Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
In 1999 the social constructionist Kenneth Gergen penned an article about identity politics which I think is as pertinent now as it was then. While I’m not a social constructionist, I do reject, along with Gergen , the moral realism that turns so much of the political rhetoric on the left these days into a finger-pointing blamefulness. I’ m curious as to how many on this forum identify with Gergen’s non-blameful approach to moral issues.
“By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no pre- established context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.
In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation.
Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”
“By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no pre- established context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.
In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation.
Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”
Comments (213)
On such a view, no apparent assertion of fact is value-neutral: in asserting that something or another is real or factual, you are always advancing some agenda or another, and the morality of one agenda or another can thus serve as reason to accept or reject the reality of claims that would further or hinder them. This is simply the flip side of the same conflation of "is" and "ought" committed by scientism: where scientism pretends that a prescriptive claim can be supported by a descriptive claim, constructivism pretends that all descriptive claims have prescriptive implications.
Constructivism responds to attempts to treat factual questions as completely separate from normative questions (as they are) by demanding absolute proof from the ground up that anything at all is universally factual, or real, and not just a normative claim in disguise or else baseless mere opinion. So it ends up falling to justificationism about factual questions, while failing to acknowledge that normative questions are equally vulnerable to that line of attack. Thus such constructivism is tantamount to cynicism with regards to factual questions, inevitably leading to ontological relativism.
An objection to relativism is thus a reason to object to constructivism.
In terms of moral relativism, there are three different senses of the term "relativism" discussed in the field of ethics:
-One of those three senses, called "descriptive relativism", is merely the view that there are in fact disagreements about what is or isn't moral. I am not against that view, and I agree that there are in fact disagreements, quite obviously.
-Another sense, called "metaethical relativism", is the view that in such disagreements, nobody can possibly be any more or less correct than anybody else, that there is no way of resolving such disagreements. That is the kind of view I am against, in that it claims that there simply are not universally correct answers to moral questions, only different opinions, none better or worse than any others.
-The third sense, called "normative relativism", holds that because nobody can possibly be any more or less correct than anybody else, we morally ought to tolerate differences of moral opinion. While as already stated I disagree with the premise that nobody can be any more or less correct, I am nevertheless broadly sympathetic to the view that we ought to be rather tolerant of disagreement anyway.
Though philosophers do not usually give them names, I think we could usefully distinguish between a similar three different senses of ontological relativism, or relativism about what is real.
-One of those senses would hold only that there do in fact exist differences of opinion about what is real; and with that I would agree, just as with descriptive moral relativism.
-Another sense would hold that in such disagreements, nobody is any more right or wrong than anybody else; and with that I would disagree, just as with metaethical moral relativism.
-A third sense would hold that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to be tolerant of disagreements; and like with normative moral relativism, I would disagree with the premise of that, but largely agree with the conclusion: though it's possible that in disagreements about reality, someone is right and everyone else is wrong, we should generally be tolerant of such differences of opinion.
The reason to be thus tolerant about differences of opinion, whether those are factual or moral opinions, is precisely because to do otherwise would lead to relativism. Universalism (of which the moral realism you contest is a species) logically demands freedom of opinion, unless it's also going to completely abandon criticism and take refuge in some kind of dogmatism. Unless someone's word could make it so, which it can't, to claim that something is universally right entails that any claim about what specifically that is might be incorrect, precisely because there is more to the claim than just an expression of subjective opinion.
I suspect it's really the dogmatism you're against, and you think that relativism is the only alternative to it, but it's not. You can be both universalist and also critical. That's a no-brainer nowadays when it comes to claims about reality: all of the natural sciences are founded on a critical univeralist approach. It's kind of exasperating that so few people can even contemplate the possibility of it when it comes to claims about morality.
In reality though, the two stages - judging and assigning praise or blame - often bleed into one another (for better or for worth). More importantly, withholding praise and blame implies not holding people responsible for their actions, and that is a dubious position*. By not holding people responsible for their actions we rob them of their agency, dehumanize them.
* I should emphasize that withholding blame, for example, is not the same as forgiving: only the guilty can be forgiven.
Well, one can be a social constructionist about some specific area of human life, such as morality; it doesn't have to be a slippery slope. Being a constructionist about games, for example, wouldn't even be particularly controversial.
Social constructs are actually defined in a sense by their unreality: to say, for example, that money is a social construct, is to say that there is nothing intrinsic about gold, or seashells, or any other token of currency, that makes it really money, that could be found in a thorough description of the gold or shells or whatever themselves. Nothing is really money in any universal sense; things are only subjectively accepted as money by some people, and to say that something is money (to some people) is really to say something about the people (namely, that they will accept the thing in trade), not about the thing itself, but phrased in such a way as to project what the people think about the thing onto the thing itself.
That is undoubtedly an indispensable concept for describing many social behaviors, but to say that all of reality is merely socially constructed is consequently to deny that there is anything really real about reality, or at least to refuse to even attempt to talk about it, or to believe that others are genuinely doing so, insisting instead that all that can be discussed is the things that people think about it, and how that effects what they think they should do.
In any case, moral claims are not attempts at describing reality in the first place, so constructivism doesn't properly apply to them at all. Just interpreting moral claims as descriptions of reality gets you to effective moral relativism (inasmuch as nihilism is tantamount to relativism) already. Then applying constructivism to descriptions of reality on top of that would get you to some weird paradoxical view where moral claims are attempts at describing reality and attempts at describing reality are all just hidden moral claims in effect.
Then Constructivism is just another assertion of supposed facts that is actually just a social construction, ways of thinking about morality put forth merely in an attempt to shape the behavior of other people to some end, in effect reducing all purportedly factual claims to normative ones. So you never assert facts,, like what Constructivism entails,, only normative claims in an effort to manipulate others?? Why do you keep making this same mistake? You keep pulling the rug out from under your own argument.
Yes, but the issue here is how such notions as responsibility and agency are to be understood from a social constructionist perspective. Gergen ( as well as Foucault) would argue that one could trace a genealogical history of changes in cultural understanding of these terms. For instance, for a Kantian, agency, character and responsibility are attributes of an autonomous subjectivity. Implied by this idealistic model of personhood and agency is the capacity to approximate moral correctness though successive approximations pointing to an asymptotic telos.Morality by this measure is conformity to the real, and the real is a pre-established objectivity.
By contrast , social constructionism abandons the notion of correctness as conformity to empirical
objectivity.
A useful comparison would be in the realm of philosophy of science. In Popper’s Kantian falsificationist approach , one cannot definitely prove a theory correct , but one can falsify, because Popper assumes a non-culturally relative, universal standpoint from which to judge empirical validity. This is an empiricist ‘moralism’, allowing one to judge a theory with respect to a supposed universal yardstick, and thus to ‘blame it’ as wrong. By contrast , Kuhn’ s post-Hegelian philosophy of science denies that there is such a standard of validation that transcends the paradigmatic basis of local scientific practice. While some interpreters of Kuhn, like Putnam, hold onto a modified form of realism whereby he maintains that it is possible to adjudicate or translate between scientific paradigms ( and thereby assess empirical ‘blame’), others , including Gergen’ s social constructionism, deny this possibility. This does not mean that one cannot find one particular paradigm preferable to another , but one cannot ground this judgement in some universal scientific standard on the basis of which one can align different scientific theories. So in this way, Gergen’s approach denies the justification of ‘blame’ ( falsification) in science as well as in politics. So one is responsible for openness to new possibilities of seeing and negotiating new understandings with others, and one is responsible for avoiding blaming others for falling short of universal standards of moral correctness.
Which would ideally have a depolarizing effect.
Quoting Pfhorrest
If moral claims are not attempts at describing reality, are they not grounded in certain assumptions concerning the nature of reality( universality, transcendence
of local cultural contexts of normativity, etc)
Is it really? You disclaimed that you are not a social constructionist; I understood your post as an invitation to comment on a specific thesis that you did endorse, not on social constructionist position as a whole.
Quoting Joshs
Well, my response didn't assume or imply empirically objective moral standards, so I am not sure how this is relevant. As I said, all that is required for assigning praise and blame is (a) moral valuation and (b) personal responsibility. This should be compatible with most positions on the nature of morality.
Quoting Joshs
Frankly, I find this to be a strained comparison, and I am not sure what point you are trying to make here with respect to blameworthiness.
Quoting SophistiCat
Could you elaborate on why it is a strained comparison? The point I am trying to make is that in order to assess moral blame one must have a justification for correctness that goes beyond mere local consensus.That is , one must believe local norma are rooted in something more universal.
Quoting SophistiCat
I really want to know how YOU make use of moral
valuation in your own life to assess blame. Give me an example of a moral claim that you have made recently concerning some issue of significance and how you ground that claim. That will give us something concrete to go on in the discussion.
Quoting Pfhorrest
As I understand it, social constructionism is the study of *which* and *how* social constructs are shared. Social constructivism is the theory *that* knowledge is socially acquired. They are not quite the same thing. The usual dismissal of social constructivism does not hold here.
I'm not sure that dismissal is ever generally valid even of constructivism. At root it is about how we learn things through social interaction. Whether by lecture, by book, by conference or by journal, science is a social endeavour in which each individual acquires knowledge through interaction with others. If that society has some bad assumptions or biases, the individual will invariably learn those too. The classic, and perfectly valid, constructivist case in point is Freud.
Strong social constructivism claims that most or all scientific knowledge is like this, while others are more interested in the extent to which this holds in the harder sciences. The former are obviously bonkers.
Social constructionism by contrast takes a social construct as its starting point, for instance an historical account of money, or systems of morality. It is the objects themselves that are of interest, not how knowledge is transmitted (although how knowledge is transmitted *into* constructs is relevant).
Unless you believe in divine revelation or some such, you'd probably agree that, to some extent, our morals are derived from our interactions with others: how we are taught by our parents, our teachers, our clergy, our peer groups and the media. As Pfhorrest knows, I actually don't think that morality is fundamentally like this, rather what we do with our morality is *altered*, rather than created, by society. We have built in moral rules, but we learn exceptions to those rules through social interaction.
Pfhorrest is a moral objectivist insofar as he believes there is exactly one correct answer to all moral questions but I don't think relativism versus objectivism is particularly relevant here. There may indeed be correct answers to moral questions, but that makes no odds to someone who learns *these particular moral rules* from their interactions. One can have a socially constructed morality and still be right or wrong. A strong social constructivist would say that objective moral truths have little to no influence on the moral rules people learn, and I think they'd be close to being right.
Like social constructivism, identity politics can yield a spectrum of claims. Eddie Izzard recently changed his (past) preferred pronoun to she (present), but said she doesn't care which people use. This is identity politics -- Izzard had established a preferred policy regarding her identity -- but it is not the sort of "fascist" identity politics that the right-wing like to accuse people like Izzard of. What are like that are those who would not only be outraged if someone now called Izzard "he", even though she's fine with it, but would be outraged that I referred to her past pronoun as "he" (a la dead-naming). Like strong social constructivists, these have a technical name: assholes.
The historic reason for identity politics is that some social constructs regarding people are harmful. Racism, misogyny and homophobia attempt to establish a natural order with straight white heteronormative people at a supremum and different people at lower strata. Such schemes are oppressive. Since these people are not open to integration and will support the perpetuation of oppressive structures, usually while denying they exist, the oppressed reassert their identities as positive qualities to challenge normalised constructs with negative connotations.
Identity politics is a social construct that is really the flip side of another, oppressive social construct. Gay pride is not an obviously useful construct except in the context of (especially religiously-fuelled) homophobia. Likewise black pride, black power, and BLM.
The problem is that these counter-oppressive identity politics can end up looking as oppressive as the social constructs they sought to challenge, and they often do so by confusing legitimate criticism of new forms of oppression with the original oppressive constructs. Two cases in point are people's reluctance to criticise Israel and the accusations of anti-Semitism they receive when they do, and their reluctance to criticise the excesses of feminism (such as a recent call to presume men guilty until proven innocent) for fear of being accused of misogyny.
If there's a common theme here, it's that sound ideas run amok, and vested interests use this as a means of dismissing the sound idea along with its extreme and absurd conclusions. Or, more briefly, there's assholes of all sizes.
Would you say that your characterization of those who are named by categories such as racism, misogyny and homophobia is compatible with Gergen’s
characterization of ‘those we excoriate’? Do you mean such terms as oppression and harmful in a way that takes into account that from their own perspective , those who are ‘guilty’ of being oppressors act from intentions as noble as we feel our own to be, and that inevitably, our own preferable perspective will appear to another group in a future era as oppressive?
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
No, I don't. These traits are examples of hypocrisy: the people who do them wouldn't have them done back to them also. But how oppressive people feel about it isn't pertinent to my point, which concerns why their victims engage in identity politics. I would think that their oppressors thinking themselves noble would only justify their counter-narrative all the more, from their point of view.
Quoting Joshs
I'd say they all belong to a specific subclass of that class, sure. First and foremost, they are those who excoriate. Second, they are excoriated in turn.
We tend to accuse others of hypocrisy when we are unable to understand their thinking from their own point of view. It’s one of the favored words of blameful
politics, which is why it is used so often both on the right and the left.
I mean hypocrisy in its strict sense, e.g. espousing rules but holding themselves or others as exceptions. That's not really a subjective opinion; it follows from logic.
I’ve heard tell that logic is grounded in intersubjectivity.
