New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The phylogeny and ontogeny of deductive reasoning

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

In a recent paper, the eminent psychologist of reasoning P. Johnson-Laird says the following:

[T]he claim that naïve individuals can make deductions is controversial, because some logicians and some psychologists argue to the contrary (e.g., Oaksford & Chater, 2007). These arguments, however, make it much harder to understand how human beings were able to devise logic and mathematics if they were incapable of deductive reasoning beforehand.

This last claim strikes me as very odd, or at the very least as poorly formulated. (To be clear, I side with those, such as Oaksford and Chater, who think that deductive reasoning must be learned to be mastered and competently practiced by reasoners.) It looks like a doubtful inference to the best explanation: humans have in fact devised logic and mathematics, which are crucially based on the deductive method, so they must have been capable of deductive reasoning before that. Something like: birds had to have fully formed wings before they could fly – hum, I don’t think so… Instead, the wing analogy suggests that there must be some precursors to deductive reasoning skills in untrained reasoners, but the phylogeny of the deductive method (and to be clear, I’m speaking of cultural evolution here) would have been a gradual, self-feeding process.

On card-carrying contextualists

In her introduction, James explains her methodology by pointing out that "in order to follow Spinoza, and to grasp the significance of his claims, it is not enough to explicate the text: one must also set it in the context of the sequence of theological and political debates to which he is contributing" (4). Though not myself a card-carrying member of the contextualist school, I believe that at least in the case of the TTP this attitude is quite fruitful and apt for a rather simple reason. The most salient feature of the text (as James points out) is its polemical nature, and it is hard to grasp the full meaning of a claim made as part of a debate when that claim is abstracted from its setting. Obviously, this interpretative attitude makes the decision about the proper context for understanding the book utterly critical.

...But James interestingly suggests that, in spite of this historical grounding, the book should not be read merely as an "active theological-political intervention in the politics of its time," but also as a work which "yields insights of general philosophical interest, bearing on our own predicament as much as that of the Dutch state in the second half of the seventeenth century" (6).--Yitzhak Melamed reviewing Susan James' Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise, Oxford University Press.

I was trained as a member of the contextualist school, and I used to carry my card proudly when I left home. (Nowadays as regular readers of this blog know I vaccilate between trying to save or abolish the school!) But the school was also founded with a dogma--the denial that classic philosophical texts addressed perennial issues that may have permanent answers. Yet, in the part of the introduction quoted by Melamed, James comes very close to denying the contextual dogma; Spinoza's text ""yields insights of general philosophical interest." So, what we are seeing, I think, is an evolution in the contextualist school.

Setting the moral bar low

From a CFP:

Despite this influence, and despite the reception Dingler's ideas found in Paul Lorenzen's constructivist “Erlangen School” from 1950 on, today neither philosophers nor historians take notice of Dingler's original approach. One reason for this might be his concessions to National Socialist politics, which pale, however, in comparison to those of a certain Martin Heidegger.

The German wikipedia offers a sobering account of Hugo Dingler's life (which is not quite captured in the English version).

On G.E. Moore, or The Origin of Analytical Philosophy in Classical Philology...

"[G.E. Moore] was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of inspiration, and with an intellect as deeply passionate as Spinoza's. He had a kind of exquisite purity."--Ernest Nagel quoting Russell on Moore.

"But Professor Moore, why do you spend so much time refuting that doctrine; surely [this emphatic use of "surely" he had learned from Moore] no one holds it. To which Moore replied, in a rising crescendo of rhetorical questions: "No one holds it? No one holds it? No one holds it? But Montague holds it-don't you Montague?" Professor Montague rolled his eyes and shook his head affirmatively."--Morton White recalling a seminar with Moore.

By treating Boole's contributions as merely mathematical and requiring a conventional step (the coding of predicates/sentences), Michael Dummett (and here) convinced himself and others that analytical philosophy has its original roots in Frege's more powerful logic and, thus, what we may call the philosophy of mathematics (for an alternative view). By contrast, at the 1959 memorial symposium on G.E. Moore at Columbia University (published in 1960 in JPhil), Ernest Nagel, who I claim (and here; recall Jeff's point) created our shared picture of analytical philosophy, has no doubt that "Moore did help to bring about a revolution, if not in philosophy, at any rate in the philosophical climate, and at the same time a marked heightening in standards of philosophical workmanship." (812; recall Catarina on Moore) Moore and his revolution stand for the "passionate devotion to the pursuit of intellectual clarity." (811)  His clarity was reflected in his writing, of course, and also bequeathed to the discipline through his charismatic teaching style.

Before I turn to Nagel's understanding of the sources and costs associated with Moore's legacy, I should emphasize that Nagel is careful to disassociate Moore from the (then) "current revolts against the traditional conception of philosophy as an inquiry into the most general features of the entire scheme of things." (811) In fact, by quoting from Some Main Problems of Philosophy, Nagel reminds his audience of Moore's vision that one of the tasks of philosophy is to present "a general description of the whole of the Universe. " Even so, Moore's conception of philosophical truth meant, in practice, that he was extremely wary of systematical elaboration. (812) Rather than seeing in Moore an anti-metaphysician (cf. Ayer), he is, thus, better  thought of as re-opening the door to a very deflationary Realism. (See also Alice Ambrose's very interesting contribution to the Memorial Session.) Fair enough.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Accountants and Greatness of Soul in Ruskin and Adam Smith (with a PS about Coetzee/Swift)

"[T]he sentiment or affection of the heart, from which any action proceeds, and upon which its whole virtue or vice depends, may be considered under two different aspects, or in two different relations: first, in relation to the cause or object which excites it; and, secondly, in relation to the end which it proposes, or to the effect which it tends to produce: that upon the suitableness or unsuitableness, upon the proportion or disproportion, which the affection seems to bear to the cause or object which excites it, depends the propriety or impropriety, the decency or ungracefulness of the consequent action; n.."--Adam Smith, (The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS) 2.1.Intro.2, 67.)

