Category Archives: Philosophy

Punished by a Philosopher

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I was slightly tempted to discuss a new book that lays out the argument for considering The Toddler to be a toddler (The Toddler In Chief by Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University). But even thinking about that subject would be a form of punishment.

Instead, I’m going to consider a different kind of punishment: being subjected to a bad philosophical argument. It’s not the worst kind of punishment. It’s often interesting or amusing to consider what a philosopher says, however implausible it might be.  Punishment is what came to mind, however, when I went from reading about the Toddler book to reading Richard Marshall’s interview with Yale philosophy professor  Michael Della Rocca. (Note: This isn’t the typical post I’ve published in recent years in terms of either subject matter or length; there’s nobody watching if you’d like to turn back now.)(PS: Another option is to read the final few lighthearted paragraphs.)

Professor Della Rocca specializes in metaphysics and early modern philosophy — “Early Modern” primarily refers to the ideas of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Locke, all published between 1615 and 1715.

This is the argument that Della Rocca makes:

… in virtue of what are [any two things] A and B not identical? If one answers: “in virtue of being in different locations,” then the question just re-arises in a different form: in virtue of what are these locations not identical? … So this response … goes no distance toward offering genuine illumination on the issue of what it is in virtue of what A and B are distinct.

Why do we need “genuine illumination” on what makes A and B distinct? If we have what seems to be an excellent reason to believe A and B are different things (one’s here and the other is over there), why shouldn’t we believe they’re different without being required to explain the difference sufficiently well?

Della Rocca continues:

I take such why-questions seriously—i.e. I think that they demand an answer, and I’m certainly not alone here. Such questions are for me a hallmark of rationalism. Rationalism can mean lots of different things to different people, but for me the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the PSR) is central to rationalism. The PSR is the principle according to which there are no brute facts that obtain or no things that exist without an explanation. That is, each thing or each fact has an explanation. The PSR is the guiding force of Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s work….

The Principle of Sufficient Reason tells us that every fact, including whether or how A and B are different, requires a sufficient (genuinely illuminating? satisfactory? compelling?) reason to admit the difference exists or explanation for why or how it exists. But must we accept that Principle? Is it true?

Professor Della Rocca doesn’t say. Instead, he points out that philosophers often demand reasons and explanations, and once you start down that road, there is no reason to stop until you get to the finish line, i.e. you are justified in demanding reasons or explanations in every case, until you get one that’s “sufficient”. That is the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (Bright children who keep asking “why” questions until their parents lose patience may be covert adherents of the PSR.)

[Philosophers] accept explanatory demands in particular domains, and I point out that it seems right that they do accept these explanatory demands. I think that explanatory demands are the lifeblood of philosophy, and you don’t need me to say that they make sense and should be taken seriously. People already do take them seriously. After showing that certain explanatory demands are accepted, I then try to make life difficult for my interlocutors by showing how the explanatory demands that they already accept lead to surprising or even troubling consequences.

He holds that one such troubling consequence is being forced to accept the principle known as the “Identity of Indiscernibles”.

This is the case with my defense of the identity of indiscernibles. I begin with explanatory claims that very many philosophers embrace or seem to embrace—claims to the effect that such-and-such a situation is to be ruled out precisely because it would involve inexplicable facts. I then ratchet up the pressure by showing how this explanatory demand generates momentum to go further and, in this case, eventually generates pressure to accept the identity of indiscernibles and indeed the full-blown PSR.

I believe the idea here is that if we cannot sufficiently explain what it is, for example, for A and B to be in visibly different locations, not only should we withhold judgment, but A and B aren’t in different locations at all. The same rule applies to the other apparent differences between A and B, their color, their size, I suppose their importance, whatever difference you care to name. But if there are no differences between A and B, they must be the same thing. They are identical. A = B.

