Philosophy Talk: The Blog

William James and the Squirrel Example.

This post was originally published shortly after our episode on William James -- which is being rebroadcast this wee-- originally aired.  We're moving it up to the top of the blog in honor of the rebroadcast. 

Russell Goodman, who was our guest a couple of weeks ago, for our episode on William James sent the following remarks as a follow up to our on-air conversation. They are posted here with his permission.

I wanted to comment on that squirrel going around the tree story with which  James opens the second chapter of Pragmatism.  It's a great story, but it seems, from my experience, to itself provoke as much disagreement and puzzlement as the squirrel and the man themselves do.

At first blush, it seems like a good verificationist story- a dispute about  two terms or hypotheses that have the same empirical consequences.  James's  point would be then be that the dispute is idle (as you put it in your  introduction, the campers are “arguing about nothing.”)  This seems to be  James's conclusion in the second paragraph, where he writes:  “If no  practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”  That's fine, and this statement fits Peirce's example (in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”) of a cup of wine that is allegedly Christ's blood but gives all the signs of  just plain wine.

But James's conclusion does not fit what he says in the first paragraph,  where the point is NOT that there is no “practical difference” between the  cases but rather that if one makes the distinction between two senses of  “going around”  (i. e. passing north of,  east of, south of,  west of, vs. facing the belly, then the side, then the back, then the other side of the  squirrel) there is no need for disagreement.  That's because each sense determines a DIFFERENT, empirically verifiable set of consequences, either for the man himself (if he can catch sight of the squirrel's belly, etc, it being a narrow tree) or certainly for the observers, who can tell whether  the man is facing the squirrel's back or belly (is the squirrel standing?) or merely circling a squirrel who keeps his belly facing the man.

So, James misinterprets his own example as one in which there is no practical difference between the two hypotheses, when there actually is. In either interpretation however, the example is meant to furnish a picture of traditional philosophy, as (in the words of one of James's heroes, George Berkeley) raising a dust and then complaining that one cannot see. In this guise pragmatism is a critical philosophy or therapeutic philosophy, freeing us from pseudo problems.  There's also a positive side (e. g. his 'humanistic epistemology') that the example doesn't seem to exemplify.

Another puzzling thing about James's example is the question of what it has to do with pragmatism, or why we need pragmatism to tell us this?  As James points out, the idea of making a distinction when we encounter a (seeming) contradiction is an old one in philosophy.  It's a funny idea to invoke at the beginning of a chapter where one expects to learn about what is distinctive about pragmatism.

From years of teaching this chapter I've learned not to start with the squirrel example,  but to pass to other points he makes in this really quite amazing piece of writing.  Last spring I gave a seminar on the chapter in North Carolina and we had a very lively discussion about the squirrel example for most of an hour, with people disagreeing about whether James really did misinterpret his own example!  We didn't get much further however.  What do you think?

Why I am not a Wittgensteinian

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode is about Wittgenstein. Our guest will be Juliet Floyd.

Many regard Wittgenstein as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I don't share that view. But there's no denying that, for a man who published only one book during his lifetime -- a book that he later basically repudiated -- he really did have a tremendous impact on 20th century analytic philosophy. Indeed, Wittgenstein has to be regarded as one of the great founding fathers of 20th century analytic philosophy, especially of the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy.

Now I don't profess at all to be an expert on Wittgenstein. I did read a fair amount of Wittgenstein as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where a number of my teachers had an enduring fascination with his work. I don't doubt that Wittgenstein was a deep, ingenious, and highly impactful philosophy. Nonetheless, I find myself resistant to much of his philosophy -- especially his later philosophy. In the rest of this post, I'll try to say a bit about why.

When I say that I find myself resistant to much of Wittgenstein's philosophy, it's not so much this or that particular claim of his that I resist. There's lots of things that Wittgenstein says in his great work the Philosophical Investigations, for example, that I find intriguing, deep, challenging, and well worth thinking about even today. I presume we'll talk about some of his more intriquing philosophical claims today -- his picture theory of meaning, his claim that the limits of my language are the limits of my world, his later (and highly influential) view that meaning is use, his argument against the very possibility of a private language. All this is rich and provocative stuff. And though I probably ultimately reject a lot of it, it isn't these things that I find so hard to swallow from Wittgenstein. It's really his "metaphilosophical" outlook that I find myself constantly recoiling from. That is, it's his views about how to do philosophy and what you can and cannot achieve by doing philosophy that I most firmly reject.

