Dear Students
In your exam essays please remember to select examples and to evaluate (criticise) as well as describe. For example, if you were asked to "assess hard determinism", you should spend a third of the essay describing what it is, then a third giving some examples that clarify what it is and its implications, then a third on a series of coherently linked criticisms - before reaching a conclusion that clearly answers the question. You cannot score very well if you don't evaluate the arguments. You can counter-counterargue the counterarguments, of course.
Good luck. I am in school on Monday if you want to ask anything.
Saturday 30 May 2009
Tuesday 26 May 2009
Free Will Revision
Dear Students
Is anybody out there? I have added three posts to help you with Free Will and Determinism revision. Please ask questions, respond, or just grunt. Any sign of life would be welcome. Don't just read. You must make notes and put things in your own words.
Questions: Is free will compatible with determinism? What are the implications of Hard Determinism? What are the attractions and problems associated with Libertarianism?
Also, any feedback on the first exam would be welcome. I wasn't in last Friday and don't even know what the questions were.
Is anybody out there? I have added three posts to help you with Free Will and Determinism revision. Please ask questions, respond, or just grunt. Any sign of life would be welcome. Don't just read. You must make notes and put things in your own words.
Questions: Is free will compatible with determinism? What are the implications of Hard Determinism? What are the attractions and problems associated with Libertarianism?
Also, any feedback on the first exam would be welcome. I wasn't in last Friday and don't even know what the questions were.
Free Will: Implications
If we accept Hard Determinism we have to face up to some pretty serious implications. It could change the way we think about morality and personhood.
If the causes of our actions are beyond our free control, does this mean their consequences are not our responsibillity? And would this mean that we shouldn't be punished for them? Morality is about "oughts" and "shoulds", and determinism is about "coulds". We could not have acted differently, so we had no real choice. What we ought to have done, or should not have done, doesn't come into it. So is it part of Hard Determinism that morality as well as freedom is illusory? I don't blame a fallen branch for scratching my car, so why should I blame a youth who couldn't have acted other than how he did?
But we could argue that morality is compatible with determinism. We have been exposed to morality - it is part of the cultural influence on us - so it has gone into the complex mix of factors that determine our actions. Blaming and the threat of punishment are factors that our desires etc respond to and which become part of the causal process. We may resist an action as the result of a second-order desire not to want the pain of punishment or shame. This is supported by the point that we do distinguish between sane adults who restrain their basic desires and animals, children, the mentally ill, who may not. Mind you, this is not to say that punishment is actually fair, because determinism still means that ultimately your character has been formed by factors outside your control.(Although as Chris pointed out, fairness may not be a concept that we should be allowed to use if morality had been undermined by Hard Determinism.)
Even so, we may think that this unfairness is a price we have to pay for keeping society safe and orderly through our systems of morality, law and punishment. In other words, determinism forces on us a practical rather than moral justification for our social practices.
But do we want to explain morality away, as science explains magic away, so that we feel we don't need it anymore? Or do we want to insist that moral blame is ineliminable, too fundamental to get rid of? For example, would you like to see scientific defences extended in court cases to such an extent that people can be excused any crime they were "caused to commit" eg by drugs, alcohol, junk food, low self-esteem, genetic inheritance, poor upbringing, peer pressure, etc?
Would it not be dehumanising to lose the notion of holding peple responsible for their actions? Peter Strawson argues that if we can't hold people responsible for their actions, we can't think of them as objects of our "reactive attitudes" such as gratitude and resentment. You can't resent, or be grateful for, a mere mechanical reaction. To treat people as people rather than as medical cases or as machines means to respond to them with such attitudes. To treat everyone objectively, without personal feelings, would be to dehumanise them. Strawson goes so far as to argue that even if science showed that free will is an illusion, the concept of freedom or autonomy is so fundamental that we simply could not eliminate it. Proving Hard Determinism true would not change a thing. If it did, society would unravel, come apart. Do you agree with Strawson?
But it is not only morality that would be affected by Hard Determinism. It could be seen as undermining rationality too, by suggesting that actions should be explained or accounted for in terms of causes rather than reasons, intentions, purposes, etc. And moral responsibility is not the only kind. We are also considered to be responsible rationally, for our beliefs and reasoning. It is irresponsible, for example, to hold two beliefs which contradict each other.
Why are you reading this now? What kind of answer does that question expect? One in terms of the physical causes that led up to you reading this, or one in terms of your reasons? I don't care about the mechanical causes; I want to know about the rational motives. This explanation would refer to things in the future, your aims and ambitions, rather than past events. Causal explanations look backwards; they explain the how but not the why. We need to see people as rational beings, with the freedom to make considered choices, not as blind bundles of mechanical atoms.
Also, we need to see actions in a social context - in what Wittgenstein called a "form of life" - or in the context of a particular "game", with specific rules and purposes. Exactly the same body movement becomes a different action in the context of a football game from what it is in the context of a fight, and therefore it needs a different explanation, one which connects with the context, the rules and purposes. This is a rational explanation rather than a causal one. A causal explanation would be missing something.
So we have two different stances on human actions/behaviour. The Intentional Stance sees us as persons with free will, as responsible for our actions, participating in various "games" for various purposes. The Mechanical Stance sees us a bodies, subject to the laws of nature, whose behaviour can be explained in terms of causes, scientifically. The question then is: Can the Intentional Stance be eliminated. Can we reduce all rational explanations to causal, scientific ones.
Of course, desires can be seen as both reasons and causes, but a cause has a law-like status. If A causes B, A will always cause B if the circumstances are the same. So we would have to show that a certain desire was always caused by a certain brain state and that it always had the same consequences when circumstances were precisely the same. If this were possible we might be able to see desires as both causes and reasons. Both could explain my behaviour in different ways without being in competition.
The Intentional Stance is one we are likely to adopt towards any very complex system with complex mechanisms and outputs - eg organisations, some animals, computers. Not just people. So that suggests it has a useful function even when genuine freedom is not really an issue.
.
If the causes of our actions are beyond our free control, does this mean their consequences are not our responsibillity? And would this mean that we shouldn't be punished for them? Morality is about "oughts" and "shoulds", and determinism is about "coulds". We could not have acted differently, so we had no real choice. What we ought to have done, or should not have done, doesn't come into it. So is it part of Hard Determinism that morality as well as freedom is illusory? I don't blame a fallen branch for scratching my car, so why should I blame a youth who couldn't have acted other than how he did?
But we could argue that morality is compatible with determinism. We have been exposed to morality - it is part of the cultural influence on us - so it has gone into the complex mix of factors that determine our actions. Blaming and the threat of punishment are factors that our desires etc respond to and which become part of the causal process. We may resist an action as the result of a second-order desire not to want the pain of punishment or shame. This is supported by the point that we do distinguish between sane adults who restrain their basic desires and animals, children, the mentally ill, who may not. Mind you, this is not to say that punishment is actually fair, because determinism still means that ultimately your character has been formed by factors outside your control.(Although as Chris pointed out, fairness may not be a concept that we should be allowed to use if morality had been undermined by Hard Determinism.)
Even so, we may think that this unfairness is a price we have to pay for keeping society safe and orderly through our systems of morality, law and punishment. In other words, determinism forces on us a practical rather than moral justification for our social practices.
But do we want to explain morality away, as science explains magic away, so that we feel we don't need it anymore? Or do we want to insist that moral blame is ineliminable, too fundamental to get rid of? For example, would you like to see scientific defences extended in court cases to such an extent that people can be excused any crime they were "caused to commit" eg by drugs, alcohol, junk food, low self-esteem, genetic inheritance, poor upbringing, peer pressure, etc?
Would it not be dehumanising to lose the notion of holding peple responsible for their actions? Peter Strawson argues that if we can't hold people responsible for their actions, we can't think of them as objects of our "reactive attitudes" such as gratitude and resentment. You can't resent, or be grateful for, a mere mechanical reaction. To treat people as people rather than as medical cases or as machines means to respond to them with such attitudes. To treat everyone objectively, without personal feelings, would be to dehumanise them. Strawson goes so far as to argue that even if science showed that free will is an illusion, the concept of freedom or autonomy is so fundamental that we simply could not eliminate it. Proving Hard Determinism true would not change a thing. If it did, society would unravel, come apart. Do you agree with Strawson?
But it is not only morality that would be affected by Hard Determinism. It could be seen as undermining rationality too, by suggesting that actions should be explained or accounted for in terms of causes rather than reasons, intentions, purposes, etc. And moral responsibility is not the only kind. We are also considered to be responsible rationally, for our beliefs and reasoning. It is irresponsible, for example, to hold two beliefs which contradict each other.
Why are you reading this now? What kind of answer does that question expect? One in terms of the physical causes that led up to you reading this, or one in terms of your reasons? I don't care about the mechanical causes; I want to know about the rational motives. This explanation would refer to things in the future, your aims and ambitions, rather than past events. Causal explanations look backwards; they explain the how but not the why. We need to see people as rational beings, with the freedom to make considered choices, not as blind bundles of mechanical atoms.
Also, we need to see actions in a social context - in what Wittgenstein called a "form of life" - or in the context of a particular "game", with specific rules and purposes. Exactly the same body movement becomes a different action in the context of a football game from what it is in the context of a fight, and therefore it needs a different explanation, one which connects with the context, the rules and purposes. This is a rational explanation rather than a causal one. A causal explanation would be missing something.
