let the children play

What makes sense of regret? Obviously, there are the moral kinds of reasons, but that’s not what I have in mind. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I end up regretting past actions, I do so believing that things could have been different than they in fact were. I could have made a different choice, imagining an alternate version of myself with slightly to vastly different desires, temperament, and beliefs at the crucial moment of decision.

This ability to reason or, at the very least, to imagine alternate scenarios – states of affairs that are in fact false but might have been true – is a really awesome and important ability (often called “counterfactual reasoning”). For instance, I imagine an alternate version of myself from this morning, and that version of myself has breakfast (when in fact it’s false that I actually had breakfast this morning).

I don’t think it’s unique to human species. There’s empirical evidence that many animals engage in behavior that is best explained with a theory of mind that attributes some similar power to them. In humans, however, the ability is deployed at higher levels of sophistication and placement within a social ecology.

Take little children, for example, who play make-believe. They imagine themselves not merely as alternate versions of themselves but as utterly different kinds of things, human and otherwise. My friend’s son plays make-believe, pretending to be a king or an animal or a fire truck or a school teacher or a... This complex cognitive behavior is actually practice for adult moral sensibility. It is a rudimentary form of the combination between counterfactual imagination and empathy. The dual abilities to imagine oneself in “another’s shoes,” so to speak, and to be able to see alternate possibilities of behavior and consequences retrospectively into the past (i.e., regret) and into the future (i.e., choice) form the raw materials of moral agency. Hence when children are whiling away hours and hours of pure, unbridled play, they are actually constructing the cognitive and conative structures that undergird high-functioning ethical character.

When I regret an action, especially one where the action affects someone other than myself, I perceive in my mind’s eye at least two things: (a) how things could have turned out differently and (b) what it’s like to be the other who suffers because of my poor decision. While these components are built into us by evolutionary mechanisms, they are also nurtured by things as innocent, simple, and vital as pure play.

These components are also the root structures that allow for us to be so good at deception and manipulation.

Two sides of a coin...

ode to Alexander Calder

I attended a lecture by one of my colleagues (an art historian), and I was treated to a discussion of the lovely work by the American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976).



The second work is titled “Two Systems.”

I think that all of us will recognize this as a mobile.

The mobile has become so common that it’s a cliché hanging over practically every crib in America.

Alexander Calder, the inventor of the mobile, had a deeper vision articulated in the form of the mobile.

The mobile is a representation of reality. The visual image implicates little bits and pieces moving in a playful dance. While everything is carefully balanced, there is a play and fluidity of suspension. Nothing is static; everything is moving.

The very artifact is altered with each spectator, since different bodies will cause the ambient air to brush the mobile into different morphologies, resulting in analogically different morphologies of meaning – quite independent of the artist’s intention. Existence vividly precedes essence.

It’s the perfect collision of surrealism and existentialism.

The virtue of thankfulness

This is an updated version of a post from my own blog written prior to Thanksgiving:

As Aquinas puts it in the Summa Theologiae, "Whether thankfulness is a virtue, distinct from the other virtues?" For Aquinas, the answer is yes, because thankfulness is "a special part of justice." Giving thanks to our benefactors, i.e. those who have given us a particular and personal favor, is an issue of obligation, or justice. We owe gratitude to them, and this is different from the related virtues of religion (owed to God), piety (owed to parents), and observance (owed to those who excel in dignity). We are left with thankfulness as a virtue distinct from these related excellences of character. His answer here only makes sense in light of the specific objection he is considering, as Aquinas distinguishes character traits by their objects, and it is on this basis that he claims a distinct role for thankfulness as a matter of justice.

The point, I take it, is that Thomas believes that gratitude is important in a variety of ways, related to God, parents, excellent human beings, and finally those who have benefitted us via a favor of some sort. We owe something to all of these persons, according to Thomas. One can see why we owe something to God, parents, and our benefactors, but why to excellent persons? I think we owe them gratitude for showing us how to live a human life in a way that is conducive to human flourishing. I think of people I know that have shed light on this by their example, and the claim that I owe them thanks seems very plausible. So thanks to Jon Sederquist, J.P. Moreland, Lewis Winkler, Dave Dishman, Terry McKinney, and the many others who have done this for me.

candy for the brain

Click on the photo below.

Conceptual Schemes

I first encountered the thought of Donald Davidson in 1982 in a graduate seminar conducted by Alasdair MacIntyre. The first thing I read was "Actions, Reasons, and Causes." The second thing I read was "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme." I have agreed with almost everything that I have come to understand from the work and thought of Donald Davidson. I agree with his views on truth and meaning, for example. I agree with his views on rational action and intention. I agree with his views on the distinction between causes of belief and reasons for belief. And I agree with his rejection of the intelligibility of the idea of a conceptual scheme. On that last one, I may well be in a minority among philosophers, and certainly am among academics. So I am wondering:

First, what motivates a belief in conceptual schemes? Why would one want to think that there are “alternative” conceptual schemes, or radically incommensurable conceptual schemes? What conceptual or theoretical (or political?) work does a belief in conceptual schemes achieve?

Second, on occasion I hear someone speaking of another person as living in a completely different world. If that is not hyperbolic, I cannot make sense of what I hear. Or could it be that the person meant that the other operated under a completely different conceptual scheme?

Third, and I think this might be different from the first two, I sometimes hear people, even reasonably intelligent academics, stating that some other people see the world completely differently from the way I see it. Again, apart from hyperbole I do not know how to make sense of that thought. I could make sense of the notion that a robot capable of ambulating without running into things sees the world differently than I do (actually, that it would be metaphorical to even say it sees).

Fourth (I am trying to understand why anyone should be attracted to the belief that there are alternative conceptual schemes), could it be that some confuse differences of language and vocabulary with differences of concept? For example, might my vocabulary for identifying birds be rather coarse, while an ornithologist would have a more fine-tuned and nuanced vocabulary? The ornithologist is more discriminating than I am.