Even as a construct, it's the same construct everywhere. The laws of logic are independent of opinion, even if they're arrived at by consensus.
I think the Western ethical systems were clearly grounded in 'divine revelation or some such'. It provided a common ground, or the sense of a supreme end, to which all were oriented, and which put an obligation on all members of the society to help one another. Hence the notion of 'commonwealth'.
This was originally a kind of contract, or actually, covenant, whereby salvation was guaranteed on the basis of faith. I'm sure this was a factor in the emergence of the notion of universal human rights, although I don't know if there's much consensus on that. But the salient point was the universalist claims of Christianity - 'Catholic', after all, means 'universal'. All mankind, including the least, socially outcaste, poor, and sick, was the subject of the 'divine plan'. That is one of the main foundations of Western invidualism. However with the advent of secular culture, the sense of the infinite worth of each individual has been retained, but the corollary of religious faith abandoned. Hence the individual is the ultimate arbiter of truth. I'm sure that is a major factor in many of these arguments and conflicts.
I'm actually somewhere in between, insofar as I believe that those social interactions were heavily biased by biology in a direction quite parallel to what was later encoded in Jewish and more so Christian values. I don't argue this is a priori knowledge, it's not knowledge at all, but it's not purely emergent from social interaction either.
My point was just that an individual's moral knowledge being arrived at through social interaction -- even if not a universal belief -- is not as controversial a belief as those who are quickly critical of social constructionism would make out.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
But logic is meaningless apart from the opinion( axiom) that it applies to. Your axiom or hypothesis concerning certain others is that they are espousing rules but holding themselves or others as exceptions.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
But I suggest you may be led to this hypothesis by your exasperation over not being able to fathom how they could justify to themselves in good faith certain behaviors towards others. The key here is your interpretation. of how they are perceiving the rules. If the rules mean the same to them as they do to you, then yes, they would be hypocrites. But the source of most moral and political conflicts , like those ripping the world apart today, is that the world views by which rules are interpreted are incommensurable with each other.
But that axiom is not a personal opinion.
Quoting Joshs
That's merely a claim that the reasons I give are not my true reasons and what you think my reasons are are the true ones. There's nowhere for that conversation to go. You can either trust me to represent myself as accurately as I can and, assuming I reciprocate, we can have a meaningful dialogue, or else you can assume anything I say is suspect and this amounts to nothing. Your call.
No no no. I believe they’re absolutely your true reasons. I’m not saying you’re making anything up or fooling yourself. To demonstrate what I mean we’d have to make this concrete. Give me an example of a homophobe who is acting hypocritically with regard to rules and I’ll try and suggest what I think you may be missing about how they are interpreting their rules, and thus why their are being consistent even as they act in ways that appear oppressive or harmful.
I think I've already told this anecdote, but I'm old now so I take great pleasure in repeating the same stories and nauseum.
One of my best friends was once homophobic and I actually convinced him to about face on it precisely because it was hypocritical (he agreed). His first objection regarded anal sex, but I asked him what he thought about himself having anal sex with a woman or enjoying a pornographic film of a man having anal sex with a woman and he conceded that he was down with that. His second objection regarded same-sex relationships, so I asked him how he'd feel about watching two women having sex and he was, again, down for it. (If anyone ever tells you porn isn't good for anything, remember this! :rofl: )
This was a very liberal guy when it came to *his* sexual activity: promiscuity, infidelity, picking drunk women off nightclub floors, anal, threesomes, some pretty exploitative behaviour... He held himself to absolutely no external standard whatsoever. And yet he held gay men to severe and arbitrary standards with values that only applied to them, no one else. That is hypocrisy. Not: this is an outrage!!!! hypocrisy. Just, dispassionately, it is inconsistent and biased toward himself and away from others.
Generally I think a good measure of hypocrisy is the veil of ignorance. If it seems unlikely that someone would espouse a value if their place was switched with who that value harms, it's probably held hypocritically.
I think the reason for this is that the idea of masculinity engrained in us sees affection between two men as a sign of weakness and a violation of that manliness , whereas two women being affectionate with each other doesn’t violate the conventional idea of femininity. So it’s possible that your friend was instinctively offended by male to male anal intercourse and relationship for this reason.
One way to test this out with your friend is to ask him whether he is more comfortable with a male who ‘tops’ another man anally as opposed to the one being the ‘bottom’.
Oh, it's absolutely certain that's a factor, as was the homophobic culture he was raised in.
This conversation has featured anal sex much more than anyone was expecting.
I don't want to digress into philosophy of science and falsificationism. I think you made your point clearly as it is. What I don't understand is why you think that holding someone morally responsible requires a commitment to moral objectivism. I haven't picked up any clues from what you've said here.
Quoting Joshs
I am puzzled by this request. How would it help the discussion? The common ground for both moral valuation and attribution of agency is me. I may or may not perform some moral reasoning in arriving at the conclusion in any given scenario, but as long as some conclusion is reached on both counts, I just don't see how I could go on to deny that someone did something praiseworthy or blameworthy.
Give me an example of what it could mean to hold someone morally responsible without a commitment to moral objectivism. More specifically , give me an example of what it would mean to hold someone morally accountable if we follow Gergen’s perspective:
Quoting Joshs
Can we hold someone morally accountable if we believe that they acted with the best and most noble intentions , and that their ‘failing’ was not one of bad intent but rather of a limitation in their worldview that they couldn’t have been expected to recognize? This is Gergen’s perspective and one I agree with. Do you agree with it? What I’m asking is, can we hold someone morally blameful if we completely sympathize with their intent and know that anyone would have done the same in their shoes? Does the issue of blame even come up here?
I will humor you with an example, if you insist. Someone I know was beaten and robbed in the street. That person suffered a concussion and a broken bone as a result. I hold the perpetrators morally responsible for what they did, because (a) they did it, and (b) what they did was wrong. Whether the act was objectively, universally wrong is simply beside the point; all that matters, as far as me holding people morally responsible, is how I relate to the incident.
Once I have given a moral assessment of an act, it would simply be incoherent for me to then say that no one is morally responsible for it. An act can only be morally charged if it is performed by a moral actor, and a moral actor is morally responsible by definition. No one would be morally responsible if the person in my example was mauled by a bear instead of being assaulted by hoodlums. But that is why we wouldn't qualify that as a moral act - it would be an accident.
Quoting Joshs
I intentionally led with an example that was not of this sort (I think we can all agree that violent street criminals are not "suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.") I can supply another, but my interpretation won't be much different. What matters is that someone did something blameworthy in my assessment. The actor may have a different take on it. You or Gergen may have a different take on it. But moral valuation is not a view from nowhere - it is personal. So you ask me and I give you mine; it can't be someone else's.
Quoting Joshs
To some extent. Moral valuation is not a simple function of the facts of the case. Knowing the background of an act and the actors, sympathizing with their circumstances and empathizing with their feelings can influence how we assess culpability. What I don't agree with is that moral vision must be aperspectival, that as long as someone else sees things differently than me, I am not entitled to my own point of view.
But whether you think that its wrongness is objective/universal, rather than just a matter of opinion, is a part of how you relate to it.
I don't like strawberries. But I understand that liking strawberries or not is just a matter of opinion; I don't think anybody is incorrect in their assessment of strawberries just because they like them while I don't. But if someone asserts that your friend being beaten and robbed was perfectly fine and not wrong at all, you wouldn't just take that like you would take a disagreement in food tastes, right? You would think their assessment of the morality of that situation is incorrect, not just different from yours, no? You don't take each of your respective assessments of the morality of the situation to just be expressions of your respective tastes for battery and robbery -- where some people might like it, while you don't, and that's fine for them, it's just not your thing -- do you? If you did take it that way, then blaming someone for doing something you merely dislike but don't think is actually wrong in a universal, objective way, doesn't seem like it would make any sense. I don't blame people for eating strawberries, even though I dislike strawberries.
Why do you see these as the only two options - either 'like trivial preferences' or 'objectively and universally wrong'?
Quoting Pfhorrest
In what way would it not 'make sense'. What is the sense you're expecting it to make? When we say some sentence doesn't 'make sense' we mean it doesn't conform to the arbitrary grammatical rules our language happens to have. When we say an action doesn't 'make sense', we mean something like that it can't be explained in terms of the actor's objectives... I can't see here what you could mean by it not making sense.
Of course if you believe strongly in an objective morality of some sort you're not going to agree with that assessment. But that's a very different matter from it not making sense.
Because the difference between those is binary: can multiple contrary opinions on the same thing be simultaneously warranted, or not?
If you think yes, then you’re treating it like it’s not objective — and also, since you think the different opinions are warranted, you have no motive to blame others for their disagreement, to treat them like their opinions are wrong and they are deficient somehow for holding them.
If you think no, then you’re treating it like it’s an objective matter. If you’re blaming someone for something, you’re treating them like their implicit opinion that their actions are okay is wrong, unwarranted, and they are deficient for thinking so — in other words, treating the matter as an objective one, where it’s possible to be wrong, not a mere difference of opinion.
That’s all independent of whether it really is an objective matter or not. This is just about whether you’re treating it like one, and what the act of blaming implies about that.
It was the triviality I was questioning - sorry, should have made that more clear. To reformulate - why must it be trivial that we have disagreements of opinion? That I love my wife is just a matter of my opinion, but it is far from trivial.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I've just explained the motive - it might get them to change their behaviour to one you find preferable. What's not a motive about that?
The problem is the statment is not rational unless there something wrong with the action. It's not rational for someone to do what you want, to act to achieve your goals, unless that action and goal ought to happen , even for oneself-- goals are normative in nature, they are an account its true something ought to occur.
Now, it's true one doesn't need the ought to be to exist with goals or act to achieve them. Those are states of the world which happen regardless of whether they ought to, by one's existence. In this space though, the goal has no more rational force then an alternative. It makes as much sense for existence to produce a person who doesn't achieve their goals as much as it does. Existence is just as capable of creating a person who doesn't want kill anyone, but goes around shooting up large crowds.
Of course it's rational. If everyone in your group thinks your behaviour is despicable then continuing to behave that way is going to get you ostracised and so lose the benefits of group membership. It's therefore entirely rational for you to stop behaving in ways your group disapproves of.
That's just a popularity and how others treat you for it-- questions of existence only. Again, any outcome of the world makes as much sense as another here. Existence where you are ostracised is just as logically coherent as one where you are not.
It's only rational for you to stop if there is an ought: that you ought not get ostracised. Then we would actually have a reason to prefer an existence of not being ostracised over being so. Yes, it is rational, but only to a world in which you ought not be ostracised.
Why not a world where you'd rather not be ostracised - why are your own personal objectives being ignored here?
Because they aren't truthful without an ought. Just because I exist wanting something is not a reason I must have it. The existence of my desire does not automatically mean it is truthful my desire should be fulfilled.
Of course, we may have a world in which I rather not be ostracised and this reflects what ought to happen, and so has a rational force, but this invoves an ought. My personal objective reflects what ought to happen, and so has rational force.
This just begs the question. That there are things which truthfully ought to be the case is the matter being debated - you here are assuming it.
I have not assumed it. My point is the exact opposite: we don't just have a fact that I should get what I want. If I exist with a desire, it does not entail I should (and have rational reason) to get it. I'm not arguing oughts are so here.
The point is that if I think my desire should happen, that is rational I get it over its absence, then I believe there is an ought. The ought is somemthing my thought and its supposed rationality cannot be posited without.
Now, I might be wrong in this believe. Maybe the ought is untrue, it being false that I ought to get my desire and it has a rational presence over the opposite. I could be believing a falsehood in thinking getting my desire was the rational outcome.
My point isn't that the ought must be. It's that if it's true getting my desire is the rational outcome, then an ought is so.
I agree. I'm not sure what I've written that might make you think otherwise.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I'm not at all sure what you mean by 'rational outcome' here. I usually take the expression to mean something like the result of a sound logical thought process, but that can't be right here because logic cannot prove it's own premises right.
What is the truthmaker in "if it's true getting my desire is the rational outcome"?
Also, I'm not sure how any of this relates to the argument about assignation of blame being an objective-oriented speech act. In order for such an argument to be plausible, it only need be the case that the speech act is effective at it's objective. That being so, you can almost guarantee that people will use it that way and so it becomes, de facto, what the speech means.
Sure, but it's also not something you're going to try to convince other people to agree with you about, right? You love your wife, I don't, and that's fine isn't it? There's no feeling like you need to get me on the same page as you about your wife?
That's the binary difference I'm on about. Does it matter that we disagree, or not? If it matters, then you're treating it like it's an objective or universal matter, where we all need to come to the same conclusion lest at least one of us be wrong (and deserve blame if we act wrongly because of that). And if it doesn't matter, then there's no point blaming someone for acting on their different opinion, because their different opinion doesn't matter. I'm not swooning over your wife and buying her gifts or whatever, but that's not something you'd want to blame me for, right?
This is the bit I don't get. Where's the connection between it mattering and me treating it as objective fact? If I was tied to five other people it would really matter that we agreed on which direction to walk (I might get injured if we don't all agree), but none of us would consider the chosen direction to be objectively 'right', we might as easily have tossed a coin for it.
There's not a necessary logical connection between agreement mattering and the subject of that agreement being treated as an objective fact. There's a step you're missing.
I think this just shows how you’re importing something much more to the sense of “objective” than I am, because all I mean by “objective” is that it’s not a topic where disagreement doesn’t matter: it’s something where in any disagreement at least one party (and possibly all parties) is at least partly wrong.
