BobTheBob

Karma: 35

BobTheBob 9 Dec 2012 15:50 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: BerryPick6’s comment on: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant
I was thinking about this as a problem of so-called social epistemology -specifically, of what a person ought to believe when her or his beliefs contradict someone else’s. It seems obvious to me that -other things being equal- the rational approach to take when encountering someone who appears rational and well-informed and who disagrees with you, is to take seriously that person’s thoughts. Since the abstract authors fit the description, it’s obvious, I think, that what they say deserves at least some consideration -ie, what they say is not obviously worthless (ie., to be dismissed with a one liner).

Is this fair?

I realize the situation is more complicated here, as there’s the question whether a whole discipline has gone off the rails, which I think the OP has convinced himself is the case with philosophy (so, maybe other things aren’t equal). I’ve tried a few times without success to recommend some epistemic humility on this point.

BobTheBob 8 Dec 2012 21:20 UTC
4 points
on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
This is an interesting post but, I have to say, kind of frustrating. I have tried to follow the discussions between Esar and RobbBB and your substantial elucidation as well as many other great comments, but I remain kind-of in the dark. Below are some questions which I had, as I read.

This question doesn’t feel like it should be very hard.

What question? What exactly is the problem you are purporting to solve, here? If it is, “What is the truth condition of ‘If we took the number of apples in each pile, and multiplied those numbers together, we’d get six.’”, then doesn’t Tarski’s disquotation schema give us the answer?

Navigating to the six requires a mixture of physical and logical reference

Not sure why you obscure matters with idiosyncratic metaphors like ‘navigating to the six’, but never mind. Can we infer from the distinction between logical and physical reference that there is a distinction between logical and physical truth? It appears you countenance the Analytic/Synthetic distinction—precisely the distinction which is usually considered to have undone logical positivism. Do you have a preferred response to Quine’s famous argument in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, or do you have a reason for thinking you are immune to it? I think you think you aren’t doing philosophy, so it doesn’t apply, but then I really don’t know how to understand what you’re saying. If your problems are just computational, then surely you’re making matters much harder for yourself than they should be (not that computational problems aren’t sometimes very hard).

Next we have to call the stuff on the table ‘apples’. But how, oh how can we do this...?

How about by saying “Those are apples”? What exactly is the problem, here?

...when grinding the universe and running it through a sieve will reveal not a single particle of appleness?

Here’s my best guess at what is exercising you. You reason that only those properties needed to account for the constitution and behaviour of the smallest parts of matter are real, that being an apple is not among them, and hence that being an apple is not a real property. Assuming this guess is right, what exactly is your reason for accepting the first premise? It is not immediately obvious, though I know there are traditionally different reasons. The reason will inform the adequacy of your answer.

Standard physics uses the same fundamental theory to describe the flight of a Boeing 747 airplane, and collisions in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Nuclei and airplanes alike, according to our understanding, are obeying special relativity, quantum mechanics, and chromodynamics.

So far so good...

We also use entirely different models to understand the aerodynamics of a 747 and a collision between gold nuclei in the RHIC. A computer modeling the aerodynamics of a 747 may not contain a single token, a single bit of RAM, that represents a quark. (Or a quantum field, really; but you get the idea.)

Nothing controversial here, but it of course has nothing to do with our understanding of the problem. If the understanding is correct, the problem exists regardless of whether anyone or thing ever imagines or represents or refers to apples or anything else. To introduce representations and models into the discussion is only to confuse matters, no?

So is the 747 made of something other than quarks?

Where does this question come from? If my guess about the problem is correct, it is irrelevant. It may be that the property of being a 747 (apple) is not identical to the property of being in any very complicated way composed of quarks, bosons and leptons, even though a given 747 (apple) is made only of these particles. The (philosophical) thesis about properties is different than the scientific thesis about the constitution of physical objects.

No, we’re just modeling the 747 with representational elements that do not have a one-to-one correspondence with individual quarks. Similarly with apples.

Please clarify—what precisely does the relation between a computer model of a 747 and a 747 have to do with the metaphysics of properties?

