The Real World

New philosophy blog

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:52:56 +0000

I’ve decided to start a new philosophy blog, called Inverted Spectrum after the famous thought experiment, containing thoughts, issues and reading notes relating to my Ph.D. research in the philosophy of mind, perception and epistemology. Although I will continue to maintain the current site—indeed I’ve recently given it something of a facelift in the form of a new design (courtesy of iWeb’s ‘Elegant’ theme)—this blog will be put in mothballs until such time as I’m able to reinvigorate it with a raft of exciting new content (i.e. for the foreseeable future).

In part, my reason for switching sites is that the software I’m using to publish The Real World (Apple iWeb) is not ideally suited to text-based blogging as it requires the entire site (including my personal and technology pages) to be updated all in one go. Unfortunately, since I like to work on several different updates in parallel, this makes it difficult to publish one site independently of the others, which generally slows down the pace of updates. My hope is that with the new web-based blogging site (WordPress), I will be able to keep my philosophy blog more up-to-date even when away from the computer thanks to WordPress’s iPhone application. In addition, WordPress blogs also support the use of categories, which makes it easier to classify and navigate blog entries—a feature that iWeb is, IMHO, sorely lacking.

Those of you who have been following my philosophical activities to date may be interested to know that I’ve recently uploaded a copy of my M.Litt. dissertation, entitled ‘Time-Consciousness and the Present’, to Academia.edu, another web site that I’ve been using of late. Although more suited to publishing formal talks and papers, I will be keeping my academic profile page on that site up to date, via which PDF copies of my dissertation, recent talks and other content may be downloaded.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to do so and to comment on my work at its new home of invertedspectrum.wordpress.com.

Best wishes,
Keith.

Relativity and the present

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 18:22:34 +0100

Much has been written about Einstein’s theory of relativity and how it contradicts the philosophical notion of ‘the present’. Most of the literature concerns the special theory of relativity (SR) as opposed to the general theory (GR) which also takes into account the effects of gravitation due to the ‘bending’ of space and time, whose complex four-dimensional geometry is thought to account for the motion of objects. Instead of taking space and time to be distinct entities (if they can be called entities), both theories posit a single four-dimensional manifold known as spacetime, which can be ‘sliced up’ in various ways depending upon the motion of the observer. Thus, what for one observer might constitute space or ‘space-like relations’, for another may constitute time or ‘time-like relations’, with important consequences for their interpretations of simultaneity, mass, distance, and so on. Einstein’s crucial insight was that no matter which frame of reference you happen to inhabit, the laws of physics remain constant. In particular, light appears to travel at precisely the same velocity away from every observer regardless of how fast they are travelling; i.e. it does not, contrary to conventional experience, recede more slowly from an observer who is travelling in the same direction.

From a philosophical point of view, several distinctions should be noted. Firstly, the four-dimensional geometry of relativistic spacetime is quite different to the four-dimensional picture of space and time often employed by philosophers in defending temporal parts theory, for example. The former — sometimes known as Einstein–Minkowski spacetime — is non-Euclidean, i.e. it contains ‘bends’ or ‘kinks’, whereas the conventional conception of time as a fourth dimension is generally thought of as being ‘flat’; i.e. it designates a fourth ‘time dimension’ in addition to the three regular spatial dimensions. In Minkowski spacetime, however, there is no time dimension, since time is relative to an inertial frame and so what constitutes time (as opposed to space) will differ between observers travelling at different speeds. The parallel between the two forms of four-dimensionalism is suggestive, but ultimately obscures radical philosophical differences, and in particular the distinction between spacetime as a unified entity and more traditional notions of space and time as independent dimensions or systems of co-ordinates.

Furthermore, much has been made of the fact that SR and most formulations of GR (see below) do not privilege any particular inertial frame, and so posit no universally agreed upon standard of simultaneity since observers will differ upon what appears to be simultaneous depending upon how fast they are travelling and in what direction. This is largely (entirely?) due to the fact that light — or any other kind of information, for that matter — takes time to travel due to the principle of locality (no action at a distance), and so what each observer perceives as simultaneous will depend upon their relative motion as characterised by a particular inertial frame. Since light travels at the same rate relative to all observers, as described above, the only objective fact that can be universally agreed upon is the causal structure of the universe, which is multi-dimensional, but not its absolute temporal order, which can only be calculated relative to a given observer. Since such observers — people, for example — generally move around or are accelerated due to gravity and other forces, even a single observer may occupy many different inertial frames throughout their lifetime and so cannot give a fully ‘objective’ description of the unfolding of events.

Relativity theory — and particularly SR — is often thought to contradict the very notion of ‘the present’, as constituted by an instantaneous ‘snapshot’ of or ‘moment’ in the life of the universe, or as interface between past and future, as suggested by Aristotle. Since there is no privileged frame of reference, or so the argument goes, there can be no privileged ‘present’ moment, but rather which events are happening now is relative to the observer’s frame of reference. Many philosophers have thought that this overwhelmingly endorses the ‘eternalist’ or ‘B-theoretic’ picture of temporal reality in which all events, past, present and future, are seen as being stretched out in an unchanging and atemporal four-dimensional manifold, just waiting to be encountered by us as we travel through the time-dimension of our particular inertial frame. However, it seems to me that this conclusion is far too hasty since it glosses over some important methodological and philosophical principles.

In the first place, it is far from clear that GR (as opposed to SR) does not contain a privileged inertial frame. It is possible that the distribution of matter in the universe does in fact fix a particular frame of reference, which may then be used to define a single universally agreed upon standard of simultaneity, or ‘present moment’. Or so physics tells us. Although I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about GR to pronounce one way or the other, it seems at least plausible that there are elements of GR which, unlike SR, lend themselves to a more conventional picture of space and time, and so this is an option that should not be ruled out prematurely. Furthermore, we must bear in mind that both theories of relativity are fundamentally incomplete since they do not take into account of many important phenomena, especially at the sub-atomic scale, where the physical model of space and time becomes even more surprising. Recent attempts to unify relativistic theories of the large-scale structure of the universe with quantum mechanical accounts of its small-scale structure appear to be getting stuck on precisely this question of what constitutes space and time, resulting in radical differences in the way that these entities are treated or explained. For example, the ‘background independent’ theory of loop quantum gravity provides an account of how space and time themselves are structured and created, whereas string theory presupposes a complex 11-dimensional geometry within which all energy and matter exist. What causes space and time to exist, or why they should possess this particular geometry, is not something that the theory itself explains (and all the worse for it, according to some physicists). Such wide divergence of opinion gives sufficient reason — for philosophy if not physics — to reserve judgement on such delicate matters as simultaneity, and so jumping on the SR bandwagon to pronounce the death of ‘the present’ would be somewhat precipitous, if not downright philosophically irresponsible.

However, I think that a stronger case in favour of the philosophical theory known as ‘presentism’ (the doctrine that only what is present exists) can be made. The alleged counterexamples to presentism arising from relativity theory generally come in one of two varieties. The first involves the observation that simultaneity is relative to a given inertial frame, and so consequently not all observers will agree on what is simultaneous, as described above. This, however, seems to be the case due to the fact that, as has already been noted, information takes time to travel, and so the way the universe seems to a given observer will depend upon what information they receive and in what order, rather than being able to see the way that things really are at another spatial location as it happens. This does not, it seems to me, contradict the notion that there is a way that things really are at some particular time in every other location, but merely reinforces the difference between appearance and reality with which we are all familiar (i.e. it only seems to observer A that observer B’s light flashed later than her own due to the information from A’s location arriving at B after it was originally emitted). Thus we do not have to construe reality or simultaneity as being relative to a particular inertial frame, but can differentiate between reality, which is objectively real, and appearance, which is relative to one’s particular perspective, in order to explain the relevant phenomena. (Perhaps this response trades on a naïve interpretation of relativity theory, but if so I’d be interested to hear where it goes wrong.)