"Magnanimity: greatness of soul...capacity of heart, the great measuring virtue, which weighs in heavenly balances all that may be given, and all that may be gained"--John Ruskin, (The Political Economy of Art, 81-2).

"[F]itness or propriety of affection can be ascertained or judged of. That precise and distinct measure can be found nowhere but in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well informed spectator."--Adam Smith, (TMS 7.2.1.49, 294)

One of the least discussed but singularly important aspects of Adam Smith's moral philosophy is that judgments of propriety -- the core Smithian moral judgments --, which from the point of view of a spectator, consists of mentally inspecting, as it were, the proportionality of the two (complex) relata that enter into a cause-effect relation. (Recall here.) One of the relata (the temporally prior cause) is itself a relation between an exciting cause (say, a desire of the person judged), which produces a sentiment of heart (that is, a motive in the person judged), while the other relata (the effect), is (also itself a relation between) the action of the person judged and its contextually or situationally foreseeable effects (that is, consequent to the motive). (See also TMS 1.1.3.6, 18.) According to Smith we paradigmatically judge others and ourselves in particular situations. As Sam Fleischacker first pointed out to me, this brings Smith remarkably close to Samuel Clarke's position (as Smith recognizes--TMS 7.2.1.49, 294 is offered as a correction to Clarke.) Throughout TMS Smith repeatedly insists that judgments of propriety can be "exact."

Berkeley's anti-mathematics

"In physics sense and experience which reach only to apparent effects hold sway; in mechanics the abstract notions of mathematicians are admitted. In first philosophy or metaphysics we are concerned with incorporeal things, with causes, truth, and the existence of things. The physicist studies the series or successions of sensible things, noting by what laws they are connected." (Berkeley, De Motu 71, [Translated by Luce].)

Yesterday, I mentioned that aspects of Hume's Treatise belong to eighteenth century anti-mathematics without explaining what I meant by the term. By "anti-mathematics" I mean expressed reservations about the authority and utility of (Newtonian) mathematical sciences, especially the application of mathematics in inquiry into nature. (I have done posts on this theme before, recall these posts on Mandeville here and here; and on Adam Smith here). I distinguish between two general strategies (although in practices the strategies may be blended): (i) "the devaluation" strategy," which tries to undermine the epistemic status (recall my post on Hume) or epistemic reach of the mathematical sciences; and (ii) what I call a "containment" strategy, which grants the success of Newtonian science, but insists that there are domains of natural inquiry in which applying mathematics lacks utility or is inappropriate (see, for example, Mary Domski's beautiful paper on Locke). While in my story anti-mathematics originates in Spinoza ("Letter on the Infinite"; I quoted a crucial passage here), the strategies get developed in response to efforts to use the authority of Newtonian natural philosophy to settle debates within philosophy (something I call "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy").

A note on Hume's social epistemology & anti-mathematics

There is no Algebraist nor Mathematician so expert in his science, as to place entire confidence in any truth immediately upon his discovery of it, or regard it as any thing, but a mere probability. Every time he runs over his proofs, his confidence encreases; but still more by the approbation of his friends; and is rais’d to its utmost perfection by the universal assent and applauses of the learned world. Now ’tis evident, that this gradual encrease of assurance is nothing but the addition of new probabilities, and is deriv’d from the constant union of causes and effects, according to past experience and observation.--Hume Treatise, 1.4.1.2

I have been revisiting a terrific paper by Kevin Meeker (recall this post). Like a lot of Kevin's other work the paper argues for interpreting Hume as an old-fashioned skeptic (even about purported mathematical knowledge). Because of it I re-read Hume's Treatise 1.4.1 ("Of scepticism with regard to reason"). In  historical 18th century context the significance of 1.4.1 is two-fold:

1. Together with much of Treatise 1.2.4, Treatise 1.4.1.2 reinforces Hume's attack on the epistemic status of applying mathematical concepts to nature: "all [purported] knowledge degenerates into probability." (1.4.1.1) In particular, the epistemic status of mathematical, natural philosophy "becomes at last of the same nature with that evidence, which we employ in common life," (1.4.1.4) That is, Hume is here part of a much larger trend of what I call, 18th century "anti-mathematics." This is much indebted to Spinoza's "Letter on the Infinite" and even if we allow that Hume had not read Spinoza (which goes against a lot of circumstantial evidence), Hume almost certainly would have been familiar with species of such anti-mathematics either in Berkeley or in Mandeville (recall here; also here and here).

RIP: Ray Frey (1941-2012)

The transition between graduate school and a tenure track position is (the few 'chosen' excepted) anxiety driven, and worse. I experienced APAs where I was apparently invisible to others at the Smoker. Papers would get rejected by journals without comment after a year's wait. So, all small tokens of kindness were much appreciated. The few genuine, critical engagements with my work, thus, stand out in memory.

Brian Leiter just reported that Ray Frey (1941-2012) passed away. I was not very close to Ray, and saw him less frequently than I would have liked. But I learned from him each time we met. In particular, he was the commentator on my paper at the "Adam Society" meeting at the central APA in 2003. (The article got published here.) It was the last "graveyard" session of the conference, and there were more people on stage than in the room when I started my talk. Ray offered incisive criticism. I emailed him after the conference, and much to my amazement he sent me detailed, elaborate further comments; we went back and forth, and then I finally realized I had to learn how to do real thinking. Five years later, I sent him a publication with a footnote that states, "This paper originates as a response to a serious question by Ray Frey on a paper." He wrote me to tell me how much he liked the paper, and that now he would have to think about his response. I had never felt more proud, and so grateful.

