The Dark Laozi

Laozi (Lao Tzu) and Kongzi (Confucius) are the best-known and most admired ancient Chinese philosophers. Yet -- with apologies to Laozi enthusiasts (including many of the students in my Asian Philosophy classes) -- I myself find Laozi's philosophy hateful. And I don't think the secondary literature has done a very good job of exposing what is hateful in him.

Consider Laozi's views on government (all translations from P.J. Ivanhoe):

Ch. 3:

... sages bring things to order by opening people's hearts [or "emptying people's minds"] and filling their bellies.
They weaken the people's commitments and strengthen their bones;
They make sure that the people are without knowledge or desires;
And that those with knowledge do not dare act....

Ch. 80:

Reduce the size of the state;
Lessen the population.
Make sure that even though there are labor-saving tools, they are never used.
Make sure that the people look upon death as a weighty matter and never move to distant places.
Even though they have ships and carts, they will have no use for them.
Even though they have armor and weapons, they will have no reason to deploy them.
Make sure that the people return to the use of the knotted cord [i.e., that they abandon writing].
Make their food savory,
Their clothes fine,
Their houses comfortable,
Their lives happy.
Then even though neighboring states are within sight of each other,
Even though they can hear the sounds of each other's dogs and chickens,
Their people will grow old and die without ever having visited one another.

Ch. 5:

Heaven and earth are not benevolent;
They treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs [i.e., ceremonial offerings treated with respect during the ceremony but discarded and defiled afterward].
Sages are not benevolent;
They treat the people as straw dogs....

It is hard to imagine a more elitist and patronizing attitude than that expressed in these passages.

Laozi is also a devotee of what I take to be cheap paradox:

Ch. 1:

A Way that can be followed is not a constant Way.
A name that can be named is not a constant name....

Ch. 36:

What you intend to shrink, you must first stretch.
What you intend to weaken, you must first strengthen.
What you intend to abandon, you must first make flourish.
What you intend to steal from, you must first provide for....

Ch. 45:

...Great straightness seems crooked;
Great skillfulness seems clumsy;
Great speech seems to stammer....

Once one gets the hang of it, it is easy to generate Laozi-esque paradoxes: The darkest intention is the most benevolent. The oldest man seems the youngest. What is steady is unstable. To achieve certainty, you must be ignorant. The greatest toothbrush is the one that brushes least!

This is, it seems to me, sham profundity. It requires and reveals no deep thought or special insight. (See also my post on the "profound" in philosophy.) In fact, sham profundity perfectly fits Laozi's elitist and explicitly obfuscatory agenda: It baffles and frustrates the mind, destroys good thinking, and establishes Laozi as an authority whose insight one can't achieve or challenge.

(The other leading ancient "Daoist" (Taoist), Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), is another matter entirely, by the way. Where Laozi is authoritarian, self-satisfied, arrogant, and superficial, Zhuangzi is self-deprecating, anti-authoritarian, and his paradoxes seem to reflect genuine puzzlement and self-questioning.)

Doing Good Philosophy on a Blog?

Most philosophers, I suspect, doubt that blogs are a good medium for philosophy. Even Brian Leiter --

the blogosphere a bit too ephemeral, and its attention-span too short, to feel like it is the right forum for serious philosophical writing (TPM).

-- not to mention your average tenured tweedy grayhair!

To Leiter's objection: Face-to-face conversation is even more ephemeral and wandering, but it is an excellent medium for philosophy. Consider Socrates!

The blog is intermediate in duration, formality, and interactivity between philosophical conversation and published articles. It would be odd if the two extremes were suitable for philosophy but not the middle; I see no reason to think so. Now, of course, many blog posts are bad -- as are many philosophical conversations and formal essays. The reasons for this are obvious and have nothing to do with the medium.

Different media differently balance virtues and tolerate vices. Blogging has one virtue that I've come to think very important to philosophy: It forces you to distill an idea to a clear, communicable core.

I'm increasingly suspicious of incomprehensible, "difficult" philosophy. The human mind, when facing abstractions, can barely deal with "unless X, not Y", much less page after page of Hegel. If you build your philosophy on a tower of technical concepts and complex arguments, it will topple with a poke. By being insufficiently clear, you can avoid decisive refutation (see my post on "profound" philosophy); but the way of integrity is to make each piece plain and simple, able to stand on its own. Posting your thoughts on a blog -- that is, making your thoughts brief and comprehensible to a general audience who may not have read previous posts -- is thus a form of intellectual discipline.

Some more specific advice to fellow philosophy bloggers. (This advice applies only to posts, not to comments.)

* Post only on matters to which you've given considerable thought. If you're a leading expert on X, your reflections on X are much more likely to be worth something than are miscellaneous ramblings on matters that have left no deep tracks in your mind.

* Write to entice the reader. The title invites the reader to consider a topic. If the title is inviting, you have the reader for about two sentences; things had better be cooking.

* If a post takes more than two minutes to read or confuses the reader with jargon or complexity, then reading it becomes a project, rather than a casual pleasure. Few readers will continue.

* Each post should have at least one thing novel, of interest to the specialist. If you write outside your area of expertise, it is difficult to judge whether you are only saying what is obvious to those more expert than you.

(Now if only I would follow all this excellent advice myself!)

Distinguishing Theories vs. Background Conditions (by guest blogger Joshua Rust)

John Searle endorses "external realism", the view that there exists a mind-independent reality, in spite of the fact that our access to that reality is necessarily mediated by conscious experience.

The thesis of external realism is in some sense not a theory at all, but rather a presupposition of our being able to have theories in the first place.

One can show that this or that claim corresponds or fails to correspond to how things really are in the 'external world,' but one cannot in that way show that the claim that there is an external world corresponds to how things are in the external world, because any question of corresponding or failing to correspond to the external world already presupposes the existence of an external world to which the claim corresponds or fails to correspond. External realism is thus not a thesis nor an hypothesis but the condition of having certain sorts of theses or hypotheses (Searle, 1995, 178).

External realism isn't a thesis or representation but rather a "background condition" for having a thesis in the first place. Why? The idea seems to be that very idea of truth or falsity seems to imply a mind-independent reality.

Rather than evaluate the merits of Searle's argument, I will rather presuppose my own version of the distinction between theories and background conditions.

Following Bas van Fraassen, explanations are answers to why-questions. Theories help us adjudicate plausible answers to why-questions from implausible answers. In a Sherlock Holmes story, a prized racing horse has been stolen. Why is the horse missing? Answer: The trainer stole the horse. Holmes is able to infer this from "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time"— the dog did not bark. The argument in favor of the explanation, of course, rides on a tacit theory: namely, that guard-dogs bark at strangers. This theory helps the trainer-story explain the missing horse. Notice that if dogs were more like cats in this respect, Holmes inference would be bunk.

I want to suggest that external realism is a background condition rather than a thesis because there is no why-question it can be called on to help answer. We cannot exhaustively specify the background understanding that goes into the evaluation of even simple why-questions, such as the one Holmes is addressing. Reasons for or against one a rival explanation can thus only be expected to supplement someone's understanding just enough to get them on board with the speaker. It's difficult to imagine a situation where pointing out the existence of a mind-independent reality would be sufficient bridge the gap in understanding which separates speaker and interlocutor; indeed, in a Monty Python parody of investigation, Holmes' pointing out the existence of a mind-independent reality could only serve to underscore the unbridgability of the interlocutor's world-views.

My claim is that theories have to be able to make a difference to the selection of rival possible explanations. Background conditions—including the claim there exists a mind-independent reality—are factors which do not make a difference to the adjudication of rival answers to a request-specification. These conditions change from explanatory puzzle to explanatory puzzle, and depending on who the audience is, but there certain things that will almost never be helpfully said—unless one is wishing to end the conversation.

"Reliability" in Epistemology

There are two ways of being unreliable. Something, or someone, might be unreliable because it often goes wrong or yields the wrong result, or it might be unreliable because it fails to do anything or yield any result at all. A secretary is unreliable in one way if he fouls up the job, unreliable in another if he simply doesn't do it. A program for delivering stock prices is unreliable in one way if it tends to misquote, unreliable in another if it crashes. Either way, they can't be depended on to do what they ought.

Contemporary epistemologists tend to classify only the first sort of failure as a failure in reliability. Here's Alvin Goldman, probably the world's leading "reliabilist":

An object (a process, method, system, or what have you) is reliable if and only if (1) it is a sort of thing that tends to produce beliefs, and (2) the proportion of true beliefs among the beliefs it produces meets some threshold, or criterion, value (1986, p. 26).

We can easily liberalize this definition to accommodate the stock quote program: The stock quote program is "reliable" on this definition if most of its quotes are right, no matter how much it crashes or how rarely it successfully delivers a quote when asked.

This peculiarity serves a purpose: For reliabilists, knowledge and justification require (something like) reliability -- and what matters in knowing or being justified, it seems, is that you're not likely to err. Regardless how glitchy the stock quote program is, if whenever it does happen to give a quote it gives the right quote, you can have knowledge and justification from it (setting aside some complexities).