Let me explain. Wittgenstein, especially the later Wittgenstein, viewed philosophy as it had been practiced more or less up his own arrival as mostly a budget of confusions. Philosophical problems and "theories" one and all arise, he says at one point in the Philosophical Investigations, from language gone on a holiday. The rough idea is that a whole lot of philosophy gets going by taking terms like say "knowledge" or "mind" or "idea" or -- take your pick -- and raising questions that have nothing to do with our sort of everyday use of such terms in the context of the "language games" in which they are at home.

Take the so-called problem of other minds. How does this problem get started? Well, Descartes convinced many philosophers that we have immediate and incorrigible access to the contents of our own minds, as if the mind were somehow completely open to itself. It's clear we don't in the same way know the contents of the minds of others. Starting with that observation, it really wouldn't take much argument to get yourself into the frame of thinking that one can reasonably and intelligibly wonder whether we have anyway of knowing about the minds of others. And once you got yourself into that state of wonder, it wouldn't take a whole lot of further argument to convince yourself to be an utter sceptic about our knowledge of other minds. Of course, at least some other philosophers will be unmoved by your scepticism. They may take themselves to be the guardians of common sense. But as soon as they admit that your arguments at least deserve answering, that there really is a problem about our knowledge of other minds, then we're off and running on a race to see which set of philosophical arguments will carry the day. Sceptical arguments will war with anti-sceptical arguments. the debate will go on -- probably interminably, with no real resolution ever being achieved.

We philosophers tend to think of our problems as "enduring." But the Wittgensteinian thought is that that may just be another way of saying intractable, however. And Wittgenstein can be seen as offering us an explanation of why we find the problems so intractable. That's the point of his saying that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. This is not for him a sign that the problems of philosophy are deep. It is rather a sign that they are grounded in utter confusion and abuse of language.

Now I won't try to reconstruct the arguments that might lead one down the primrose path of worrying about our knowledge of other minds. I'll leave that as exercise to the reader for now. What Wittgenstein wants to do for philosophy is to give us a way of avoiding taking even the very first step down such paths in the first place. The secret, he thinks, is simply to look at how we actually use such terms as 'knowledge' 'self' 'others' etc in the real life language games and "forms of life" in which those terms are at home. Philosophy should simply stick to describing use. It should abandon the grand hope of building philosophical theories of things like mind, knowledge and self. It has no particular resources for enabling it to construct such theories in the first place. And all of its past attempts to do so have led to intractable confusion.

Once we abandon the urge to build grand philosophical theories designed to get at, as it were, hidden philosophical essences, and simply look at how language is actually used, it's not so much that we thereby solve the traditional philosophical problems, It's rather that we dissolve them. If we simply look at our actual practices, we will see that the idea that we know the contents of our own minds in some immediate, incorrigible fashion that is different from the way in which we we know the minds of others cannot be sustained. The very problem that gets the whole intractable debate about our knowledge of self vs. our knowledge of other minds is based again on "language gone on a holiday." And once you see this, the problem immediately dissolves itself.

There's something profound about Wittgenstein's approach. Not without reason did generations of later philosophers find it a potent rallying cry. It's certainly true that we want to pay attention to how our language is actually used and we don't want, through mere inattention to the facts of use, to generate pseudo problems. But I have to say that I think it is a serious mistake to think that all the so-called traditional problems of philosophy are mere pseudo-problems borne of insufficient attention to how we actually use certain quite ordinary terms, that, in their everyday use, are completely unproblematic.