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Since the variables A and B can be assigned to anything, we end up with a version of the classic philosophical position called “monism”. Generally speaking, monism is the position that reality is one thing and not a collection of things. The ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides is credited (or discredited) as an early monist. Della Rocca thinks Parmenides was serious about what sounds like an incredible position:

Parmenides, as I interpret him, is a strict monist in the sense that he denies that there are any negations or distinctions whatsoever (i.e. one thing’s not being another). Indeed, for Parmenides, such distinctions, such negations, and any multiplicity are unintelligible—they cannot even be thought.

Parmenides’ successors—notably Plato and Aristotle—were haunted by Parmenides’ vision, and they sought to make the world safe for distinctions and multiplicity. Whether they succeeded is another matter. My view is that this move in Parmenides from the PSR to a strong version of monism or a rejection of all distinctions and multiplicity is repeated time and time again in the history of philosophy. Attempts to avoid this result either by limiting the PSR or denying it outright fail.

Della Rocca than presents his own take on monism:

I endorse Parmenideanism in my own voice for reasons stemming from the PSR…. Thus, there are no differentiated substances or beings, actions, knowledges (instances of knowledge), or meanings. There is, one might say, being or substance, but not substances or beings; there is action, but no actions. For me, these terms (“substance”, “action”, “knowledge”, “meaning”) are not count nouns, but are something like mass terms.

The challenge in each of these cases is this: we ordinarily think of actions, etc. as differentiated, as relational, but for me there is no good way to make sense of such differentiation, such relations, and so—in order to save or redeem the concepts of substance, action, knowledge, and meaning—we have to ascend to an undifferentiated, non-relational version of these phenomena, if they are to be saved or redeemed at all.

We take the reality that we were trying to capture in terms of differentiation and, instead, we capture it better by appealing to undifferentiated versions of these phenomena. In this way, my account is deeply skeptical, not in the tame sense of denying that we know that there are instances of these phenomena, but in the sense of denying that we have a coherent conception of these phenomena, at least of these phenomena as involving distinctions.

I think this is the structure of Della Rocca’s argument, even though it’s not how it’s presented in the interview:

1) The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a fundamental, highly plausible principle.

1a) It is so fundamental that it might not be justifiable, but to be consistent, anyone who has ever required a good enough reason to believe something exists or some statement is true should require a good enough reason in every case.

2) Once we accept the PSR, we realize that the explanations we ordinarily accept are insufficient, because we can ask for those explanations themselves to be explained.

4) Among the insufficient explanations are those that attempt to explain how or why two or more things are different (e.g., “you might think these two objects are different because they are in different locations, but in virtue of what are their locations different?”).

5) Since such explanations are insufficient, the supposed differences don’t exist.

6) The Identity of Indiscernibles is another plausible principle. But it says that if there are no differences between two things, the two things are only one thing; “they” are identical.

7) Therefore, we should adopt some kind of monism, the view that reality is somehow one thing; the universe doesn’t consist of many things (such as electrons and gluons, or apples and oranges). Neither does it consist of only a couple of things (like mind and matter).

8) In particular, we should think of certain things, action and meaning, for example, as one thing (action or meaning) rather than many things (e.g. the actions you performed yesterday or the meanings of the words in Della Rocca’s interview).

I don’t think I’ve expressed the argument very well, but, since it’s part of an interview, it’s not presented with crystalline clarity. No doubt it’s clearer and has more detail in Della Rocca’s articles or books.

Nevertheless, I think it’s nuts. On the face of it, denying that reality is made of different things, things that have relationships and distinctions between them, seems so wrong, so counterintuitive, one wonders if “all is one” means something deeply and obscurely profound, not what it appears to mean.

Anyway, here are a few observations.

The obvious place to start is the Principle of Sufficient Reason. What makes a reason or explanation sufficient? Ordinarily, when we evaluate a reason or explanation, we think it’s sufficient if it meets our purposes now and (we hope) in the future. But the Principle of Sufficient Reason doesn’t include a statement of purpose, so the meaning of “sufficient” is hard to determine.  If somebody is visiting our house for the first time, it would be helpful to tell them that there is a tree on either side of our driveway, and their leaves are (somewhat surprisingly) different colors. Asking for further explanations of these facts would be a waste of time. It wouldn’t change the original facts about location and color. It would serve no purpose.