I don’t know what more exactly you take it to mean by that.
Quoting Isaac
If you trying to walk to somewhere for some reason, then there is an objectively right way to do that, first of all in the sense of a way that will most effectively get you where you want to go for whatever reason you’re going there, but also in the sense that the choice of where to go and why accounts for all of your separate needs to go different places for different reasons.
Getting hurt because you’re trying to go different ways is a problem, sure, but also if one of you needs to get to their inhaler and another of you needs to get to their insulin, etc, there is some best route or another for you all to walk that will get the most urgent things done quickest etc. And it matters that you can all come to agreement not just on anything whatsoever to avoid hurting each other in the process of walking, but that you all agree to whatever that best walking route is to get all of your needs met.
Simple. an objective fact is one about which it's possible for all parties to be wrong. A decision on which agreement matters is not such a thing - if all parties reach the same conclusion it is right.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yep.
I see we've simply reached the point where you've previously abandoned the conversation, so that's probably it, but on the off-chance I'll repeat the same objection I raised last time...
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Pfhorrest
Are all subjective judgements and so do not produce a conclusion which is any more objective (or inter-subjective, even) than simply asking "which way should we go?".
In a disparate, socially estranged group (of ten such people), you'll get ten different answers as to which way to go. Ask which route satisfies everyone's needs, you'll get ten different answers (based on different ideas about hierarchies of need). Ask which solution best 'accounts for' everyone's instinct or feelings about the solutions, you'll get ten different answers (based on different judgements about whether, and to what extent, a solutions has 'accounted for' the needs concerned).
Ask a socially unified group (joint culture, joint interests, feelings of companionship between them) which 'best accounts for' everyone's needs you'll more likely get a single answer (or close), but then you would have more likely gotten a single answer from the original question in the first place "which way should we go?"
That's what I just said.
Quoting Isaac
Because we've gone over and over and over and over and over this a zillion times and I'm tired of struggling to figure out exactly how to communicate the apparent misunderstanding between us, because your objections sound to me like the kind of things that would apply (and be rebuttable) equally as much to descriptive matters, yet you don't deny objectivity there. It's just not worth the effort of trying to figure out how to convey to you the difference between the things you take me to be saying, whatever those are, and what I'm actually trying to say.
Different kinds of people in different contexts observe different things and interpret those observations differently in part through the influences of their different cultures -- a whole bunch of subjective disagreement there, and not to do with morality at all, but with reality -- yet we're nevertheless able to take all that subjectivity and distill an ever-better approximation of objectivity out of it with time and effort. All I advocate is to do exactly the same thing with the experiences, interpretations, cultural influences, etc, that are of a prescriptive rather than descriptive nature, as well.
And all I'm able to pull out of your responses to that is just "but you can't do that, it doesn't work, they're different", without any clear elucidation of why, what is fundamentally different about them. At least not one that isn't question-begging, e.g. that 'you can do that with descriptive matters because there is an objective reality that we can compare our descriptions to but there's not an objective morality to compare our prescriptions to' -- when the whole thrust here is that objectivity of either reality or morality is something we can only assume (or not), methodologically, and then try to work towards from the inescapably subjective perspectives that are our only connection to either. Objectivity is a choice that we make about our methods, not a condition that we find out there somewhere.
Yes, I get that the starting point for the moral decision-making process I advocate is a bunch of subjective stuff. So are all our starting points for the natural sciences. Yet we (seemingly) agree that the latter can get ever closer to objectivity, if we do it right. I just say to do that exact same kind of thing, but with an opposite direction of fit to all of the subjective pieces we start from. And of course people who don't agree to use that kind of process (like the strangers tied together in your example) aren't going to agree with its conclusions. People who don't agree to use scientific methods can end up thinking the Earth is flat, or any other kind of pseudo-scientific nonsense, too.
Sociological and psychological issues getting in the way of people making progress toward an unbiased, universal, objective account of things is not exclusive to prescriptive matters; it happens in descriptive matters too. But if people care to, they can work around it, and make progress toward objectivity... on either matter, descriptive or prescriptive, reality or morality. And if people don't care to, then yeah, of course, the endeavor toward objectivity is fucked... on either matter, prescriptive or descriptive, morality or reality.
The reason you seem to think otherwise is because you are still ascribing people have a rational reasonof taking action, absent the presence of the ought. You are still acting like people still have reasons for taking on action or another when there is no ought, as if the mere presence they existed seeking an outcome was sufficient to suggest it should be achieved.
My point is this cannot be true. People don't just get to say it is true an outcome ought be achieved just because they exist wanting it. That's the same leap as someone who thinks getting an outcome must be an objective truth just because they exist wanting it. Without an ought, their failure will make just as much sense as their success.
The fact the existence of your desire does not equal that it ought to be achieved. You only have reason to prefer your own success if it ought to be over your failure. Otherwise, it makes just as much sense for you to be one who fails and never gets their desires fulfilled, even from your own point of view .
[quote"Isaac"]Also, I'm not sure how any of this relates to the argument about assignation of blame being an objective-oriented speech act. In order for such an argument to be plausible, it only need be the case that the speech act is effective at it's objective. That being so, you can almost guarantee that people will use it that way and so it becomes, de facto, what the speech means.[/quote]
The objective is the problem: it supposes an ought. If there is no ought, then we have no reason for uttering this speech act to achieve this outcome over any other. The effectiveness doesn't matter because , without the ought, failure in this goal makes as much sense as success.
People will, of course, act to achieve success because they want it, but this doesn't ground the action a preferable or the rational option. It's just describing how people exist acting to get what they want. That one has "the might" and uses it does not amount to an action being preferable, either in terms of ethics or the rational.
Yeah, but I just explained how you're missing a step from the first half of that sentence to the idea of potentially all parties being wrong.
With our current models of reality, there's an external source of our sense data about which it is possible for all parties to be wrong. Everyone in the world could assume the source was some way (flat earth), but everyone was wrong (it's actually round).
With a system of 'objective' morality where 'objective' just means that agreement matters, it is not possible for all parties to be wrong. So long as there's agreement, they are right, by fiat. We don't have a model whereby they might all be wrong.
The significance of this difference is that in the former, accord with this external source is the truthmaker - inter subjective agreement is just a proxy for it. We assume that widespread inter subjective agreement about an observation makes it more likely that it is in accordance with the external source.
With morality, in this sense, inter subjective agreement is not a proxy for accordance with some external source of data. Inter subjective agreement is all there is to it. Nothing more.
I have to say that generally I can't make much sense of what you've written, so I've little faith that the following will actually address it, but I'll have a go...
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I agree. Again, I'm not sure where I've said anything that might make you think I wouldn't.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
So if the truthmaker is that it ought to be achieved, I cannot marry that with your response when I said...
Quoting Isaac
...where you replied...
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It seems now that you are saying that there's an objective 'ought', afterall.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I don't need a reason to prefer success over failure. It's literally the meaning of those words in this context. I could not possibly prefer failure because by doing so it would become success, I would have just misused the word 'failure' in that context.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Failure or success in a goal isn't the sort of thing that can make sense. Sentences make sense, actions makes sense (in respect of their objective). Labelling ('failure'/'success') is just a categorisation exercise. It might be wrong or right, but not sensical or nonsensical.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yeah, I'd generally go along with that. Not seeing what I've said that is contrary to this.
This example is a red herring. The contrast here is between moral and amoral (morally neutral) actions, not between moral simpliciter and objectively/universally moral (whatever that might mean).
Quoting Pfhorrest
I would consider other people's assessments incorrect if and only if they are different from mine. This is a trivial tautology; you can't base any argument on it.
We don’t ask people what they believe or perceive to determine what is real. That would be just as problematic as you say my approach to morality is — because you take my approach to morality to be analogous to that. But it’s not.
The “external source” in our judgement of reality, if we’re not just going to beg the question here, is our senses, which are still subjective — we can’t ever discover whether or not there really is an objective reality on the other end of our senses, we can only assume it one way or the other. But unlike beliefs or perceptions, sensations per se cannot be completely irreconcilable with each other, because senses by themselves do not declare that a state of affairs is the case, they just give us some data points that the real state of affairs must conform to, and like it’s always possible to draw an arbitrarily complex curve through any set of data points, it’s always possible to come up with some state of affairs that matches (satisfies, accounts for, etc) all of those different sensations. It might be difficult, but it’s always possible.
Likewise, by “appetites” I mean the “sensations” of pain, hunger, etc. These do not directly tell us (or constitute us thinking) that particular states of affairs ought to be the case, so they cannot conflict with each other, just like sensations cannot conflict with each other, only perceptions or beliefs can. It’s only when we interpret those appetites into desires and intentions that we end up targeting different and possibly conflicting states of affairs. Asking people what they desired to figure out what’s moral would be like asking people what they perceive to figure out what’s real — it’s not guaranteed that you could put all the answers together in one coherent picture, so that’s not going to work, in either case. And that’s not what I’m advocating.
But you can put everyone’s different sensations together as the data points to fit a descriptive model to, and the limit of the series of such models that we progress through with adding further sensations to the data is what we take to be objective reality.
Objective reality isn’t something we just have on hand to compare our beliefs to. It’s merely the whatever-it-is that lies in the direction that our ever-growing accumulation of sensations is headed.
And you can likewise put everyone’s different appetites together as the data points to fit a prescriptive model to. The limit of the series of such models that we progress through with adding further appetites to the data is what we take to be objective morality.
On my account objective morality was never meant to be something we would just have on hand to compare our intentions to. It’s only ever been meant as the whatever-it-is that lies in the direction that our ever-growing accumulation of appetites is headed.
This is what I mean about you begging the question. We no more just have objective reality given to us than we do objectively morality, but you just assert that we have one but not the other, while we “have” neither. In both cases we are inescapably stuck in our subjective experiences. But it’s equally possible in either case to choose to eschew our conflicting intuitive interpretations of those experiences and try, however hard it might be, to piece together a unified model that fits all the raw experiential data itself. It’s that choice that makes for objectivism, not anything handed down to us from somehow outside of our subjective experiences.
Quoting SophistiCat
Non-objective “morality” is simply not morality at all, so that’s the same distinction. Making “moral” judgement without acting like it applies to everyone is just expressing a preference with room for disagreement, not making moral judgement at all.
Quoting SophistiCat
The point is that you don’t do that for all assessments about all things, like on non-moral matters of mere taste. It’s precisely the taking of disagreement as not merely different but incorrect that makes it a moral assessment.
Bringing this back to the theme of the OP, what is your view of Gergen’s social constructionist treatment of ethics? Do you agree that moral claims cannot justify themselves to the extent that they attempt to ground themselves on the basis of anything outside of contingent normative practices? And does this fact not deprive would-be enforcers of moral norms their justification for blameful finger-pointing?
I do not agree.
Moral claims were always justified by something other than the fact a person makes a claim, by an ought significance which is truth independent of whether people make claims for it. The moral was never a contingent normative practice-- that's why they are still true even when contingent normative practices are the opposite or the moral (e.g. instances of stealing still being wrong, even when people are practising it all the time).
A moral justification (ought)is a different truth to contingent normative practices (the existing states of our actions and what we believe about actions). That's why we cannot bootstrap an ought or absence or an ought simply on the existence of a practice or culture.
This is the mistake. Actions do not just makes sense to given objective. Someone doesn't just have reason to do something because they exist with a related objective. It would make as much sense, in terms of existence, for them to fail. They actions to success only make sense if their is an ought.
Otherwise, it makes as much sense for them to fail in respect to their objective as succeed
My point is about what is believed if someone has a rational preference. I wasn't suggesting here it was the there was an ought. I was saying any postion which holds their is a rational course of action holds there is an ought, as it is a logical requirement of actions being rationally preferable to others.
Indeed, but Nietzsche neither accounts for everything nor equates value with merely existing.
By "independent" I do not mean of something other than the living being, some transcendent force or some such. I just mean one's value is a different truth than just being a state of existence.
If I have reason to act because it is valuable to me, it is not the same truth as merely existing.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You are confused. Of course I do - how could I not? Assuming, of course, that they are assessments of the same thing.
This is a classic naturalistic fallacy, an instance of is/ought confusion. The natural origin of morality is not the same as the grounding for moral claims. A constructivist may believe (rightly or wrongly) that normative beliefs come about as a result of social construction. But that is neither here nor there as far as what that same constructivist believes ought to be the case.
No, I get that bit.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes they are, each of those processes takes place in a brain. Sensation>perception>belief, and appetite> desire>intention are directional, staged processes which have no medium other than neurons through which to act. So if we can find no neural equivalent (or if we find a neural equivalent which, once labelled as such, reveals additional step) then your picture cannot actually be the case. The alternative is to say that you can have a conceptual scheme regardless of the physical reality of it's subject - in which case any conceptual scheme would work. If I disagreed with you and said "no, it goes intention>desire>appetite", how would you argue against that without invoking empirical evidence for what actually happens?
For the sake of perhaps communicating where I think you're going wrong, however, let's take your model as our basis. Beliefs about reality go reality>sensations>perceptions>beliefs. Intentions (ways things ought to be) go reality>internal states>interoception (what you're calling appetites)>desires>intentions.
When we make assumptions about the objective truth of our beliefs about the world, we assume they are objective because we assume we share reality, the bit at the beginning of the chain. It's a reasonable assumption. Get enough people together and errors in the chains of any individual should revert to the mean and so give a good account of that which is shared (reality).
