Dissolving philosophy
Summary: a large chunk of the history of Western philosophy is about finding out by what kinds of less conscious algorithms does the human mind arrive to certain intuitions.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates runs around Athens talking with people, trying to find an answer to the question: “What is justice?” Two and half thousands of years later we still don’t have a truly definitive answer. We can spend another thousand year or two pondering it, but I suspect it would be better to reformulate the question in a more answerable way. So let’s look at what Socrates is trying to do here, what his method is and what is actual question is!
It is not an empirical, scientific question that can be answered by observing something whose existence is independent of the human mind. Rather the question is about a feature of the human mind, not of a feature of the external reality out there.
However Socrates is not simply conducting an opinion survey. He is not content simply finding 74% of Athenians think justice means obeying laws. Socrates also argues against definitions of justice he considers _wrong_.
So, apparently, justice in this question relates to something that does not exist outside the human mind, but we can still have wrong opinions about it.
The method Socrates is employing is the following. He assumes when people see an actual action, they can intuitively judge it just or unjust and that judgement will be seen as _correct_. Well, not always, but at least when they are dispassionate, and have no vested interest either. So according to Socrates, any definition of justice can be tested by thought experiments that are sufficiently dispassionate and disinterested for the audience that they will actually use their Justice Sensors to form a judgement about them, and not, say, their passion like anger or greed, or their interests.
What Socrates is doing here, then, is asking people to make an algorithm that predicts what acts will a dispassionate and disinterested observer find just or unjust.
Example: “I think justice is paying debts.” “Okay dude, but what if you borrowed a sword from a friend and now you see he is really mad at people and wants to go on a murderous rampage. Would it be just / righteous / correct to pay the debt and return the sword now?” “Uh, no.”
This means: “I propose this algorithm.” “This algorithm predicts you would find hypothetical situation X just. Would you?” “Uh, no.”
The big question: is he looking for any algorithm that _happens_ to predict human intuitions of justice, or looking for the algorithm the human brain _actually_ uses? Well, they probably did not know much about algorithms back then, and they considered the brain an organ for cooling the blood but from our own angle, since we know the brain uses algorithms, any algorithm that predicts really well what another algorithm does is more or less the same algorithm.
So, “What is justice?” roughly means this: “What algorithm does our brain use when we intuitively consider something just or unjust?”
I am not claiming you can reduce all of philosophy to this, but apparently a significant chunk of Western philosophy (“footnotes to Plato”) you can.
If we see philosophy this, we can also see better how does it overlap with yet why is it distinct from science. The basic ideas are the same: propose hypotheses, test them with (thought) experiments. The difference is that science is focused on looking outward, on the observable reality outside the mind. When science wants to learn about the brain, it invariably treats it as an external object and manipulates and observes it so, for example, looking at what areas of neurons light up under an fMRI scan.
Philosophy is, apparently, a form of cognitive science, a way of learning about the brain that looks inward, not outward, here the experimenters observes his own brain from the inside, and generally tries to consciously notice the subconscious algorithms his brain works with.
This is also why philosophy can feel so “truthy” on the gut level. You can have these kinds of “I knew it! I knew it all along, dammit, just did not connect the dots!” types of euphoric heureka experiences (or: “how could I have been so stupid” types of experiences) far more often in philosophy or math than in the empirical sciences such a biology, because here you study how your own brain works and you study it from the inside. It is about one part of your brain learning how the other part works. (OK, phyiscs is empirical enough and yet it happens. But the point is, it does not really happen in the empirical part of physics like measuring the weight of a particle. It happens in the mathemathical parts of physics.)
Are you aware of the movement of Experimental Philosophy? They say exactly the same thing: that what we should really do is investigate the cognitive algorithms that give rise to philosophical intuitions. Which requires doing cognitive psychology rather than pointless arguing. There have been very interesting investigations into, for example, what factors people’s attributions of blame or causation are sensitive to.
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I like the basic thrust:
I would add Tonto’s wisdom to Socrates’:
Our brain? You got yours, and I got mine.
I think, per Haidt, that we don’t have identical algorithms. And the result of our individual algorithms are highly dependent on just what we’ve considered and what we’ve focused on.
Instead of saying that the subject is conceptually confused, you phrase the question in terms of discrepencies between their “intuitive algorithm” and some formally proposed algorithm. But is this actually different from resolving discrepencies between a proposed definition of a term and the subject’s intuitive understanding of it?
Begging your pardon if this sounds excessively deflationary, but it seems to me that you’re basically just saying that philosophy is the practice of clearing up conceptual confusion. I think that’s a description most people would agree with anyway.