To compare a mental image of high-level apple-objects to physical reality,

Can you say what you mean by this? For myself, this is someting I only ever do very rarely -conjure a mental image, then see how it agrees or differs from what I’m looking at. To be sure, sets of neurons in my brain are being activated all the time by patterns of light hitting my retinas, but there’s a lot of explanatory distance to cover to show these (the story about neural events and the story about images) are the same thing. In any case, this seems entirely irrelevant to the present concerns.

for it to be true

Are mental images the sorts of thngs which can be true (in the sense in which a sentence or proposition can be, as opp. merely accurate)? Suppose I have a mental picture of a certain cat on a certain table and that the cat is indeed on the table. Is my mental image true? Even if the cat in my image is the wrong colour? Or is sitting when the cat is standing? As far as I can see this isn’t just nit-picking. You have some kind of AI model which involves mental images and which you seem to think needs a semantic theory, and it’s just not clear how it all fits together.

...doesn’t require that apples be fundamental in physical law.

If my guess is correct, your answer to the problem as far as I can see is something like “The problem is not a problem”.

A single discrete element of fundamental physics is not the only thing that a statement can ever be compared-to. We just need truth conditions that categorize the low-level states of the universe, so that different low-level physical states are inside or outside the mental image of “some apples on the table” or alternatively “a kitten on the table”.

Can you give an example of a low-level state being ‘inside a mental image’ of “some apples on the table”? I really don’t know what this means.

Having gone through this once, here’s a second pass at a gloss. You accept, reasonably, that “That is an apple” is true in English iff that (pointing to a certain apple) is an apple. The referent of the “that” we can take to be a certain object. The question arises, however, as to what the referent or other semantic value is of “is an apple”. Plausibly, it is the property of being an apple. But, we may reasonably ask, what sort of thing is being and apple? I understand your answer is as follows:

Just as an individual apple is nothing more than a quite large number of quarks and leptons and bosons interestingly assembled, being an apple is nothing more than being a quite large number of quarks and leptons and bosons assembled in a certain interesting way.

Is this roughly a fair understanding? If so, please consider:

1) You will need to augment your story to include so-called etiology. The property of being a 10-dollar bill is not equivalent to the property of being in a certain way composed of matter—causal origin/history matters, too (perfect counterfeits).

2) The problem of vagueness often seems like a paradigm of philosophical futility but it is a real problem. Suppose you could cross-breed apples and pears, and have a spectrum of individuals ranging from unproblematic apple to unproblematic pear (= non-apple). What will the truth-condition be of the statement ‘That is an apple’, pointing to the piece of fruit in the middle? Do you give up on bivalence, or do you say that the statement is determinately true or false, but there are deep epistemological problems? Neither answer seems satisfactory, and where you come down may affect your theory.

3) If this story is correct, it will presumably apply to the whole very large hierarchy of properties, ranging from being a quark through being a proton and being a carbon atom up to being an apple and beyond. And the high-level properties will have at a minimum to be disjunctions of lower properties, even to accomodate such mundane facts as the existence of both green and red apples. And you may find ultimately that what is in question is more like a family-resemblance relation among the cases which constitute being an apple (if not apples, then tables and 747s, very likely). And then aren’t you in danger simply of laboriously re-capitulating the history of 20th c. philosophical thought on the subject?

This is all philosophy, which you’ve repeatedly said you aren’t interested in doing. But that’s what you’re doing! If you’re just doing AI, you really shouldn’t be wasting your time on these questions, surely. Research into neural nets is already making great progress on the question of how we make the discriminations we do. Why isn’t that enough for your purposes?

A last thought: there’s something of a debate on this site about the value of traditional philosophy. I think it has value, a big part of which is that it encourages people to think carefully and to express themselves precisely. I don’t claim always to be as careful or precise as I should be, but these are values. Doing analytic philosophy is some of the best rationality training you can get.

BobTheBob 8 Dec 2012 20:52 UTC
−5 points
on: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant
I thing the comments of fortyeridania, JonathanLivengood, Peterdjones and others have pretty much nailed matters, but here’s my take:

This post is actually self-undermining. Roughly, it is an argument that a person’s having a background in Pearl and Kahneman will lead to that person’s being able to reason better than if s/he lacked the background, which is in fact (sorry to be blunt, but I think the balance of the comments support this) a quite poor specimen of an argument made by someone who has the background. There’s no evidence that you would have done even worse without the background. So the post is itself some evidence for the falsity of what it claims.

What is the rational value of the abstracts and your one-liners? I understand the point in each case is that the paper is obviously worthless. But this is false: they are indeed obviously not obviously worthless, insofar as they are made by people who are likely almost as smart and well-read as you, and very likely aware of the kinds of criticims you make.

