Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Social Reality

posted by Ken Taylor

Our  topic this week is social realities.  I must admit that when I first brought the nature of social reality up as a topic for an episode of Philosophy Talk, the non-philosophers on our team all went  “huh?”   That phrase obviously doesn’t mean much to the person on the street.  But  social realities are all around us.  Think of cocktail parties, football games, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, and even nations.  These are all social realities.  

 And in connection with this sort of thing both parts of that phrase “social reality” are worth focusing on. All the things I just mentioned are things that really and truly exist.  They aren’t figments of anyone’s imagination; they’re real.  Really real.  Objectively real.   But at the same time, they're all made up entities, at least in a sense.   Cocktail parties exist only because a group of people get together and say “we're having a party now.”  People just sort of decide that these things are going to exist.  And so they do exist.  Seems kind of like magic.

It isn’t really magic,  but it is puzzling.  At bottom, social realities are just creations of the human mind.  Not individual human minds, but collections of human minds.   You can’t all by your little lonesome create a social reality.  Try it and you really will end up with something that’s just a figment of your own imagination.  But put a bunch of people together, let them exercise their imaginations together;  let them agree; and presto,  you’ve got a new social reality. 

What could, I suppose, make that sound a little like magic still is the fact that it takes at least two minds to make a social reality. If one mind can’t do it, why are two or more minds any better, you might ask.  Well the answer is that social realities are, by their very natures,  founded on agreement.   If a bunch of humans agree to create a club, then there is a club.  If a bunch of humans agree to form a nation, then there exists a nation.  And although clubs and nations are nothing but products of human agreement, they're not figments of our imagination.  To be sure they are products of our imaginations, but they’re real products, not mere figments.  Once we agree that they exist, they are  as objectively real as rocks and mountains.

Not only are things like clubs and nations real, they are  really important.  They have a huge impact on our lives.   We’re immersed in a universe of ever changing social realities.  And they play an immense role both in determining how we live and how well we live.   Our earliest forbears foraged on the savannah and huddled in caves. Civilizations have risen and fallen and with them, ways of life have come and gone.  Throughout these massive changes in the social world, the biological and physical worlds have changed too -- but not as radically, and mostly in ways that are more or less direct consequences of changes in the human social world. 

So the social world affects not only the way humans relate to one another, but also how we interact with the rest of the biological and physical world.   Science, for example, is really a complex social undertaking by which humans collectively seek to understand the physical, biological, and even the social world itself.

Now scientific understanding of the social world sounds like a good thing.  But it also sounds a bit like sociology or anthropology or maybe social psychology.  We’re philosophers.  Why should we philosophers worry about the social world?

Well for one thing, we want to understand just how the social world arises out the natural world.  

But wait a minute, you’re about to interject. You started out by saying that social realities are a creation of the human mind.  Doesn’t that suggest that the social world doesn’t arise out of the natural world at all?  In one sense yes; in one sense no.   The sense in which the social world is not part of  unaided nature is obvious.  The social world depends entirely on us humans and not on the blind and impersonal forces of nature.  But ultimately human beings are just parts of the natural world.  So the power of the human mind to create social realities must have its roots in human psychology, which must ultimately have its roots in human biology, which must ultimately have its roots in physics.

 This may sound a little reductionist.  Afterall, I  started out talking about the power of the human mind to create, almost out of nothing, all varieties of new social realities.  And now I seem to be suggesting that it all comes down to the chemical processes of the brain.   It’s definitely got to come from somewhere.   It’s not just magic.  And besides, even animals have some limited power to create social realities.  It would certainly be good to understand just what equips the human mind to build social realities of such a wide variety and just how those human capacities evolv ed from lower level capacities of social animals,

There’s obviously a lot to think about here.  Fortunately for us we had an excellent guest for this episode -- Berkeley’s own John Searle, author of Making the Social World. 

I should say that this program was recorded in front of live audience at the Marsh Theater – this time in Berkeley, California.  As a consequence, you won’t be able to join the conversation on air.   But you can join it here.   

