Do Ethicists Steal More Books?

When I was young, my father and I used to joke about stealing Bibles, or breaking into a Christian store and making off with a load of crucifixes. The irony appealed to us, on the assumption that an important part of wanting a Bible or a crucifix is endorsing a set of values that includes the repudiation of theft. There's something likewise ironic, it seems, in stealing an ethics text (or should I say deliciously wicked?).

One might expect Bibles and books extolling the life of virtue to be relatively less stolen than similarly popular books with no moral message. On the other hand, given my sense that ethicists, on the whole, behave no better than the rest of us, maybe we shouldn't expect a difference. In casual conversation, I've sometimes heard it remarked that ethics books seem, indeed, more likely to be missing from libraries than books in other areas of philosophy -- which would comport nicely with the sense some people have of the particular viciousness of ethics professors. However, the impression that ethics books are more likely to be stolen might derive from their simply being more popular, or it might be a saliency effect -- perhaps we're more likely to be struck by and remember a theft of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals than a theft of Kripke's Naming and Necessity.

Here at the University of California, we have access to a system called Melvyl, which gives circulation information on all the books in the University of California system. The main campus libraries at Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, and Santa Cruz also give due date information, including for overdue books. So we can inquire: Are ethics books more or less likely to be overdue or missing from these UC campuses than other philosophy books?

I looked at the book reviews in Philosophical Review from 1994-2001. I included in my survey books that were clearly in ethics (excluding philosophy of action, political philosophy on proper governance [rather than private virtue], and other borderline cases). As a comparison class, I also looked at books that were clearly outside of ethics if the review started on a page number divisible by four. This gave me 76 ethics books and 67 non-ethics books. Almost all these texts were held by at least 5 of the 6 campuses; some texts had multiple copies at a single campus.

The ethics books were listed as off the shelf (checked out or missing) in 73 cases (between the 6 campuses) out of 452 held copies, for an off-shelf rate of 16.1%. Of these, 8 were overdue or missing (5 missing or lost; 1 more than 1 year overdue; 2 less than one year overdue), for a 1.8% deliquency rate per copy. 11.0% of the off-shelf books were delinquent.

The non-ethics books were listed as off the shelf in 66 cases out of 379 held copies, for an off-shelf rate of 17.4%. Of these, 7 were overdue or missing (actually, all 7 were simply missing, none overdue), for a 1.8% delinquency rate per copy. 10.6% of the off-shelf books were delinquent.

These numbers are too small to draw any definite conclusions, but they do seem to suggest that, among philosophical books prominent enough to be reviewed in Philosophical Review, ethics books are checked out and stolen at very nearly the same rate as non-ethics books -- neither more nor less.

The University of California has a pretty good system for tracking down overdue books. I wonder to what extent the low delinquency rates are due to good enforcement rather than the conscientiousness of the patrons. In this connection, it would be interesting to do a study of libraries that depend primarily on the honor of the patrons. The UCR Philosophy Department Library is an example of the latter (as opposed to the main library, Rivera, whose holdings are included in Melvyl, described above); but unfortunately there's no systematic record of its holdings.

If any readers of this blog have access to the circulation records of a consortium of libraries, or have access to information from which they could infer deliquency rates in libraries that depend mostly on the honor of the patrons, and are interested in exploring this issue farther, I'd love to hear from you!

Paranormal Phenomena and Substance Dualism

If you're going to be a dualist -- that is, if you differentiate the mental from the physical -- I think you ought to be a good old-fashioned substance dualist. You ought, in other words, to embrace the idea that there are distinct mental and material substances. The more fashionable form of dualism in analytic philosophy these days, "property dualism", which distinguishes mental from physical properties, as conceptually distinct, while denying that there is any distinctly mental substance, seems to me too far removed from the questions that we should care about in the dualism-materialism debate -- questions such as whether we have immaterial souls that could persist into an afterlife (property dualism, like materialism, says no), and whether our thoughts depend solely upon physical goings-on (property dualism, like materialism, says yes, for all practical purposes). I've not yet been convinced that I should care much about what would be the case in "logically possible worlds" where the laws of physics and psychology are suspended -- the sort of thing property dualists such as Chalmers want us to think about. (But if you are going to think about such things, Chalmers is a model of clarity and intelligence.)

The truth of substance dualism is empirically explorable, as the debate between materialism and property dualism (with its focus on the merely logically or "metaphysically" or "conceptually" possible) appears not to be. Of central relevance to the question, of course, is the dependency of our mental processes on how things stand in the material world -- on our brains in particular. The more it seems that mental life depends on and covaries with brain activity, the worse for substance dualism. With the advance of neuroscience, substance dualism isn't looking so good, I'd say.

However, there is one class of evidence that philosophers rarely explore and which, if it were to pan out, would spell serious trouble for materialism; that is "paranormal" or "psi" phenomena -- especially direct mind-to-mind communication (without a physical medium) and out-of-body experiences.

The evidence for paranormal phenemona is mixed. It is not as decisively negative as most contemporary academics tend to assume. The work of Daryl Bem (on direct mind-to-mind communication) and Pim Van Lommel (on out-of-body experiences in near-death situations) especially comes to mind.

Bem's classic "Ganzfeld" experiments (e.g. Bem & Honorton 1994 in Psych Bulletin) require a "sender" and a "receiver" to be sequestered in separate compartments; the "sender" is given a randomly selected image to concentrate on and to try to send; the "receiver" is to describe her thoughts and images aloud for 30 minutes. Finally the receiver is presented with four pictures (one the target) and asked to rate the similarity of each to her mentation during the 30 minute period. Results are generally above chance.

Bem, an eminent Cornell psychologist, knows how to design a study. Reading through his work, I generally think to myself, "If this were about anything else, I'd say this was a perfectly designed and utterly convincing study. He has controlled for everything." Carl Sagan was surely right in saying extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; but how extraordinary, exactly, is sufficient? Do we need to consider, for example, that Bem might simply be lying, or have been systematically deceived by unscrupulous collaborators and subjects?

Pim Van Lommel, similarly, has published work in the Lancet and elsewhere, work done in accord with typical scientific standards and suggestive of the reality and frequency of near-death experiences. Van Lommel has evidence that patients during cardiac arrest, with eyes closed and severely compromised brain function, were in some cases able to acquire otherwise unavailable information about happenings in the outside world (e.g., detailed descriptions of the what the doctor did with the patient's dentures) reported by the patient as having been seen from above. Van Lommel (personal communication) has even tried prospective studies of this latter sort of phenomenon, posting notes high in rooms where patients near cardiac death are being treated, notes facing the ceiling; but unfortunately, he reports, patients reporting near-death out-of-body experiences seem to be much more focused on their bodies and their religious experiences than on the contents of such notes!

I'm not saying we should accept Bem and Van Lommel; but I do think we should take them seriously. This is where I'd like to see the action in debates about dualism, rather than on questions such as the conceivability (or not) of various possibilities (e.g., "zombies"), if one suspends the laws of physics!

Brief Hiatus

Regular visitors to The Splintered Mind will know I usually post on a MWF schedule. No post this Friday, though: I'm heading up to Oregon tomorrow for my sister's wedding! I should be back in the saddle on Monday.

Purkinje on Visual Experience with One's Eyes Closed

Johann Purkinje [Jan Purkyne] was a leading figure in early 19th century physiology, and his descriptions of visual experience were discussed extensively by late 19th century introspective psychologists. However, I haven't been able to find English translations of his work. In connnection with my recent thoughts on our visual experience with our eyes closed, I was particularly intrigued by the respectful citations of his work on this topic by introspective psychologists such as Hermann Helmholtz and E.B. Titchener. So I decided to struggle through some Purkinje in German. In the Underblog, I've posted amateurish translations of a few passages.

A few points of interest about the translated passages:

(1.) Purkinje claims to see a chessboard pattern of squares when his eyes are closed and he's facing toward the sun (as well as in many other conditions). He claims that this experience "was noticed by most individuals with whom I made the experiments" -- so much so that he thinks it must derive from general conditions in the human organism. Yet I don't seem to have such an experience in those conditions; nor has anyone in any condition, whom I've asked about visual experience with their eyes closed, reported such a chessboard pattern to me.

(2.) He makes an interesting point about the difficulty in finding the borderpoint of the visual field with the eyes closed (cf. my post on the limits of the visual field with respect to nasal-side phosphenes).

(3.) The portrayals of afterimages (with the exception of what is now called the "Purkinje afterimage") are two-dimensional -- a point about which he is fairly explicit in Section XXVIII (cf. my post on whether images are flat).

The New Philosophers' Carnival is

here!

Can You Touch Your Jaw and Feel It in Your Hand?