Since I'm going to have to leave for the studio pretty soon, I'm not sure I can spell this all out before airtime. Probably I'll come back to it after the show and provide an update. But here's a couple of quick takes on why I don't share Wittgenstein's assessment of the "enduring" philosophical problems and his assessment of what to do about them. First, I think it's wrong to say that if we just look at how the language is actually used the problem about other minds would simply go away. One needn't doubt that we do know the minds of others. One can simply wonder both how possibly we could know the minds of others and how actually we do, in fact, do so. Both of these strike me as important and interesting questions. The former is the kind of question that you'll find a philosopher more likely to be asking. And the second -- the how actually question -- is one you'll find a psychologist/cognitive scientist more likely to be asking.

I could say a lot about the nature of how possibly questions. Think of what you're doing when you ask and try to answer a how possibly question like this. You've got an initial budget of concepts -- maybe concepts of mind, knowledge, self, others. And reflecting on these concepts you find yourself puzzled as to how these concepts "coordinate" with one another. You can see how possibly a thinking being can know itself, but your puzzled about how a thinking being can know the contents of the mind of another thinking being. You start to imagine the possibilities. In so doing, you are, as it were, taking an imaginative walk through a range of alternative possible worlds, trying to see if there are any in which one mind knows the contents of another mind. If you find one, and if it's not too far away from the actual world, you conclude that yes one mind can know the contents of another mind. If you don't find one, or if the ones you find are very very far from the actual world, you become a sceptic or conclude that one can only know the contents of one's own mind.

You can read Wittgenstein as arguing that we don't really have any discplined way to walk through the range of possibilities in any way likely to produce stable conviction. Instead of trying to take unconstrained and undisciplined walks through a range of imagined, but un-ordered possibilities, we should just look. Look at how we actually talk about mind, self, knowledge and other in the actual language games we play when we do so in the context of the lived forms of life that give those games point.

I think there is something to this advice. But not everything that Wittgenstein seems to think.

Consider the practicing cognitive scientist. What we do when we walk through a range of alternative worlds in the imagination can feel a lot different from what we do when we do science. Take your practicing cognitive scientist who wants to know how minds actually cognize one another. How does she go about constructing a theory of how people actually manage to know the minds of others. Well one thing she doesn't do is to simply look at how words like "knowledge" "mind" "self" "others" etc are used in ordinary language games. She might take such use as data points. But she's perfectly prepared to find out that people don't actually have much of a clue as to how we actually go about figuring out what other people think and believe. So what does she do? She deploys more or less tried and true methods of hypothesis generation and testing. She does experiments, she builds models, etc. That is, she draws on all the ways and means of empirical inquiry to try to figure out exactly how, in fact, we so regularly, reliably and systematically figure out what other people feel, believe, and desire. [She also notices that we are not so good at figuring out our own thoughts and feelings.

But what about the poor philosopher? The psychologist cum cognitive scientist in her attempt ot answer the how actually question about our knowledge of other minds is armed to the teeth. She has all the ways and means of empirical inquiry to draw upon. But what do we poor philosophers have to draw on in trying to answer our how possibly question? One worry might be the one we discussed above. We philosophers really don't have much to draw on except our own unconstrained philosophical imaginations. But philosophical imagination unmoored to the everyday forms of life that give our language games point, is a paltry thing, a thing more likely to mislead than illuminate. So perhaps what Wittgenstein is trying to do by suggesting that we look at how language actually works is simply to give us a way to constrain the imagination in ways that prevent it from just running rampant.

I applaud that instict, if that was the instinct. But take it a step further. Why restrict ourselves to just in tact "language games" in which the problematic terms and concepts supposedly have their homes? You wouldn't recommend that procedure to the practicing psychologist cum cognitive scientist would you? You wouldn't say look only at what people say. Don't do clever experiments designed to ferret out the hidden inner mechanisms or regularities not immediately evident in our everyday practices and our everyday descriptions of those practices.

WHy should the evidential base for our philosophy be more restricted than the evidential base for the construction of psychological and other theories.

Because philosophy is, well, different, and sui generis? I don't think so. Philosophy, on my view, is very much continuous with science. I don't mean to say that philosophy is just one science among others. It isn't. For one thing philosophy really is much more concerned, often, with "how possibly, if at all" sorts of questions than the sciences typically are and less concerned with the "how actually" than the sciences typically are. But how possibly questions should really be thought of as "how possibly, given what we know" questions. And as science increases our knowledge of the actual, we get greater and greater resources for constraining our answers to the how possibly questions that are our stock and trade.