Yet I wonder if epistemologists haven't lost something valuable in giving up on the ordinary notion of reliability. In cognition -- for example in introspection -- the difference between failing to reach a judgment about whether you have (e.g.) very detailed current imagery or not and reaching the wrong judgment about that is sometimes vague and cognitively minor. Either way, introspection (like the secretary or stock quote program) has failed to deliver what one might reasonably hope it should. There's often no firm line between guesses, conjectures, impressions, and definite opinions, and whether one expresses oneself hesitantly, unhesitantly, or not at all -- to oneself or aloud -- may depend more on context and temperament than anything else. These different ways of failing must of course be distinguished -- yet drawing too sharp a distinction between them, and giving them vastly different roles in our epistemology, is artificial and misses something important.

So: When I say introspection is unreliable, I mean that in the broad, ordinary sense of "unreliable". It is no objection to my pessimism, but rather supports it, if the reader or general population fails to reach introspective judgments about their experience -- as long as it's a case where it seems like introspection should be able to deliver results, like a basic and pervasive aspect of currently ongoing conscious experience patiently considered.

Is Perception Always Experiential? (by guest blogger Joshua Rust)

In an earlier post, Eric asked the question, "Is There an Experience of Thinking?". In this post I would like to look at a related question—is perception always experiential?

Given the amount of philosophical ink spilled on this question, I think it will be more helpful to proceed indirectly by reframing it as an interpretive question.

First, some background: if the question concerns the role phenomenal properties play in perception, there are two broad classes of answer. On one hand, phenomenalists argue that phenomenal properties are necessary for perception (Chalmers, Pitt, Siewert, G. Strawson). On the other hand, representationalists argue that a phenomenal experience is not necessary for sensory experience (Dennett, Brandom, McDowell, Rey, Sellars), or else is reducible to perception's intentional content (Dretske, Lycan, Tye). For more background see Pitt's excellent entry on mental representation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (especially sections 3-5).

Now, the interpretive puzzle: Pitt includes John Searle within the phenomenal camp. He claims that Searle thinks that phenomenal properties are necessary in determining the content of sensory experience. While there is much in Searle which supports Pitt's characterization of Searle, I have recently come across a passage in Intentionality which suggests Searle's considered view is otherwise: while phenomenal conscious properties are "characteristic" of perception, for Searle, they are not necessary.

Searle is clear that beliefs need not have phenomenal experience. But perceptions are different: (A) "States such as beliefs and desires need not be conscious states. A person can have a belief or desire even when he is not thinking about it and he can be truly said to have such states even when asleep. But visual and other sorts of perceptual experiences are conscious mental events" (Intentionality, 45).

He then goes on to assert that, (B) "Someone who claimed that there was a class of beings capable of perceiving optically, that is, beings capable of visual perception but who did not have visual experiences, would be making a genuine empirical claim" (Intentionality, 46).

Given what he says in (B), one would expect that Searle would then cite empirical evidence which would buttress his claim in (A), that in order to percieve one must have some sort of conscious, phenomenal experience. He does go onto cite empirical evidence, but it doesn't appear to justify the claim made in (A).

(C) "Weiskrantz, Warrington and their colleagues have studied how certain sorts of brain lesions produce what they call 'blind sight'. The patient can give correct answers to questions about visual events and objects that he is presented with, but he claims to have no visual awareness of these objects and events. Now, from our point of view the interest of such cases derives from the fact that the optical stimuli the patient is subjected to apparently produce a form of Intentionality. Otherwise, the patient would not be able to report the visual events in question. But the Intentional content produced by their optical stimulation is not realized in the way that our presentational contents are realized. For us to see an object, we have to have visual experiences of a certain sort. But, assuming Weiskrantz's account is correct, the patient can in some sense 'see' an object even though he does not have the relevant visual experiences. He simply reports a "feeling" that something is there, or makes a "guess" that it is there. Those who doubt the existence of visual experiences, by the way, might want to ask themselves what it is that we have that such patients seem to lack" (Intentionality, 47)

To my ear, Searle appears to misconstrue the significance of the 'blind sight' evidence. If blind sight tests show that we can see without having certain phenomenal experiences (C), given that Searle holds that phenomenal experiences must be present in order to see is an empirical claim (B), then the blind sight test seems to contradict his claim in (A) that perceptual experience is a conscious mental event.

Questions: are there are alternative readings of these passages which saves Searle from incoherence? Given (C), is Pitt wrong to characterize Searle as a phenomenalist about visual experience in the SEP article? More generally, is a phenomenal experience necessary for perception? If so, is there any way for the phenomenalist to make sense of the Weiskrantz "blind sight" findings?

On Not Seeking Pleasure Much

When I was a graduate student, a girlfriend asked me what, of all things, I most enjoyed doing. Eschewing the obvious and half-clever reply, I answered skiing -- thinking of those moments of breathing the cold, clean air, taking in the mountain view, then expertly carving a steep, lonely slope. But how long had it been since I'd gone skiing -- maybe three years? My girlfriend suggested that if has been three years since I've done what I most enjoyed doing, then maybe I wasn't living wisely.

Well what, I asked, did she most enjoy? Getting back massages, she said. Now the two of us had a deal at the time: If one gave the other a back massage, the recipient would owe a massage in return the following day. We exchanged massages occasionally, but not often, probably about once every few weeks. I pointed out to her that she, too, might not be perfectly rational: She could easily get much more of what she most enjoyed by simply giving me more back massages. And surely the displeasure of giving me a back massage couldn't outweigh the pleasure of getting the thing she most enjoyed in the world? Or was pleasure for her so tepid a thing that even the greatest pleasure was hardly worth getting, so that the combination of getting and receiving a back massage would for her be a hedonic negative?

I suspect at the root of both these cases is the same thing: Avoiding displeasure is, for her and me and most people, intrinsically more motivating than gaining pleasure, so that even our top pleasures (skiing, back massages) aren't motivating enough to overcome only moderate displeasures (organizing a ski trip, giving a massage). Is this rational? Is displeasure more unpleasant than pleasure is pleasant? Or is this like the economic irrationality of doing much more to avoid a loss than to secure an equivalent gain?

If avoiding displeasure is more motivating than seeking pleasure, this also might explain certain strands in Stoicism and Buddhism.

Difficulties with Davidson's account of action (II): What is the force of the "because" that links action and desire? (by guest blogger Joshua Rust)

It is worth drawing attention to the flexibility of the subordinating conjunction, "because". I can think of at least three importantly different senses of the word. It can flag a causal explanation: "my car stopped because it was out of gas." It might indicate an inferential relation: "My car must be out of gas because it stopped." Finally, it can denote a clarificatory relation: "He is a bachelor because he is an unmarried male" or "He was precious because of his skills and experience." In both of these cases, we are specifying what is meant by, or what counts as, "bachelor" or "precious." We are not inferring his preciousness, nor do his skills or experience cause him to be precious.

Davidson is concerned to explicate sentences like, "He flipped the switch because he wanted to turn on the light." In what sense is the word "because" being used here, where turning on the light is an action? Indeed, he frames his own project in these terms: "Central to the relation between a reason and an action it explains is the idea that the agent performed the action because he had the reason. Of course, we can include this idea too in justification; but then the notion of justification becomes as dark as the notion of reason until we can account for the force of that 'because'" (Davidson 1963, 691).

The orthodox reading of Davidson sees the subordinating conjunction which links reason and action as exclusively causal. Reasons, Davidson says, "rationalize" or "causally explain" action.

But, if as I argued in the previous post, actions are defined in terms of their causes (primary reasons), it doesn't seem as though these same causes can then be cited as a causal explanation of that action.

What, then, is the force of that 'because'? It is obviously not inferential. We don't come to know that he flipped the switch because of his beliefs and desires. But I think a case can be made for the subordinating conjunction which links reason and action as being clarificatory.

Consider the case of motion sickness, which is also defined in terms of its causes. If I asked "why am I experiencing motion sickness?," you cannot answer "because of the motion." If you did answer in this way, your answer might rightly be construed as a rejection of the question—"what else," you might be wondering, "did you want to know, that you didn't already know?!" Now consider the following response to the same why-question: "because of the movement of the boat." This seems like a perfectly good response to the same question. But notice that boat-movement is just a kind of movement. Why would citing a kind of movement be a good answer to the question, when citing movement in general is not? In fact, I don't think it is an answer to the why-question at all. It's rather an informative rejection of the question. Why-questions are answered when we cite some event in the causal stream leading up to explanandum, which is not already specified by the explanandum (see Woodward's non-triviality requirement in the previous post). Since the sickness is already known to be caused by motion, saying that motion is, further, boat-motion doesn't satisfy this requirement. What the response is doing is not causally explaining the motion sickness, but rather clarifying for the interlocutor what kind of motion sickness he/she has—boat or seasickness. The subordinating conjunction in the claim, "I am experiencing motion sickness because of the movement of the boat," is clarificatory rather than causally explanatory. It says what I mean by motion sickness in this instance—seasickness.