"Phantom limb" phenomena have been well-known since at least the time of Descartes. People with missing limbs will report feeling sensations in the missing areas. In 1998, V.S. Ramachandran famously showed that people with missing arms can sometimes be induced to feel phantom sensations (as though in their missing hands) if gently stroked on the face. (See this article, for example, which is rich with interesting descriptions.) The reason for this, evidently, is that as the nerves from the phantom limb area provide no useful input, other nearby regions of the brain begin to recruit neurons from the areas formerly dedicated to input from the phantom limb; and the primary cortical region associated with tactile input from the face is adjacent to that associated with tactile input from the hand. Apparently, plasticity in input can sometimes outrun plasticity in the felt sensation, so that the relevant neurons that used to respond to stimulus from the hand and trigger (appropriately) a sensation subjectively located in the hand can come to respond to stimulus from the face while still triggering (now inappropriately) a sensation subjectively located in the hand.

Recent research -- for example by Peter Hickmott here at UC Riverside -- has shown that in animals whose nerves have been cut, one can start seeing neural plasticity within minutues. Cortical neurons near the border between forepaw and jaw which formerly acted in synchrony with other forepaw neurons start to act in synchrony with the jaw neurons.

This leads me to think of the following experiment. If we somehow induced in people cortical input from the hand similar to that one would get from denervation of the hand (by sensory deprivation? by anaesthesia?), and then one gently stroked the jaw, a la Ramachandran, might the person report a sensation in the hand?

If this has been done, I haven't heard of it.

Are Images Flat?

Okay, here’s another post about the spatial properties (or not) of visual images. I seem to be on a kick!

Pete Mandik reminded me of this issue when he said something in his comments on my last post that seemed (perhaps only seemed?) to imply that he regarded images as generally two-dimensional.

We certainly talk, sometimes, as though they are. Most tellingly, I think, we call images “pictures” (in the mind’s eye), not (say) “sculptures”. Stephen Kosslyn, in his seminal 1980 book on imagery, describes the imagery space as “roughly circular” and compares its horizontal and vertical dimensions. He does not (that I recall) discuss its depth. Likewise, he says that position in the imagery matrix can be indicated by a pair of co-ordinates (polar co-ordinates r and theta) – not, as would be necessary for a three-dimensional imagery space, a triplet of co-ordinates (such as the Cartesian x,y,z or the polar r, theta, and phi). His sample portrayals of images never indicate depth.

In my posts here and here and my article on the question of whether things look flat, I suggest that our tendency to think of circular objects viewed obliquely as “looking elliptical” and distant objects as “looking small” derives primarily from an over-analogizing of visual experience to flat media such as paintings and pictures. I won’t rehearse those arguments again; but if that’s right, then perhaps our (at least some of our) tendency to think of images as flat derives from a similar over-analogizing and should be treated with similar skepticism.

One can accept that images are often (or even typically?) three-dimensional without going so far as to say that we can imagine something from multiple perspectives at once -- just as we can say that our visual representations and visual experience are fundamentally and ineliminably marked out in three-dimensional space (even monocularly) without saying that we can see from more than one angle at once.

So I’m wary of our too easily supposing that our imagery appears as if on a flat plane. But maybe, nonetheless, it does. I wonder about readers' introspective sense of this; and I’d be interested to hear also if you have reflections on neuroscientific or behavioral tests that might shine light on the question.

Can People Imagine Things from Multiple Angles at Once?

Here's another question about imagery experience -- related to Monday's post about whether images have subjective location. Can people (at least some people, in some circumstances) imagine things from multiple angles at once? Francis Galton, in his seminal study of imagery experience (1880, 1907), says that some of the best imagers report being about to do this. Jorge Luis Borges describes a similar phenomenon in a fictional character obsessed with a coin he calls a "Zahir":

There was a time when I could visualize the obverse, and then the reverse. Now I see them simultaneously. This is not as though the Zahir were crystal, because it is not a matter of one face being superimposed upon another; rather, it is as though my eyesight were spherical, with the Zahir in the center.

Now is this really possible? I can't claim ever to have had such an imagery experience myself; but that doesn't mean others can't do it. On the other hand, I don't think we should simply take people at their word when they make unusual claims about their experiential lives.

Here are two reasons one might think multiple-angle imagery is impossible:

(1.) If images are located in subjective space, as some people report -- say, near your forehead -- then it seems natural to suppose (if not strictly implied) that we have a single visual angle on those images, presumably the angle from the center of one's subjective self to the image in question. (Now that I see these words in print, though, I must say there seems to me something a little fishy in them!)

(2.) If images are instantiated in the brain (or caused by the brain) in accord with some topography of either subjective or objective space (e.g., the right side of the image is created by this location in the brain, the left side by this other location), then that topography may well require a single visual angle or point of view (e.g., in "circular vision" right and left might not be well defined).

I don't mean to say that either of these points is decisive -- not by a long shot. I wonder: Have any readers of this blog have had experiences they would describe as imagery from more than one angle simultaneously?

Are Images in Subjective Space?

I've interviewed a number of people about their imagery. Some I've asked to form images as we speak; others I've had wear random beepers during their normal daily activity, and they're reported having imagery at the "sampled" moments when the beep goes off. Interestingly, some people report that their images have a spatial location -- typically near their foreheads or some small distance directly in front of their foreheads (up to a couple feet) -- while others deny that their images are located in subjective space in this way: Neither in their heads, nor in front of their heads, nor anywhere else.

Now I wonder: Are these differing reports to be trusted? Do some people experience their imagery as located in subjective space, while others do not? Or is one or the other, or both, of the groups confused in some way?

Although I'm not especially optimistic about definitively answering that question, here's at least one thought about how, in principle, it might be testable. Maybe imagery interacts to some extent with vision. If you imagine something in some particular region of space you might be worse (or better) at seeing external objects in that region. If so, then maybe people whose imagery is subjectively located will have enhanced or diminished performance in perceptual tasks in regions of space associated with their imagery, while they are maintaining an image, compared to regions of space outside their usual imagery field; and not so for those who report imagery as having no subjective location.

Philosophy of Mind and Science Works in Progress

Pete Mandik's Brain Hammer will be hosting a "works in progress" series in Philosophy of Mind and Science. The first article is already up. Check it out here!

What is Low Self-Esteem? (by guest blogger Brad Cokelet)

We commonly explain habitual patterns of action by appeal to people’s degree self-esteem. For example if your friend, call her Jane, keeps dating people who treat her poorly and someone asks you why, you might say she has low self-esteem. But what does it mean to say that someone has a low level of esteem for his or her self?

Taken literally, self-esteem seems to suggest believing that one's character and/or achievements are praiseworthy – that one has done well and, perhaps, can take credit for having done so. But Jane might be very successful in a number of departments of her life – she is doing well at her career, has many friends, material security, etc. If asked, she might say that all of these things are accomplishments that she can take credit for. But she can believe that and still suffer from “low self-esteem” and date people who are bad for her.

So what is self-esteem if it is not belief that one has done things that deserve praise?

One possibility is that esteem is like love – you can believe you have reason to love someone, but not actually feel it, and you can believe you have reason to esteem yourself, but not feel it. But even if self-esteem does involve feeling in addition to belief, I doubt that this solves our problem, because counterexamples cases seem to exist. For example: Jane believes she has reason to think well of herself, and feels positive when she thinks of herself and her accomplishments, but she still engages in the imprudent behavior – entering into relationships that are bad for her.

A second possibility is that the term ‘self-esteem’ is misleading; it is respect, not esteem, she is missing. To make this suggestion work we need an explanation of what self-respect – respect for one’s self – amounts to. Although it is initially appealing, I have doubts about this too. It is plausible to assume that a failure to respect X to be a failure to have the attitude towards X that one is obligated to have and that talk of obligation implies that the person in question is able to adopt do what they are obligated to do at will (by choice); and these assumptions imply that Jane could choose to respect herself (at will). But this casts doubt on the claim that her imprudence is explained by a failure of self-respect: part of the tragic thing about people like Jane, to whom we attribute low self-esteem, is that they often cannot solve their problem simply by choosing to (i.e. at will).

A final, third possibility, is that what we have in mind is Jane’s lack of self-concern. On this view, Jane would likely refrain from acting so imprudently if she cared more about her own well-being. If so we should stop talking about low self-esteem and talk about a lack of self-concern instead.

I am myself tempted to take that final approach and to stop talking of low self-esteem. Is this right? And do I need to fatten my diet of examples before drawing this general conclusion; are there other cases that allow us to make better sense of talk of low self-esteem?

Black and Black

When I close my eyes, and I'm not looking toward a bright light, I'm tempted to say I see black -- or, more accurately, an assortment of colors (afterimages?) on a largely black background. (See this post for a broader discussion of what we experience when our eyes are closed.)

But here's something that shakes my confidence: When I put my hands over my eyes (without pressing), it seems to get considerably darker. When I then remove my hands, I'm inclined to think (a.) that I'm having pretty much the same visual experience as when I originally closed my eyes, and (b.) that experience is one of middle gray, or -- since that doesn't seem quite right, either -- at least something too bright to be black.

Now it seems to me that either I was wrong in my first judgment that I was seeing (largely) black, or I'm wrong in (a) or (b).