"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.

Self-Deception and the Problem with Religious Belief Formation

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

A quote: “He who eats the bread and drinks the cup with an unbelieving heart eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” This line is from the communion liturgy of the Church I grew up in—the Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The word “judgment” in the quote is a way of saying damnation to Hell. The word “unbelieving” refers to disbelief in the core metaphysical doctrines of the Church. The effect of regular repetition of lines like this in the service is to strike fear in the person who may be questioning such doctrines. Fear in turn squelches inquiry and creative thought. I was only eight years old when I first heard that line and understood what it meant.

The point of this blog is not to criticize religious beliefs. I think many are wrong, many right, and many we just can’t know about. My focus is rather on the character of the belief formation process inherent in much religious practice. The phrase “belief formation process” will refer broadly to the way that beliefs in a human mind come about, are maintained, or are extinguished (or not). We all have beliefs, which have to get there somehow.

I choose this focus because I suspect my experience with the Grand Rapids CRC is representative of what goes on in a much broader spectrum of religions. This topic is also timely for Philosophy Talk, since we’re approximately halfway between our show on the existence of God and our upcoming show on the intelligent design argument. I also think that although particular religious beliefs have been much discussed and criticized, there still needs to be clearer discussion and criticism of the mental pathways by which such beliefs characteristically arise and are maintained. My view is that the a-rational nature of the religious belief formation process is pernicious and ultimately more destructive than any individual religious belief, or system of beliefs, taken by itself. That process critically involves self-deception.

There is, to start, a beautiful thing about being human. We’re equipped with senses, capacities for reasoning and logical comparison, and an imaginative faculty for generating new ideas. The beautiful thing is that just by our getting up in the morning and walking around the capacities we have compel us to the generation of new knowledge and more subtle beliefs. The data that come to our senses because of our daily actions spark our reasoning capacities to call out for explanation; our imagination answers with the generation of ideas that, if all goes well, provide answers. This is how detailed knowledge of nature—individual plants and animals, and systems of them—has come about in so many diverse human societies. The particular answers and beliefs will come and go—if one belief doesn’t work, another takes its place—but the beautiful thing is the process and the nature we have that allows us to participate in it. Let’s call this the healthy belief formation process; it’s driven by curiosity.

The process of religious belief formation stands in stark contrast. Let’s return to the quote I started with. There’s no doubt that the repetition of such threatening lines has played a role in the formation of many religious beliefs. But how? Those lines provide no evidence of their claims. Why should they bring about belief?

The first thing to note is the vilification of unbelievers. Those with an unbelieving heart will be judged, for, presumably, they’ve done something (morally?) wrong. The vilification of unbelievers threatens exclusion from the group to anyone on the fence. And then there’s the fear of Hell that’s engendered. The net effect of the vilification and fear is that a desire to believe comes about in the mind. “ . . . eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” I certainly had such a desire in my youth.

Once there is a desire to believe the metaphysical doctrines of the religion, the mind is ripe for self-deception. Self-deception has essentially two components. First, a person forms a belief in violation of his usual standards of evidence and judgment—what philosophers call epistemic norms. Second, a desire with content related to the content of the belief causes the deviation from the healthy belief formation process. Because vilification, fear, and desire bring about the religious credence—while that credence is at odds with usual standards of judgment—the process by which religious beliefs come about is one of self-deception. (For a similar view, see this piece by Georges Rey.)

A religious advocate might respond that I’ve gotten it all wrong, that it’s direct encounter with the spirit of God that brings about religious belief. But then why is religious practice so full of methods that have the precise effect of establishing credence by a-rational means? The singing, the chanting, the repetition of lines that vilify unbelief, the stress on believing only on faith? Surely the existence of such methods is no coincidence. And even if some have been touched by something divine, surely there are many who formed their religious beliefs in response to the constant pressures of liturgy. And that’s the religious belief formation process I’m talking about.

