Berkeleyan Myth

This is a reflection on the first two pages of Berkeley's Three Dialogues. Philonous and Hylas meet early in the morning in a garden. Philonous expresses his surprise at meeting Hylas so early, and praises the morning as follows:

Can there be a pleasanter time of day, or a more delightful season of the year? That purple sky, those wild but sweet notes of birds, the fragrant bloom upon the trees and flowers, the gentle influence of the rising sun, these and a thousand nameless beauties of nature inspire the soul with secret transports; its faculties too being at this time fresh and lively are fit for these meditations, which the solitude of the garden and tranquility of the morning naturally dispose us to.

Thus, Philonous is immediately established as the kind of person who:

1. Gets up early. This suggests diligence and non-decadence, moral virtues.
2. Enjoys the simple pleasures of nature. This suggests (again) non-decadence, but also that Philonous is in touch with the natural world, has his senses wide open, is not locked into the world of books and ideas.
3. Is reasonable and comes to independent conclusions. Notice solitude and tranquility: Philonous does not come to his opinions because others tell him to believe something, nor does he jump to conclusions in the heat of an argument.
4. Has thoughts that are natural. This is really the key word here: it is nature herself that leads Philonous' thoughts in a certain direction, that makes him think, that makes him believe whatever he believes.

On the very next page, Philonous' character is sketched in further:

I entirely agree with you, as to the ill tendency of the affected doubts of some philosophers, and fantastical conceits of others, I am even so far gone of late in this way of thinking, that I have quitted several of the sublime notions I had got in their schools for vulgar opinions. And I give it to you on my word, since this revolt from metaphysical notions, to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened, so that I can now easily comprehend a great many things which were before all mystery and riddle.

Philonous, the natural man, condems in others affected doubts, fantastical conceits, sublime and metaphysical notions--in other words, all that is not natural. And he does this is the name of two things: the plain dictates of nature and common sense.

This should give us pause. If the dictates of nature are indeed plain, then why does Philonous need to invoke a second authority, namely, common sense? And note that 'common sense' here is not something like rational thought, a system of operations we need to process the plain dictates of nature; on the contrary, common sense is identified as the opinions of the vulgar.

A strange alliance has been created here! Why would the plain dictates of nature need complementation from the opinions of the vulgar? The real reason is clear: the dictates of nature are famously unclear, if they are dictates at all; using Nature as authority will not get Berkeley very far. He needs an authority that actually speaks, and that has not been used by all the school philosophers (but if his enemy is Locke, why speak about the schools at all?) he wishes to demolish. This authority is common sense.

But of course, common sense alone will not do the trick. Tell philosophers that instead of arguing they just need to go to the local tavern and ask the farmer, the baker and the tanner his questions about the world, and they will laugh at you. Rightly so, of course: for whatever the prejudices of the philosophers themselves may be, those of the common people are certainly no less strong and no more innocent. Common sense is but the name of an uncritically received, purely contingent historical heritage; it is the least authoritative of authorities; its voice is not that of Nature, but that of a distorted and petrified History.

It is only by a clever trick of characterisation, pulled off seemingly before the argument has started, that Berkeley manages to glue nature and common sense together. The most improbable connection is given a proper name (Philonous) and made probable--if it speaks, it must surely exist!

Berkely here seems to provide the perfect incarnation of what Barthes called myth. He turns the historical (common sense as the product of a specific cultural development) into the natural (common sense as closeness to nature); he justifies the claims of common people without explaining them; he makes common sense innocent. Here, observe Barthes (page references to the Vintage Classics English translation):

What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a while, by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality. [...] [M]yth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made. (p. 142)

Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. (p. 143)

And, the cherry on the cake, this is what Barthes says about statements of fact in myth (which he identifies as typically bourgeois):

The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it. (p. 155)

Berkeley, then, creates not just a myth among many, but the myth of myths: the myth of common sense, which in turn justifies all the myths that follow.