Back to Davidson: If I ask, "why did you flip the switch?," when I already know the body movement to be an action, you may not explain this action by saying that you had primary reasons. This much is already entailed by its being an action, if actions are defined in terms of their causes—primary reasons, consisting of beliefs and desires. But you may nevertheless respond, quite appropriately, "Because I wanted to turn on the light". This is not a causal explanation; if I already knew the body movement stemmed from a desire (=action), in telling me what kind of desire you have you are not citing a cause that falls outside the scope of the explanandum, as required by the non-triviality requirement. But have nevertheless learned something: the flipping of the switch is an instance of turning on the light, and not alerting a prowler. This is analogous to your telling me that my motion sickness is, moreover, seasickness. But notice that the "because" which links my desire to turn on the light and my flipping the switch is not causally explanatory at all, but rather clarificatory.

I don't think that Davidson would agree to my characterization of his view. He clearly thinks that desires rationalize or causally explain action. But as my first post indicates, I'm not sure this view is tenable. But Davidson also says of his view that "The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as urged by [Anscombe, Hampshire, etc.]". These authors, I think, would be sympathetic to the idea that the "force of the 'because'" is more clarificatory than causally explanatory.

Knowing Your Own Thoughts

Readers familiar with my research will know that I'm pretty pessimistic about the reliability of introspection, even of currently ongoing conscious experience -- e.g., ongoing visual experience, imagery, emotion. Regarding our own thoughts, though, you might think it's plausible to suppose that our introspection is excellent.

I'm not so sure.

It's not clear that, even if we reach accurate judgments about our on-going thoughts, the accuracy of those judgments is due to a genuinely introspective process -- if we take introspection essentially to involve something like detection. Rather, the accuracy may be more a matter of self-attributions of thoughts being self-fulfilling, as statements like "I'm saying 'blu-bob'" are self-fulfilling. Or, similarly, our self-knowledge of our thoughts might be like the driver's knowledge of whether he'll be going left or right at the coming intersection (to borrow an example from Tori McGeer) -- knowledge we have as a result of our capacity to shape our behavior, or thoughts, to accord with our judgments about what our behavior or thoughts will be. Or maybe (with Dorit Bar-On and others) the accuracy of our self-attribution of thoughts is due to the fact that our self-attributions are simply expressions of our thoughts (like "that hurts" is an expression of pain, no more introspective than "ow!"). What all these accounts have in common is that our accuracy in self-attribution is not due to accurate detection in an introspective sense.

But there's something left out here, too. For it seems that sometimes we have accurate knowledge of recently past thoughts. Because the purported thoughts are in the past, our accuracy can't be due to self-fulfillment or self-shaping or self-expression. Of course, it's not clear that it's due to introspection exactly, either -- since ordinarily we think of introspection as a means of detecting what's currently ongoing in our minds, not what happened in the past. But the fact remains, whether we call it introspective or not, we do seem to have some accurate knowledge of recently past thoughts.

But how accurate, I wonder? I'm feeling pretty confident that about a minute ago I was thinking about getting some tea. But should I trust this confidence? People are also pretty confident in their judgments about imagery, dreams, visual experience, etc., even when they are quite plausibly mistaken. We are never proven wrong in our self-attribution of past thoughts, and maybe that underwrites our confidence -- but we have no test for the accuracy of such self-attributions, so of course we won't be proven wrong, no matter how wrong we actually are! Is there really some basis for thinking that our memories of our recent thoughts do generally accord with the thoughts themselves?

Philosophers' Carnival #44...

is here.

Difficulties with Davidson's account of action (I): On explaining something in terms of the very causes by which it is defined

(by guest blogger Joshua Rust)

It is not uncommon to find philosophers defining otherwise problematic entities in terms of their causes. A plausible reading of Davidson, for example, sees him as defining action as a body movement which is caused by certain beliefs and desires. If the body movement is not caused by these attitudes, it does not count as an action. This is Davidson's answer to Wittgenstein's puzzle—when I raise my arm what is left over when I subtract the fact that my arm has gone up? (Philosophical Investigations, I-621) If the arm-raising is a genuine action, its causes are what remain following the subtraction.

Defining something in terms of its causes is not, of course, limited to philosophical discourse. Motion sickness is, perhaps, a certain queasy feeling that is caused in the right way. If one has the same feeling, but is on otherwise stable ground, that feeling does not count as motion sickness.

Here is my worry: if we define something in terms of its causes, it seems as though we are precluded from then explaining that thing by appeal to those same causes. This is manifestly clear in the case of motion sickness. If explanations are answers to why-questions, I may not cite motion in answer to the question, "Why am I experiencing motion sickness?" Why not? Because a condition of something's being an explanation is that it is genuinely informative. James Woodward, for example, says that a scientific explanation aims to "draw attention to further considerations the relevance of which is not apparent from [the why-question's] original characterisation of the explanandum under investigation" (Woodward 1979, 61; see also Mumford 1998, 139-41, and Braithwaite 1953, 320).

Davidson opens "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" with the following claim: "What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action" (Davidson 1963, 685). But given Woodward's non-triviality requirement placed on a causal explanation, if actions are defined in terms of their causes (primary reasons = beliefs and desires), is Davidson then correct to say that a reason causally explains or rationalizes an action? That is, if (action = body movement caused by reason), we may not answer "Why (body movement caused by reason)?" by citing a reason. Reasons are not causal explanations of actions. This seems like a serious flaw with Davidson's account of action.

One possibility is that I've misconstrued Davidson's account of action; he does not define actions in terms of their causes. What is his solution to Wittgenstein's puzzle? Or what are the grounds by which he rejects this puzzle? Another possibility is that Davidson has something different in mind by explanation than does Woodward. But Davidson goes on to say "that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation" (Davidson 1963, 685). As far as I can tell, actions aren't rationalized or causally explained by primary reasons—if anything, only a body movement is so explained. In the next post I will exploit this flaw to offer a non-standard reading of Davidson's account of action.

While this post is nominally about Davidson's account of action, I'm principally interested in leveraging the issue for metaphilosophical purposes. Any author which defines x in terms of its causes may not, if I am correct, then go on to claim that he or she has causally explained x by appeal to those same causes. Searle, for example, defines an institutional fact as a brute fact which has had some function intentionally imposed on it. He cannot, if I am right here, thereby go on to claim that institutional facts are causally explained by the said intentional imposition of function.

The Pinch Test for Dreaming

"Pinch me, I must be dreaming!" What assumption about dreaming lies behind this saying? I see two main candidates:

(1.) If I'm dreaming and someone in the dream pinches me, I will wake.

(2.) If I think I might be dreaming and someone in the dream pinches me, I'll be able to tell whether I'm dreaming or not.

The more dominant and more plausible view, I suspect, is (2). The thought presumably is this: In dreams, we don't have tactile sense experiences, or pain experiences, or we do have such experiences but they're different from waking tactile experiences in a way discernible to a dreamer.

A plausible assumption, I said. And appealing, I think, to many contemporary Americans. But is it right? Let me mention one reason to think it might be, two reasons for doubt, and two questions.

Reason to think it might be: I've read a lot of dream reports in the course of my research on dreams (e.g. here), and indeed it's not unusual to remark on the absence of tactile and pain sensations in dreams. For example, someone might report dreaming of being stabbed in the stomach and seeing blood come out, but without feeling any pain.

Reason for doubt #1: Traditional theories of dreams, like Descartes's, as well as most contemporary theories of dreams, don't give us much reason to suppose that we'd experience vision and hearing in dreams (or have visual and auditory imagery) but not other senses.

Reason for doubt #2: In the 1950s, people thought they dreamed in black and white. Both before and after the 20th century, people generally report dreaming in color. The best explanation for this, I think, is not that our dreams themselves changed from color to black-and-white and back again, but rather that our reports about our dreams assimilate them too much to the dominant media of our culture. (There was even a brief period when some psychologists said our dreams were generally silent, like Charlie Chaplin films!) Hence I suspect that if the dominant media involved tactile sensations, our dream reports would include them.

Question 1: I know there is considerable cortical activity in visual areas during REM sleep (including in regions associated with color experience). Is there a lower level of activity in brain regions associated with pain and tactile sensation?

Question 2: Is the "pinch me" thing primarily just American, or anglophone, or confined to Western cultures, or is something like it widely cross-cultural? If we don't have tactile and pain experiences in sleep, one might suppose that the reasons for that would apply cross-culturally.

On the connection between moral reasoning and emotion (by guest blogger Joshua Rust)

I have been recently listing to a series of lectures on the psychology of human emotion, distributed as a podcast from the UC Berkeley website. In lecture 22, Professor Dacher Keltner argues that the Western/Platonic propensity to distinguish emotion and reasoning is peculiar and, to some extent, pernicious.

For example, On Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development, children start as emotional and thus immoral. It is only once they are able to contain these emotions to the point that they can take on other people's perspectives that they are able to achieve some degree of moral clarity.

Keltner argues that emotions are central to most of our day-to-day decision making and reasoning. To illustrate this, he presents a thought experiment to the class (formulated by John Haidt, 2001) which is intended to draw out our intuitions as to how emotions fit into our moral judgments. By way of warning, the thought experiment is disturbing (by design). From the podcast:

Does this person deserve to be punished or not? A guy goes to the supermarket and he decides he is going to cook himself some chicken. He get some organic chicken that is plucked and packaged in cellophane, he takes it home, he shuts his curtains, he unwraps the chicken, he has sex with the chicken, cooks it and eats it. Do we punish that guy?