What exactly is wrong with this process? First, it’s at odds with the healthy belief formation process. It stagnates and undermines the healthy process just when it could be most beneficial to reflecting on our core beliefs and values. Fear, not curiosity, is the driving force. By representing as evil disbelief in any of a long and specific list of doctrines, the factors involved in the religious belief formation process cause us to disengage with the normal and healthy creative process of belief generation and revision. Persons attending a religious ceremony are made to fear the prospect that something else might strike them as true. The mind loses its flexibility. Consider some examples. How else could the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe persist for so long in the face of Galileo’s new evidence? How else could members of a church that canonized a woman, Joan of Arc, for her leadership hold the belief that women are categorically unfit to lead congregations? Why do evangelicals who have seen pictures of the changed color of the peppered moth believe natural selection has never occurred? How else should we explain the belief at high levels in the Catholic Church that it’s wrong to teach about and distribute sexual protection in a South Africa crippled by AIDS? Responsiveness to reality is needed here. But that’s precisely what the religious belief formation process lacks. The beautiful thing about the human mind is undermined.

Why else do I think the religious belief formation process itself is worse than any particular belief? As I’ve been stressing, I think the healthy belief formation process is central to our humanity; it’s a tragedy for that to be undermined. But as importantly, human actions take on a vicious and inflexible character when they are driven by beliefs that are unresponsive to reality. The problem with Crusaders and Jihadists is not primarily that they think their enemies are evil; it’s that their beliefs are unresponsive to being moved by the simple humanity of their victims. One belief can explain a skirmish, but it takes a degenerate, self-deceptive belief formation process to explain the systematic maintenance of a set of beliefs underlying a Crusade. Other examples are abundant: the Inquisition, the longtime inability of the Catholic Church to respond appropriately to child molestation by its clergy (how could we fire someone ordained by God?), and the malicious condemnations of Jerry Falwell (and those who listen to and act on them), to name a few. All these cases involve false beliefs that would have been changed by a simple bit of responsiveness to reality if they hadn’t been insulated by the religious belief formation process. Dogmatically held beliefs give rise to destructive behaviors. The further danger is that acceptance of such a degenerate belief formation process can spread and lead to wider corruption of our cognitive economy.

So what of the intelligent design argument, the argument that posits an intelligent creator to explain the ordered complexity of life in the natural world? It’s fine; these criticisms don’t touch it. I don’t think it ultimately works; nor does it fall in the domain of science. But I wish all religious thinking had such a rational character. The reasoning involved in that argument is an instance of the healthy belief formation process in action. We’d all be better off if religious people thought so rationally all the time.

What, finally, of faith? I know of two ways in which the word “faith” is used—one pernicious, one laudable. At its worst, “faith” is used rhetorically to bring about a-rational, unreflective credence in what the “wise” men of the Church would have you believe. I think I’ve said enough already to indicate what I think is wrong with this kind of “faith.” But the word is also used in another sense. Faith in this sense is the action-guiding confidence that good will come about if we pursue goodness uncompromisingly. Having this kind of faith is consistent with uncertainty about what the good, in terms of outcome, will ultimately be. And, despite what religious leaders may suggest, having this faith is also consistent with active questioning of religious dogma. In short, faith in this sense is not opposed to intellectual curiosity.

The Dark Allure of Idealism

Posted by Ken Taylor

On our now not so recent episode about Berkeley, with David Hilbert,  I said in passing that idealism, in some form or other,  is permanently tempting.   Don't get me wrong,  I don't believe in idealism.  I consider myself a realist and a physicalist.  Not only do I think that the world is (largely) independent of mind.  I also think that the mind is ultimately just a part of that mind-independent world.   That is,  the mind is ultimately built out of and reducible to stuff that is not yet mind.   Or so I would argue.   So I don't come here to defend idealism.   Neither do I come to refute it -- not  exactly anyway.  Lots of philosophers  have claimed to have decisively refuted one form of  idealism or another, but   I suspect that such decisive refutation is probably not to be had.    Although I don't for a second endorse idealism,  I think it is worth ruminating on its (dark)  allure  just for a bit.