Cappelen's rather 'partial' account of the history of analytic philosophy

As many readers will have seen, there is an interview with Herman Cappelen in the latest issue of 3:AM Magazine. Moreover, Cappelen has recently published the much-discussed Philosophy without Intuitions, where he seems to argue (I haven’t had the chance to check out the book with my own eyes yet) that the X-Phi critique of ‘armchair’ methodology misfires in that it criticizes an inexistent straw-man: there are no (serious) philosophers for whom intuitions play the philosophical role that X-Phi’ers claim is the case in traditional, armchair philosophy. Here are some relevant passages from the interview:

3:AM: Your latest book, Philosophy without Intuitions, enters a hot debate in philosophy, that of the role of intuitions. Philosophers' alleged reliance on intuitions has been source of concern. This concern is unwarranted?

HC: Right. Not because reliance on intuitions is unproblematic, but because philosophers don’t rely on intuitions. It turns out that those who assumed philosophy was intuition-based hadn’t done their homework: they made broad, sweeping claims about an activity (philosophising) and a group of people (philosophers) without careful study of those people and that activity. When you look at what real – as opposed to caricatured – philosophers write (and say), there’s nothing there that is appropriately characterised as ‘relying on intuitions as evidence’.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith's use of the "revival set"; on naming and abstraction

[Because I am about to go on holiday, I am cheating a bit this week. Below an excerpt from my manuscript-in-progress-on Adam Smith.--ES]

It is evident that the mind takes pleasure in observing the resemblances that are discoverable betwixt different objects. It is by means of such observations that it endeavours to arrange and methodise all its ideas, and to reduce them into proper classes and assortments. . .  When two objects, however unlike, have often been observed to follow each other, and have constantly presented themselves to the senses in that order, they come to be so connected together in the fancy, that the idea of the one seems, of its own accord, to call up and introduce that of the other. If the objects are still observed to succeed each other as before, this connection, or, as it has been called, this association of their ideas, becomes stricter and stricter, and the habit of the imagination to pass from the conception of the one to that of the other, grows more and more rivetted and confirmed. As its ideas move more rapidly than external objects, it is continually running before them, and therefore anticipates, before it happens, every event which falls out according to this ordinary course of things.--Adam Smith (History of Astronomy, 2.1-7, 37-41)

At NewAPPS I have posted about this passage from Smith's posthumously published (1795) Essays on Philosophical Subjects (EPS) before. Smithian causation is founded on a pleasing psychological disposition that activates the mind to notice and, perhaps, even search out resemblances between objects. In the most Humean part of Smith’s treatment above, the habitual observation of the ordered, constant conjunction of two objects causes the habitual conjoining of the two ideas in order to form an association between them (as Smith says) in the imagination. (In Hume’s terminology this is called a "natural relation.")

The best medieval solution to the Liar ever

I posted this on M-Phi yesterday, but now it occurs to me that it might be of interest to some NewAPPS readers as well (the interest sparked by Brit's recent post suggests this much!). It is in fact a review of Stephen Read's edition and translation of Bradwardine's treatise on insolubles, which I just wrote for Speculum. 

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Thomas Bradwardine (first half of the 14^th century) is well known for his decisive contributions to physics (he was one of the founders of the Merton School of Calculators) as well as for his theological work, in particular his defense of Augustinianism in De Causa Dei. He also led an eventful life, accompanying Edward III to the battlefield as his confessor, and dying of the Black Death in 1349 one week after a hasty return to England to take up his new appointment as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

What is thus far less well known about Bradwardine is that, prior to these adventures, in the early to mid-1320s, he worked extensively on logical topics. In this period, he composed his logical tour de force: his treatise on insolubles. Insolubles were logical puzzles to which Latin medieval authors devoted a considerable amount of attention (Spade & Read 2009). What is special about insolubles is that they often involve some kind of self-reference or self-reflection. The paradigmatic insoluble is what is now known (not a term used by the medieval authors themselves) as the liar paradox: ‘This sentence is not true’. If it is true, then it is not true; but if it is not true, then what it says about itself is correct, namely that it is not true, and thus it is true after all. Hence, we are forced to conclude that the sentence is both true and false, which violates the principle of bivalence. It is interesting to note that, in the hands of Tarski, Kripke and other towering figures, the liar and similar paradoxes re-emerged in the 20^th century as one of the main topics within philosophy of logic and philosophical logic, and remain to this day a much discussed topic.

On the Origin of Analytic Metaphysics, again...

The lore we are told inspired by, say, Putnam (not a disinterested spectator) and more recently Huw Price, who thinks we delude ourselves, is roughly this: after the founders of analytical philosophy had successfully ridden philosophy of its thirst for metaphysics, Quine, discerning a crack in Carnap's edifice, re-opened the door to our deposed Queen, μεταφυσική, in "On What There Is" (and "Two Dogmas"); with the door ajar and Alvin Goldman and Dan Dennett distracted by 'naturalizing' everything, Hillary Putnam developed a Quine-ean argument from the authority of science for the really real existence of numbers and, more significantly, David  Lewis -- perhaps spurred on by some Antipodes -- drove a truck through the opening by embracing modal realism. 

We love linear stories [Carnap --> Quine --> Lewis], don't we, so even the descriptive metaphysics of Strawson's Individuals (1959) can't quite be squished into, shall we say, our conceptual scheme. Now consider the following paragraph written in 1930:

The pursuit of metaphysics as the study of generic characters of existence has been slowly regaining its professional adherents. Once its central theme, reaction to the unchecked flights of nineteenth century romantic speculation has well nigh banished metaphysics as a legitimate subject matter for philosophy. But the problems which professional philosophers refused to consider became acutely pressing in the special sciences. It was to be expected that ere long comprehensive treatises on the nature of existence would appear, fashioned by philosophers were where sensitive to the advances of recent science as well to the ancient tradition that philosophy is the systematic study of being. To the series of distinguishes essays on metaphysics which contemporary philosophers have contributed, these volumes [by Whitehead--ES] are a notable addition.--Ernest Nagel (1930 "Alfred North Whitehead," republished in Sovereign Reason, p. 154.)