The fact that the experience gets blacker with the hands over the eyes does not, it seems to me, compel the conclusion that it wasn't black in the first instance. My jeans are black, but my desk is definitely quite a bit blacker. Does this necessarily imply that my jeans are really only gray? And my desk is shiny. It reflects the beige floor tiles, in places, in a way that really is rather bright. That doesn't seem incompatible with its also being a perceivably black object; but is my visual experience as I look at that patch of the black desk also a visual experience of blackness? -- not just an experience of a black object, but involving "black(-ish) phenomenology" itself? Hm! I worry that there's something objectionably simplistic in that question, though I can't quite put my finger on it.

Coming back to my visual experience with my eyes closed, some of these same questions and confusions arise.

But -- you might have thought -- what could be simpler than recognizing an experience of blackness? Aren't judgments about one's current visual phenomenology of a field of color exactly the kind of thing that many philosophers have thought it's impossible to be mistaken about?

What’s Wrong With Judging Others? - Part I (by guest blogger Brad Cokelet)

Although I am not a Theist, I have always found Jesus’s sayings
thought-provoking. Consider his take on judging others:

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment you judge,
you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured
back to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye,
but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to
your brother, 'Let me remove the speck from your eye'; and look, a
plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite!”

Jesus is clearly denouncing our tendency to judge others. But what
is his argument to that effect? And how should we understand the
warning about being judged ourselves?

One interpretation is as follows: if we judge another person against
some standard, S, and offer to correct them or help them improve when
they are judged to be lacking, then we will be judged against S too
(perhaps at the last judgment).

But even if it is true, does it give us reason to refrain from
judging others? I do not think so.

In some cases it clearly does not: I judge students in my logic class
- I measure their performance against a standard - and try to “remove
the specks” from their thinking, and I do this knowing that I still
make errors that are just like theirs. But, the possibility of
having my own thinking judged by the same standard is no reason to
refrain from my practice; in fact, I hope to make this possibility
actual by helping my students understand standards of sound
reasoning! I judge my students in part to help them develop their
own capacities to judge.

Analogous considerations seem to apply in the ethical realm. Ben
Franklin reports in his Biography that a Quaker friend told him he
(Franklin) was commonly thought proud, and that led Franklin to add
humility to the list of virtues he was trying to keep in mind and
develop. I do not see why the fact that the friend's own level of
pride (or humility) would be judged, would count against his judging
Franklin. And I do not think the appropriateness of his judging
Franklin depends on whether he was himself proud or even had many bad
traits. After all, people who are working to overcome serious
problems of their own are often better at noticing more subtle
shortcomings in others; having a plank in your own eye can make you
more attentive to speck in your brother’s eye, so why not tell him
about it and help him get it out of there?

Consequently, on this first reading (a second one will be considered
in the next post), I can’t agree with what Jesus says: I think we
should go ahead and judge each other and say to each other, ‘Let me
remove the speck from your eye’ even if ­ maybe especially if ­ we
have a plank in our own eye. By judging each other, we can hope to
become a bit more self-aware and clear-sighted.

The Troublesome Appeal of Eugenics

One thing I think I'll always remember from Robert Jay Lifton 's excellent book, The Nazi Doctors -- though not the only thing -- is the ease with which I found myself able to sympathize with certain aspects of the Nazi mindset, the "Nazi biomedical vision" as Lifton calls it.

The Nazis (and some others!) gave eugenics a bad name, and few openly embrace eugenics today. Yet eugenics had many eminent supporters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it's easy to see how people could be attracted to the idea of humanity taking control over its genetic pool and implementing eugenic measures designed to ensure that future generations are healthier, more intelligent, and of better moral character.

The view that racial differences are genetically important and that the races differ significantly in their intellectual and moral capacities has a similar history, involving some of the same figures. Like eugenics, the position had numerous eminent adherents in the 19th and early 20th centuries, only to become a political hot potato in the second half of the 20th century.

Both positions are of course abhorrent; let's take this as common ground. But I don't think they are obviously abhorrent. And it is that last fact to which I want to call your attention. In the current political climate, mainstream and liberal thinkers reflexively dismiss these views without, perhaps, appreciating their potential attractiveness to reasonable people in the right frame of mind and the right cultural context -- frames of mind and cultural contexts not too different from our own.

And of course, if you combine these two opinions (and certain views about the division and character of the races), one can come startlingly close to seeing merit in Nazi policy. In a Malthusian world, one might think it a moral duty to open up Lebensraum ("living space", i.e., new territory) for the genetically superior; given limited resources, one might think it best to trim away poor, and potentially genetically corrupting, stock. Evil can acquire the look of a moral imperative. If the heart rebels (as the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius, one of my favorite moral psychologists, thinks it will), one might interpret that rebellion as misplaced compassion -- or at least compassion that should not be acted on, like the compassion that judges must sometimes set aside in delivering appropriately hard sentences.

That evil can disguise itself as reason is of course not news; but I think it salutary to remind ourselves sometimes how easily it can do so. Our ordinary, lazy habits of thinking tend to exaggerate the distance between ourselves and those we condemn.

Lifton writes:

Starvation as a method of killing was a logical extension of the frequent imagery of mental patients as "useless eaters." As a passive means of death, it was one more element of general neglect. In many places, mentally ill patients had already been fed insufficiently; and the idea of not nourishing them was "in the air" (p. 98).

and (you may wish to skip the following quote if you are easily upset):

I remember the gist of the following general remarks by Pfannmueller: These creatures (he meant the children) naturally represent for me as a National Socialist only a burden for the healthy body of the Volk. We do not kill (he could have here used a euphemistic expression for this word kill) with poison, injections, etc.; then the foreign press and certain gentlemen in Switzerland would only have new inflammatory material. No our method is much simpler and more natural, as you see. With these words, he pulled, with the help of a ... nurse, a child from its little bed. While he then exhibited the child like a dead rabbit, he asserted with a knowing expression and a cynical grin: For this one it will take two to three more days. The picture of this fat, grinning man, in his fleshy hand the wimpering skeleton, surrounded by other starving children, is still vivid in my mind (p. 62).

There are different kinds of evil -- evil in passion, evil in neglect -- but it is this cold evil, rigorously rationalized, whose shadowy potential in myself frightens me most.

Eastern Intuitions about Framing the Innocent (by guest blogger Brad Cokelet)

Consider this stock problem case for Utilitarians: if a judge frames an innocent person and has him killed in order to placate a violent mob, he will produce better overall results than if he refuses to do so.

Assuming the Utilitarian thinks we should choose to do whatever maximizes utility, he has to bite the bullet and condone the framing, which is a blatant injustice and therefore wrong.

To avoid condoning framing the innocent, many Utilitarians adopt forms of indirect Utilitarianism, according to which utility will not be maximized if people consciously aim to maximize it; they claim that utility will be maximized when people, including judges, don’t (directly) aim to bring about that result. We might defend this shift by appeal to a general methodological principle: when an ethical theory conflicts with an intuition that all reasonable people share, the theory needs to yield to the intuition. On this view, then, all reasonable people share the intuition that framing the innocent is an injustice and therefore wrong. But is that true?

In a forthcoming paper (available here), John Doris and Alexandra Plakias raise doubts about that very claim by citing empirical evidence that the anti-framing intuition is a parochial artifact of Western culture. More specifically, they appeal to a study (which is forthcoming) that contrasts the intuitions of, “Americans of predominantly European descent and Chinese living in the People’s Republic of China,” and suggests that people in China are more likely to have pro-framing intuitions. Doris and Plakias suggest that the variability of intuitions (if it exists) is evidence for a surprising conclusion: the intuition that framing an innocent is unjust and wrong is something about which reasonable people can disagree.

Now even assuming that the empirical claim about cultural variability is true, one might resist the suggestion about reasonable disagreement on the grounds that the relevant Easterners --­ Chinese living in the PRC --­ have distorted intuitions. The most promising argument to this effect is that some background theory or value conception has distorted the intuitions. One possibility that Doris and Plakias mention is the collectivist conception of self that some attribute to Easterners. Other possibilities include Marxist theories and more traditional value conceptions (e.g. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism).

One thing to do, I suppose, would be to by running the study in other Eastern countries that do not have the history of Marxist rule or the same traditional value conceptions. But it is also important to ask whether any of these background theories or value conceptions would actually (purport to) support, or have been thought to support, the pro-framing intuition. One question here is about whether a conception claims to support the intuition that framing and killing an innocent is not wrong; the other is about whether people who endorse the conception have in fact avowed the intuition. For example some Japanese Zen Buddhists endorsed Japanese militarism, but that does not show that a Zen Buddhist conception would support militarism or war.

So I am wondering:

(1) Are there Chinese philosophers who explicitly discuss cases or issues like this and come down one way or the other?

(2) Would the Communist ideology promulgated in China support framing an innocent to placate a mob? Has it been taken that way in China or elsewhere?

(3) What is a collectivist conception of self and would it support pro-framing intuitions?

Philosopher's Carnival #35 is...

here! Thanks, Steve!

Do You Mostly See Double?

Raise a finger to about four inches in front of your nose. Focus on some object in the distance, then -- without changing your focus -- shift your attention back to your finger. Does it seem doubled? Most people claim to be able to experience this, at least after a few tries.