Idealism is a mansion containing many different rooms, some more elegantly furnished than others.  Berkeleyan idealism, the ur-form of idealism, is a pretty spare  thing compared to   Kant's  "Transcendental Idealism"  which we will no doubt explore a bit to day on the show.    Though the latter has sometimes been said to be just a  fancied up form of  Berkeleyan idealism, that construal does inadequate justice to the richness and complexities of Kant's philosophy.  Kant's  understanding of the constructive and combinatorial powers of the human mind vastly exceeds anything on offer in Berkeley's philosophy.   Indeed,  despite the fact that I reject his transcendental idealism,  I tend to think of Kant as an early and great cognitive scientist.  He was really an amazing student of the human mind, much more astute than John's favorite philosopher David Hume  -- though Hume, too, had many deep and lasting insights into the mind.

After Kant, Idealism, especially in Germany,  takes on many and variegated forms.  Though our show on Shchopenhauer touches on one form of post-Kantian idealism,    I can claim no expertise in this rich period in the history of philosophy.     I do currently chair a department that has perhaps the single best collection of scholars of German Idealism in the English speaking world.  Whether that's blessing or a curse,  I'll leave to others to judge.   This preface is just a way of warning you that I myself am content to  paint with a very broad brush here.   If you really want to know about the many rooms in that  philosophical mansion called Idealism,  I'm not really  the right  philosopher to serve as your guide.

Idealists of all varieties  seem to share  a certain deep puzzlement over how "transcendental realism" could even possibly be true.   By transcendental realism I mean, roughly, the view that our "ideas" somehow represent,  give us cognitive and perceptual access to, and thereby enable us to think about and perceive  a world not of the mind's own constituting and not in any sense contained within the mind.

Why should anybody find the idea that we perceive and think about a world not contained within mind and not entirely of the mind's own constituting  at all puzzling?    Isn't it the most natural thing to believe that there is something "out there" to which our thoughts and perceptions somehow manage to give us access?

Apparently not.  Historically, perhaps the  puzzlement starts with the "idea" idea.   The idea idea has a couple of different components that make idealism a tempting option.  First, there's the thought that ideas are some sort of inner mental occurrence.   Next there is the thought that ideas represent what they represent by "resemblance."   One then rather quickly notices that  an idea is bound to resemble some other idea more than it resembles any non-idea.   It's a pretty short step from there to concluding that our ideas never "resemble" any mind-external reality and so can never represent any mind-independent reality.

This admittedly  quick little  argument  doesn't begin to do justice to the subtlety of various actual arguments for idealism.   But since not  much of  the  remaining allure of idealism in the 21st century is depends on arguments directly tied to the idea-idea,  I won't  try to do better justice to the detailed arguments for idealism that start from the idea-idea.   The idea-idea, especially, its resemblance theory of representation,  fell out of repute long ago.  Kant, for example, had already rejected it and replaced talk of ideas with talk of "concepts."   Thoroughly modern representationalists have many views about how representations connect up to reality,  but mostly they don't go in for simple resemblance theories thereof.   Some  take linguistic representations to be the paradigm of a representation, for example.  The word  'snow'  doesn't  resemble snow in any interesting ways that I can think of but it "stands for" snow nonetheless.

So what  could tempt one to idealism if one rejects the idea-idea and its resemblance theory of representation-represented relation?    One possible answer is connected to belief in what I call the priority of the representation over the represented.   If you think, as many philosophers do, that all of our episodes of thought or perception involve deployment of inner representations of some sort,  you might think that it's impossible to "step outside" the representations.   We have always to do with our own representations and never with a bare object.  If objects are ever present to us in either thought or perception, they are present only through our representations themselves. (Something like this insight is at the core of Kant's own transcendental idealism, by the way.) 

