allowing only for the 16 difference necessarily resulting from the place Adam stood in, as head or root of the whole, and being first and most immediately dealt with, and most immediately acting and suffering. Otherwise, it is as if, in every step of proceeding, every alteration in the root had been attended, at the same instant, with the same steps and alterations throughout the whole tree, in each individual branch. I think, this will naturally follow on the supposition of there being a constituted oneness or identity of Adam and his posterity in this affair.”

He then deals with an immediate and obvious objection that this way of speaking of “oneness” or “identity” is completely inappropriate.

It’s the way he deals with this objection that is radical. Like the clever metaphysician he was, he argues that it’s not any stranger than any case of identity or sameness.

He begins with the standard Cartesian line on divine concurrence vis-à-vis endurance, namely, there isn’t any if we’re being strictly philosophical about it. Each moment is God’s (re)creating out of nothing the entire space-time reality. Each momentary slice is strictly causally unconnected to the previous and later moments.

He writes:
“It will certainly follow from these things, that God’s preserving created things in being is perfectly equivalent to a continued creation, or to his creating those things out of nothing at each moment of their existence.”

From there, he eventually goes after personal identity and the identity of substances, arguing that these paradigm cases of identity are actually what he calls “dependent” on the will of God. After all, at each given moment, my slices are related, at best, by a Humean relation of contiguity in space and time, but there is no authentic causal relation between them. [Philosophical aside: Note the question-begging phrase “authentic causal relation” in the previous sentence. Caveat lector!] Each is a kind of momentary substance that winks in and then immediately out of existence. (So here, Edwards would not qualify as a genuine four-dimensionalist. He would be more like a three-dimensionalist presentist who denies that anything endures.)

He writes:
“From these things it will clearly follow, that identity of consciousness depends wholly on a law of nature; and so, on the sovereign will and agency of God; and therefore, that personal identity, and so the derivation of the pollution and guilt of past sins in the same person, depends on an arbitrary divine constitution: and this, even though we should allow the same consciousness not to be the only thing which constitutes oneness of person, but should, besides that, suppose sameness of substance requisite. For if same consciousness be one thing necessary to personal identity, and this depends on God’s sovereign constitution, it will still follow, that personal identity depends on God’s sovereign constitution. And with respect to the identity of created substance itself, in the different moments of its duration, I think, we shall greatly mistake, if we imagine it to be like that absolute independent identity of the first being, whereby “he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Nay, on the contrary, it may be demonstrated, that even this oneness of created substance, existing at different times, is a merely dependent identity; dependent on the pleasure and sovereign constitution of him who worketh all in all.”

What he does is relativize identity to the will of God. Hence, how God views identity is what makes identity. All cases of identity are relative in this way, and so “oneness” or “sameness” is context dependent, and the justice of applying these predicates to unify particulars and treat them as parts of the same whole is all in the eye of a Giant Beholder.

The distinct, conscious episodes that I ordinarily look upon as my own consciousness are actually causally distinct (i.e., a fairly radical occasionalism runs all through this particular Edwards piece), and what *makes* them one is that God *treats* them as one. And if this is true of the paradigm cases of identity, then what’s so unjust or unseemly about treating all human agents as parts of one object? So asks Edwards.

He ends on this note:

He writes:
“There are various kinds of identity and oneness, found among created things, by which they become one in different manners, respects and degrees, and to various purposes; several of which differences have been observed; and every kind is ordered, regulated and limited, in every respect, by divine constitution. Some things, existing in different times and places, are treated by their Creator as one in one respect, and others in another; some are united for this communication, and others for that; but all according to the sovereign pleasure of the Fountain of all being and operation. It appears, particularly, from what has been said, that all oneness, by virtue whereof pollution and guilt from past wickedness are derived, depends entirely on a divine establishment. ‘Tis this, and this only, that must account for guilt and an evil taint on any individual soul, in consequence of a crime committed twenty or forty years ago, remaining still, and even to the end of the world and forever. ‘Tis this, that must account for the continuance of any such thing, anywhere, as consciousness of acts that are past; and for the continuance of all habits, either good or bad: and on this depends everything that can belong to personal identity. And all communications, derivations, or continuation of qualities, properties, or relations, natural or moral, from what is past, as if the subject were one, depends on no other foundation. And I am persuaded, no solid reason can be given, why God, who constitutes all other created union or oneness, according to his pleasure, and for what purposes, communications, and effects he pleases, may not establish a constitution whereby the natural posterity of Adam, proceeding from him, much as the buds and branches from the stock or root of a tree, should be treated as one with him, for the derivation, either of righteousness and communion in rewards, or of the loss of righteousness and consequent corruption and guilt.”

So, in the end, it’s not really the quasi-four-dimensionalism that’s the interesting, radical stuff (though of course there’s some of that really in Edwards).

It’s his novel view of the metaphysics of identity.

Cartesian voluntarism

I'm back from a short trip to Los Angeles, and now for a quick blog entry...

Descartes is delightfully notorious for so many things.

One of those things is a deep, divine voluntarism not just about the good but also about the true. In particular, he is a voluntarist about modal truths.

One way to make this sound less crazy (and perhaps even be less crazy, if true) is to domesticate what is happening when one asserts modal claims.

According to Descartes, a modal claim asserts what is or is not understandable or consistently statable within the limitations of human conception.

To say of P that it is impossible is to say that no person whose cognitive processes are efficiently at work can place P within her noetic structure without running into a contradiction. Notice that the only thing that this strictly entails is that P is not thinkable by persons with the aforementioned cognitive faculties.

The obvious question asks why it’s unthinkable.

Descartes’ answer is that God made persons with those cognitive faculties and their limitations. In that respect, God is the author of modal truths (since modal truths are actually just statements about what can and cannot be conceived — viz., statements about intellectual limitations of properly functioning cognizers).

An obvious answer to the why question that Descartes rejects is that we have some special criterial insight into the nature of what is really possible and impossible by means of our conceivability.

This helps to explain why Descartes would say of God that he could have made it the case that 2 and 2 equal 5 and that God does not have to trouble himself with modal truths in his own understanding.

This doesn’t really line up well with Descartes a priori argument for the existence of God in the Meditations, partly because his voluntarism is muted in that work. Nevertheless, it’s an undeniable chunk of his philosophy and well attested in his correspondence, even if it imports some inconsistency into his overall system.

Here’s a sample written to Arnauld:

“I do not think we should ever say of anything that it cannot be brought about by God. For since every basis of truth and goodness depends on his omnipotence, I would not venture to say that God cannot make an uphill without a downhill, or that one and two should not be three. But I merely say that he has given me such a mind that I cannot conceive an uphill without a downhill, or a sum of one and two which is not three, and that such things involve a contradiction in my conception (CSMK 358-9).”

Does this make Descartes a modal skeptic? I’m not sure how to answer that question, but his modal reasoning is certainly more intriguing and problematic when seen in this light.

Once again, special care paid to these early modern philosophers explodes such platitudes attributed to them such as “conceivability is a test for possibility.”