If you then focus carefully on your finger (bringing it out maybe to six or eight inches, depending on how close in you're able to bring your focus), do the objects in the far distance seem unfocused, blurry? Even doubled? Reports of doubling in this case are less common, but I think I can get some doubling in myself in this condition.

One of the great geniuses of the 19th century, a pivotal figure in physics and physiology and psychology, Hermann von Helmholtz writes:

When a person's attention is directed for the first time to the double images in binocular vision, he is usually greatly astonished to think that he had never noticed them before, especially when he reflects that the only objects he has ever seen single were those few that happened at the moment to be about as far from his eyes as the point of fixation. The great majority of objects, comprising all those that were farther or nearer than this point, were all seen double (1910/1962, III.7).

The eminent 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid writes:

We find that when the eyes are sound and perfect, and the axes of both directed to one point, an object placed in that point is seen single.... Other objects at the same distance from the eyes as that to which their axes are directed do also appear single.... Objects which are much nearer to the eyes, or much more distant from them, than that to which the two eyes are directed, appear double. Thus, if the candle is placed at the distance of ten feet, and I hold my finger at arms-length between my eyes and the candle; when I look at the candle, I see my finger double; and when I look at my finger, I see the candle double: and the same thing happens with regard to all other objects at like distances which fall within the sphere of vision.... You may find a man that can say with good conscience, that he never saw things double all his life; yet this very man, put in the situation above mentioned, with his finger between him and candle, and desired to attend to the appearance of the object which he does not look at, will, upon the first trial, see the candle double, when he looks at his finger; and his finger double, when he looks at the candle. Does he now see otherwise than he saw before? No, surely; but he now attends to what he never attended to before. The same double appearance of an object hath been a thousand times presented to his eye before now; but he did not attend to it; and so it is as little an object of his reflection and memory, as if it had never happened (1764/1997, p. 133-134).

E.B. Titchener, the leading American introspective psychologist circa 1900 (second in eminence only to William James), writes:

The field of vision … shows a good deal of doubling: the tip of the cigar in your mouth splits into two, the edge of the open door wavers into two, the ropes of the swing, the telegraph pole, the stem of another, nearer tree, all are doubled. So long, that is, as the eyes are at rest, only certain objects in the field are seen single; the rest are seen double.... Our habitual disregard ot double images is one of the curiosities of binocular vision (1910, p. 309).

I assume most people now would not agree with such claims.

What's going on? Are these guys, despite their reputations -- and despite Helmholtz's and Titchener's many subtle and interesting introspective discoveries -- simply bad introspectors? I can barely get any doubling, I think, except in the most extreme conditions. I focus on the bookshelf four feet away; the door handle ten feet away seems not at all doubled. Have they unwittingly trained themselves to see double? If so, do they really see most things double, most of the time?

Maybe, I -- we? -- are the bad introspectors? Yet I find it very difficult to imagine that I'm wrong about the singular appearance of that doorknob....

Is Pride in a Sports Team Foolish Pride? (By Guest Blogger Brad Cokelet)

I had a friend in high school, let’s call him Randy the Rebel, who was proud to have never read any of the assigned books for any of his English classes. I remember one break during college when he said he was no longer proud of that - he realized his pride had been foolish because not reading the books was nothing to be proud of.

This raises an interesting question: what should we, and what should we not, be proud of?

In thinking about this it is useful distinguish between two reasons we might have for saying that someone’s pride is foolish. The first is that the person is proud of something morally or ethically objectionable. The Nazi guard’s pride in having killed more prisoners than any other is foolish, and itself immoral, because nothing immoral is something to be proud of. But, as Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson have argued, we may also criticize someone’s pride simply because it is inappropriate; some things are nothing to be proud of even though they are not immoral. Take, for example, my friend Randy’s “feat” of not reading the assigned books.

But what, then, makes something an appropriate object of pride? What does Randy’s “feat” lack?

One suggestion, built on Phillipa Foot's comments in her paper “Moral Beliefs” is as follows: in order to be an appropriate object of pride a thing must (1) belong to the person who is proud of it and (2) provide the person with some advantage or be an achievement. On this view, Randy’s pride was inappropriate because not having read the books was not really much of an achievement and provided him with no overall advantage. Personally, I like this but lean towards making the advantage bit a necessary condition; I think it is foolish to be proud of something that is not good for you.

D’Arms and Jacobson have recently objected to this account by appeal to the example of a sports fan. Consider a fan who is proud of the Buccaneers. On Foot’s view, this seems inappropriate because the team is not something that belongs to the fan. Or so D’Arms and Jacobson claim. On the contrary, I think that when we say that a fan is proud of his team, we really mean that she is proud to be a fan of a winning team, and that *is* something that belongs to her.

But even if that response works, I have to admit that on my view being a sports fan, even of a winning team, is not much to be proud of because it is not much of an achievement (it is mostly luck) and gives you only a minimal advantage (bragging rights, maybe the spoils from an office pool, etc.) I think it is foolish to be proud of your favorite team’s accomplishments.

Sentence-Like vs. Map-Like Representations

Most philosophers of mind think that believing requires having mental representations. Jerry Fodor and many others suggest that these representations have a language-like structure. Frank Jackson and a few others suggest that their structure is more map-like.

Consider this example. Sam believes that the mountain peak is 10 km north of the river and 10 km south of the coast and that there's an oasis 5 km due east of it. What happens when he learns that the mountain peak is actually 15 km north of the river and 5 km south of the coast?

If Sam's representations are map-like, then changes to any part will ramify automatically throughout the system: Moving the mountain peak farther north on the map automatically changes its position relative to the oasis (which is now southeast, not due east, and a bit farther away), automatically changes the distance between it and the road south of the river, the length of the northbound trail, etc. A single change on the map draws with it a vast number of changes in the relationships of the elements. If his representations are language-like, no automatic ramification ensues: One can change the sentences about the distance of the mountain from the river and the coast without altering anything else.

Whether the advantage here goes to the maps view or the language view is unclear: On the one hand, the maps view nicely captures the fact that when one belief changes, we seem to update our connected beliefs effortlessly and automatically. (Consider, analogously, where a geographical map isn't at issue, the case of learning that Gary has replaced Georgia as chair; I now know that Gary will be running the meetings, that he'll be signing the forms, that Georgia will be back in her regular office, etc., for quite a large number of propositions, with no noticeable effort on my part.) On the other hand, the sentences view seems more naturally to account for those cases in which we fail to ramify -- if for example, Sam fails to take account of the fact that the oasis will no longer be due east of the mountain, or if I go to visit Georgia in the chair's office after Gary has moved in.

Relatedly, the sentences view seems more naturally and easily to account for inconsistency and indeterminacy in one's belief system. Can a map even be logically inconsistent? The maps view can perhaps avoid this problem by postulating multiple maps, each inconsistent with the others, but that drags in its train a lot of questions and apparatus pertaining to issues like reduplication and the relationship of the maps to each other.

The maps view seems to avoid the problems of implicit belief and overcrowding of the "belief box" in cases like that of the number of planets (less than 100, less than 101, less than 102, etc.: many sentence-tokens, but a small map; see this post). On the other hand, we probably don't want to say that you believe every consequence of what appears on your map, and it's not clear where to draw the line.

Is there a fact of the matter here (or a third model that avoids all these problems?) -- or just competing models with different strengths and weakness?

Is it Irrational to Wish to be Human? (by Guest Blogger Brad Cokelet)

First off, I want to thank Eric for inviting me to Blog on The Splintered Mind. I hope my posts, like Eric’s, help some fellow procrastinators fill their time in a less regrettable fashion than they would otherwise. But today’s topic is wishing, not hoping.

In the Groundwork, Kant makes a striking, negative claim about what it is rational to wish for: “But inclinations themselves, as sources of needs, are so far from having absolute value to make them desirable for their own sake that it must rather be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free of them,” [4:428] Is Kant right? Is it irrational to wish to have human inclinations for creature comforts like food and sex?

It will help to consider an argument for a similar conclusion that Graham Oddie discusses in his recent book. It focuses (no surprise) on desires for things that are indeed good; desires for the bad are presumably not something a rational agent would wish to have. Here is a version of that argument adapted to present purposes.

First, note that if we desire something then we do not have it. Thus, given that the object of a desire is something good, our desiring entails that we lack something good. But that entails that if you wish to have a desire for something good, then you wish to be without something good. And given that it is irrational to wish to be without something good instead of wishing to have that good, that entails that it is irrational to wish to have desires for the good. So we can conclude that it is irrational to wish to have desires.

How should we respond to this argument and Kant’s claim?

I think the most promising possibility is to argue that some desires are plausibly seen as necessary parts of or necessary means to a valuable experience. For example, we might argue that you have to have sexual desires in order to have valuable sexual experiences. We could then either argue one of two ways:

(1) That these desires are instrumentally valuable and that we cannot conceive of the experiences without them.

(2) That the desires are intrinsically valuable because we can undergo the relevant valuable experience if and only if we delay gratification and enjoy a desire, so to speak.

Questions abound here: Are there other types of experiences that we need desires in order to have? Is there a better way to respond to this argument? Or is Kant right that, if we are rational, we will wish to leave our humanity behind?