This way of thinking doesn't yet give rise to any particular form of  idealism, to be sure.  Many representationalists are also realists.  But if we ask  just what an object is,  a certain way of looking at objecthood leads pretty naturally to some form or other of idealism.  You could think -- though I don't think you should -- that an object is just whatever is "represented"  by certain sorts of representations, representations that play a certain role in an overall system of representations.    Never mind exactly for now just which sorts of representations and which roles.    But if you think the role playing representations somehow precede and determine the objects, rather than following and being determined by them,  you've taken a first step toward idealism.   

Idealists tend to think that   the very concept of an object is nothing but the concept of a something that is tied to our representations in a certain way.  And they tend to think that this is some sort of  a priori truth about our representations.   If you start thinking this way, you could quickly get yourself into believing that "objects" are just a sort  projection from or construction out of our representations and relations among them.   

Why should anyone believe in the priority of the representation over the object?  Idealism starts with a kind of "how else could it be" impulse.  Think about it this way.   We realists tend to think that our representations  sometimes manage to "match" a world that is entirely independent of us.  But this "external" world  is supposed to make itself manisfest to our minds, realists admit,  only through its relentless rush upon  the portals of sensation.   But this inward rush, the realist will also have to admit,   is really just bare energy that does nothing but energize our nerve endings.   It's not as though through the inward rush upon sensation the external world somehow directly "imposes" truth tracking representations upon us.    As Berkeley puts it somewhere the "external" world does nothing to the eye except to shake the optic nerves.  Yet, somehow the energized shaking of our nerve endings gives rise to a vast and varied plethora of representations -- representations of time, space, cause, effect, persistence, change, and on and on.    How does the mere energized shaking of our nerve endings manage that?   

One only need read, say, Hume, to convince oneself that these representations can't quite be "derived"  or "deduced"  or even "induced"  from the bare inward rush of energy upon the portals of sensation.   They go beyond -- way beyond --  anything merely "given" in sensation.   If you accept that Humean conclusion you might be tempted to conclude that a our representations as of  an "external world" of objects  arrayed in space, rushing in upon the portals of sensation,  is some sort of illusion and that many of our  representations are  groundless and deserve to be abandoned.  In some  moods, Hume seems to flirt with such the view that many of our representations as of an external reality  are groundless.  But his finals views are actually quite subtle.

An alternative path from Hume's insights -- which are genuine insights -- is represented by Kant.  (Kant claims, by the way, that reading Hume awoke him from his "dogmatic slumber.")  Hume is right, according to Kant.   We don't derive our representations of cause, effect, persistence, change, space or time from the inward rush of sensation.  Rather, we impose them upon the inward rush and thereby "constitute" or "create" the world -- at least the world that we experience -- which is the only world that we can know.       The representations of space, time, cause, effect, persistence are already resident in the mind,  prior to the inward rush.  They are deployed by the mind to "organize" the inward rush.   In organizing the inward rush via these pre-given representations,  we structure and order the world.  The structure and order that we impose on the inward rush is not there before we do our thing.  It's not something we find in the inward rush.

Why is this a tempting idea?   In large measure its allure results from the its promise to explain, in a way that few competing theories do,  just how we mamage to cognize a highly complex, structured and ordered world,  on the basis of the meager deliverances of "brute" sensation. 

It comes with a cost, though.  If the order and structure we cognize in the world is merely the mind's own imposition,  that means we can't really know anything about the world "in itself."   Indeed,  it's fair to wonder how an idealist, even a Kantian transcendental idealist,  can believe in the existence of a mind-independent world at all.   

Personally,  I find that an inordinate cost.  But this is not the place to talk about how we can avoid paying that cost.

 

Naturalism and Value

John Perry

This is a response to Ken’s fascinating blog on naturalism, Schopenhauer and value.  I’m amenable to his naturalism.  But I’m not sure I see the problem of value as a matter of getting something out of nothing.