Since I'm writing at sort of break-neck pace because I want to get this up before I leave for the studio, I'm not sure if I'm being clear. So let me try a quick statement of a kind of anti-Wittgensteinian bottom line, that concedes something but far from everything to Wittgenstein. Just starting out bare, with a bare "how possibly question" isn't likely to get you very far. All you have to go on, from square one, is one's own philosophical imagination. But an imagination unconstrained is probably not a reliable guide to anything very deep. Looking at actual language in practice can be one source of constraints. There is a way we actually do talk about the minds of others. There is the actual evidence that we do use to support our actual conclusions about the contents of others minds. And its wise advice that we start out by looking at such things. But we should also be prepared to look eslewhwere -- at, for example, the deliverances of cognitive science -- and constrain our imaginations by those deliverances as well. And we should also be prepared to find that our everyday practices are sometimes infected with all sorts of illusory material, founded on all sorts of historical mistakes and misdiagnosis that achieve through the mechanisms of cultural transmission the status of received wisdom. That is, we should be prepared to find that common sense and ordinary usage may themselves stand in need of thoroughgoing reformation.

But once we see that we can constrain our imaginations in lots of different ways, from lots of different sources, in its walk through a space of possibilities, why believe that we are prevented from even beginning the walk? Why despair that we will only end in confusion and chaos and intractable fruitless debate? Maybe we will, but we are not bound to.

Of course, another worry is that if we make more and more progress on the how actually questions, the how possibly questions will eventually cease to grip us. And at least that part of philosophy will come to an end. Maybe. But we are often gripped by how possibly questions when we cannot even begin to get a grip on how the thing actually works. I don't know what mechanisms are actually in there, but let's see what mechanism might be in there. And once we consider which ones might be there, let's see if we can eliminate some of the possible ones and hone in on the actual ones. Is the elimination of possibilites a scientific or a merely philosophical undertaking? I think the answer must be really both and. And as long as there are domains ripe for conceptual reconfiguration, there will always be room for philosophy. Philosophy will end only when conceptual puzzlement itself comes to an end.

With that, I really gotta go, as Ian Shoales is found of saying.

"Beautiful" and the Metaphysics of Beauty

posted by D. S. Neil Van Leeuwen

People argue whether beauty is objective or subjective. But what would it mean for it to be one or the other? A good example of something subjective would be: tasting good to Bob. If something tastes good to Bob, it’s because of Bob’s subjective experience of it. It depends on the subject. An objective property would be: being 5 kg. Anything 5 kg has that mass independently of any subjective experience of it. It’s in the object. Tomorrow’s episode of Philosophy Talk is on athletic beauty—beauty in sports. So I decided to write this blog on beauty in general to pave the way for tomorrow’s discussion.

Is being beautiful like tasting good to Bob (subjective) or being 5 kg (objective)? The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” suggests subjective. But other sayings—“beauty is truth” or “beauty is eternal”—suggest there is some objective quality to beauty. Advocates of the subjective view emphasize how difficult it is to get people to agree on aesthetic judgments. Advocates of the objective view make arguments like: “The Grand Canyon would be beautiful regardless of whether anyone was there to see it, so beauty is in the object.” Both kinds of advocate are given to more than occasional question-begging.

How we come down on the question of objectivity vs. subjectivity will make a big difference to how we view the experiences of things like sports and music. But before getting into the metaphysics of beauty, I want to make a simple linguistic point. The word “beauty” (and cognates) can be used to make objective claims (claims whose truth is meant to be determined by the object referred to) or subjective claims (claims whose truth is meant to be determined by one’s subjective experience). It can work both ways.

Here’s what I mean.

