Comments on The Splintered Mind: Against Metaphysics, Especially the Metaphysics of...

The word "meta" means "self-aware," which means th...

2008-07-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

The word "meta" means "self-aware," which means that established fields of knowledge are distilled phenomenologically and reiterated as subjective theory. Metaphysics isn't a sham but is in the unique position of offering nothing that be objectively proven but everything than can be subjectively useful. Explore my metaphysics tags for good examples.

If you are interested in a view of how the brain c...

2008-07-17T08:14:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in a view of how the brain constrains our intersubjective understanding of verbally communicated concepts you might take a look at "The Pragmatics of Cognition" in *The Cognitive Brain*,pp. 300-301.

Oh, and Arnold, I'm with you on that -- though the...

2008-07-16T17:44:00.000-07:00

Oh, and Arnold, I'm with you on that -- though there is clever philosophy enough out there to wiggle out of almost anything, so I don't think the argument will be a short one!

What a great and helpful discussion, Jonathan and ...

2008-07-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

What a great and helpful discussion, Jonathan and Joachim! Thanks so much!

I don't think I'm so far away from the point on which you two are converging, perhaps -- although we might be being a bit too rough here with "rational"? I probably wouldn't require someone to have the right philosophical views at the end of the day for that person to count as rational.

Also, I'm not so sure that the views described as "funny" really are so bad. Williamson's view of vagueness strikes me as pretty odd, too! One could have a different set of rules for the quantifier "all", for example. I'm not an "atomist" or "molecularist" about concept possession -- closer to holism (but not crazy holism), where divergences in patterns of use are sufficient to render concepts slightly different -- so we don't necessarily share *exactly* the same concept of "all" with someone who has a different logic for it, and my concept of "bachelor" is somewhat different if I admit a range of vague cases and you do not. So then, what's analytic and rational for you with respect to the concepts we both describe with those labels may differ....

Jonathan, I agree! So, if you have any further tho...

2008-07-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

Jonathan, I agree! So, if you have any further thoughts about my last post or some other issue from our discussion, then I would be very interested to come to know them by email-testimony...

Joachim, I'm not sure about Williamson. I'm sure t...

2008-07-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

Joachim, I'm not sure about Williamson. I'm sure that he thinks that these subjects are making philosophical mistakes -- it seems to me that if you're making a philosophical mistake, then you're not proceeding rationally.

But I think we've gotten both off-topic and into sensitive matters of Williamson interpretation, so I'm going to suggest that we take this to email if we want to continue the discussion further.

Eric, it seems to me that anyone who believes in t...

2008-07-15T08:33:00.000-07:00

Eric, it seems to me that anyone who believes in the theory of evolution should agree with your skepticism about metaphysics as a privileged path to "a special class of truths while reflecting from an armchair."

Jonathan, given that you roughly seem to share my ...

2008-07-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

Jonathan, given that you roughly seem to share my view on knowledge based on conceptual competence, then probably it's already a bit more likely to be true... :-)

Although I don't have Williamson's argument exactly in mind, I do think that it would weaken his argument considerably if he did not suppose that rational disagreement about supposed conceptual truths is possible. I thought that this was his improvement on Quine's holism argument. Think about his example of the logician Graham Priest who denies the validity of disjunctive syllogism (because he denies the law of non-contradiction). Doesn't Williamson strongly suggest in the book that Priest is someone who rationally disagrees with him or us? After all, at least from my point of view of an amateur logician, it seems as crazy to claim that Priest fails to grasp our common logical concepts as it seems to accuse him of irrationality. Furthermore, if someone did disagree irrationally with us about some seeming conceptual truth, why should this show anything at all with regard to epistemic analyticity? For, if you are sufficiently crazy or obnoxious, you can deny anything whatsoever with any or no reason whatsoever. So, these people might still be disposed to rationally assent to "bachelors are unmarried", but there disposition could be masked by their overriding craziness. But all a sensible defender of epistemic analyticity or conceptual analysis should claim is that, in virtue of the possession of certain suitable concepts (like "knowledge" or "bachelor") we are rationally committed to the ultima facie acceptance of certain conceptual truths (in the epistemic sense).
Do you think this is plausible?

Joachim, if I'm understanding you right, the respo...

2008-07-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

Joachim, if I'm understanding you right, the response you're describing is not too car removed from my own view. I think that although possession of concepts and linguistic competence are not sufficient for knowledge of any particular analytic truth, such competences, combined with sufficient rational reflection, are.

