Wednesday, April 08, 2015

Blogging and Philosophical Cognition

Yesterday or today, my blog got its three millionth pageview since its launch in 2006. (Cheers!) And at the Pacific APA last week, Nancy Cartwright celebrated "short fat tangled" arguments over "tall skinny neat" arguments. (Cheers again!)

To see how these two ideas are related, consider this picture of Legolas and his friend Gimli Cartwright. (Note the arguments near their heads. Click to enlarge if desired.) [modified from image source]

Legolas: tall, lean, tidy! His argument takes you straight like an arrowshot all the way from A to H! All the way from the fundamental nature of consciousness to the inevitability of Napoleon. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.) All the way from seven abstract Axioms to Proposition V.42, "it is because we enjoy blessedness that we are able to keep our lusts in check". (Sorry, Baruch, I wish I were more convinced.)

Gimli: short, fat, knotty! His argument only takes you from versions of A to B. But it does it three ways, so that if one argument fails, the others remain. It does without without need of a string of possibly dubious intermediate claims. And finally, the different premises lend tangly sideways support to each other: A2 supports A1, A1 supports A3, A3 supports A2. I think of Mozi's dozen arguments for impartial concern or Sextus's many modes of skepticism.

In areas of mathematics, tall arguments can work -- maybe the proof of Fermat's last theorem is one -- long and complicated, but apparently sound. (Not that I would be any authority.) When each step is unshakeably secure, tall arguments go through. But philosophy tends not to be like that.

The human mind is great at determining an object's shape from its shading. The human mind is great at interpreting a stream of incoming sound as a sly dig on someone's character. The human mind is stupendously horrible at determining the soundness of philosophical arguments, and also at determining the soundness of most individual stages within philosophical arguments. Tall, skinny philosophical arguments -- this was Cartwright's point -- will almost inevitably topple.

Individual blog posts are short. They are, I think, just about the right size for human philosophical cognition: 500-1000 words, enough to put some flesh on an idea, making it vivid (pure philosophical abstractions being almost impossible to evaluate for multiple reasons), enough to make one or maybe two novel turns or connections, but short enough that the reader can get to the end without having lost track of the path there.

In the aggregate, blog posts are fat and tangled: Multiple posts can get at the same general conclusion from diverse angles. Multiple posts can lend sideways support to each other. I offer, as an example, my many posts skeptical of philosophical expertise (of which this is one): e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here.

I have come to think that philosophical essays, too, often benefit from being written almost like a series of blog posts: several shortish sections, each of which can stand semi-independently and which in aggregate lead the reader in a single general direction. This has become my metaphilosophy of essay writing, exemplified in "The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind" and "1% Skepticism".

Of course there's also something to be said for Legolas -- for shooting your arrow at an orc halfway across the plain rather than waiting for it to reach your axe -- as long as you have a realistically low credence that you will hit the mark.

51 comments:

  1. Have you come across William C. Wimsatt's Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality? It strikes me that you are making strong allusions to fallibilism, to the catastrophe that was the Cartesian "quest for certainty".

    What might be fun to consider is whether it might be worse, if humans were better at the process you discuss. :-) That is, perhaps there are correctable errors in current thinking that, as long as they exist as-is, are more damaging, than is the failure to have a higher level of ability than you characterize humans as having.

    P.S. Have you come across Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (excerpt)? I came across it after reading about self-representation in David Braine's recent Language and Human Understanding: The Roots of Creativity in Speech and Thought. It seems possibly quite related to your Unreliability of Naive Introspection. :-)

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  2. Neat, Luke. Thanks for the suggestions! I've read some Wimsatt essays individually, and am broadly sympathetic, but I haven't read the collection. Do you have a favorite piece in there? I knew Aquinas (and Augustine) had a bit on this stuff, but I'd missed that book and it looks like Aquinas's remarks might have been more extensive than I thought -- so thanks for that tip!

    Interesting thought about correctable errors. I bet you have an example in mind and are being coy!

