Metathought

Back Again

2005-05-18T23:10:00.000-04:00

It's been a good long while. I thought on Monday that I'd come up with a new form of disjunctivism about perception, but it turned out that I was making a use/mention error. (Frankly, I'm rather inclinded to believe Michael Thau's Consciousness and Cognition's theory that most philosophical errors are versions of missing the use/mention distinction.) Indeed I think metaethics is more my topic than the troublesome philosophy of perception... Sylvia and I are getting along well these days, again. I've explained to her some basics about anti-realism and realism and she's very into it. It seems she thinks projectivism is the best bet, but thinks it's a pretty depressing view of the world. She says this makes it sound more true.

Confessions of a Realist

2005-05-14T14:17:00.000-04:00

Some of you might have noted a realist taint to some of my blogs. Well when it comes to ontology, my house has many rooms. But like in the White House one has to pay a lot to get face time. That is, certain realities are more significant than others. Take for instance the existence of a timeslice of me now and Elizabeth Anscombe in 1943. Much as it dissapoints me, there is very little significance to this nonetheless real thing. Moreover I do not limit my ontological leniancy to mereology, I am perfectly willing to countenance both universals, functions, numbers, sets, values, etc. The question which I propose we should focus on is not whether the "are out there" but rather what they can do for us. Universals, for instance, can do good work. On the other hand trying to get a an arbitrary mereological sum to mow the lawn has never worked for me. Note, however, my pragmatism does not link existence and usefuleness, rather I link usefulness and usefulness.

I hope this isn't too obscure. As Alex suggests I have have been taking some pills lately (though they are not labelled "stupid pills"). They are partly for philsophical interest and partly for my insomnia and sense of total worthlessness in the face of the astounding number of great papers coming out every day in major journals. Anyway, these pills have made me a little overexcited, I think... But Zane tells me that will wear off soon. They really do bring home to me the real closeness of the psycho-physical nexus, though.

Put This in Your Pipe and Smoke It

2005-05-12T00:32:00.000-04:00

Many like Jackson seem to think that proper names and natural kind terms are disguised descriptions. Well, maybe descriptions are disguised names instead. After all, there are these in between descriptive names: like "The Man Who Saved the World". Maybe most descriptions are really like that. It's just that each time we create a description we have a new baptismal event. Non-referring descriptions? the Wittgensteinian interlocuter queries. Well these are no more trouble than non-referring names, which there is much to say about. Attributive descriptions? Perhaps they merely refer to non-standard individuals, or collections of counterparts.

I know this requires a bit more work, but I think I'll save that for the real paper.

Yours truly,

The Blogmaster

A Common Bias of Uniformity

2005-05-11T01:19:00.000-04:00

Paul Benacerraf in Mathematical Truth suggests that a semantic theory should be uniform for both mathematical discourse and everyday discourse. His idea, as I remember it, is that if we think of reference and satisfaction applying to talk of ordinary objects then we should think of them as applying to mathematical objects also. So that we should think of number terms as referential terms (at least if we think of ordinary terms as referential). I don't know much about the philosophy of math---take a look at Antimeta for some cutting edge stuff though--but I've often wondered how general such a claim should be--i.e. how much we should read ontology off surface grammar. Now I know, this isn't exactly the most original thought in the world--Quine, Carnap and all that. But my specific question is this: why should we expect a semantic theory to be uniform across different chunks of discourse. I mean I've always thought that there's one theory of truth for talk about chairs and tables and another one for talk about, say literature. For instance, when I talk about wine with some of my buddy's I tend to think that what determines the truth of what we say is very different--if equally objective--than what does when we talk about say where tables and chairs are (something we rarely do). Now I understand various ways one might get at a general worry about ontology and all that, but it doesn't seem like the idea that there has to be a uniform theory of meaning (or reference, or truth) is a very good one. In fact, I think every time one broaches a new subject the best thing to say about what the theory of truth is changes. Philosophical analysis is supposed to be the attempt at making the best sense of how we think about things--why the bias towards uniform accounts. And don't give me that science is uniform stuff. Science seems to me about as uniform as the contents of a typical issue of the Philosophical Review, think of the worlds apart between comp sci, quantum mechanics, evolutionary psychology et cetera. Well, I better let this go...