Parenthetically, I am somewhat suspicious of the notion that philosophy’s imponderables are subject to dissolution by empirically grounding such questions. It seems to assume a kind of “philosophical completeness” to the human mind whereby any meaningful question that can be formulated by it is also in principle resolvable by it.
I think there are subtle differences between definitions / conceptual confusion and algorithms, although they are really close to each other. But when I flunked my first calculus test, I realized that having memorized the Newton-Leibniz definition did not give me the practical, algorithmical skill to solve 10 equations in the allocated time for the test, I should actually practice the algorithm. Definitions people can argue forever, but algorithms work or don’t.
Nevertheless clearing up conceptual confusion is close enough—although I haven not seen everybody thinking about philosophy that way. Rather it is so that they ask “what is concept x?” and by that “is” they tend to reify the concept, as if it had an individual existence.
The point is to propose an algorithm that by matching the intuitive, unconscious algorithm, makes it conscious. There is an element of self-consciousness there that goes beyond clearing up concepts. It is more like “I am now really aware what I am actually doing when I do X!”
Well, sometimes we can’t tell by any finitary means that they work since there are algorithms that cannot be proved either to terminate or not. Perhaps the practice of philosophy is just such an algorithm?
Take a look at the later Wittgenstein—he’s basically the Plato (Socrates) killer, as well as the Descartes killer.
This whole way of doing philosophy is misconceived. Meaning is not about what goes on in our brains, language is a precipitate of human social action, but not the result of human design, much like economic value (and also, I think moral value).
IOW, there is no “the” concept of justice, there are various things (in the real world) called “justice”, in the context of various “games” (ways of using words combined with ways of acting), and they are inter-related, but not in an essentialist way (one thing in common), rather in the way a rope is made out of skeins and threads that overlap some of the way, but with no thread or skein going all the way the length of the rope. Or again, cf. his concept of “family resemblance”—there’s a family nose, but not everyone in the family has it, while some members of the family have the family cheekbones, but not all have them, etc.
With this understanding, philosophy is free to go back to being pre-Socratic and Bayesian (with some element of Aristotle’s systematization). In the long view (which is but the blink of an AI) it was an interesting 2,000-odd year detour, but it was ultimately a dead end (as was the “modern” philosophical turn of Cartesian methodological solipsism).
After the Tractatus?
Yeah post-Tractatus—Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar, Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein’s Lectures by Alice Ambrose (very useful to get an inroad into the later W.), On Certainty and a book on phil of maths the title of which I can’t remember.
None of these were published, they’re all notes or lectures notes or nearly-finished books. The only book post-Tractatus that Wittgenstein seems to have been ready to publish was the first part (as currently published) of Philosophical Investigations (the second part isn’t connected really, it’s someone else’s idea of something that they thought fit with it).
His later philosopy was WIP at the time of his death, but with the first part of PI, we’re seeing something that’s really new and revolutionary in philosophy. Some of it was taken up and became “ordinary language philosophy” in Oxford (esp JL Austin), but that was really only part of the story. Dan Dennett is, I think, a true heir of the later Wittgenstein (perhaps W. wouldn’t have thought so, because his conception of philosophy excluded it from the empirical domain altogether, and restricted it to purely being about language and concepts—but he wasn’t right about everything, and I hold to the older definition of philosophy :) ).
The Tractatus isn’t actually totally repudiated by the PI either, but it’s seen as a kind of special case of his later philosophy, as having a more limited scope and usefulness than W. thought when he wrote it.
I’m saying all this as someone who, when I first encountered W.’s later philosophy, agreed with Russell’s estimate of it as trivial—I thought W. was just a fey poseur. But over the course of the past few decades of my life, having re-read PI maybe 4 or 5 times with concentration, and returned to pondering it again and again, I’ve come to gradually realize that he really was the philosophical schizz :)
It’s not systematic though—as W. says in the intro to PI, it’s something you’ve got to go over several times, like becoming familiar with a landscape by journeying through it, criss-crossing it several times.
I like your interpretation of philosophy as it pertains to ethics, aesthetics, and perhaps metaphysics. Your Socrates example, and LW in general, privileges emotivist ethics, but this is an interesting point and not a drawback. Looking at ethics as a cognitive science is not necessarily a flawed approach, but it is important to consider the potential alternative models.
Philosophy has a branch called “philosophy of science” where your dissolution falls apart. Popperian falsifiability, Kuhnian paradigm shifts, and Bayesian reasoning all fall into this domain. There is a great compendium by Curd and Cover; I recommend searching the table of contents for essays also available online. Here, philosophers experiment with the precision of testable models rather than hypotheses.
Nope.
You know Philosophy of Science is a different thing to Experimental Philosophy , right?