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  3. You are welcome; I'm coming across all sorts of neat stuff these days. Edouard Machery suggested Wimsatt to me by email last month. He and you are some of the few faculty who deign to interact with non-fellow-experts outside of specific outreach. I am very thankful for this! If I can in any way contribute back, I will.

    As to Wimsatt in particular, I only just started reading him; I learned to argue a surprising amount of his first chapter ("Myths of LaPlacean Omniscience") in the several months prior to buying his book. For example, Bernard d'Espagnat makes a compelling case in In Search of Reality that, per Bohr's observation, we are the instruments with which we explore reality. Hume actually explored this idea; see Yoram Hazony's Newtonian Explanatory Reduction and Hume's System of the Sciences. There is also Charles Taylor's 1971 Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, which contains this anti-positivist bit:

    >     In other words, in a hermeneutical science, a certain measure of insight is indispensable, and this insight cannot be communicated by the gathering of brute data, or initiation in modes of formal reasoning or some combination of these. It is unformalizable. But this is a scandalous result according to the authoritative conception of science in our tradition, which is shared even by many of those who are highly critical of the approach of mainstream psychology, or sociology, or political science. For it means that this is not a study in which anyone can engage, regardless of their level of insight; that some claims of the form: "if you don't understand, then your intuitions are at fault, are blind or inadequate," some claims of this form will be justified; that some differences will be nonarbitrable by further evidence, but that each side can only make appeal to deeper insight on the part of the other. The superiority of one position over another will thus consist in this, that from the more adequate position one can understand one's own stand and that of one's opponent, but not the other way around. It goes without saying that this argument can only have weight for those in the superior position. (46–7)

    What Taylor means by "unformalizable" may be somewhat better formalized (heh) by Gregory W. Dawes in Theism and Explanation, of all places, where he talks about a "rationality principle" which is causal but not nomological, not describable by laws (3.4.1, A.3.3), contra Donald Davidson. One could also look at Richard J. Bernstein's Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, in which he argues for a revitalized praxis which I predict will show up in Wimsatt's book, in one form or another.

    As to "correctable errors", I mostly have a vague intuition. I suspect that Berstein's discussion of praxis is crucial, and that we need to seriously rethink causality. That idea comes from Evan Fales' Divine Intervention: Metaphysical and Epistemological Puzzles and Christian Smith's Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. Yeah, I'm weird.

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  4. Hang on, this seems like advice for a debate team, rather than a philosopher...
    The question is, why would you want to get from A to B or from A to H? What would be motivating a philosopher to construct arguments to H, or to B?

    In practical terms, I see the point, but I would have said the philosopher's job is to take apart a Gimli skein and sort it into something more like several Legolas towers.

    I think we can retain those forms and come up with a better metaphor. If you want to go from London to Birmingham, you've really got to go via the M1. If you just want to get from Kensington to Westminster, there are plenty of routes you can take. But the philosopher's job is not to go anywhere, but to map out what routes exist - what arguments work, which concepts can be linked together in which ways.

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  5. @chinaphil, what you're describing sounds like a "choose your own adventure" database of arguments or might we say, dialogues. Does that make any sense to you? If it does, then I've been thinking along the same lines, and would like to try to build such a thing and populate it with data. But I don't want to code it up all by myself...

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  23. @Luke, yes, that image works for me. I guess I misspent my youth in the same way you did!

    I worry that it's a bit of an old-fashioned approach - I think of Descartes as the exemplar of this kind of approach. But I still like it. And the way Eric was writing in this post worries me, because it sounds like exercises in using philosophy to justify intuitions. Of course that's something we do along the way. It can be part of the process. But the objective of philosophical argument can't be to provide support for our intuitions, I think. Using philosophical argument to take us beyond our intuitions seems like the goal.

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  24. @chinaphil:

    > I worry that it's a bit of an old-fashioned approach [...]

    Why would that be "an old-fashioned approach"? Dialogues are powerful stuff; monologues can get freaking boring. Seeing how two views mesh or don't mesh can be absolutely fascinating, especially if you see those views morph in time. Although perhaps I didn't make explicit that the "choose your own adventure" idea would very likely involve dialogues, or at least the aspect of dialogues which made Plato insist on them (IIRC). Alternatively, perhaps the old is sometimes better than the new.