Often I listen to a piece of music and don’t like it at first. But then later I come to believe, and say, that the music is “beautiful,” even though I didn’t realize it at first. I’ve gone through this process with songs from Shostakovich to Radiohead. And when I claim that the music is beautiful—finally, after hearing it many times—I’m saying that the music has something I wasn’t aware of at first. That property, I seem to be saying, was discovered by me, not constituted by my subjective experience. I was wrong when I missed it at first. When I use the word “beautiful” to indicate something I missed the first time around, I’m using it to make an objective claim about the music. So it seems to be a linguistic fact that “beautiful” can be used to make objective claims.

On the other hand, I once had a friend with a mangy cat who would always say, “She’s beautiful to me.” Plainly there’s some sense to my friend’s words, but they would be silly if “beautiful” were supposed to denote some objective property. You’d be hard-pressed to find something objectively beautiful about that mangy cat, but I don’t think that means my friend said something false. That the claim is subjective is indicated by the phrase “to me”: the truth of the claim is determined by the subject’s experience.

So there are at least two senses of “beauty”—one objective and the other subjective. (See this PT blog by Alexander Nehamas for a closely related view.) What, if anything, unifies these two senses? It is not as if the two senses of “beauty” are unrelated, like the senses of “bank” (of a river) and “bank” (the financial institution). I hold that what unifies the two senses is that objects that are truly “beautiful” (in either sense) give rise to a certain kind of experience. I’ll call this ‘aesthetic experience’. The difference is that the objective sense of “beautiful” refers to the property itself in the object that causes the experience, while the subjective sense of “beautiful” refers to the subjective experience alone. 

So my idea is this. A Leonardo painting, Chinese calligraphy, ballet, and a Michael Jordan move to the basket can all truly be called beautiful in the objective sense because of the properties they possess. But other things, like my friend’s mangy cat, may—although they are less grand—elicit an aesthetic experience for some people despite lacking the relevant properties of objectively beautiful things.

I won’t try to describe aesthetic experience. You all have had aesthetic experiences. But I will say something further about the objective sense of “beauty.” What property does it denote? Actually, I think this is a misleading question. There are several different properties that something can have to make it beautiful in the objective sense. I doubt I can give a whole list, so I won’t try. But some words will suggest what some of these properties are: simplicity (in an appropriate context), harmony (the matching of parts), and fluid motion. That these properties are distinct can be seen as follows: something can be harmonious without being simple (a Bach cantata); something can be simple in the relevant sense without having fluid motion (a simple painting); and something can have fluid motion without either simplicity or harmony (a turbulent rapids). And, again, the reason why these properties all get to be denoted with the same word, “beauty,” is that they all, when recognized, elicit a certain kind of experience. But objects can have these properties—and hence be objectively beautiful—even if no one is around to experience them.

Where—to connect this discussion to tomorrow’s show—might we hope to find the properties of beauty in sports? Answering this completely would take volumes. But I’d like to make one suggestion. I often noticed when watching Michael Jordan that his movements had something that was only rarely found in the movements of other players—and then only to a much lesser degree. They seemed to be the simplest movements possible for accomplishing the goal he set for himself. When other players were faced with having to drive on multiple defenders, they would juke, cross over, and spin in all sorts of fancy ways. Michael Jordan, however, would move his body and the ball in the simplest, most direct trajectory to allow him to get up for the dunk—spinning and juking only minimally and fluidly. That’s beautiful.

Thus I think that one of the properties that the objective sense of “beauty” refers to is that of solving a complex problem in the simplest way possible. This is a property that can be shared by dunks, musical harmonies, and mathematical proofs. It’s the property referred to when a theory is called “elegant” or a movement is called “natural.” It’s apparent in the shape of a dolphin’s body and its movements. Thus, this kind of beauty is both in works of human art and in nature. I would say that Michael Jordan’s moves belong to both categories.

Does Truth Matter?

posted by Ken Taylor

We've  been very, very busy  here at Philosophy Talk.  I'd like to say that that explains the slowdown in both my and John’s blogging.  It does – sort of.   We’ve just gotten back from a hecticbut exhilerating road trip.  We recorded two shows up in Portland – one in front of an audience of professional philosophers at the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the  American Philosophical Association.   That was a blast and I think it will make good radio. 