Intellectuals Today?

2005-05-10T12:38:00.000-04:00

Having glanced through Richard Posner's book on public intellectuals, I've started to wonder about a less complex topic: what makes an intellectual? Back in the mid twentieth century I suppose it was being up on Freud, knowing about relativity, reading novelists like John Updike, being able to pass muster on Kuhn and so on. But what is it now? Surely, Freud is out, despite some excellent attempts at revival. Likewise, John Updike is a bit dated, and Kuhn is really over. So what does one need to know about to be an intellectual? Maybe, I just don't know because I'm not one. I'd like to think one has to at least have a passing familiarity with possible worlds semantics, but apparently outside of philosophy circles, this is not so widespread. So, what are the hot current theories and books one needs to know to pass muster as an intellectual? Zane suggests Foucault, but clearly continental philosophy is dead too. Indeed apparently even in France analytic philosophy is gaining a serious foothold. So, I'm starting to think that the age when there were a few hot sociological/philosophical theories that everybody needed to know about is over. But maybe this is a good thing. Maybe as Scott Soames suggests in his history of twentieth century philosophy, the age of specialization has taken over, and big general theories just aren't so important any more...

Still does anyone know what novels one should read, or is the age of novels over too?

Private Property

2005-05-06T19:52:00.000-04:00

I have to say, I quite like the idea of private properties--by which I
mean, unique qualitative essences which are sometimes called
haeceities. Most metaphysicians tend to be down on them for some
reason--that is they might accept that there are primitive thisnesses,
but not accept that they get their thisness by being unique qualitative
essences. For me though, the only way one gets a thisness is by having
a unique qualitative essence, i.e. to instantiate some universal
property, which, as it happens nothing but you can instantiate. I call
mine "Fred". Since it's not an essential aspect of Fred that it be
instantiated only in me, but merely a contingent fact, this leads me to
hypothesis about my favorite possible worlds: one where all of space
and time is filled with nothing but Fred-instantiations. No, just
kidding, I'm not really such an ego-maniac. My favorite possible world
actually is more along the lines of Herman Hesse's glass bead game, but
with less eastern nonsense.

Paradox Postponed

2005-05-05T00:51:00.000-04:00

I've never thought up a paradox. I think almonst any philosopher worth his salt has thought up a paradox or two. I'm in my mid-thirties now and I haven't ever had a paradoxical thought. Maybe there's some variation of Russell's paradox for meta-ethics. Like suppose everyone who doesn't make their own values gets their values from God... Well it's not really a different paradox from Russell's. So, anyway, I want to think up a paradox but I don't know how. I've tried tweaking other's paradoxs. I've tried thinking really hard about hard problems. When I was in college I tried hallucinigens but that didn't worked either. What can I do?

Summer Planning

2005-05-02T22:59:00.000-04:00

I was thinking today about my summer plans. The semesters winding down
and one can almost imagine the warm, humid summer months with open
hours free from meetings and teaching and nonsense in which to try to
buckle down and actually write out some of my ideas. Of course, after
this thought comes into my head, I immediately remember that I still
have an exam to write, and people to meet, etc. Still, I thought I'd
use the blog as a little workspace to plan the first half of my summer

June: A) Work on my new project: The Metaphysics of Moral Emotions
B) rewrite an old paper on chance and rational choice theory.
July: A)Catch up on the contextualism literature, lots of exciting
stuff I havent read like Keith DeRose's latest
addition.
B) Maybe also think about knowing-how versus knowing that.
C) Think about some problems about material constitution and beliefs
(i.e. is there a determinate number of beliefs in the head at one time,
or is it indeterminate. how does this relate to the statue and the clay
problems)

Well, still got some time before the fun starts...

