24 April 2008

Disjunctivism, Skepticism, and Why I Shouldn't Start Writing Things at One AM

McDowell has a new article out, in the collection Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge. The title of the article is "The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument". It was previously delivered as a lecture in 2006. As best I can tell, there's nothing new in this article; McDowell just covers some of the same material he's discussed in his earlier writings about disjunctivism, skepticism, and transcendental arguments.

McDowell has previously been hesitant to endorse any "transcendental arguments" (since there shouldn't be a need for them if we can therapize away the worries instead), and he's generally just as hesitant here; I'm pretty sure all of the material on Stroud and TAs was already covered in "Reading McDowell". The one thing that did leap out at me is p.382, where McDowell claims that Strawson's reading of the Transcendental Deduction, or perhaps the Deduction itself, might serve as a convincing transcendental argument that any potentially self-conscious state or episode is an episode which claims objective purport. So McDowell is slightly less hesitant to endorse "transcendental arguments" than he has been in times past, but only slightly, and he doesn't actually offer any arguments of his own under that banner, but merely points to the work of others.

The meat of the article is devoted to continuing an argument with Crispin Wright about perceptual skepticism. It all read like stuff I've read before.

I've wasted several hours puzzling over Wright's response, rather than sleeping. I now have a headache. 2400 words worth of dreck about Wright and disjunctivism are hidden behind Rena.

I just don't get Crispin Wright's response. It seems to be as wrong as anything can be; he seems to totally miss how the disjunctive view is supposed to answer perceptual skepticism.

What could make someone want to say something like this, from Wright's response to McDowell: "There is surely no plausibility whatever in the thought that the mere perceptual apprehension of the hand in front of my face is all it takes to put me in position rationally to claim knowledge that it is there." (Emphasis his; I'm not sure what the emphasis is there for. Wright seems to have some pretty crazy ideas about what being "rational" demands, or perhaps he means something remarkable by "claim". In any case I don't know why his emphasis stops short of "knowledge"; it doesn't seem like a publisher's error, since I'm going off of the draft, which was presumably from Wright's own fingers.)

Wright doesn't think it's rational to claim that I know I have hands, when I can see my hands in front of me. He claims that Moore's argument is question-begging, but he seems to hold that it isn't even valid.

Wright repeatedly treats the "disjunctive view" as if it meant that the object of one's perception is the disjunction "p or the-mere-appearance-that-p" -- as if this was the information conveyed by a perception that p, on the disjunctive view. But this is just what the disjunctive view denies. On the disjunctive view, the "highest common factor" is not a possible object of perception; only the disjuncts separately are. I can see a barn, or I can see a fake barn; I can't see either-a-barn-or-a-fake-barn. I might, on reflection, withhold judgement about which of the two I saw, but this would not be to judge that I had seen a third thing, the disjunction of the two. I saw the one, or I saw the other; I am warranted in holding that I saw one of them, and have no grounds for holding that I saw the other. To withhold judgement on which is which may or may not be justifiable, depending on what else one holds true. This is unlike the "highest common factor" view, wherein any inference from what I perceive to what is the case is groundless and without warrant.