But that was just a warm-up for a superblast.   We made a combined TV/Radio special or pilot or something with the good folks at Oregon Public Broadcasting – who have been our partners from the beginning. I’m not sure when it will air on TV, but we’ll let you know when the folks at OPB decide.   This may be the beginning of a new undertaking for  the Philosophy Talk Crew.   I can envision us doing, say, 6-9 TV specials per year.

It  was  a  great pleasure working with the OPB folks and meeting some of the folks in Portland listen to our show.  Thank you all for coming and being a part of a really special events.

I would also like to welcome all you philosophically mind folks up in Seattle to Philosophy Talk.  We  had our debut on KUOW2  -- KUOW’s HD radio channel --  Saturday April 1st at 4pm.   If you don’t have an HD radio,  you can still check us out via the web, I’m told, via KUOW’s live stream.

But to the topic at hand.   Today’s show is about “The Value of Truth.”  Our guest will be Simon Blackburn. I’m predicting Simon will be a fantastic guest.  He’s a very fine philosopher and a great conversationalist.    Unfortunately,  for you outside the Bay Area, since this is a special “pledge week” show, with a funny structure to allow for pitch breaks  (in which John and I will join in)  stations other than KALW probably won’t play this episode. But we’ll put it up on the web, for sure,  and you can listen at your leisure.

Let me say a few things about the value of truth to get today’s conversation started.   First,  it seems to me that truth is a very good thing.   We think science is grand because it reveals deeper and deeper truths about nature.  We typically would much prefer to know and be told the truth than to be told a lie.  We hardly ever say to ourselves,  “I know that false, but I choose to believe it anyway.”   To believe something is to believe it’s true.   Moreover, if your beliefs are true and you act on them, then you are likely to get what you want.  I want a beer.  I believe that there is a beer in the fridge.  I believe that I can get to the fridge by getting up and walking toward it.   Because what  I believe about the beer and the means available to me are both true,  then if I act on those beliefs I am very likely to end up getting just what I want.  On the other hand, if I had false beliefs about the beer and its whereabouts,  acting on them would be very unlikely to eventuate in my getting a beer – except perhaps by sheer accident.

This all makes it seem right to say that in some sense we aim at truth in much of our cognizing.  Truth is what we seek to discover in science. It’s what we seek to believe for the purposes of acting in the world.   Moreover,  truth seems to have both instrumental value – witness the instrumental value of having true beliefs about the whereabouts of things that you seek – and intrinsic value – witness the intrinsic value of knowledge of the world.

On the other hand,  it has to be noticed that not all truths are created equal.  Some truths may be not worth knowing.  We have finite minds, finite resources, and a finite amount of time.  We could,  I suppose, spend all of our time and resources seeking to know every possible truth, but that does not seem like the path of wisdom.  What we want to know are truths that matter, truths that are relevant to our practical projects and concerns,  truths that will be serviceable for action or explanation, or merely to day to day existence.  Some truths are clearly more serviceable than others.  And by serviceable I don’t mean anything crude or shallow necessarily.   In science,  we seek to uncover truths that richly explanatory and profusely predictive.  Truths like that are bound to be the opposite of shallow.

But a still small voice objects.  Wait!  Wait!.  Haven't you given up the ghost of truth, here?  You've just  granted, after all,  that its not truth per se that matters but serviceability.  Perhaps there are serviceable falsehood.  Sometimes we should believe what's true.  And sometimes we should believe what's false.   But we should always believe what it is serviceable to believe.   We should never prefer to believe the  unserviceable truth over the serviceable falsehood.

But  what could a  serviceable falsehood possibly be?   Well, think of approximations as one sort of serviceable falsehood.   Newtonian mechanics is false.  But when we’re talking about middle-sized dry goods, moving relatively slowly, it’s good enough.

Fair enough, the defender of truth might say, but that example doesn't make the point you are  after.   The serviceability of Newtonian mechanics has to do with the fact that it’s an approximation of  -- drum roll please --- the truth.  So if not truth than at least truth-relatedness still does matter, even granting your argument.     Sometimes it's alright to believe what is merely approximately true  -- but only if you can't do better or don't need to do better given your purposes.