Matt's Theory of Time

2005-04-29T00:24:00.000-04:00

Matt does ancient philosophy, but is nevertheless a pretty good guy.
Unlike me, he's got a tenure-track position, so I'm a bit envious of
him. He's got this idea about time which I've never quite got. The
idea is that while space is purely relational, temporal relations are
actually physically present. I don't do philosophy of physics, but
somehow this doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, time can't be
substantival if space is. After all isn't our whole grasp on what's
substantival based on the idea of substantival SPACE? I tried to
explain this to him, but he doesn't seem to get it.

philosophy after hours

2005-04-27T01:54:00.000-04:00

so after a hard night's drinking with Zane and Matt--more about the
latter to come--here's a late night's blog entry.

values are real. moral emotions are relations to values. sometimes,
though, its tough to relate to values in the right way, especially when
one's mind is related to things like sylvia. nonetheless, one can,
through the right sorts of thought, relate to values in the right way.

okay, sleep for me now.

Externalism and Attraction

2005-04-25T16:20:00.000-04:00

Well, the truth about my not blogging last weeks isn't what I said in
my last post, that I'd been busy grading papers--though, I had been
quite busy grading papers (p.s. I just found about the difference
between "quite" in British English, where it de-emphasizes, and
American English, where it emphasizes---incredible!). The truth is I'd
been thinking about the header comment. The truth is things didn't
quite work out with Sylvia (American sense), and that's had me down for
awhile. Like all the hurdles one reaches in life, however, it's made
me reflect, and reflection is my job, so it makes me do my job better.
What I've been reflecting on is what attraction consists of.
Internalists, are, of course, tempted to say it is just a state of
mind. So it is just the emotions I feel when I drink a nice Pinot and
think about her. ( And wow, is a nice Pinot nice!--thanks to Sideways
for letting out the secret of California's best grape!) This
comforting thought, which got me through the end of my last
relationship, no longer seems true to me. Sylvia is a part of my
thought. I may be able to get her out of my head, but she is
constitutive of my mental. Externalism about the mental, while it may
make epistemology a little easier, certainly makes the romantic life a
bit harder.

Well, this blog is getting to be a bit more sappy than I intended
I've actually pretty much recovered from that little burst of
post-romantic melancholy and am back in the game, philosophically
speaking. In fact, at a colloqium on rights yesterday I mopped the
floor with a few questions about the relationship between persons and
their desires.

pace Wittgenstein

2005-04-24T20:46:00.000-04:00

I've been away for awhile, mostly doing some grading. Recently, I've
been thinking a lot about Wittgensteinian philosophical methodology.
I'm certainly no Wittgenstein scholar, but, like many philosophers, I
often think about whether our business is more about solving puzzles
that in certain lights should never have arised--shewing the fly out of
the fly-bottle--or rather than tracking substantive new areas of
knowledge. My thought is that philosophy is neither one nor the other.
Rather certain areas--say for instance certain parts of philosophy of
language (say the discussion of truth) are Wittgensteinian areas
whereas others like, say, the discussion of free-will or knowledge,
involve substantive discoveries sometimes. This doesn't make
philosophy much different from other disciplines, where some issues are
just conceptual disputes and some involve substantive new discoveries.
So I don't think we should be concerned that there is anything
particularly fly-bottlish about philosophy.

Dinner

2005-04-19T22:25:00.000-04:00

Sylvia and I went somewhere more respectable this time, a local mexican place with some serious charm. I had thought before of explaining to her that there was no philosopically respectable view which reconciled the naive conception of human agency with the basic facts about our material being, and that even denying determinism by quantum mechanics was of little help. But, thinking better of it, I decided that all this could do was throw her, like me, into a depression from which there was no escape. So instead, we talked again about virtue ethics. I wonder if one is morally obliged to cite one sources in conversations with non-philosophers. I think I may have (unintentionally!) given Sylvia the idea had thought up the whole idea of virtue ethics myself.

Analytic Philosophy Meets Freud

2005-04-17T20:26:00.000-04:00

As I said I was in Toronto this weekend for a conference and happened to see Jonathan Lear give a talk at the Plato and the Divided Soul conference. It's wonderful to see the techniques of analytic philosophy applied to such basic questions as "how we should live?" and "how can mere talk help us be better people?" Lear began by posing the very deep of how a "conversation" can make structural change to the soul. He gave quite a spectacular answer, though there was so much Plato, psychoanalysis and subtle analytic probing involved that I can't quite reconstruct it. The picture I got from him was that both Plato and Freud saw the soul as structured into different parts (i.e. the famous tri-partite soul from Plato and Freud's Ego, Superego, and Id (which Lear charmingly compared to Cookie-Monster). The question is how mere talk can affect serious change to the soul. As I understand it he was really asking the fundamental question of how we as philosophers by our mere "talk" (which this blog is just one example of) can really change the way people think. He compared recieving words to digestion and said the question was how one form of food (i.e. conversation) could change someone's metabolism (i.e. way of taking in conversation). I was told that Lear is a psycho-analyst himself which makes him uniquely qualified to discuss a "talking cure", I guess.