Your emotional response, much like my own and that of the class to which Keltner is lecturing, is immediate and visceral—revolting disgust (perhaps followed by the sense of relief that comes with the realization that we philosophers only have to subject our students to the relatively tame trolley examples).

But the question remains: should this person be morally punished? (community service, jail, etc.) The kaleidoscope of emotive responses followed by a set of rational deliberations concerning privacy and rights manifests, in sequence, upon the faces of Keltner's students. In spite of overt disgust exhibited by Keltner's class, not one of them thought that he should be morally reprimanded. Moreover, when the chicken example is presented to psychology undergrads across the country no more than 20%-30% of the students recommend that he be punished (it's not just Berkeley students).

Haidt presented the chicken example to a wide cross-section of the world's population. Against that contrast, the data shows that the typical American undergraduate response is extremely unusual. In many other places the visceral emotional response isn't countervailed by a belief in rights, freedom, and personal privacy; in places such as Brazil upwards of 70-80% of those surveyed thought that this individual should be punished.

Haidt takes this as evidence that our emotions figure prominently in our moral decision making.

The survey's results are interesting. But does does Haidt's conclusion follow? Has he shown a connection between emotional and moral judgment, undermining a Platonic tendency to drive a wedge between the emotional and the rational, and then locate moral judgments on side of the side of reason?

One reading of the evidence does not appear to undermine Kohlberg's theory but support it. The judgment not to punish the man is a moral judgment; and is one that is seemingly arrived at in spite of strong a emotional force to the contrary. My partner pointed out that it is the ability of reason to swim against the current of emotion that allows, for example, someone supporting equal rights for homosexuals in spite of, perhaps, being repulsed at the thought of gay sex. The fact that the considered judgment comes after the immediate emotional response, further suggests that traditional philosophers are right to distinguish reason from emotions.

Nevertheless, I think that Haidt is right to suggest a deeper connection between our emotional capacities and our moral judgments. Against the above Kohlbergian reading, it is important to see that the study only shows that American students don't think the man should be punished. The link between punishment and moral judgment is a contingent one. It seems to me perfectly coherent to think that he has done something wrong, say from the point of view of Virtue Ethics, but nevertheless also hold that he should not be punished. Perhaps what the survey shows is that American undergrads feel as though we ought to reserve the institution of punishment for the most heinous violations.

Along these lines, MacIntyre distinguishes between the Aristotelian virtues on the one hand and a "morality of law" on the other. As a first approximation, virtues are skills—qualities of mind or character—that bring about a shared end, most generally characterized as the good. The phronimos or expert has the skill to both discriminate and respond appropriately to a variety of unique situations. A morality of law, however, is primarily a set of prohibitions on injurious actions (murder, theft, etc.) that intolerably undermine the possibility of the good (After Virtue, 151-2). Perhaps we don't think of the action as violating a morality of law, but nevertheless use our emotional response as a guide to moral evaluation concerning his character. On such a distinction, our disgust is deeply connected to a moral evaluation, even if we don't think that the man's action justifies punishment.

The Motivation of Ethicists: A Seven-Year-Old's Thought

Regular visitors will know I post quite a bit on what I call The Problem of the Ethics Professors -- the fact (if it is a fact) that ethicists seem to behave no better than non-ethicists. Does this suggest that philosophical moral reflection is largely impotent to improve behavior? I hope not, but I'm not entirely comfortable with any of the obvious resolutions.

A couple weeks ago, I posed the question to my seven-year-old son Davy. I told him that there's some evidence that people who talk a lot about the importance of behaving in good, moral ways don't seem to behave any better than anyone else. What did he think of that? Did that sound right to him?

Davy said that he has noticed that the kids who talk most about about being nice and sharing are the ones who want you to be nice to them and share with them. We then agreed that these kids might not themselves be any better behaved than other kids when the tables are turned, and may even in some cases be more greedy and demanding than average.

It's an obvious thought, in a way; and it may well be too cheap a shot -- not really true, or even if true of seven-year-olds, not very well connected with the motivations for studying ethics among adults. But I was at least struck by Davy's insightfulness. I can't say that exactly that thought had occurred to me before, either on my own or in any of my many conversations with other philosophers about the matter. (Maybe someone raised it, but Davy's way of putting it stuck with me better?)

Let me emphasize that I don't think this is very plausible as a full explanation of the motivations of professional ethicists. I think most ethicists genuinely want to turn their standards on themselves and maybe even do so as their first and primary sort of ethical reflection, outside the abstract context of argumentative philosophy. Yet I wonder: What makes us turn to ethics in the first place? What makes it the case that some of us are fascinated with right and wrong, fair and unfair, praise and blame, while others are left comparatively cold by such issues? Ontogenetically, I wonder if Davy mightn't actually be so far off....

Flow and the Not-So-Skillful Zhuangzi?

If you've been reading much psychology recently, you've probably heard about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "Flow". Flow is characterized as a state of complete, undistracted immersion in skillful activity. Csikszentmihalyi (and often his subjects) regards such experiences as positive and fulfilling. Imagine the pianist completely immersed in a brilliant performance or a basketball player completely attuned to the events on the court, responding skillfully and spontaneously to every move. There's no denying that there's something cool about that!

(On the other hand, I'm not sure there's anything so intrinsically wonderful in being so immersed in driving or in your customary work -- two of the most common "flow" activities in ordinary life, according to Csikszentmihalyi -- that time flies by without your seeming to notice. The "flow" of data entry isn't maybe quite as romantic as the flow of the concert pianist.)

Standard interpretations of the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) -- most notably, that of A.C. Graham, but also of P.J. Ivanhoe and many others -- would make him the greatest early advocate of "flow": The life one should strive for, according to Graham's Zhuangzi, is one of spontaneous, skillful reactivity, like that of an artisan in the flow of his work.

The standard passage in support of this view is in Zhuangzi chapter 3, on the butcher cutting up an ox:

A butcher was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. Wherever his hand touched, wherever his shoulder leaned, wherever his foot stepped, wherever his knee pushed -- with a zip! with a whoosh! -- he handled his chopper with aplomb, and never skipped a beat. He moved in time to the Dance of the Mulberry Forest, and harmonized with the Head of the Line Symphony. Lord Wenhui said, "Ah, excellent, that technique can reach such heights!"

The butcher sheathed his chopper and responded, "What your servant values is the Way, which goes beyond technique. When I first began cutting up oxen, I did not see anything but oxen. Three years later, I couldn't see the whole ox. And now, I encounter them with spirit and don't look with my eyes. Sensible knowledge stops and spiritual desires proceed. I rely on the Heavenly patterns, strike in the big gaps, am guided by the large fissures, and follow what is inherently so. I never touch a ligament or tendon, much less do any heavy wrenching! A good butcher changes his chopper every year because he chips it. An average butcher changes it every month because he breaks it. There are spaces between those joints, and the edge of the blade has no thickness. If you use what has no thickness to go where there is space -- oh! there's plenty of extra room to play about in. That's why after nineteen years the blade of my chopper is still as though fresh from the grindstone.

"Still, when I get to a hard place, I see the difficulty and take breathless care. My gaze settles! My movements slow! I move the chopper slightly, and in a twinkling it's come apart, crumbling to the ground like a clod of earth! I stand holding my chopper and glance all around, dwelling on my accomplishment. Then I clean my chopper and put it away."

Lord Wenhui said, "Excellent! I have heard the words of butcher and learned how to care for life!" [Kjellberg trans., in Ivanhoe & Van Norden 2001/2005, p. 224-225]

Csikszentmihalyi cites this very passage in his 1990 book Flow. And how can one resist? Who'd have known butchery was so wonderful? (The butcher at the local Ralph's debones my trout: Whoosh! In a single fluid movement, all the bones are gone, a perfect skeleton in his hand. Now he's spiritually fulfilled!)

Setting aside the question of whether this is really spontaneous skillful activity, beyond words and conscious thought, or genuine flow -- maybe it is, but that might turn on nuances in interpreting the penultimate paragraph -- I have some doubts about the centrality this passage is often given in interpreting Zhuangzi's positive vision of life.

(1.) Although there are other passages celebrating skillful executing of mundane activities in the Zhuangzi, this is the only clear and substantial one in the Inner Chapters, the authentic core of the book.

(2.) In the Inner Chapters, Zhuangzi criticizes what might seem to be flowing, skillful activity at least as much as his praises it:

Zhuangzi said, "Haven't you seen a weasel? It bends down then rises up. It springs east and west, not worrying about heights or depths -- and lands in a snare or dies in a net. Now the yak is so big he looks like clouds hanging from Heaven. He sure can be big, but he can't catch mice. You have a big tree an are upset that you can't use it. Why not plant it by a nothing-at-all village in a wide empty waste? You could do nothing, dilly-dallying by its side, or nap, ho-hum, beneath it. It won't fall to any axe's chop and nothing will harm it. Since it isn't any use, what bad can happen to it?" [Kjellberg trans., p. 213]

This sounds almost like the opposite of the message of the butcher: The weasel has the skill of catching mice, but because it becomes completely absorbed in that activity, it loses track of the big picture and dies. And, indeed, isn't this exactly the danger of undistracted skillful activity? -- that one becomes so absorbed in it, so purely reactive to just a narrow range of pre-defined goals set by that activity, that one risks losing sight of the big picture, or of things one should be distracted by (including lunch, one's home life, or even the fire alarm)? Indeed, the context of the weasel example is Huizi's not knowing what to do with a huge gourd that resists the ordinary uses of gourds but invites unconventional uses. What would the butcher do with a 40-foot ox? Could he see past his usual methods and think instead of riding its shoulders through the impassable swamp?