Implicit Belief and Tokens in the "Belief Box"

You believe the number of planets is less than -- well, let's be safe, 100! You also believe that the number of planets is less than 101, and that the number of planets is less than 102, etc. Or are you only disposed to believe such things, when prompted to reflect on them, while prior to reflection you neither believe nor disbelieve them?

Most philosophers of mind who've discussed the issue (e.g., Fodor, Field, Lycan, Dennett) are inclined to think everyone does believe that the number of planets is less than 157, though they may never have explicitly entertained that idea.

Now some of these same authors also think that, paradigmatically, believing something requires having a sentence "tokened" somewhere in the mind (metaphorically, in the "belief box"). So, then, do I have an indefinitely large number of tokens in the belief box pertaining to the number of planets? That's a rather uncomfortable view, I think, if we take the idea of "tokening" relatively realistically (as Fodor and others would like us to do). Consequently, the idea of "implicit belief" might be appealing. As Fodor and Dennett describe it, only explicit beliefs require actual tokenings in the belief box. We believe something "implicitly" if its content is swiftly derivable from something we explicitly believe.

Here are some concerns about that idea:

(1.) It draws a sharp distinction -- between the real cognitive structure of explicit and implicit beliefs -- where folk-psychologically and (so far) empirically, none (or only a gradation of degree) is discernable. Five minutes ago, did you believe that Quebec was north of South Carolina (or New York), that the freeways are slow at 5:17 p.m., that Clint Eastwood is a millionaire, that most philosophers aren't rich, etc.? Some of these contents I have probably previously entertained, others not; I don't know which, and it doesn't seem to matter. I note no sharp distinction between the implicit and explicit among them. (On the other hand, there is a sharp distinction, I think, between my belief that the number of my street address is less than 10,000 [it's 6855] and my just-now-generated belief that it's divisible by three, which took some figuring [using the rule that a number is divisible by three only if the sum of its digits is divisible by three and 6+8+5+5=24].)

UPDATE (2:39 p.m.) on (2) and (3):

(2.) Dennett imagines a chess-playing computer that, as a result of its programmed strategies, always tries to get its queen out early -- though there's nothing explicitly represented in the programming from which "get the queen out early" is swiftly derivable. Although most people wouldn't ascribe a chess-playing computer literal beliefs, one can imagine a similar structural situation arising in a person, if one accepts the rules-and-representations approach to cognition Fodor and others are offering. In such a case, we might still want to say, as Fodor grants, that the machine or person (implicitly) believes one should get the queen out early. But now we need a different account of implicit belief -- and there's a threat that one might go over to a view according to which to have a belief is to exhibit a certain pattern of behavior (and experience?) as Dennett, Ryle, and others have suggested; and that would be a change of position for most representationalists about belief.

(3.) Briefly: If beliefs commonly arise and (especially) are forgotten gradually, this puts strain on the central idea in the belief box model of the explicit-implicit distinction, which seems to assume that there's generally a distinct and discrete fact of the matter about what is "tokened" in the belief box. (At least I've never seen a convincing account of belief boxes that makes any useful sense of in-between cases and gradual change.)

(Thanks to Treat Dougherty for discussion of this issue [at This Is the Name of This Blog] in connection with my Stanford Encyclopedia entry on belief.)

Goldhagen's Challenge

Daniel Goldhagen's provocative (and controversial) book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, despite -- no because of -- its simplifications, powerfully raises a question that every moral psychologist should consider: When one's culture, or subculture, embraces a noxious set of values, what resources do ordinary individuals have to discover the immorality of those values?

In the early 1940s, Reserve Police Battalion 101, composed of a fairly arbitrary slice of 300 or so ordinary men from northern Germany -- men with no particular commitment to Nazism and little ideological training -- was sent to Poland to kill Jews. They killed thousands of men, women, and children. The two most prominent histories of this event -- Goldhagen's book and Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men -- concur on the basic facts of the case: That these ordinary men committed this slaughter willingly, without threat of severe punishment, and largely without objection. Browning thinks that at least some of the men felt pangs of conscience and remorse; but he concludes this (as Goldhagen points out) largely based on self-exculpatory claims ("well, I didn't want to do it") that these men gave at trial. If we dismiss such self-exculpatory claims, and look at the evidence of the time and the claims made by these men about the feelings of other men, Goldhagen argues, it is very difficult to find signs of genuine remorse or moral disapproval. The men posed for pictures of themselves tormenting Jews; almost none applied for transfer (one who did -- the one clear objector who consistently refused to participate in the genocide -- was actually transferred back to Germany and promoted!); there were plenty of volunteers for "Jew hunts"; etc.

Goldhagen points out that these men were given plenty of time to reflect: They had considerable free time between their genocidal activities. They had furloughs during which they could go home and gain perspective. And given the evident significance of what they were doing, reflection would certainly be natural. Based on their behavior, this reflection seems largely to have confirmed the permissibility, perhaps even praiseworthiness, of the genocide.

I would like to think that reflection tends to lead to moral improvement, to the discovery of right and wrong -- and that it has the power to do so, at least to some degree, even in an environment of noxious values. I'd like to think that an ordinary man, anti-Semitic but not brainwashed, asked to walk into the forest side by side with an innocent Jewish girl then shoot her in the head, could, by reflection, see that what he has been asked to do is gravely morally wrong.

But maybe not. (After all, ethical reflection doesn't seem to help philosophy professors much.)

Nasal Phosphenes and the Extent of the Visual Field

Of course you know this: If you press one corner of your eye, a bit of a spot will appear at the opposite end of your visual field, due to mechanical stimulation of the retina. (Or didn't you know that?) I find the effect clearest when I close one eye and press near the midline on the outside edge of the other eye. A phosphene -- seemingly a dark spot encircled by a bright ring -- appears right near the nasal edge of the visual field.

Now here's a challenge: See how far into the periphery you can get that nasal-side phosphene. Keep the other eye closed, half close the lid of the eye you're pressing, and rotate the pressure a bit toward the center of the eye. Can you see the phosphene go deeper in? At some point I find the phosphene disappears, but only well into the dark field -- not in the shade created by my nose but in what would, if the phosphene were located in space, be the interior region of my face. Who'd've thought we'd have retinal receptors that could refer stimuli there?!

Now if I open the other eye, I see that the phosphene is actually (barely) within the visual field created by both my eyes together. Well, that makes sense! Otherwise, there'd be some explaining to do about how the experienced visual field for phosphenes can extend beyond that for outward objects!

My question is this. When I close one eye, normally, does my visual field contract? My first impulse is to say yes. But now I wonder whether instead, my visual field might actually contain some of that dark region I've recently been exploring with the phosphene, the region inside my face -- a region I usually totally ignore, of course! If I turn my one open eye as far inward as it can go, I see my nose, and blackness farther in. But blackness, of course, isn't the end of the visual field. It's part of the visual field -- a part experienced as black. To see the contrast, rotate your eye as far outward as it can go. There's no blackness at the edge (or maybe just a little in the bottom half?) -- the visual field just stops.

So, when I stare straight ahead with one eye closed, does my visual field stop somewhere near my nose, like it stops at the outer edge, or does it include inward blackness, stretching over the entirety of the visual space that would normally be filled in by peripheral input from the other eye?

On (Not) Washing Your Car

I often walk in the early mornings, around sunrise. Sometimes I see the following remarkable phenomenon: a man out washing his car. (Yes, always a man.)

What's so remarkable about this? For one thing, the car is always clean before it is washed, already the cleanest in the neighborhood. No doubt a certain type of eye could have found an imperfection of dirt in it somewhere, though who but this man himself would inspect his car so closely? Maybe washing it again gives is a special sheen? Well, maybe so! -- but the difference is at most incremental and brief, thin pay for his labor.

Does he enjoy washing his car? Probably he does; and it gets him out in the morning air. But why should one enjoy washing a car more than washing dishes, or going for a walk, or lingering over the newspaper, or gardening, or any of the many other things a man could do in the morning for profit, pleasure, kindness, or self-maintenance? Surely he's not simply bored?

No, he loves his car. In washing, he caresses it. He spins the shammy cloth with a flourish. He takes comfort in the ritual. He tells himself it's only a chore, that he doesn't want to do it but he should -- that those of us who wash our cars at more moderate intervals are slovenly. Is his car a production of his hands to be proud of, a rebuilt 1932 Ford, maybe? No, it's an ordinary 2005 Lexus -- a "prestige" car. Is he proud of that? He is, of course, in his secret heart (and why not?), but also -- perhaps more -- he delights in the car itself, in its shine, its smooth surfaces, its power.

My father drove his cars into the ground. He never washed them. Following my father, I used to be proud, too, in my own perverse way -- proud that I drove a dirty 1985 Corolla rather than a two-year-old Lexus, proud precisely because it was an old and dirty car, and so -- I thought -- it said something about where my values, time, and money were: somewhere other than my car!

That pride was misplaced, though. I would never say the same about having an unwashed body and clothes. I would never sport them proudly as evidence that I have better things to do with my time and resources than take a shower and use a washing-machine! The Corolla is gone; I wash my two-year-old Honda, though not as often as I should.