What you're trying to claim is the same thing is not the same thing at all. With your model of intention, each step is not caused by the previous one.
We can model descriptive data points because (and only because) we assume a cause. Our modelling process is exactly to speculate as the the cause of our sensations (and thereby predict the results of our response). Without cause the modelling makes no sense at all.
So with sensations of pain and hunger we might model how they were caused, even our desires we could model how they were caused, but none of this gets us anything prescriptive.
The assumed 'reality' is not...
Quoting Pfhorrest
It is the cause of our ever-growing accumulation of sensations.
We also have an ever growing accumulation of desires, hedonic sensations etc. We can model the cause of those too. But nowhere in that model would there be anything that we 'ought' to do.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Appetites do not tell us that particular states of affairs ought to be the case indirectly either. They tell us only about the state of our endocrine system. We interpret that state as an attraction or a repulsion.
Moral blame is about the behaviour of others, so what matters is the point of inter-subjectivity. With both sense data and ineroception data the point of inter-subjectivity is the cause (reality), the assumed cause.
Intention requires inputs from outside of the chain you specify. It's not sufficient for us to have appetites derived from reality. First we must desire some valence of those appetites. An internal model which assumes some target valence to internal sense data may be either learned (such as feeling full after a meal) or hard-wired (such as osmoregulation). The target valence comes from a predictive model about the origin of sense data (ie something goes wrong if that valence is not maintained). What that something is could be biological or cultural.
Then these desires must be weighed with competing ones to produce intentions. The weighing most often takes place in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - ie it's what we might call a rational process, there's some actual calculation going on. But it also takes input from models of interocepted states - you'll make a different calculation in a different hormonal environment. So intention depends not only on desires (which are already somewhat culturally mediated), but on your varying endocrinologic states.
None of this is to say that beliefs about reality or not also influenced by these systems, but they (unlike intentions) have a short-term checking system to tie them back into the assumed source. If we think we see a tiger (because perhaps we're scared and so our judgement of shadows is skewed toward an explanation for that fear), we will, within seconds, focus on audiovisual input that could confirm such a belief. If, however, we have an intention to make the world some way in order to reduce/increase the valence of some appetite to it's desired level, we cannot check that. We could check if the intention does indeed reduce/increase the valence of the appetite. But we cannot check if the target valence is the 'right' valence (there's nothing to check it against), nor can we check if the weighing of competing targets is 'right' (again, there's nothing to check against. This is because the targets (as opposed to the causes) are not derived directly from an external source.
Essentially (in spite of my extremely long-winded explanation) your error is simply that you say "because we do X with Y we can do it with Z" without any supporting argument. Just because we can make falsificationist-type inferences about causes, does not automatically mean we can do the same with intentions. they are two different processes (as I've just explained). It's like saying that because putting petrol in a car makes it go, it must be that doing so to a horse is also OK because they're both forms of transport.
This is literally just a repeat of what you said before without any attempt to address the issues I raised with it. As I'm having great trouble making sense of your cryptic grammar, and you seem entirely unmoved by anything I have to say in response anyway, I think we'll leave it there.
So when you like one flavor of ice cream and someone else prefers a different flavor, you think that their opinion on ice cream is incorrect, rather than just not the same as yours?
Quoting Isaac
I'm not making any claim about directionality or staging, or any particulars of any process, and anyone doing so would not be doing philosophy anymore. I'm talking only about a way of categorizing aspects of our introspective experience. If anything, "perception" and "desire" seem (in my own introspection) to be the aspects that I'm chronologically first aware of: some state of affairs initially just seems/looks/feels/etc true to me (a perception), and some state of affairs initially just seems/looks/feels/etc good to me (a desire).
It's only when I examine those kinds of mental states reflexively that I can tease them apart from the raw experiences that seem to have provoked them ("Why does this seem true to me? Because I see [some sensations]"; "Why does this seem good to me? Because I feel [some appetites]" ). And of course it's only when I do that reflexive self-examination that I form reflexive opinions about those opinions, affirming or denying that I'm perceiving correctly (forming beliefs) or that I'm desiring correctly (forming intentions).
Exactly what is or isn't going on in the underlying mechanisms that give rise to experience and thought doesn't change anything at all about the ability to categorize kinds of experiences and thoughts in this way. There don't have to be perfectly symmetrical neural processes going on in the brain to make this kind of symmetric conceptualization useful, and I'd be surprised if a product of evolution like the human brain was that tidy. The usefulness of such a conceptualization only requires that people somehow or another have the experiences of perceiving and desiring, and the ability to analyze those experiences, and reflexively judge them.
Quoting Isaac
What I am proposing to model is precisely what states of affairs cause all of our appetites to be satisfied, in the very straightforward sense that eating food normally satisfies hunger, but also other any other 'yearning' feelings like hunger, as well as things like what alleviates various pains. Those are all what we might call "imperative experiences": they're base, physiological feelings that call for something to be done, though no particular something is directly specified by them, we fill that in.
The question of what is moral is the question of what ought we do. We all have those feelings that call for something or another to be done (our appetites), and our immediate, unreflective opinions about what that something or other should be (our desires), on the basis of just our own such feelings. But an objective answer is an unbiased answer. So an objective morality is one that takes into account all such feelings (all appetites). But -- and this is the really important part that saves the whole thing from your usual criticism -- we don't have to take into account everyone's opinions about their feelings (all desires).
Are you familiar with Principled Negotiation? The distinction I'm on about here is basically synonymous with that method's principle to "focus on interests, not positions".
Quoting Isaac
Maybe this is where the real point of contention lies. This sounds to me like someone claiming that empirical observation only tells us about the world as it appears to us, but nothing at all about how the world really is. In that case I'm left wondering what the heck they mean by "really is" other than "consistently appears to everybody", as distinguished from "only appears to some people sometimes".
Likewise, I'm left here wondering what the heck you could mean by "we morally ought to do" if not "would consistently please everybody", as distinguished from "would only please some people sometimes".
As I'm saying to SophistiCat above, the very concept of morality inherently implies objectivity (as in universality, lack of bias). A non-objective morality is just a non-morality, in the same way that a non-objective reality is just a non-reality: something that only subjectively looks true to some people sometimes but false to others or at other times is unreal, and something that only subjectively feels good to some people sometimes but bad to others or at other times is immoral. ("Looks" and "feels" here referring to sensations and appetites, not perceptions and desires).
Quoting Isaac
I'm not proposing we should. I'm only proposing that we model what states of affairs simultaneously match all such valences. (Understood here to mean appetites rather than desires, as elaborated above). The subjective way that interactions with the world are experienced by people is just part of the raw data by which to judge the world, it's not itself the subject of judgement.
Our sensations are equally subjective: we don't directly experience a frequency of light, we see a color, and different people see different colors in response to the same light (e.g. various kinds of colorblindness, and tetrachromats). All that can be taken as objective about a visual observation is that a certain kind of person experiences (particular patterns of) certain kinds of colors.
Likewise, all that can be taken as objective data points in my model of morality is that certain kinds of people have positive or negative hedonic experiences (satisfaction or dissatisfaction of appetites) in certain kinds of contexts. We're not judging them for the having of those experiences; we're judging the world for its evocation of those experiences. (And then later judging people for their role in the world being that way, but that's more analogous to judging people for the quality of their assessment of what is real than it is to judging what is real).
The human body is an instrument used in the observation of the world: what we're checking, both in the case of sensations and in the case of appetites, is how our bodies react to the world, which in both cases tells us something both about the world and about ourselves.
That would just be an inter-subjective morality. IE one that tries to make it so that as many people as possible get their "moral appetites" filled. It's a compromise. But when I hear "objective morality", "compromise" isn't the first word that comes to mind. An objective morality implies a right answer, regardless of what appetites you may have, not merely a social compromise that satisfies the most appetites. That right answer should not change based on the society, but your "objective morality" is purely defined by the majority appetite of the society it's in.
The way you use objective just seems really odd.
I like this metaphor, not least for having a Beckettian vibe. It's interesting to think through the possible configurations of individuals and how they'd handle the situation. It seems clear enough to me that there's not always a right answer, and that the situation will play out according to the particular configuration of individuals.
Because they don't disagree with me. Look, this is a silly argument and it doesn't have much to do with the topic, as far as I can see.
Getting back to the topic, it's interesting to note that the constructionist, according to Gergen, is an objectivist despite herself, inasmuch as she grounds morality not in her subjective judgements of right and wrong, but in a social construct, because a subjective social construct would be an oxymoron. "Transcendental" or not, social norms exist out in the world for anyone to observe.
Quoting Gergen
And if morality was grounded in some other foundation, then what? The complaint would be the same, only replace "traditions" with whatever moral foundation Gergen thinks would be more satisfactory.
This is the problem with so-called objective morality: if moral responsibility rests on the moral foundation and that foundation is located outside the individual, then the individual doesn't bear any moral responsibility - she is just a passive receiver of norms, not a moral agent.
What I’m talking about , what the whole
point of the OP is, is that how people ground their claims in terms of what ‘is’ has everything to
do with how violently and punitively they treat other who violate their standards of what ought to be . What a person assumes ‘is’ in terms of an ontology of nature , the physical or the human, is profoundly connected with how they formulate their ‘oughts’ and the level
of tolerance , the violent and punitive character of the enforcement of those oughts. No evolution of moral thinking can take place without a parallel evolution of one’s understanding of what ‘is’. You can’t devise standard of what should be the case for human behavior without knowing what is possible for human behavior. So how we think others ‘ought’ to act is profoundly tied up with our psychological understanding of such issues as the nature of the will, what it means for it to be free or not free ,how social or biological conditioning contributes to human intentions , whether intent can ever be evil. All of these considerations of the ‘is’ of human functioning will determine our sense of how likely it is that we can shape others behavior and what methods are necessary , appropriate or ‘moral’ in order to do so.
The Enlightenment ideal of human moral
perfect ability was a direct consequence of the Enlightenment scientific formulation of a rational universe. Every scientific revolution leads to new formulations of moral standards and new ‘oughts’. One can trace pc and cancel culture to post-Hegelian and Marxist- inspired models of what ‘is’.
Gergen’s version of social constructivism does away with the ‘fuel’ forviolent retribution and punishment , for righteous indignation , by removing the ability to believe that another’s choices were a deviation from a correct path. There is no ‘ought’ for Gergen for the same reason that there is no factual realism. They are social practices that have a temporary stability to them, a temporary ‘isness’ and there are always ways that emerge of reconstruing these practices.I suppose that is an ‘ought’,but an ‘ought’ with no moral force, because for Gergen the only true ought is continual reinvention of social practices with no final aim. So what Gergen believes ought to be the case, an attitude of openness to continual social reinvention , is inconceivable without a prior belief that what ‘is’ the case is radical
contingency of moral practice based on a Nietzchean notion of reality as self-overcoming.
Yeah, but that's exactly Sophsitcat's point: the "is" amounts to an objective account of who someone is with respect to normatively. We have described the "is" of an individual's value or ought, such that we have a grounded moral cliam. In this respect, we have a moral realism, just grounded on the signifcance of an individual's existence rather than a transcendent force or encompassing rational standard.
So it doesn't do away with moral fuel at all, it just shifts from concept or history, to the existence of a given individual. The ought becomes a feature of the contingent being-- "this is an existence which ought to be treated in this way"-- and grounds questions of how to treat them. (and versions of this are common amongst "PC" culture because it's frequently about respecting and valuing a given individual for who they are, for the fact they are an existence which is valuable).
Objectivity as in universality is nothing more than the limit of increasing inter-subjectivity.
Quoting khaled
I like to distinguish between two senses of “objective”, one of which I support (and is what I usually mean when I talk about it) and the other of which I oppose because it’s a useless non-sense of the term that I would rather never be used. The former is the sense of “objective” as in universal, the opposite of relative. The latter is the sense of “objective” as in transcendent, the opposite of phenomenal. Both “relative” and “phenomenal” are senses of “subjective” in turn.
I am wholly on board with everything, reality and morality both, being “subjective” as in phenomenal, not transcendent: there is no sense to speak of about either of them that is not grounded entirely in our experience of the world, and if there somehow was more to either, whatever that would mean, we definitionally could not ever tell, because to tell we would have to have some experience of it.
But conversely I’m also adamant that we take both to be equally “objective” as in universal, not relative: never accepting that anything short of unlimited intersubjectivity be taken as sufficient in our answers, though because we are limited in our knowledge and power we will often be forced to make do for the time being with just the most intersubjectivity that we can manage.
That last part is where compromises come into play, but it is not the compromise that makes for the objectivity; we compromise only in lieu of being able to attain the fully objective good. If we had unlimited power, there would be no need for compromise: we could just create a scenario in which everyone’s appetites were satisfied, even if that meant giving everyone their own private world. We can’t do that yet, so we have do do the best we can instead, and how exactly to methodically approximate the objective good is a different subtopic within ethics. But there’s no sense getting on to that topic at all if we’re not even on the same page that there is some objective good that we’d be trying to approximate.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Also the more common use. I also agree that it's a useless term because it never comes into play. What is "transcendentally true" doesn't matter, only what seems true, because we always deal in seemings. But that's why I use "inter-subjective" when I want to refer to the first use, to avoid any sort of confusion.