The second type of alleged counterexample to presentism involves the fact that identical clocks travelling at different speeds will run faster or slower relative to one another. A clock, whose mechanism can involve any physical process, travelling at 95% the speed of light, for example, will measure a shorter duration of elapsed time than one that is in freefall (the closest thing that relativity offers to ‘absolute rest’). Time, in effect, will pass ‘more slowly’ according to how fast one is travelling up to the logical maximum of the speed of light, at which time would effectively stand still (although there are good reasons why an observer with non-zero mass cannot accelerate up to this speed, since mass also increases with velocity). This phenomenon has been observed to follow Einstein’s theory to a high degree of accuracy, and so must be accounted for by any future ‘complete’ theory of physics, should such a theory turn out to be possible. Such cases are generally explained in terms of the faster clock taking a ‘different path’ through the four-dimensional structure of spacetime such that less time has elapsed whilst covering more space. Since one’s combined velocity through spacetime cannot exceed the speed of light — the fastest speed that there is — travelling faster through space slows one’s rate of passage through time, and so clocks run slower when travelling at speed than those which are travelling more slowly through space, and therefore faster through time.

It is far from clear, however, that the four-dimensional explanation is the only one available. It would, I submit, be possible to account for the relative slowing of the clock in terms of alterations to the physical processes occurring within the clock that is travelling at high speed — it’s increase in mass, perhaps — without invoking the notion of objects traversing different paths through four-dimensional ‘reality’. Of course, such an explanation would need to avoid the obvious circularity of saying that time ‘slows down’ for rapidly moving objects, since this presupposes that time passes at a particular rate that can itself ‘slow down’ or ‘speed up’. However, such changes can only be measured relative to a secondary time scale, since the notion that time itself passes at some particular rate, e.g. one or two seconds per second, is absurd, as many philosophers have observed. However, this does not mean that such an explanation is impossible. Provided that the rate of change is properly indexed to other changes that occur (or would occur) in matter travelling at slower speeds relative to the rest of the universe, the need for an additional fourth dimension of reality is avoided in favour of a single three-dimensional reality, events within which are governed by a single set of inertia-sensitive laws. (Again, I do not pretend to have an in-depth understanding of the physics involved, but this kind of solution appears to be at least prima facie plausible from a philosophical point of view. I invite argument from my physicist friends as to why such a formulation should be considered impossible.)

So far, I have given two reasons why I think that it is too soon to give up on the notion of ‘the present’ as a unified, coherent and simultaneous state of the entire universe: (i) the incompleteness of current physical theory, and (ii) the possibility of accounting for relativistic phenomena in other ways than positing four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. However, there is a third and perhaps more important way in which the presentist may perhaps resist the claim that SR and/or GR refutes their theory, which concerns the very notion of ‘the present’ that such arguments employ.

Philosophers and physicists have typically either identified ‘the present’ with a single instantaneous moment of time — the ‘now’ — or a very short duration — perhaps something approaching the Planck length with respect to time. The latter notion, however, may arguably be shown to be incoherent since if the present itself has some finite duration, then it also has a beginning and an end which themselves can either be past, present or future. As Augustine famously observed, since it is absurd to think that some part of the present may itself not be present, this leads to the conclusion that the present must be instantaneous, or possess zero duration. This notion of an ‘instantaneous present’ is expressed within relativity theory in terms of an inertial frame which, as has already been discussed, causes problems for a universal definition of simultaneity for reasons discussed above. However, I do see any reason why the presentist need adopt this notion of ‘the present’ as it stands. Instead, the presentist’s ‘present’ should be expressed in terms of the world’s existing as a enduring three-dimensional whole, rather than an instantaneous time-slice of some notional ‘temporal continuum’ — the very image of time that presentism itself rejects. Instead, the presentist’s ontology should be framed in terms of being, which is essentially temporal (i.e. tensed), and existence, since — according to the presentist, at least — only what is present exists. The being of the present should not merely be contrasted with the non-being of the past and future, therefore, but rather expressed in terms of the being of the world as a unified and co-present whole. To that extent, the name of the doctrine may itself mislead since it characterises the theory in terms of the very picture that it rejects, i.e. the notion of ‘the present’ as an instantaneous time-slice between the past and future, as opposed to what it affirms, i.e. the existence of the world as a whole. Given that the moniker of ‘existentialism’ is already taken, perhaps ‘three-dimensionalism’, ‘endurantism’, or even ‘universalism’ would be a better name, although the former terms are more usually employed in relation to metaphysical discussion of the persistence of objects, rather than as a doctrine concerning the nature of temporality per se (although the two are of course very closely related).

Of course, simply calling presentism by a different name does nothing to answer the challenge that Augustine and others put forward concerning the duration of the present, but when we consider this question in relation to the world as a three-dimensional whole, we can perhaps start to see why it is so misguided. Does the world as a whole have a duration? Well it persists in time, if that’s what you mean, but otherwise the question lacks sense. Which inertial frame is privileged in calculations of simultaneity? I do not think the presentist need take a view on this question, since it only makes sense from within the theoretical framework of SR (and possibly GR), although he does then owe us an account of relativistic phenomena that does not rely upon the four dimensional account of spacetime, but rather accounts for differences in judgements of simultaneity and relative rate of physical processes in terms of the speed that information can travel and the behaviour of energy and matter as it travels at different speeds relative to its surroundings (i.e. a Machian formulation of relativity theory — something which may or may not be possible, depending upon who you talk to). In short, the presentist’s ‘present’ need not be the zero-duration instant that we have come to think of as synonymous with the term, but may take into account a broader and more flexible notion of the world, reality and being itself.

Is presentism incompatible with relativity? I don’t think so. Certain formulations or interpretations of relativity certainly posit the existence of a single unchanging four-dimensional manifold. However, this may be as much an artefact of the way that relativity theory is formulated as opposed to an essential feature of relativistic theories per se. Just as we shouldn’t be misled by Newtonian physics’ use of the variable t for time into thinking that time is itself a distinct dimension, much careful analysis is required before jumping to the conclusion that Minkowski spacetime literally represents how space and time really are, as opposed to merely being a convenient mathematical model for describing the unfolding of certain spatiotemporal phenomena. Moreover, physical accounts of time are prone to treating the past as being entirely symmetric with the future, whereas everyday experience shows them to be anything but. As such, any four-dimensional or eternalist theories is guilty of obscuring the deep metaphysical connections between temporality and modality — i.e. possibility and necessity — since what is time if it is not the process by which the possible becomes actual? This apparent symmetry is perhaps unsurprising since physical theories are based upon the model of past observations, extrapolating these patterns in a way that mirrors the structure of the past in its predictions for the future. However, as a recent paper on the possibility of quantum mechanical time travel admits, ‘looking backwards, the world is deterministic … looking forwards, the future is probabilistic’, and our best theory of the workings of the small-scale structure of the universe, namely quantum mechanics, does preserve an important asymmetry between past and future in terms of the collapse of the wave function. If our intuitions of free will and the openness of the future are true — and why should we think they are not? — then it is the eternalist and not the presentist that has some explaining to do, since only the latter theory is compatible with the non-determinateness of future events, regardless of whether the laws of physics are determinate or (as currently appears to be the case) not.