If I take myself to have seen a barn, then I'm either entitled (non-defeasibly) to the claim that There's a barn over there, or I am wrong about what I take myself to have seen. And the same holds with the fake barn: If I take myself to have seen an illusory barn, then I am either entitled to the claim that I apprehend the mere shade of a barn there or I'm wrong about what I've taken myself to have seen. In either case, if I saw what I took myself to have seen, then it does follow that what I've seen is the case, and Wright's skeptic is refuted. If what I took to be the case is not, in fact, the case, then I was wrong about what I was entitled to hold. But this is not a case of a defeasible claim being abandoned as more information comes to light; if I was wrong about what it was I saw, then I never had any entitlement to the claim I took myself to be entitled to -- not even a defeasible one. If I take myself to have seen a barn, and what I actually saw was something else (or just a hallucination), then I was flat wrong. I never had even defeasible warrant for my claim, and so there's no warrant that I could be abandoning when it comes to light that I was wrong about the barn. But if the skeptic wants to suppose that all of my perceptual judgements are false (and so any entitlements I ascribe to myself are in error), then this clearly begs the question in favor of the skeptic. If I am wrong about practically everything I take myself to know, then I'll grant that I'm also wrong about what I take to be entailed by what I know. But Wright's skeptic gives me no reason to think that I am wrong about everything I take to be the case by way of perception. Hence if I take myself to have seen various things, and I am right about some of them, the skeptic is defeated. If I am wrong about all of them, then the skeptic's conclusion is true, but he has provided no reason to believe that it is so. If I withhold judgement on all of my perceptions, refusing to either believe that they are veridical or that they are illusory, then Wright's skeptic is correct: I don't know if I've ever perceived anything. But this is trivially true, since knowledge that p requires belief that p; if I refuse to believe all my purportedly perceptual claims, then I can't know anything that way, either. But no argument is given for why I oughtn't to trust my senses, since on the disjunctive view my senses provide me with opportunities to gain warranted knowledge of how things stand, in some cases. Thus, on the disjunctive picture of perception, whatever the position I take with respect to my purported percepts, Wright's skeptical argument does not go through.

Wright writes: "Direct awareness of states of affairs that make P true is one thing; warranted belief that P, for one fully apprised of what it takes for P to be true, is something else. One plausible additional necessary condition for the latter..." and then goes on to some blather about "responsibility" and "rationality". But this just shows that he rejects the disjunctive picture of experience. For the disjunctivist, the only additional "necessary condition" for warranted belief that p, if I have been made directly aware that p, is that I believe that what I intuit is actually how things stand in the world.

Wright considers a hypothetical in which there is a 50-50 chance he is hallucinating that there is a cricket match going on, and claims that in this scenario he is neither justified in claiming that there is a cricket match going on, nor does he know same, and neither can he say the opposite. But there seems to simply be no argument for this conclusion; it is simply called "irrational" to reason otherwise. But I am inclined to say that Wright would be perfectly justified in claiming (even claiming to know) that there is a cricket match going on in such a scenario; it is just that there are even odds that he would be wrong about this. And I'd say the same about his right to claim that he's hallucinating that there is a cricket match going on. If he wants to withhold judgement on the matter, this also strikes me as rational, given that nothing great rides on whether or not there is a cricket match going on -- in this case he will have failed to gain some bit of knowledge which he was entitled to, but he has also avoided gaining a false belief that he might have been lead to hold. None of these three options strike me as more or less rational than the others, given only the details Wright gives us; he seems to be afraid of gambling, lest he possibly be in error. Wright claims that only the third option is rational, but I can't find an argument for this conclusion, unless it's simply supposed to be that perception rests on a defeasible inference, and in this situation it is so defeased, and so the inference would be a bad one. Which, again, would simply be to reject the disjunctivist picture without argument; for the disjunctivist there is no inference involved in perceiving that p.

Wright occasionally states the disjunctive position correctly, but then immediately goes on to act as if the "phenomenal state" common to the two disjuncts was all that was actually perceived. Which is just to go back to a "highest common factor" view. From the close of Wright's paper: "It is the supposedly possible phenomenology of subjective indistinguishability, rather than a supposed "highest common factor", that is at the base of the problem." Wright seems unaware that treating this "possible phenomenology of subjective indistinguishability" as an object of perception is just what the disjunctivist calls the "highest common factor view"! No doubt, the disjunctive view is not a helpful way to dissolve skepticism, if it doesn't exclude the view it was designed to oppose.

On the disjunctivist picture, in perception I am either given that this is how things are or I am not given anything. Wright occasionally claims that to be justified in holding that I have been given that p, I must be able to justify that I am able to be given things in the manner I regard myself as having been given the fact that p -- if I hold myself to have sensed that p, I must be warranted in trusting my senses. But this inference is trivially available to the disjunctivist: if I am given an indefeasible reason to hold that I perceive that p, then the inference to I can perceive things is banal. Hence Wright's skeptical arguments fail on this front, too. They give the disjunctivist no reason to doubt that he has perceived that many things are the case which are the case, and that his so perceiving them justifies his beliefs that that is how things are.