It seems to me that values come out of valuing, and that valuing starts with an attitude we might call “caring whether.” As we look to the future, many facts seem unresolved.  Will I eat tonight or go hungry?  Will the Cardinals choose an Italian to be Pope, or a non-Italian?  Will the White House support Tom Delay, or keep its distance?  Will Camilla and Charles someday be Queen and King, or will they be passed by in favor of young William?  Some of these things I care about.  I care whether I eat tonight or go hungry.  This is shown by the fact that I will exert some energy to assure that I get something to eat.  If all else fails, I will actually get out of my comfortable chair and make myself something.  Others of these things I care nothing about.  If it were in my power to decide the British succession by getting out of my chair and going to the refrigerator, I wouldn’t do it.  Even if I could decide the issue by raising my right or left hand, I wouldn’t spend the energy.  And Tom Delay?  Well, I would gladly lift a hand if it would lead the White House to abandon this irksome politician.  But I don’t care enough to do much more than that.

As of now, the future consists of an infinity of open states of affairs, things that may happen, or may not happen: P or not-P, as philosophers like to say.  A small minority of these are ones I care about.  The thought of P rather than not-P makes me sad, fills me with dread, mildly upsets me, or whatever.  It matters to me.  And if I can contribute to bringing about P rather than not-P, I’ll expend some effort to do so.

This phenomenon, of caring, isn’t confined to humans, or even to mammals.  It seems quite general throughout the animal kingdom, and it seems to extend a pattern that is found in everything alive.  A bird cares whether it eats a worm or not; it will expend energy to get to the worm; it will be upset if some other bird snatches it away.

In thinking about caring, it is important to distinguish between two different ways in which the “self” can be involved.  It is true in general that only ones own cares will affect what one does.  My cares are housed in my brain, and so play a causal role in what I do.  But that doesn’t mean that only I can be the object of my cares.  If I want you to have something to eat tonight, I am the subject of the want, the possessor of it, but you are the object, the thing I care about. 

This is where I would locate the phenomenon of value, in the objects that animals care about.  Animals clearly care about their own welfare, but just as clearly some animals care about the welfare of their offspring.  These objects have some value to them, because they care what happens to them, as shown by their emotional reactions to the fate of these things, and their willingness to invest energy to cause certain things to happen, and prevent other thing from happening.

Ken want to bring value in at the human level, in the characteristically human phenomenon of reflecting on our desires and identifying with some of them and rejecting others.  That’s an important phenomenon, but I don’t believe it is where valuing, or values, originate. 

The Only Mattering Worth Caring About

posted by Ken Taylor

Schopenhauer's view of life certainly seems bleak and pessimistic.  Consider the following description of the life of man (and animals):

Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst.  The basis of all willing, however, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain.  If on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom comes over it; in other words, its being and its existence become an intolerable burden for it.  Hence its life swings like a pendulum  to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.  This has been very quaintly expressed by saying that after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom

Interestingly,  the pendulum swinging to and fro betwixt the pain of desire and the boredom of attainment pretty much describes the approach taken  to sex by  Phillip,  the Schopenhauer  stand in   in Irv Yalom's novel The Schopenhauer Cure.   Phillip pursues women with a passion and urgency evidently  borne of some kind of emptiness.  But as soon as he makes a sexual conquest,  he experiences not pleasure and fulfillment, but  utter  boredom.  Almost  immediately, he returns to the chase with the same urgency and the whole cycle repeats itself.   Irv, by the way,  will be our guest tomorrow.  I don't doubt we'll spend lots of time talking about The Schopenhauer Cure and what seems to me it's non-Schopenhauerian ultimate message. 

Schopenhauer's pessimism is deeply held and forcefully argued.  He clearly sees it as  integral to his metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic system.  Notice how he heaps  ridicule and scorn on  the optimist:

...I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really a wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.  Let no one imagine that the Christian teaching is favorable to optimism: on the contrary, in the Gospels world and evil are used almost as synonymous expressions.