The Myth of a Unified Theory

Among scientists only physicists still believe in the dream of a single theory, and among them only the theoreticians, and in fact only those that work on string theory, quantum gravity, and other attempts to "unify" the fundamental forces of nature--a tiny but vocal minority, vocal because people want to hear what they say. These are the celebrities of science, since only their work still embodies the mythical goal of science.

Meanwhile, the fundamental forces are fundamental only on the plane of ideology; in the actual practice of physicists, there is a proliferation of models, equations, approximations; everything points to an always increasing diversity. Nature and Science, as concepts, are about to fracture; only the myth of a unified theory (which is the myth of reductionism) still holds them together.

Closed till further notice

This blog is closed for the forseeable future.

Look for interesting new content on my website or my blog The Gaming Philosopher.

Regards,
Victor

Person and possibility

In her book Sartre, Iris Murdoch writes (p.91-92):

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.) But usually one views other people as compact finished products to whom labels ('jealous', 'bad-tempered', 'shrewd', 'vivacious') are attached on the strength of their conduct; and [...] we inevitably think of the person as composed of psychic forces which issue in the performances that justify the names.

I think this ia very lucid description of something we do all too easily: we make other people into things, and we make ourself into a thing too. Instead of persons, we become characters: the abstract core is clothed in characteristics, and suddenly our life is determined to follow a certain path.

But we are never determined. We are never our actions, nor our thoughts, nor even our dispositions to act or think in a certain way. What makes a person a person is that he or she is a radical possibility. We are all our possible futures. We are not the choices we have made, we are the naked fact of choice itself.

I once looked upon a dead body, and was overcome with horror and revulsion: what lay there was not a human being, was not the man I had talked to only a few days before - it was a thing. Death destroys all possibilities.

The finished life is but a story.

The possibility of wisdom I

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Good questions, these desperate cries in The Rock by T.S.Eliot, and ones that we should think about not merely to create in ourselves a sense of nostalgia or loss, but to actually understand ourselves and the time we live in. Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge or, god forbid, information? Why does it sound strange to call someone a 'wise' person? Why do young people look down upon the elderly instead of going to them for advice? And why are they probably right if they believe that good advice will not be forthcoming?

Let us, for a moment, go to an essay by Walter Benjamin, Der Erzähler. One of the themes which runs through this text is that we have lost and are losing an ability that once seemed the most unproblematic and most sure of all: the ability to share our experiences. Here, 'experience' is my translation of 'Erfahrung', and the translation is not entirely truthful; 'Erfahrung' carries connotations of wisdom and having learned something, as does 'experience' is some expressions, such as 'an experienced person'.

According to Benjamin, what one person experiences can no longer be easily formed into something that he can share with others, that everyone can learn from. He gives us an intriguing image of the soldiers that returned from the first World War, not richer, but poorer in communicable experience:

Hatte man nicht bei dem Kriegsende bemerkt, daß die Leute verstummt aus dem Felde kamen? nicht reicher - ärmer an mitteilbarer Erfahrung. ... Und das war nicht merkwürdig. Denn nie sind Erfahrungen gründlicher Lügen gestraft worden als die strategischen durch den Stellungskrieg, die wirtschaftlichen durch die Inflation, die körperlichen durch die Materialslacht, die sittlichen durch die Machthaber.

According to Benjamin, then, the first World War showed that much of the experience that had been transferred from generation to generation was lies - or at least, was no longer applicable. The situation had changed so drastically that the wisdom of old was the meaningless folly of today.

Here we have, not the, not even an, but at least a partial answer to the question why wisdom has lost its elevated position in contemporary society. As the world has begun to change faster and faster, the experience of yesterday is less and less relevant for the reality of present life. How should you grow up in a world of internet and computer games, of world-wide terrorism and globalisation, of fast-food and commercials aimed at small children, and so on? Nothing our parents lived taught them anything with respect to that; let alone our grandparents.

Experience is valid only for a moment - then, when it is no longer new, it is no longer interesting. Erfahrung becomes Erlebnis. We miss the quiet, the time, the slow process of accumulation and refinement that transforms lived events into wisdom.

But fear not - we will slouch onwards.