In other words, concept possession doesn't guarantee knowledge of the Gettier conclusion -- but if you're sufficiently rational, it guarantees you enough to get to it.

By the way, I didn't take Williamson to be arguing that people could rationally decline assent to these analytic truths -- just that they could in fact, consistent with understanding, decline assent. I think Williamson will admit that his subjects are making philosophical errors, and are therefore, in some sense, failing to live up to the standards of rationality.

Jonathan, I also like Williamson's argument a lot,...

2008-07-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

Jonathan, I also like Williamson's argument a lot, but I'm also struggling to find a way to resist his conclusion. For, somehow I tend to agree with Eric here when he says: "I would be inclined to deny that someone with such persistent tendencies of misuse really does have the requisite concepts matching our own."
Now, Williamson does argue, of course, that someone could rationally disagree about a supposed conceptual truth like "bachelors are unmarried" and still possess all the relevant concepts. However, Eric rightly emphasized that persistent disagreement is the crucial case here. So, let's take the person with funny views about vagueness (call him V). Supposedly, we can find the true theory about vagueness in a rational way. But if this is so, then we will ultimately not disagree with V but converge on some theory of vagueness, and so we will also not disagree about the bachelor-sentence then, either. However, if we ultimately do not come to agree with V, then there seem to be two possibilities. (1) there is no rational way to find out the truth about vagueness, or (2) there is some kind of conceptual difference between us and V. If (1) is true, then there never was a rational disagreement between us and V in the first place - contra the above assumption. If (2), however, then there really is something like conceptual truth in the epistemic sense. Do you think this could be a promising line of response to Williamson?

Eric, your last comment seems to run together the ...

2008-07-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

Eric, your last comment seems to run together the two questions that Joachim helpfully distinguished. When I said that knowledge of concepts or language was neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge of analytic truths, I made an epistemic claim. You gave an argument against this epistemic claim, then suggested that there is a real metaphysical conception of analyticity. But, as Joachim made clear, both by argument and by serving as an example, you can disagree with my epistemic claim and still reject metaphysical analyticity.

So the rest of this comment is in defense only of my epistemic claim.

As for the question what it would be like to reject analytic truths even with understanding of the relevant language and concepts, I'm really going to just point to Williamson here. (For arguments -- I'm not accusing him of being an example!) I recommend the piece in his new book. Very briefly, he gives two kinds of examples: someone with funny views about vagueness, and someone with funny views about quantifiers.

Someone with funny views about vagueness might end up thinking it's non-true (perhaps false, perhaps indeterminate) that all bachelors are unmarried, because there are borderline cases of bachelors who are borderline cases of unmarried for whom it is not true that if they are bachelors, then they are unmarried (I -> I: I), and that the quantifier can only be true if all instances are determinately true.

Someone with funny views about quantifiers might think that it can only be true that all bachelors are unmarried if there is at least one bachelor. If he also has funny empirical views about marriage and thinks that there are no bachelors, then he'll reject the quantifier too.

These are stupid views, but I think Williamson is right that they're consistent with concept possession and knowledge of language.

Jonathan: The necessity claim is at face value fal...

2008-07-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

Jonathan: The necessity claim is at face value false, but there may be a version of it that can be worked out in terms of translation or the like. What is it to believe that bachelors are unmarried? Maybe you need some concept that translates roughly into the concept "bachelor" (or some conceptual architecture that invites such a concept)....

On the sufficiency claim: What would it be to possess the concept "bachelor", "married", etc., and NOT believe that bachelors are unmarried? I don't think a lapse in judgment due to a bad argument would suffice, but only a persistent (and counterfactual supporting) tendency to misuse the terms in a variety inferences and attributions (this fits in with my broadly dispositional view of belief) -- and I would be inclined to deny that someone with such persistent tendencies of misuse really does have the requisite concepts matching our own. (A different story will have to be told, of course, for false beliefs about complex mathematical facts.)

So I hold to the view that there are analytic truths that are truths "about" or that are "made true by" (or something like that, I'm not sure how best to put it) facts about our conceptual systems and structures. This is not to say that there aren't problematic cases in natural language (is "stars emit light" uttered pre-scientifically true in virtue of its meaning?), but I have a story to tell about such cases. (Briefly: "Sun" in natural, prescientific language does not pick out a single rigid concept but rather can be rigorized and developed in different ways, and depending on the empirical facts we may want to rigorize or develop it one way or another.)