So we have two different stances on human actions/behaviour. The Intentional Stance sees us as persons with free will, as responsible for our actions, participating in various "games" for various purposes. The Mechanical Stance sees us a bodies, subject to the laws of nature, whose behaviour can be explained in terms of causes, scientifically. The question then is: Can the Intentional Stance be eliminated. Can we reduce all rational explanations to causal, scientific ones.
Of course, desires can be seen as both reasons and causes, but a cause has a law-like status. If A causes B, A will always cause B if the circumstances are the same. So we would have to show that a certain desire was always caused by a certain brain state and that it always had the same consequences when circumstances were precisely the same. If this were possible we might be able to see desires as both causes and reasons. Both could explain my behaviour in different ways without being in competition.
The Intentional Stance is one we are likely to adopt towards any very complex system with complex mechanisms and outputs - eg organisations, some animals, computers. Not just people. So that suggests it has a useful function even when genuine freedom is not really an issue.
.
Free Will: Libertarianism and Compatibilism
There are two main challengers to Hard Determinism.
Libertarians include dualists who, like Descartes, believe the mind is a non-physical substance (spiritual) and is therfore not subject to laws of nature - it is essentially free.
The problem with this is how to account for the interaction of the physical body and the non-physical mind. If we want the mind to cause the body to behave in a particular way (eg pick up the pen), how does the mental message connect with the physical body? Through the brain? OK, but that doesn't help: the brain is still physical. Likewise, in reverse, how can bodily events (accidents) cause a mental event (pain)? Surely only two physical things or events can interact causally.
Also, there is plenty of evidence that mental events depend on the physical brain. If we damage our brains, we can lose certain mental abilities, even consciousness. Then there's the problem of God. Dualism claims the mind is non-physical, spiritiual, supernatural. This implies God, and God is omniscient, which means He must know what we are going to do in the future, which means it must already in some sense be determined, pre-destined. So there is a question mark over Dualism's ability to deliver genuine freedom.
Libertarians aren't all substance dualists, so the problems with Dualism don't affect all kinds of Libertarianism. But all kinds must put some constraints on our freedom to act, for two reasons. 1) We need to act consistently rather than totally randomly in order to have a unique character, personality, identity. 2) We need our actions to be determined, or at least influenced, by rational considerations - reasons for choosing A rather than B. You could argue that for any particular decision, there is always just one most rational option, so the more rational we are, the more we are determined (influenced) by the compulsions of rationality. Does this mean that very rational and intelligent people are in some ways less free than others?
One interesting attempt to produce a radically Libertarian philosophy was Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentionalism (1940s/50s). Our existence precedes our essence. Infact we have no essence, no essential characteristics. We choose our own natures. We are 100%responsible for our lives. We are nothingness, not confined or defined by human nature. But we suffer from "bad faith", the illusion that we are fixed, determined in various ways. We fear responsibility, we are made giddy by our freedom. Existensionalism, like all forms of Phenomenology, starts from the cogito (I think, therefore I am): what's most certain is that I exist, rather than that matter and the laws of nature exist. Our starting point should be our freedom, not physics.
The trouble with this is that most of us do feel that we have some kind of nature, some essence. When we introspect we find not only a sense of freedom but a sense of being a certain kind of person who makes decisions of certain kinds. Also, can we really ignore science and what it tells us about how we work, including our brains? If you have a brain disease, you don't go to an existentionalist.
One argument in favour of Libertarianism concerns gaps in causation. There is at least one gap in the causal chain - at the very beginning. If one, why not lots? Is the notion of uncaused events really so absurd? If not, why not free will?
Compatibilism is the other alternative to Hard Determinism. It is also known as Soft Determinism because it does not try to deny that our decisions are caused, but it claims that determinism and free will are compatible, they can co-exist. The basic idea is that for an action to be my action it has to have been caused by my desires or volitions. It is free in so far as it wasn't caused by anything outside me - I was not physically forced or constrained by another person or an outside force. I could have acted differently if my desires had been different, but they were my desires and so the action was my action, the result of my decision. My free choice, albeit one constrained by my desires, which were, of course, themselves connected to the causal chain. This accords with out common-sense notion of choice, and with our ideas about morality and moral responsibility. I must take responsible for the actions that were caused by my desires.
Problem is, what counts as constraint? Is being constrained by my desires, caused perhaps by factors of which I am unaware, really compatible with freedom? My actions derive from my desires which derive from my character which derives from my genes and upbringing, etc. Is that really freedom? It still doesn't really explain our choices - "explain" in the sense not of "accounting for" but in the sense of "justifying". We want rational explanations, not causal ones, based on our thinking not our bodily processes. A rational explanation would provide the right kind of constraint. We would do the same thing again because we would make the same rational choice again because it was the right choice in the first place. Being a rational person means not being wobbly in our decision-making, but also being free to make bad decisions too.
So it is not clear than Compatibilism gives us what we really want. We want a theory that can account for our sense that we can rationally over-ride our desires, etc. Harry Frankfurt has proposed a theory according to which our basic "first-order" desires (eg for a cigarette) can be controlled by our "second-order" desires (not to want to want a cigarette) - by our desires about our desires. We do not have to be wanton and give in to every passing whim. We can resist the doughnut! Frankfurt says this is what free will is. This is what you are: the controlling, censoring mechanism. This theory explains why you are willing to accept a degree of pain and boredom (revison?) in order to gratify your longer term higher-order desires and purposes. We can train ourselves to ignore desires that don't fit in with our higher order desires.
Trouble is, what makes these second-order desires more you than the first-order ones? Where do they come from? Are they not just as caused (genetics, culture) as the others? The theory makes it still a matter of luck whether you can resist temptation or not. It doesn't seem to help that much with the question of moral responsibility. If someone has limited second-order control over his or her basic desires, can s/he be blamed when s/he (dangerously) gratifies them? May be the theory helps to explain our psychology a little, but it doesn't solve the philosophical issues.
So, what are you? As a human - a machine or a person with autonomy, freedom? As a philosopher - a Hard Determinist, a Libertarian or a wishy-washy Soft Determinist? Me, I'm a marshmallow.
Libertarians include dualists who, like Descartes, believe the mind is a non-physical substance (spiritual) and is therfore not subject to laws of nature - it is essentially free.
The problem with this is how to account for the interaction of the physical body and the non-physical mind. If we want the mind to cause the body to behave in a particular way (eg pick up the pen), how does the mental message connect with the physical body? Through the brain? OK, but that doesn't help: the brain is still physical. Likewise, in reverse, how can bodily events (accidents) cause a mental event (pain)? Surely only two physical things or events can interact causally.
Also, there is plenty of evidence that mental events depend on the physical brain. If we damage our brains, we can lose certain mental abilities, even consciousness. Then there's the problem of God. Dualism claims the mind is non-physical, spiritiual, supernatural. This implies God, and God is omniscient, which means He must know what we are going to do in the future, which means it must already in some sense be determined, pre-destined. So there is a question mark over Dualism's ability to deliver genuine freedom.
Libertarians aren't all substance dualists, so the problems with Dualism don't affect all kinds of Libertarianism. But all kinds must put some constraints on our freedom to act, for two reasons. 1) We need to act consistently rather than totally randomly in order to have a unique character, personality, identity. 2) We need our actions to be determined, or at least influenced, by rational considerations - reasons for choosing A rather than B. You could argue that for any particular decision, there is always just one most rational option, so the more rational we are, the more we are determined (influenced) by the compulsions of rationality. Does this mean that very rational and intelligent people are in some ways less free than others?
One interesting attempt to produce a radically Libertarian philosophy was Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentionalism (1940s/50s). Our existence precedes our essence. Infact we have no essence, no essential characteristics. We choose our own natures. We are 100%responsible for our lives. We are nothingness, not confined or defined by human nature. But we suffer from "bad faith", the illusion that we are fixed, determined in various ways. We fear responsibility, we are made giddy by our freedom. Existensionalism, like all forms of Phenomenology, starts from the cogito (I think, therefore I am): what's most certain is that I exist, rather than that matter and the laws of nature exist. Our starting point should be our freedom, not physics.
The trouble with this is that most of us do feel that we have some kind of nature, some essence. When we introspect we find not only a sense of freedom but a sense of being a certain kind of person who makes decisions of certain kinds. Also, can we really ignore science and what it tells us about how we work, including our brains? If you have a brain disease, you don't go to an existentionalist.
One argument in favour of Libertarianism concerns gaps in causation. There is at least one gap in the causal chain - at the very beginning. If one, why not lots? Is the notion of uncaused events really so absurd? If not, why not free will?
Compatibilism is the other alternative to Hard Determinism. It is also known as Soft Determinism because it does not try to deny that our decisions are caused, but it claims that determinism and free will are compatible, they can co-exist. The basic idea is that for an action to be my action it has to have been caused by my desires or volitions. It is free in so far as it wasn't caused by anything outside me - I was not physically forced or constrained by another person or an outside force. I could have acted differently if my desires had been different, but they were my desires and so the action was my action, the result of my decision. My free choice, albeit one constrained by my desires, which were, of course, themselves connected to the causal chain. This accords with out common-sense notion of choice, and with our ideas about morality and moral responsibility. I must take responsible for the actions that were caused by my desires.