Our faith in science

Casting doubt upon things you have never believed in, or at least do not now believe in, can be both useful and important - thus, if in the future the possibility of reinstating the death penalty would become a topic in Dutch politics, I would see it as my duty to cast doubt upon that dreadful institution. (Or perhaps just tell people to read L'étranger by Albert Camus, for I am not sure anything I say could be more powerful than his novel.) But casting doubt upon things that you have always believed in, belief in which has, in fact, shaped your existence to a considerable extent - that is something different. That is an existential experience. It is also a step on the path to wisdom. (Which is not at all incompatible with it being a step on the path to one's doom; for wisdom and tranquility do not, pace all too many old philosophers, go hand in hand.)

Recently, I have started doubting science. These doubt are not of an epistemological nature: I do in fact believe that as far as our knowledge falls within the domain of science (and not all of it does), science performs admirably. In fact, I am afraid that it succeeds all too admirably to be comfortable: the time has already come when statistical models are better at predicting whether a prisoner will commit crimes again upon release than humans can, and this leads to dangerous moral questions about how we should decide which prisoners are to be released on parole. (What is good for society seems to clash with out basic individualistic and humanistic intuitions.) The time may come soon when we discover that statistical models are much better at predicting happy and loving marriages than people themselves are, and how could we then defend carrying on along traditional lines? But these are not the doubts I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is a big social question, which is also an existential question for many of my friends and probably most of the people who will ever read this entry. It is the question: why are we doing so much science? In the case of the individual, this becomes the question: should I do science?

Until quite recently, I would have said that science grants us many technological and related benefits; and that on top of that, it is an activity with intrinsic worth. It is the search for truth, and isn't truth right up there with beauty and love among the highest values? And why should I do science? Because it ennobles the mind, uses my capacities to the fullest, allows me to work on the great project of human knowledge, and thus gives me both personal growth and the chance to use my talents to the benefit of humanity.

But is this true?


First, the benefits of science. Let me allow that some inventions in medicine have been very benificial. It is not at all my wish to preach a return to the times before antibiotics and vaccination. One may wonder, however, whether the general effect of medicine has been and is beneficial. If a treatment for cancer cures one in ten patients, but means only more months of agony for the others, is its invention and use a boon to mankind? Could it be that medicine has, in general, made us more afaid of death, less able to accept the whims of fortune and unable to bear the curses laid upon our bodies with grace? Might it not be that, although we have more cures, we nevertheless suffer more?

Perhaps not. Perhaps these questions do not stir up doubts in your soul, as they do in mine. But once we wend our gaze to other fields of science, surely all must agree. What are the benefits of physics? Summing up techonological innovations is easy, and it is the accepted way of defending science: television, radio, computers, airplanes, and so forth. Would we want to live without them? We would not - because we have become accustomed to them. The important question is: would we have been less happy without them? The answer there must be, emphatically, that we would have been just as happy without them. We cannot bear the thought of losing the ability to look up all information on the internet; but we did not miss it when we could, and our lives were different but not less happy. The advent of radio did not make mankind happier. The advent of television did not make mankind happier. The advent of the computer did not make mankind happier. For all of these, we could go on listing advantages and disadvantages for a long time, but in increase of happiness? I doubt it.

As an example, take the mobile phone. Several years ago, nobody had a mobile phone. Now, everyone (except for me) seems to have one, and people are generally very surprised to find out that I do not. But have they become happier? I see no signs of it. They have become used to it; they have become even less able to be alone and silent, less patient, less able to accept that fate may sometimes intervene in their lives - but I do not believe, for an instant, that they have become better friends, that they have somehow become more 'connected' to other human beings in any interesting sense of that word. Technology does not create happiness, it creates demand - and whether the end result is good or bad for humanity is always doubtful.

And these, then, are the inventions that are most obviously useful. Science has also brought us the missile and the atomic bomb, it has brought us pollution and traffic accidents, it has brought us totalitarianism and the Shoa (Holocaust). None of this marks science down as 'evil', but what it does show is that the effect of science on society is neither clearly good nor clearly bad. Science is grey; defending it by pointing to technological innovation is a dubious strategy at best.