What I want to do briefly in the rest of this post is to  lay out an argument that maybe, just maybe,  Schopenhauer's pessimism is unwarranted and a trifle overblown.  I don't mean so much to suggest that  Schopenhauer is wrong to be a pessimist.  I'm not about to argue that this is the best of all possible worlds, as Leibniz would have us believe.  I'm more concerned to suggest that you could have a metaphysics like Schopenhauer's  and could, in particular, accept  a lot of what he has to say about the nature of the will, and still  not be driven to anything so severe as his pessimism  Or so it seems to me.   What Schopenhauer misses, I think, is the power of creatures like us to create values ex nihilo, in a sense, from the very emptiness of the nature.    He seems to think that if value and meaning don't reside in, as it were, the antecedent universe itself, then they can't reside anywhere.   But that I think is his mistake.  Values exist because we create them.   And the kind of story he tells about the will seems perfectly consistent with such an approach. 

Without plunging deep into Schopenhauer's metaphysics, the argument I want to make is a little hard to state.  But let me try.   Suppose  that we grant Schopenhauer  that human life, indeed all existence,  is the "objectification," as he calls it,  of the ceaseless striving of an aimless, meaningless  will, a will that is the inner essence of all that exists.     Suppose too that this  will 'cares' nothing for the well being of individuals.  As  Schopenhauer puts it:

Nature too, the inner being of which is the will-to-live itself, with all her force, impels both man and the animal to propagate.  After this she has attained her end with the individual, and is quite indifferent to its destruction; for, as the will-to-live, she is concerned only with the preservation of the species; the individual is nothing to her.

So far, so bleak.   But even if we  grant that we as such simply don't matter to the  great scheme of things, that nature is indifferent to us, what exactly  follows from that?   After all, we  matter to ourselves.  Indeed,  our capacity to matter to ourselves is built on the very stuff about which Schopenhauer goes on at such great length.   Think, for example,  about what he has to say about our desires and about our knowledge.    Our desires are  the proximate  source of our own ceaseless striving.  He thinks they are merely  sources of pain and suffering.  But why think that, exactly?   Admittedly,  where there is a desire unsatisfied, there is disquiet and a striving toward fulfillment.  But if my desire can be fulfilled, especially if I can conceive that my desire  can be fulfilled, then the desire sets me a project.   Doesn't the capacity to be set a project in this way make me an entirely new kind of thing.  I am a thing that has and pursues  projects.  I am not just nature's tool.  Nature may have its own uses for me.  But I also have my uses for myself.     Let nature do with me what  it will, let it discard me when I have served the  reproductive needs of the species. Still, there is what I want.  What I strive for.  What projects I give myself.  Those projects  matter to me, whether or not it matters to nature whether I ever get what I want. 

Think of the earth.  The earth is an objectification of the all encompassing will, Schopenhauer would no doubt say.    Though the earth has endured for billions of years,  its existence too is a matter of indifference to nature at large.   If the earth were consumed by the sun tomorrow, nature would go on without a hitch, with no remorse or regret.   But does that mean that earth does not matter to us.    Our  caring is enough to make the earth matter, not to the universe at large, but to us.  Does our caring stand in some need of vindication from nature?  I don't see why it should. 

Schopenhauer would probably say that it's an illusion that your projects are "self-given."   When you learn to see yourself under the aspect of the will, you will see that you are nothing but nature's only temporarily useful tool.   But that's the step that I don't think is inevitable.  We have indeed been constituted  by blind, uncaring nature. And nature is through with us in the blink of an eye.    But we have been constituted by her  as creatures who are capable both of knowing and desiring, by Schopenhauer's own lights.    Merely this, however,   already gives us at least the beginnings of the capacity for  creating values, as it were, out of the nothingness that is nature.   The  values we create  are only  our values and not nature's own.  Nature  doesn't have any values.    It's blind and aimless, just as Schopenhauer alleges.   But that doesn't mean that we have to be.  Does it?