Quoting Pfhorrest
:up:
Quoting Pfhorrest
To me it always seemed like the task of finding the most "inter-subjectively" fitting morality was a task for the social sciences, politics, and some neurology, not really the task of philosophy. I don't see the point in musing about it without data and research. If figuring out the best moral code was easy enough to be done by a couple of shmucks on the internet we wouldn't have fought wars over it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I just don't like the word use. "Objective morality" is a term that has already been booked as the second use (I think thanks to the Abrahamic religions which make morality transcendental). Which is why if I hadn't read the rest of your comment I would have disagreed with the statement. But hey, you do you. Just telling you that it may come off as confusing.
I find many posters do this on the forum. Sort of "dress up" subjectivity as objectivity by having an unorthodox (and much weaker) definition of the latter. I'm not against it but you just never know which use they intend which is why I use "inter-subjective" only.
It’s only an objective account if the person formulating the account is an objectivist.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
We have a moral realism if we , like Sophisticat, are a moral realist. If we are Gergen we are a moral relativist .
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
What is common among PC culture is what Gergen is accusing it of , a blameful moralism based on a belief in a normative standard that is claimed to be superior or preferred to standards of other normative cultures. Homophobia is a pc term that implies that accepting homosexuals as part of normal culture is better than not doing so, because such acceptance is superior and can be justified in its superiority based on a higher or more universal grounding than that of contingent convention. The accusation of homophobia doesn’t justify itself merely on the basis of the fact that it just so happens in this particular era in this particular part of the world there is a normative community that prefers to treat homosexuals the same as heterosexuals. Homophobia implies that homosexuality is wrong. ‘Wrong’ implies that the standard of this particular community in this particular era happens to be a better standard in some objective sense than that of another community in another era. This is what give pc its polarizing force, the fact that those who do not buy into its standards believe that they will be ostracized and condemned as deplorable.
This is not Gergen’s position and that is why he rejects pc language.
I disagree, as I’ve seen the other used quite a lot too — but prevalence isn’t really important for our purposes here. It seems like with many terms the sense which makes most sense is used by proponents and a sense that makes less sense is used by opponents. Aside from “objectivism” and “subjectivism”, there are also different senses of “skepticism” and “fideism” commonly used by proponents and opponents of each. Likewise with “optimism” and “pessimism”, and probably lots of others too.
Quoting khaled
I agree, which is why I think that ethics proper should not be a part of philosophy, only meta-ethics, like philosophy has meta-physics but not physics itself anymore.
The properly philosophical questions regarding morality are about how to go about the investigation of what is moral — what question are we even asking, why does it matter, what counts as evidence, etc — not about what specifically in particular is or isn’t a moral state of affairs, or a just action or intention, etc. Just like philosophy’s proper role with regard to investigating reality is answering those same kinds of questions about that investigation, and then letting physics (and the rest of the physical sciences) take over from there.
And I think the answers to both are the same: phenomenalism (meaning empiricism in one case and hedonism in the other), universalism (meaning realism in one case and altruism the other), and two other principles I call criticism and liberalism (that don’t have special names for each side of the is-ought divide).
On the one side that gets you broadly the scientific method; but actually using that method is not the place of philosophy, just defending its use over other alternatives. Likewise on the other side I think philosophy can give a method for doing an ethical analogue of the physical sciences; but actually using that method is beyond the domain of philosophy.
Quoting khaled
Utilitarians are usually considered moral objectivists, AFAIK, and they use basically the same criteria as I do for what is a good state of affairs, altruistic hedonism. (Though I disagree with them about the ends justifying the means; I only agree on what good ends are, and take just means to be a different subject — which is what I was just talking about, actually).
Quoting khaled
I’m wondering now if I was clear about the two different senses of “subjectivity” as well, and whether you’re distinguishing between them yourself. I find the two broad directions of philosophical error across the board to involve talking both senses of each term to be the same thing, and so thinking that in rejecting one sense of one term they have to reject the other too.
So you’ll get people who rightly reject relativism and “therefore” wrongly adopt transcendentalism (when all they needed was universalism, which you can have without transcendentalism); or people who, like I fear you might be doing, rightly reject transcendentalism and “therefore” wrongly adopt relativism (when all they needed was phenomenalism, which you can have without relativism).
I thought it would be clear that I use “objective” and “subjective” in the second, less useful sense. So to reject transcendentalism is to adopt relativism.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Pfhorrest
Not only do I disagree with the definition (when “inter-subjective” is available and gets rid of all confusion), I also disagree that the most inter-subjective morality is the correct one. You run into utility monster issues, where people with the strongest appetites get too much leeway.
That would be entirely fine if all you were doing was categorising, but that's not all you're doing. You go on to treat appetites, desires and intentions as a components in a causal chain. To do that you need more than just conceptual categorisation, you need evidence that these things are actually causally related in the way you suggest.
Quoting Pfhorrest
When? Since it is absolutely demonstrably true that the target valences of our apettites change both with time and with cultures, exactly what point in time would your model address? Now?...or now?....or now?
Quoting Pfhorrest
What about future generations? Do their appetites not get a look in?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm passing familiar, yes, but the situation you describe here would require us first to establish those interests, which is an empirical matter. The interests of human beings, in terms of ideal valence of certain appetites, is something which is the case about the world. Even if I were to accept your jump from the existence of this fact to the maxim that we 'ought' to seek to attain it (which I don't) then discovering it would be a matter of biology and neuroscience - since, as you've already admitted, introspection, and subsequent discussion, cannot provide a faithful account of either the appropriate target valence, nor the method by which it is best attained.
Quoting Pfhorrest
What we 'morally ought to do' is an expression in our language - it's used for several purposes. One is to express a social convention which is considered more important than mere etiquette, another is often to push a set of behaviours which would benefit the person using it, another is simply to ostracise people who aren't conforming to social mores. "Would consistently please everyone" is certainly one way it's used, but not the most common by far. Again, who is 'everyone' in this? All future generations?
Quoting Pfhorrest
You've misunderstood my use of the term 'valence' here. The target valence of interocepted sensations is the point at which the feedback systems in the endocrine network kick in to act to reduce then or increase them. It's different in different people for different sensations and it's highly susceptible to environmental factors, particularly in childhood. So why would we build a model of a target world based on the target valences we know for a fact have been generated by the world we happen to have been brought up in? All we're going to end up doing is replicating those conditions.
Cool, then I'll pretend that was what I was going for!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, I suppose it would. It's something that would be interesting to study (damn ethics committees, with their "you can't tie a load of people together and abandon them in the woods"...). I do think there'd always be a 'right' answer though, but that's perhaps because of the way I'm using 'right'. I'm using it more like in game theory, than in ethics. The 'right' play for everyone is the perfect move in the game.
Yes, I meant more of an unambiguous moral rule.
Let's say two of the people are surgeons who need to get to theatre immediately to save the life of a different child. What is the "right" answer in this case?
This is the sort of ambiguity I (tried to) describe in my natural morality thread, in which I talk about how unfeasible it is to act on every opportunity for altruism, necessitating that we must choose arbitrarily when to act and when to hope that others will act, giving us the possibility of never acting, thus giving us the possibility of being in a society in which hardly anyone acts, which sounds a lot like ours to me.
In the above Beckett scenario, the two best scenarios are: save child A; save child B. If the group opts for surgeon A, child B dies; if they opt for surgeon B, child A dies. If either are possible then, generally, child A dying is permissible and child B dying is permissible, or, to put it another way, it is not twice as difficult to resign oneself to the death of two children as to one. "What's the point in going on?" person C might ask? "We'll not go on then," person D replies. "But we cannot not go on," person E retorts, noting that not acting is an action. "Fine, then we'll go on," person F sighs.
(Reference to some subtext that all six people are the same person here.)
Indeed. I think there's a deeper neurological basis for this. A lot of what happens in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex seems to be to act like a filter for actions (and onward signals), so it's not taking in data and then deciding what to do, it's more like what to do has already been decided and it's just trying to catch anything that doesn't make sense. So we end up, at a phenomenological level, experiencing this activity post hoc as arbitrary (which I suppose it is, to our conscious selves - who knows what models in the deeper brain came up with the unfiltered behaviour though, and by what heuristic).
What's interesting is why we ever do act altruistically when on each individual occasion we could, quite reasonably say "I'll do it next time". Personally, I think it has to do with bandwidth - the idea that there's a limit to the number of processes the brain can simultaneously engage in. I think each opportunity for (evolutionary/culturally appropriate) altruism is assessed as viable, goes through the early motions, but gets filtered out and eventually dissipated by the 'first-come-first-served' (or possibly loudest-first served) filter of our limited bandwidth.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Chaucer then...?
That doesn't follow. There's a less useful sense of "objective" (transcendent) and a less useful sense of "subjective" (relative), but those aren't each other's negations.
The negation of transcendent is phenomenal, which is the more useful sense of "subjective". And the negation of relative is universal, which is the more useful sense of "objective".
It's only by conflating the more and less useful senses of each together that you get relative as the apparent negation of transcendent, but you seem to recognize the distinction between the more useful sense and the less useful sense.
The thrust of all of this is that universalism doesn't have to be transcendent, and phenomenalism doesn't have to be relativist. A universalist phenomenalism is possible.
Quoting khaled
"Most inter-subjective" doesn't mean "utilitarian". As I said early I'm opposed to utilitarianism on the whole, I just agree with its definition of what makes for a good end; I disagree entirely with consequentialism as a just means. So utility monsters don't blow up the system I advocate.
Quoting Isaac
I do not. As I said in my last post, we can (and possibly can't help but) start with desires, and then analyze them into appetites, just like we start with perceptions and then analyze them into sensations. I do struggle to imagine what other causal arrangement there could possibly be, just given what is even meant by the concepts, but no particulars of that causal chain matter at all to my philosophy.
I'm explicitly avoiding relying on any a posteriori knowledge about the substrate that human minds run on. I'm dealing entirely with phenomenological concepts here. What exactly gives rise to the instantiation of those concepts in our phenomenal experience is besides the point, philosophically.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
All appetites at all times matter, just like all observations at all times matter to science.
I think you're probably thinking that I'm looking to establish some kind of absolutist, always-do-this-in-all-circumstances-at-all-times kinds of rules, when I'm not. Universalism is not absolutism.
For an example, different people at different times and in different contexts feel too warm or too cold, sometimes, for reasons I'm sure you could elaborate in more detail than I could. That's a kind of displeasure, an unsatisfied appetite, so my system would say we ought to aim to eliminate or at least minimize that happening -- people's environments being too warm or too cold for them.
But doing so doesn't require that we identify the single best temperature that everywhere should always be at all times. The optimal solution would probably involve allowing each person to independently adjust the temperature of their personal environment as they like.
But it's still universally good that some particular person's environment be whatever particular temperature makes them most comfortable at that particular time. And that's the case for every particular person at every particular time, and the complete picture of what is good would involve each of those particular people having their environment be the particular temperature at which they're more comfortable at each particular time.
When we don't have the power to achieve that, we'll have to make compromises, yes, but at this point we're just talking about whether there is even a universally good end to aim for, not how to pursue it and how to deal with obstacles to attaining it.
Quoting Isaac
Discovering how to attain it would be, yes. Discovering that it is good is something that can be found just from people living their lives and noting what circumstances feel good and bad to them.
The big picture of my overall philosophy involves using science to discover how the world is, and an analogue of it based on hedonic rather than empirical experiences to discover how it ought to be, and then combining those two sets of findings to figure out how to change the former to the latter.
In addition to just "use empiricism!" ("and of course realism, who would ever doubt realism"), a scientific method also needs a philosophical account of how exactly to apply empiricism to justify our beliefs. Just anything that empirically looks true (to whom?) isn't automatically real just because of that. That's what epistemology is for.
Likewise, in addition to just "use hedonism!" ("altruistic hedonism specifically, hedonism isn't egotism"), the analogue of it needs also a philosophical account of how exactly to apply hedonism to justify our intentions. Just anything that hedonically feels good (to whom?) isn't automatically moral just because of that. That's what the other half of ethics, the deontological half, is about.
But if you're talking to someone who doesn't even accept empirical realism as an ontology, talking about how to apply it epistemically is pointless. And likewise, if I can't even get you on board with altrustic-hedonic ends, there's no point in talking about the just means to pursue them yet.
Might you not be better off establishing sustainability as a bridge between is and ought, and trusting to the moral sense playing out in political and economic systems, to prioritise factual information to that end? The hedonic; whether you mean Revealed Preference Theory in economics, or a more generic form of moral hedonism is not a responsible means of prioritising facts.
If by this you mean "universal inter-subjective agreement is possible" sure, I don't think anyone is debating that.
Quoting Pfhorrest
What is the system you advocate then? How do you deal with someone who has an extremely strong appetite for seeing people suffer?
I’m not sure what you mean by that.
Quoting counterpunch
That is a part of the deontological side of my ethics.
Quoting khaled
That’s not what I mean, no.
Look to the descriptive side of things for clarity here, because it’s the prescriptive side where all the confusion lies.
Descriptive universalism is the opposite of descriptive relativism: it means that what is true is true for everyone everywhere always, whether or not they agree that it is; in contrast to, say, it being true inside the Flat Earth Society headquarters that the whole earth is flat, and true outside those headquarters that the whole earth (including under the FES-HQ) is round.
Prescriptive universalism is like that, but about what is good, rather than what is true.
Descriptive phenomenalism, or empiricism, is the opposite of descriptive transcendentalism, which is more or less supernaturalism: it means that nothing is true or false for any reason or to any extent other than its accord or discord with empirical experience.