Thanks, Joachim, I'm reluctant to describe myself ...

2008-07-14T11:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Joachim, I'm reluctant to describe myself as a friend of "metaphysical analyticity," and as I briefly mentioned in an earlier reply to Jonathan, truth-makers is not really my prefered idiom -- but there still may be a sense in which I accept what you and Boghossian call "metaphysical analyticity". So sure, why don't you send along that paper!

I posted behind Joachim without realizing it. I'll...

2008-07-13T09:33:00.000-07:00

I posted behind Joachim without realizing it. I'll just add that he's right to separate the epistemic questions from the metaphysical ones, and I should have done a better job of that in my last comment.

The question whether analytic truths obtain in virtue of meaning is independent from the question whether conceptual or linguistic knowledge is sufficient for knowledge of those truths. I say "no" to both anyway, but Joachim points out that you can say no to the first and yes to the second.

I'll tag in for Joachim; I think we're on the same...

2008-07-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'll tag in for Joachim; I think we're on the same page.

What Quine demonstrated, I think, which is also what I was arguing earlier, is that there is no interesting sense in which the fact that all bachelors are unmarried obtains in virtue of the meaning of any terms.

There are some uninteresting senses, of course. Like this one: the sentence, "all bachelors are unmarried", is made true in part by the meanings of its words -- if "bachelors" had referred to husbands instead of to bachelors, the sentence would be false. But of course this kind of "truth in virtue of meaning is cheap" -- the sentence, "Jonathan is a bachelor" is true partly because of the meanings of its terms, too. It would also be false if "bachelor" meant husband.

Knowledge of concepts and language are, I think, neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge that all bachelors are unmarried. The necessity claim is easily refuted: many people know that bachelors are unmarried who do not have any idea what the word "bachelor" means. I have in mind, for instance, people who don't speak English.

The sufficiency claim is trickier and more controversial, but I have become convinced by Timothy Williamson's recent arguments (ch. 4, if memory serves of PoP) that it is possible for someone to have the relevant linguistic and conceptual knowledge and nevertheless fail to know that all bachelors are unmarried, if, for instance, he becomes convinced by faulty reasoning that this proposition is not true.

Eric, maybe you can grant me the use of "about" fo...

2008-07-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

Eric, maybe you can grant me the use of "about" for now (which seems so hard to avoid, I guess, because it serves as something like a general placeholder for any kind of referential relation between words/concepts and the world - and I really would like to hold on to this kind of minimal semantic realism!). Then I agree with the following: There is a sense in which we can learn that bachelors are unmarried merely in virtue of understanding the English sentence "bachelors are unmarried". This sense was quite aptly dubbed "epistemic analyticity" by Boghossian (in his 1997 "Analyticity"). The other sense of "truth in virtue of meaning", however, is the one of being made true by meanings/concepts or of being about meanings/concepts, which Boghossian calls "metaphysical analyticity". And it is this latter sense that is attacked by the argument from Quine that I was referring to. So, in short, I have no in principle objection against conceptual truth in the sense of epistemic analyticity (in fact, I try to defend conceptual analysis in my dissertation), but I think that metaphysical analyticity is in big trouble, though (but maybe not hopelessly so; if you are interested why, then I can send you the forthcoming paper "In Defense of Metaphysical Analyticity" by Frank Hofmann and me) - and that's where Quine definitely had a point!

Sorry, Joachim, if I interpreted you uncharitably ...

2008-07-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Joachim, if I interpreted you uncharitably there! I've so often heard people appeal to Quine's arguments against Carnap and the analytic/synthetic distinction appealed to in argument-from-authority style that I've got a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.

I worry about the word "about" in your and Quine's argument here, and I regret casting my own point in that way earlier -- though I also find it hard to avoid the term entirely! I might be willing to grant that "bachelors are unmarried" is "about" bachelors, in some sense of "about" -- but still it's true in virtue of the meanings of the terms, isn't it? There's some sense in which one can learn this truth without knowing anything "about" the world beyond our concepts and language, yes?

Eric, my reference to Quine was not at all intende...