Note also:

The Way is lost in the glorification of right and wrong. The Way is lost in the completion of love. But are there such things as loss and completion? Or are there no such things as loss and completion? Loss and completion -- that's Master Bright Works playing his lute. No loss and no completion -- that's Master Bright Works not playing his lute. Bright Works playing his lute, Shi Kuang holding his baton, Huizi leaning on his desk: the knowledge of these three masters was almost perfect, and they passed their successes on to later years. What they liked they tried to set apart from other things. What they liked they tried to illuminate. But they only succeeded in illuminating the other things and so ended in the gloom of "hard and white" [that is, meaningless logical distinctions]. Their followers ended up tangled in the string of works and were incompete their whole lives. If this counts as completion, then we are all complete, too. If this doesn't count as completion, then none of us have ever been complete. So the torch of slippery doubt is what the sage steers by. Don't insist, but lodge in the usual: this is what I mean by throwing things open to the light. [Kjellberg trans., p. 218-219]

A difficult passage! But if anything is clear, it's that the Way is lost (if anything can be lost, if there is such a thing as loss) in the skillful activities of Master Bright Works on the lute, etc. There is no praise here of skillful activity as the secret of caring for life.

(Indeed maybe it's the commitment to caring about success and failure -- "right" and "wrong" -- that is the root of the problem. The Zhuangzi of Chapter 2 might not praise the butcher who takes pride in his accomplishment, and who presumably would be disappointed if he broke his knife and ruined the ox, or even became only an average butcher -- which most butchers must of course be.)

(3.) Zhuangzi (for example in the weasel passage) praises "doing nothing". Although the idea of doing nothing (wu wei) has received enormous attention in the secondary literature in classical Chinese philosophy and has come to seem to mean something very different from its surface meaning (something like spontaneous, skillful reactivity, in fact), I don't really see much of a textual basis for this in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi. He seems simply to praise literally doing nothing (or very little), like the yak. To the extent Zhuangzi does, here and elsewhere, praise uselessness and doing nothing, that seems the opposite of praising skillful accomplishment.

So I think we must re-evaluate standard interpretations of Zhuangzi's view of skill. And, indeed, I think Zhuangzi contains the seeds of a critique of the idea of "flow" as a central aim of life.

A Priori Metaphysical Possibility (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

Some philosophers think that we can't know any propositions to be possible a priori. One way to argue that we can't do this might go something like this: at best, you can only know something to be conceptually possible a priori; but conceptual possibility doesn't entail real (metaphysical) possibility, for which armchair investigation isn't enough. This is because, as Kripke demonstrated, some conceptual possibilities are metaphysically impossible.

(Hesperus is not Phosphorus is metaphysically impossible because 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' refer rigidly to the same object ­something that requires empirical investigation to establish. But it seems in some sense conceivable. We might call this a mere conceptual possibility.)

I agree that not all conceptual possibilities are metaphysical possibilities. But I think that, given a priori access to conceptual possibility and conceptual impossibility, we can get some a priori access to metaphysical possibility. Because I think there is an a priori link between conceptual and metaphysical possibility.

Here's a principle that might be true and a priori:

For any proposition q, if q is conceptually possible but metaphysically impossible, then there is some conceptually possible proposition p such that p -> []~q is conceptually necessary. (That's a material conditional and the box of metaphysical necessity.)

Why believe this principle? For one thing, for any such q, ~q is an a posteriori necessity, and a posteriori necessities follow a priori from empirical facts and concept possession. Since all empirical facts are conceptually possible, this is sufficient to prove the principle.

This principle gives us an a priori test for metaphysical possibility. (I'm assuming a priori conceptual modality.) Take some conceptually possible proposition q. If it is conceptually impossible that some conceptually possible proposition p is such that p conceptually entails necessarily not-q, then q is genuinely metaphysically possible.

For instance, it is conceptually possible for the Bears to have won the 2007 Super Bowl. Furthermore, there is no conceivable proposition p such that it is a priori that if p, then it is metaphysically impossible for the Bears to have won the 2007 Super Bowl. Therefore, it is metaphysically possible for the Bears to have won the 2007 Super Bowl.

If this is right, then one upshot is that it's worth getting clear on what conceptual possibility amounts to, and how it works.

I'd like to thank Eric for the opportunity to guest-blog for the past few weeks, and to thank everyone who's read and offered valuable comments. I hope and believe that this has helped get me back into the habit of philosophical blogging ­ I'll be continuing back at my own blog, There is Some Truth in That. I hope to see some of you there.

[And from Eric: Thanks so much, Jonathan, for your thought-provoking posts!]

Is Philosophy Ever Profound?

I can't recall ever having had the inclination to call a bit of philosophy "profound". I've been wondering recently what's behind attributions of profundity.

The opposite of profound might be "superficial". I do think some philosophy is superficial. For example, if one critiques Descartes's Meditations by complaining that he ignores somatic sensations in the gut, that critique is superficial (unless one draws something interesting and general from that observation). But it doesn't seem to follow that any critique of the Meditations that fails to be superficial is consequently profound.

Is profundity a matter of striking at the core of an issue? Berkeley strikes at the core of our conception of "material objects" in his suggestion that there are none such, but only minds and their experiences, co-ordinated by God. Ayer strikes at the heart of ethics when he says there are no moral facts. Yet these thinkers are not, I believe, the sort often labeled profound. Nor are those who give straightforward responses to their arguments in defense of mainstream opinion. Perhaps their views are too clear and comprehensible to be profound?

A philosopher writes about a matter of considerable importance; it's hard entirely to understand what he is saying, but you get hints and glimmers; any attempt to express it in familiar terms (or in newly-invented but clearly articulated terms) seems to fall short; straightforward objections seem to miss the mark, because they depend on exactly what the text does not provide, a plain interpretation that cannot plausibly be shifted to accommodate difficulties. If you are prone to philosophical trust -- if you believe that there is an elusive truth behind the text that you don't quite understand and that plain-speaking philosophers always (even necessarily?) miss -- then perhaps you will consider the text profound. Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein invite this sort of attitude. In contemporary "analytic" circles, maybe Davidson and McDowell do (among devotees).

If I think no philosophy is profound, then maybe that's because I am not much prone to philosophical trust, and because I am doubtful that there are any important philosophical truths so complex that they cannot be clearly stated in 400 pages.

Or, maybe, emitting evocative hints and glimmers that defy clear interpretation and engender interesting thoughts in others -- maybe that just is profundity?

Dreaming, Belief, and Emotion (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

Colin McGinn thinks that we believe what we dream. In his book Mindsight, McGinn raises lots of questions about dreaming and imagination, but only briefly considers the suggestion that we "no more believe our dreams than we believe our daytime reveries." That's my view. He rejects it on the grounds that without invoking belief, we cannot explain our emotional involvement with dreams. Here's a quote:

The sure test that dreams are suffused with belief is their ability to generate emotions that are conditional on belief, such as fear and elation—with which dreams are full. (p. 112)

The problem for the imagination model, then, can be stated thus:

(1) When I dream that p, I experience fear, elation, and other emotions of a certain type.
(2) Emotions like fear and elation, arising from an attitude that p, can only arise from a belief that p. Therefore,
(3) When I dream that p, I believe that p.

This argument strikes me as pretty bad. This parallels a puzzle in the philosophy of literature involving emotional responses to fictions. Fictions arouse emotions in us without causing belief; we seem to be happy that p, even though we do not believe that p. This is what philosophers of literature call the "Paradox of Fiction," and it takes the form of an apparently-inconsistent triad:

(1') When I read in a fiction that p, I experience fear, elation, and other emotions of a certain type.
(2) Emotions like fear and elation, arising from an attitude that p, can only arise from a belief that p. Therefore,
(3') When I read in a fiction that p, I do not believe that p.

It is generally accepted that (3') is true, so philosophers of fiction agree that it is either (1') or (2) that has to go. We may, with Kendall Walton, deny that we really experience fear and elation, but rather experience different, similar states, which he calls quasi-fear and quasi-elation. Or, we may say with Derek Matravers and others that belief isn't really necessary for fear; imagination can also play the role that belief often plays in fear, and likewise for the other emotions. I prefer the latter option, but I think it's obvious that one of these has to be right.

If we take the latter option to solve our puzzle about fiction, then we have also directly avoided the problem for the imagination model by denying the shared premise (2). If, on the other hand, we insist that these emotions include a cognitive element, denying instead that fictions really generate these emotions, then we may very well ask whether dreams really generate them either. It will be, perhaps, more plausible if we qualify our denial of emotional involvement in dreams thus: dreams don't involve emotions, except in the way that fictions do.