Prescriptive phenomenalism, or hedonism, is like that, but about what is good or bad, rather than what is true or false, and about hedonic experience, rather than empirical.
Universal phenomenalism about reality means that truth is all about concordance with empirical experiences, not just any one person’s but everyone’s everywhere always. But it doesn’t at all demand that everyone agree, in their perceptions or beliefs, about what is true in order for it to be true. It’s possible that everyone could fail, in different ways, to come up with a model of what concords with all empirical experiences, and that wouldn’t change that such a model, whatever it is, is the universal truth, even though nobody believes it.
Likewise, universal phenomenalism about morality means that goodness is all about concordance with hedonic experiences, not just any one person’s but everyone’s everywhere always. But it doesn’t at all demand that everyone agree, in their desires or intentions, about what is good in order for it to be good. It’s possible that everyone could fail, in different ways, to come up with a model of what concords with all hedonic experiences, and that wouldn’t change that such a model, whatever it is, is the universal good, even though nobody intends it.
Quoting khaled
That’s a longer topic and I can link you to something on it but I don’t want to derail this thread even further right now.
Quoting khaled
This question misunderstands what “appetites” even are. They are not for specific states of affairs. They are physiology feelings like pain and hunger. Someone who wants to see other people suffer can get bent as far as what he wants, but whatever emotional pain is probably behind that desire is something that deserves alleviation somehow or another, just not necessarily in the way he wants.
— counterpunch
Quoting Pfhorrest
Malthus believed population would outstrip food supply and there would be mass starvation. His logic was sound, but he was proven wrong by the invention of the tractor. Initially, steam powered tractors developed land faster than population grew. Later we invented the internal combustion engine - and things really took off. So sustainability is a fact in that we have survived in large part due an application of technologies that support our way of life. It's sustainability as function; a factual arrangement of technologies and resources - that now runs up against the same problem again.
Sustainability is also a universal value - an ought in terms of which it is possible to prioritise the hypothetical 'list of facts' inherent to a scientific understanding of reality, as a basis for policy that would create a level regulatory playing field that ends the race to the bottom inherent to capitalist economics.
Some kind of hedonic consumer sovereignty cannot prioritise facts in a way that secures a sustainable future - in large part because the consumer cannot be expected to bear the cognitive burden of knowing how everything they consume is produced, even if the information were available - even if the consumer would prioritise the ethics of sustainability over price, they cannot be expected to handle the sheer volume of information necessary to make consumer decisions that secure a sustainable future.
The only way to secure sustainability is to regulate production to ensure the right technologies are applied, starting with energy technology, carbon capture and sequestration, desalination and irrigation, hydrogen fuel, recycling, fish farming - as a basis to promote continued capitalist growth, employment and prosperity.
"trusting to the moral sense playing out in political and economic systems, to prioritise factual information to that end?
— counterpunch"
Quoting Pfhorrest
The only deontological ethic in my approach is sustainability. Otherwise, given a scientific understanding of reality, I regard morality as a sense, fostered in the human animal by evolution, made explicit for the purposes of political organisation when hunter gatherer tribes joined together to form societies and civilisations. Sustainability aside, morality is culturally relative. God save the Queen!
I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve - or how the various concepts you've said you adhere to can possibly fit together into any sort of workable whole. Universal phenomenalism seems like a contradiction in terms, that refutes acceptance of a scientific epistemology, that again, grinds gears with deontological ethics, that again disputes any kind of moral hedonism.
What I'm trying to do is create an authoritative rationale for the application of technology on the basis of scientific merit, without undermining current systems of political and moral authority, in order to secure a sustainable and prosperous future - going forward from where we are, as who we are, without turning the world upside down. Help me!
I'm going to forgo any critique for a minute because we keep losing what you're claiming in all your analogies (which I don't find helpful) and I want to see if I can clarify it. alone (un-analogised!) My understanding so far is that...
1. There may possibly exist some state of affairs, dynamic rather than static, which would most equitably promote every human's (and all future human's) appetites toward their current target valences, at any given time.
2. This state of affairs my well not be the desire or the intention of any individual (or even all individuals) and so it's possible for everyone to be wrong about what they desire or intend - hence the 'objective' bit. Relativism, when it comes to what we desire or intend, is thus dismissed.
3. An intention which is more 'good', morally, is an intention to make the world match more closely this state of affairs.
Is that right?
Oughts provide motivation for action - for carrying out their imperatives. Either you have moral beliefs and thus have these motivations, or you are amoral - there is no other way. Tolerance towards moral transgressions, the will to punish transgressors, the methods of enforcement - these depend on temperament and politics, not on the nature of morality.
Quoting Joshs
Right, the only way to remove fuel - not just for violent retribution, but for any moral action, good or bad - is to renounce moral beliefs altogether. But, except for a few psychopaths, no one is actually willing to do that, whatever theories they espouse in public.
Quoting Joshs
I am curious, if you are actually reading my responses, what in what I wrote made you think that I am a moral realist?
Quoting Joshs
This is confused. A belief, whatever its nature, origin and grounding, is always held to be superior to alternatives, however tentatively or transiently. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be a belief. (One can take a pluralistic stance on some issue, but then any isolated strand within that pluralistic web would not be an accurate representation of the whole.)
Which is precisely what gives them too much leeway. If someone has a dying thirst for others’ suffering, then by your system we should take that into account and try to alleviate it. I see no way to do that that doesn’t harm others in some way.
Quoting Pfhorrest
And the way to come to this model is to maximize appetite-satisfaction correct? I disagree with this. I think some appetites shouldn’t be considered at all. I don’t see why maximizing appetite-satisfaction should be the goal. It’s just arbitrary.
Hedonism doesn't mean shortsightedness. We're going over this over in Darkneos' "Reason for Living" thread too. The reason why sustainability is good is because it prevents even greater future suffering. That's still a hedonistic consideration.
I do agree that sustainability is a very important thing to worry about, but we're talking here more about the criteria by which something could be judged as normatively important or not, rather than what specific things are most important.
Quoting counterpunch
The scientific method hinges entirely on a kind of universal phenomenalism. Science rejects supernaturalism, and generally any transcendentalism, in favor of empiricism, a kind of phenomenalism. It also rejects the kind of truth-relativism that would say that different things can be true of the same thing at the same time to different people (see earlier example about the Flat Earth Society), in favor of a realism that says that anything that is true is true to everyone regardless of whether they believe it or not, a kind of universalism. That's not a contradiction, to say that nothing supernatural or non-empirical is real, and yet there is only one universal reality.
I advocate that same kind of approach to prescriptive as well as descriptive matters: to reject claims about morality that transcend hedonic experience (i.e. that have nothing to do with whether or not anyone suffers or flourishes), and to reject claims that the same thing at the same time can correctly be assessed as good by one person or group and correctly assessed as bad by another person or group (i.e. in such a disagreement at least one, possibly all, must be wrong).
Quoting counterpunch
Deontological ethics opposes consequentialism, as do I. But consequentialism is a position about the methods of morality, not about the objects of morality; it's about how to decide on what is a right or just action, not about how to decide on what is a good state of affairs. Consequentialism says that a right or just action is any one that promotes a good state of affairs, regardless of anything else: only the ends matter. Deontological ethics disagrees (as do I), and says that means matter as well; different kinds of it may or may not care about ends too, but I certainly do.
I think a full moral evaluation has to involve both means and ends: a fully moral action is one that achieves good ends by just means, and an action that only achieves good ends by unjust means, or that is just but fails to yield good ends, is as faulty as an argument that reaches a true conclusion by invalid inferences, or a valid argument that nevertheless fails to yield true conclusions. (In the last case, that can only be because false premises were accepted and remain uncorrected; in the analogous moral case, it would be because bad prior circumstances were accepted and remain uncorrected).
Neither of those has anything in it either for or against science. It's a separate matter entirely.
Quoting Isaac
I appreciate that.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, although I don't think this bit (just that such a state of affairs is logically possible) is controversial? I think it's only saying that that is pretty much definitionally a good state of affairs that's at all controversial here -- that a wholly good state of affairs is necessarily and sufficiently one where everyone is pleased and not pained, enjoying rather than suffering, etc.
Quoting Isaac
Yes.
Quoting Isaac
Mostly yes, although see above in response to counterpunch about the importance of justification in there too. I know you said you don't find analogies helpful, but I can't think of a clearer way to explain:
Goodness is to intentions as truth is to beliefs, in that it's a necessary but not sufficient quality. We think it important for our beliefs to not be only true by chance, but to be justified as well, in a sense that means more than just the coincidence of the thing being believed and the thing being true. We aim to not only have beliefs, nor even true beliefs, but justified true beliefs.
Likewise, I think it's important for our intentions to be justified, in a sense that means more than just the coincidence of the thing being intended and the thing being good. We should aim to not only have intentions, not even good intentions, but justified good intentions.
Elaborating on the details of that is a long, separate topic, that hinges firstly on some common understanding of what a good state of affairs is, which is what we're working on here.
But yes, on my account, a state of affairs that more closely matches the kind of state of affairs described above is a "more good" (or "closer to good", or "less bad") state of affairs.
Quoting khaled
...is not the kind of thing that fits the category of "appetite" as I mean it. Appetites in this sense cannot be for any particular state of affairs; that's not the kind of thing that is meant by the word. By the time you get to the "for", you've interpreted the appetite, and formed a desire.
What you're describing is a person who is suffering somehow (every unfulfilled appetite is a kind of suffering) and thinks that seeing other people suffer will alleviate his own suffering (satisfy his appetite): someone who has some appetite (his own suffering), and interprets that into a desire to see someone else suffer.
My moral system doesn't care at all that he thinks seeing others suffer will alleviate his own suffering, even if that's true. It does care to alleviate his suffering (satisfy his appetite), in some way. But it also cares to prevent the suffering of others (to satisfy their appetites), so the alleviation of his suffering can't be done in the way he wants to do it.
Think about the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which illustrates the distinction between sensation and perception/belief, which is analogous to the distinction between appetite and desire/intention. Each blind man touches a different part of the same thing, and on account of what he feels, thinks he knows what he has touched. One man thinks he has touched a tree. Another thinks he has touched a rope. The third things he has touched a snake.
All three of of them are wrong about what they think they have touched. But the truth -- that they have touched different parts of an elephant, its leg, its tail, and its trunk, respectively -- is consistent with the sensations that they all felt when they touched it. They were all wrong in their perceptions or beliefs, but the truth has to accord with all of their sensations. One of them being really really certain that the thing they all touched absolutely has to have been a snake and cannot possibly have been anything else doesn't change anything.
Ah, I see. For me, philosophy is a means to an end - and that end is the continued existence of the human species. It's like the old proverb: "Society grows great when old men plant trees in the shade of which they know they shall never sit." That's a normative justification of sustainability. A hedonistic justification might be the utter triviality of one's own existence if it's not part of an ongoing concern. A deontological justification might follow from the struggle of all previous generations. In terms of universalism - science and sustainability are an is and an ought everyone might be able to agree in common. But phenomenalism? Phenomenalism is essentially subjectivism.
"Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects cannot justifiably be said to exist in themselves, but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli."
Do you run back into rooms to see if everything is still there?
Science is objectivism. Science assumes an objective reality exists independently of our experience of it.
Yes. And who also knows that others suffering fulfills this appetite.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But what if that is the only way? Here, compromise would involve harming others for this person.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Not necessarily. The way you made your system, his appetite is just as valid as anyone else’s. It has the same moral weight. So if he is suffering hard enough due to this appetite, and we know of only one way to fix it which is causing suffering to others, if the latter suffering is smaller than the former we must allow him to do as he likes. Because after all, we’re looking for the best compromise and dubbing that “the objectively correct morality”
Quoting Pfhorrest
Just sounds bizarre to me. In this example the elephant is a physical existing thing. But I don’t see how this can be analogous to moral situations. There is no “moral elephant” as in “the objectivity correct morality”. I agree that there definitely is the “best compromise morality” which satisfies the most appetites, but I don’t think that is really what anyone’s looking for. You say the two are the same. I don’t think all hedonic experiences should be taken as data points to indicate how we should compromise. Some appetites should be ignored.
Quoting SophistiCat
Gergen has a belief, or more precisely a theory, called social constructionism, the view that all truths are contingent constructions of local cultures, including his own theory. Does he think it is superior to alternatives in terms of its implications for how people treat each other? Yes. Does he think that people who don’t hold that belief are morally wrong? No. Then how is his belief superior if it isn’t ‘t making a moral claim?He realizes it is only superior from his perspective and he has no reason to assume that it will or should be perceived as such by another community. Thus, he isnt claiming that others who don’t hold his belief are presenting a moral failing , because he realizes that it is his responsibility to attempt to offer his theory to towers and allow them to determine if it appears superior to them. It is not his judgement to make but theirs, or more precisely, its value is to be decided via intersubjective negotiation.
Quoting SophistiCat
How don’t we save a little time here and you just tell me as succinctly as possibly what philosophical position on morality you hold. If you could also mention just 4 or 5 philosophers ( within the past 2 centuries, including living writers ) whose general framework you most closely identify with that would be helpful too.
Quoting SophistiCat
Probably a better way to put this is that you reject philosophies which claim to go beyond moral thinking. Would you put Nietzsche’s Geneology of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil in this category? How about Foucault? Or Richard Garner? ( https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Morality_The_Final_Delusion )
To simplify , let’s just say that you reject postmodern philosophies in general , to the extent that they all claim to go beyond morality( Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty).