 

Spinoza, Hume, Hazony and Regimes of Truth

Some of the Hebrews seems to have seen this, as if through a cloud, when they maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same.--Spinoza (E2P7S) [in Curley's translation]

In my previous three posts (here, here, here) on Yoram Hazony's The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, I did not engage with Hazony's efforts at articulating the epistemology (chapter 6) and metaphysics (7) of the Hebrew Scripture. Chapter 6 is a fascinating meditation on Jeremiah. Here I focus on the latter. According to Hazony in "the Hebrew Bible...truth is not in the first instance a quality of that which is said, but of "objects and persons." "Objects" here are taken very widely to include "objects of the understanding more generally, including actions and circumstances." (195-196). In particular, that "which is true is something that is reliable, steadfast, faithful; while that which is false is something that cannot be counted upon, or which appears reliable but is not." (199) So to simplify: something is true iff it is a steadfast object. So, in addition to true being a property of objects (etc.) it is also a normative property. As Hazony writes, "that which is true is that which proves, through time and circumstance, to be what it ought." (202)

Hazony contrasts what one can label -- to introduce and deploy a Foucault-ish terminology -- "the Biblical regime of truth" with the traditional one he claims we have inherited from Aristotle. (Foucault nor Heidegger are mentioned by Hazony.) In the traditional regime truth is a "quality of speech" (thought, etc.); true speech is about a reality separate from speech and agrees with or corresponds to that reality. (195) Let's grant Hazony the conceptual possibility that there are different "regimes of truth." So, here I ignore the kind of criticism familiar from, say, Bernard Williams' "general point:" that "nothing that was not opposed to the false could be rightly represented as the "the true." (Truth and Truthfulness, 272; emphasis in original; Williams' passage was discussed recently in an illuminating lecture on Foucault's debts to Marcel Detienne by my Ghent colleague, Maarten Van Dyck.) Williams is not just making a narrow (and plausible) point about translation; the general point denies the possibility of different regimes of truth. Given that here I am merely describing the history of various regimes of truth I need not worry if alternative regimes to ours represent anything.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Rawls' Silence on Hayek; and Ernest Nagel...

[I thank Kevin Vallier, a blogger over at BHL, for discussion; none of the mistakes below should be attributed to him.--ES],

I got my first taste of the existence of boundary policing within philosophy a year after graduation (Tufts 93): at my graduation a family friend had given me a collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin. Subsequently, I devoured it and his other writings; went on to Vico (of course), and a whole lot of other obscure authors. A year later I went back to Tufts to celebrate some friends' graduation and to beg for a TA job (in political science); as it happened I bumped into a "famous student of Rawls" on campus; he (not Rawls) was a very good teacher and involved in the great questions of the day in Washington. I admired him. He recognized me, we made some small talk, and for whatever reason I revealed my excitement about Berlin (I may have even carried a totemic copy of Four Essays on Liberty around with me). I am not sure what I expected, but was completely taken aback by the disapproving grunts, and was told something to the effect that Berlin isn't "really philosophy." Fair enough.

Much later I decided that Rawls had created (by design/also here) a "school" with broadly shared sensitivities and, thus, gaps in scholarly knowledge. For, Rawls would teach his own work in light of constructed traditions from which he privileged certain thinkers (including, in fact, Berlin when his "famous student" was at Harvard; Rawls studied with Berlin at Oxford on his Fullbright). One consequence of this way of teaching I noted in passing last week: in Theory of Justice (TJ), Rawls calls attention to the significance of the now forgotten Frank Knight (and Knight's debates with Arrow)), but from the evidence available to me it's clear that Rawls did not teach his students to appreciate the significance of Knight to TJ.

This by way of introduction to the topic of the present post: from the vantage point of contemporary political philosophy, Rawls' near-complete silence on his contemporary, Hayek, is striking, and even a bit puzzling. (Here's an exception to the point.) Even Nozick engages less with Hayek in Anarchy than one would expect today.

The Myths of Modern Science in the Responses to Nagel's Mind and Life in the Cosmos

Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos is drawing quick responses. (Can't wait to read Mohan's!) Both in the hostile review by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg as well as in the more cautious strategic pivot by Alva Noë (who doesn't engage critically with Nagel's book), mythic history of the scientific revolution plays significant rhetorical roles.

Let's start with Noë:

If there is mind — and of course the great scientific revolutionaries such as Descartes and Newton would not deny that there is mind — it exists apart from and unconnected to the material world as this was conceived of by the New Science.--Alva Noë (NPR)

Let's accept Noë's point about Descartes. But Newton thought minds  had to be somewhere in space and in time, extended but "indivisible." Incidentally, this is also Newton's doctrine about "the Maker and Lord of all things" who "cannot be never and no where."  (Principia, General Scholium.) And at one point earlier in his career, Newton also flirted with the idea that an extended body had to be the kind of thing that was capable of exciting various perceptions in the senses and imagination of minds (this is from a piece known as "De Gravitatione;" I am linking to a very nice treatment by Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk.) [Note that I am not drawing on the infamous sensorium passage at all.]

Weekly Philo of economics: (Polling) Predictions, Modal Economics and the marriage of Philosophy & Technocracy

"It has been shown, for example, that a pollster can in principle always publish his prediction of an election result in such a form that, despite the reactions of voters to the forecast, the prediction is not falsified by those reactions. CF. Herbert A Simon"--Ernest Nagel ((1960) Structure of Science, 473, n 13)

"it was shown that it is always possible in principle to make a public prediction that will be confirmed by the event...It was shown that correct prediction requires at least some knowledge of the reaction function."--Herbert Simon (1954) 253; emphasis in original)

Simon won a Nobel in economics in 1978. (In his intellectual autobiography he recounts his debts to Carnap and his ongoing interests in philosophy of physics.) In philosophy he is probably now best remembered for his work on bounded rationality/satisficing. The work discussed by Nagel (who didn't just invent the category analytical philosophy as we know it, but was also a leading figure in the discipline in the 50s and 60s [Nagel's Structure was much cited]) above and from which I cite is part of a larger literature in which Simon played a non-trivial role as acknowledged in the key (1954) paper by Grunberg and Modigliani (who won the Nobel in 1985). Simon & Grunberg/Modigliani provide a framework for showing under what conditions social scientific predictions need not be self-refuting--a welcome result to the economics profession that was warming up to Milton Friedman's (1953) proposal that what mattered was not the realism of the assumptions in an economic model but its predictive power (Simon was critical by the way).