I have to say, though, I'm somewhat skeptical of all this soul-talk. I mean, I've learned my lessons from Fodor and Putnam on reductionism about the mental (i.e. that it's bad). But still, I can't help thinking that these divided souls/minds of Plato and Freud with their automous parts battling it out is going a bit far...

Sylvia (mentioned here), and I are having dinner again tomorrow, and she told me that I must tell her all about the problem of free will... If anybody has on any advice on the best way to approach topic in an engaging way with a bright philosophical novice, I'm all ears.

Away

2005-04-16T11:27:00.000-04:00

In Toronto where I just saw a terrific talk by Jonathan Lear. More on that when I get a chance.

What Accounts for Progress?

2005-04-14T12:50:00.001-04:00

At the end of Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit makes some very poignant comments about the development of moral philosophy. (I’m not sure why I keep talking about this book I haven’t read it in years and don’t even work on Ethics. Indeed, I lent my last copy to my ex-girlfriend who lost it promptly after deciding not to read it.). He claims, though, that owing to the domination of ethical thought by religion there has been little opportunity for ethical theory to advance. Freed from this constraint there has been a real rise in our understanding of the ethical predicament of contemporary times. Indeed with some hard-headed thinking and a few rhetorical flourishes, a new breed of ethical philosophers could change the face of Western ethical thought. (In fact Parfit suggests, I seem to recall, that the East is already ahead of us in its understanding of personal non-identity.)

Metaphysics and epistemology has bloomed as much as moral philosophy has in the twentieth century--if not more!, but not because of the decline of religious influence. Indeed it’s widely acknowledged that since Descartes the place of Theistic beliefs in M&E has been relatively minor. So what explains the twentieth century blooming of metaphysics and epistemology (broadly conceived to include the philosophy of language)? You might think I'm wrong here but, I challenge anyone to argue that M&E didn't bloom in the second half of the 20th century: just think about the sophistication of current debates on such topics as causation, knowledge, possibilia, logical form, temporal parts, laws etc.

I think the simple claim is answer that there are more good philosophers than ever, and that this applies to moral philosophy also. The truth is that the problems are just really tough and require a lot of great minds not just a few. Of course, the social support structure of the university, communication about ideas also helps, but I think the big improvement isn’t the decline of religious thinking but just the increase in numbers. If we can multiply even further, perhaps even the problem of free will or the surprise exam will be mere curiosity pieces.

Beliefs

2005-04-13T16:09:00.000-04:00

It's an occupational hazard that one comes out of the process of inquiry holding many beliefs on topics one did not have beliefs on before:

Examples:

Numbers exist.
Beings are composed of temporal parts.
Pereception is simply becoming aware of facts.
Counterfactuals involve what is true at the nearest possible world.

I often wonder what to do with these beliefs, however. Clearly one can write about them and various implications they may have in professional context. But what about the old Socratic question, how should one live one's life? I'd like to think that philosophy teaches one a respect for truth and accuracy. However, these seem to be very outdated things these days.

Just a thought experiment....

2005-04-12T23:24:00.000-04:00

As I,mentioned in the last post, Zane, my friend and colleague from the English department has been reading Parfit lately. We had a drink this evening...

Zane: Why would someone want to reproduce assexually using Star Trek technology? You know I'm not a Freudian, but some times these things are just too obvious.
Simeon: He doesn't want to reproduce assexually it's just a thought experiment.
Zane: Yeah, just like Oedipus Rex was a Sophocles's 'thought experiment' about sleeping with your mother and killing your father...

