dataandphilosophy asked:
scientiststhesis-at-pillowfort answered:
I could say that the statement doesn’t have a truth-value and that’d be that :P
At any rate… I think I’m wrong to say that “only differential statements about the world have truth-values.”
On the one hand, I feel like saying “’1 + 1 = 2′ (given basic arithmetic) is true” and saying “’the sky is blue’ is true” aren’t qualitatively different things. Also, ‘1 + 1 = 2′ subjectively “feels like a statement that could be otherwise,” whereas your statement doesn’t - even though they’re theorems and do follow inexorably from their axioms.
And I don’t know that your statement doesn’t refer to anything. Where did I claim it doesn’t refer to anything?
And finally… my relation with “Truth” has always been something like “X has a truth-value if it’s differentially expressed or if it follows from something that has a truth-value.” That means that things that/whose consequences are in principle differentially observable have truth-values, generalisations/laws arising from these have truth-values, and consequences of these laws have truth-values.
So this seems to cover all my bases? ‘1 + 1 = 2′ follows from the axioms of basic arithmetic, which are differentially expressed (i.e. different things are observed depending on whether any of these axioms is true or not), so it has a truth-value.
Your statement follows from the law of excluded middle, which is also differentially expressed, so it has a truth-value, which is the same as that of the law of excluded middle, i.e. True.
And this makes (maybe) my objection to the epiphenomenalism a bit clearer: if the existence of qualia doesn’t actually depend on the brain states that are causing it-
Well, the idea behind the P-Zombies thing, as far as I understand it, is that there’s a “bridging law” between physical states and subjective experiences, and that without knowing this law just knowing the physical states is not sufficient to know about subjective experiences. Since under this idea Consciousness is epiphenomenal and causally impotent, the only way it could have a truth-value would be if it followed from something that has a truth-value. Brain states clearly do.
This bridging law? The only thing differentially expressed under this is Consciousness itself, so it has a truth-value in the same sense an axiom does, you having to assume it’s true.
I was sloppy in my language there, with a very loose definition of (the stolen term) “differentially expressed,” but I hope I made myself clear, here?
So um. This means that the consciousness thing has the same truth-value as the sentence “x ∈ X”, i.e. depends on which axioms you assume to be true. Without any axioms, it doesn’t have a truth-value - that is, without this “bridging law” the consciousness thing doesn’t have a truth-value.
(It’s past midnight sorry for the slop <.<)
I guess the reason I bring up points like the one I did is that positivism just seems to me like it’s … I don’t want to say “correct,” because what does that even mean, but something like “in accordance with the standards my mind naturally has for meaning.”
That is, when I ask whether I understand something, I ask (either explicitly or in some more-or-less veiled way) what its observable consequences would be, or whether it follows logically from a definition. When people make statements that don’t seem to have empirical implications, I don’t understand them (except perhaps for certain special cases). That isn’t the passive-aggressive, Socratic “I don’t understand” you see a lot in philosophy seminars – meaning “I think you are wrong and am trying to trap you” (Gellner has some fun bits about this in Words and Things) – but a literal lack of understanding.
So, yes, it is hard to say what empirical consequences a verificationist assumptions would have. But I don’t really care, because when I see a verificationist assumption, I think something like “ah, yes, that is what I have been doing all along.” This is an interesting moment of recognition, and trying to spoil it with “ah, but how does that deal with itself?” seems to me less like epic philosophical ownage and more like missing the point. The assumption describes what I’m doing; if we have to cordon it off as not part of the description because of self-reference problems, so be it.
So these descriptions in terms of competing theories, “us vs. them” and so forth, are frustrating to me. It’s not that I think I’m better than metaphysicians; I just don’t understand what they’re doing, what intuitions it is keying into. I’m not going around trying to make people “see the light” of verificationism because it’s the most airtight theory or something; I just think verificationism describes what I already think, and kind of can’t help thinking. Even if the choice between verificationism and some other theory is “arbitrary,” the symmetry is broken by the fact that I feel like I know what, say, Carnap is getting at, and I do not feel like I know what Hegel or Fichte or Heidegger are getting at. No technical objection to verificationism will really change this psychological situation.
Many metaphysicians these days think metaphysics is continuous with science. This means that it uses, largely, the methods of science while dealing with topics that science is not equipped to. Note that many topics science used to be unequipped to deal with, it is now equipped to deal with. Maybe the most notable recent example is cognitive science. It is an open question regarding any philosophical enterprise whether it will remain philosophy or become a science, and it is a question only the passage of time can really answer. Philosophy gets a bad name because the stuff it really succeeds at stops being called philosophy.
People get an odd impression of philosophical debates because they don’t understand that they emerge exactly the way scientific debates do: the world offers up questions and we try to answer them. In science, if one theory’s predictions fail, or if a more elegant or parsimonious solution emerges, we don’t say of the first theory, “well, it still seems right”. This is anti-intellectual. It’s an odd behavior to continue on in this manner with philosophy.