You seem to be conflating questions of philosophical pedagogy with questions of professional practice/methodology.
- Concerning the former: can you give an example of a philosophical paper which is mistaken as a result of biases which reading Kahneman as an undergraduate might have prevented, and indicate the mistake? Can you give an example of a philosophical paper which is mistaken as a result of a knowledge gap which reading Pearl might have avoided (written since Pearl published)? Your claim would be strengthened, of course, if the latter example is from the considerable majority of philosophy not specifically about the problem of causation (otherwise you’re getting everyone to read Pearl despite its being apparently relevant only to a small minority). In other words, can you give any empirical evidence at all for your view? (Please don’t say simply that people who understand Kahneman won’t rely on ‘philosophical intuitions’, as that’s plainly false and misrepresents the nature of what dispute there is over intuitions in philosophy)
- Concerning the latter: your link is to a paper recommending formal methods in epistemology. Sounds terrific! Does the point extend to other areas of philosophy? As CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, maybe you’d be willing to set the example by going first. Would be great to see a formal statement of your intended argument here, and even better, formal re-statements of your past posts on philosophical topics.

BobTheBob 2 Dec 2012 17:43 UTC
1 point
on: Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way
Following the sequence link at the top, I found this similar post, which has an impressive list of references. You include there this paper by Timothy Williamson. It seems to me an oversight you don’t mention the paper’s argument at all, as it’s a sustained critique of the position you’re representing.

The basic idea is that the kind of doubts about intuitions you raise are relevantly similar to more familiar forms of philosophical scepticism (scepticism about the external world, etc). I understand Williamson sees a dilemma: either they are mistaken for the same reasons familiar scepticism is mistaken (Williamson’s position, to which most of the paper is dedicated), or the doubts undermine way more than its proponents think they do.

It’d be great to hear your summary of the argument there, and what you consider to be its flaw(s).

If you like Williamson, check out also this excellent bit on naturalism.

BobTheBob 17 Nov 2012 15:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: The Useful Idea of Truth
The issue is whether a sentence’s meaning is just its truth conditions, or whether it expresses some kind of independent thought or proposition, and this abstract object has truth conditions. These are two quite different approaches to doing semantics.

Why should you care? Personally, I don’t see this problem has anything to do with the problem of figuring out how a brain acquires the patterns of connections needed to create the movements and sounds it does given the stimuli it receives. To me it’s an interesting but independent problem, and the idea of ‘neurally embodied beliefs’ is worthless. Some people (with whom I disagree but whom I nevertheless respect) think the problems are related, in which case there’s an extra reason to care, and what exactly a neurally embodied belief is, will vary. If you don’t care, that’s your business.

BobTheBob 15 Nov 2012 14:01 UTC
5 points
in reply to: chaosmosis’s comment on: The Useful Idea of Truth
This seems to me a reasonable question (at least partly—see below). To be clear, I said that reading the work of experts is more likely to produce a good understanding than merely writing-up one’s own thoughts. My answer:

For any given field, reading the thoughts of experts -ie, smart people who have devoted substantial time and effort to thinking and collaborating in the field- is more likely to result in a good understanding of the field’s issues than furrowing one’s brow and typing away in relative isolation. I take this to be common sense, but please say if you need some substantiation. The conclusion about philosophy follows by universal instantiation.

“Ah”, I hear you say, “but philosophy does not fit this pattern, because the people who do it aren’t smart. They’re all at best of mediocre intelligence.” (is there another explanation of the poor understanding you refer to?). From what I’ve seen on LW, this position will be inferred to from a bad experience or two with philosophy profs , or perhaps on the grounds that no smart person would elect to study such a diseased subject.

Two rejoinders:

i) Suppose it were true that only second rate thinkers do philosophy. It would be still the case that with a large number of people discussing the issues over many years, there’d be a good chance something worth knowing -if there’s anything to know- would emerge. It wouldn’t be obvious that the rational course is to ignore it, if interested in the issues.

ii) It’s obviously false (hence the ‘partly’ above). Just try reading the work of Timothy Williamson or David Lewis or Crispin Wright or W.V.O. Quine or Hilary Putnam or Donald Davidson or George Boolos or any of a huge number of other writers, and then making a rational case that the leading thinkers of philosophy are second-rate intellects. I think this is sufficiently obvious that the failure to see it suggests not merely oversight but bias.