Well, let's  try another example, the still small voice says.   Imagine a person whose psychology is such that in order to get anything done, she has to vastly overestimate her own abilities.  Suppose if she were to have a realistic assessment of her own abilities,  she would simply be paralyzed.   On the other hand,  if she vastly overestimates her abilities she would at least make the effort.  And though she might not do all that she sets out to do,  she at least accomplishes something.  Her overestimation doesn't even approximate the truth.  It's just flat out false.  But if overestimating her own abilities helps her get on with her life and accomplish things she otherwise wouldn't,  more power to her, the defender of mere serviceability now says.

We can  easily multiply examples of this sort of thing.  Much of what we believe about ourselves is false and not true.   Human have some tendency to  believe comforting falsehoods and to disbelieve discomforting truths.  And you can give something of  a  practical justification for that tendency.  Believing the comforting falsehood can help to get you through the day, can help to sustain practical projects.  Believing discomforting truths, on the other hand,  could be a recipe for falling into paralysis and despair.   Why do that?   

Here's a dictum:  when it would be more useful or serviceable for the purposes of ordinary life  to believe the comforting falsehood, do so.   Of course, you can't really consciously set out to follow that dictum -- that's partly because believing something is a form of taking it to be true.  You cannot both commit yourself to believing something and simultaneously explicitly acknowledge the falsity of what you commit yourselve to believe --  even if it is something it would be in your practical interest to believe. 

But one of the wonderful things about the workings of the human mind is that its workings are often hidden from our own conscious scrutiny.  Perhaps nature arranged it that way just so that we would have the wherewithal to believe the false, when doing  so would be  in our best practical interest.    Wonderful thing that nature!

I can hear the stalwart  defender of always believing the true arguing that we just shouldn’t have such messed up psychologies.   We should have an insatiable psychological appetite for truth.  Discomforting truths should spur us into action rather than paralyze us.   Perhaps.   But if 'should' implies 'can' and 'can' depends on what we are really and truly  like, then I’m not so sure that we always have what it takes, psychologically speaking,   to live up to the consequences of  discomforting truth.  And I’m not sure that those who try to rub our noses in discomforting truths that we would rather not believe are always doing us a favor.

These are just some preliminary pre-show thoughts.  I’m sure I will spurred on to deeper reflection by the combined philosophical wisdom of John and Simon.   I’m sure you will be too.  So have a listen.

The Language of Politics

posted by Ken Taylor

We had a fun show last week with Geoff Nunburg about the language of politics.   In a little bit,   I'll ruminate a bit more about the language of politics.

Since we're in the middle of the  pledge drive,   though,   I want a put in a brief   good word for KALW -- the innovative little station that could.   I really meant it  when I said on air that without the risk-taking and innovation that KALW brings to public radio, Philosophy Talk simply would not be happening.   I hate to say it - though it's probably  no secret -- but lots of public radio has turned really staid and highly risk averse.    KALW is an exception.   If you value risk-taking and innovation on the air,  you really should think about  giving  to this gem of a station.  They  really need you.   They  operate on a shoestring.  If you compare KALW's operating budget to a certain other public radio station that broadcasts out of San Francisco -- Bay Area folks,  you know which one I mean -- you'll be really amazed at the difference.   But for my money,  KALW beats that to remain nameless behemoth on the other side of town by a quite considerable margin when it comes to putting fresh and engaging stuff on the air.   Even if you don't live in the Bay Area, and listen to our archive over the Internet, think about giving to the station.   You can do so on-line here. 

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But back to the language of politics.

On the air, we didn't talk much about competing ways of "framing" the same issue.  George Lakoff has recently been arguing that the main reason that Democrats lose elections is that Republicans have been masters at framing the issues, while Democrats have not been.   We didn't get very deeply into this idea on the air.  Too bad, because Nunberg has some pretty interesting things to say  both about Lakoff's claims about framing in general and about Lakoff's particular suggestions about how certain issues might best be framed by the democrats.   