Problem is, what counts as constraint? Is being constrained by my desires, caused perhaps by factors of which I am unaware, really compatible with freedom? My actions derive from my desires which derive from my character which derives from my genes and upbringing, etc. Is that really freedom? It still doesn't really explain our choices - "explain" in the sense not of "accounting for" but in the sense of "justifying". We want rational explanations, not causal ones, based on our thinking not our bodily processes. A rational explanation would provide the right kind of constraint. We would do the same thing again because we would make the same rational choice again because it was the right choice in the first place. Being a rational person means not being wobbly in our decision-making, but also being free to make bad decisions too.
So it is not clear than Compatibilism gives us what we really want. We want a theory that can account for our sense that we can rationally over-ride our desires, etc. Harry Frankfurt has proposed a theory according to which our basic "first-order" desires (eg for a cigarette) can be controlled by our "second-order" desires (not to want to want a cigarette) - by our desires about our desires. We do not have to be wanton and give in to every passing whim. We can resist the doughnut! Frankfurt says this is what free will is. This is what you are: the controlling, censoring mechanism. This theory explains why you are willing to accept a degree of pain and boredom (revison?) in order to gratify your longer term higher-order desires and purposes. We can train ourselves to ignore desires that don't fit in with our higher order desires.
Trouble is, what makes these second-order desires more you than the first-order ones? Where do they come from? Are they not just as caused (genetics, culture) as the others? The theory makes it still a matter of luck whether you can resist temptation or not. It doesn't seem to help that much with the question of moral responsibility. If someone has limited second-order control over his or her basic desires, can s/he be blamed when s/he (dangerously) gratifies them? May be the theory helps to explain our psychology a little, but it doesn't solve the philosophical issues.
So, what are you? As a human - a machine or a person with autonomy, freedom? As a philosopher - a Hard Determinist, a Libertarian or a wishy-washy Soft Determinist? Me, I'm a marshmallow.
Free Will and Determinism: Introduction
What is freedom? Not in the political sense, but in the sense of our ability to make free decisions. Are we machines? Can we ever over-ride our programming? Our bodies, including our brains, work like everything else in nature by cause and effect. But is there, in humans at least, something beyond this which makes us genuinely free? In other words, do will have free will or are we physically determined?
Obviously the answer makes a real difference to how we view ourselves, what we think a person is, how we approach our futures. It also, of course, affects our attitude to morality. Should we hold people responsible for their behaviour? If not (because they have not freely chosen to behave as they did), should we punish them?
The white snooker ball hits the red snooker ball and they each go off in certain directions and stop. Repeat the event exactly and the same consequences will be repeated. Even a leaf twirling in a breeze isn't free. Its apparently random movements are actually the result of complex causes. But you, when you make a choice, is your choice causally determined? Of course, you may have good reasons for your choice - you prefer A to B, or you can't afford B - but we must be careful not to confuse reasons with causes. Reasons are rational, not physical. They can be ignored.
If you think all our actions are physically caused, either by physical events in our bodies of which we are unaware or by mental states, such as desires, which themselves have physical causes, then you are a (physical)determinist. There are other kinds of determinism - eg religious and logical - but we are interested in physical or causal determinism. This is a scientific concept. Everything in the universe obeys the laws of nature: everything that happens can be explained purely in terms of cause and effect. Each cause was itself caused. Every event is connected by a long chain of causes to...the first cause. Everything is completely predictable, or would be if we had perfect knowledge. Some things are unpredictable due to complexity - and that may include human behaviour - but in theory even we are part of the causal chain. So when we think we are making a free decision, we are deluded. This is the claim made by "hard" determinists. Whatever we think our reasons for decisions are, our volitions, intentions, purposes, etc., what is really happenening is that physical causal mechanisms (most immedidiately of course, in our brains and other body parts)are causing us to behave in certain ways.
In response to this we can question the nature of causation, as Hume did - he argued it was merely a question of our human habit of expecting one thing to follow another when we have seen that happen a few times. (We never see a physical event that we can say is the cause, only smaller and smaller events occurring under maginification.) Also, we can refer to quantum physics and the unpredictability of subatomic particles. But these points don't really affect hard determinism. After all, scientists are getting better and better at explaining and predicting human behaviour, discovering paterns, accounting for behavioural characteristics in terms of brain events; and there is some evidence (eg from Libet) that messages are sent out to our limbs by our brains before we have made a conscious decision to move them - this would suggest that our feeling of freedom is illusory.
On top of the neurological and other biological causes affecting our behaviour, there is evidence that culture also has a causal effect on us - ie our environment, upbringing, religion, etc. This is still to be counted as physical because it is about patterns of behaviour, dispositions, being created in the brain during our formative years. Culture contributes to our "hard-wiring".
So, if hard determinists are right, you are pretty much just a very complex machine. It means your AS level results are already inevitable. There's nothing you can do about it. Even if you decide to work harder, that will only be because you are already predisposed to make the decision to work harder. Oh, well!
Obviously the answer makes a real difference to how we view ourselves, what we think a person is, how we approach our futures. It also, of course, affects our attitude to morality. Should we hold people responsible for their behaviour? If not (because they have not freely chosen to behave as they did), should we punish them?
The white snooker ball hits the red snooker ball and they each go off in certain directions and stop. Repeat the event exactly and the same consequences will be repeated. Even a leaf twirling in a breeze isn't free. Its apparently random movements are actually the result of complex causes. But you, when you make a choice, is your choice causally determined? Of course, you may have good reasons for your choice - you prefer A to B, or you can't afford B - but we must be careful not to confuse reasons with causes. Reasons are rational, not physical. They can be ignored.
If you think all our actions are physically caused, either by physical events in our bodies of which we are unaware or by mental states, such as desires, which themselves have physical causes, then you are a (physical)determinist. There are other kinds of determinism - eg religious and logical - but we are interested in physical or causal determinism. This is a scientific concept. Everything in the universe obeys the laws of nature: everything that happens can be explained purely in terms of cause and effect. Each cause was itself caused. Every event is connected by a long chain of causes to...the first cause. Everything is completely predictable, or would be if we had perfect knowledge. Some things are unpredictable due to complexity - and that may include human behaviour - but in theory even we are part of the causal chain. So when we think we are making a free decision, we are deluded. This is the claim made by "hard" determinists. Whatever we think our reasons for decisions are, our volitions, intentions, purposes, etc., what is really happenening is that physical causal mechanisms (most immedidiately of course, in our brains and other body parts)are causing us to behave in certain ways.
In response to this we can question the nature of causation, as Hume did - he argued it was merely a question of our human habit of expecting one thing to follow another when we have seen that happen a few times. (We never see a physical event that we can say is the cause, only smaller and smaller events occurring under maginification.) Also, we can refer to quantum physics and the unpredictability of subatomic particles. But these points don't really affect hard determinism. After all, scientists are getting better and better at explaining and predicting human behaviour, discovering paterns, accounting for behavioural characteristics in terms of brain events; and there is some evidence (eg from Libet) that messages are sent out to our limbs by our brains before we have made a conscious decision to move them - this would suggest that our feeling of freedom is illusory.
On top of the neurological and other biological causes affecting our behaviour, there is evidence that culture also has a causal effect on us - ie our environment, upbringing, religion, etc. This is still to be counted as physical because it is about patterns of behaviour, dispositions, being created in the brain during our formative years. Culture contributes to our "hard-wiring".
So, if hard determinists are right, you are pretty much just a very complex machine. It means your AS level results are already inevitable. There's nothing you can do about it. Even if you decide to work harder, that will only be because you are already predisposed to make the decision to work harder. Oh, well!
Friday 22 May 2009
The best philosophy quote!
For something can be thought that cannot be thought not to exiat. Hence, if that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought can be thought not to exist, then that than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought is not the same as that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought, which is absurd. Something-than-that-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought exists so truly then, than it cannot be even thought not to exist.
(Anselm)
Wednesday 20 May 2009
Revision
If anyone wants a revision pack I can send you one via email as I have been creating one for each of the 3 subjects for the up-coming exam on Friday, I have done one on:
Persons
Reason + Experience
Ontological argument etc.
Just leave a comment and I shall c what I can do! =D
Monday 18 May 2009
Revision
Dear Students
For Friday's exam, please revise Reason and Experience, Persons and the first God unit. I have some handouts that a few of you asked for. The Reason and Experience question is compulsory.
Please read the relevant sections of the textbook. Revise all the topics thoroughly. Remember there will be shorter Part A questions and longer (essay length) Part B questions, where examples and fully developed arguments are required. On the blog, below, you will find posts on Personal Identity, Introduction to Reason and Experience, Rationalism, Empiricism, Criticisms of Empiricism and, lastly, Conceptual Schemes. You may need to click on Older Posts to read the earlier ones. Read them carefully. Make notes from them and from the textbook and other sources. Make sure you understand. This subject is much less about knowledge (although you are expected to know things!) as about understanding and arguing rationally.
Ask me questions via the blog.
Good luck!
