Philosophers, as a general rule, are a conservative lot when it comes to ontology: when trying to describe "what there is in the world," it pays to be a minimalist. There are quite a number of good reasons for this, but perhaps the best is that it becomes very difficult, once new (classes of) entities are posited, to come up with principled reasons for doing so that don't allow you to posit endless new ones.
Put another way, there are principled reasons for saying that the basic particles of physics exist, and maybe atoms and molecules. But something like "living thing" is much harder to encapsulate (What about viruses? Estivating fish? Yeast in suspended animation?) and "mental state" is one of the most notoriously ephemeral targets for delineation in Western philosophy. So if we go on admitting these creatures into our ontological zoo, and we can't draw firm lines to delineate what falls into these classes and what does not, then "I think they exist and this is what I think they are" becomes a very feeble ontological principle. Does it make sense to admit "red sofas" and "propane tankers" into our accepted ontological classes? Surely this is an unappetizing consequence of one's metaphysical practices.
Philosophers have long appreciated this: Occam's razor may be the single most widely known philosophical rule in the Western world. The last century has seen the rule become all but systematized and internalized. W. V. O. Quine, arguably the most influential Anglosphere philosopher of the 20th century, famously announced his ontological preference for "austere desert landscapes," and most of the analytical philosophical world has shared the preference.
But this very conservative ontology has its downside as well, and probably the biggest casualty is common sense. Now, common sense is neither necessary nor sufficient for correspondence with reality: just ask a physicist to talk about relativity and quantum mechanics. (Hey! I can do that!)
Philosophy often gets an undeserved bad rap for its seeming uselessness. Now, as someone with some decent scientific training, I am cheerfully happy to defend philosophy from that charge. On the other hand, as a philosopher, sometimes it's hard to not to be exasperated with our less sensible pronouncements.
What 20th century philosophy did to philosophy of mind shouldn't have happened to a dog. Now, in philosophy's defense, science started it: with Watson and Skinner's (possibly) well-meaning but (horrifically) misguided Behaviorism, the idea that the mind was simply an "ontological danger" - an isolated, inexplicable, and therefore unrespectable part of academic discourse - became entrenched. Thus began the unwarranted exile of the category of mental states from philosophic discussion.
And while philosophy didn't start it, they certainly made it worse. What happened to philosophy was the result of our merely nascent scientific understanding of so many interesting facets of universe, such as psychology, bumping up against sloppy and confused patterns of thought that have been culturally entrenched by millennia of unquestioning acceptance. The last few generations of philosophers, seeing the genuinely difficult problem of understanding the mind resist scientific investigation, were panicked into simply pretending the problem didn't exist and then convinced themselves the problem had been solved.
The bad old days of mid- to late-20th century philosophy of mind saw such annoyingly short-sided and premature pronouncements: the non-existence of mental states (eliminativism); the identity of mental states with specific brain states; the causal irrelevance of beliefs and desires. I can't help but wonder, sometimes, if philosophers were going through a rebellious phase and were simply trying to seem dark and edgy.
So... an overly permissive ontology is a bad idea. But an overly restrictive ontology defies common sense. So what is to be done?
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
An Introduction to Metaphysics, Caro-style, Part 1: What am I smoking?
A few weeks ago, Tomas asked me to write an outline for my magnum opus, principally, I think, for the not-unrelated purposes of getting my ideas actually out into the noosphere, and forcing me to put my otherwise inchoate and extensive thoughts into some formally organized structure.
Both purposes, I think, have been well-served by my recent spate of activity.
One of the recurring themes, as I have tried to put the overall big (nay, grand) picture into focus, has been the extent to which a certain metaphysical quirk of mine manifests itself, implicitly, in much of what I try to articulate. Put another way, how I see the world (quite differently from anyone else, I suspect) informs my thinking about a wide range of topics and phenomena so as to lead me to conclusions few others would even imagine considering. (To summarize the summary: my mind is a strange place, ladies and gentlemen).
First and foremost of these metaphysical quirks, and one that is absolutely essential to understanding why I think about certain topics the way I do, is a class of ontological distinctions which I have arrived at through a somewhat arduous process of good-old-fashioned armchair philosophizing. (Thinking really hard about stuff is still the philosopher's stock-in-trade.) Now, I have devoted this entire blog just to the intellectual task of articulating and expounding on just what those ontological distinctions are. And if you're literate enough in philosophical problems to make heads-or-tails of the description of this blog, you'll note that I'm biting off quite a chunk of intellectual real-estate. Thus, an explication of What is all this about is probably over-ambitious for a single post.
So, for now, I'm just going to dip [your!] toes into the water.
So for now, I'm going to simply list a set of widely disparate phenomena and observations. Feel free to comment on any patterns you see see here.