But Della Rocca thinks apparent differences like location and color require further explanation. Perhaps physics could do the job. A physicist can explain various characteristics of spacetime and light. But only up to a point (or down to a point). The further the explanations proceed, questions will come up. Why do certain constants have the values they do? Is there a reason for the strong nuclear force to have the strength it does? Or is it a brute fact? If it’s a brute fact, the PSR is false. Does everything happen in a chain of cause and effect, even at the quantum level? Or are quantum events random? How about the Big Bang? Did it happen for a reason or simply happen? If there are any brute facts, or anything happens (or once happened) randomly, the PSR is false. Why presume it’s true, as Della Rocca does?

In step 5 above, there is a leap from “such and such explanations of difference X are not sufficient” to “the supposed difference X doesn’t exist”. But being unable to explain X doesn’t demonstrate that X is unreal. There must be other evidence for the existence of X, or why bother trying to explain it?  The most we should infer from our inability to explain something is that we don’t understand it as well as we’d like to. We might want to reserve judgment. If we want to further justify our belief in X’s existence, we have more work to do.

One of the more surprising claims Della Rocca makes is that there are no relations or distinctions. He begins by referring to actions and then broadens his thesis to cover substances, meanings and knowledges (which is, in fact, the plural of “knowledge”). Revisiting a paragraph from above:

… we ordinarily think of actions, etc. as differentiated, as relational, but for me there is no good way to make sense of such differentiation, such relations, and so—in order to save or redeem the concepts of substance, action, knowledge, and meaning—we have to ascend to an undifferentiated, non-relational version of these phenomena, if they are to be saved or redeemed at all. We take the reality that we were trying to capture in terms of differentiation and, instead, we capture it better by appealing to undifferentiated versions of these phenomena….  we [do not] have a coherent conception of these phenomena, at least of these phenomena as involving distinctions.

Della Rocca says we should think of substance, action, knowledge and meaning as “undifferentiated” phenomena. Yet he differentiates between substance, action, knowledge and meaning. Why? Following his lead, we have to ask what the difference is between substance and action, for example. Is there a “genuinely illuminating” explanation of the difference between them? Or between them and phenomena like quantity or intention?

For that matter, Della Rocca (like Parmenides did in the past) uses words to communicate. If there are no distinctions or relations, why choose one word rather than another? Why say “attempts to deny” instead of “deny to attempts”? Why not say “cornflakes green belief” when he greets a colleague in the philosophy department? If meaning is an undifferentiated phenomenon, the words one chooses and the assertions one makes shouldn’t matter.

Moore
Russell
Wittgenstein

Finally, the typical monist response to being challenged regarding the existence of different things is to invent new language. The English philosopher G. E. Moore once said (in his “Proof of an External World”) that he could prove the existence of the external world by holding up one hand and then the other while intoning “Here is one hand … and here is another”.

From the article on “Monism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

[In “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism”, Bertrand Russell declared:]

“I share the common-sense belief that there are many separate things; I do not regard the apparent multiplicity of the world as consisting merely in phases and unreal divisions of a single indivisible Reality.”

Whether due wholly to argumentative force or at least partly to historical contingencies, such declarations [as Russell’s and Moore’s] had the effect of ending any interest in monism … for nearly one hundred years. And so philosophical fashion swung from some form of monism in the nineteenth century, to some form of pluralism in the twentieth century.

By “phases and unreal divisions”, Russell was referring to a standard response a monist might give to Moore’s proof of an external world. Again from the Stanford Encyclopedia:

For instance, when one claims that there is a hand here, the … monist might hold that what is strictly the case is that the world is handish here.

I don’t see much difference between “here is a hand and here is another” and “the world is handish here and also handish here”, or “handing here and also there”. But I don’t find monism appealing.