My father always lived next-door to car-washers. He was always friendly with them, and them with him; but they could never entirely understand each other.

(Revised August 30.)

Keith Frankish on In-Between Cases of Believing...

... in the new underblog.

The New Philosophers' Carnival is...

here. (It took me a couple days to spot it; I was out of town, playing in the La Jolla surf rather than surfing the blogs!) Gracias, Marcos!

When Our Eyes Are Closed, What Do We See?

Here are some possibilities:

(1.) blackness or a grey haze,
(2.) nothing at all (not even blackness),
(3.) a field of shifting colors,
(4.) afterimages on a background field of black or gray,
(5.) patterns of color, not obviously related to external stimulus, on a field of black or gray,
(6.) visual imagery of objects, maybe like a dream or a daydream or a faint perception or a hallucination?

What do you think?

Last week I asked visitors here and a number of people around UCR. The responses were wonderfully various, and some of them quite detailed, but if I had to summarize or force them into boxes I'd say I got these results:

(1) black/grey (possibly shifting or undulating): 4 respondents;
(2) usually nothing, not even blackness: 1 respondent;
(3) colors: 4 or 5 respondents;
(4) afterimages: 1 or 2 respondents;
(5) patterns of color against a black or grey background: 5 respondents;
(6) visual imagery of objects or scenes: 1 respondent, but 3 others mentioned that they sometimes have this experience or they have it after a while.

Now what's interesting to me in this is the variability in the responses. Do people really experience such radically different things when they close their eyes? I don't think we can dismiss these differences as differences merely in the language used to convey basically the same idea (except maybe between 3 and 5, though even there only in some cases). Could some people simply be wrong about such an apparently easily observable matter?

To bolster some of the less popular responses:

On (2): Many researchers think we don't have conscious experience at all without attention -- for example, when we're not attending to the refrigerator hum in the background, we don't have any auditory experience of it at all. Others disagree. (I've written about this here and posted on it here.) If we go with those who deny experience outside of attention, and if we think that when our eyes are closed we normally aren't visually attending to anything, that lends some credence to (2). Of course, on this view, when I ask you what your visual experience is, and then you close your eyes, your attentional state is atypical and you'll probably experience something. But this may be quite unrepresentative of our visual experience when we're listening to music with eyes closed or when we're trying to fall asleep, etc.

On (1): This response can be buttressed by a related argument. Maybe paying attention to visual experience with one's eyes closed does something to bring out or enliven that experience, with afterimages and shifting colors, but normally, when we're not really attending, its more like a plain black or grey field.

On (4): Early introspective psychologists like Purkinje, Helmholtz, and Titchener, seemed to think afterimages consistuted a major part of one's eyes-closed visual experience. They studied this stuff intensively, so I don't think we should simply dismiss their reports.

Okay, I've managed to completely bewilder myself! Any thoughts about how (and whether) we can make progress on this question? Maybe it's not, strictly speaking, an especially important question. But it's a basic question -- one that's surprisingly hard to find good discussions of, this late in our study of the mind and visual experience.

My Long Encyclopedia Entry on "Belief"...

... is finally up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, after my having worked on it off and on for four years. Bad timing on the "number of planets" example, though!

Brad Cokelet Will Be Guest Blogging Here...

... the weeks of August 28 and September 4. Stay tuned!

Does Saying "I'm Thinking of a Pink Elephant" Make It True?

Suppose I say "I'm thinking of a pink elephant". I'm sincere and there's no linguistic mistake. Does merely thinking such a thought or reaching such a judgment, silently or aloud, make it true? Tyler Burge and Jaakko Hintikka (among many others) have endorsed this idea; and it has often been thought key to understanding introspective self-knowledge.

I'll grant this: Certain things plausibly follow from the very having of a thought: that I'm thinking, that my thought has the content it has. Any thought that manages to assert the conditions or consequences of its existence will necessarily be true whenever it occurs.

But, indeed, anything that's evaluable as true or false, if it asserts the conditions or consequences of its existence, or has the right self-referential structure, will necessarily be true whenever it occurs: the spoken utterance "I'm speaking" or "I'm saying 'blu-bob'"; any English occurrence of "this sentence has five words"; any semaphore utterance of "I have two flags". This is simply the phenomenon of self-fulfillment. This kind of infallibility is cheap.

If I utter an infallibly self-fulfilling sentence, or if I have an infallibly self-fulfilling thought, it will be true regardless of what caused that utterance or thought -- whether introspection, fallacious reasoning, evil neurosurgery, quantum accident, stroke, indigestion, divine intervention, or sheer frolicsome confabulation. If "I'm thinking of a pink elephant" is of this species, then despite its infallibility, no particular introspective capacity, no remarkable self-detection, is required. And very little follows in general about our self-knowledge.

But I'm not sure that it is really necessary to think of a pink elephant to utter sincerely and comprehendingly, "I'm thinking of a pink elephant". Surely I needn't have a visual image of a pink elephant. Nor need I have, it seems, a sentence in inner speech to that effect (especially if the thought is uttered aloud). What is it to "think of" something? Is it merely to refer to it? To include it in a silent or spoken judgment? That seems a rather thin notion of "thinking"; and if we do adopt that notion, the vacuity of the infallibility claim becomes even more obvious. It becomes tantamount to "this thought makes reference to the following object: a pink elephant". Then it really is structurally no different from the utterance "I'm saying 'blu-bob'".

So, despite some philosophers' quest for and emphasis on the infallible in self-knowledge of the mind, to me the matter seems rather trivial, unimportant, and in fact utterly unconnected to the issue of the trustworthiness of introspection. (Take that, Descartes!) Or am I missing something? Maybe a fan of the importance of self-verifying thoughts can help me out?

Are Salty Experiences Salty? Are Square Experiences Square?

It has often been noticed -- I won't try to track down the history of this observation, but Ned Block and David Chalmers come to mind, and Ignacio Prado states it nicely in a comment on my Aug. 7 post about Dennett on fictions -- that the language in which we describe sensory experience is often derivative of the language we use to describe the objects sensed. Asked to describe the taste experience I have biting into a potato chip, I might say "salty". Now probably I don't (or shouldn't?) mean that my experience itself is salty. Rather, it's the potato chip that's salty. My experience is only "salty" in the sense that it's the kind of experience typically caused by salty things -- it's an experience of the saltiness of something else. Likewise, I might say that my tactile experience of the carpet is "rough" and my olfactory experience of my wife's cooking is "oniony".

Asked to describe such experiences without recourse to the language of external objects, I'm stumped. I could try analogy: "It tastes like a rushing elephant!" -- but the metaphor is weak, and we're still in the language of external objects, anyway. I could say a few things using concepts that apply literally both to experiences and to external events: The taste experience had a sharp onset, then gradually faded. But this won't get us far. Likewise, I can say things like that it was pleasurable and that it made me want to eat more, but such remarks, again, don't have much specificity. In attempting to describe sensory experience accurately and in detail, we depend essentially on our language for describing sensed objects.

I've used tactile, gustatory, and olfactory examples so far. What about vision and hearing? It's clear -- I think it's clear! -- that taste experiences aren't literally salty, etc., in the same way external objects can be salty. The parallel observation is not as clear for auditory and visual experience. Are experiences of square things literally square? Are experiences of loud things literally loud? By analogy, it seems we should say no; but on the other hand I, at least, feel some temptation to say that there is something literally square in my visual experience of a square object -- a squarish sense-datum? And can auditory experiences literally differ in volume in the way external sound events can differ in volume (louder and quieter sense data)? My taste experiences plainly don't literally contain salt, but maybe my visual experiences of squares do literally contain four equally sized edges set a right angles to each other?

Aren't the senses all ontologically parallel? Why, then, is it so much more tempting to say that square experiences are square than that salty experiences are salty? (Color introduces a separate batch of primary-quality/secondary-quality confusions, so I'm avoiding it as an example.)

The description of emotional experience, I might add, seems to work a little differently, though it presents its own problems. We can try to locate it in space and associate it with bodily conditions (I felt a twisting in my gut); we can fit it into an emotional category (it was a feeling of sadness); but most people I've interviewed think such descriptions don't do full justice to the phenonema and feel frustrated when asked to describe their emotional phenomenology very precisely and accurately.

When Your Eyes Are Closed...

... (but you are awake) do you generally have visual experience, or not? And if you do, what is that experience like?

I've been polling my acquaintances. Post your reflections in a reply (ornery responses welcomed). I'd encourage you to settle on your own response before reading the responses of others.

Next week, I'll work up a little post on the results and why I care.

Thanks for being my victims, I mean, um, participant-collaborators!

Degrees of Conscious Judging? Degrees, but Not of Confidence?

Keith Frankish, in Mind and Supermind, argues (among many other things) that although non-conscious dispositional beliefs come in degrees of confidence, conscious beliefs (he calls them "superbeliefs") are always flat-out yes-or-no, are always simply either accepted or not accepted. I'd like to disagree with that.

(By the way, I'd recommend Dominic Murphy's illuminating, if somewhat critical, review of Mind and Supermind.)