But "why is that the end?" is a philosophical question itself.
Quoting counterpunch
Did you miss the part earlier in this thread about distinguishing different kinds of "objectivism" and "subjectivism"? Science is objectivist as in universalist, as in not relativist. But it's also subjectivist as in phenomenalist, not transcendent. Science deals entirely with the world as it appears in our observations (which is to say, our subjective experiences), without discussing anything that is wholly unobservable. But it also presupposes that there is a single unified (objective) explanation for all observations, that it's possible for everyone to be wrong about simultaneously.
Quoting khaled
There is never only one way. Appetites are data points: the states of affairs desired are curves fit to that data. And there are always infinitely many possibly curves that can fit any possible data.
Quoting khaled
I already said earlier that my notion of "the objectively correct morality" does not involve any compromise. We may have to compromise in some ways in lieu of our ability to attain that objectively best state of affairs, but that kind of compromise doesn't have to be an "ends justify the means" kind of consequentialism that you seem to assume I support (which I definitely don't).
Quoting khaled
This is question-begging. We're all stuck inside of our own subjective experiences, both descriptively and prescriptively. We can never know for sure that there is or isn't a physically existing elephant apart from our experiences of it, or that there is or isn't anything morally analogous to that. All we can do is choose whether or not to act as though there is some objectivity attainable, in either case.
Don’t mean to interrupt or be another distraction, but I’m curious about this.
How would one arrive at an unbiased position on a particular moral dilemma, when all the data points available are subjective? I can get that “everyone feels anger” is objective (unless you want to argue that we can never really know if what I call anger, and what you call anger, feel the same/similar), but this doesn’t lead to any sort of resolution on what I should do when I’m angry. The issue seems to be trying to determine what is an appropriate desire for a particular appetite. Anger can be relieved/released in many different ways, I just so happen to prefer a handful of options over others, so how do I figure out which one is best?
Also, note that there is more than one option that refrains from causing harm, either to myself or others, so simply saying “whichever option causes less harm” doesn’t fully answer the question. If there is an objectively correct answer, then that answer, whatever it may be, can be the only correct answer. So, someway or another, I need to figure out if it is better to exercise to relieve my anger, or to listen to music, for example. What exactly is the criteria I should use to determine which answer is objectively correct?
Well you don't know that. What you said does not prove that there will never be a case where there is only one way. But regardless, it was a hypothetical "what if".
Quoting Pfhorrest
How do we figure out what the "objectively correct morality" looks like? We try to maximize appetite-satisfaction no? But what happens when these appetites clash is the question. If the goal is to maximize appetite-satisfaction, then the one with the stronger hunger just wins out no matter what they are hungry for. That's consequential-ism but how do you avoid it if your goal is purely to maximize appetite-satisfaction?
Quoting Pfhorrest
It goes a level beyond that. I cannot even conceive of putting morality "out there" in the world in the same way you would put an elephant. An elephant is a separate entity from us that has its own agency. "Objective morality" doesn't have its own agency. We cannot see or touch "Objective morality". "Objective morality" would cease to exist the second we do. Etc...
Sure we are stuck inside our subjective experience when seeing the elephant but I don't understand what it means to "see objective morality" from within these subjective experiences in the first place. What does it smell like? What does it look like? Is it edible? Nonsense questions. But not so with the elephant see?
I can conceive of "inter-subjective" morality in the sense that we all agree on what we should do but that's as far as it goes.
You could ask the exact same question about how we arrive at an unbiased position about what is real, since all data points about reality (observations) are also subjective. In both cases, we approach objectivity by replicating each others' experiences, and if we can't, by seeing what is different about us that results in different experiences in the same circumstances.
Quoting Pinprick
There is likewise always another theory that explains a given set of observations (this is the underdetermination of theory by evidence). What to do about that is an epistemic, not ontological, question; and likewise the moral equivalent of that question is not one of what states of affairs are good, but about what the right course of action is.
Analogously to falsificationism in epistemology, which says that all different theories that have not yet been ruled out be the evidence are acceptable, liber(al|tarian)ism in deontology says that all actions that have not yet been ruled out (e.g. that don't harm anyone else) are acceptable. There is still one unique universal reality under falsificationism, we just never pin down exactly what it is, only narrow in on it. Likewise there is still one unique universal morality under my scheme -- one optimal solution -- but we can never pin down exactly what it is, only narrow down the possibilities.
Quoting khaled
It's analytically always the case that there will never be only one way. Like I said above, this is basically underdetermination of theory by evidence, but about moral "theories" and moral "evidence".
For a simple illustration, the easy to come up with (but hard to implement) solution to all moral dilemmas is just to give everyone their own virtual world where everything goes however makes them the most satisfied. No matter what moral dilemma you come up with, that's an obvious solution to it.
That's a very very hard solution to implement though, so we have to make do with less than that, but for the purpose of theory it demonstrates that there's always a solution. There just might not be an easy solution.
What to do when we can't just effortlessly make everything perfect like that is the second question of ethics, what I call the deontological one, analogous to epistemology (which we need in turn because we don't just have a Big Book Of Reality that we can look up all the facts in; we have to make do with our imperfect knowledge, like in ethics we have to make do with our imperfect power).
What we've been discussing thus far, and what needs to be settled before you can apply any method like that, is what I call the teleological question, the question of what are good ends, what criteria define a wholly good state of affairs, which we are then going to try to approximate with such a method. That is analogous to how ontology is about the question of what criteria constitute some state of affairs being real, which we then try to approximate with epistemological methods.
Quoting khaled
Not maximize, and not try to. A wholly good state of affairs is one where all appetites are satisfied.
As above, we can't just make that happen with a snap of our fingers, so we've got to have a methodology of making do in lieu of that, but that has nothing to do with the definition of what a good state of affairs even is, which we need to have first before we can apply that methodology.
Quoting khaled
Yes, nonsense questions, because you're asking about senses, which define what is real, whereas it is appetites that defined what is moral. I'm not suggesting that there is a real object that exists that is the cause of things being moral or not. Think about what it means for something to be real. Unless you believe in supernatural things, or you're a solipsist, things being real are about them being a part of our empirical experience, everyone's empirical experience.
Likewise, on my account something being moral is about it being a part of our hedonic experience, everyone's hedonic experience. Morality doesn't look like anything per se, or smell like anything per se, but it feels good, it feels comfortable, it feels like a full belly, it feels like all of your appetites are sated, and it feels like that to everyone, not just you. And if there was some state of affairs where everyone felt good like that, and yet someone wanted it to be different in a way that made someone not feel good, or said that there was something still morally wrong even though everyone's every need was met like that, then that person would just be incorrect.
And the scientist would know this, be the first to admit it, and seek alternate methods of investigation. Looking in the bag springs to mind!
Underdetermination only becomes a problem if it is the basis of illegitimate claims to knowledge, but every scientific paper I've read goes to enormous lengths to equivocate, by setting conclusions in the context of the limitations of the methods of investigation employed.
I’m talking pragmatically not analytically.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Not maximize? So there are times when you would purposely choose to stray away from the ideal of all appetites being satisfied? Based on what?
I would assume if your goal is all appetites being satisfied then you would choose the option that gets you closest to that. But that’s consequentialist. But idk how you would avoid it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I can get behind that. Isn’t it consequentialist though? Here you’re saying that the only arbiter of whether or not someone is wrong is whether or not people’s needs were met. If the act meets people’s needs, it cannot be wrong. How do you avoid consequentialism then?
Then we're talking about different things. There's a whole stack of different questions in ethics, just like there are a stack of questions involved in the investigation of reality, including:
- What do our questions (and proposed answers mean), linguistically? What are we trying to do with our words here? (We've not really touched on this one and hopefully won't need to here).
- What are the criteria by which we assess those answers?
- - In investigations of reality this question is answered by the field of ontology: what is it that makes some possible state of affairs a real state of affairs?
- - In investigations of morality I call this question the "teleological" one, because it's about ends rather than means, what it is that makes some possible state of affairs a moral state of affairs?
(This is where questions of objectivity and subjectivity come in, and so what I've mostly been talking about.
- What is the nature of our faculties for assessing such things? I.e. what's the nature of the mind and the will? (We've not really touched on this one and probably don't need to here).
- What are the methods to use to find / get to such a state of affairs, given our limited knowledge / power means we can't just look it up / wish it into being?
- - In investigations of reality this is answered by the field of epistemology, about what is a justified belief.
- - In investigations of morality I call this the "deontological" question", because it's about means rather than ends, what is a justified intention (and consequently action, as justified actions require both a justified belief and a justified intention motivating them).
- Who gets to actually apply those methods or judge if they've been applied correctly?
- - In investigations of reality this is where scientific peer review and other facets of academics and education come into play.
- - In investigations of morality this is where politics and governance come into play.
- How do we get people, as a whole, society, to actually do things that way?
Those last three are the more pragmatic questions. But none of them can begin to be answered without first having a notion of what it even is that we're aiming for.
Quoting khaled
Sorry, I was unclear. "Maximize" to my ear sounds like "get as much as you can manage", but at this point in the analysis we're not talking about what is manageable or not, so maximization is irrelevant. A good state of affairs is one where all appetites are satisfied. A less bad state of affairs is one where fewer appetites are unsatisfied (or they're less unsatisfied), but that doesn't mean that the correct methodology is just "do whatever creates more satisfaction than dissatisfaction", and that all intentions to do so (and actions on such intentions) are justified. Just like in science we can't just throw out the inconvenient observations and go say that whatever satisfied more observations than it dissatisfies is the right theory; if there's unsatisfied observations there's still a problem with your theory.
Quoting khaled
It is necessary that the ends be one where everyone's appetites are satisfied, but that is not sufficient. The means used to get there must themselves also be justified. It's exactly like how an argument with a true conclusion is not therefore a sound conclusion; it needs to get there by valid inferences as well.
For example, if you could magically create a state where all appetites were satisfied, but at the cost of an agonizing death for half the people presently in the universe, then you would end up with a state of affairs where there is no room for improvement (everyone's appetites are satisfied, nothing can be made better there... somehow, we posit in this thought experiment), but you would have gotten there by horribly unjust means, and that end would not justify those means, so we in the universe prior to making the decision to that should decide not to do so.
Yes, they do. Descriptive statements do not necessitate normative statements. But they do imply them, and they do so because morality is fundamentally a sense - fostered in the human animal by evolution in the context of the hunter gatherer tribe - and only made explicit when hunter gatherer tribes joined together to form societies and civilisations. Human beings cannot look at a list of facts without inferring the moral implications of those facts.
I guess I'm having a hard time understanding why you think that descriptive statements can imply normative ones. I think you are quite right that morality is a sense fostered in the human animal by evolution, and I think that is an astute observation. But I am unable to make the logical leap between the fact that morality is a "sense" and the notion that "is" statements can imply "ought" ones. How are those related? I hope you will expand upon this. I also agree with what you said about how humans infer moral implications from a list of facts, I think that is very true. But are humans correct in such inferences? How can we be sure? I like what you said a lot but I need some comprehension help
Quoting Pfhorrest
Those two seem contradictory. In one you’re saying that means matter. In the other you’re saying that as long as everyone’s need is met, that’s all that matters (which implies the means don’t matter)
Here's what Hume said:
"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not."
By descriptive statements, I assume you mean "the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not." Or facts.
By normative statements I assume you mean "no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not." Morals or values.
I would argue that Hume misunderstood his own observation because he believes there is a God given objective moral order; whereas, for me - I think morality is a sense, and religion, law, politics, economics are expressions of that sense.
Quoting Anthony Minickiello
Hume says it himself. It's what people do. He's right insofar as 'is' does not necessitate 'ought' because people have different values. We can look at the same list of facts, and think they imply different moral responses. But the implication of ought from is, is what people do. We know things, and then act morally on the basis of what we know. (ideally)
Quoting Anthony Minickiello
We cannot be sure. Is does not necessitate ought, but is does imply ought - a different ought for me than for you perhaps, and so we have philosophy forums and democracy to argue it out. The problem with the suggestion that is does not imply ought is that it devalues the significance of the 'is' - and this is an entirely deliberate feature of western philosophy since Descartes; currently playing out through left wing post modernist identity politics.
Hit the "post comment" button by mistake. I'm done editing now.
The is/ought distinction gets confused because people mistake it for a suggestion morality is not..
Really, it's a logical discintion that a fact of existing is not the same as a fact of an ought-- that's to say, we do not get or derive the ought from the mere fact something exists. The ought is own fact, an ought about something, which is known on its own terms.
In the respect, the human sensing of morality is about an is: a fact of the ought, about a state or action of concern. We never derived from the fact something existed. We know all along that some existences we ought to have (or not have).
Yes. Descriptive statements aim to describe the world as it is.
Quoting counterpunch
I am not familiar with Hume, but that phrase sums my thoughts up well. Normative statements aim to describe how things ought to be.
Quoting counterpunch
That's right. I agree that people often tend to infer conflicting conclusions about what courses of action are morally right and wrong based from their observations of the real world.
Quoting counterpunch
Well said. I concede that human beings do imply "ought" from "is". I guess my worry is that this feature of philosophical thinking is unwarranted. If we cannot be sure whether or not "ought" statements could ever be correctly derived from "is" statements in the first place (as you seem to suggest...correct me if I got the wrong impression), then don't we run into the possibility that all normative statements could be baseless?