For Friday's exam, please revise Reason and Experience, Persons and the first God unit. I have some handouts that a few of you asked for. The Reason and Experience question is compulsory.
Please read the relevant sections of the textbook. Revise all the topics thoroughly. Remember there will be shorter Part A questions and longer (essay length) Part B questions, where examples and fully developed arguments are required. On the blog, below, you will find posts on Personal Identity, Introduction to Reason and Experience, Rationalism, Empiricism, Criticisms of Empiricism and, lastly, Conceptual Schemes. You may need to click on Older Posts to read the earlier ones. Read them carefully. Make notes from them and from the textbook and other sources. Make sure you understand. This subject is much less about knowledge (although you are expected to know things!) as about understanding and arguing rationally.
Ask me questions via the blog.
Good luck!
Conceptual Schemes
At the end of the eighteenth century (c 1770) the German philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted to combine rationalism with empiricism in what is known as Kant's Synthesis. He was dissatisfied with the attempt by both rationalism and empiricism to make our knowledge of the world conform to how objects in the world really are, with one arguing that we have knowledge of them through sense experience, the other through reason.
The problem is that in both cases we don't have direct experience of them. Kant's solution was to ditch that attempt and to see if he could connect objects to our minds by looking at the problem the other way round - by explaining how objects conform to our understanding. In other words, it's not the objects that cause the way we experience them; it is our minds that "create" the object as we experience it. The concepts he called "the categories of experience" impose a particular conceptual scheme on the raw data of sense experience. Without that conceptual scheme, we would not have self-conscious experience at all. There would be no "I" to know it was experiencing the world. The categories include space, time, causation. They do not derive from experience; they are a priori in that they come before experience, but they are not mental processes that we control, as maths and inferential reasoning are. We can only experience objects in space and time, but we don't actually experience space and time themselves: they are part of the structure of our experience. Without experience, there could be no awareness of them.
So Kant is neither an empiricist nor a rationalist. He argues against both sides. Hume had argued that knowledge was either synthetic a posteriori (factual knowledge from experience) or analytic a priori (true by definition, not factual), but Kant argued that knowledge can be synthetic a priori - that is, knowledge that is known independently of experience but which is not analytic, not trivial. "Every event has a cause" is an example. It is factual but it depends on the a priori categories organising experience in such a way that we experience events chronologically and as causally connected.You couldn't even form the concept of an event without the categories: it depends on us perceiving things in space and time.
Today we would more naturally think of the categories as brain mechanisms (as Chomsky does in relation to the Language Acquisition Device) but Kant thought of them as a priori rules of the understanding which somehow unify our experience, imposing an order and coherence on it. Otherwise, our raw sense experience would be chaotic, confused, incoherent. We wouldn't even be able to say it was our experience because we wouldn't have a sense of an enduring self without the concepts of time, space and causation. This order comes from our minds, so it is in this sense that objects "conform to our knowledge". [Look at the quotation from Kant on page 25 of the textbook.]
Notice two important points. Firstly, Kant is accounting for our experience being as it is (phenomenon). He does not claim to explain how things in the world really are in themselves (noumenon). So you might well think that he still leaves us cut off from reality. Secondly, some philosophers (including Bertrand Russell) have argued that if the categories are a contingent fact about how we happen to filter raw sense data in our minds, then there is no logical necessity in our knowledge of the world. It could have been different. In which case, do we have the kind of certainty that is usually considered necessary for science, maths and inferential reasoning?
Kant certainly did consider that his conceptual scheme, his categories, were essential for human experience. Without them to filter raw sense data, we would not have experience because there would be no selves to experience. My sense of self depends on my ability to differentiate myself from other people, and that depends on my knowledge of objects in the expternal world, outside of my own experience, which in turn depends on the categories filtering sense experience and imposing a particular order or schema on it. The conceptual scheme makes the concept of self possible.
So even if they are not logically necessary, the categories are supposed to be essential, fundamental to what it is to be a human or a person. But we can think about conceptual schemes in a very different way. Perhaps we all need to experience the world through concepts that organise our perceptions in particular ways, but could the conceptual scheme vary from person to person, or at least from culture to culture? Perhaps the way people in one time and place organise experience (the way they see things) can be different from the way people in a different time and place do. If so, we might still consider that Kant's categories are essential, operating at a deeper layer in our minds, perhaps, but the particular way our culture conceptualises the world could be overlaid on top of them.
Think, for example, of different ways in which different cultures might categorise animals or plants. We see certain four legged animals as dogs, despite their different sizes, shapes, habits, etc. But do we have to? Could a different culture organise their concepts differently and therefore see things differently? Surely, the answer is yes. We interpret the world, we don't just see it, and our culture imposes an interpretation on us to a large extent, through language and concepts. So our world - our way of seeing how things are in the world - is not universal. It is specific to our culture, or to our culture's conceptual scheme.
This means that on top of the Kantian conceptual scheme that is considered to be essential to our human nature, to our human experience, there are culture-specific conceptual schemes that affect the way we perceive things. Both kinds affect our view of reality and of truth.
But the idea of variable conceptual schemes opens up the possibility of truth and knowledge being relative to particular cultures. Unless...we can decide that one conceptual scheme is better than others, that one presents the world to us as it is, and the others are false. In that case, we can dismiss relativism and say truth is not relative, it is absolute, fixed, and Culture X has it.
Problem is, which culture is Culture X, the one with The Truth? Is it, for example, the culture of the Sioux Indians, of Kalahari hunter-gatherers, of the Taliban or of fundamentalist Christians from the American mid-west? No, I don't think so either. I think my culture, my way of seeing the world is more right than theirs is. On the whole, I trust science and rationality. I am biased in favour of what I know and understand.
It was just this kind of problem that Foundationalism wanted to avoid. If we could trace all our knowledge and ideas back to absolutely secure basic beliefs, we could then build up truths from there with confidence, as Descartes and Locke both intended. But neither rationalism nor empiricism has convinced us that they can provide firm foundations. A priori reasons and sense experience lead to problematic theories. Kant's categories look promising, but they are contingent on human nature and don't give us logical necessity or certainty. In any case, the cultural concepts can be considered to be in addition to Kant's conceptual scheme.
The main alternative to Foundationalism is Coherence Theory. This says that all we can aim for is that our beliefs are coherent, that they fit together and help us to interpret the world in a particular way and to make predictions. They are useful rather than absolutely true. As long as conceptual schemes work, do the job, we cannot choose between them. Our scientific web of beliefs is no better and no worse than any other. Some schemes could be criticised, perhaps, for being contradictory or over-complicated, but most long-established cultures will have traditional beliefs that are coherent and with their own kind of elegance or beauty. (One twentieth century philosopher who has argued for this is W V Quine.)
Personally, I am not convinced. I do not believe that all conceptual schemes that are coherent are as good as each other, for I don't think they really can all do what, on the whole, our broadly scientific and rational conceptual scheme can do. Ours has more predictive and explanatory power. It has allowed us to bring the world to the brink of disaster by developing technology...but (with necessary adjustments) it may allow us to go beyond existing technology and save the world from disaster. It is very open to change; it revises itself as new evidence and techniques become available. It does not get quite so bogged down in traditional belief as some cultures do. It allows us to change not only the minor beliefs at the edge of the web of beliefs but even occasionally important beliefs towards the centre. Also, as the world shrinks due to globalisation and electronic media, it the scientifc culture of the West (USA and Europe) that is spreading. It is hard not to conclude that this is simply because it is more likely to bring progress through knowledge and truth. (Although, of course, many would disagree, including fundamentalists of all kinds - but they still use the technology that Western thinking invented.)
Of course, that is not a reason for disregarding other conceptual schemes or cultures. We can respect them without accepting that they have an equal claim to truth as ours. Also, of course, there may be some aspects of them from which we can learn, ways in which we can recognise that they are wiser or clearer.
So I want to avoid relativism about conceptual schemes. Some beliefs simply are more true than others. But you must decide for yourself, and when you do you will inevitably be using ideas and concepts (reasons, truth, knowledge, justification, fairness, freedom, etc) which are concepts from our culture, with which we organise our understanding or interpretation of the world. It is hard to escape the conceptual scheme - the web of beliefs, the language, the concepts - our culture has given us.
The problem is that in both cases we don't have direct experience of them. Kant's solution was to ditch that attempt and to see if he could connect objects to our minds by looking at the problem the other way round - by explaining how objects conform to our understanding. In other words, it's not the objects that cause the way we experience them; it is our minds that "create" the object as we experience it. The concepts he called "the categories of experience" impose a particular conceptual scheme on the raw data of sense experience. Without that conceptual scheme, we would not have self-conscious experience at all. There would be no "I" to know it was experiencing the world. The categories include space, time, causation. They do not derive from experience; they are a priori in that they come before experience, but they are not mental processes that we control, as maths and inferential reasoning are. We can only experience objects in space and time, but we don't actually experience space and time themselves: they are part of the structure of our experience. Without experience, there could be no awareness of them.