Nagel does not name his targets in dealing with a "difficulty confronting the social sciences, sometimes cited as the gravest one they face." (466) But if one goes to Simon's paper it's not so hard to figure out; after a nod to Aristotle, he names Frank Knight and Hayek in the first footnote. Now, there are very important differences between Hayek and the now-forgotten Knight  (not the least of which is that in TJ Rawls encouraged attention to Knight (he even tells us to read the footnotes) and not so with Hayek--a judgment of relative value that the discipline has reversed), but one important commonality is that in the 1940s and 50s economists from free-marketeers like Alchian to high theory types like Arrow were extremely eager to reject their skepticism about the technocratic turn of the discipline. Nagel is certainly aware of Hayek's skepticism. (In addition, Grunberg & Modigliani also point to another forgotten economist, Vining--recall my post.)

What happened to Philosophy of Social Science after Ernest Nagel (1961)?

The hazards of trying to draw conclusions about all of science, by focusing narrowly on physics were learned at the end of the last century. However, including biology and chemistry are only the beginning, not the end, of the project of trying to develop a more well-rounded picture of science.--Alisa Bokulich

The quoted passage is from a terrific NDPR review by Bokulich that Catarina discussed yesterday. Bokulich notes that "Conspicuously absent from this list are any of the social sciences." Bokulich goes on to call attention to the works of four recent leading philosophers of social science--all of which happen to be women. [By the way, when later in the review Bokulich calls attention to the lack of representation of women in the volume (and the lack of focus on philosophy race/feminism) she does not refer back to her earlier discussion. This justifies Catarina's claim that Bokulich should be praised for the "elegant way" in which these issues are raised. ]

As the epigraph to this post suggests, our current understanding of the development of philosophy of science is that we are "trying" to develop it away from an exclusively physics focus to other sciences during the last few decades. (It was gratifying to read Bokulich's claim that philosophy of economics is "thriving.") But this leaves me with a puzzle: if one opens Ernest Nagel's (1961) The Structure of Science, one notes that three out of fifteen of chapters are exclusively focused on philosophy of social sciences and history. These together comprise 25% of the text. (This understates the situation because  earlier chapters also discuss relevant material. There is is also a chapter on biology, by the way.) So, half a century ago one the most widely cited works in the philosophy of science (although probably unread these days unless one is interested in Nagel-reduction) by one of the professional leaders of the discipline (who arguably invented analytical philosophy as a category) at one of the then  elite departments already was offering a "well-rounded" picture of science. How come this was not the norm in the profession?

Spinoza, Hazony, (Lincoln) and The Political Philosophy of the Hebrew Bible

These three things taken together – the simplicity of the theme of all these books, the way they are connected, and the fact that they were written by someone other than the person whose name they bear, many generations after the events related – lead us to infer that, as we have just said, they were all written by one Historian alone.--Spinoza,  (1670) Theological Political Treatise (TTP), Chapter 8 [Here and below I use a draft of Curley's translation he kindly shared with me.--ES]

Yoram Hazony's The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (recall also here) identifies "a single, largely unbroken  narrative extending from creation of the world in Genesis to the destruction of Judah at the end of the book of Kings" at the core of the Hebrew Bible; this core he calls "The History of Israel." (140; disclosure: Hazony and I have written a piece on Hume & Newton together.) Hazony reads The History of Israel as offering an "instructional narrative," which conveys (among other things) a political philosophy.  The History of Israel favors the anarchic, shepherding life, but as the story unfolds comes to recognize that anarchy is not self-sustaining. Political order is understood "as oscillating between the imperial state...and anarchy." (160) Hazony reads the Hebrew Bible as a search for a politics grounded in ethics--one that makes the state "limited in its aspirations" (153-4; recall this post).

Hazony sugests that Jeremiah "or perhaps one of his students, may have been the final author of the History of Israel as a unified work." (161; by "author," Hazony does not mean "the person who wrote all of it by himself," 37-8.) Hazony's argument for this is that  The History ends "with the exile of Judag's leading political and spiritual figures, the most straightforward reading us that this history is the product of the exile from the land and its aftermath." (37; Hazony acknowledges he is echoing the Rabbanic opinion here.) The book would have been composed in Egyptian exile in the seventh century (BC). Crucially, it means that the viewpoint of the political philosophy of the Hebrew Bible is "the experience of the Jews in degredaton and exile, and the attempt to survive it." (38)

Allow me to keep DOIs in my References/Footnotes/Bibliographies

These days journal articles (and book chapters) have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) attached them. I include such DOIs in my bibliographies and citations. For some reason copy-editors at academic publishers (and their philosophical editors-enablers) still insist on removing DOIs and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) from bibliographies and footnotes. I do not get this. A lot of research is now found and read online. Why not tell people where to find the material electronically? Moreover, given that my references are about my sources, shouldn't my readers now where I found them?  (I am not saying a DOI/URL ought to suffice, although that has tempted me, too.) Also, I thought presses made money from electronic downloads, so why discourage the practice in one's citations?

How much work should a reviewer do?

There is one last lacuna that demands mention. When Verene puts forward the idea, to cite but one example of many, of the importance of Goethe and the opportunity for a separate study on Goethe's influence on Cassirer, one wonders why Verene has not mentioned John M. Krois who, it is well known, has always insisted on the importance of Goethe for Cassirer. The footnotes of Verene's work are filled with such lacunae.--From this review.