Now he wants to know what other twentieth-century philosophy to read. Says it's like primitive art or something... I hope he doesn't get wind of the fat man in front of the trolley case or the rapist's pleasure objection to utilitarianism. Not to mention Jim and the Indians... (perhaps native-americans would have been more sensitive)

This Blog Title

2005-04-12T22:37:00.000-04:00

I've been wondering today whether this blog should really be called metathought. I haven't really had many thoughts about thoughts lately. I think rather the purpose of this blog is to analyze the role of philosophy in A) contemporary intellectual life, and, well, B) my personal life. It is deal with the intrinsic difficulty of reconciling pure thought with well the realities of a complex and difficult world. So perhaps the blog should be called metaphilosophy, but, frankly, that sounds too post-modern. I'm not really interested in the self-conscious reflection on philosophy per se (what one might call the philosophy of philosophy) but rather simply the relation of philosophy to other thing. But no name can quite capture that in a very pithy way, so I may as well stick with metathought. After all it is a form of talking about a form of thought, so it is one partiuclar form of metathought, or perhaps metapractice as really philosophy is a practice.

By the way more on Zane in a bit. Apparently our little "conversation" about the self has piqued his interest in analytic philosophy. I saw him this evening walking home with "Reasons and Persons" which he said was very "Freudian"...

The Olive Garden

2005-04-12T14:04:00.000-04:00

I’ve talked to many other philosophers about, what literary critics might call, “the other”. That is, of course, talking to non-philosophers. I mean it’s easy if you’re on some safe topic like politics or The Sopranos, but there’s only so much mileage that can be gotten from them…

Yesterday I went out with a friend (let’s call her Sylvia) to our local trattoria, the Olive Garden. (I tried to explain to Sylvia that it was partly an ironic tribute to middle america and partly because I have a deep affection for their calamari.)

After the appetizers and a couple glasses of white Sylvia asked the Question: “What exactly do you philosophers do?” Indeed. I told her of course that we try, to the best of our meager abilities, to analyze the basic nature of such things as knowledge, thought, substance, truth etc. She perked up a bit at that, having suffered from the commmon Historical Confusion--i.e. the idea that contemporary philosophers only discuss dead philosophers--and asked me to give an example.

I have to say I’d been quite looking forward to this dinner, and now I realized that the Moment of Truth had come. Could I, like Socrates or Alain de Botton, coherently relate the world of THOUGHT to LIFE and thereby win myself the affection of my own (slightly more effeminate) Alcibiades?

I decided to start out simple. I said, “Well, for example, how many things do you think are on your plate.”

She looked at me somewhat blankly and said, “Do you want me to count the fusilli?”
Simeon: Let’s just stipulate that there are 34 pieces of Fusilli on the plate.
Sylvia: Why don’t we make it easier and just stipulate that there is ONE thing on the plate, a pasta dish. (Her eyes veritably sparkled here.)
Simeon: Well, if we did that there wouldn’t be much to discuss… So let’s say, to put in a non-question begging terminology if you counted the fusilli you would count 34 pieces, whether there really are 34 pieces we’ll leave undecided.
Sylvia: Alright then there’s 35 THINGS on the plate.
Simeon: What things?
Sylvia: Well, there’s 34 pieces of pasta and then there’s the sauce.
Simeon: But didn’t you already say there was the whole pasta dish also? Shouldn’t that make it 36: 34 pieces of pasta, the sauce, and the whole dish.

She looked slightly confused but nonetheless interested. Anyway, the dinner went quite well, and I’m hoping that there will be some more philosophical conversations with Sylvia to report.

Philosophical Blogging

2005-04-12T09:01:00.000-04:00

Gillian Russell has posted an intriguing question: which great philosophers of the past had the blog-lust? Indeed it seems to me that she misses out on some obvious examples by forgetting that the public correspondances of the past were essentially blogs--so we've got to include Leibniz and Descartes and give them credit for getting non-philosophers--indeed non-philosopher royalty--to make appearances on their blogs. You don't see any European nobility contributing even to Weatherson!