Wittgenstein is often quoted as saying “philosophy leaves the world as it is”. What he actually wrote (in German, Philosophical Investigations, 124) was on the relationship between philosophy and language: “philosophy leaves everything [i.e. the way we actually use language] as it is”. I don’t think that’s true, but what Wittgenstein wrote could be interpreted in a way that pertains to Della Rocca’s argument for monism.

Philosophers often argue about which terminology to use to describe facts they agree on. All philosophers agree that people have hands. But, if we want to be as precise and accurate as humanly possible, how should we talk about that fact? G. E. Moore insisted he had two hands, by which he meant that his hands were objects external to his mind, that is, part of the external world, something he would only bother pointing out when responding to “idealist” philosophers who denied such an external world exists.

Della Rocca would agree that Moore had two hands, and probably agree that Moore’s hands weren’t ideas in Moore’s mind or anyone else’s (like the idealists did), but he wouldn’t want to say that Moore’s hands were part of anything. I don’t know exactly what he’d say, but he’d have to somehow refer to them as aspects (?) of the one reality while denying that they are distinct objects related to each other (in Russell’s words: “unreal divisions of a single indivisible Reality”). He thinks that when we really get down to it, notions like “difference” and “relation” make no sense. That makes no sense to me. And people continue to have two hands regardless.

Philosophical arguments like the one between monism and pluralism (there are many individual things) have been going on for centuries. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Quoting Wittgenstein again:

Philosophy hasn’t made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching … or genuine itching? [Culture and Value, 86e].

And once more:

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again “I know that that’s a tree”, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy” [On Certainty, 467].

I’m done. If you read this whole thing, you’ve been punished enough.

Spinoza Made a Difference

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Baruch (sometimes Benedict) Spinoza was a 17th century Jewish philosopher who famously referred to reality as either God or nature. Scholars have been arguing about what he meant ever since, but whatever he meant helped get him “excommunicated or expelled from the people of Israel” in 1656. In 2012, a rabbi declined to remove the ban, citing Spinoza’s “preposterous ideas, where he was tearing apart the very fundamentals of our religion”.

From Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English by Jonathan RĂ©e (Spinoza wrote in Latin but couldn’t be left out of the book):

Christians had never taken much interest in atheism: the Bible dismissed it as the delirium of “fools”… After Spinoza, Christians would find themselves doing battle not only with heresy and heathenism, but also with sheer unbelief. Atheism was still a dangerous word, however, and it was sometimes replaced by a new coinage: deism, which implied rejecting revelation, ritual and tradition, while retaining a residual belief in an impersonal divine power, perhaps on the lines of Spinoza’s “God or nature”.

Ordinary Christians were alarmed: “at this day Atheism is slily [i.e. “slyly”] called Deism by those that are indeed Atheists”, as an English pamphleteer observed in 1695: “they would disguise it by a false Name, and thereby hid the Heinousness of it”. By that time, a clandestine network of atheistic and deistic pamphleteers was operating across northern Europe, building on Protestant contempt for Catholic superstition and extending it to religion as a whole. They used the arguments of various “new philosophers” — principally Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes and Spinoza — to attack beliefs in miracles, apparitions and omens, and derided the doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in consecrated bread and wine.

As far as they were concerned, everything in the physical world was governed by universal laws of nature, and the Bible was no holier than any other book. “Such is human malice and stupidity” — to quote a notorious  pamphlet called the TraitĂ© des trois imposteurs — that men choose to pass their lives in duping each other and worshiping a book handed down from an ignorant nation”. Manuscript copies of the TraitĂ© circulated in Latin and French in the 1690s, promoting the idea that religion is a fraud perpetrated by “the three imposters — Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. The pamphlet grew larger and bolder as time went by, and when it was printed at the Hague in 1719, it was bound with other works under a title that was not much less provocative: La Vie et l’Esprit de Spinoza….