Wright's reply in this volume is the first piece of his I've actually forced myself through, all the way to the end. His style grates on me, and his arguments just seem bad. I've never found "fake barn country" scenarios to lead my intuitions in the way they are intended to; if I see one barn and am fooled a hundred times in addition, then I want to say I saw one barn, and was fooled a hundred times in addition. If I am then told that I passed a hundred fakes, along with a solitary real barn, then I would be inclined to suspend judgement on which of my many perceptual beliefs vis-a-vis barns were true, and which false. But I would know that one of them was true, if I thought I'd seen a hundred and one barns, and there were only a hundred fakes. The moral I am supposed to draw from this story is that I didn't know that I saw any barns, including the one that I know that I saw. But I did know (in one of the 101 cases) that I saw a barn, before I distanced myself from the judgement. If I reverse this distancing, and hold that all of the things I saw were barns, then I will be wrong many times, and right once. The many errors do not detract from the one success, though they might make it harder to take advantage of the knowledge.

Wright applies his "I am in position rationally to claim that" operator incorrectly on page 12. Line I should become "I am either in position rationally to claim knowledge that I am perceiving a hand in front of my face or I am in position rationally to claim knowledge that I am in some kind of delusional state of that phenomenal character", if it is to represent something a disjunctivist would take themselves to be entitled to if they (seem to) see a hand in front of their face. If Wright had applied his invented operator in this manner, then it would be easy to see how II followed from I: Depending on how the world is, one or the other of the disjuncts will be true. If it's the first then II follows, if it isn't then it doesn't. This consequence relation is a matter which is independent of whatever I know or take myself to know, and so there is no question of whether or not I am warranted in believing it to hold; if I have a hand in front of my face and I perceive that this is so, then my rational credentials are impeccable.

I suspect that all of the above may be the wrong tack to take in handling this issue.

I am mystified by Wright's "Cartesian Dreaming Argument" in his paper's appendix. The conclusion of the argument does not strike me as more paradoxical than its first premise, so I don't see the point of the formalisms at all.

"To get empirical evidence you have to carry out some empirical procedure." This strikes me as false. I do not carry out any "empirical procedure" to perceive things; I simply see them. I don't do anything to see them; experience is "forced upon me". Wright uses this claim, along with the claim that "it is plausible that the evidence produced by such a procedure may not rationally be regarded as any stronger than one's independent evidence that the procedure was carried out competently and with due diligence — and hence that it was carried out at all" to argue that I'm not warranted in believing that I'm not dreaming. I don't know what it would mean to perceive "competently and with due diligence". But that doesn't seem to matter, for the passage continues

Dreaming excludes the genuine execution of empirical procedures. Hence the strength of warrant generated by executing such a procedure is rationally limited by the strength of one's independent warrant that one did not dream its execution! Hence no such procedure can generate a warrant that one is not (fully lucidly and coherently) dreaming.
Which is to say, if I want to claim that I saw a hand, I need independent warrant for the claim that I can see. Given that this would apply to every other claim I make to being gained through sight, this strikes me as entirely implausible, unless I can bootstrap my way up by using "I see a chair" to warrant trusting the senses that tell me that I see a desk, and then vice-versa. Which doesn't sound like what Wright is demanding claiming is plausible about warrant. I suspect Wright is trying to rule out responses like Putnam's response to brain-in-a-vat stories: I can see that p; I could not see that p if I were dreaming (or otherwise out of touch with reality); ergo I am not dreaming (or otherwise out of touch with reality). Which strikes me as a perfectly fine way to respond to brain-in-a-vat stories.

I suspect that the only points of substance in this post are my response to "fake barn country" scenarios and my attempt to give a disjunctivist's view of Wright's double blind test. These are the parts of the post I like least.

18 April 2008

how does i can read last page

Finally getting around to reading Murray's paper on McDowell and "second nature" from a little while back; the one Currence liked so much. It's a draft, and sadly one of the things Murray hadn't gotten around to was including a bibliography.