Why do politicians inevitably become "corrupted by the system," even if they manage not to become legally or ethically corrupted in the process? What is it about being in government that co-opts even the most idealistic civil servant into a cog in the system?
There seems to be a pattern with family-owned corporations: someone starts them, invests their blood, sweat and tears, and creates something new and wonderful in the world. The next generation typically consolidates the work of their parents and strengthens the corporation, turning it into a large, efficient enterprise. Yet by the time the grandchildren get involved, the corporation has lost its focus, and has lost many of the defining features that led the corporation to greatness in the first place. Why does this happen?
Speaking of corporations: why do they sometimes crumble from the inside? Why do they so short-sightedly treat their employees (at least in the bottom rungs) as disposable chattel, whose labor is to be extracted with a minimum of compensation, till the corporation as a whole rots from the inside due to a culture of apathy?
What's the deal with bureaucratic bloat? Why are bureaucracies so damned inefficient at doing things? For that matter, why does Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy seem to be the inevitable course of evolution for bureaucratic enterprises?
The 1992 US Olympic Basketball team was, arguably, the greatest basketball team ever assembled. Given the NBA, the USA should have completely dominated the sport till the end of time. Yet 12 years later, they were beaten by Argentina. How was that even possible?
Evolutionary Biologists have a long-standing debate on the question of levels of selection: what is the proper level of description at which evolution operates? Is it, as Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene, principally an issue of allele distribution among the set of genes? Or is it, as Stephen Gould articulates in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, a process that takes place at multiple biological levels, from the gene to the individual to the group, up to species and even higher clades?
Why do species seem to evolve to a point where they are never in danger of over-exploiting their available resources? I remember reading once that a population of herbivores never grows beyond the point where it will use more than a fraction (think between 1/3 and 1/4) of available food. What mechanism keeps species at such a sustainable level?
Philosophers have a cluster of related philosophical problems that are collectively referred to as Material Constitution (as in, the relationship between a material and the object which that material constitutes). Probably the classic problem in this area is the Ship of Theseus, though more recent literature has introduced such interesting titles as "Tibbles the Cat" and "Lumpl and Goliath."
Not unrelated to the problem of material constitution is the problem of identity (though, of course, identity is much broader). Leibniz' Law is typically taken as the definitive characterization of identity: roughly, two things are identical ("X is the same as Y") if everything that can be predicated of one can be predicated of the other. One understanding of identity is to stipulate what kind of thing an identity claim is being made of (briefly, "X is the same as Y" is enthymematic for "X is the same F as Y"); however, there is a dispute as to whether such "indexing of identity" is really identity, and whether it satisfies Leibniz' Law.
And, not wanting to leave philosophy behind: What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? To mental states reduce to physical states? Does that mean there are no "real" mental states, just physical states that we ascribe a convenient shorthand label for? Related but distinct: what are the implications for free will? Can free will even exist in a world where physicalism is true, and what goes on in our minds really is just what happens in our brains?
And what about that relationship: What is "reduction" anyway? How do you spell it out? What does it entail? Even more basically, it is taken as a point of consensus among philosophers that "biology reduces to chemistry, and chemistry reduces to physics." (I rarely saw philosophers literate in the relevant sciences making these claims, but what matter are concrete details when you have a beautiful theory to expound upon?) What do these relationships entail? What does it mean that biology "reduces" to chemistry? That chemistry "reduces" to physics? [I have to admit, 7 years in graduate school, working specifically in areas of philosophy where these questions were relevant, and I never saw an explanation for these claims.]
What about other relationships of this kind? What about supervenience (Jaegwon Kim and Donald Davidson's favorite relationship)? Or emergence (the new buzzword among philosophers who want the benefit of having all the magical powers that believing in immaterial souls will grant them in solving philosophical problems, while somehow managing to jettison the inconvenient baggage of ectoplasm)?
What is the unifying theme here? It's not altogether obvious that there is one, I'm sure. Yet here is where I go off the rails, my friends. My hypothesis is this:
All of these philosophical, cultural, and scientific problems arise from a failure to properly account for the relationship between individuals and collectives. Furthermore, each of these relationships is but one aspect of a general set of unifying principles that governs all such relationships.
That set of principles is what I refer to as Differential Ontology.
Both purposes, I think, have been well-served by my recent spate of activity.
One of the recurring themes, as I have tried to put the overall big (nay, grand) picture into focus, has been the extent to which a certain metaphysical quirk of mine manifests itself, implicitly, in much of what I try to articulate. Put another way, how I see the world (quite differently from anyone else, I suspect) informs my thinking about a wide range of topics and phenomena so as to lead me to conclusions few others would even imagine considering. (To summarize the summary: my mind is a strange place, ladies and gentlemen).