Philosophical progress may tend to take the form just of increasingly nuanced understandings of its problems’ parameters rather than clear resolutions of them, and so may not seem worth doing, to some. I don’t know whether I’d argue with someone who thinks this, but I would suggest if one thinks it, one shouldn’t be claiming it even while expounding a philosophical theory.

BobTheBob 15 Nov 2012 13:54 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Useful Idea of Truth
As far as I can see, your point is something like:

“Your reasoning implies I should read some specific thing; there is no such thing; therefore your reasoning is mistaken.” (or, “unless you can produce such a thing...”)

Is this right? In any case, I don’t see that the conditional is correct. I can only give examples of works which would help. Here are three more. Your second part seeks (as I understand it) a theory of meaning which would imply that your ′ Elaine is a post-utopian’ is meaningless, but that ‘The photon continues to exist...’ is both meaningful and true. I get the impression you think that an adequate answer could be articulated in a few paragraphs. To get a sense of some of the challenges you might face -ie, of what the project of contriving a theory of meaning entails- consider looking at Stephen Schiffer’s excellent Remnants of Meaning and The Things we Mean or Scott Soames’s What is Meaning? .

BobTheBob 14 Nov 2012 3:46 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Useful Idea of Truth
1) I don’t see that this really engages the criticism. I take it you reject that the subjects of truth and reference are important to you. On this, two thoughts:

a) This doesn’t affect the point about the reliability of blogging versus research. The significance of the irrationality maybe, but the point remains. You may hold that the value to you of the creative process of explicating your own thoughts is sufficiently high that it trumps the value of coming to optimally informed beliefs—that the cost-benefit analysis favours blogging. I am sceptical of this, but would be interested to hear the case.

b) It seems just false that you don’t care about these subjects. You’ve written repeatedly on them, and seem to be aiming for an internally coherent epistemology and semantics.

2) My claim was that your lack of references is evidence that you don’t accord importance to experts on truth and meaning, not that there are specific things you should be referencing. That said, if your claim is ultimately just the observation that truth is useful as a device for so-called semantic ascent, you might mention Quine (see the relevant section of Word and Object or the discussion in Pursuit of Truth) or the opening pages of Paul Horwich’s book Truth, to give just two examples.

3) My own view is that AI should have nothing to do with truth, meaning, belief or rationality—that AI theory should be elaborated entirely in terms of pattern matching and generation, and that philosophy (and likewise decision theory) should be close to irrelevant to it. You seem to think you need to do some philosophy (else why these posts?), but not too much (you don’t have to decide whether the sorts of things properly called ‘true’ are sentences, abstract propositions or neural states, or all or none of the above). Where the line lies and why is not clear to me.

BobTheBob 13 Nov 2012 4:30 UTC
1 point
on: The Useful Idea of Truth
A criticism—somewhat harsh but hopefully constructive.

As you know, lots of people have written on the subjects of truth and meaning (aside from Tarski). It seems, however, that you don’t accord them much importance (no references, failure to consider alternate points of view, apparent lack of awareness of the significance of the matter of what the bearer of truth (sentence, proposition, ‘neurally embodied belief’) properly is, etc.). I put it to you this is a manifestation of irrationality: you have a known means at your disposal to learn reliably about a subject which is plainly important to you, but you apparently reject it in favour of the more personally satisfying but much less reliable alternative of blogging your own ideas -you willingly choose an inferior path to belief formation. If you want to get a good understanding of such things as truth, reference and mathematical proof, I submit that the rational starting point is to read at least a survey of what experts in the fields have written, and to develop your own thoughts, at least initially, in the context they provide.

BobTheBob 18 Aug 2011 14:00 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Remind Physicalists They’re Physicalists
The comments of yours I’ve read are always clear and insightful, and usually I agree with what you say. I have to disagree with you here, though, about your supposed second fallacy.

Arguments against the existence of subjective experience (consciousness, qualia, etc.) generally take the form of arguing against other people’s arguments in favour. Since no-one has a good account of what it is, it is not difficult to demolish their bad accounts. This is like refuting the phlogiston theory to prove that fire does not exist.

I disagree. Arguments against qualia typically challenge the very coherence of anything which could play the desired role. It’s not like trying to prove fire doesn’t exist, it’s like trying to prove there is no such thing as elan vital or chakras.