[Sophia, Electress of Hanover, who almost became Queen of England] spent several years mingling with scholars in Heidelberg… Above all, she became an admirer of Spinoza: she described his Tractatus as “extraordinary and entirely reasonable” and supported a plan to offer him a professorship. She was appalled when he died shortly afterwards, suspecting that he had been murdered by partisans of “faith without reason”, and reflecting that “most of the human race … lives on lies”. 

Unquote.

If you’d like to know more about Spinoza’s philosophy, including his critique of religion and the Bible, as well as his liberalism and secularism, give his Theological-Political Treatise a try. When it was published, it was denounced as “godless,” “full of abominations,” “a book forged in hell . . . by the devil himself”. Stephen Nadler’s A Book Forged In Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age is another option. If anyone was ever born before his time, it was Baruch Spinoza.

“Devs” Is an Excellent Series, Except…

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Devs is a science fiction series that’s streaming on the Hulu service. You have to pay for Hulu, but they usually have a free trial for new subscribers. If you have the right kind of Spotify account, Hulu is free.

The people who made Devs have done a brilliant job. The scripts are intelligent, the actors are talented. One thing that sets it apart is that it’s visually stunning. It’s a TV show that looks better than most big-budget movies. One reason it’s so good is that it’s written and directed by Alex Garland, the filmmaker hugely responsible for 28 Days Later, Ex Machina and Annihilation.

Another thing that sets Devs apart is that it concerns the nature of reality. Is the universe deterministic? What is the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics? Are there multiple worlds? Do you and I have free will? Should we be held morally responsible for our decisions if we couldn’t have chosen otherwise?

I haven’t finished the series yet. Maybe when it’s over, my opinion will have changed. I think Aristotle said we should judge a work of art as a whole.

What motivated me to write this post, however, was that one of the characters, Lily Chan, is now faced with what might turn out to be a truly momentous decision, possibly the biggest decision anyone has ever made. (A determinist would say I had no choice — the history of the universe made me start writing.) It isn’t giving much away about the show to say that Lily has been told she will be at a certain place later tonight and, assuming she is, things are going to go terribly wrong. She and her friend both think it’s crazy to think anybody could reliably predict such a thing, but at the same time she wants to make sure the prediction doesn’t come true. How should she make sure of that?

Here are two options:

(a) She and her friend, who are in the beautiful city of San Francisco, should get some cash, turn off their phones and start driving. They should drive as far away as possible from the place she’s predicted to be later tonight. They should definitely not stay in San Francisco, since it’s only a few miles from where the big, bad event is supposed to happen. Come on, Lily! Run away!

(b) Lily and her friend should stay in her apartment in San Francisco, but not go outside. That should be good enough.

If you were in her situation and you wanted to prove the prediction wrong, which option would you choose? Would you choose (a) or (b) to make sure the very, very bad thing didn’t happen?

This is a TV show. Which option does she choose?

I think we all know the answers to these questions.

Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation by Cheryl Misak

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Cheryl Misak is an expert on America’s pragmatist philosophers (Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, et al.) and a practicing pragmatist herself. This book grew out of her doctoral thesis. It argues that the philosophical position known as pragmatism best explains how the idea of truth applies to ethical judgments. This is a “cognitivist” position in ethics, as opposed to the “non-cognitivist” view that ethical statements merely express feelings or preferences and should never be considered true or false (non-cognitivists think that saying something like “Generosity is more ethical than greed” is like saying “I prefer generosity to greed and I want you to feel the same way”).

On the face of it, it isn’t obvious that ethical statements can be true or false. Most of us think of truth as correspondence to reality (this is the “correspondence theory”). “The cat is on the mat” is true if and only the cat really is on the mat. But there doesn’t seem to be anything real for ethical statements to correspond to. How can they be true (or false)?

However, there is more to truth than correspondence. After all, what do true statements of arithmetic correspond to? And how about logical statements like “it is not the case that P and not P”? Pragmatists like Professor Misak don’t accept correspondence as the basis for truth. Instead, they view truth in terms of successful inquiry:

It is not that a true belief is one which will fit the evidence and which will measure up to the standards of inquiry as we now now know them. Rather, a true belief is one which would fit with the evidence and which would measure up to the standards of inquiry were inquiry to be pursued so far that no recalcitrant experience and no revisions in the standards of inquiry would be called for. Only then will pragmatism preserve the kind of objectivity that might suffice to attract those philosophers and inquirers who insist that truth is more than what we happen to think correct [68].