I liked this review a lot; it first offers a critical summary of the book and then moves to substantive criticism. But the last paragraph (quoted above) left me dissatisfied. Rather than just pointing at at an example of "such lacunae," I would have preferred a more substantive list of examples and references as a guide to (future) graduate students and scholarship. But maybe that's too much work to expect from a review? What do readers think? 

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith, anti-Individualist.

[O]f the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expence, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise of that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expence, repays that expence with a profit.--Adam Smith, WN 2; emphasis added.)

The vivid paragraph above is a familiar passage from An Inquiry Concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN) for those interested in the history of the so-called "human capital" concept. (Wikipedia quotes it in the background section; see here for more scholarly treatment.) Smith does not shy away from likening the skilled laborer to a machine. What is less remarked upon is that Smith is adamant that the "capital fixed and realized" consequent education (apprenticeship, etc.) also is part of the society to which the laborer belongs. This is not a slip of the pen in Smith. It's the point of his book to help explain what causes the "wealth of nations," after all.

Three problems for Maudlin's account of Laws; (and some Newton)

[This is the third post after this and this on Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics that I am reading with F.A. Muller, Victor Gijsbers, and Lieven Decock.--ES]

[A] "If a law governs a particular space-time region then the physical states will so evolve." (Maudlin, 17)

[B] "My analysis of laws is no analysis at all. Rather I suggest we accept laws as fundamental entities in our ontology." (Maudlin, 18)

[C] "The laws can operate to produce the rest of the Mosaic exactly because their existence does not ontologically depend on the Mosaic." (Maudlin, 175; emphases in original)

[D] "The universe, as well as all the smaller parts of it, is made: it is an ongoing enterprise, generated from a beginning and guided towards its future by physical law." (Maudlin, 182; emphasis in original)

Maudlin's book is fantastic. It gives you a sense of what metaphysics  looks like if one has an advanced education in recent physics; it is also rooted in "scientific practice." With laser like precision it focuses on the most fundamental weaknesses of the most important alternative approaches (Quine, Lewis, Van Fraassen, etc), and it makes obscure physics seem easy to digest. What would stop somebody sympathetic to Maudlin's general orientation from accepting laws in one's ontology [B]?

Maudlin calls the fundamental laws "FLOTEs" (for Fundamental Laws of Temporal Evoluton). Together with "adjunct principles," FLOTEs describe how states (may) evolve into later states. (17) Initial conditions are examples of such principles. One can certainly understand physics such that its business is mainly discovering FLOTEs.  So far so good. But [A, C, D]  describe the laws themselves as the productive sources of change. If Maudlin were writing in the seventeenth century we would describe his position about laws either as "second causes" (Cartesian language) or as a special modern instance of "formal causation" (in the way that platonizing mathematicians thought of these [see Mancosu's book])--inspired by Kuhn (and anticipated by Burtt), I think such formal causes were conceptually transformed into laws of nature by Bacon and Newton.

Žižek and Kant: on philosophical taboos (or: on the demise of philosophical history)

Slavoj Žižek calls attention to and connects the following two passages in Kant:

A people should not inquire withany practical aim in view into the origin of the supreme authority to which it is subject; that is a subject ought not to rationalize for the sake of action about the origin of this authority, as a right that can still be called into question  with regard to the obedience he owes to it....[this] sets forth an idea as a principle of practical reason: the principle that the presently existing legislative authority ought to be obeyed, whatever its origin. (6: 318-9 and the German).

For a people already subject to civil law these subtle reasonings are altogether pointless and, moreover, threaten a state with danger. It is futile to inquire into the historical documentation [Geschichtsurkunde] of the mechanism of government, that is, one cannot reach back to the time at which civil society began (for savages draw up no record of their submission to law; besides, we can already gather from the nature of uncivilized human beings that they were originally subjected to it by force). But it is punishible to undertake this inquiry with a view to possibly changing by force the constitution that now exists. For this transformation would have to take place by the people acting as a mob, not by legislation. (6:339-40 and the German [The parts in bold are omitted by Žižek (because he is focused on a slightly different question--ES.])

As Žižek notes, Kant legislates a philosophical taboo (recall here.) A people cannot call into question obedience to present (lawful) government. This is not the place to explore  if Kant allows either exceptions to such obedience or  if a government stops being lawful (say because its laws become at odds with itself (recall my recent posts on Smith and Emerson and Thoreau) or  because it has no de facto authority (recall my posts on Hobbes, Hume, Smith) etc.), such that no obedience is warranted anymore. Moreover, I am also going to pretend as if the events of the French Revolution have nothing to do with this doctrine of Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Rather, Kant's taboo limits the possible philosophical role of history (as a form of inquiry) on practical grounds (if not plain raison d'État). For, history has to stop just where it gets interesting. Moreover, if history is not allowed to tell the origins of (any) us as a political unity, it cannot provide a genuine causal account of our unity and, thus, is incapable of offering full explanations. (It's only when one lowers one's expectation of what a proper causal account is that such history gets allowed back in.) The taboo is especially striking because it goes against the classical ideal that inquiry into politics is among the highest philosophical goods (I'll remain agnostic on what the correct reading of Aristotle is).

Kant's taboo helps us better understand the demise within philosophy (and history) of history as a genuine philosophical enterprise. This has caused a so-called Kuhn-Loss for philosophy: we are incapable of recognizing much of Xenophon,  Polybius, Machiavelli, and, say, Hume's History, as properly philosophical, nor (as I noted recently in response to Hazony's book), the main narrative of The Hebrew Bible.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Emerson, Complicity and the Natural Sentiments

"Greece and Judea, furnish the mind and the heart by which the rest of the world is sustained"