The moral of this story? That philosophers should be careful not to interpret physical theory too literally since — as most physicists would be the first to admit — such theories merely represent an abstract model of reality, as opposed to a literal description of it. The Quineans amongst you may think that this amounts to much the same thing, and there are times that we should have the courage of our convictions and, á la David Lewis’s modal realism, posit the existence of those entities that the variables in our best physical and philosophical theories dictate (not that I subscribe to modal realism — quite the reverse!). However, in my view, as regards the reality of the past and the future, the jury is still out, and the inconsistency of relativity and ‘the present’ has yet to be conclusively demonstrated. In the meantime, by rejecting the physicist’s or Aristotelian notion of ‘the present’ in favour of a more flexible and inclusive conception of reality as a whole, it remains open to the presentist to describe a view in which reality is not confined to a single durationless time-slice, but in which the abstract entities we think of as ‘times’ are explained in terms of the being and endurance of the world, which is in a constantly changing and self-creating state of flux. In other words, in questions of time, there is still everything to play for.

Some preliminary ramblings on the philosophy of time

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:36:20 +0100

As I intend to write my M.Litt. dissertation on the philosophy of time and temporal passage, I thought it might be useful to set down a few preliminary remarks concerning some of the points at issue, as well as some possible strategies for resolving them. So here goes…

In general, much discussion in the philosophy of time centres upon the following basic questions:

1. What is time?
2. Do the past and the future exist, or only the present?
3. Does time really pass, or is temporal passage some kind of illusion?
4. What makes statements concerning past and future events true?

Having already had one or two stabs at (1), I would like to focus primarily upon (3), which will also involve elements of (2) and (4), as all four questions are closely related. For example, if in answer to (2), one holds that both past and future exist, then question (4) concerning truthmakers for past and future events may be answered in exactly the same manner as it is for present events: namely, its being the case that something is thus and so (to borrow a McDowellian phrase) at the relevant temporal ‘location’. The converse view, known as presentism, however, takes it that only what is present exists, or is real, and so whatever makes statements concerning the past and future true or false must be something that is present, e.g. the traces or potentialities of the relevant events that currently exist, or else some fact about the world as a whole, e.g. that it is a world in which the sun came up this morning (what Robin Le Poidevin somewhat mischievously calls a ‘Bigelow property’). A third possibility is to deny, as per Merricks (2007), that such facts even require truthmakers, which is an option I plan to investigate in greater detail over the next few days.

It is notable that each of the above questions concerns what really is the case, as opposed to how things seem to us; i.e. they are explicitly metaphysical or ontological in character, rather than primarily epistemological or linguistic. This raises the question of how such issues can be decided in the absence of compelling phenomenological or empirical evidence for one account or another. Regarding (3), for example, whilst we clearly experience time as passing in the sense that things change in an apparently ordered and directed manner (the so-called anisotropy of time), and the same sentence uttered at different times may vary in truth value etc., whether this is admissible as evidence that time really changes as opposed to merely seeming to do so is something of a moot point. At the very least, the anti-realist about temporal passage owes us an account of why it seems to us that time passes, since the nature of temporal experience constitute at least prima facie evidence for the reality of temporal passage, but it is difficult to see how phenomenological or empirical evidence alone can settle the matter.

Such difficulties are compounded by the fact that all sides agree on most (all?) of the relevant data. It is, for example, true that today is 23rd June, that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, and that the sun will (presumably) come up tomorrow. It is also true that the future follows the present, and that the present follows the past, and that Ken Livingston was mayor of London before (hard to believe though this is) Boris Johnson. The truth of such tensed statements can easily be admitted by the presentist, four-dimensionalist and growing block theorist alike. The difference between these positions concerns, rather, what makes it true that these things are the case, or whether other unknown (or unknowable) facts the truth or falsity of which we are (presently) unaware have determinate truth values. Such issues are not something that can be resolved by turning to the contents of experience, temporal or otherwise. They can only be settled by application of familiar philosophical tools such as conceptual analysis designed to bring out paradoxes and contradiction, or by theoretical concerns such as simplicity, elegance, consistency with everyday thought and language. Even worse, such concerns often pull in opposing directions and are themselves subject to dispute. (Witness, for example, the disagreement over the role that intuitions should play in the philosophy of mind and language.)

In constructing a theory of time, as with theories of truth or modality, it is tempting to extrapolate from the ‘best’ case in which the relevant facts are known or easily accessible to us. In doing so, we construct a picture in which all of the facts are ‘stretched out in front of us’ such that were we to obtain appropriate access to them by means of empirical investigation, or by some benevolent deity, for example, then they would turn out to be of no different in kind to the everyday facts with which we are all familiar. Facts, one might say, are homogenous — even those to which we currently have, or could have, no access whatsoever, and which to all intents and purposes may not even exist without it making the slightest jot of difference to our present (i.e. actual) situation. One alternative to this Tractarian view is that in which the facts are somehow tied to our epistemic situation. It could be, for example, that we construct the facts by being in possession of appropriate concepts and ways of knowing, or that truth is itself ‘gappy’ in that certain regions of reality are genuinely indeterminate, not just because we have limited access to them, but because that’s really how things are. Such indeterminacy tends to offend our intellectual sensibilities since it introduces an additional outcome over and above the basic binary opposition of truth and falsity with which we are most comfortable. However, such a position cannot be ruled out of court without substantive argument (cf. Michael Dummett’s Truth and the Past).

In some cases, choice of theory may be dictated by more practical concerns, such as the theory’s ability to make predictions, or our ability to perform the necessary calculations — in fundamental physics, for example — or by mere simplicity of expression. Of course, it is generally desirable to avoid an overly anthropocentric view in which truth and falsity only applies to what can be known by us, or those beings sufficiently similar to us, but as soon as we stray outside of such human concerns it becomes difficult to maintain a grip upon what the resulting concepts actually mean, and in what sense we are entitled to draw any conclusions from them at all, except perhaps upon purely logical grounds (see my 2007 for further discussion).

All of which serves to illustrate the problem: the supposedly conflicting philosophies of time only disagree upon points that everyday experience and speech are at best agnostic to, and which are at worst irrelevant to any practical concerns. It could even be the case that several different theories are internally consistent, each of which agrees upon all of the empirically and experientially available facts, but that disagree about what it is that makes them true; i.e. the answer to questions (2) to (4). In this case, the theory of time would be underdetermined by the evidence, making it largely a matter of faith or ontological preference which theory one adopts, as is so often the case in issues of metaphysics.

My own preference is to take the phenomenological evidence as a basis for further refinement and to construct a theory with the minimum number of additional ontological commitments which diverges as little as possible from the ordinary ‘common-sense’ view embedded in everyday thought and language. Such evidence is perhaps the best we can hope for in any philosophical theory and is (I contend) most likely to maintain consistency with other widely held beliefs, such as those concerning reality in general or the mind (although it is conceivable that common-sense is inconsistent on these issues, in which case we may be forced to decide which of our intuitions we are most willing to reject). Such a theory should certainly be consistent with the best available physical theories, but neither can this factor be considered decisive since such theories are well known to be incomplete and conflict with each other on many important points — especially when it comes to issues of space and time (general relativity and quantum mechanics being an obvious case in point).

Whilst it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to draw any firm conclusions concerning the metaphysics of time based upon the phenomenology of temporal passage — or even of experience more generally — alone, an approach that involves a consideration of mental phenomena may perhaps prove more decisive. Thought, memory, consciousness, perception, etc. are all phenomena which take place ‘in time’, and whose essence, in a peculiar sense, particularly in the case of thought and memory, is time, as Kant and Heidegger, amongst others, have noted. Could it be possible to argue for or against particular theories of time based upon their implications for any explanation of such phenomena? Such a project would undoubtedly be complicated by the fact that there are no uncontested accounts of the phenomena in question, which are equally in dispute, and so any doubts that they cast upon a particular theory might equally be levelled at the account of the relevant phenomena, rather than towards the theory of time itself. However, this is certainly something that I would like to investigate further, and one upon which I hope to blog upon further in the relatively near future (if indeed, there is any such thing!).