**edit: I really need to sleep. I somehow failed to scroll all the way to the last page, where there is a bibliography. The quote I couldn't locate is from "Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind", which I have as being from 2004. I'm leaving this post up anyway, because I went through the trouble of including content at the end and I'm not letting it go to waste!!1**

I'm not having any luck finding where this quotation is from:

She [Millikan] argues that ‘the biological sciences, including physiology and psychology, are distinguished from the physical sciences by their interest not in lawful happenings…but in biologically proper happenings ’ (‘White Queen Psychology,’ p. 362). But this does not remove the biological, as she
conceives of it, from what I introduced as the realm of law: it is just that the relevant laws are underwritten by considerations about proper function, rather than inductively based on what actually happens. We still have the contrast with the space of reasons. (McDowell 1999:294, fn. 28)

I've checked all of McDowell's work from 1999, according to Wikipedia, and none of it includes a page 294. Millikan's book isn't mentioned in "Having The World In View", so it isn't from there, either. Google is also unable to find it.

Any help?

I'd like to see the context for this quote; it reminds me a lot of Davidson's "Three Varieties of Knowledge", wherein Davidson has to clarify (against Dummett) that the "anomalism of the mental" is different in kind from the "anomalism" of the special sciences. The special sciences, such as geology, can deal in laws only if they include ceteris paribus clauses; these "loose" geological laws are likewise irreducible to strict physical laws. But it hardly makes sense to claim that geological phenomena are "free". Butt Davidson claims that the anomalism of the mental allows for mental phenomena to be considered free, to be considered autonomous. So Davidson has to clarify how anomalous monism can "make room for freedom" in the way that he claimed it did.

Davidson says that his point was not just that there can be no strict mental laws, but that our knowledge of our own and others' minds, of "I and Thou"*, could not even in principle be replaced with knowledge of lawful happenings, even if the relevant laws contain ceteris paribus clauses. This is not the case with geological phenomena, where shifting from (say) talk of plate tectonics to talk of the various relations of force in which plates stand to one another, from geology-talk to physics-talk, needn't defeat one's purposes in talking about the plates. To try to abandon talk of our own and others' minds for talk of (loosely law-like) psychological phenomena would, however, leave us unable to carry on as we do. Our talk of beliefs, desires, etc is not talk of anything which is amenable to subsumption under laws. (I do not think Rorty ever grasps this aspect of Davidson; see his review of "Mind and World", which takes the form of a commentary on Davidson's "Mental Events" and "Three Varieties of Knowledge", for a clear illustration of this. Rorty's compatibilism seems closer to Hume's than to Davidson's.)

*I'm hoping that the Buber reference will help make clear the sense in which "psychological phenomena" are something treatable by the nomothetical sciences and the sense in which they are not. Davidson does allow for "loose" psychological laws, and even psychophysical laws; he simply thinks that nothing of this sort could replace our ordinary way of talking about the propositional attitudes & their cohorts. When I speak of our knowledge of our own minds and of the minds of others, I mean only this latter sort; there is probably a better way to phrase this, but I am tired and really want to know where that reference is from.

16 April 2008

I like C.I. Lewis

I read "A Pragmatic Conception of the a priori" for the first time the other day, and it's fantastic. If one wants to retain the a priori/a posteriori distinction, I think Lewis does a wonderful job of showing how to do it. (The retained distinction will, of course, be unable to play the (bad) metaphysical role it has been called in to do in times past.) I really find nothing to object to in this paper: so long as one is not troubled by the idea that what is "held true no matter what" might also be rejected at some future point, I think it is a thoroughly splendid essay, especially for something so short.

In the interview which was reprinted at the end of "Problems of Rationality", Davidson says that he thinks Quine and C.I. Lewis were closer than Quine recognized: "The explanation for that is that Quine had no training in philosophy [when he encountered Lewis at Harvard] and so when he took Lewis's course in epistemology, he took it for granted that this was what everyone knows about epistemology.... I don't think he realized any of this, but you can find most of Quine's epistemology in C.I. Lewis minus the analytic-synthetic distinction. Epistemology naturalized was very close to the heart of C.I. Lewis. I don't think Quine knows the extent to which there really is a sequence that starts with Kant and goes through C.I. Lewis and ends with Quine."

I would add that C.I. Lewis does not appear to suffer from Quine's scientism, and he certainly doesn't have the weird fetish for classical logic that Quine does. And at least in "A Pragmatic Conception of the a priori", the analytic/synthetic distinction seems to be doing nothing objectionable (it passes largely without comment, and plays no essential role in the paper). Which makes Quine a lesser version of C.I. Lewis.