Leaving for Yue Today and Arriving Yesterday

Little is known about the ancient Chinese philosopher Huizi (or Hui Tzu, c. 300 BCE), but some of his paradoxes survive in the remoter chapters of the Zhuangzi. It's diverting to consider what reasoning might lie behind them. For example:

* I left for Yue today and arrived yesterday.
* I know the center of the world: It is north of Yen [in the north] and south of Yue [in the south].
* An egg has feathers.
* Wheels never touch the ground.
* No matter how swift the barbed arrow, there are times when it is neither moving nor at rest.
* Take a pole one foot long, cut away half of it every day, and at the end of ten thousand generations there will still be some left.
[Burton Watson, trans., except the first which is mine.]

The last two of these paradoxes are surprisingly close to Zero's famous paradoxes of motion in ancient Greece. (It is highly doubtful there was any influence.)

Consider the first of these: I left for Yue today and arrived yesterday. Is there any way to make sense of it?

Well, the following are plausible principles:
(a.) The last day you are in a locale is the day you left.
(b.) The first day you are in a locale is the day you arrived.
(c.) You are in a locale if at least 50% of your body is in that locale.

Now suppose I crossed over the border of Yue at exactly midnight, so that 50% of my body was in my home state at that instant and 50% was in Yue at that instant. It follows from (c) that:
(d.) I was in my home state both yesterday and today.
(e.) I was in Yue both yesterday and today.

By (a) and (d), I left for Yue today. However, by (b) and (e), I arrived yesterday.

The New Philosophers Carnival Is...

here.

Do We Believe What We Dream? (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

I guess it's pretty standard to think that when we dream that p, we believe that p. Why?

To clarify the question: obviously, if I dream that I'm a famous opera singer (when in fact I am not a famous opera singer), it's part of the dream that I believe I'm an opera singer, and it's false that I'm an opera singer. But the question I'm engaging in isn't whether I believe it in the dream; it's whether in fact I believe it during the time that I'm dreaming. (Compare: in the dream I am performing at the Met; in fact, I am in my bed, which is not at the Met.)

If I knew the correct theory of belief, this might not be too hard a question to answer. We'd just see whether my dream state falls under that theory. Unfortunately, I don't know what the right theory of belief is. But it looks to me like most of the candidate theories will make the "you believe what you dream" view problematic. That's good news for me, because I reject that view -- but it also makes me wonder whether I'm missing something, in light of the fact that the dream belief view is so standard.

So are there plausible views about belief on which it turns out that we believe what we dream? Laura is sleeping in bed, dreaming that she is in England. What could make it true that she believes herself to be in England?

Some philosophers hold that beliefs necessarily play a certain kind of functional role; that what it is for a mental representation to be a belief is for it to play a distinctive belief-like role in a subject's cognitive economy. But, dream beliefs do not appear to play many of the same functional roles as do prototypical beliefs. Functionalists are of course free to specify which cognitive functions are distinctive of belief, but I am skeptical about there being a satisfactory specification of the functional role of belief that includes Laura's representation I am in England, but excludes obvious non-beliefs, like the representation Laura has when she fantasizes about being in England while awake.

Likewise, if one is tempted by an interpretationalist or dispositionalist theory of belief, one will have difficulty granting belief status to dream beliefs. Let's observe Laura as she's dreaming. On what basis can we ascribe to her the belief that she is in England? She is not behaving as if she is in England – she is not
looking to the right before crossing streets. Neither does she give us utterances that are best interpreted as expressions of the belief that she is in England, so any kind of Davidsonian radical interpretation is out of the question. Indeed, she's exhibiting very little behavior at all, since she is asleep. What is it about Laura in virtue of which she believes she is in England?

Eric, I think, has defended a view relating beliefs to long-term dispositions -- Laura's I'm in England representation definitely isn't one of those. It'll be gone when she wakes up, if not sooner! Maybe Eric can clarify whether I'm interpreting his view right, and how dreaming could fit in.

So, why would anybody think we believe what we dream?

Do Atheists Commit Less Vicious Sexual Crimes?

This article suggests so. From the abstract:

This article examines associations between self-reported religious affiliations and official offense histories among 111 incarcerated adult male sexual offenders. Four categories of religiosity were devised according to self-reported continuities and discontinuities in life-course religious affiliations: atheists, dropouts, converts, and stayers. ANCOVAs indicated that stayers (those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood) had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crimes, serve to deter sexual offending behavior....

One is reminded, of course, of the Catholic church's troubles over the last several years. The average age of the youngest victim of the "stayers" was 9.5 years.

A few caveats: (1.) "Atheists" just means comparatively low reported religiosity, both childhood and present, and may not correspond to full-blown atheism. (2.) One cannot draw the conclusion that atheists are less likely, in general, to commit sex crimes, since rates of atheism and religiosity were not measured in the general population. (3.) The researchers (Donna Eshuys and Stephen Smallbone) seem to overlook the possibility that the "stayers" may come from a sub-population in which sex crimes are less likely to be detected and/or lead to jail time, in which case one might expect only the worst offenders to be incarcerated; or that maybe the more vicious sexual offenders are more likely to exaggerate their religiosity.

The general literature on the relationship between religiosity and crime is mixed and difficult to interpret. If only we could randomly assign religiosity! ;) Unfortunately, the social factors affecting religiosity are entangled with those affecting criminality. Furthermore, the literature may be distorted by the fact that null results are hard to publish and by the prior commitments of the researchers (many are from religiously affiliated institutions, for example).

Why do I care about this issue? Well, if academic moral philosophy has no great positive effect on one's moral character (as I'm inclined to think), then one might hope for religion as a better source. I'm not especially optimistic about that either (though I have some hope that there may be particular religious practices with positive moral effect), but I haven't yet explored the empirical literature as much as I'd like.

Dreaming in Color (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

Thanks to everyone for some really interesting discussions about methodology last week. I found them valuable, and will continue to think about them. But for now, I'd like to turn to a discussion of a different issue.

One of my pet theories is the imagination model of dreaming. I used to blog about it on Fake Barn Country (may it rest in peace) a lot. According to the imagination model of dreaming, when we dream, we do not have false beliefs, as Descartes assumed we do. Instead, we imagine things, much the same way we imagine when engaging with fictions or deliberate daydreams. Similarly, on this model, we don't experience percepts -- the kinds of sensory experiences we have while perceiving -- while dreaming. Instead, we have imagery experiences.

My first contact with our Splintered Mind host was through this 2002 paper: Eric Schwitzgebel, "Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33 (2002), 649-660. Eric remarks on a surprising pattern: In the 1950s, just about everybody thought that dreaming was a black and white phenomenon. Dreaming in color was considered a sign of insanity. Today, most of us report that we regularly dream in color. How strange!

Eric theorizes that the explanation may have to do with the predominant film media. People who watch black and white movies describe themselves as dreaming in black and white; nowadays we self-attribute technicolor dreams. He's got some cool data to support this theory.

I think that if this theory is right, it provides support for the imagination model of dreaming. If the sensory-like content of dream experience is pretty much like waking experience, it's very weird that black-and-white movies should make dream experience black and white. Watching black-and-white movies doesn't cause my waking experiences to be black-and-white. The imagination theorist's explanation is much easier. He may say that the familiarity of black-and-white film associates black-and-white imagery with imaginary events; when I tell myself a story while sleeping, I imagine watching it occur, and I do so in black and white, because that's what I'm used to in fictions.

What is "Rationalization"?

Kant concludes Chapter One of the Groundwork suggesting that the value of formal moral philosophy over "common" moral reasoning is this: It serves as a counterweight to our tendency to be led astray in our moral thinking by wishes and inclinations. One might say it helps us guard against rationalizing.

On the other hand, one might worry that moral philosophy actually gives such powerful tools for rationalization that we're better off going with our common-sense gut feelings about right and wrong.

I don't aim to addres that (partly empirical) dispute now. But it does raise the question, What exactly is rationalization, in this pejorative sense? Philosophers haven't discussed this much (though Al Mele has a nice piece in PPQ 1998).

Here are two first approximations:
(1.) A moral conclusion that X is permissible is a rationalization if it flows from a reasoning, or quasi-reasoning, process with the goal (conscious or not) of justifying X. [The "goal" account.]
(2.) A moral conclusion that X is permissible is a rationalization if it flows from a reasoning, or quasi-reasoning, process that was bound to result in the judgment that X is permissible, largely independently of the quality of the reasons for that conclusion, because the reasoner is influenced by non-moral considerations. [The "predetermination" account.]

(1) and (2) are often related: If you aim to justify doing X then you might not be very sensitive to the quality of the reasons in its favor. But the two can come apart.

(A.) Goal without predetermination: I start thinking about whether it would be okay to ask a co-worker out on a date. I think about the question primarily because I want to come to the conclusion that it is okay. And I do come to that conclusion. However, it actually is morally permissible in this case, and had it not been I wouldn't have come to the conclusion that it was.

(B.) Predetermination without goal: I am so enchanted by the idea of a communist revolution that I can't think straight about it. I sincerely want to reject a particular act of communist revolutionizing if it's morally wrong, but I can't give it a fair hearing in my mind; so almost regardless of how poor the reasons, I will endorse it.

It seems to me that (B) is more usefully (and intuitively) thought of as "rationalizing" than (A), thus favoring the predetermination account.