Yes, I may have made an inferential leap here that was wrong or unnecessary. You and I agree very strongly on there being a distinction between Philosophy of Science and Experimental Philosophy. I wanted to draw a distinction between the kind of, “street philosophy” done by Socrates and the more rigorous, mathematical Philosophy of Science. “Experiment” may not have been the most appropriate verbiage.
I would be glad to reconsider my stance that this rationalist community privileges emotivist readings of ethics. I will begin looking into this. My reason for including this argument is the idea (from the article) that when philosophers ask questions about right and wrong or good and bad, they are really asking how people feel about these concepts.
PoSc done by analyticals is no more rigorous than other analytical philosophy, and PoSc done by continentals is no more rigorous that other continental.
Socrates and co were the analyticals of their day......let not the ungeometered enter the Academy.… with the role of the continentals being taken by the Sophists.
Well said again, and well-considered that ideas in minds can only move forwards through time (not a physical law). My initial reaction to this article was, “What about philosophy of science?” However, it seems my PoSc objections extend to other realms of philosophy as well. Thank you for leading me here.
Could you explain to me in what extend Popper provided a precise model that’s testable?
Popper (or Popperism) predicted that falsifiable models would yield more information than non-falsifiable ones.
I don’t think this is precisely testable, but it references precisely testable models. That is why I would categorize it as philosophy (of science), but not science.
Another variation would be that philosophy is aimed at finding better algorithms.
PS.
I don’t see much actual dissolution going on here …. not that that is surprising
You can try reduce philosophy to science, but how can you justify the scientific method itself? To me, philosophy refers to the practice of asking any kind of “meta” question. To question the practice of science is philosophy, as is the practice of questioning philosophy. The arguments you make are philosophical arguments—and they are good arguments. But to make a statement to the effect of “all philosophy is cognitive science” is too broad a generalization.
What Socrates was doing was asking “meta” questions about intuitions that most people take for granted. Now what you are doing is asking “meta” questions about what Socrates was doing. Was his goal to study how people think about justice? Perhaps. But that is saying that Socrates’ goal was to find the truth. Perhaps his goal was more than that: he wanted to personally convince people to question their own intuitions via the “Socratic method.”
But this does not fit into the scientific framework. because in science it is accepted that there is a universal truth. From the scientific point of view, Socrates should just design some experiment to test peoples’ intuition about justice, publish the findings, and be satisfied that he uncovered some of this universal truth. But would that be enough to convince an average person to question their own intuitions? Perhaps in our age, it would be enough, since most people accept science. But I doubt it even now, and certainly people back in Socrates’ time would not be convinced if he wrote his findings, proclaiming it as universal truth. He had to seek out individuals and personally convince them to question their own thinking.
You can’t boil down philosophy to the process of “seeking universal truth”, because for one, that is the definition of science, and two, philosophy is the place you start before you assume things about the universal truth. Of course, philosophy can lead you to science, if philosophical arguments convince you about the existence of universal truth. Once you accept the “universal truth”, then looking back, most of philosophy looks like nonsense. But you shouldn’t discount the importance of the process of asking apparently silly questions that got you, and the rest of civilization, to where we are now!
By the fact that it works, where works defined as getting goals reached?
I didn’t mean to discount or disparage philosophy by it, I meant to improve it. Once we know what philosophers are trying to learn, we can try to find better methods to achieve the same. Whether that would be called philosophy or cognitive science is beside the point: the point is it would deliver what philosophers want to get delivered.
What kind of meta? “How to recruit recruiters who can recruit the kind of recruiters who can recruit the kind of recruiters who can recruit a lot of people?” is very meta, but not philosophical.
“What is music?” is philosophical. But it reduces to “By what algorithm does our subconscious hindbrain to find a sequences of sounds musical or not?”
The point is, once we know philosophy is largely looking for this kind of meta, we can try to propose more efficient methods for finding them.
But he was doing precisely that, consider the example of the guy with the borrowed sword. He designed thought experiments to test people’s intuitions about justice. To be more precisely, to test people’s intuitive proposals for an algorithm of justice against their intuitive judgements of examples which the algorithm was supposed to predict. He was looking for an algorithm that predicts intuitive judgements of examples, and tested all proposals. This is scientific enough. He was trying to arrive to a universal truth—could not find it, but science cannot always get a final answer at the first try. He managed to at least dispel some commonly proposed bad algorithms, such as justice is obedience to rulers, or paying debts, or similar ones, and proving some common ideas are misconceptions is an important part of the work of science.
Given that his experiments were not fully succesful at finding the final truth, of course it was not the universal truth yet, but going that direction by dispelling some myths.