First and foremost of these metaphysical quirks, and one that is absolutely essential to understanding why I think about certain topics the way I do, is a class of ontological distinctions which I have arrived at through a somewhat arduous process of good-old-fashioned armchair philosophizing. (Thinking really hard about stuff is still the philosopher's stock-in-trade.) Now, I have devoted this entire blog just to the intellectual task of articulating and expounding on just what those ontological distinctions are. And if you're literate enough in philosophical problems to make heads-or-tails of the description of this blog, you'll note that I'm biting off quite a chunk of intellectual real-estate. Thus, an explication of What is all this about is probably over-ambitious for a single post.
So, for now, I'm just going to dip [your!] toes into the water.
So for now, I'm going to simply list a set of widely disparate phenomena and observations. Feel free to comment on any patterns you see see here.
Why do politicians inevitably become "corrupted by the system," even if they manage not to become legally or ethically corrupted in the process? What is it about being in government that co-opts even the most idealistic civil servant into a cog in the system?
There seems to be a pattern with family-owned corporations: someone starts them, invests their blood, sweat and tears, and creates something new and wonderful in the world. The next generation typically consolidates the work of their parents and strengthens the corporation, turning it into a large, efficient enterprise. Yet by the time the grandchildren get involved, the corporation has lost its focus, and has lost many of the defining features that led the corporation to greatness in the first place. Why does this happen?
Speaking of corporations: why do they sometimes crumble from the inside? Why do they so short-sightedly treat their employees (at least in the bottom rungs) as disposable chattel, whose labor is to be extracted with a minimum of compensation, till the corporation as a whole rots from the inside due to a culture of apathy?
What's the deal with bureaucratic bloat? Why are bureaucracies so damned inefficient at doing things? For that matter, why does Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy seem to be the inevitable course of evolution for bureaucratic enterprises?
The 1992 US Olympic Basketball team was, arguably, the greatest basketball team ever assembled. Given the NBA, the USA should have completely dominated the sport till the end of time. Yet 12 years later, they were beaten by Argentina. How was that even possible?
Evolutionary Biologists have a long-standing debate on the question of levels of selection: what is the proper level of description at which evolution operates? Is it, as Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene, principally an issue of allele distribution among the set of genes? Or is it, as Stephen Gould articulates in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, a process that takes place at multiple biological levels, from the gene to the individual to the group, up to species and even higher clades?
Why do species seem to evolve to a point where they are never in danger of over-exploiting their available resources? I remember reading once that a population of herbivores never grows beyond the point where it will use more than a fraction (think between 1/3 and 1/4) of available food. What mechanism keeps species at such a sustainable level?
Philosophers have a cluster of related philosophical problems that are collectively referred to as Material Constitution (as in, the relationship between a material and the object which that material constitutes). Probably the classic problem in this area is the Ship of Theseus, though more recent literature has introduced such interesting titles as "Tibbles the Cat" and "Lumpl and Goliath."
Not unrelated to the problem of material constitution is the problem of identity (though, of course, identity is much broader). Leibniz' Law is typically taken as the definitive characterization of identity: roughly, two things are identical ("X is the same as Y") if everything that can be predicated of one can be predicated of the other. One understanding of identity is to stipulate what kind of thing an identity claim is being made of (briefly, "X is the same as Y" is enthymematic for "X is the same F as Y"); however, there is a dispute as to whether such "indexing of identity" is really identity, and whether it satisfies Leibniz' Law.
And, not wanting to leave philosophy behind: What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? To mental states reduce to physical states? Does that mean there are no "real" mental states, just physical states that we ascribe a convenient shorthand label for? Related but distinct: what are the implications for free will? Can free will even exist in a world where physicalism is true, and what goes on in our minds really is just what happens in our brains?
And what about that relationship: What is "reduction" anyway? How do you spell it out? What does it entail? Even more basically, it is taken as a point of consensus among philosophers that "biology reduces to chemistry, and chemistry reduces to physics." (I rarely saw philosophers literate in the relevant sciences making these claims, but what matter are concrete details when you have a beautiful theory to expound upon?) What do these relationships entail? What does it mean that biology "reduces" to chemistry? That chemistry "reduces" to physics? [I have to admit, 7 years in graduate school, working specifically in areas of philosophy where these questions were relevant, and I never saw an explanation for these claims.]
What about other relationships of this kind? What about supervenience (Jaegwon Kim and Donald Davidson's favorite relationship)? Or emergence (the new buzzword among philosophers who want the benefit of having all the magical powers that believing in immaterial souls will grant them in solving philosophical problems, while somehow managing to jettison the inconvenient baggage of ectoplasm)?
What is the unifying theme here? It's not altogether obvious that there is one, I'm sure. Yet here is where I go off the rails, my friends. My hypothesis is this:
All of these philosophical, cultural, and scientific problems arise from a failure to properly account for the relationship between individuals and collectives. Furthermore, each of these relationships is but one aspect of a general set of unifying principles that governs all such relationships.
That set of principles is what I refer to as Differential Ontology.
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