Every hour brings us from distant quarters of the Union the expression of mortification at the late events in Massachusetts, and at the behavior of Boston. The tameness was indeed shocking. Boston, of whose fame for spirit and character we have all been so proud ; Boston, whose citizens, intelligent people in England told me they could always distinguish by their culture among Americans; the Boston of the American Revolution, which figures so proudly in John Adams's Diary, which the whole country has been reading; Boston, spoiled by prosperity, must bow its ancient honor in the dust, and make us irretrievably ashamed. In Boston, we have said with such lofty confidence, no fugitive slave can be arrested, and now, we must transfer our vaunt to the country, and say, with a little less confidence, no fugitive man can be arrested here ; at least we can brag thus until to-morrow, when the farmers also may be corrupted.--Emerson, "THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW ADDRESS TO CITIZENS OF CONCORD, 3 MAY, 1851"

The second passage above was at the core of a fantastic lecture, "A Kantian Account of Complicity," delivered by Julia Driver in Ghent yesterday (and tomorrow in Amsterdam), all the more notable because Driver tends toward a more consequentialist moral philosophy. The core of Driver's lecture, was on the relationship between complicity and a certain form of action-guiding self-respect (even integrity). For, in Emerson, the dishonor of Boston creates a collective shame that potentially leaves none untouched.

In the passage, Emerson re-actives what we may call a republican rhetoric, in which commerce, luxurious prosperity, and city-life are associated with cowardice and tameness. By contrast, the independent, self-reliant, rustic farmer all stand for heroic virtue. But Emerson also insists that even beyond the suburbs, the country is no safe haven from the shared complicity in injustice (tomorrow the farmer). As Emerson said in his lecture, "Great is the mischief of a legal crime. Every person who touches this business is contaminated." So, in his lecture, Emerson's analysis relies on a different strain of argument, one greatly indebted to Adam Smith, who as regular readers may recall, thinks we can even be polluted if we unwillingly contribute to harm of others (and connects shame to pollution).

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith and Proportions (as well as good judgment)

“An effect always holds proportion with its cause,” David Hume, “Of Interest.”

Whatever be the actual state of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which labour is applied in any nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must depend, during the continuance of that state, upon the proportion between the number of those who are annually employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. The number of useful and productive labourers, it will hereafter appear, is every where in proportion to the quantity of capital stock which is employed in setting them to work, and to the particular way in which it is so employed. The Second Book, therefore, treats….--Adam Smith (1776), Introduction and Plan of the Work, The Wealth of Nations (WN; emphases added).

In the passage above and throughout WN Smith appeals to "quantity" and "number." In light of this, consider, for example, this famous passage:

The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people. What is bought with money or with goods is purchased by labour, as much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. That money or those goods indeed save us this toil. They contain the value of a certain quantity of labour which we exchange for what is supposed at the time to contain the value of an equal quantity. Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command. (WN. I.v; emphasis added)

Adopting the language of "precisely equal"  Smith seems to imply to many readers that that such magnitudes enter into an exact theoretical model that is capable of being reconstructed by a series of equations. (Here is a famous example by Paul Samuelson.) Of course, such a model would have to be implicit because -- curiously enough -- explicit equations are lacking in WN.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith, David Hume, and the Hebrew Bible on Shepherding

Early in Genesis we encounter the story of Cain (a farmer), who kills his brother, Abel (a shepherd), because he is jealous over God's (mysterious) unwillingness to accept his sacrifice (while accepting Abel's). In his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (CUP, 2012), Yoram Hazony, reminds us that we are  in addition to being a farmer, Cain also founds a city; cities are viewed negatively because of their tendency toward despotic-imperialism in the Hebrew Bible. [Full disclosure Hazony and I have co-authored a piece on Hume and Newton.] In Hazony's hands the Biblical (archetype) life of a shepherd (think also of Abraham, Moses, Jacob, David) stands for an anarchic "life of dissent and initiative" (108) away from the polity. While the life of the farmer (think of Noah, Isaac, and Joseph) stands for "pious submission, obeying in gratitude the custom that has been handed down, which alone provides bread so that man may live" (108). According to Hazony, The History of Israel (basically Genesis through Kings), favors the shepherding life, but as the story unfolds comes to recognize that anarchy is not self-sustaining. Hazony reads the Hebrew Bible as a search for a politics grounded in ethics--one that makes the state "limited in its aspirations" (153-4). (Some other time I'll say more about Hazony's handling of these issues.) 

Implicit in this reconstruction of the Hebrew Bible is a kind of genealogy of civilization: first, in the Garden of Eden we are gatherers (maybe hunters, too); then, second, humanity splits in between mutually antagonistic shepherds and farmers, from which city-governments with an impulse toward territorial (and other) ambitions spring. As Hazoney notes  (308 n. 26), Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly read the Bible this way (see his posthumous Essay on the Origins of the Languages, written about the time of the second Discourse) and sides with the anarchic impulse of the "author of Genesis."

Now consider this prominent passage from Adam Smith:

This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, 1.2.1)

Hume, Smith, and Posidonius: true liberty, magnanimity, design arguments, and a once-famous Stoic...

But if all the parts of the universe have been so ordered that they could not have been better adapted for use, or more beautiful as regards appearance, let us see whether they are the work of chance, or whether their arrangement is one in which they could not possibly have been combined except by the guidance of consciousness and the divine providence. If, then, the things achieved by nature are more excellent than those achieved by art, and if art produces nothing without making use of intelligence, nature also ought not to be considered destitute of intelligence. If at the sight of a statue or painted picture you know that art has been employed, and from the distant view of the course of a ship feel sure that it is made to move by art and intelligence, and if you understand on looking at a horologe, whether one marked out with lines, or working by means of water, that the hours are indicated by art and not by chance, with what possible consistency can you suppose that the universe which contains these same products of art, and their constructors, and all things, is destitute of forethought and intelligence? Why, if any one were to carry into Scythia or Britain the globe which our friend Posidonius has lately constructed, each one of the revolutions of which brings about the same movement in the sun and moon and five wandering stars as is brought about each day and night in the heavens, no one in those barbarous countries would doubt that that globe was the work of intelligence.--Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods.