In the mean time (!), I still maintain that a metaphysics of time based upon a dynamic, ever-changing present in which past and future supervene upon present reality or being, is the most plausible option, and will be seeking to develop and refine some form of presentism to overcome many of the difficulties associated with this doctrine in all its various incarnations. Perhaps the worst of these is the so-called truthmaker problem, as sketched out above. If Merricks is right, however, then this might, as with so many other philosophical problems, turn out to be illusory — unlike the passage of time or temporal becoming, which is surely a genuine feature of reality, regardless of what Einstein’s theory of special relativity, or naïve philosophical interpretations of it, might have to say about it!

Neutral monism and the conceivability argument

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:24:08 +0100

I’m currently writing an essay on the so-called conceivability argument against mind–body identity statements, and whether neutral monism (aka ‘Type-F materialism’ in Chalmers-speak) presents be a suitable response to it. Ever since studying Bertrand Russell’s neutral monism, which accounts for the reality of both mental and physical entities in terms of a single ‘neutral’ type, namely events, I’ve been intrigued by the position, which seems to offer the potential for a reductive analysis of the mental whilst making it intelligible how mental and physical phenomena are so closely interrelated (Descartes’s problem of the union of mind and body).

The basic idea of neutral monism can be summed up relatively simply: the universe is neither wholly mental (a position known as phenomenalism) nor wholly physical (i.e. physicalism), nor comprised of an amalgam of the two (substance or property dualism, dual aspect theory, etc.), but rather of neutral elements that are themselves neither mental nor physical, but out of which everything mental and physical is comprised, or whose properties they supervene upon. The close relation between mental and physical phenomena may then be explained in terms of changes to the neutral elements that underlie the mental (i.e. phenomenal, psychological) and physical (i.e. brain states, nerve firings etc.) entities in question, and which comprise the various aspects of reality with which we are all familiar. It is important to note that this relationship is constitutive, rather than causal, and so what it is for something to be mental or physical is just that it is comprised of the relevant groupings of the underlying neutral elements, whose type and nature is unknown.

In effect, neutral monism solves the mind–body problem by positing a single ‘lowest common denominator’ non-physical ‘substance’ from which everything is comprised, and of which the mental and the physical are simply two different manifestations of. Mental and physical properties are merely different configurations or properties of the underlying neutral elements, and are interrelated due to their being comprised of one and the same stuff. As such, the theory is not unlike Kant’s account of phenomena and noumena in that the nature of noumena is entirely unknown — and quite possibly unknowable — to us, although that is not an essential part of the theory. It is sufficient that reality is, at base, non-physical and non-mental, and that the physical and the mental are merely two different ‘views’ onto the same underlying substrate.

The position is attractive because of its ontological parsimony and because it retains the basic spirit of scientific materialism but without identifying the underlying ‘material’ with the substances that are the subject of current scientific theory. As many scientists would acknowledge, such theories only tell us about the structural or causal properties of the universe, and not of its intrinsic properties, although this is no doubt the aim and aspiration of much modern physics. Nevertheless, most scientists and philosophers assume — justifiably or otherwise — that there must be some bearers of the relevant causal-structural properties, and so some underlying elements out of which the universe is comprised (contrary to the position known as structuralism, which suggests that only structural properties exist). Neutral monism posits the existence of just such elements, but places them beyond the reach of current physics, thus avoiding reducing everything to what the laws of physics tell us about — a position known as physicalism, which becomes philosophically problematic when accounting for the nature of mind and consciousness.

One such problem for the physicalist view concerns the kind of identities between mental and physical entities that it entails. Such terms would, according to Kripke’s modal semantics, have to be necessarily identical or, to put it in common philosophical parlance, refer to the same thing ‘in every possible world’. However, our modal intuitions would seem to suggest otherwise, since — according to Kripke and Chalmers at least — we seem to have little difficulty in imagining pain without C-fibre firings, to take a well-worn example, or exact physical duplicates of ourselves that have no inner experience (aka philosophical ‘zombies’). Whether such intuitions are a reliable guide to reality is itself a much debated methodological issue, but assuming that there is something to this line of argument, it would seem that the apparent contingency of the relevant identity statements calls for an explanation.

Neutral monism seems to offer just such an explanation, and it goes something like this: the mental and the physical are interrelated via their constitutive relations in the underlying neutral (i.e. non-physical and non-mental) substrate. Mental properties pick out the intrinsic properties of elements of this neutral substrate, and are therefore essential properties that pick out the same elements in every possible world. Physical properties, on the other hand, are individuated by their causal role such that being a particular brain event — a neuron firing, for example — is a contingent property of the neutral elements that could, in another possible world, be realised via an intrinsically different instantiation of such elements. Physical events, brain events, etc. are therefore contingent properties of the neutral elements, since they are multiply realisable and need not correspond to the same intrinsic (i.e. mental) properties in every possible world. The apparent contingency of mind–brain identity statements is therefore explained by the hypothesis that physical events (the right-hand side of the identity statement) are picked out via a contingent structural property of the underlying neutral elements, namely that of being a particular brain event, whereas mental events (the left-hand side) pick out an essential intrinsic property of the very same elements, e.g. that of being a particular sensation of redness. Since one is necessary and the other contingent, the two terms can (in theory at least) come apart, thus creating the logical possibility of disembodied minds or philosophical zombies. In practice, this will depend very much upon the relevant properties and configurations of the neutral substrate, so whether such esoteric entities are physically possible remains a moot point (although, to be fair, no-one really thought this anyway — not these day, at least).

The above explanation, apart from being rather tricky to get one’s head around, has a number of things going for it. Firstly, neutral monism constitutes a powerful framework for resolving the infamous mind–body problem. Secondly, it is ontologically very minimal, positing only one fundamental type of entity (the neutral elements), rather than two (the mental and the physical). Of course, this is no different to physicalism itself, which suggests that all other phenomena are constituted of or supervene upon physical properties, but this position is notoriously difficult to maintain, and in any case makes the philosophically dubious assumption that our knowledge of physics is somehow fundamental, despite the fact that such knowledge is only accessible from an irreducibly first-person perspective (although no doubt others will disagree).

Perhaps the main problem with such a view is that it accounts for the nature of phenomenal experience in terms of a kind of object or entity, as opposed to a relation. In many ways, this just seems to be the wrong ontological category to place experience in. It certainly makes sense to think of us as standing in, for example, perceptual relations to objects in the world, and it seems plausible that the phenomenal character of those experiences are a kind of property of this relation — a position known as adverbialism. This idea would be difficult to capture within the framework of neutral monism, since the phenomenal aspects of experience are explained in much the same way as the objects which they are experiences of without reference to their relational nature. The disjunctivist notion of perceptual experience is similarly problematic (although perhaps unnecessary under neutral monism).

Such concerns notwithstanding, the neutral monist position, when stripped of its historical baggage, represents an intriguing and, in my view, underrated response to the conceivability argument, as well as to the issue of the relation between mind and body in general. You might worry that it is a bit of a metaphysical sledgehammer to crack a philosophy of mind nut, but there are many reasons to find the view attractive — not least that we seem to know a lot less about the ultimate constituents of the physical universe than might first appear.

Three new essays (and one old one)

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:24:32 +0100

I finally got around to posting last semester’s philosophy essays on this site, along with a slightly updated version of a previous essay. Further details below.

Direct Realism and Visible Figure in Reid
Describes the role that the notion of ‘visible figure’ plays within Thomas Reid’s theory of visual perception. I really enjoyed writing and researching this essay and am relatively pleased with the results, since this seems to be something of an unresolved issue within Reid scholarship. My interpretation was influenced by Ryan Nichols’s excellent book on Reid’s theory of perception, and takes visible figure to consist of the objective set of relational properties that holds between the perceiver and the object. On the advice of my lecturer, I’m hoping to revise this paper for possible publication later this year.