Note by the way that neither account appeals to the quality of the reasons. For example, no matter how sound my justification for the permissibility of the revolutionizing, if my goals and sensitivities in employing that reasoning aren't right, I'm still rationalizing.

(These ideas arose in conversation with UCR grad student Joshua Hollowell and are as much his ideas as my own. I post them here with his permission.)

Why Do People Worry about Whether Intuitions Are Evidence? (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

I wanted to say a little more about philosophical methodology and naturalistic challenges to a priori investigation. A key point of dispute between, let's call them, naturalists and rationalists, seems to involve the proper role of intuitions in philosophical methodology.

Again, I'll start by describing a hypothetical disagreement, running the risk of caricaturing the arguments in question. If that's what I'm doing, it will be instructive to see how the real views are different from my presentations of them here.

Archie: Consider twin earth, which is kind of like regular earth, but where there's no H20. Instead, there's this other stuff XYZ, which is not H20, but is superficially very similar to H20. It's clear and quenches thirst, etc. Introspecting, we discover in ourselves the rational intuition that XYZ is not water. Intuitions are good evidence; therefore, XYZ is not water. Therefore, externalism about content is true.

Eddie: It's not rational to blindly treat your so-called "rational intuitions" as evidence. We can't calibrate our intuitions to check their reliability, and it's totally mysterious how it is that they could be reliable. We shouldn't just trust them. We should go administer surveys instead. If we want to know whether XYZ is water, we have to go see how the folk use the word 'water'.

In my last dialogue, I claimed there was no real disagreement, even though they clearly thought there was. This time, I think they're both agreeing to something silly. According to traditional methodology, our intuitions are supposed to be evidence? Why? I think the most attractive position is this one: Experimental Eddie is right that we shouldn't treat our intuitions as evidence, but both he and Armchair Archie are wrong that traditional methodology commits to intuitions as evidence.

When I judge that that stuff on twin earth is not water, how shall we understand the reasoning I run through? Not, I suggest, like Archie said:

(1) I have the intuition that XYZ isn't water. (introspection)
(2) So, XYZ isn't water. (1, principle about intuitions)

(I'm omitting (3) So, content externalism.) Instead, we can understand the reasoning as not involving any premise about intuitions, or based on introspection, at all:

(3) All and only H20 is water.
(4) XYZ isn't H20.
(5) So, XYZ isn't water.

This argument is valid and plausibly represents the reasoning we go through to ourselves. And no premise is based on introspection or a claim about an 'intuition'.

Someone will say: "but the only way you could know (3) is by intuition." Since I don't know what intuitions are, I won't try to evaluate that claim; the point is that (3) is something that everybody should agree we can know, and that therefore its invocation in this judgment about a thought experiment shouldn't be problematic. (Do you doubt that we know (3)? That's to doubt whether we can recognize the possibility of fake water.)

This argument, of course, is a posteriori, because premise (3) is. But there's an a priori version of it, too:

(3') All and only things that are F are water, where 'F' stands for whatever it is that it turns out makes up water.
(4') XYZ is not made up of F.
(5) So, XYZ isn't water.

Whenever possible, we should avoid putting argument in terms of 'intuitions'. I suggest that this is almost always the case.

"Experimental Philosophy" -- Wide and Narrow

I'm a philosopher. For some reason, this hasn't prevented me from running experiments when I've felt they could shine some light on an issue troubling me. (I examined whether people still reported dreaming in black and white in the U.S. and in China, as part of exploring how well we know our own stream of experience; for similar reasons, I've given people beepers and had them report on their sensory experience; I'm also trying various things aimed at discerning whether ethicists behave better than other people.) By 20th-century standards, this is highly unusual behavior for a philosopher!

But as I'm sure you've noticed, this is the 21st century. I must be a man of my times, for I find I have company -- most notably the company of a group who call themselves "Experimental Philosophers" and perceive themselves, self-consciously, as a movement -- with a blog, for example, and bibliographies. As a movement, Experimental Philosophy ("X-Phi"!) has received considerable attention, both positive and negative (e.g., here and here).

The philosophers most central to this movement tend to poll undergraduates regarding their moral intuitions or their intuitions about traditional philosophical examples and puzzles. Tired of hearing one philosopher say something like, "Well, of course, our ordinary intuition in cases like X is such-and-such" and another respond with "Well, I don't have that intuition!", they quite sensibly decided to go out and see what people's intuitions actually were. Only in philosophy would it take sixty years to think of doing this! (I chose sixty years as approximately the beginning of the tendency to take ordinary intuition as the principal court of philosophical appeal; it's salutary to reflect on the brevity of this period relative to the entire history of philosophy.)

One might doubt how much we can learn about the world by polling undergraduate intuition (other than learning what undergraduate intuitions are -- which is actually a pretty important thing), but at a minimum the movement should put to an end cavalier philosophical appeals to ordinary intuition. It's good metaphilosophical conscience.

Construed as such a project, experimental philosophy is relatively fresh, controversial, and coherent as a movement. But here's the strange thing: Such philosophers often characterize "experimental philosophy" as experimental work done by philosophers [caveat: see comments section] to shine light on philosophical disputes (e.g., here). In this broader sense, "experimental philosophy" is much less coherent as a movement, and much older; and much of it is hard to distinguish from the sorts of things psychologists do.

In discussions of "experimental philosophy" I think there's often a problematic ambiguity between these broad and narrow senses, as though, implicitly, the participants assume that polling intuitions is the only kind of experimentation a philosopher could do that would shed light on a genuinely philosophical dispute....

What Do Analytic Philosophers Analyze? (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)

Hello, Splintered Mind readers! I'm pleased to be guest-blogging, and
thanks to Eric for the invitation. I'm looking forward to some good
discussions over the next couple of weeks.

I thought I'd start off with a question in philosophical methodology.
There's a certain kind of disagreement that sometimes comes up about
how to go about doing philosophy -- it connects to lots of deep
issues, and from the way people talk about it, it sure seems like it's
a big ideological disagreement, but I have a pretty hard time wrapping
my head around just what the disagreement is supposed to be.

The debate I have in mind tends to occur between traditional
philosophers who think that lots of interesting philosophy is a
priori, and philosophers who think that we have to go out and do
empirical investigation to learn anything interesting. Roughly -- and
only roughly -- speaking, some philosophers like thought experiments,
and others like psychological experiments.

Sometimes, I feel debate between these camps goes something like this.
Maybe I'm caricaturing, but I don't think so:

Archie: I'm using a priori investigation to learn about the
nature of knowledge.

Eddie: When you say 'knowledge', are you talking about something out
there in the world? Or are you just studying the concept of
knowledge?

Archie: Oh, I definitely am interested in knowledge out there in
the world. I'm using a priori investigation to learn which
things are instances of knowledge -- that thing out there in
the world.

Eddie: That's hopeless. How can a priori investigation teach
you something about something out there in the world? At best, a
priori investigation could give you insight into which things fall
under the concept knowledge. That's a merely psychological
matter.

Archie: No, it's not just a psychological question -- I agree that
would be uninteresting. I'm learning about the nature of knowledge,
that thing in the world!

You may anticipate my confusion from the way I set up this dialogue.
I can't see what this disagreement is supposed to be about. Here are
the two questions that we're supposed to be contrasting:

(1) Which things are knowledge?
(2) Which things fall under the concept KNOWLEDGE?

But these two questions are identical. Or, at least they're
equivalent. For after all, it is a tautology that all and only things
that are knowledge are things that fall under the concept KNOWLEDGE.

So what is it that this disagreement is supposed to be about? It
can't be that Armchair Archie is illicitly attempting to adjudicate
from the armchair what actual cases of knowledge there are in the
world, because this would be an obvious and ridiculous mistake. It
can't be that Experimental Eddie's question presupposes that
'knowledge' is a natural kind term, because it doesn't; "which things
are trains?" has just the same structure as "which things are
knowledge?", and nobody thinks trains are natural kinds.
(Furthermore, "Which things fall under the concept WATER?" can't be
answered a priori.)

So what gives? Is there a genuine disagreement in the ballpark?

The Parable of the Farmer of Song (Mengzi 2A2)

No, he doesn't harvest music!

One must work at it, but do not aim at it directly. Let the heart not forget, but do not help it grow. Do not be like the man from Song (Sung). Among the people of the state of Song there was one who, concerned lest his grain not grow, pulled on it. Wearily, he returned home, and said to his family, 'Today I am worn out. I helped the grain to grow.' His son rushed out and looked at it. The grain was withered. Those in the world who do not help the grain to grow are few. Those who abandon it, thinking it will not help, are those who do not weed their grain. Those who help it grow are those who pull on the grain. Not only does this not help, but it even harms it.

This parable appears in the middle of a larger fragment, Mengzi (Mencius) 2A2 (Bryan Van Norden, trans.). The standard interpretation these days (e.g. P.J. Ivanhoe) is this. Just as the man of Song harms his grain by trying to force it to grow, so also we can harm our moral development by trying to perform grand acts of morality before we are psychologically ready to do so -- i.e., before we'd feel happy and unresentful doing so.