It won't do to object that obviously we sometimes consciously think that some proposition is only somewhat likely to be true. Frankish can handle such cases as defenders of flat-out belief have always done: He can say such judgments are flat-out judgments about likelihoods. (Jargonistically, one might say it's bel[flat-out](pr(P)= .9) rather than bel[.9](P).) If the debate comes down to attempting to distinguish between believing flat-out that something has a certain likelihood of being true and believing that thing simpliciter with some degree of confidence, it's going to take some subtle argument to straighten it out; and indeed, I suspect, it will ultimately be a pragmatic decision about how to regiment the word "belief" for scholarly purposes.

So let's not touch probability and degrees of confidence. It has always bothered me, anyway, philosophers' talk about degrees of confidence as "degrees of belief" -- as though having intermediate confidence were the only way to be between fully believing something and entirely lacking the belief!

Consider superstition. At the craps table, the dice come around again to a man who has been a "cold" shooter the last three times in a row; I wager against him, on the "don't pass". In a sense, I know the dice are fair and he's no more likely to crap out than the hot shooter; but still I think to myself "he's gonna flail", and I'm much more comfortable with the don't pass than the pass bet. It doesn't seem quite right to say that I consciously judge that he's going to flail or quite right to say that I consciously judge that he's as likely as the next guy to have a hot run. Maybe in some cases, I flip between two contradictory judgments, each full and genuine judgments; but can't I also, instead, simply have a single superstitious thought that I recognize as superstitious and yet half judge to be true? Such cases are in-between, I'd suggest, in a way not neatly captured by positing intermediate degrees of confidence.

Consider half-endorsed thoughts. Someone is speaking. You're not sweating it too much, but going with the flow. She hasn't said anything startling or questionable enough for alarms to go off, so you're nodding -- not entirely absently, but not entirely conscientiously either. Are you judging or believing what she says? Here, too, I think is a spectrum from mere idly letting words wash over you and fully endorsing and accepting them, a spectrum not best characterized in terms of degrees of confidence. Similar phenomena occur with slogans that come unbidden to mind, or remembered strands of prose, or memorized lecture notes.

Consider indeterminate content. Mary thinks consciously to herself that the purse is on the bed. The thought has half-formed associations: that it's not in the kitchen, that she'd better go to the bedroom, that she'll be needing it soon. Must all these thoughts or associations be either fully formed or entirely absent from consciousness? Must Mary's thought have a single, precise English content (as perhaps an instance of inner speech does?) that includes its being on the bed, say, but not its being in the bedroom?

In my published discussions of in-between belief (e.g. here and here), I've emphasized dispositional cases, where someone is simultaneously disposed to act one way in some situations and other way in other situations. I have not, as here, focused on cases in which a single, individual thought may fall between being a genuine judgment and not being one.

The Splintered Mind Will Be Hosting...

... the Philosophers' Carnival on Nov. 6!

Veteran bloggers will know about the carnival, but for those who don't, it's an annotated collection of links to selected philosophical blog posts. It's easy to nominate a post to be included in a carnival: Just click the link above and follow the directions.

Dennett on Fictions about Consciousness

Dan Dennett, in his seminal work, Consciousness Explained, says some confusing things about the ontological status of claims about consciousness. Sometimes, he seems to say there are facts about consciousness that we can get right or wrong; at other times he compares claims about consciousness to the claims of fiction writers about their fictional worlds -- claims that simply can't be wrong, any more than Doyle could be wrong about the color of Holmes's easy chair (CE, p. 81). The first strand tends to be emphasized by those who find Dennett appallingly (or appealingly) committed to the possibility of pervasive and radical mistakes about consciousness (Alva Noe calls Dennett the "eminence grise" of the new skepticism about consciousness), the second strand by people attracted (or repulsed) by the promise of an end to questions about what our "real" conscious experience is, underneath our reports.

Both strands of Consciousness Explained have their appeal, but I can't seem to reconcile them. One can't get it wrong in one's reports about one's consciousness, it seems to me, if there are no facts about consciousness underneath one's reports. Fiction writers can't make errors of fact about their fictional worlds.

I've written a paper outlining my confusion more fully, forthcoming in a special issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Dennett has written a very gracious reply to my criticisms in sections 2-3 of "Heterophenomenology Reconsidered". Among other things, he suggests a helpful analogy. Imagine cavemen brought into the 21st century; to describe what they see, they'll be forced to use metaphorical language (a pencil might be a slender woody plant with a black center that marks square white leaves, etc.). I'm amenable to this way of thinking about our phenomenological reports: Despite the apparent nearness and familiarity of experience, our tools for thinking about it and our conceptualizations of it are very weak and primitive. But nothing Dennett says in his response seems to me to remove the tension between the we-often-get-it-wrong strand of his work with the we're-fiction-writers strand. The cavemen, of course, aren't fiction writers. They can't, like Doyle, make their claims true simply by uttering them. Of course they use metaphor, as Dennett emphasizes; but metaphor and fiction are two entirely different beasts.

When I pressed Dennett about this in an email, he responded with the interesting suggestion that I was thinking too narrowly about fiction. Not all fiction is novels; there are "theoretical fictions" like quarks (maybe) or functionalist homunculi. And of course the rules governing the use of theoretical fictions in science are quite different from those governing novels.

If Dennett really endorses this (and I don't want necessarily to hold him to a quick remark in an email), it seems to me represent a shift of position, given his earlier talk about Doyle and Holmes's easy chair. But I don't know if it entirely resolves the tension, or how appealing it is as a view. Claims involving theoretical fictions, for instance, probably should not be evaluated as true or false. Rather, they are helpful or unhelpful, provide an elegant model of the observable phenomena or don't. Is this really how we want to think about our phenomenological claims?

Rather than novelists or positers of theoretical fictions, I'd rather see the person reporting her phenomenology as like a witness on the stand. She aims (if sincere) to be speaking the literal truth; and her claims can come close to it or can miss the mark entirely. Perhaps, in some ways, she will be like a caveman asked to report a drive-by shooting, stuck with inadequate conceptions and vocabulary, forced to (witting or unwitting) metaphor; but there's still a realm of facts that render her claims, independently of her or our judgment, true or false or somewhere in between.

Addendum, August 10: Pete Mandik reminds me in a comment that Dennett has spoken at length about "theoretical fictions" in earlier writings on belief and desire attribution -- for example in his magnificent essay "Real Patterns" (1991) and in the Intentional Stance (1987). There, Dennett's examples of "theoretical fictions" are things like centers of gravity and equators, not quarks and homunculi. (Dennett cited no particular examples in his email to me.)

Now, I'm more inclined to think that claims about centers of gravity are literally true than claims about homunculi. So if that's the kind of thing Dennett has in mind, my last remark above may be off target. On the other hand, the rules governing "theoretical fictions" of that sort match very nearly those governing literal language. This brings us even farther from the Doyle, saying-it-makes-it-true model in Consciousness Explained.

The Golden Rule vs. Mencius's "Extension"

One kind of emotionally engaged ethical reflection involves putting oneself in another's shoes, as it were -- imagining what things would be like from another's perspective. This kind of empathetic or sympathetic reasoning has received considerable attention in moral psychology, from the ancient Christian "Golden Rule" "do unto others..." to contemporary moral psychologists such as (to mention just a couple, William Damon and Patricia Greenspan).

In ancient China, Confucius also employs a version of the Golden Rule ("Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire"; Analects 15.25, Lau trans.; cf. 5.12) However, the next great Confucian, Mencius, offers a subtly and interestingly different view. His focus is rather on "extending" one's concern or love or respect from those close to you (or those you can see) to others farther away.

Here's the key difference, it seems to me: Whereas Golden Rule or empathy accounts start from presumed concern for oneself first, and then transfer that concern to others (perhaps by an imaginative act), Mencian extension starts from presumed concern for others nearby and then transfers that concern to others farther away (by noting that those farther away merit similar consideration).

(For example, Mencius says, "Among babes in arms there is none that does not know to love its parents. When they grow older, there is none that does not know to respect its elder brother. Treating one's parents as parents is benevolence. Respecting one's elders is righteousness. There is nothing else to do but extend these to the world" [7A15, Van Norden trans.].)

We can, of course, allow for both means of coming emotionally to take others into account in one's ethical reasoning. Both self-concern and familial concern are deep-seated. There's something especially appealing, though, about the Mencian process. It starts less egoistically and closer to the target as it were; and it might be easier logically and emotionally to justify the shift from concern for someone nearby to someone far than to justify the shift from self-concern to other concern.

The Prevalence of Afterimages?

In autumn 2003, vacationing in Berkeley with wife and son, I was up early and late, in secret nooks of our hotel, reading E.B. Titchener's great 1600-page laboratory training manual of introspective psychology. (Security rousted me out of one corner where a woman must have thought I was a sexual predator lying in wait. Doubtless I was unshaven and uncombed.) The result was a more bleary-eyed interaction with my Bay Area in-laws, a vast string of confusions about conscious experience, and one essay that vanished into the void (as most essays do). Let me share one confusion.