    > But the objective of philosophical argument can't be to provide support for our intuitions, I think. Using philosophical argument to take us beyond our intuitions seems like the goal.

    Unless you can solve the problem of intentionality in a philosophically rigorous manner, I'm afraid that our data of external reality will be critically sourced in intuitions which we then tease out philosophically. That's very different from some connotations of 'support'. And then yes, once they have been teased out, one can find contradictions or opportunities to extend.
     

    Curiously, my first of two blog posts, Intersubjectivity is Key, covers both topics you raised: interactions between people and the expansion of understanding (philosophical or otherwise). Now I just need to find someone who loves the first chapter of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and talk about how it is that we actually gain new knowledge. But perhaps I digress.

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  48. 2Luke
    >Unless you can solve the problem of intentionality in a philosophically rigorous manner...

    Well, give me a couple of days and I'll get back to you!


    > I'm afraid that our data of external reality will be critically sourced in intuitions...one can find contradictions or opportunities to extend.

    That's right, that's the distinction I was trying to draw. Intuitions are fine as a starting point, but philosophy has to go further.

    >Why would that be "an old-fashioned approach"? Dialogues are powerful stuff;

    I think maybe you're using the choose-your-own-adventure metaphor differently to me. For me, CYOA isn't a dialogue, it's a map. It says, if you make this choice (e.g. animals are conscious) then you MUST turn to page 67. There are necessary consequences to that choice, consequences which are not open to dialogue. The dialogue element comes in the choice: you could make the other choice (e.g. animals are not conscious), in which case you MUST turn to page 54; there are a different set of equally necessary consequences.

    So, despite the fact that the reader can interact with the CYOA book, or the driver can interact with the map, they are essentially static and absolute. That's why I say this image is a bit old-fashioned. For me, the (first half of the) 20th century was all about tearing down that idea that we can generate static, absolute philosophies. So you get Wittgenstein (and Saussure) pointing out that language varies depending on context, and cannot be relied upon to refer effectively to either things or arguments. You get the positivist project and its ending. And then later 20th C philosophy is much more suspicious of the idea that big systems can be properly grounded. At least, that's my layman's reading of a little bit of history!

    I don't know if the map metaphor can be revived: nuanced with different kinds of maps, maybe? road maps, physical maps, political maps, corresponding to different language approaches? Like I say, I still like the map metaphor a lot, but I think we have to be a bit open to the challenges that it faces.

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  49. I am sorry you are having such a difficult time, Anon! I'm afraid I am now going to have to implement pre-approval of all comments on the blog. I wish you the best and I hope you can find the support you need.

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  50. Luke and chinaphil: Thanks for those metaphors (and Luke, for the references). I'd resist the choose-your-own adventure metaphor partly because of the "musts" and the option-layout. One of the wild things about philosophy is that what seem to be an exhaustive set of options might prove to be non-exhaustive when something new is thought of, and what seems must be the page you go to might not turn out to be the right page -- so I think it inherits the weaknesses of the tall arguments. I think this fits with chinaphil's remarks against static philosophies.

    On maps: What if the map was only 85% likely to be correct at every junction?

    On intuition: I agree that it's not especially trustworthy either (as I've often argued myself). But maybe in certain types of cases it's at least fat, so that one type of intuition about a fat range of cases, despite the dubiousness of intuition, might merit greater credence that the tippy-top of a tall philosophical argument each step of which seems individually more secure than folk intuition and which is highly counterintuitive by the end.

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  51. "One of the wild things about philosophy is that what seem to be an exhaustive set of options might prove to be non-exhaustive when something new is thought of"

    philosophers should have the ability to question everything around them, dont you think?
    newton questioned the world fundamentally and he changed everything.
    Einstein questioned what newton established and he changed everything once again.
    they were not philosophers, but surely they were very good thinkers.




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