Realism and Conceivability
My attempt to refute Nagel’s argument against Davidson from chapter VI of The View from Nowhere. Raises some interesting questions about realism, idealism, the existence of inconceivable facts, and the various types of conceivability involved. Not, I think, terribly conclusive, but it was the best I could manage given the constraints upon time and word limit. In retrospect, I wish I’d written something entirely different on another topic that interested me more since a lot of the interesting stuff sadly got edited out at the proposal stage… oh well, that’ll teach me!

Making Sense of Indexicals
Evaluates Wolfgang Künne’s account of the first-person indexical, ‘I’, which involves the use of a unique ‘ego-mode’ of presentation much as Frege himself envisaged (although the details of Frege’s own account remain unclear). I argue that such an approach successfully accounts for the logical structure of first-person statements, and that it can be generalised to account for other indexical terms, such as ‘here’ or ‘now’, although the details of the generalisation are not spelled out in any great detail. More descriptive than critical, the essay gives a reasonably clear exposition of the problem and Künne’s distinctive response to it, which is itself quite difficult to understand.

Time, Tense and Adverbial Change
A slightly updated version of an essay I wrote in my final undergraduate year at the University of York evaluating what I take to be E. J. Lowe’s adverbialist account of time and tense. I say take to be as I have started to wonder to what extent Lowe really is an adverbialist about time, although if he isn’t then I really think he should be, as it’s an interesting and (I hope) attractive view. The changes are limited to rewritten introduction, which more clearly sets out the aims of the paper, and some additions to Section III that explain why the adverbial account is preferable to some of the alternatives. After giving this paper at a University of St Andrews graduate reading party, I found that most of the questions related to this section of the essay, which I’d previously been forced to cut out due to space constraints (damn word limits!). Reinstating this material makes for a more balanced and well-rounded account of the benefits of adverbialism. I have since submitted this paper for a graduate conference on time and consciousness that I’ll be attending in June, although I’ve yet to hear whether it’s been accepted.

As always, I’d be grateful for any comments and feedback that you might have, especially for the first and last papers, which I’d like to try and do more with if at all possible. In the meantime, I’d better get back to writing the next batch of essays, which are due to be handed in in less than three weeks time!

Can knowledge be a matter of luck?

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:46:48 +0100

After re-reading Alvin Goldman’s influential 1976 paper, ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge’ (Journal of Philosophy, 73, pp. 771–91), I found myself questioning the intuition that is supposed to lead to a problem for the traditional causal account of knowledge. As per the original Gettier cases, the scenario that Goldman describes involves an individual (Henry) arriving at a justified true belief (JTB) that we would (allegedly) nevertheless consider to fall short of knowledge. However, in contrast to the Gettier cases, the reason that he has for arriving at the true belief is exactly the same (at least according to traditional accounts of reasons and experience — see my previous post for an alternative view) as the reason that he has in the good case. This makes it even more challenging for post-Gettier accounts of knowledge, such as Goldman’s causal theory, to explain why Henry doesn’t have knowledge since he seems to have done everything right, just as he would have in the good case, giving rise to many different ways of accounting for this discrepancy.

The story goes like this: Henry is driving through the countryside with his young son, pointing out objects of interest, such as trees, fields, cows, tractors etc. Pointing at a barn, Henry says ‘That’s a barn’, which is a true statement, arrived at by recognising the appearance of the building that appears some distance away as a barn. However, unbeknownst to Henry, in this part of the country there are many structures that are indistinguishable from barns when viewed from the road, but which are in fact only wooden frontages, or façades, made to look exactly like barns. (Perhaps it’s a local tourist attraction, or the farmers are engaged in some kind of practical joke, it doesn’t matter.) Now, it just so happens that Henry pointed to the one and only real barn in the area, and, since he is unaware of the presence of the other fake barns, he has true justified belief that what he sees is a barn. But does he know that it is a barn? Goldman thinks not, and many philosophers would seem to agree with him. However, I’m not so sure. My intuition is that he really does know that it is a barn, and that the presence of the barn façades does nothing to undermine this.

Of course, if (ex hypothesi) Henry knew that there were lots of fake barns in the area then he could not be said to know (or perhaps, would not claim that he knew) that this particular object was a barn, since he has no way of determining which of the barn-looking things are real barns and which are fakes. However, according to the case in hand, he does not know this, and so his knowing that the object in front of him is a barn (if indeed it is such) is entirely down to his luck in pointing at the right barn quite by accident. Can we acquire knowledge in such ways? Can luck contribute to our epistemic standing, or is a recognitional ability for telling things from their relevant alternatives (in this case fake barns) a necessary condition for knowledge? I certainly don’t have a clear intuition that it is, and I don’t see why some of our knowledge shouldn’t be lucky in this way.

Note that the above example involves quite a different sort of luck to the one within the original Gettier job interview case. There, Smith thinks that the person who will get the job has $10 (or whatever) in his pocket on the basis of a mistaken belief about who will get the job (i.e. Jones, rather than himself), which undermines his epistemic standing. Henry, on the other hand, has done nothing wrong in terms of the way that he arrives at his belief, and so is epistemically blameless on any account.

My concern is that basing an entire theory of knowledge upon the intuition that Henry doesn’t have knowledge in the above and other similar types of cases may is to start out with a very shaky foundation, since the intuition is at least disputable and could be attributed to an altogether different source. Apart from contamination by philosophical theory — for example by tying the idea of knowledge very closely to the exercise of a recognitional ability, as per Millar (forthcoming) — we may be begging the question against attributing knowledge in this case. There is also the fact that, were Henry to find out about the barn façades — perhaps he reads it in a guidebook — then he may himself be inclined to withdraw his claim to knowledge, since he realises that it is likely that what he saw was in fact a barn façade, and not a real barn, since he has no way of telling the two apart. Consequently, Henry may no longer believe that it was a barn, and so, since knowledge requires belief (or so the story goes), can no longer be said to have knowledge. This seems odd since we do not normally expect additional information to reduce the amount of knowledge that someone has, but rather to add to it, since acquiring information is one of the ways that we gain knowledge. However, this may just be a peculiarity of the case, as it is certainly plausible that I can have knowledge of something — a complex mathematical truth, for example — but then lose it due to someone convincing me otherwise (although in this case we may want to say that I still have knowledge but that I am no longer aware of it, perhaps because I wasn’t very confident about my reasoning). In any case, there certainly seem to be sufficient factors at play to generate what could seem, prima facie, to be an intuition that Henry doesn’t have knowledge, when in fact we are just being distracted by, for example, what we would claim to know in that situation given the way the example has been set up (i.e. the existence of the fake barns).

The above considerations raise some difficult methodological issues for any theory of knowledge, such as what should such a theory answer to, and which of our linguistic intuitions genuinely express our understanding of knowledge, and which are due to mere analogy or convention. I was first led to thinking about this by speculating about what McDowell’s epistemological disjunctivism would have to say about Goldman’s fake barns case, which is something that (to my knowledge at least) McDowell himself has never responded to in print. I suspect that he would be inclined to say that, since we take in the fact that the object is a barn in the relevant way via normal perceptual channels, we do in fact know that the object is a barn. Indeed, we may even know that we know, although that knowledge is based upon our ignorance of a salient fact: namely, that the area is littered with identical looking barn façades. He could say this on the basis of the justification for our higher-order knowledge being just the same as the justification for our first-order belief: namely, that we see that it is a barn, which, since it turns out to be true, warrants us in having knowledge. Of course, if the thing we pointed to wasn’t a real barn, then we would have been wrong to claim that we knew otherwise, but that’s a matter of an erroneous claim to knowledge, rather than there not having being any knowledge in the good case where there is in fact a barn. The one doesn’t necessarily entail the other.