Titchener seems to have assumed we have nearly constant afterimages. This follows naturally from his view that the eyes are constantly adapting to their surroundings, that they're constantly in motion, and that adaptation and de-adaptation are experienced in part as afterimages. Close your eyes and note that you do not experience perfect blackness but an array of afterimages. Now consider this question: Do you always experience afterimages like this when your eyes are closed -- for example as you lie down to sleep? The two most obvious possibilities: Yes, but you simply ignore and forget them most of the time, or no, but you can evoke them by thinking about them. For that matter, do you always experience blackness when your eyes are closed or do you sometimes (usually?) have no visual experience at all?

People will say different things. But how the heck can we figure out who's right?

Of course, your eyes needn't be closed to experience afterimages, so the question generalizes. You've been looking at your computer for a bit, I assume; now turn toward a blank wall. You can experience some (probably subtle) afterimage effects, if you attend properly. Anywhere you look, your eyes will start to adapt; then when they move somewhere else, their adaptation will start to change. Is there then a constant flux of subtle afterimages, generally lost and unattended against the much more vivid visual array? Or is visual experience relatively stable and simple? Though subtle, this question is fundamental to a full understanding of visual phenomenology. Yet it's not obvious how best to explore it.

Our visual experience is constant (or maybe only frequent). Yet retrospective reflection on it is tainted by our poor memory for what's unattended, and concurrent introspection risks inventing the very objects we seek. So it remains unknown, despite its proximity.

Titchener, by the way, claims there are are also afterimages of pressure, temperature, and movement. Do you ever experience those? Do you always experience them?

The Paradox of the Preface

You write a book. You believe every single sentence in that book. Yet you also write a preface in which you acknowledge that probably something you've said in the book is false. It seems that you believe each claim p1, p2, p3, ... pn, individually but you disbelieve the conjunction (p1 & p2 & p3 & ... & pn). But of course, it follows straightfowardly from p1, p2, p3, ... pn, that their conjunction is true. In denying it, you commit yourself to an inconsistent set of beliefs. We ordinarily think holding an inconsistent set of beliefs is irrational; yet your acknowledging the likelihood of error in the preface seems eminently rational. Hence, the paradox of the preface.

Much has been written about the paradox of the preface, but I want to focus on just one issue here: The challenge it poses for the idea, raised last Monday that we cannot have flatly contradictory beliefs. For if we accept what we might call the conjunctive principle of belief attribution -- the principle that someone who believes A and who believes B also believes A & B -- then it seems to follow that the preface writer has baldly contradictory beliefs: (p1 & p2 & p3 & ... & pn) [from repeated applications of the conjunction principle] and -(p1 & p2 & p3 & ... & pn) [from what he says in the preface].

The solution, I think, is to deny the conjunction principle. On a representational warehouse model of belief, according to which to believe something is to have representations of the right sort stored in an appropriate location in the mind, denying the conjunction principle invites the unsavory conclusion that in order to believe that I got in the car and drove to work I have to represent both "I got in the car" and "I drove to work" and "I got in the car and drove to work". (On the other hand, if the warehouse-representationalist accepts the conjunction principle, she risks sliding into the even more unsavory position of holding that we believe all the logical consequences of our beliefs.)


On a dispositional approach to belief, according to which to believe something is to act, cogitate, and feel in ways concordant with the truth of the proposition in question, there may be room to deny the conjunction principle, without dragging in a suite of redundant representations. The key is to notice that one needn't be absolutely consistently disposed to act in accord with some proposition P to count as believing that P. For example, one can believe in God despite passing fits of irreligiosity. One need only act appropriately generally speaking, most of the time, and when excusing conditions are not present. One need only match the profile of the full and complete believer to a certain degree. (For more on this, see my Phenomenal, Dispositional, Account of Belief.) And what comes in degrees doesn't conjoin.

To see this last point, consider the lottery paradox: It's approximately certain that Jean won't win and approximately certain that Bob won't win and approximately certain that Sanjay won't win, ..., but it doesn't follow that it's approximately certain that no one will win. The uncertainties compound with conjunction. So also, likewise, in the paradox of the preface: I come pretty close to matching the profile of a full and complete believer in each of p1, p2, p3, ... pn, considered individually, but it doesn't follow that I come at all close to matching the dispositional profile of a full believer in the conjunction (p1 & p2 & pn & ... & pn). This point is often made in terms of Bayesian degrees of belief; but I intend it here as a point of set theory, where the relevant sets are sets of dispositions. Having most of the elements of set A and most of the elements of set B does not necessarily imply that one has most of the elements of A+B.

(By the way, I believe it was Jay Rosenberg who first raised this as a puzzle for my rejection of baldly contradictory beliefs, at an APA meeting some years ago.)

Depression and Philosophy

John Fischer once suggested to me that many of the best philosophers are mildly depressed: This gives them the lack of confidence necessary to recheck and rethink their arguments with paranoid care; it prompts them to toss what's less than excellent in the trash; it gives them a realistic appreciation of how someone opposed to their point of view might react to their writing. The average person generally accepts her first thought with blithe confidence and is satisfied to stop there until someone points out a flaw. The mildly depressed philosopher worries that her first thought is off-target or too simple, that there are important objections she hasn't considered, and that her opponent may be right after all. Consequently her thinking deepens.

There's much right in this, I suspect. Surely you can think of philosophers (I won't name any names!) who are rather too satisfied with their own work and their first thoughts in response to challenges, whose philosophy would profit from a loss of self-esteem! (Perhaps in their early careers, before they earned their flattering students and editors, they were rather more depressed?) And contrary to what one might superficially think, a depressive lack of confidence is quite compatible with the seemingly arrogant conviction, essential to the boldest, most creative philosophy, that every other scholar in the world (and Kant) is farther wrong than you.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for euphoric philosophy, too -- philosophy that strikes out in new directions, without too much looking back, philosophy that doesn't detain itself overmuch with fine distinctions and robotic consistency. And of course even mild depression is enervating, making it hard to take up the bold project or even just to sit down and write or revise what one has already planned out. The inner critic speaks too loudly after each sentence, each paragraph -- they don't come out, or half come out, or come out and get deleted.

The best pathology for a philosopher is probably mild manic-depression. The ephoria, self-confidence, and energy of a mild hypomania can drive the drafts, enliven one's thinking, encourage new starts, new directions, bold ideas. The subsequent depression puts one's feet back on the ground when it comes time to revise, rethink, and often just completely abandon the thing. The philosopher's ideal condition is one of gentle fluctuation.

The implications of this for the proper use of caffeine and diurnal rhythms I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Do the Mundane Think in Prose?

Do you tend to think in strings of words or in successions of images? (You probably think you know the answer to this question. I'd wager that you don't, but let's bracket my outrageous skepticism for today.) Russ Hurlburt (with Chris Heavey and Sarah Akhter) claims that those who think primarily in inner speech tend to be (among other things):

- above average in logical capacity,
- good at planning sequential operations,
- unimaginative, focused on prosaic facts,
- narrow-minded and overconfident,
- less interested than others in relationships and artistry.

Those who tend to think primarily in images, on the other hand, Hurlburt claims, tend to be

- energetic, optimistic, impatient, and fast-talking,
- creative and visionary,
- self-absorbed and poor at seeing things from another's perspective.

These bold claims (along with some caveats and disclaimers) can be found in Chapter 14 of Hurlburt's just-published book with Chris Heavey. Hurlburt, Heavey, and Akhter hint at some ways in which these different characteristics might follow from features of sentences (logical, sequential, matter-of-fact) vs. pictures (rich, vivid, depicting possibilities), but the main basis of their claims seems to be Hurlburt's decades of experience interviewing people about their everyday thoughts and experiences as sampled by a random beeper. Hurlburt, Heavey, and Akhter also describe a few other types.

I find at least two interesting matters to contemplate here: (1.) The potential truth of these claims, and how we can evaluate their truth or falsity. And (2.) my own jumble of defensive reactions. How easy it is, too, to get this defensive rise out of me ("I'm not unimaginative and narrow-minded!"), though of course Russ isn't claiming that everyone who tends to think in words has these traits. I recall my own occasional visual images. Maybe I'm the perfect blend of speaker and imager? Maybe some folks' inner prose (mine!) carries more than others'? Even before I accept the truth of Russ's claims, I find my self-image shifting defensively in reaction to it.

The mere utterance of generalities about groups, by anyone, tends to engage our defenses -- even when we have excellent reason to be skeptical of the claims. I think I'm now completely immune to horoscopes, but the visceral defensive reactions vanished only years after my intellectual dismissal of astrology. Likewise, two years ago, I read some Nazi-era portrayals of the personalities of different racial types, and (I blush to confess) I found myself having similar defensive and self-congratulatory reactions. Is it just me? How can my self-image and my thoughts be so easily commandeered by what I know to be ungrounded utterances!

Maybe Russ is right. I'm not saying his claims are entirely ungrounded. It does seem plausible that differences in the dominant form of one's stream of conscious experience would both reflect and cause differences in cognition and personality. We can and should investigate the matter more thoroughly. And maybe then I'll just have to buck up and accept my aloof logicistic mundaneness -- and you your impatient egoism!