I almost don't want to read "Mind and the World Order", just in case it's not as good as this essay was.

13 April 2008

On the very idea of blegging for a paper

Forster has a paper titled "On the Very Idea of Denying the Existence of Radically Different Conceptual Schemes" (Inquiry, Volume 41, Issue 2 June 1998 , pages 133 – 185). I would like to read it, but my UT library account is unable to hook me up with a copy; this isn't the first time something's been published in Inquiry which I should like to read, but am not able to.

It has occurred to me that talk of "different conceptual schemes" can be harmless, if sundered from the scheme-content dualism. If two different people (or groups, or cultures) act differently enough, then there's no reason to deny that they get around in the world in different ways, that they conceive of things differently -- that they have different concepts. Rejection of the scheme-content dualism in no way prohibits this; the problem lies not in "conceptual schemes" but in the way these schemes were supposed to "latch on" to the world; the dualism, and not either pole, was the problem.

I do think there are certain families of concepts which anyone who has the ability to communicate must possess -- notions of self, other, belief, truth, etc. -- for basically Davidsonian reasons. But these needn't be identical concepts for all speakers; so long as something in a speaker's practices is able to play the role of distinguishing truth from (mere) belief, the way things are from the way so-and-so holds them to be, all is in good order. And this is a general enough sort of demand that I should imagine very different sorts of practices might suffice to satisfy it. The Davidsonian demand is an externalist one, not an internalist one -- to be a speaker, one must be able to do certain sorts of things, but one needn't necessarily recognize that what one is doing is (e.g.) distinguishing truth from belief. There is no stock of "pure" concepts which all conceptual schemes must have in common, which anyone must possess to be able to think; practices can vary widely, and concepts will vary along with them. And yet all conceptual schemes will have certain family resemblances -- they will all be concepts used by speakers, thinkers, willing agents who act to make things more agreeable to themselves etc. (I am honestly not satisfied with anything I say about "pure" concepts; I cannot seem to find the right words for what I want to say about them, and this leads me to suspect I'm not sure what I want to say about them in the first place.)

I think that incommensurability-talk can be salvaged to an extent; two speakers might be unable to understand one another, despite both being understood by a third speaker. This would be a relative sort of incommensurability, as opposed to an absolute one; it looks to the conceptual repertoire of a particular speaker at a particular moment, rather than something broader. Without learning to cope with one another differently, the two will be unable to understand one another. If the necessary change in coping seems sufficiently difficult, if the mutual incomprehension seems sufficiently resilient to attempts to dissolve it, then talk of "incommensurable conceptual schemes" starts to seem attractive. Of course they might still come to understand one another; there is nothing prohibiting the dropping of old concepts and the taking up of new, or the revision of old concepts in light of new circumstances. The only thing that can bring the hermeneutical circle to a stop is the death of the hermeneut(s). This is all in keeping with Davidson; he has no objection to schemes which can be "calibrated", sentences which are in principle translatable, though they are presently impenetrable. I take this to be the truth of his claim towards the end of "On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" that we ought not to "announce the glorious news that all mankind -- all speakers of language, at least -- share a common scheme and ontology." Understanding does not come this easily; but, contra certain sorts of incommensurability-talk, neither is it impossible.

An aside: I am reading Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for the first time; I'm fifty pages in now. So far, no surprises. One thing that I am keeping an eye open for is how Kuhn demarcates paradigms; as entities, they seem fishy to me. Kuhn's "normal science" is too smooth; it seems idealized. I suspect that a "paradigm" is just an idealization, too -- as it were, the tutelary angel of a normal-scientific practice. Revolutions might then be the same sorts of disputes which occurs in normal science, only they are more intense; they are disputes sufficient to make an idealized picture cease to seem applicable (the fall of a paradigm), whereas normal disputes are able to go on without the general picture appearing to shift. (These are all very speculative thoughts, obviously, and I ought to finish the book before I worry too much about these big-picture notions in it. But "normal science" just seems too sanguine to be human.)

Chicago and Becoming-Emo











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