I deny the existence of UFOs. It’s pretty clear what UFOs are—spaceships built and flown to Earth by creatures who evolved on distant planets—and I can give fairly straight-forward probabilistic reasons of the kind amenable to rational disagreement, for my stance.

I (mostly) deny the existence of God. Apologies if you’re a theist for the bluntness, but I don’t think it’s at all clear what God is or could be. Every explication I’ve ever encountered of God either involves properties which permit the deduction of contradictions (immovable rocks/unstoppable forces and what-not), or are so anodyne or diffuse as to be trivial (‘God is love’ -hence the ‘mostly’). There is enough talk in our culture about God, however, to give meaning to denials of His existence—roughly, ‘All (rather, most of) this talk which takes place in houses of worship and political chambers involving the word ‘God’ and its ilk, involves a mistaken ontological commitment’.

Do I deny the existence of consciousness, or subjective experience? If my wife and I go to a hockey game or a play, we in some sense experience the same thing -there is a common ‘objective’ experience. But equally we surely have in some sense different experiences—she may be interested or bored by different parts than I am, and will see slightly different parts of the action than I. So clearly there is such a thing as subjective experience, in some sense. This, however, is not what is at issue. Roughly, what we are concerned about is a supposed ineffable aspect of experience, a ‘what it is like’. I deny the existence of this in the sense in which I deny the existence of God. That is, I have yet even to see a clear and coherent articulation of what’s at issue. You imply the burden of argument is with the deniers; I (following Dennett and many others) suggest the burden is with defenders to say what it is they defend.

Are qualia causally efficacious, or not? If they are, then they are in principal objectively detectable/observable, and hence not worthy of the controversy they generate (if they have a causally efficacious ‘aspect’ and a non-efficacious, one, then just factor out the causally efficacious aspect as it plays no role in the controversy). On the flip side, of course, if qualia are not causally efficacious, then they aren’t responsible for our talk of them—they aren’t what we’re presently talking about, paradoxically.

It seems to me the best case for exponents of consciousness is to force a dilemma—an argument pushing us on the one hand to accept the existence of something which on the other appears to be incoherent (as per just above). But I have yet to see this argument. Appeals to what’s ‘obvious’ or to introspection just don’t do it—the force of the sort of arg above and the several others adduced by Dennett et. al., clearly win out over thumping one’s sternum and saying ‘this!’, simply because the latter isn’t an argument. The typical candidates for serious arguments in this vein are inverted spectrum or Black and White Mary type-arguments, but it seems to me they always just amount to the chest thumping in fancy dress. Would be interested to hear of good candidate arguments for qualia, though, and to hear any objections if you think the foregoing is unfair.

BobTheBob 25 Jul 2011 2:38 UTC
0 points
in reply to: torekp’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
Thanks for the link to the paper by Timothy Bays. It looks like a worthwhile -if rather challenging- read.

I have to acknowledge there’s lots to be said in response to Quine and Putnam. I could try to take on the task of defending them, but I suspect your ability to come up with objections would well outpace my ability to come up with responses. People get fed up with philosophers’ extravagant thought experiments, I know. I guess Quine’s implicit challenge with his “undetached rabbit parts” and so on is to come up with a clear (and, of course, naturalistic) criterion which would show the translation to be wrong. Simplicity considerations, as you suggest, may do it, but I’m not so sure.

BobTheBob 21 Jul 2011 21:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Secrets of the eliminati
This may owe to a confusion on my part. I understood from the title of the post and some of its parts (incl the last par.) that the OP was advocating elimination over reduction (ie, contrasting these two options and picking elimination). I agree that if reduction is an option, then it’s still ok to use them in explanation, as per your dollar example.

BobTheBob 21 Jul 2011 20:31 UTC
2 points
on: Secrets of the eliminati
Thanks for this great sequence of posts on behaviourism and related issues.

Anyone who does not believe mental states are ontologically fundamental—ie anyone who denies the reality of something like a soul—has two choices about where to go next. They can try reducing mental states to smaller components, or they can stop talking about them entirely.

Here’s what I take it you’re committed to:
- by ‘mental states’ we mean things like beliefs and desires.
- an eliminativist has both to stop talking about them and also using them in explanations.
- whither go beliefs and desires also goes rationality. You can’t have a rational agent without what amount to beliefs and desires.
- you are advocating eliminativism.
Can you say a bit about the implications of eliminating rationality? How do we square doing so with all the posts on this site about what is and isn’t rational? Are these claims all meaningless or false? Do you want to maintain that they all can be reformulated in terms of tendencies or the like?