When it comes to verificationism, of course a lot of people still have intuitions that accord somewhat with it. A lot of philosophers do as well - probably all philosophers. And yet there are no heroic defenses of the positivist program. Again, if you think this is because nobody wants to mount one, you are wildly mistaken. In fact, verification-style arguments are mounted very frequently in metaphysics. Nobody really believes in any sort of non-physical entities anymore, except sets, which are necessary to construct all sorts of things.
It’s possible that you don’t understand the scope of the verificationist criterion. In “Empriicism, Semantics, and Ontology” Carnap wrote about how metaphysics reduced to choices among languages, which were then made for “pragmatic” reasons. (Pragmatic in what sense? He doesn’t say - nor, do I think, can he.) This doesn’t just mean you can’t talk about all that wacky stuff like Platonic forms or souls or whatever. It also limits how, and how deeply, you can talk about physical things. For instance, you probably have the intuition that you are real in a sense in which Bugs Bunny is not real. The positivists shrug at a statement like that; true in some models, not in others. You probably have the sense that your nose is part of your face in a sense in which it is not a part of my face. The positivists shrug again. You probably think that even if it doesn’t rain tomorrow, it could have, at least in a way that two and three could not have added up to six. The positivists don’t, as far as I can tell.
Philosophy isn’t about picking one intuition and going with it. That would be incredibly fucking easy. It is about making sense of the fact that our intuitions conflict, and then making arguments about which intuitions to favor, and using them to build theories. This is why we no longer have naive set theory, a naive “pointing” theory of reference, naive moral realism, naive libertarian theories of free will, and yes, a naive verificationism about meaning. The psychological situation is uninteresting to me. The philosophical situation is what’s interesting to a philosopher.
(Added after writing the post below: sorry for being more grandiose and hostile than usual. I’m in kind of a keyed-up mood.)
I guess I just have totally different interests. And I also think that, while this is an accurate description of how the current paradigm of analytic philosophy sees things, it isn’t a description of all of the things that have been widely considered philosophical inquiry. All of this talk of differing “accounts” and “theories,” some of which have been definitively refuted, is a very modern-analytic-philosophy way of speaking; I will admit that it is the way a certain academic discipline likes to frame things, but I think if you say it is the way “philosophers” like to frame things, you are being ahistorical.
For me, philosophy and psychology are inextricably intertwined because a lot of philosophical statements require interpretation in a way that scientific predictions don’t. With a scientific prediction, I don’t have to sit down and say “hmm, now what exactly did they mean by that?” I can just test it, or look to see whether it has been tested. Things are much, much murkier when I look into (the actual words of) say, the pre-Socratics, or (some parts of) Plato, or Plotinus, or Hegel, or Heidegger, or Wittgenstein – you can try to translate these people into the modern language of “accounts of meaning” and that sort of thing, but that wasn’t their native language, and you may lose something in the translation. Analytical Marxism (one such program of “translation”) described itself as “non-bullshit Marxism,” but the “bullshit” they were removing was stuff that a lot of Marxists consider central to Marx. Or, say, many of Derrida’s fans claim that Derrida wrote in such a strange style because what he had to say could not be conveyed in a more straightforward style. If that is true, then whatever he is doing, it is presumably not something that can be translated into an ordinary set of analytic-philosophy-like “theories” (if it could have been, he would have said it that way!). Or, Wittgenstein was trying to suss out exactly what the proper scope and style of philosophical inquiry was, and he wouldn’t have approved of attempts to “translate” his statements into any style he didn’t deem proper. Etc.
So, if I’m in the process of trying to understand one of the kinds of linguistic performance that is conventionally called “philosophical,” a lot of what I end up doing is thinking things like “what does this mean? What could this person have meant by this string of words? What thought process might have led them to write it down?” Which is inherently psychological. If I want to know whether the metaphysicians are “right,” I have to first know what they are saying, or at least what sorts of things they might be saying. Interpretation precedes evaluation. And interpretation needs psychology.
To come at it from a different angle: I can imagine having some sort of big upheaval in which my metaphysics changes, but if I do, it won’t be from the kind of technicality that tends to “refute” theories in analytic philosophy. The problem with these technical refutations is that they don’t say anything about the magnitude or scope of the error, about whether the theory is way off about everything or whether it just makes some technical pratfall while being correct in every practical case.
(This is roughly what happened with Hilbert’s program and Godel’s incompleteness theorems: learning about Godel sentences didn’t mean that all the math we’d ever done about building bridges and airplanes was suddenly unjustified, because a theory can be incomplete without being inadequate for any practical purpose. A scientific analogy might be: we haven’t yet succeeded at setting quantum field theory on a fully rigorous footing, so in a sense it is “unfounded” – but it is not “just as unfounded” as, say, a theory that presumes 1 = 0. “Morally true, but formalizing it has been a huge pain” is not the same thing as “false,” and the stringent criteria by which we can “refute” naive-this-or-that seem to ignore this.)
So, I might someday realize that the metaphysicians are talking more sense than I realize, and become one of them. But if so, this will happen by listening to them, interpreting them, and coming to understand their thought processes (which will involve psychological inferences). I won’t run over and embrace metaphysics just because I can’t devise a perfectly airtight formalization of metaphysics-free thinking, any more than I would abandon mathematical proof simply because to the failure of Hilbert’s program.
I also want to endorse basically all of this.