I’d be interested to hear what other people think about the above, and whether your intuitions agree with Goldman’s that there cannot be any knowledge in such cases, and exactly why you think that should be so. My view is that we have no firm ‘pre-theoretical’ intuition to this effect, and perhaps have an intuition to the opposite, that Henry has knowledge in the good case. When prompted to explain why this is so, we might be tempted to say “Well, he just sees the barn, which is a barn, so he knows that there’s a barn”, which would tend to favour the McDowellian hypothesis, although as I’ve argued above, it’s always dangerous to base one’s choice of theory upon a single intuition — especially one which can be modified when put under pressure.

On the reality of the past and future

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:51:29 +0100

Since writing these two essays, and indeed even before that, I have been trying to formulate a metaphysical account of time that acknowledges the reality of past and future events without reducing them to what is actually present — a philosophical view known as presentism — but without losing the distinctive character of the past and future as compared to the present. In McTaggart’s well-worn terminology, this would amount to an A-theory of time that preserves the notion of ‘the present’ as being ontologically significant, as opposed to a B-theoretic account, which reduces the notions of past, present and future to the fixed and unchanging relations of before and after. In general, I am more attracted to the A-theory of time since as it seems to fit our everyday experience of and talk about time more closely, and accounts for the apparently profound asymmetry between temporality and the three dimensions of space. (The B-theorist envisages time to consist of fourth ‘temporal dimension’, and is reminiscent of four-dimensional accounts of spacetime, but without the bendiness.)

After having tried to describe the view that I’ve come up with so far to someone the other day and failing miserably, I thought I’ve have another go at it here to see whether it makes any more sense in print. The idea is essentially this. Past, present and future events co-exist in the sense that they are all part of what we might call ‘the world’ or reality. However, what makes past or future facts true is different to what makes present facts true. So far, so good, but this is where it starts to get weird. On my view, past and future events have a different mode of being (for want of a better expression), of which there are many, corresponding to something’s being in the far future, the near future, the immediate or distant past, and so on (those of you who have seen my essay on adverbialism about time may recognise the similarity). Accordingly, objects and events that exist ‘in the present’, so to speak — spot the spatial metaphor! — exist in a fairly straightforward way, and we are able to ‘read off’ the truth or falsity of facts concerning them in a more or less direct way. In other words, there is no epistemic gap between what exists and what we can know about it (assuming that we can know anything — previous posts notwithstanding!). With past and future events, however, things get a little more complex.

To explain how this works, imagine a circular jar (I was going to say a vat, but that might confuse things!) of some extremely syrupy and gelatinuous liquid. Now imagine a blob of coloured dye placed at some point around the edge of the liquid in the jar, such as a blob of ink, for example. Finally, imagine a rotating arm or blade that moves through the liquid such that each time it rotates, it moves slightly further up (or down) the container. The movement of the rotor would therefore ‘smear’ the ink throughout the gel, turning it (the ink) from a single point-like blob to a continuous thread that extends throughout the liquid. As the blade moves up or down, the ink would become distributed throughout the gel in a manner quite unlike the original blob, but in way that retains some continuity with its original form. Indeed, if the system were perfectly deterministic then reversing the direction of the rotor (i.e. the direction of time) would reassemble the original blob from its stretched out form, showing that no information had been lost, but rather merely distributed in a different fashion. In case you wonder where all of this is going, the ink blob is supposed to be analogous to an event within (present) reality, which corresponds to the entire volume of liquid. The effects of the rotor simulates the passage of time acting upon the blob, causing it to change form until it becomes virtually unrecognisable. The blob still exists, but it does so in a different manner, or ‘mode’, to use the above terminology, from its original form.

This (admittedly rather bizarre) example is actually taken from David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, although he uses it for a slightly different purpose. The thing that I think it illustrates rather nicely is the way that the form of an event changes through time as its effects become more widely distributed and ‘diffuse’ within reality. Up to a point, we can track the existence of the event as being identifiably the same event — i.e. that blob of ink — which still exists for us by way of its manifest effects (the ink trail). Once further transformations have occurred, it may become impossible to say exactly what the event looked like or from whence it originated, but we can still infer its existence from the discolouration of the gel, for example, i.e. by its effects upon present reality (which is not to say that it exists in the same form as a present event, but rather that its pastness is manifest in present reality). This state of affairs illustrates a more distantly past mode of being, and so on until all trace of the event is virtually eradicated. However, even then we would want to say that there is a fact of the matter about whether the event occurred or not. This is a problem for many purely presentist descriptions of temporal reality, since as soon as all traces of an occurrence are wiped out, or become so diffuse so as to be undetectable, then they can no longer be said to ‘exist’ in the present. On my view, however, even very distantly past (or future) events possess a modified form of existence such that it should be possible to construe them as exist indefinitely, not merely by way of their manifest effects but by their being partly constitutive of reality. In other words, the way things are now is entirely due to the way things have been such that the present is itself a manifestation of past and future events.

This is, of course, all very speculative, but I believe that there may be a way of working this out so that there is a definite fact of the matter about events with which we no longer have any epistemic access (e.g. the number of times I blinked yesterday). This is much more plausible than the alternative since, even for facts that are no longer decidable, we want to resist the idea that there is no longer any fact of the matter; i.e. it is neither true nor false that such-and-such an event occurred (I believe this was Michael Dummett’s position until a few years ago when he changed his mind — or so I’m told).

The upshot of all this metaphorical tomfoolery is a view of reality in which the pastness, presence and futurity of events is a constantly changing and shifting compound but without there being an existent ‘past’ or ‘future’ sitting out there in the fourth (i.e. temporal) dimension. Reality is all here right now — it’s just a matter of which events are currently ‘in focus’, as it were (another useful metaphor). This resists the urge to ‘spatialise’ time by treating times as if they were places since there are no ‘parts’ of reality that are exclusively assigned to the past or present. Strange as it may sound, this view of time is, I think, much more in tune with everyday experience, although perhaps not the way that we spatialise time by means of clocks, calendars, etc. More notably, it opens up the possibility of our having direct epistemic access to the past and future, since they exist right here in and amongst the present, which is not to say that they are present in the temporal sense. Rather, the past and future can, in a very important sense, be said to constitute the present, since present events are merely a manifestation of the past and future in their current state of temporal unfolding (to coin a phrase), all of which seems to sit rather well with the Heideggerian phenomenology of time, if you’re interested in that kind of thing (which I am).

Of course, there are many potential problems with this type of view, not least the issue of how to account for the possibility of events that have no causal effects, or whose effects cancel each other out such that present reality would be consistent with their never having happened. Does it make sense to say that such events really exist, or that they form part of the past when pastness is constituted in terms of its causal relation to the present? It all depends upon how you flesh out the details of what it means to be past, but perhaps there is a sense in which such events can be said to ‘drop out of’ reality — although that’s a somewhat awkward bullet for any view of time to have to bite, especially in the case of multiple events that cancel each other out. There may also be problems with giving causation such a prominent role, not least since it is notoriously difficult to define in its own right. Furthermore, it had better not turn out to be the case that causation is itself defined in terms of temporal order otherwise the whole thing starts to become dangerously circular. Again, it may be possible to avoid this by adopting a different account of what pastness consists in, or by making causation primitive and time secondary, rather than the other way around, but this will need some thinking about.

You may have noticed that the above view gives existence to both past and future events — the latter of which may be somewhat controversial given questions about free will and determinism. I certainly wouldn’t want it to be part of my view that the future is already fixed by the present state of affairs, and yet it does seem right to say that certain events, i.e. those that are more or less inevitable, already exist ‘in the future’, as it were. Ideally, I would want to develop the view in such a way that it is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism (although in light of the nature of quantum mechanics, as well as the whole free will debate, my money is on the latter option). Either way, the notion of future events being ‘in’ the present is not entirely without precedent, since there is a strong link between the notion of possibility and that of futurity such that we sometimes experience future events becoming more and more actual until they finally manifest themselves in the present. (I don’t mean when things are actually moving towards us, but rather the progression from possibility to actuality as an event becomes more fully ‘realised’ or manifest in the present, although many such examples do involve some form of spatial movement as well.)