The basic idea here is that people (which people depends on the case) can try to figure out if a statement is true, whatever kind of statement it is, using appropriate methods (direct experience, scientific research, philosophical discussion, etc.) and if it looks like they wouldn’t be able to proceed any further in their inquiry, without it being a complete waste of time, the statement is true.

It’s easy to see how this approach can be applied to simple factual statements like “the cat is on the mat”, but also to statements of mathematics and logic, as well as judgments of value, such as deciding which is the most practical course of action in a given case, the ethical thing to do or the best economic policy to adopt. What isn’t easy is to know when all reasonable avenues of inquiry have been exhausted, so that no further inquiry would make a difference.

Misak discusses many issues that her position raises, and many possible objections. I found her explanations and arguments to be quite convincing. I think her hopes for the book are fulfilled:

What I hope to have shown is that there are some good reasons for thinking that we can make assertions or have genuine beliefs about what is right and wrong, just and unjust, cruel and kind; that we can inquire about the correctness of those beliefs; that our moral deliberations aim at the truth. And I hope to have shown that if we are to make sense of this, we must conduct ourselves via democratic principles — ones which encourage tolerance, openness and understanding the experiences of others [155].

If we want to answer questions in the most effective way, and have good  reasons for our answers, we need to look at issues from different perspectives. That is how the pragmatists believe we should search for truth.

I want to mention one other thing. It’s common to think that the best way to find out what is true is to confront reality head on. Is the cat truly on the mat? Look at it. Make sure other people see it. Verify that it’s a cat — not a mouse — and that underneath it is a mat. Does the cat purr? Will it run away if you bother it?

Reading this book, I wondered what kind of reality can be confronted when deciding if a statement of ethics is true. It’s harder to say what the reality would be to make true a statement like “generosity is generally more ethical than greed”. Isn’t that a statement about how the world should be, how people should behave, and not how the world is (or how some mystical, supernatural realm of ethics is)? Misak’s answer is that if we try to figure out whether an ethical statement is true, we eventually get to a point where we can’t think otherwise. We end up being confronted with the brute reality of what our ethical beliefs are in the given situation. We will eventually say to ourselves “that’s simply right, it’s as simple as that” or “that’s just wrong, and there are no two ways about it”. I don’t recall hearing anyone give that answer before. It’s worth thinking about.

The American Pragmatists by Cheryl Misak

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At least the internet doesn’t forget. I finished this book and had a question about the exact title. Right there on the first page of the search results appeared an entry from this very blog. It turns out I read this book in 2018. Who knew?

Let’s see if I agree with myself. (I see I left out a word. Now corrected.)

Well, I was concerned about trying to summarize this book today. I must have felt the same two years ago, since that earlier summary includes a lot of quotation. But I stand by every word (including the one I just added)!

I’ll simply add one thing.

Part of the author’s purpose was to counter the popular understanding among philosophers that pragmatism as a philosophical movement faded away in the 20th century under intense criticism, especially after the death of John Dewey in 1952. Misak shows it’s more accurate to say pragmatism was absorbed rather than replaced. Many of the leading philosophers in the last half of the 20th century (including former members of the Vienna Circle, as well as W. V. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson) argued for positions quite compatible with the early pragmatists, especially the views of Charles Sanders Pierce, even though these later philosophers rarely called themselves “pragmatists”. The same holds true for philosophers in this century. It’s the label that has mostly disappeared.

The American Pragmatists is worth reading, but repetitious at times. There are only so many points you can make about a concept like “truth”. But I want to learn more about two philosophers Misak thinks highly of: Clarence Irving Lewis and Hilary Putnam. I’ve got some of their books. I should open them — that’s what a pragmatist would do.