So Kant is neither an empiricist nor a rationalist. He argues against both sides. Hume had argued that knowledge was either synthetic a posteriori (factual knowledge from experience) or analytic a priori (true by definition, not factual), but Kant argued that knowledge can be synthetic a priori - that is, knowledge that is known independently of experience but which is not analytic, not trivial. "Every event has a cause" is an example. It is factual but it depends on the a priori categories organising experience in such a way that we experience events chronologically and as causally connected.You couldn't even form the concept of an event without the categories: it depends on us perceiving things in space and time.
Today we would more naturally think of the categories as brain mechanisms (as Chomsky does in relation to the Language Acquisition Device) but Kant thought of them as a priori rules of the understanding which somehow unify our experience, imposing an order and coherence on it. Otherwise, our raw sense experience would be chaotic, confused, incoherent. We wouldn't even be able to say it was our experience because we wouldn't have a sense of an enduring self without the concepts of time, space and causation. This order comes from our minds, so it is in this sense that objects "conform to our knowledge". [Look at the quotation from Kant on page 25 of the textbook.]
Notice two important points. Firstly, Kant is accounting for our experience being as it is (phenomenon). He does not claim to explain how things in the world really are in themselves (noumenon). So you might well think that he still leaves us cut off from reality. Secondly, some philosophers (including Bertrand Russell) have argued that if the categories are a contingent fact about how we happen to filter raw sense data in our minds, then there is no logical necessity in our knowledge of the world. It could have been different. In which case, do we have the kind of certainty that is usually considered necessary for science, maths and inferential reasoning?
Kant certainly did consider that his conceptual scheme, his categories, were essential for human experience. Without them to filter raw sense data, we would not have experience because there would be no selves to experience. My sense of self depends on my ability to differentiate myself from other people, and that depends on my knowledge of objects in the expternal world, outside of my own experience, which in turn depends on the categories filtering sense experience and imposing a particular order or schema on it. The conceptual scheme makes the concept of self possible.
So even if they are not logically necessary, the categories are supposed to be essential, fundamental to what it is to be a human or a person. But we can think about conceptual schemes in a very different way. Perhaps we all need to experience the world through concepts that organise our perceptions in particular ways, but could the conceptual scheme vary from person to person, or at least from culture to culture? Perhaps the way people in one time and place organise experience (the way they see things) can be different from the way people in a different time and place do. If so, we might still consider that Kant's categories are essential, operating at a deeper layer in our minds, perhaps, but the particular way our culture conceptualises the world could be overlaid on top of them.
Think, for example, of different ways in which different cultures might categorise animals or plants. We see certain four legged animals as dogs, despite their different sizes, shapes, habits, etc. But do we have to? Could a different culture organise their concepts differently and therefore see things differently? Surely, the answer is yes. We interpret the world, we don't just see it, and our culture imposes an interpretation on us to a large extent, through language and concepts. So our world - our way of seeing how things are in the world - is not universal. It is specific to our culture, or to our culture's conceptual scheme.
This means that on top of the Kantian conceptual scheme that is considered to be essential to our human nature, to our human experience, there are culture-specific conceptual schemes that affect the way we perceive things. Both kinds affect our view of reality and of truth.
But the idea of variable conceptual schemes opens up the possibility of truth and knowledge being relative to particular cultures. Unless...we can decide that one conceptual scheme is better than others, that one presents the world to us as it is, and the others are false. In that case, we can dismiss relativism and say truth is not relative, it is absolute, fixed, and Culture X has it.
Problem is, which culture is Culture X, the one with The Truth? Is it, for example, the culture of the Sioux Indians, of Kalahari hunter-gatherers, of the Taliban or of fundamentalist Christians from the American mid-west? No, I don't think so either. I think my culture, my way of seeing the world is more right than theirs is. On the whole, I trust science and rationality. I am biased in favour of what I know and understand.
It was just this kind of problem that Foundationalism wanted to avoid. If we could trace all our knowledge and ideas back to absolutely secure basic beliefs, we could then build up truths from there with confidence, as Descartes and Locke both intended. But neither rationalism nor empiricism has convinced us that they can provide firm foundations. A priori reasons and sense experience lead to problematic theories. Kant's categories look promising, but they are contingent on human nature and don't give us logical necessity or certainty. In any case, the cultural concepts can be considered to be in addition to Kant's conceptual scheme.
The main alternative to Foundationalism is Coherence Theory. This says that all we can aim for is that our beliefs are coherent, that they fit together and help us to interpret the world in a particular way and to make predictions. They are useful rather than absolutely true. As long as conceptual schemes work, do the job, we cannot choose between them. Our scientific web of beliefs is no better and no worse than any other. Some schemes could be criticised, perhaps, for being contradictory or over-complicated, but most long-established cultures will have traditional beliefs that are coherent and with their own kind of elegance or beauty. (One twentieth century philosopher who has argued for this is W V Quine.)
Personally, I am not convinced. I do not believe that all conceptual schemes that are coherent are as good as each other, for I don't think they really can all do what, on the whole, our broadly scientific and rational conceptual scheme can do. Ours has more predictive and explanatory power. It has allowed us to bring the world to the brink of disaster by developing technology...but (with necessary adjustments) it may allow us to go beyond existing technology and save the world from disaster. It is very open to change; it revises itself as new evidence and techniques become available. It does not get quite so bogged down in traditional belief as some cultures do. It allows us to change not only the minor beliefs at the edge of the web of beliefs but even occasionally important beliefs towards the centre. Also, as the world shrinks due to globalisation and electronic media, it the scientifc culture of the West (USA and Europe) that is spreading. It is hard not to conclude that this is simply because it is more likely to bring progress through knowledge and truth. (Although, of course, many would disagree, including fundamentalists of all kinds - but they still use the technology that Western thinking invented.)
Of course, that is not a reason for disregarding other conceptual schemes or cultures. We can respect them without accepting that they have an equal claim to truth as ours. Also, of course, there may be some aspects of them from which we can learn, ways in which we can recognise that they are wiser or clearer.
So I want to avoid relativism about conceptual schemes. Some beliefs simply are more true than others. But you must decide for yourself, and when you do you will inevitably be using ideas and concepts (reasons, truth, knowledge, justification, fairness, freedom, etc) which are concepts from our culture, with which we organise our understanding or interpretation of the world. It is hard to escape the conceptual scheme - the web of beliefs, the language, the concepts - our culture has given us.
Sunday 17 May 2009
Criticisms of Empiricism
1. Empiricists talk about forming compound ideas by combining simple ideas, but what is a simple idea? If "golden mountain" is a compound idea, what makes "mountain" a simple idea - is it too not a combination of ideas? Is the concept "horse" simple or compound? It is not a clear distinction.
2. Do you agree that all ideas could come from sense experience - not just from experience but from sense experience? Take moods such as joy and melancholy - do we really acquire those through our senses? Also, we have concepts of things that we believe exist but no-one has ever experienced (eg atoms; and we have abstract ideas (such as justice and freedom). How do they connect with sense impressions?
On the other hand, perhaps we do experience justice and freedom in some way. Perhaps we can trace them back to basic human needs and experience. Perhaps we can relate them to evolutionary developments. What do you think? Also, the example of people who are born blind and therefore lack certain ideas may be relevant: they do not seem to form certain concepts or ideas. How convincing is this point?
3. Do you agree that Hume's empriricism about meaning is dodgy? Language doesn't have to relate to sense experience to be meaningful, but that's what the twentienth century Logical Positivists (such as A J Ayer) argued (as well as Hume). They were extreme empiricists. They argued that "metaphysical" words, such as "God" and "soul" were meaningless because they did not connect with things that had been drectly experienced and therfore couldn't be verified. But we do have perfectly meaningful converations about such things. They are trying to restrict what we can talk about, but if we couldn't speculate about such things our lives would be devalued. Do we experience beauty directly? Self? Justice?
Part of the problem is that Hume thought of ideas as images in the mind (copies of impressions), but this is a naive account of ideas, as Wittgenstein showed in "Philosophical Investigations". An account of language that is based on meanings being private images or ideas in the head is fundamentally incoherent: meanings have to relate to what is shared. (Remember the beetles in a matchbox example.)
4. Empiricism, like Descartes' version of rationalism, cuts us off from the physical world, from reality - because we can only know it indirectly, via sense impressions. This means that we can't be certain about anything except our own private sensations, which makes our beliefs subjective, whereas we normally like to think that our knowledge claims (ie good quality beliefs) are objectively true.
Also, it leads us into solipsism - ie scepticism about the existence of other minds - and towards the Matrix/Brain-in-a-Vat scenario: how do we know this isn't all a dream/gigantic illusion/creation of a crazy scientist, etc? So, empiricism leads us towards the trap of scepticism and solipsism - the same trap that Descartes could only escape by relying on God not to be a deceiver, and which Berkeley also required God to save him from. But what if you don't believe in God? Can empiricism avoid scepticism about the external world and soliosism about other minds without invoking God? Hume didn't think so, which is why he gave up the search for rationally justified beliefs and focused on explaining why we believe what we believe, accounting for it by reference to human dispositions.
5. Another form of scepticism concerns our knowledge of the past and of the future. Can empiricism give us good reasons for trusting our memories, the main source of knowledge of the past? Can it justify our beliefs about the future? All our inductive reasoning about the future depends on things continuing as they have done previously - but can empiricism justify our faith in things continuing as they have done up to know. Perhaps the laws of nature will suddenly change. Can experience rule that out?
