Suppose a psychological researcher, Beth, believes that humans are reinforcement-learning stimulus-response machines, and that such machines are incapable of reasoning about representations of the world. She presents a logical specification of stimulus-response machines that she believes applies to all humans. (For similar real-world theories, see: Behaviorism, Associationism, Perceptual Control Theory)
However, a logical implication of Beth’s beliefs is that she herself is a stimulus-response machine, and incapable of reasoning about world-representations. Thus, she cannot consistently believe that her specification of stimulus-response machines is likely to be an accurate, logically coherent representation of humans. Her belief-set, then, fails to self-ratify, on the basis that it assigns to herself a level of cognitive power insufficient to come to know that her belief-set is true.
This section (and the physicist later) seem weird to me. Suppose the physicist is, rather than a mind skeptic, an anti-dualist. That is, the dualist thinks that there’s a physical realm and a mental realm, and messages pass between them, and the physical realm by itself isn’t sufficient to have minds in it. The anti-dualist doesn’t see any way for messages to enter the physical realm, and so concludes that it actually must just be one realm, with minds originating from basic components in a reductionistic way.
The dualist will look at this and scoff. “They think they have a belief that there’s no mental realm, but that’s where beliefs are obviously stored, and so their disbelief in the mental realm cannot be self-ratifying.” But the anti-dualist doesn’t believe that’s where beliefs are stored, they think it’s stored in positions and behaviors of material objects, and so the anti-dualist’s position looks self-ratifying to the anti-dualist.
Similarly with Beth, it looks like there’s this sense of “ah, Beth is doing it wrong, and therefore can’t be doing what she’s doing in a self-ratifying way.” But if Beth’s standard of self-ratification is different, then Beth can think what she’s doing is self-ratifying! “Yeah, I’m a stimulus-response machine,” Beth says, “I didn’t write that book through reasoning, I wrote it through responding to stimulus after stimulus. Even this sentence was constructed that way!”
This is a bit like looking at someone building an obviously-unstable tower saying “no, see, my tower is self-supporting, I just have a different notion of ‘self-supporting’!”. If I’m interpreting self-supporting in a physical manner and they’re interpreting it in a tautological manner, then we are talking about different things in saying towers are self-supporting or not.
Note that I said at the top that self-ratification is nontrivial when combined with other coherence conditions; without those other conditions (e.g. in the case of asserting “psychological theories” that make no claim about being representative of any actual psychologies) it’s a rather trivial criterion.
(In the case of eliminativism, what Phyllis would need is an account of the evidentiary basis for physics that does not refer to minds making observations, theorizing, etc; this account could respond to the dualist’s objection by offering an alternative ontology of evidence)
I think you’re dismissing the “tautological” cases too easily. If you don’t believe in a philosophy, their standards will often seem artificially constructed to validate themselves. For example a simple argument that pops up from time to time:
Fallibilist: You can never be totally certain that something is true.
Absolutist: Do you think thats true?
F: Yes.
A: See, you’ve just contradicted yourself.
Obviously F is unimpressed by this, but if he argues that you can believe things without being certain of them, thats not that different from Beth saying she wrote the book by responding to stimuli to someone not already believing their theory.
This section (and the physicist later) seem weird to me. Suppose the physicist is, rather than a mind skeptic, an anti-dualist. That is, the dualist thinks that there’s a physical realm and a mental realm, and messages pass between them, and the physical realm by itself isn’t sufficient to have minds in it. The anti-dualist doesn’t see any way for messages to enter the physical realm, and so concludes that it actually must just be one realm, with minds originating from basic components in a reductionistic way.
The dualist will look at this and scoff. “They think they have a belief that there’s no mental realm, but that’s where beliefs are obviously stored, and so their disbelief in the mental realm cannot be self-ratifying.” But the anti-dualist doesn’t believe that’s where beliefs are stored, they think it’s stored in positions and behaviors of material objects, and so the anti-dualist’s position looks self-ratifying to the anti-dualist.
Similarly with Beth, it looks like there’s this sense of “ah, Beth is doing it wrong, and therefore can’t be doing what she’s doing in a self-ratifying way.” But if Beth’s standard of self-ratification is different, then Beth can think what she’s doing is self-ratifying! “Yeah, I’m a stimulus-response machine,” Beth says, “I didn’t write that book through reasoning, I wrote it through responding to stimulus after stimulus. Even this sentence was constructed that way!”
This is a bit like looking at someone building an obviously-unstable tower saying “no, see, my tower is self-supporting, I just have a different notion of ‘self-supporting’!”. If I’m interpreting self-supporting in a physical manner and they’re interpreting it in a tautological manner, then we are talking about different things in saying towers are self-supporting or not.
Note that I said at the top that self-ratification is nontrivial when combined with other coherence conditions; without those other conditions (e.g. in the case of asserting “psychological theories” that make no claim about being representative of any actual psychologies) it’s a rather trivial criterion.
(In the case of eliminativism, what Phyllis would need is an account of the evidentiary basis for physics that does not refer to minds making observations, theorizing, etc; this account could respond to the dualist’s objection by offering an alternative ontology of evidence)
I think you’re dismissing the “tautological” cases too easily. If you don’t believe in a philosophy, their standards will often seem artificially constructed to validate themselves. For example a simple argument that pops up from time to time:
Fallibilist: You can never be totally certain that something is true.
Absolutist: Do you think thats true?
F: Yes.
A: See, you’ve just contradicted yourself.
Obviously F is unimpressed by this, but if he argues that you can believe things without being certain of them, thats not that different from Beth saying she wrote the book by responding to stimuli to someone not already believing their theory.