2008-07-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

Eric, my reference to Quine was not at all intended as an appeal to authority. In fact, I am highly critical of all of Quine's arguments against the analytic/synthetic-distinction, except the one from "Carnap and Logical Truth" I was referring to. And I think I didn't just gesture vaguely in Quine's direction but I also said what the argument is. So let me repeat it in my own words this time:
A sentence like "John is a bachelor" is not about concepts or our own psychology, but about John and a certain social status that he has, namely being a bachelor. But why, then, should we assume that a sentence like "bachelors are unmarried" is about concepts and not also about some worldly fact, namely that being a bachelor and being unmarried always occur together? It just doesn't make any sense to me to claim that "bachelor" has a different reference in the second sentence compared to the first. After all, there is no indication that "bachelor" could be ambiguos like "bank", or that it might have some hidden indexical component. So, the point that I tried to make, maybe hiding too much behind Quine's back, was simply this: If you claim that "bachelors are unmarried" is about our concepts, and not about bachelors, than you owe as a credible account why all the semantic appearances count against your view, or how you intend to explain those appearances away. The burden of proof, I think, is entirely on your side here, as always when one of two contradictory claims is so much less plausible than the other.

I agree with you, Genius, with special emphasis on...

2008-07-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

I agree with you, Genius, with special emphasis on the point that what we learn from armchair introspection is a consequence of facts about the world (resulting from previous encounters or possibly evolutionary selection) affecting our minds.

And yes, Arnold, how could one disagree with that -- at least without overthrowing evolutionary theory!

Joachim: I find it interesting how analytic philos...

2008-07-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

Joachim: I find it interesting how analytic philosophers will use arguments from authority using Quine as an authority as they will with respect to virtually no other philosopher. I think Quine was right that the analytic/synthetic distinction with regard to natural language is blurry, but I think much less follows from this against Carnap that people ordinarily suppose. For example, I think we can use concepts as technical terms with official definitions such that analytic truths follow from them. We may not, in the end, decide such concepts are useful, if the empirical facts turn out a certain way, but that doesn't undermine the analyticity of certain statements.

My view is indeed similar to Carnap's in many ways, though I also differ from him in other ways. I don't think metaphysics is "nonsense", only that its truths are truths about the users' concepts. I don't accept verificationism. And I don't hold to a cartoon version of the analytic/synthetic distinction.

I'd be happy to hear more, though, about what particular arguments from Quine you believe undermine my views.

Thanks, Jonathan and others, for continuing to pus...

2008-07-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Jonathan and others, for continuing to push me on this. There's nothing like spirited opposition to help me see the gaps and cracks in my arguments!

Jonathan: The truthmaker remark was just adapting the language of an earlier comment. It's not my own preferred lingo, though I don't see why it couldn't be given an empirical interpretation.

I have an unusual view of properties, which is connected to the themes of this post and discussion. Properties, on my way of thinking about things (and I think metaphysicses [pardon the word!] are ways of thinking about things) hold when a concept applies, so that if you have two different concepts that can come apart we can say that two different properties are instantiated even if there is no external reality that undergirds this difference. Thus, for example, I am a "property dualist" about consciousness, but I think of property dualism as a thesis about our concepts rather than about the world behind our concepts.

So, from the armchair, we can discover relaionships of properties, and we can realize that if an eight-faced dragon were born purple he would not be "smeggy" -- the concept SMEGGY would not apply to him. But we have still, I think, not discovered anything beyond the circuit of the mind.

In general, I am highly nervous about counterfactuals -- especially what Felipe would call "high-flying" counterfactuals that involve weird or remote possibilities. I have concerns both about natural necessity (since I don't think there is a unique set of true natural laws, only competing models with different virtues and different counterfactual implications) and about conceptual necessity which (as should be clear) I give a psychologistic, deflationist reading of. I am much more comfortable hanging an argument on empirical observations (including observations about the limitations of the armchair) than on counterfactual claims that begin "if there were no people". I don't think such claims are always unjustified, but my "philosophical fog" alarms start to go off.

The human cognitive brain emerged and flourished i...

2008-07-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

The human cognitive brain emerged and flourished in the course of evolution not because it provides absolute truths about the world (how would we recognize an absolute truth if we were confronted with one?) but because it gives us the biological machinery to arrive at pragmatic conclusions about the world. These enable us, in contrast to other creatures, to adapt successfully to an ever wider and richer ecological niche.

I'm sympathetic to the position in this post but I...

2008-07-11T02:13:00.000-07:00

I'm sympathetic to the position in this post but I still think an armchair philosopher might be able to find some truth even if it is usually drowned out by the static caused by quirks of his own mind because eternal reality is the inputs to the mind and so some hint of reality should remain in the mind's output.