There are three explicit mentions of Posidonius, the great Stoic philosopher, in Cicero's dialogue, On the Nature of the Gods. (I have used a slightly dated translation.) The first one is in Cicero's own voice, when he includes Posidonius among his "teachers.' The second is the passage above, which was celebrated in  eighteenth century renditions of the design argument. Let's call it the "Posidonian argument." It shows up, for example, in Derham's very popular and influential Physico and Astro-Theology (originally 1714, I think). But it is also familiar in the seventeenth century. (See Cumberland's use of it here.) It reminds us that Paley's famous argument has a long and known pre-history. Hume alludes to a version of the argument in the Enquiry and discusses it more at length in his Dialogues (here and here) and may have even enjoyed transforming Cicero's "Britain" into a desert island. Even so, Hume's treatment does not explicitly mention Posidonius or his portable planetarium (not unlike the now famous Antikythera mechanism [this post was inspired by Jo Marchant's entertaining book about the mechanism!]) In an age in which the motions of the heavenly bodies define time, a planetarium just is a watch.

 

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith (Hobbes and Hume) on Religion and Usurpation

The good temper and moderation of contending factions seems to be the most essential circumstance in the publick morals of a free people. But the factions of the Greeks were almost always violent and sanguinary; whereas, till the time of the Gracchi, no blood had ever been shed in any Roman faction, and from the time of the Gracchi the Roman republick may be considered as in reality dissolved. (Wealth of Nations, Book V)

Let's leave aside Smith's embrace of mythic history here (even if he rejects the death of Remus as even more mythic, he is familiar enough with Livy to know better). In context Smith is offering an empirical attack on a theory proposed by Montesquieu (who drew on "the very respectable authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius"--some other time we need to discuss the significance of the loss of Polybius from our collective philosophical memory) that Greek musical education of the young (a kind of military-gymnastics) has no positive impact on their public morals. Here Smith leaves open which institution does produce "good temper and moderation of contending factions," or if it is a matter of chance.

Elsewhere, in a different context, he explains the  source of moderation by pointing at the experiences of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania: "This plan of ecclesiastical government, or more properly of no ecclesiastical government..has been established in Pensylvania, where, though the Quakers happen to be the most numerous the law in reality favours no one sect more than another, and it is there said to have been productive of this philosophical good temper and moderation." (Wealth of Nations, V.) That is to say, he takes the lesson of Hume's Natural History of Religion (where in the context of extensive treatment of the Romans the link between polytheism and mutual toleration is nicely established), and then uses it as a political argument against state control over religion (as favored by Hobbes, Spinoza and Hume) in favor of freedom of religion (and state neutrality among competing sects).

Partisanship in philosophy, or the principle of charity reconsidered.

Philosophy is not, I submit, primarily a matter of private performances of profound insight. It is a public act of stringing together words and arguments. What is on the page is the philosophy, regardless of what the philosopher might have thought in his secret heart.--Schwitzgebel

I am so happy to return from my internet-free holiday to a discussion initiated by Eric Schwitzgebel about the methodology of the history of philosophy! Catarina wrote a very important response, which prompted a consessive comment by Schwitzgebel here. (I am avoiding calling him "Eric S." in order to avoid confusion.) The above quote is from Schwitzgebel's second (out of three) reasons against over-reliance on the so-called principle-of-charity. The statement expresses an important insight (too often forgotten by some contextual historians of philosophy who wish to turn the history of philosophy into a sub-discipline of the history of material culture). But it is also a manifestly parochial sentiment (which relies on a misleading opposition between page and heart). For, not-so-long-ago philosophy would also be thought to involve the integration of a life-lived-with-words-on-the-page. This is why the deaths of Socrates, Descartes, Spinoza, and (say) Hume were (in a complex sense) public spectacles and could be seen as significant to the evaluation of their philosophical doctrines (recall my post). It's not clear our present indifference to such integration is to be esteemed as progess in all ways. 

One could argue that the principle of charity is designed to protect the confident interpreter from his or her parochialism. But -- like all principles -- it is a blunt  instrument that can be wielded skillfully and unskillfully. This is why Catarina's point ("it is only equipped with in-depth knowledge of a given historical theory/author that the scholar can justifiably be uncharitable. Otherwise, it may well be that she is simply missing some crucial details in the story") matters so much. Now, as I put it in a review once "The principle of charity leads to very flattening readings of past philosophers by importing one age’s plausible prejudices into another age." In context I was being critical of the very skilled use of the principle by one of the greatest historians of philosophy, Ed Curley, who had claimed (together with Walski) ‘views that are tremendously implausible should not be attributed to great, dead philosophers without pretty strong textual evidence.’ (For references see here.) The principle of charity has at one point led Curley to read Spinoza as a mid-twentieth century logical positivist and (to comment on another outstanding historian), say, more recently Don Garrett to read Hume as a kind of Quine-ean naturalist. These readings are thrilling and inspiring, but leave out a lot, too.

Favorite Closing lines in Philosophy

We are all familiar with the closing scene of Plato's Phaedo and the last sentence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, of course. But I think this is pretty damn good, too:

Is it not odd that men should have come to this pass--that they look for hope in physics and welcome, as some do, any indication of unreason in the world? Perhaps it seems less odd when we reflect upon the history of mankind, the hopeless mess that we have made of human lives. Our greed, our stupidity and lack of imagination, our apathy, these are the factors upon which the present sorry state of the world is largely consequent. It is enough to fill us with depair. Yet, despair need not be the last word. It lies within our power, if we so desire, to make the familiar world we inhabit more worthy of habitation by beings who aspire to be rational and are capable of love. Our limitation is due not to ignorance, not to the 'blind forces of Nature', not to the astronomical insignificance of our planet, but the feebleness of our desires for good. This limitation is not to be removed by the advances of physical knowledge, nor should our hopes be placed in the researches of the physicist.--L. Susan Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists.

Some other time I'll blog more about Stebbing (recall my exchange with Mohan (here, here, and here); Mohan and I have done some follow-up work), but for now let me ask readers for their favorite closing lines of philosophical works.