6. We can question the empiricist account of the relation between concepts and experience. Concepts depend on our forming general categories, but how can we know how to categorize our sense impressions. Sense impressions just arrive - they are pre-conceptual, immediate, "the Given" - but without some kind of conceptualization or categorization they would be simply a "blooming buzzing confusion" (as William James said). This is why Kant and others argued that it couldn't be true that all ideas derived from experience because we need some ideas or concepts to make any sense of sense impressions in the first place. So it might well be that what empiricists such as Locke took to be immediate and incorrigible sense experience, it actually experience which is already filtered through concepts that make sense of it, organise it, conceptualise it. In which case, experience isn't the incorrigible "Given" that empiricists take it to be: it is already the result of intellectual (cognitive) processes.
7. Of course, rationalists criticise empiricism for prioritising sense experience over a priori knowledge. Without inferential reasoning, for example, we would not be able to generalisze from particular experiential cases. If it is reason that makes categorisation or conceptualisation possible, then it is reason that makes self-conscious experience possible. So reason comes first and rationalists are right. But is it?
In the next post I will write about Kant and Conceptual Schemes.
2. Do you agree that all ideas could come from sense experience - not just from experience but from sense experience? Take moods such as joy and melancholy - do we really acquire those through our senses? Also, we have concepts of things that we believe exist but no-one has ever experienced (eg atoms; and we have abstract ideas (such as justice and freedom). How do they connect with sense impressions?
On the other hand, perhaps we do experience justice and freedom in some way. Perhaps we can trace them back to basic human needs and experience. Perhaps we can relate them to evolutionary developments. What do you think? Also, the example of people who are born blind and therefore lack certain ideas may be relevant: they do not seem to form certain concepts or ideas. How convincing is this point?
3. Do you agree that Hume's empriricism about meaning is dodgy? Language doesn't have to relate to sense experience to be meaningful, but that's what the twentienth century Logical Positivists (such as A J Ayer) argued (as well as Hume). They were extreme empiricists. They argued that "metaphysical" words, such as "God" and "soul" were meaningless because they did not connect with things that had been drectly experienced and therfore couldn't be verified. But we do have perfectly meaningful converations about such things. They are trying to restrict what we can talk about, but if we couldn't speculate about such things our lives would be devalued. Do we experience beauty directly? Self? Justice?
Part of the problem is that Hume thought of ideas as images in the mind (copies of impressions), but this is a naive account of ideas, as Wittgenstein showed in "Philosophical Investigations". An account of language that is based on meanings being private images or ideas in the head is fundamentally incoherent: meanings have to relate to what is shared. (Remember the beetles in a matchbox example.)
4. Empiricism, like Descartes' version of rationalism, cuts us off from the physical world, from reality - because we can only know it indirectly, via sense impressions. This means that we can't be certain about anything except our own private sensations, which makes our beliefs subjective, whereas we normally like to think that our knowledge claims (ie good quality beliefs) are objectively true.
Also, it leads us into solipsism - ie scepticism about the existence of other minds - and towards the Matrix/Brain-in-a-Vat scenario: how do we know this isn't all a dream/gigantic illusion/creation of a crazy scientist, etc? So, empiricism leads us towards the trap of scepticism and solipsism - the same trap that Descartes could only escape by relying on God not to be a deceiver, and which Berkeley also required God to save him from. But what if you don't believe in God? Can empiricism avoid scepticism about the external world and soliosism about other minds without invoking God? Hume didn't think so, which is why he gave up the search for rationally justified beliefs and focused on explaining why we believe what we believe, accounting for it by reference to human dispositions.
5. Another form of scepticism concerns our knowledge of the past and of the future. Can empiricism give us good reasons for trusting our memories, the main source of knowledge of the past? Can it justify our beliefs about the future? All our inductive reasoning about the future depends on things continuing as they have done previously - but can empiricism justify our faith in things continuing as they have done up to know. Perhaps the laws of nature will suddenly change. Can experience rule that out?
6. We can question the empiricist account of the relation between concepts and experience. Concepts depend on our forming general categories, but how can we know how to categorize our sense impressions. Sense impressions just arrive - they are pre-conceptual, immediate, "the Given" - but without some kind of conceptualization or categorization they would be simply a "blooming buzzing confusion" (as William James said). This is why Kant and others argued that it couldn't be true that all ideas derived from experience because we need some ideas or concepts to make any sense of sense impressions in the first place. So it might well be that what empiricists such as Locke took to be immediate and incorrigible sense experience, it actually experience which is already filtered through concepts that make sense of it, organise it, conceptualise it. In which case, experience isn't the incorrigible "Given" that empiricists take it to be: it is already the result of intellectual (cognitive) processes.
7. Of course, rationalists criticise empiricism for prioritising sense experience over a priori knowledge. Without inferential reasoning, for example, we would not be able to generalisze from particular experiential cases. If it is reason that makes categorisation or conceptualisation possible, then it is reason that makes self-conscious experience possible. So reason comes first and rationalists are right. But is it?
In the next post I will write about Kant and Conceptual Schemes.
Empiricism
We agreed (I think) that rationalists are right to argue that we cannot achieve certainty about knowledge unless we can generalize from particular cases (experience, observations, experiments) and form general principles or laws of nature. I think we could also agree that in order to do that we need to use the kinds of intellectual tools that rationalists say we have a priori knowledge of: maths, inferential reasoning, etc. But do we agree that we have knowledge of such tools innately or by intuition? Probably not.
Empiricists certainly argue that we can have knowledge only as a result of experience, and that includes knowledge of maths and inferential reasoning. They trace the foundations of all knowledge and all ideas back to the firm foundations (as they see it) of sense experience - that is, the basic, raw perceptions that reach our senses from the outside world. Hume called them "impressions". More recent philosophers have referred to "sense data". Whatever we call them, the point is that we cannot have any knowledge of the world except via our senses.
John Locke argued (against Descartes) that we are not born with any innate ideas; we arrive with "tabula rasa" minds - clean, blank, empty. The knowledge and ideas we acquire all come as a result of sense experience. Hume agreed with this, although he also thought that as humans we are born with a certain nature, dispositions, for example, to associate one idea with another, or to form habits of expectation, so that when we see item A we tend to expect item B. This was how he explained our inductive reasoning, causal explanations and our knowledge of the external world. "Hume's Fork" is his argument that all ideas and meanings can be traced back to impressions (sense experience). Ideas are faint copies of impressions. The impressions (sights, smells, sounds, etc) have impressed themselves, printed themselves, on our minds, and our memory of them is what we call "ideas", but of course we can combine ideas of basic impressions to create more complicated concepts and imaginary objects (eg golden mountain). As for analytic truths - Hume was dismissive: they cannot give us genuine knowledge of the world because they only recycle ideas we already have, being merely true by definition. All genuine factual knowledge (synthetic truths) derives from impressions, sense experience.
One major difference between Lock and Hume is that Locke believed our beliefs about the world were rationally justified, whereas Hume was more sceptical and thought they were only justified in so far as our natures (imaginations, habits, emotions) allow us to interpret the world in particular ways. He didn't think we could know what the external world was really like because we only ever see impressions, not the objects that (we assume) caused the impressions. Locke and Descartes were both Indirect Realists, believing that we could rationally infer the existence of the objects that cause our perceptions of them. The ordinary "common-sense" view is that we just see objects as they are. This is known as "Direct Realism", and Hume thought both the Direct and Indirect versions of Realism were equally shaky. So he was a kind of sceptic or anti-realist. He had been persuaded by Bishop Berkeley's arguments against Realism but he didn't follow him all the way to Idealism ("to be is to be perceived" - ie only perceptions actually exist) - partly because Hume couldn't believe in Berkeley's God, who ensures existence is continuous by perceiving everything! So Locke, Berkeley and Hume are all empiricists, because they all believe that we acquire knowledge from sense experience (a posteriori) not before it (a priori), but they represent different kinds of empiricism.
Next we will look at some criticisms of empiricism.
Empiricists certainly argue that we can have knowledge only as a result of experience, and that includes knowledge of maths and inferential reasoning. They trace the foundations of all knowledge and all ideas back to the firm foundations (as they see it) of sense experience - that is, the basic, raw perceptions that reach our senses from the outside world. Hume called them "impressions". More recent philosophers have referred to "sense data". Whatever we call them, the point is that we cannot have any knowledge of the world except via our senses.
John Locke argued (against Descartes) that we are not born with any innate ideas; we arrive with "tabula rasa" minds - clean, blank, empty. The knowledge and ideas we acquire all come as a result of sense experience. Hume agreed with this, although he also thought that as humans we are born with a certain nature, dispositions, for example, to associate one idea with another, or to form habits of expectation, so that when we see item A we tend to expect item B. This was how he explained our inductive reasoning, causal explanations and our knowledge of the external world. "Hume's Fork" is his argument that all ideas and meanings can be traced back to impressions (sense experience). Ideas are faint copies of impressions. The impressions (sights, smells, sounds, etc) have impressed themselves, printed themselves, on our minds, and our memory of them is what we call "ideas", but of course we can combine ideas of basic impressions to create more complicated concepts and imaginary objects (eg golden mountain). As for analytic truths - Hume was dismissive: they cannot give us genuine knowledge of the world because they only recycle ideas we already have, being merely true by definition. All genuine factual knowledge (synthetic truths) derives from impressions, sense experience.