So I'd be inclined to think of it a methodology of last resort for those problems that no other methodology can investigate.

Eric, what worries me about your whole argument is...

2008-07-10T02:47:00.000-07:00

Eric, what worries me about your whole argument is that it just sounds like good old Logical Positivism again, e.g. when you say things like:

My concept of "bachelor" is such that it's impossible to be married and a bachelor; that's a fact about my concept, and I don't find it compelling to suppose that it's a mind-independent fact about the world.

Now, Jonathan has already pointed out why this can't be right: "bachelor" does not refer to a concept, but to a certain kind of people (roughly, unmarried adult males). What I find so irritating is that you make that claim as if Quine had never existed and never written "Carnap and Logical Truth", where he already argues that even seemingly trivial analyticities like "Eric is Eric" are as much true in virtue of what the world is like, namely such that Eric is identical with himself, as they are true in virtue of what "Eric" and "is" means. I can see no new argument in what you say that would make Quine's point obsolete, except your "empiricist dogma" that it just cannot be that we learn anything about the mind-independent world from our armchair. Why? Because it just cannot be!

Thanks for the clarification, Eric. The encycloped...

2008-07-09T21:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the clarification, Eric. The encyclopedia analogy was intended against your earlier suggestion (or apparent suggestion) that anything we could learn a priori would have to be a fact about concepts; I take it from your last comment, however, that you're backing off of that suggestion, in favor of the alternate claim that we could never learn mind-independent facts a priori.

Mind-independence, on (one of) your preferred characterizations, is in terms of truthmakers: the fact that p is mind-dependent just in case it is true in virtue of facts about minds. And a fact is mind-independent just in case it's not mind-dependent.

(I hope you don't mind my glossing it that way; I know you put mind-independence as "made true by the world (outside the mind)". I'm just trying to be as neutral as possible -- leaving open, for instance, the possibility that there could be truths that are true in virtue of nothing at all, or in virtue of something that is not the world (or a mind).)

It is interesting to see truthmaker talk called into service in the post "Against Metaphysics". The way most people investigate "true in virtue of" claims, I would have thought, is by doing something in the ballpark of traditional armchair metaphysics. Do you have thoughts on how you know which facts are made true by which other facts?

So, onto smegginess. What did you do when you wrote this passage: it may be helpful to clear away the underbrush by inventing a new [concept]: “smeggy”. I hereby declare that something is smeggy by virtue of having eight faces and not being purple.

Certainly you've coined a new term, the word "smeggy". Maybe you've created a new concept, SMEGGY. (You haven't if, for instance, nativism is correct, or if a crude concept empiricism, according to which SMEGGY is identical to the conjunction of EIGHT-FACE and NOT-PURPLE is correct.) Let's grant that you've created a new concept. What you have not done, however, is create a new property. My orange eight-faced dragon has been smeggy her entire life -- we just never had a word for it until now. In virtue of what is she smeggy? She's smeggy in virtue of having eight faces and a non-purple color. These are properties intrinsic to my dragon; her smegginess has nothing to do with me or you.

Smegginess is an intrinsic property -- it obtains in virtue of the intrinsic features of the smeggy body.

(Compare: I a bachelor in virtue of being male and unmarried. And the substance in my cup is ice in virtue of being H2O and frozen.)

Onto the counterfactual reading of mind-independence. I think it's obviously true that my dragon would be smeggy even if there were no people, or if you had never made up the word "smeggy". We know what sorts of things would have resulted in her nonsmegginess: if she'd been born purple, for instance, she wouldn't have been smeggy. If her mother hadn't drunk so much, she wouldn't have been smeggy (because she wouldn't have developed the birth defect that resulted in her having eight faces). If there were no people, she would still be a dragon, she would still get hungry, and she would still be smeggy.

You say you have a hard time even understanding these counterfactuals, but I really don't see why. Just plug in your preferred account of counterfactuals. We can use Lewis's: go to the nearest worlds where this orange dragon has eight faces and there are no people -- are these worlds in which the dragon is smeggy? Sure they are. "Smeggy" means "eight-faced and nonpurple", and this dragon has both those properties in all those worlds.

Can you say a bit more about what you find troublesome with this counterfactual? (Do you think that ALL counterfactuals which include there being no people in the antecedent are similarly problematic?)