Perhaps the benefit of science lies not in technology, but in the accumulation of knowledge itself? Is not this brilliant quest of mankind, to find the truth that lies hidden in the world, one of its highest expressions?

But truly, what use these bits and pieces of knowledge, so far removed from our daily lives, so esoteric, so abundant? The amount of facts and theories that science has discovered and constructed is so mind-bogglingly large, that in a lifetime a man might perhaps be able to form an accurate impression of his own ignorance - but no more than that. We cannot possibly be doing science because we want to know more, because there is so much known that we, personally, do not know, that doing science is the very last thing we should engage in if knowledge was our aim. We should be reading science instead of doing it, and we would never lack for new knowledge to imbue.

Is it, then, that we know a lot, but not the important things? What then are they, the important things? Is it important to know, say, the final building blocks of the universe? A mad quest if ever there was one, finding these, but even if one could successfully complete it - would it lead to happiness, or hope, or love, would it improve our lives or those of others, would it make us better humans? It would not. And even so, the vast majority of scientists is working on problems so obscure that only specialists even understand what they are - why? Surely not because these bits of knowledge are so 'important'?

We want to discover new facts or create successful theories for many reasons: to become famous, to get the respect and admiration of our peers, to be able to publish articles and thus keep our job, to prove ourselves - but not because we like puzzles or desire to test our intellect, because we could do that as easily with old questions - yet these social and psychological reasons are not very noble in themselves. I ask again: why do we do science? What are its so called benefits?


I will rephrase the question in another light. It is a fact that a large part of our intellectual elite, the people with brains and discipline, spend several years of their lives getting a scientific education. Such a scientific education, especially in the later years, is quite akin to being trained for a craft: one learns how to function as a scientist in a particular field. Universities do not wish to impart wisdom, but information and the skills one needs to perform a craft; one gets an education, not Bildung. Afterwards, a large part (and often the most intelligent) of these students go on to become scientists themselves, perform their craft for the rest of their lives.

And the question is: is this a good thing?

Is it a good thing that the best minds of our society do not become artists, do not become political activists, do not become philosophers (in a serious sense of the word, rather than 'someone who publishes articles in philosphical journals'), do not become wise men and women - but become instead craftsmen in a huge, hierarchical, conservative, government- and industry-funded undertaking that will keep them busy for the rest of their lives?

If one asks the question like that, the answer is obvious.

Let's be cynical for a moment. Perhaps academics (and related fields) are tolerated and even encourage by the powers that be, because it is the relatively unimportant field of play set aside for potentially dangerous minds. "We give them money to indulge in their esoteric research," on power that is might say to another, "and they have crafted for themselves a huge and complicated system of honours and prizes. Getting higher up in the academic hierarchy, publishing more papers, being cited more often, becoming famous because of some result or another, the noble prizes - it all works so much better than repression! They keep themselves busy, and all their energy and ambition is directed towards this semi-autonomous, a-political enterprise. The joke is even better, because they see it as their sacred political duty to protect science from intervention by politics and to ensure that we keep funding them - it is as if prisoners wanted to keep the walls of their own prison in good shape! We give them their toys, they are happy playing their games, and we never have to fear that those minds will start to question us... why, even Marx and Foucault, who worried me for a moment, are now merely objects of study. Marx-scholars... it doesn't get funnier than that!"


Why do we have faith in science?

Is it really the best we can be doing with our lives?

Propositional knowledge

In their excellent introductory text book Modern Epsitemology , Nicholas Everitt and Alec Fisher discuss three kinds of knowledge: capacity knowledge, which is knowledge how to do something; knowledge by acquaintance, which is being acquainted with something or someone; and propositional knowledge, which is knowing that truth or falsity of sentences or propositions. They write (p. 13):

There are clearly some complex interactions between these three types of knowledge.

Good! But then, a paragraph further on, they write:

Historically, it is propositional knowledge which has attracted most attention from philosophers, probably because it connects with such philosophically interesting concepts as rationality and truth (remember that our initial explanation of propositional knowledge was knowledge of truths). We shall follow this tradition and focus on propositional knowledge.