One major difference between Lock and Hume is that Locke believed our beliefs about the world were rationally justified, whereas Hume was more sceptical and thought they were only justified in so far as our natures (imaginations, habits, emotions) allow us to interpret the world in particular ways. He didn't think we could know what the external world was really like because we only ever see impressions, not the objects that (we assume) caused the impressions. Locke and Descartes were both Indirect Realists, believing that we could rationally infer the existence of the objects that cause our perceptions of them. The ordinary "common-sense" view is that we just see objects as they are. This is known as "Direct Realism", and Hume thought both the Direct and Indirect versions of Realism were equally shaky. So he was a kind of sceptic or anti-realist. He had been persuaded by Bishop Berkeley's arguments against Realism but he didn't follow him all the way to Idealism ("to be is to be perceived" - ie only perceptions actually exist) - partly because Hume couldn't believe in Berkeley's God, who ensures existence is continuous by perceiving everything! So Locke, Berkeley and Hume are all empiricists, because they all believe that we acquire knowledge from sense experience (a posteriori) not before it (a priori), but they represent different kinds of empiricism.
Next we will look at some criticisms of empiricism.
Thursday 14 May 2009
Rationalism
Rationalism claims that our knowledge of the world rests on firm foundations derived from ideas that we know a priori, before experience. We have ideas or knowledge that are not merely kinds of "knowing how" (such as knowing how to suckle) but can be used in propositional knowledge - factual knowledge or "knowing that...". So, not mere instincts. Innate knowledge or innate ideas are ideas or facts we are born with, even if they require experience to realise their potential, to make us aware of them. Claims are made for the idea of God, of maths and inferential reasoning, for morality and beauty. A famous example of a rationalist's claim about innate ideas is Descartes' Trademark Argument for the existence of God: we find in ourselves the idea of a perfect being, only a perfect being could have placed that idea in our minds from birth, therefore the perfect being must exist.
Intuitions are ideas or facts that are simply self-evident - "clear and distinct ideas", Descartes called them. We grasp them by pure thought or introspection. Descartes thought that we grasp the real nature of objects in this way: not their secondary, perceptual features but their underlying measurable features (extension - mass, etc.) G E Moore, a twentienth century moral philosopher, thought the rules of morality were grasped intuitively, not by experience - they are simply self-evident.
Another kind of a priori knowledge is analytic knowledge. That is knowledge of the identity or sameness of two different ways of putting things. Analytic propositions are true by definition. So, for example, "Torture is cruel" might be considered analytic (rather than synthetic) because it is true by definition: it is built into the concept of torture that it is cruel. A lot of philosophy is about analysing concepts in this way.
In general, rationalists argue that a priori truths are necessarily true. They are not contingent on how the world happens to be: they simply have to be true, the world could not be otherwise. Empiricists claim the opposite: the only necessarily true propositions are analytic ones and they don't give us any new information about the world; they simply repeat the same thing in different terms.
Rationalists claim that it is by pure rational thought that we are able to generalize from particular instances (experiences, observations, experiments) to reach necessarily true laws of nature. We do this by maths and by ampliative inductive inference.
Criticisms of rationalism. Research these for yourself, but make sure you consider the innate, intuition and analytic points separately. Are there really any ideas or facts that are innate in every human being? God? Morality? Maths? Reasoning? Do all hmans really find the rules of morality self-evident, or grasp the underlying nature of physical objects? Is Hume right when he argues that analytic truths are not facts about the world; they are only definitions - analysing the necessary conditions for using a particular term or concept?
On the other hand, is it not true that we do need to generalise from particular instances? Repeating experiences or observations does not gives us knowledge of general principles or laws of nature> For that we need maths, logic, rules of inference (such as non-contradiction). So you might agree with rationalists to some extent - at least, that experience alone cannot give us useful, practical or scientific knowledge.
Intuitions are ideas or facts that are simply self-evident - "clear and distinct ideas", Descartes called them. We grasp them by pure thought or introspection. Descartes thought that we grasp the real nature of objects in this way: not their secondary, perceptual features but their underlying measurable features (extension - mass, etc.) G E Moore, a twentienth century moral philosopher, thought the rules of morality were grasped intuitively, not by experience - they are simply self-evident.
Another kind of a priori knowledge is analytic knowledge. That is knowledge of the identity or sameness of two different ways of putting things. Analytic propositions are true by definition. So, for example, "Torture is cruel" might be considered analytic (rather than synthetic) because it is true by definition: it is built into the concept of torture that it is cruel. A lot of philosophy is about analysing concepts in this way.
In general, rationalists argue that a priori truths are necessarily true. They are not contingent on how the world happens to be: they simply have to be true, the world could not be otherwise. Empiricists claim the opposite: the only necessarily true propositions are analytic ones and they don't give us any new information about the world; they simply repeat the same thing in different terms.
Rationalists claim that it is by pure rational thought that we are able to generalize from particular instances (experiences, observations, experiments) to reach necessarily true laws of nature. We do this by maths and by ampliative inductive inference.
Criticisms of rationalism. Research these for yourself, but make sure you consider the innate, intuition and analytic points separately. Are there really any ideas or facts that are innate in every human being? God? Morality? Maths? Reasoning? Do all hmans really find the rules of morality self-evident, or grasp the underlying nature of physical objects? Is Hume right when he argues that analytic truths are not facts about the world; they are only definitions - analysing the necessary conditions for using a particular term or concept?
On the other hand, is it not true that we do need to generalise from particular instances? Repeating experiences or observations does not gives us knowledge of general principles or laws of nature> For that we need maths, logic, rules of inference (such as non-contradiction). So you might agree with rationalists to some extent - at least, that experience alone cannot give us useful, practical or scientific knowledge.
Wednesday 13 May 2009
Funny innate
I thought we could do with a laugh, but it is to do with innate ideas and stuff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLPyPJTwEC4&feature=related
watch from about 6:50
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLPyPJTwEC4&feature=related
watch from about 6:50
Tuesday 12 May 2009
God and evolution, the meaning of life
The Meaning of life
I am thinking that humans as a species are only a link in a chain - at the end of the chain will be the ultimate knowledge of the 'meaning', but in order to get to that stage we need to evolve, evolve to something greater than human.
When the meaning is finally found by one thing, this ultimate meaning will give that thing ultimate knowledge, with knowledge comes power and with power brings the ability to be good, so basically a new 'God' shall be created....this is the only explanation i can give to how the God that is here now exists.
Once the new God is created, the old God (the one present) will die, however - its not really a death as the new being that is God will have all the same powers that God has so surely can be called God?
We say that shakespear lives forever due to his stories....he’s not physically living....can this not be the same with God...the powers stay the same, the being changes?
Sunday 10 May 2009
Reason and Experience: Introduction
Where does our knowledge come from? How do we acquire it? Epistemologists argue about what knowledge is – ie what its necessary conditions are. Is it, for example justified true belief? What properties must a mere belief have before we can count it as knowledge?
Epistemologists also argue about whether knowledge is a unitary concept: is knowing that Obama is the US president the same kind of thing as knowing how to swim or knowing your neighbour (knowledge by acquaintance)? But the arguments we are concerned with are about the sources of knowledge.
No doubt a great deal of what you know has come from other people (friends, parents, teachers) telling you things – ie testimony. Some people think they know things as a result of revelation – it has been revealed to them by a vision, or voices or a miracle. We might argue that our own memories can be a source of knowledge for us. But the main arguments traditionally have revolved around the claims that rationalists have made for reason as the primary source of knowledge, and the claims made by empiricists for experience as the only true source of knowledge.
On the whole, empiricists argue that none of our ideas come from reason alone, whereas rationalists argue that some do. Rationalists concede that much of our knowledge depends on sensory experience, but insist that the true foundations rest on what we know by reason alone.
Rationalism argues that we can know things by reason alone: thinking can give us truths without help from our senses. The truths of maths and logic are often used as examples. A solitary thinker sitting in front of his fire, with a candle burning by his side – Descartes’ meditator – can discover certain truths in his own mind. His senses may deceive him, he may be the victim of the tricks of an evil spirit, but certain clear and distinct ideas or intuitions can give him certain knowledge. In this way Descartes’ meditator achieved certain knowledge of his own existence and of the existence of God (the cogito argument and the ontological argument). He also discovered in himself innate knowledge of God(the trademark argument). He was then able to use such certainties as foundations on which to build a secure body of knowledge – the existence of the external world, science, etc.
So the twin claims of rationalism are that we can have knowledge without help from the senses (a priori knowledge) and we have a certain stock of innate knowledge or innate ideas (eg God, morality, rules of reasoning). These are separate claims and it is important not to confuse them. We could reject one without necessarily having to reject the other.
Two separate claims can be differentiated in the a priori claim: firstly, that substantive knowledge (facts) can be achieved by pure thought or intuition, and, secondly, that analytic truths can be known without sensory input – they are true by definition. Again, we could reject one without having to reject the other.