Alternately, if you want to avoid this implication, can you say where you dig in your heels? My prejudices lead me to suspect that the devil lurks in the details of those ‘higher level abstractions’ you refer to, but am interested to hear how that suggestion gets cashed-out. Apols if you have answered this and I have missed it.

BobTheBob 19 Jul 2011 2:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: torekp’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality

The idea that any given hypothesized set of beliefs and desires is compatible with all possible facts, is not very plausible on its face.

I didn’t mean to say this, if I did. The thesis is that there are indefinitely many sets of beliefs and desires compatible with all possible behavioural and other physical facts. And I do admit it seems a tall order. But then again, so does straight-forward scientific underdetermination, it seems to me. Just to be clear, my personal preoccupation is the prescriptive or normative nature of oughts and hence wants and beliefs, which I think is a different problem than the underdetermination problem.

The canonical statement comes in Chapter 2 of W.V.O. Quine’s Word and Object. Quine focusses on linguistic behaviour, and on the conclusion that there is no unique correct translation manual for interpreting one person’s utterances in the idiolect of another (even if they both speak, say, English). The claims about beliefs are a corrollary. Donald Davidson takes up these ideas and relates them specifically to agents’ beliefs in a number of places, notably his papers ‘Radical Interpretation’, ‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning’, and ‘Thought and Talk’, all reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Hilary Putnam, in his paper ‘Models and Reality’ (reprinted in his Realism and Reason ), tried to give heft to what (I understand) comes down to Quine’s idea by arguing it to be a consequence of the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem of mathematical logic.

BobTheBob 17 Jul 2011 15:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: torekp’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
As I tried to explain in my July 08 post, there is a difference.

Straight-forward scientific underdetermination:
- One observer/scientist
- One, unproblematic set of facts (a curved white streak on a film plate exposed in a bubble chamber)
- Any number of mutually incompatible scientific theories, each of which adequately explains this and all other facts. All theories completely adequate to all observations. The only puzzle is that there can be more than one theory. (Tempting to imagine two of these might be, say, established particle theory, and Wolfram’s New Kind of Science conception of nature. Though presumably they would ultimately make divergent predictions, meaning this is a misleading thought).
Underdetermination of psychological facts by naturalistic facts:
- One observer/scientist
- One, unproblematic set of facts (behaviour and brain states. eg, a person picking an apple, and all associated neurlogical events)
- Any number of problematic sets of supposed facts (complete but mutually incompatible assignments of beliefs and desires to the person consistent with her behaviour and brain states)
- No (naturalistic) theory which justifies choosing one of the latter sets of facts -that is, justifies an assignment of beliefs and desires to the person.
The latter problem is not just an instance of the former. The problem for physics comparable to psychological underdetermination might look like this (ignoring Reality for the moment to make the point):
- Scientist observes trace on film plate from cloud chamber experiment.
- Scientist’s theory is consistent with two different possible explanations (in one explanation it’s an electron, in another it’s a muon).
- No further facts can nail down which explanation is correct, and all facts can anyway be explained, if more pedantically, without appeal to either electrons or muons. That is, both explanations can be reconciled equally well with all possible facts, and neither explanation anyway is ultimately needed. The suggestion is that the posits in question -electrons and muons (read different beliefs)- would be otiose for physics (read naturalistic psych).

BobTheBob 14 Jul 2011 17:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: torekp’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
I’m confused by your use of “cognitive states” in your 08 July comment above

You are quite right -sorry about the confusion. I meant to say behaviour and computational states -the thought being that we are trying to correlate having a belief or desire to being in some combination of these.

The question is, are these distinctions robust enough to support your argument?

I understand you’re referring here to the claim -for which I can’t take credit- that facts about behaviour underdetermine facts about beliefs and desires. Because the issue -or so I want to argue- is of underdetermination of one set of potential facts (namely, about beliefs and desires) by another (uninterpreted behaviour), rather than of underdetermination of scientific theory by fact or observation, I’m not seeing that the issue of the theory-ladenness of observation ultimately presents a problem.