As you can see, there are many aspects of the theory — if I can call it a theory — that still need to be worked out, but I think that the basic idea has potential and hope to be able to develop it further through the work I’m doing for my M.Litt. dissertation on the metaphysics and phenomenology of temporal passage. I very much suspect that others have already developed similar theories, perhaps in the guise of a modified form of presentism, in which case I’d very much like to hear about it as it would help me to refine my views. I’d also like to come up with a catchy name for the position — neutral realism? modal presentism? enfolded temporality? — which is always a nice way to promote a new idea. Superficialities aside, however, it does seem to fit with a lot of stuff I’ve read on time, both from a metaphysical and experiential point of view, as well as arguably fitting our pre-theoretical intuitions of time and temporal passage more closely than the traditional ‘dimensional’ model. In any case, it’s a view that I think could be developed in some interesting ways, and might even help to address some long standing philosophical questions concerning the nature and experience of time, but that’s an issue for another day.

Disjunctivism, scepticism and perceptual experience

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:38:57 +0100

As one of my friends recently pointed out, this blog has lain dormant for rather a while (almost a year now!), so I thought it was time to rejuvenate it with some ruminations on a topic I’ve been reading up on lately — namely, disjunctivism. Put simply, this is the thesis that what genuine perceptual episodes (e.g. seeing the lake) and their imaginary or non-veridical counterparts (e.g. hallucinating the lake) have in common is not that they consist of the same internal, phenomenally identical experience, but rather just the fact that both episodes satisfy the description of looking as if there is a lake. On this account, what makes them experiences that they are is different in the two cases: the first is a genuine ‘seeing’ of a lake, and is therefore relational, since it is essentially related to an object in the external world (the lake), whilst the second (the hallucination) is non-relational in any straightforward sense. What’s distinctive about disjunctivism is that it rejects the need for any ‘highest common factor’ that is identical between the two cases. This is supposed to help explain why it is that we can have knowledge of external world objects, and thus form the basis of a response to scepticism, although many (e.g. Crispin Wright) disagree that it has the resources to do so.

Another way to understanding the above conception of disjunctivism is that perceptual experiences are externally individuated. In other words, it’s not just a matter of what’s going on inside one’s head or central nervous system, but that experience literally ‘takes in’ aspects of one’s immediate environment. On this view, the (external) differences between the perceptual and hallucinatory cases are sufficient to make them different experiences, as opposed to the same experience achieved in two different ways, as in the traditional (i.e. internalist) conception of experience. To see how this might begin to address sceptical doubts, we need only think of the standard argument from illusion in which the sceptic argues that since any experience is phenomenally indistinguishable from its hallucinatory counterpart (e.g. being massively deceived by an evil demon or mad scientist — take your pick), merely having that experience is insufficient evidence for the existence of an external world, there being a chair in front of you, or whatever, since you would have had exactly the same experience had you merely hallucinated that the world was that way (thanks to the intervention of the demon/scientist — sorry, it seems that even my examples have become disjunctive!). In effect, the disjunctivist argues that the assumption that the person would have had exactly the same experience is incorrect since the genuinely perceptual experience (the good case) is an entirely different kind of experience than that of the hallucination (the bad case), and so the sceptic’s argument is misguided.

The trouble with this kind of response is that it doesn’t seem to address the main worry. The sceptic’s agument wasn’t that we don’t have any first-order knowledge, but that we cannot know whether we have knowledge or not; i.e. it is second-order. All this talk of taking in the facts and external individuation is all well and good, and may even be right, but it doesn’t do anything to secure our second-order knowledge — i.e. knowledge that we have knowledge (or our warrant to claim knowledge, if you prefer Wright’s terminology), and so, as a response to scepticism, the argument fails. Even worse, there would seem to be a lurking circularity in the disjunctivist’s reasoning since it is only by assuming that there is an external world containing knowable facts that we can grant the possibility of genuine perceptual experience in the first place. It could be that there are nothing but hallucinations, in which case the disjunctive conception of experience fails to get off the ground (except perhaps showing that genuine perceptual knowledge it possible, but that’s hardly a victory for anti-scepticism).

In his 1982 lecture, ‘Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge’, John McDowell connects the disjunctivist conception of experience with Wittgenstein’s notion of a criterion. He argues — quite convincingly, I think — against Wright’s interpretation of this term as a necessarily reliable but defeasible indicator of knowledge, and in favour of conceiving criteria as ‘ways of telling’ that something is the case (or that they are ‘thus and so’, as he is fond of saying). This, I think, is a good way to understand the notion of criteria, and certainly fits better than Wright’s defeasible warrants, at least on my reading of the Philosophical Investigations, but it seems characteristic of the disjunctivist response to scepticism that the notion of factivity is portioned off into some other (externally individuated) factor. A criterion, we are told, is a way of telling that something is true such that whenever the criterion is present then we have knowledge, and where there is no knowledge — e.g. we are hallucinating — then there is no criterion either. Since the criteria for a given type of knowledge may vary between cases and what constitutes a criteria is (it seems to me) externally, rather than internally, individuated, there is simply no way of telling whether our experience involves genuine criteria for knowledge or not since second-order knowledge of what constitutes the appropriate criteria is lacking.

In a forthcoming paper, Alan Millar develops this notion of a criterion into what he calls a recognitional ability, which is an externally individuated knowledge-conferring capacity. Such capacity are only said to have been exercised when knowledge is delivered in the appropriate way; i.e. by virtue of their ‘taking in’ the relevant facts. Such abilities are indexed to particular kinds of environment such that one’s ability to discriminate (to take a well-worn example) zebras from cleverly disguised mules may depend upon whether there are normally any such cleverly disguised mules in the vicinity, or (to take an even more hackneyed example) one’s recognitional ability to tell barns from non-barns depends upon whether one is operating in fake-barn country or not. Again, the worry is that this sort of approach, although it locates the factive element in the subject’s ability to tell, rather than in the signs of knowledge themselves, simply portions off the factivity into another externally individuated element — in this case, a recognitional ability. We are left in the position of having (relatively) reliable recognitional abilities, but without necessarily being able to tell when and if we are exercising those abilities; i.e. whether we have knowledge or not. Of course, it is open to Millar to claim (and he does) that we also have reliable ways of telling when our first-order recognitional abilities have been employed — indeed, that’s part of what having the abilities themselves involves — but it’s equally open to the sceptic to cast doubt upon our whether such second-order knowledge is in fact available without getting into some kind of higher-order regress, and so again this seems an unpromising strategy for refuting the sceptic.

Despite the above comments, I actually have a lot of sympathy with the disjunctivist position and the idea that our epistemic capacities make direct content with the objects and/or facts that they supposedly apprehend. It seems much more likely — even from an empirical perspective — that experience should be individuated such that hallucination is a different type of experience to veridical perception, despite the fact that the two may (although by no means necessarily) be phenomenologically indistinguishable. The trouble is, this just seems to shuffle the pieces around such that we can have knowledge of the facts but without us being aware of whether we have knowledge or not, and so scepticism once again gains a foothold. Of course, if you’re inclined (as I am) to think that scepticism is just a kind of philosophical pseudo-problem based upon a misunderstanding of how natural language works, as per Wittgenstein, then this is unlikely to be of great concern, but still, it would be nice to have something more substantive to say about it — especially as I’m hoping to write an essay on the topic in the very near future! In the final analysis, perhaps the enterprise of constructing some conception of knowledge that is fully verifiable by the subject is itself misguided, or appeal to common sense as placing the burden of proof upon the sceptic to give a reason for why we should doubt the existence of such knowledge in the first place. In any case, I doubt that disjunctivism presents a strong argument either way — although this is, of course, an entirely defeasible conclusion.