Both traditions, rationalism and empiricism, have generally (until the twentieth century) been forms of foundationalism. This is the idea that we justify our beliefs or claims to knowledge by connecting them to chains of reasoning going all the way back to basic foundational beliefs, the ones you can’t go beyond. For empiricists the basic foundation of all knowledge is sense experience – the raw sense data that comes into our mind from the outside world via our five senses. This is the Given; it is immediate, incorrigible, present. Rationalists argue that we can’t trust our senses: they can deceive us, so they cannot provide secure foundations for our judgements; absolutely certain knowledge can rest only on what we discover in our minds by pure thought.
One of the problems for empiricists is to explain how propositional knowledge (knowledge that p) can be built on perceptual experience, which is knowledge by acquaintance. But then rationalists have to explain how it is that we can discover propositional knowledge already in our minds. How did it get there? The problem for both traditions is to explain how something that is subjective and private (sense experience or thoughts) can be the foundation of something that is essentially public and shareable – knowledge.
At the end of the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and empiricism through his idea of an innate conceptual scheme, and in the twentieth century philosophers have questioned foundationalism and the possibility of founding knowledge on private experiences. Various versions of coherentism argue that beliefs are only ever justified by other beliefs: what you belief is justified and rational when it fits into your existing web of beliefs. There are no foundations. This opens the way to relativism about truth and knowledge.
The starting point for all modern philosophy is Descartes’ cogito ergo sum argument in Meditations. It was published in the 1640s at the dawn of the new age of experimental science, which combined observation and experiment with mathematical reasoning – in other words, it combined the empirical with the rational. Particular empirical observations needed to be generalised into theorems, principles and laws of nature. Descartes and others considered that you need the empirical data but you also need to interpret the data in the light of the general, universalisable truths that rational methodologies have discovered. Observation gives us data but reason gives us understanding. So the philosophical debates about reason and experience have real significance for science, for how we interpret the world to ourselves. Empiricists and rationalists have to achieve generalised truths or laws of nature in different ways.
Another key moment was when John Locke, towards the end of the senventeenth century, rejected innate ideas and argued that we are born without any ideas or knowledge- the tabula rasa argument. So, what are the key arguments for and against innate ideas?
Epistemologists also argue about whether knowledge is a unitary concept: is knowing that Obama is the US president the same kind of thing as knowing how to swim or knowing your neighbour (knowledge by acquaintance)? But the arguments we are concerned with are about the sources of knowledge.
No doubt a great deal of what you know has come from other people (friends, parents, teachers) telling you things – ie testimony. Some people think they know things as a result of revelation – it has been revealed to them by a vision, or voices or a miracle. We might argue that our own memories can be a source of knowledge for us. But the main arguments traditionally have revolved around the claims that rationalists have made for reason as the primary source of knowledge, and the claims made by empiricists for experience as the only true source of knowledge.
On the whole, empiricists argue that none of our ideas come from reason alone, whereas rationalists argue that some do. Rationalists concede that much of our knowledge depends on sensory experience, but insist that the true foundations rest on what we know by reason alone.
Rationalism argues that we can know things by reason alone: thinking can give us truths without help from our senses. The truths of maths and logic are often used as examples. A solitary thinker sitting in front of his fire, with a candle burning by his side – Descartes’ meditator – can discover certain truths in his own mind. His senses may deceive him, he may be the victim of the tricks of an evil spirit, but certain clear and distinct ideas or intuitions can give him certain knowledge. In this way Descartes’ meditator achieved certain knowledge of his own existence and of the existence of God (the cogito argument and the ontological argument). He also discovered in himself innate knowledge of God(the trademark argument). He was then able to use such certainties as foundations on which to build a secure body of knowledge – the existence of the external world, science, etc.
So the twin claims of rationalism are that we can have knowledge without help from the senses (a priori knowledge) and we have a certain stock of innate knowledge or innate ideas (eg God, morality, rules of reasoning). These are separate claims and it is important not to confuse them. We could reject one without necessarily having to reject the other.
Two separate claims can be differentiated in the a priori claim: firstly, that substantive knowledge (facts) can be achieved by pure thought or intuition, and, secondly, that analytic truths can be known without sensory input – they are true by definition. Again, we could reject one without having to reject the other.
Both traditions, rationalism and empiricism, have generally (until the twentieth century) been forms of foundationalism. This is the idea that we justify our beliefs or claims to knowledge by connecting them to chains of reasoning going all the way back to basic foundational beliefs, the ones you can’t go beyond. For empiricists the basic foundation of all knowledge is sense experience – the raw sense data that comes into our mind from the outside world via our five senses. This is the Given; it is immediate, incorrigible, present. Rationalists argue that we can’t trust our senses: they can deceive us, so they cannot provide secure foundations for our judgements; absolutely certain knowledge can rest only on what we discover in our minds by pure thought.
One of the problems for empiricists is to explain how propositional knowledge (knowledge that p) can be built on perceptual experience, which is knowledge by acquaintance. But then rationalists have to explain how it is that we can discover propositional knowledge already in our minds. How did it get there? The problem for both traditions is to explain how something that is subjective and private (sense experience or thoughts) can be the foundation of something that is essentially public and shareable – knowledge.
At the end of the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and empiricism through his idea of an innate conceptual scheme, and in the twentieth century philosophers have questioned foundationalism and the possibility of founding knowledge on private experiences. Various versions of coherentism argue that beliefs are only ever justified by other beliefs: what you belief is justified and rational when it fits into your existing web of beliefs. There are no foundations. This opens the way to relativism about truth and knowledge.
The starting point for all modern philosophy is Descartes’ cogito ergo sum argument in Meditations. It was published in the 1640s at the dawn of the new age of experimental science, which combined observation and experiment with mathematical reasoning – in other words, it combined the empirical with the rational. Particular empirical observations needed to be generalised into theorems, principles and laws of nature. Descartes and others considered that you need the empirical data but you also need to interpret the data in the light of the general, universalisable truths that rational methodologies have discovered. Observation gives us data but reason gives us understanding. So the philosophical debates about reason and experience have real significance for science, for how we interpret the world to ourselves. Empiricists and rationalists have to achieve generalised truths or laws of nature in different ways.
Another key moment was when John Locke, towards the end of the senventeenth century, rejected innate ideas and argued that we are born without any ideas or knowledge- the tabula rasa argument. So, what are the key arguments for and against innate ideas?
Thursday 7 May 2009
Survival
Derek Parfit (Oxford) has argued that it is not personal identity that matters to us. Why should we care if what survives of us is or isn't the selfsame person as previously? (The police and the insurance company and the Inland Revenue might care, of course). So what do you want to survive of your present self 1) into old age, 2) after death?
Parfit's point is partly that something of us can survive - not enough to satisfy your interest in immortality, perhaps, but something, for a time. Not even in your own continuous consciousness, perhaps, but in the thoughts and memories of others. "What will survive of us is love", Philip Larkin said in a lovely poem ("An Arundel Tomb"). Not just love, though: also, the way we may have affected the world, influenced others, etc.
Would this be better than nothing? What would you prefer: that you survive your death as a disembodied consciousness or that tangible effects on the world or on other people continue without you?
NB Get ready to revise Reason and Experience.
Parfit's point is partly that something of us can survive - not enough to satisfy your interest in immortality, perhaps, but something, for a time. Not even in your own continuous consciousness, perhaps, but in the thoughts and memories of others. "What will survive of us is love", Philip Larkin said in a lovely poem ("An Arundel Tomb"). Not just love, though: also, the way we may have affected the world, influenced others, etc.
Would this be better than nothing? What would you prefer: that you survive your death as a disembodied consciousness or that tangible effects on the world or on other people continue without you?
NB Get ready to revise Reason and Experience.
Saturday 2 May 2009
Mars Teletransporter Thought Experiment
You're in a hurry, so you take the quick route to Mars. You enter the cubicle on Earth and every cell of your body is (somehow) recorded and the information transmitted instantly to Mars, where the cells are replicated. The original cells on Earth (ie your body) are annihilated. A qualititively identical thing steps out of the cubicle on Mars. Is there numerical (quantitative) identity between the you that entered the cublicle on Earth and the one that steps out of the cubicle on Mars? Is it you?
Because all the cells of your body have been replicated, including brain cells, the assumption is that the new body will have all the thoughts, memories, etc of the old one. There is psychological continuity.
What are your intuitions about this? What can a thought experiment like this really show or prove? Would your intutions be different if the original body were simply replicated, but not annililated, so there is now one "You" on Mars and the original still on Earth? Perhaps one could have a conversation with the other.
Would your intuitions be different if what your thoughts, memories, etc were replicated in on Mars wasn't physically identical (qualititively) to your body - if it were more obviously a machine, if the medium were different but the content the same?
Because all the cells of your body have been replicated, including brain cells, the assumption is that the new body will have all the thoughts, memories, etc of the old one. There is psychological continuity.
What are your intuitions about this? What can a thought experiment like this really show or prove? Would your intutions be different if the original body were simply replicated, but not annililated, so there is now one "You" on Mars and the original still on Earth? Perhaps one could have a conversation with the other.
Would your intuitions be different if what your thoughts, memories, etc were replicated in on Mars wasn't physically identical (qualititively) to your body - if it were more obviously a machine, if the medium were different but the content the same?
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