In one way, it seems to me right, maybe even trivially so,   that politics is bound to involve a lot of competition over ways of "framing"  a set of  policy choices.   There are two reasons for this -- one having to do with the nature of politics and the other having to do with just what we're doing when we're "framing" a set of issues.  Politics is about distributing benefits and burdens.  Somebody gets a benefit and somebody, possibly a distinct somebody,  has to bear  a burden.  That doesn't mean that  politics is necessarily a zero-sum game.  Sometimes we all win and sometimes we all lose. 

People  tend  to want to see their  benefits maximized and their  burdens diminished.  Lawrence Mitchell, who was our guest awhile back on our episode about corporations, described corporations as great "externalizing" engines.   I think he meant by that that  corporations are expert at pushing the social costs of what they do onto third parties.   Though corporations may be the most efficient and ruthless externalizers of all,  I don't think they're alone.   Indeed, we all want to push as much social costs as we can onto somebody else, while receiving as much social benefit as we possibly can.   Kant once held that  who "wills the end" necessarily "wills the means."   He seemed to think that willing the end without willing the means involves some kind of incoherence.   There may be something to Kant's thought, if we restrict ourselves just to ends that I must bring about tr

But what does this have to do with the war of the frames?  The answer, I think, is that   "framing" is really a matter of  representing, especially of representing in normatively laden terms.  When we frame the issues in competing ways we are, in effect, offering competing narratives about  who deserves to enjoy what benefits and  bear what burdens.   

I also think that  many of the narratives we tell ourselves are  thoroughly self-serving.  They represent us and ours as the deserving recipients of benefits and the undeserving recipients of burdens, while representing "the other"  as  the undeserving recipients of benefits and the deserving recipients of burdens.   A whole lot of politics involves a competition over normatively laden construals, I think.  And I suspect that often he who wins the battle over normative construal has gone a very long way toward winning the day. 

You might wonder whether there's an objective right and wrong in the battle over construals.   This is a tricky question.  Certainly, one can misconstrue and misrepresent all sorts of matters and one can do in service of some political agenda or other.  Take the so-called controversy over  natural selection vs  intelligent design. Every even marginally scientifically literate person knows,  or should know,  that  intelligent design is not a serious scientific hypothesis that  deserve to be taught in any science class anywhere.  But proponents of intelligent design in order to promote a certain anti-science, religiously inspired political agenda have "brilliantly" sought to "frame" intelligent design as a rival scientific hypothesis that deserves teaching along side natural selection and other naturalist mechanisms of evolution.   In this case,  we have a clear example of an attempt at framing that one might expect or at least may be  debunked merely by steadfastly drawing  public attention to the real scientific facts of the matter.  But even here that thought may be too hopeful.  The forces of darkness are so organized, determined, and entrenched in our political culture that they may win the battle over the construals despite the fact that the frame they seek to impose is a framework of misrepresentation and ignorance rather than truth and knowledge.   It is frightening that men who ought to know better -- Bill Frist, MD, to name just one  -- are now spouting this nonsense.

If it is politically difficult  to combat even an attempt at framing that rests on such  patent and pernicious falsehoods and misrepresentations what hope is there where the objective truth of the matter, if there is one,  is even harder to discern.  Indeed,  I have to admit that I tend to doubt that there are objective  facts of the matter about who  should pay what taxes, about when a fetus becomes a person deserving the protection of the law, and even about who is  entitled to "marry" whom?   What there are instead are competing normative frameworks that construe these matters in different terms and no external authority by which we may adjudicate which normative framework better gets at the truth of the matter.  To be sure,  our competing frameworks do sometimes give way to a more encompassing normative consensus.  This is what has happened at many moments of great social progress and enlightenment.  But there is no simple  recipe for making that happen. Certainly,  there is  no antecedent guarantee that it can be made to happen in every case.

So what does that mean about the language of politics?   Perhaps it means that political discourse will always suffer from a certain fragmentation and division.  Perhaps politics will always involve a battle of competing construals and frames.  We may be destined to often talk past and at each other, rather than to each other.   One can hope for a more deliberative politics in which we reason together about how to live our shared lives.  But that is really only a hope and one far from being realized at this particular moment in history.