For 'focus on propositional knowlegde', read 'discuss propositional knowledge exclusively'. And yet - may it not be at this preliminary stage that epistemology's subsequent failures are decided? Perhaps the idea of 'propositional knowledge', as something that can be studied in isolation of other kinds of knowledge, is mistaken. And perhaps this mistake is the source of such vexing problems as the inability of philosophers to solve the Gettier problem and the problems of foundationalism.



A first thought, which is pretty natural given certain philosophies of language: propositional knowledge is merely a subset of capacity knowledge. It simply encompasses the capability of saying the right things at the right moment. When someone asks you "What was Napoleon's last battle" and you answer "Waterloo", you demonstrate that you know how to answer this (and related) questions. You also demonstrate that you know the proposition "Napoleon's last battle was Waterloo".

Of course, this analysis is only non-trivial if capacity knowledge of such a kind is based in linguistic practices: if, in other words, truth is analysed as a social concept. And although this may in some cases be a plausible analysis, we still want to say that knowing whether gravitation can be unified with the other forces of nature is something different than knowing how to behave linguistically in certain social situations. We are trying to find that out through physical research, a practice that makes little sense if knowing the truth is merely knowing how to behave correctly.


A second thought. I know what the quickest way is to go to my house from where I am now. This can be interpreted as capacity knowledge: I know how to get to my house as quickly as possible. It can be interpreted as knowledge by acquaintance: I have travelled this route often, and therefore I am acquainted with it. It can also be interpreted as propositional knowledge: I know that the quickest way from my current location to my house is such and so.

Is there a difference between these three things? Is the propositional knowledge any different from the capacity knowledge?

My rabbit knows the quickest way from any point in my room to her cage. Naturally, this means that she has capacity knowledge: she knows how to get to her cage as quickly as possible. But if this knowledge is the same as the propositional knowledge "the quickest way from this point in the room to my cage is ...", then she also has propositional knowledge - even though she cannot talk and probably doesn't think in a linguistic manner.


Let us explore the link between propositional knowledge and capacity knowledge further, by taking the famous Gettier example. Allegedly, Smith knows that "the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket". Suppose that we want to identify this with some capacity knowledge. What about: Smith knows that he has to speak to the man who will get the job if he needs ten coins. There may not be identity in a strong sense, but certainly knowing the proposition involves this capacity knowledge. And since capacity knowledge is practical, this means that Smith, unless he is disabled, must be able to actually go and ask the man who will get the job for those coins.

But Smith can't do that! He'll go and ask Jones about those coins, and hey, Jones even has ten coins, but Smith can't go and talk with the guy who'll get the job - because he doesn't know who that is. If we interpret the system of propositional claims as prescriptions for actions, Gettier's example loses its sting.


Does it? This post is too short, and needs a follow up. But I have to go now.

Internalism and Externalism

In analytic epistemology, there is an important difference between internalists about knowledge and externalists about knowledge. Radical internalists believe that whether a belief of a subject ought to be called 'knowledge' depends only on things internal to the subject's mind - his own conscious reasons for believing the proposition under consideration, for instance. Radical externalists believe that whether a belief of a subject ought to be called 'knowledge' depends only on external factors, such as the truth of the proposition (we are supposing that the proposition is about the external world). In general, internalists stress justification, whereas externalists stress truth.

Radical internalism appears to be based on a very Cartesian idea of the subject: as someone locked into his own mind, having access only to his own impressions and ideas and not being able to justify his beliefs by pointing to the world around him. But the problem of justification doesn't even arise for a Cartesian subject: it is only in a social setting that we can be asked to justify our beliefs, and it is only in a social setting that a set of normative rules for justification can be worked out. Without a social setting, the idea of justification doesn't even make sense.

Of course one may ask oneself to justify one's own beliefs, and in practice one does so often. But arguably one uses the internalised standards of judgement that the community has given one. Really? Does that mean that conscious critical reflection on one's own ideas is impossible if one has not been raised in an epistemic community? (Such as most animals.) I'm hesitant to say so - see below. Does it mean that you are tied to the rules laid down for you by your community? Surely not, but I suggest that adopting different rules of justification amounts to taking the stance that the rest of the community should also adopt those rules - it is a statement that one would like to bring about a social change. "Please people, let's use this rule to evaluate ourselves!"