The underdetermination is pretty easy to show, at least on a superficial level. Suppose you observe
- a person, X, pluck an apple from a tree and eat it (facts about behaviour).
You infer:
- X desires that s/he eat an apple, and X believes that if s/he plucks and bites this fruit, s/he will eat an apple.
But couldn’t one also infer,
- X desires that s/he eat a pear, and X believes (mistakenly) that if s/he plucks and bites this fruit, s/he will eat a pear.
or
- X desires that s/he be healthy, and X believes that if s/he plucks and bites this fruit (whatever the heck it is), s/he will be healthy.
You may think that if you observe enough behaviour, you can constrain these possibilities. There are arguments (which I acknowledge I have not given), which show (or so a lot of people think) that this is not the case—the underdetermination keeps pace.

BobTheBob 14 Jul 2011 4:25 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
I think the formal similarities of some aspects of arguments about qualia on the one hand and rationality on the other, are the extent of the similarities. I haven’t followed all the recent discussions on qualia, so I’m not sure where you stand, but personally, I cannot make sense of the concept of qualia. Rationality-involving concepts (among them beliefs and desires), though, are absolutely indispensable. So I don’t think the rationality issue resolves into one about qualia.

I appreciated your first July 07 comment about the details as to how norms can be naturalized and started to respond, then noticed the sound of a broken record. Going round one more time, to me it boils down to what Hume took to be obvious:
- What you ought to do is distinct from what you will do.
- Natural science can tell you at best what you will do.
- Natural science can’t tell you what you ought to do.
It is surprising to me there is so much resistance (I mean, from many people, not just yourself) to this train of thought. When you say in that earlier comment ‘You have a set of goals...’, you have already, in my view, crossed out of natural science. What natural science sees is just what it is your propensity to do, and that is not the same thing as a goal.

BobTheBob 12 Jul 2011 13:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: torekp’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
As I understand it, the problem of scientific underdetermination can only be formulated if we make some kind of fact/theory distinction—observation/theory would be better, is that ok with you?

I’m not actually seeing how the temperature example is an instance of underdetermination, and I’m a little fuzzy on where bridge laws fit in, but would be open to clarification on these things.

BobTheBob 11 Jul 2011 15:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
I think your question again gets right to the nub of the matter. I have no snappy answer to the challenge -here is my long-winded response.

The zombie analogy is a good one. I understand it’s meant just as an analogy -the intent is not to fall into the qualia quagmire. The thought is that from a purely naturalistic perspective, people can only properly be seen as, as you put it, preference- or rationality-zombies.

The issue here is the validity of identity claims of the form,
- Wanting that P = being in brain state ABC
My answer is to compare them to the fate of identity claims relating to sensations (qualia again), such as
- Having sensation S (eg, being in pain) = being in brain state DEF
Suppose being in pain is found empirically always to correlate to being in brain state DEF, and the identity is proposed. Qualiaphiles will object, saying that this identity misses what’s crucial to pain, viz, how it feels. The qualiaphile’s thought can be defended by considering the logic of identity claims generally (this adapted from Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity).

Scientific identity claims are necessary—if water = H2O in this world, then water = H2O in all possible worlds. That is, because water is a natural kind, whatever it is, it couldn’t have been anything else. It is possible for water to present itself to us in a different phenomenal aspect (‘ice9’!), but this is OK because what’s essential to water is its underlying structure, not its phenomenal properties. The situation is different for pain—what’s essential to pain is its phenomenal properties. Because pain essentially feels like this (so the story goes), it’s correlation with being in brain state DEF can only be contingent. Since identities of this kind, if true, are by their natures necessary, the identity is false.

There is a further step (lots of steps, I admit) to rationality. The thought is that our access to people’s rationality is ‘direct’ in the way our access to pain is. The unmediated judgement of rationality would, if push were to come to shove, trump the scientifically informed, indirect inference from brain states. Defending this proposition would take some doing, but the idea is that we need to understand each other as rational agents before we can get as far as dissecting ourselves to understand ourselves as mere objects.

BobTheBob 8 Jul 2011 15:14 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
I do accept that ‘wants’ imply ‘oughts’. It’s an oversimplification, but the thought is that statements such as
- X’s wanting that X eat an apple implies (many other things being equal) that X ought to eat an apple.
are intuitively plausible. If wanting carries no implications for what one ought to do, I don’t see how motivation can get off the ground.

Now, if we have

1) wanting that P implies one ought to do Q,

and

2) being in physical state ABC implies wanting that P

then, by transitivity of implication, we get

3) being in physical state ABC implies one ought to do Q

And this is just the kind of implication I’m trying to show is problematic.