But that reminds me of the question I addressed and never answered, i.e. the academic isolation of philosophy today. Before I suggested that it was perhaps just too hard--technical and specialized. Maybe so, but then lot's of other things are pretty hard--like Finnegan's Wake and Derrida--and that doesn't stop people from reading them. Since teenagers are interested in philosophy, it can't just be that people don't find philosophy interesting, like they might not find fluid mechanics very interesting. So that leaves two hypothesese: either what we do is boring or its wrong. But neither one of these is remotely plausible. Clearly I need to have my coffee.

Half-things

2005-04-11T14:37:00.000-04:00

So, I know, it's my first day with my new blog and I'm getting a little over-excited. I was reading this student's paper on Wittgenstein. He/she/it writes,

"Wittgenstein didn't think pain was nothing but he also didn't think it was something. This implies that Wittgenstein thought that there were "things" with an intermediate status between proper thinghood and proper nothinghood. I think Wittgenstein was right because my that's like that woman Schiavo was before she died."

Pretty clever for a Freshmen in my intro to analysis class, a class with smart jocks from less harsh sports (like tennis players who have a real knack for ontology--has any body else noticed that?). But I like the idea here that thoughts can be thought of as things with intermediate ontological status. It's a bit like David Lewis's naturalness by degrees. Perhaps we can think of properties (like thought-properties) that are less natural as being less ontologically real. So for instance, electrons are totally really real. But washing machines are a little less real--still very real, but a little less. You might think that's crazy, but afterall what exactly is a washing machine? For instance, which electrons belong to it rather than to the air around it (air is another not quite real thing.) So that's the Schiavo-theory of thoughts. Of course, it's just what W. says, but only if you take him literally and not try to think he was just "throwing down the ladder".

The Self

2005-04-11T14:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, in the faculty club, a colleague form an unnamed rival department in the humanities asked me if philosophers have actually had any interesting things to say about the "self". He said this with a jeering tone, as if we were too busy discussing counterfactual causation to think about the self. The food may be palatable but there's no way to avoid indigestion if one has to deal with all this sort of nonsense. I mean, does Daniel Dennett ring and bells? Does Derek Parfit or Thomas Nagel mean anything to you? Probably most of genuine insights into self-hood around are from twentieth century philosophers. I mean, did Shakespeare ever think about fission? (Not to say this colleague was from the English department...but not to deny it either.)

This led me to wonder--how come no one outside philosophy departments reads contemporary philosophy? You might think this is a bad question: after all I don't really care what the latest bit of Gertrude Stein criticism is, so why should Zane Appleby (the misguided English Professor who interrupted my pasta primavera) read any of the new J Phil (more on THAT later)? But when you think about it, while we (philosophers, that is) are not professionally obliged to concern ourselves with the intricacies of post-modernist reflections of Chaucer, they (the post-modernist Chaucer scholars, like Assistant Professor Appleby) ARE professionally obliged to have views or at least views on what views they might have on topics of current philosophical interest.

Let me explain by noting why various recent philosophical discussions are relevant to literary criticism.
1st example: the self. I mean this is pretty obvious. The kinds of main critical questions and foundational issues are exactly ones about personal identity: who is the Author? When is a fictional representation of a real person actually the real person and not just a parody of the real person, etc.
2nd example: counterfactuals and metaphysical possibility. It seems to me a like a major question in understanding what the author is trying to do is figuring out whether she/he/it is writing about an EPISTEMIC possibility or a COUNTERFACTUAL possibility. Literary critics never seem to address this question. Perhaps its because they think it's obvious that books are intended to describe counterfactual possibilities... This might be the case with MOST fiction, but isn't it possible that some authors are intending to describe a world that might be actual for all they know. This seems especially true when the work is about the future. In this case 1984 has gone from being an epistemic possibility to an epistemic impossibility.

I could go on. Some examples include, parthood, realism/anti-realism, theory of reference... Any comments of the following form are welcome: describe how a major current topic in philosophy relates (or, Zane, doesn't relate) to literary criticism.

This leaves me with the question of why, given the RELEVANCE of analytic philosophy for literary studies (not to mention other fields across the spectrum) is philosophy so unread. Maybe because it's just too hard?

Here

2005-04-11T14:10:00.000-04:00

Here I am--this is a token linguistic representation of a thought about a thought.