Making 'justification' a social concept doesn't really solve the problem, though. For one could still be an externalist or an internalist about the social group: does it have knowledge simply when it conforms to its own standards of justification, or does it have knowledge when it is right? And a new problem has arisen: is a social group entirely free to choose its standards of justification, or does the world somehow have a say in this?

We will turn to truth. I have no patience at all for 'everybody has his own truth'-talk, so I'll simply start by assuming that we all agree that truth is somehow external to us. We cannot know for sure that something is true merely by looking at our own mind. Why do we all accept it? Why would we accept it if we were Cartesian subjects? There would simply be no reason to accept the world as something that exists, let alone as something that is relevant, if we were Cartesian subjects. Nope, our idea of truth as something external to us is based on two things: the existence of epistemic authorities, and our reliance on the world.

With the first I mean simply this: there are people who know more about some things than we do. We learn to accept this, and we learn to put their beliefs about those subjects above our own - at least as long as we think that they probably have better justifications than we do. (Justifications are, after all, the social standards which pick out epistemic authorities from the mass.) The existence and our constant recognition and acceptance of epistemic authorities proves to us that we are fallible, that truth is not possessed by us, but that it is sometimes possessed by others who may give it to us.

With the second I mean that to us, non-Cartesian subjects, the world is very relevant as it is what gives us pain and pleasure, shows us beauty and ugliness, gives us enough food or makes us starve, and in the end decides about our life and death. We rely on the world, and since we are ('causally', if we can use that word pre-theoretically) predisposed to choose pleasure, beauty, food and life over pain, ugliness, starvation and death, holding beliefs that will (causally) make us perform worse in those aspects are punished swiftly.

This is a very important point. Beliefs are causes of our behaviour. The most basic normativity concerning beliefs stems from the normativity of survival: those beliefs which harm our survival are bad and therefore not knowledge, those which help it are good and therefore knowledge. But the exact same thing holds for the standards of justification adopted by a community: if they lead to the community's eradication, something was wrong with them. As far as we are not at a liberty to choose pain and death, we are not at a liberty to choose our standards of justification.

I am using a very weak notion of normativity here. It is utterly grounded in natural phenomena, and should not be interpreted as a return of the realm of absolute morals. We have left that behind forever, I'm afraid. In Nietzschean terms, I'm saying that though God is dead, there are strong causal restriction on the new values we can adopt - thus, strong causal restrictions on our (utterly relative) norms.

But this means that our idea of truth as something external is partly grounded in our practice of justification, and partly grounded on aspects of the world that also ground this practice. But this grounding severly underdetermines both our practice concerning truth and that concerning justification. Furthermore, the standards the social group adopts with respect to truth and those it adopts with respect to justification will intertwine and often be identical - indeed, I don't truly see how we could seperate them. Our personal judgements, our social dynamics and the world all intertwine to create our practice of knowledge, and this practice simply cannot be cut into those parts that refer to the self, and those parts that refer to the external world. Many of the things that I have refered to as being part of the world are actually parts of our brains and of our self, and they are dependent on social conditionalisations too.

These conclusions could use more argumentation. Maybe another time. Posts in a blog should not be held to the standards of articles.

So it seems to me that the entire distinction between internalism and externalism is a philosophical misunderstanding. It mistakenly assumes that in the domain of knowledge we can make a distinction between 'internal' and 'external' factors, whereas in reality this domain is formed by a hugely complicated network of causes and effects that is not neatly divided into the self, the social and the world.

Another blog

It is only two days ago that I started my first blog, The Gaming Philosopher, on roleplaying games and interactive fiction. It is far too early to judge whether it is a success or not, and yet I have decided to start a second blog - on philosophy, this time. Why?

Mainly because this just might be a fruitful way of developing assorted philosophical thoughts, and perhaps even discussing them with some people. I want to give it a try.

Therefore: welcome!