Postscript: perhaps what disjunctivism has to offer is that it provides a plausible story as to how knowledge is possible, as well as an analysis of what knowledge amounts to; i.e. the ‘taking in’ of worldly facts. Whilst this falls short of providing a satisfactory response to the sceptic, it does at least secure the possibility of knowledge — something that the sceptic not only throws into doubt, but undermines its very basis of by providing an ‘error theory’ as to why we can never know anything due to the subjective indistinguishability of knowing from not knowing. The debate then turns to which model of knowledge is the more plausible, or best fits our everyday linguistic practices, whereby the attractiveness of the sceptical position is undermined, although never actually refuted… Food for thought!

Update: I have since written an essay on this topic that sets out the issues in greater detail and which can be found here.

Philosophy Wars

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:53:09 +0100

I was talking to a friend about philosophy the other day who mentioned the phrase ‘light saber of truth’. This immediately led to a discussion of the parallels between Star Wars and contemporary philosophy, which turned out to be an extremely amusing source of analogies and comparisons between academic and fictional worlds. After spending an amusing half hour or so thinking about which philosophers would best match up with each of the Star Wars characters (Darth Descartes? Ludwig Skywalker? Plato-D2? — the possibilities are endless!) we thought that it would be a good idea if someone came up with a Star Wars spoof comic strip based on the battle between rival philosophies… and thus Philosophy Wars was born!

The idea probably wouldn’t have gone much further, but I had trouble sleeping the following night (too much revision and an annoying cold that just won’t go away!) and so decided to investigate further. After coming up with some more amusing character names, I discovered this amazing little program by Darel Finley called Star Wars TSG that creates Star Wars title sequences, complete with scrolling yellow text and opening credits. I just couldn’t resist coming up with a Philosophy Wars equivalent and proceeded to rewrite the introductions to the original Star Wars trilogy to fit the fictional story that my friend and I had created. It was great fun and you can see the results here in glorious widescreen QuickTime and on YouTube in regular MP4 format.

The choice of the analytic philosophy establishment as the evil Empire seemed an obvious one, not because I’m inherently opposed to it (most of the philosophy I have studied is analytic), but because it was just more fun to have a pop at the predominant philosophical tradition. I’ll leave you to find out who are the major good and bad guys as I had to change some of the names to make them fit the plot and don’t want to spoil any of the jokes, but the story basically comes down to a bunch of rebel philosophers who heroically resist the attempt to turn philosophy into a set of logically derived formulae and thus ‘restore freedom of thought to the galaxy’ (sic). I’d dearly love to go the whole hog and come up with an illustrated comic strip, but I don’t have much time at the moment and so this will probably have to wait for a bit. In the meantime, if anyone out there has the necessary graphics skills or is a dab hand with Lego stop-frame animation then I’d be more than happy to collaborate! (I already have several ideas for additional plot lines…)

Anyway, hope you enjoy watching these clips at least half as much as I enjoyed making them. I’ll be posting subsequent episodes, as well as the inevitable prequels, over the next few weeks so watch this space for future developments (you can also subscribe via iTunes or RSS to make it easy to keep up to date!). Have fun… and may the assertoric force be with you!

The BUPS Experience

Sat, 7 Apr 2007 11:42:29 +0100

Last weekend, I attended the British Undergraduate Philosophy Society’s annual skills conference where I presented a paper on vagueness and the denial of bivalence. It was a good event with a great selection of philosophical talks interspersed with skills workshops, mainly given by Ed Grefenstette, the current chair of BUPS, and Rab Charleston, its founder. The keynote was given by Professor Bob Hale from the University of Sheffield, who not only presented an excellent and very interesting, although rather technical, paper about the arguments for and against fatalism (the doctrine that future events are already predetermined or fixed in some way), but was kind enough to stick around for the rest of the weekend and attend all of the student talks, offering some worthwhile and insightful comments along the way. I was very impressed by this as I’m sure that not all academics would be prepared to give up their weekends for such a worthwhile cause!

Despite enjoying the conference and meeting some lovely people (there were less of us than usual, only 25 or so, but this worked well as it made it more focussed and easier to get to know everyone), I came away, as I often do from BUPS conferences, with slightly mixed emotions. On the one hand, it was great to spend a weekend with such a wonderful bunch of committed and enthusiastic philosophers talking about topics of common interest. On the other, I always tend to feel slightly — intimidated would be too strong a word, but it’s close enough — by the near encyclopaedic knowledge and almost limitless enthusiasm of these budding academics, both of which seem to be well in advance of my own not inconsiderable (even if I do say so myself!) abilities. Perhaps this is just insecurity or paranoia on my part, but I can’t help feeling that I am not entirely on the same level as these people as, despite having a great enthusiasm for philosophy, I am above all interested in thinking rather than the more obscure aspects of the subject as it is studied in academic circles.

I guess this comes partly from having had a long (16 years!) break from full-time education, during which time I was able to gain many invaluable skills and experience, but which has led to me having a rather different take on things from those who have been brought up (so to speak) within the academic tradition. To them, it would appear to be quite natural for talk within the tradition of contemporary analytic philosophy whereas for me, even after three years of study, it seems something of a foreign language. I find myself having to do a lot of ‘translation’ in my head between what I really think and what academic philosophers have to say about the subject, and the two often don’t match up at all. It gives me the feeling of having to either play along with a rather abstract (and possibly irrelevant) ‘language-game’, to borrow a term of Wittgenstein’s, or to concentrate my efforts purely on my own thinking. That said, in areas where I feel reasonably competent, I seem to be able to make as good an argument as anyone else, although this is often on the basis of what I intuitively feel to be right, backed up with the appropriate philosophical justifications, rather than being led purely by the philosophy, or what I have read. Perhaps this is the same for everybody, I don’t know, but I do feel that there is some kind of communication barrier beyond which I am reluctant to engage.

My own paper seemed to go down reasonably well, especially given the challenges of presenting a paper that is primarily on logic to a undergraduate audience. Although it’s not the best thing I’ve ever written, I wanted to see whether I could manage to give a clear and accurate account of the material, and hopefully to make it interesting and accessible to people who had perhaps never studied logic before, or maybe just a little during their first year (not that I’m much of an expert myself, although I did take a module on it!). The feedback I received was very positive, although there are a few aspects of the paper that could be improved upon, as well as a logical problem (pointed out by Professor Hale) with one of my suggestions, although I think I can get round this with reference to the assertibility conditions that are mentioned earlier in the paper. The feedback was especially useful given that this paper is actually one of the essays for my logic module and although I’m not sure whether my lecturer is going to think much of it in any case, at least it helped me understand the material better, as well as clarifying a few points that I could have expressed better.

All in all, the conference was a very enjoyable experience, and it’s heartening to see so many highly motivated and capable individuals, many of whom will no doubt go on to successful graduate and academic careers. As far as my own career goes, that’s very much a topic of deliberation at the moment. On the one hand, I feel like I have something positive to offer, both in terms of philosophical ability and for future teaching and research. On the other, I find myself increasingly at odds with the academic style and approach, which seems to encourage engagement with literature much more than it does original and creative thinking, which is what primarily interests me, although of course if you can do both then all the better. I guess it’s down to the difference between being a good academic scholar and a good thinker. The two don’t always (in fact, quite rarely) go hand in hand, although they are not mutually exclusive by any means. However, I do tend to find the latter much more interesting and on many occasions find the conventions, restrictions and traditions of analytic philosophy quite frustrating in terms of trying to achieve this goal — a goal that, you might think, is absolutely central to a philosophical education.