To make it clear: it would be a truth about how, by what algorithms, does the brain arrive to these kinds of judgements.
It is all prediction, just aimed differently. Science is the kind of prediction that tomorrow there will be a lunar eclipse. Philosophy is the kind of prediction that if you take this algorithm and plug a situation into it, you will know how people will feel about it: they will find this act just or this sequence of sounds musical and so on.
Of course, so far philosophy is highly unsucessful at settling any question, only negatively (i.e. something is probably not true), but this is where I think it could be helped if we define it as the discipline for looking for the less-conscious algorithms in the human mind.
My larger point is that the most fundamental “what is” questions may relate to the world or the mind. And philosophy is the subset where they relate to the mind. What is music is philosophical, we are trying to find out what the mind is finding musical. What is an electron is scientific. But they overlap a lot.
The problem is that philosophical questions tend to presuppose existence. What is justice or what is music presupposes justice or music just exists like an object out there. If we understand they are questions about the mind we should rewrite them as what does the mind find just or what does the mind find musical.
Progress in philosophy was probably hampered by the “what is X?” type of formulation, instead of the “what and how our minds consider X?”
Is that a fact? What’s your track record?
If you could cash out the working thing in a rigorous way, you would be in to something. But the world has long been full of STEM types who can announce the two word version of “it works”....that does not change anything.
But that is what psychology does,. Philosophers are interested in justice because they want just societies....they want improved versions of things.
We, not me.
That is step 2. Once we get an algorithm that reliably predicts our feelings about justice, we can codify it into law.
“Your” can be plural.
Once we understand the principles behind things, we may accept contradictions to our feelings.
By the same account appeal to the stick would be okay if it got you what you wanted. Yet violence seems epistemologically very suspect.
I consider philosophy to be a study of human intuitions. Philosophy examines different ways to think about a variety of deep issues (morality, existence, etc.) and tries to resolve results that “feel wrong”.
On the other hand, I have very rarely heard it phrased this way. Often, philosophy is said to be reasoning directly about said issues (morality, existence, etc.), albeit with the help of human intuitions. This actually seems to be an underlying assumption of most philosophy discussions I’ve heard. I actually find that mildly disconcerting, given that I would expect it to confuse everyone involved with substantial frequency.
If anyone knows of a good argument for the assumption above, I would really like to hear it. I’ve only seen it assumed, never argued.
But obviously morality or existence is not a thing “out there” that we can just examine and see if they are red or blue, they are things in the mind. Mental constructs. Maps, if you like it that way. Ultimately, just words that mean something but that something is not a simple sensory input .Reifying them is pretty much an automatic fail.
So the investigation begins at the assumption that they are made by the mind, hence what we are trying to learn is how the mind makes them.
Philosophers may not admit it, but act as if they did: if a proposal leads to results we find absurd, it is abandoned. If we find nothing exists and we should eat babies, we abandon that line of thought because it did not do its job, it did not predict how we feel about things. What else could it be about if not the mind? If the mind finds something absurd, that is only relevant to truth if it is a truth about the mind. External physical reality is allowed to feel weird to our minds, it is only our minds themselves that not .
Existence is not out there?
Your conclusion doesnt follow. Treating mental processes as the last word on a subject is not the only alternative to reification …. rather it is an opposite extreme. There is a middle way, where you find out what your intuitions are murkilly grasping at, and then come out with an explicit, formal abstraction that does the same job better.
No, it is a highly abstract term. Very roughly, we make categories or classes of things based on our perceptions and then existence is looking at it from the other angle: does this class have an instance? But classes are in the mind.
You may be onto something here. Elaborate/example?
Some people use “existence” to mean the some total of all that exists.
That’s how we ended up with things like maths and logic. They are not just descriptions of human thought, they are norms in their own right: when an individual departs from the norm, we conclude that the individual is wrong, not that the description of human intuition has been falsified.
But this then sounds like that math or logic is a “thing”, and then I must ask where that does thing reside? Either in physical reality out there, or in people’s minds.
If you simply define math as a symbol manipulation game, still the expected outcome is that not playing any game by the accepted norms is wrong, not that the game is wrong. Why this “game” then predicts reality surprisingly well, part of the answer is that only subsets of it do, as math as practiced by mathemathicians is far above and beyond what is usable for it by physics, and part of the answer is that because we simply like to study the kinds of things math happens to be useful for. If basic algebra is a formalization of the rules of a certain set of human intuitions and then every higher math is simply whatever is generated by those rules, this predicts precisely that it will be useful for some of the things we like to study, without it really being a “thing”.
It doesn’t have to be either or. You can learn maths from books, .ir record your knowledge in them.
Consider Vaniver on Harari on cultural artefacts:-