Two considerations may seem to compel this interpretation. First, Mengzi often uses agricultural metaphors to talk about the cultivation of moral goodness. And second, the sentence preceding the parable is: "Consequently, I say that Gaozi never understood righteousness, because he regarded it as external." Hence, the "it" at the beginning of the parable might naturally be understood as "righteousness".

But here are two problems: First, its plausibility. It seems strange to say that "Those in the world who do not help the grain [i.e. morality] to grow are few." Are people generally as eager to work at becoming more virtuous as this farmer is to help his grain? And furthermore, is trying to force oneself to be virtuous such a bad thing? -- something that generally harms one's moral development?

Second, Mengzi never says, anywhere else, anything like "That would be a morally good thing to do, but you would resent doing it, so you shouldn't do it. Take it slow, instead." On the contrary, Mengzi seems to demand instant moral behavior from everyone and is unsatisfied with half-measures (e.g. 3B8, 7A39, 1A3).

A better interpretation of the parable, I think, comes from looking at 2A2 as a whole. 2A2 begins with long discussion of the "unperturbed heart", the "floodlike qi [breath/vital-energy]", and courage. The kind of courage Mengzi most admires is strength of moral conviction (which seems to be the core of "sageness", e.g., in 5B1) -- not being blown about by the winds of circumstance and drawn away from one's convictions by the temptations of personal advantage. If no circumstance, good or bad, could perturb your heart and interfere with your breath [qi], then you will be unshakeable from morality: This is having a "floodlike qi". Immediately before the parable of the farmer is this:

Gongsun Chou said, "I venture to ask what is meant by 'floodlike qi.'"

Mengzi said, "It is difficult to put into words. It is a qi that is supremely great and supremely unyielding. If one cultivates it with uprightness and does not harm it, it will fill up the space between Heaven and earth. It is a qi that unites righteousness with the Way. Without these, it starves. It is produced by accumulated righteousness. It cannot be obtained by a seizure of righteousness. If some of one's actions leave one's heart unsatisfied, it will starve. Consequently, I say that Gaozi never understood righteousness, because he regarded it as external."

In this broader context, I'd suggest the parable is not about the cultivation of morality or righteousness per se but rather about the cultivation of a floodlike qi -- i.e., steadfastness of character. Plainly this is related to morality for Mengzi, but it is not the same.

What is it, then, to try to force one's character to grow, per the farmer of Song? Maybe this: Overestimate one's steadfastness. Allow oneself to be put into situations that bring out the bad in people, thinking that you can resist in a way others can't -- allowing yourself that "one more drink", saying to yourself "I won't yield to temptation this time", or "politics won't corrupt me", or "if I get [money, power, influence, the promotion, etc.] I won't be like those other people". There are few of us who don't overestimate ourselves in that way; and so overestimating ourselves we put ourselves in situations that greatly harm our moral character.

This interpretation, although only subtly different from the standard, is different enough to avoid the latter's difficulties.

Humeschwitzstein

Astronomers know -- or seem to know -- the most remarkable things on the slenderest base of evidence. Largely on the basis of the spectral analysis of light (often supplemented with verbal reports about rare events in very small pieces of the world called physics laboratories), they reach conclusions about the origin and early history of the universe, about unfamiliar events at virtually unimaginable distances, about the destiny of the sun in some billions of years. It could, of course, all have been one giant projection screen overhead that we'd have punctured with our first moon probe.

Why assume that as things happen here, they happen everywhere? -- that as things happen now, they've happened always and will happen forever? Hume compared us (didn't he?) to fleas on the back of a dog, watching a hair grow and saying "ah, that's how the universe works!"

Some days, I feel very much like such a flea. Hume used this idea, or something like it, in defense of atheism, or something like it; but in me it works the other way. Our science does a pretty good job with our local little hair, Earth, and the nearby hairs (Mars, etc.) seem to grow under much the same rules; but should I be so confident there isn't a whole dog somewhere underneath whose operation I haven't even begun to imagine?

Nor can we even remember or keep straight the growth of our little hair. I search for the Hume quote. I can't find it in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which would have been my guess. I have a sense that I heard my colleague Howie Wettstein attributing the quote to him. So I email Howie and he tells me that the part about the flea on the dog is pure invention on my part but the back half of the quote is accurate; but now he can't find it in Hume either.

Finally we trace it to the source: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part II:

From observing the growth of a hair, can we learn any thing concerning the generation of a man?

(In context, Hume is challenging the assumption implicit in the argument from design that we can transfer what we know about the workings of small, local things to the workings of universe as a whole.)

Howie remarks that it's like that old game "telephone": Hume said it, Howie misremembered it to me, I misremembered it to my students and to you just now. All the more reason for humility, Hume might say.

Philosophers Carnival #42 is...

here.

(Thanks Justin and Garrett!)

Is It Fair to Expect Ethicists to Behave Better?

Suppose I'm right and ethicists don't behave better than anyone else (see these posts). Shall we accuse them of hypocrisy? Consider a concrete example: Kant is remarkably strict in his denunciation of lying (famously saying that you shouldn't even lie to a murderer at the door about the hiding place of his innocent target). Should we hold him to higher standards of truthfulness in his personal behavior than others? Is there something particularly bad about Kant falsifying his tax return?

The obvious and natural answer is yes. Yet I'm struck by this analogy: A doctor goes to a third world country. Every time she takes a day off, ten people die who wouldn't otherwise have died. Suppose she takes a day off to go fishing, knowing that she doesn't need to fish, that a vacation isn't necessary to her continued functioning, that should could have worked that day without any loss to her future efficiency. She just wants to fish, and she thinks she deserves the time off. Shall we accuse her of preferring a day of fishing for herself to the lives of ten other people, and thus fishing at the expense of their lives? In a sense her choice does seem repugnant in that way. Yet also the accusation seems unfair. Had she chosen a pleasant career as a philosophy professor, or a cosmetic surgeon, she could take a day off without deadly repercussions. Her choice to go abroad instead was morally admirable. Surely, she deserves a "me day" at least as much as the rest of us.

I draw the conclusion that we should be careful about requiring people to shoulder an additional moral load because of their choice of profession (setting aside cases in they shoulder such a load to compensate for a wicked profession). Considering myself: I chose to specialize in philosophy of psychology, not ethics. Do I therefore have fewer moral obligations? Is it more permissible for me to lie, disrespect my students, ignore the disadvantaged? To say so seems not only unfair to ethicists but to create a kind of prudential incentive to avoid ethics -- perhaps even to avoid thinking about ethics -- if one wishes to remain (comparatively!) un-blameworthy for one's actions.

(I was brought to this thought reading Richard Posner's comment [in his 1999 book, p. 69] that ethics professors seem just as eager to reduce their teaching loads as anyone else -- and that therefore they must either think their teaching ineffectual or value the cultivation of morality less than they say. At first, this seemed to me a fair and interesting criticism; and maybe it still is....)

Echolocation and Knowledge

Wednesday I argued that you can probably echolocate considerably better than you think you can. Let me amplify on that idea.

First, we not only have the capacity to echolocate, but we do actually use echolocatory information in negotiating through our daily environment. Our sense of the space we're in and the objects that surround us is continually confirmed or altered by echolocatory information. Here's an example Mike Gordon and I used in our 2000 essay on human echolocation: Wenger Corporation's "virtual room" can electronically simulate the acoustics of a very large room within a small space. According to Mike, when unsuspecting listeners walk into such a room, they quickly sense that something is amiss. Typically, they glance upward at the ceiling to see if it is unusually high. Now that I'm attuned to it, I'm struck by the acoustic difference between the typical classroom and a carpeted room with lots of soft furniture. If I'm thinking of it as I walk through a doorway, I notice the acoustic transition between rooms and the echolocatory sense I have of the doorframe as it passes near my ears. Even if I weren't thinking about it, a classroom that sounded like a living room or a doorway that gave me no echolocatory sense of its frame, would likely disconcert me -- you, too, I'd wager, independent of any intellectual apprehension you have, or not, of your capacities for echolocation.

Second, there's something it's like to echolocate. It's not an entirely nonconscious capacity. We have auditory experience of the direction and distance (and maybe also the texture and shape) of silent objects. This experience is both ordinary and pervasive.

Yet, despite the two points above, we have very little apprehension of this experience. For example, in the 18th and 19th centuries, blind people who navigated by echolocation were struck by their remarkable ability to avoid unseen objects in novel environments -- and many of them hypothesized that they did so by feeling pressure on their faces. In fact, the capacity was generally known as "facial vision". Yet, 20th-century researchers established that this was an auditory, not a tactile capacity (for example, by covering their faces and not their ears and vice versa). Most normally sighted subjects who participate in echolocatory experiments (as Mike and Larry and others have noted, and as I have seen informally) are surprised at the results, and many have the impulse to think they are feeling pressure on their faces.

If we assume -- as I think is probably warranted -- that echolocatory information is not generally felt as pressure on the face, then these people have gone wrong about a pervasive and fundamental aspect of their ongoing conscious experience; and most of us, even if not wrong in quite that way, are strikingly ignorant about this aspect of our stream of experience.

We should, I think, turn the epistemology of Locke and Descartes on its head: What we know best and most directly are outward objects (the size of the room, the shape of the desk before me); what we know only partially, tentatively, and after reflection is our sensory experience of that world.