This resonates with me a bunch. This is kind of why I believe an "ought" can't come from an "is".
You are kidding, right?
Quoting Joshs
No, let's not. I see you aren't really interested in the conversation. That's fine, the thread has been derailed anyway.
The discintion is embedded in morality itself. If all it took was the existence of something to make an ought, then anything that existed would be moral. There would be no space for wrong to be committed. Any time a suggested ought didn't happen, it wouldn't even be the case it ought to be (as it didn't exist).
I think I get what you're saying. My worry is that if existence does not accurately tell me anything about how things ought to be, then does that mean all of my ethical beliefs are wrong? Or are they unjustified as a result? I am concerned that talking about a right way to live morally is vacuous because of the "is/ought" gap.
"Baseless" is a strong term. The moral sense is a very real basis for human action; but often, people are quite ill-informed, or worse yet, deliberately misinformed. BLM spring to mind.
When the rioting began, I went looking for statistics - and it's quite clear from the Bureau of Justice statistics website that the BLM social media narrative is false. Nonetheless, people seemed to believe US police were engaged in some sort of racist killing spree, and were outraged. They took to the streets, burning and looting, attacking police.
The statistical evidence shows that police arrest 10 million people per year, and less than 1000 die in the process - so it's clearly not the case that there's some sort of systematic, racist killing spree.
The footage shared on social media of George Floyd was carefully edited. Only later was police bodycam footage leaked showing George Floyd fighting like a wild animal to resist arrest. He needed to be restrained. He was restrained. Unfortunately he died. But because people were misled, an unbiased observer must agree - the moral outrage generated was massively disproportionate to the facts.
What I'm trying to get to, I suppose - is that just because morality is a sense, does not mean it is not a finely tuned instrument responsive to "fact" - whether merely believed, or actually true. So when you say 'baseless' - while that's true in the sense that no moral response is logically necessitated by the facts, it remains - many people had exactly the same response to the false narrative created by BLM, and so baseless isn't quite the right term. Instead, one might argue that the normative value of morality is in the normative value of morality.
This is very helpful to me because I can't make head nor tails of Willow's post and don't know how to handle it politely. "I think I get what you're saying" How simple and diplomatic. I don't get what she's saying, and was preparing to tell her so in no uncertain terms.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I was about to suggest that sentence looks like it was scrawled on the wall of a toilet by an idiot child dipping its fingers in a mad woman's shit! Sorry Willow. No offense sweetie. It's my problem, and I'm learning how to deal with it!
I think this is where you're going wrong. pleasure and pain, enjoyment and suffering are not appetites in the sense you're trying to suggest. They're already interpreted. This is why the incorrectness of the causal chain you're implying matters. A feeling like 'pleasure' is not an interocepted state, it is an interpreted state, the interocepted states of various neural circuits massively under-determine the phenomenological feeling of pleasure. What happens is that these states are compared to expected states which are themselves influenced by our culture/upbringing/experiences and are not only interpreted in that light, but actually filtered and suppressed in that light. thus what makes a person feel 'pleasure, or 'pain' is to a very great extent, a product of their upbringing and the culture in which they live.
Drug addiction is a good example. For a drug addict, the taking of a drug dose is not merely an intention (as you put it, a plan to achieve a desire which is formed from an appetite being unfulfilled). The drug actually initiates changes in the amygdala and hippocampus which trigger negative valences in internal states which simply did not exist prior to the exposure to that drug. Hunger is another example, mediated, in part, by pro-opiomelanocortin neurons. Individuals with genetic disfunctions limiting the production of pro-opiomelanocortin neurons become very obese and they do so because they are less satiated, their raw sensation, not their desire or their intention.
It wouldn't be a rational target to satisfy the hedonic levels of the drug addict of the the POMC deficient patient would it? Yet these are not 'desires', or 'intentions' as you describe them, they are raw appetites, no less than the pain I experience when I stub my toe (which itself is already interpreted by sub-conscious cortices before I'm even aware of the pain).
So why do we treat the drug addict or the POMC deficient patient? Only because we recognise that their target valences are not normal. That taking action (even temporarily harmful action) to bring those target valences down to normal levels is overall a better course of action than trying to re-arrange the world in such a way as to meet them (together with everyone else's, of course). But we'd have absolutely no reason at all not to take these target valences seriously unless we used 'normality' as a baseline.
It would be perfectly possible to satisfy everyone's target satiety by exposing them to less food in childhood, thus reducing the sensitivity to Agouti-related protein neurons and so promoting the interpretation of their action as more pleasurable than otherwise. Similarly, we could change our culture to be more rewarding of pain experiences, which would give a dopamine counterpart to pain nociception promoting the interpretation of pain experiences as more positive.
As I know you're fond of linking your ethical approach with your epistemological one, it will perhaps please you that the problems here are similar to the ones I (and others) had with that. You've underestimated the reach of the underdermination, you limit it to the matching of data points (which you admit is underdetermined), but it actually extends to the ability to manipulate, in predictable ways, the valence of those data point in future. We can match a curve to data points as they are, or we can deliberately manipulate data point to match a chosen curve. The second is the option we take with drug addicts and POMC deficient patients.
We end up with such enormously wide parameters as to be virtually useless as a moral aim. Basically we're limited to saying that we should not bring about a world which is so utterly unbearable that it is outside of the neurological limits of our brain to cope with it. I just don't think that helps at all with any actual real-world moral dilemmas.
In the latter, I'm saying that there is nothing wrong with the state of affairs. There can still be something wrong with how we got to that state of affairs.
For an example of the analogy with soundness of arguments (already explained before): I have on my desk here a yellow pencil. One could give the argument "All yellow things are asteroids. This pencil is an asteroid. Therefore this pencil is yellow." The conclusion is absolutely true, there is nothing the slightest bit false about the sentence "this pencil is yellow" (assuming "this" refers to my yellow pencil here). But the argument to that effect is horribly broken: both of its premises are false, and even if they were true, they wouldn't entail the conclusion. Nevertheless, the conclusion is still completely true.
Likewise, a state of affairs can be fine and optimal, such that nothing is morally wrong with it, and there is no room for improving it from there; but the way that we got to that state of affairs can still have been horribly wrong.
Quoting Isaac
It would be rational to aim for their appetites to be sated, whether that would be by changing the world to sate their appetites or by changing their appetites to be satiable by the world. I'm not saying that people should never change and the world must bend to them exactly as they are now, just that somehow or another (within deontological limits beyond the scope of this teleological part of the conversation) the two should be brought together into alignment.
But that part aside, the only reason why the drug addictions and overeating disorders are bad are because they lead to other suffering, i.e. the dissatisfaction of other appetites, like from health problems, withdrawals, etc. "Normalcy" should have nothing to do with it. Since we presently lack the power to sate those appetites and avoid the consequent dissatisfaction of other appetites, we're forced to compromise and target (within those deontological limits again) the maximal balance of satisfaction minus dissatisfaction. But a more optimal solution would be to eliminate those negative consequences: it would be great if e.g. we could all eat as much as we want and enjoy that, without our health suffering because of it (or running out of resources due to overconsumption, etc).
One other extreme conceivable solution to satisfying all appetites (besides the "everyone gets their own world" one previously mentioned) would be merely to extinguish all appetites, changing all the people such that they want for nothing, and so don't suffer from lack of anything. That is the solution aimed for by Buddhists, Stoics and the like, and it is a solution that's fine on my account, and some aspects of it can be very useful in pragmatic compromises we're forced to make. But it's not the optimal conceivable solution. Because while wanting nothing and getting nothing is better (less suffering) than wanting something and not getting it, wanting something and getting it is better (more enjoyment) still.
Quoting Isaac
Even if that were an accurate gloss of my moral stance (and I'm not sure whether it is or isn't), I still think that that is a useful limit to the range of ethical considerations, compared to the kinds of things people actually try to bring into play in real-world ethical debates. This teleological aspect of my ethics we've been discussing, about what makes for a good state of affairs, is deliberately very broad, just like my ontology is, but there are still limits that rule out completely untenable extremes.
My ontology pretty much only rules out the utterly supernatural, and there being different actual realities for people who believe different things. Within that, anything goes, and it's beyond philosophy's scope to figure it out; that's for physics to do. Likewise, this teleological aspect of my ethics is only meant to be whatever is left after you rule out two things:
- that considerations besides what affects people's pain/pleasure/enjoyment/suffering/etc, like "ritual purity" or something, are morally relevant (i.e. that something can be wrong despite it hurting nobody)
- that who or how many people are of what ethical opinion or another has any bearing on what the correct ethical opinion is (e.g. that slavery was actually morally okay in societies where 'enough' of 'the right' people approved of it, and only became not-okay after they changed their minds).
The deontological aspect of my ethics (about the methods of applying those criteria to the justification of particular intentions) is more useful for resolving ethical dilemmas between people who're already on board with that kind of thing, like most modern philosophers have been (e.g. Kant vs Mill). And even that is still just a method for figuring out what intentions are justified; I think it's beyond the scope of philosophy to give actual prescriptions on particular choices, just like it's beyond the scope of philosophy to go into what kinds of physical particles exist.
But there's no point even getting into that methodological aspect with people who can't even agree on those two very broad limits on what makes for a good end, or state of affairs. And you've generally sounded like someone who's strongly attached to that second broad class of views that I would categorically exclude.
Quoting counterpunch
I accept readily that moral senses are real bases for human action, but when do you think moral senses are and are not reliable? What conditions do you think must be met before I can trust my moral intuition to guide my actions correctly? As you mention, perhaps I need to grasp the facts of a situation before I can make correct ethical inferences about them. Although, that may not be enough; which facts are deemed morally relevant seem to depend on who you ask, because that matter tends to dip into value judgements, often subjective things.
Quoting counterpunch
If moral sense is not finely-tuned to correctly respond to fact in the first place, as you seem to suggest here, how can I trust it to lead me to lead a good life? When is it right or wrong? This is where my doubt surfaces. Two people may accept the same morally relevant information about a situation but react in different ethical manners to that data, so how can I know which moral sense is correct? Inevitably, humans hold subjective values that influence in different ways what individuals make of morally relevant facts. So there is something more than “fact” that can lead our moral senses astray. An unbiased, neutral, and value-free observer, I think, would not infer any moral conclusions from facts, since that very act seems to introduce extraneous bias to factual information. At the very least, all of this aims to explain why moral senses like emotions and intuitions cannot be relied upon in any consistent way to track down moral truth.
I'm inclined to suggest, the moral sense is not reliable. It takes work to develop a moral sense for yourself. Either that or painful experience. You could always adopt the moral code of a religion, and just do as you're told. Probably easier, but I'm inclined to suspect someone doesn't really learn if their morality is mere obedience, rather than agonised and recriminated over.
Quoting Anthony Minickiello
Valid understanding of any situation is a pre-requisite of valid decision making, whether that be moral decision making, or deciding which technologies to apply to combat climate change. If the basis of decision making is factually inaccurate, the outcome cannot be right - either morally right, or sustainable.
Quoting Anthony Minickiello
Therein lies the choice; accept someone else's moral code, or develop one for yourself through hard work - and/or painful experience. Go out and live your life, and rest assured that whatever stupid thing you do, your moral sense will be there in the morning to make you feel terrible about it. Pretty quiet beforehand - but afterwards, it gets real loud! Ha ha ha! Seriously though, trust yourself. You don't seem bad, mad or stupid. If you have a moral problem, learn all you can about it - and go with your gut.
So, if I’m angry I should just use trial and error to see what relieves it? In this case, what would an incorrect (immoral) act be? One that doesn’t relieve anger? Also, I would say that we’re never in the same moral circumstance twice, and that no two people are ever in the exact same moral circumstance.
Quoting Pfhorrest
How could I know what the right course of action is without first knowing what state of affairs is good? A good state of affairs is precisely what I’m trying to achieve by acting in the first place.
TGQuoting Pfhorrest
Ok, so it’s basically the golden rule, at least the Wiccan version of it. That probably answers some of what I just wrote. But, if you’re willing to accept that there are many “correct” answers, or at least not wrong answers, then why not just say moral truth is relative? Why insist that there is some unknowable absolute correct answer? A belief in that seems faith based, as opposed to evidence based. That’s like insisting Bigfoot exists, and using the existence of other Bigfoot-like creatures as evidence.
It doesn’t have to be entirely trial and error, you can use prior knowledge and expectations based on that to guide you. But yeah a bad outcome would be one where either your anger is not relieved, or where you or someone else are made to suffer (now or later) in some other way.
Quoting Pinprick
You do need to know what a good state of affairs is first, but that’s not all you need.
Quoting Pinprick
Because just having a range of acceptable possibilities doesn’t mean that that range is unlimited. We can be sure that some things are definitely wrong no matter who thinks they’re not, without having to know exactly what the optimal course of action is for everyone.
It’s the difference between multiple answers being acceptable because we’re not completely sure on the details of the correct answer, and ANY answers being acceptable because the only thing that makes it a right answer is someone believing it.
I want get back to what you wrote last week as an example of a moral assessment:
Quoting SophistiCat
My favorite psychologist George Kelly argues that individuals always make what he calls the elaborative
choice when faced with any kind of decision. This entails always choosing what enhances ones ability to anticipatively make sense of a situation. You may wonder what this has to do with moral acts. For Kelly, sense making is inherently in the direction of the greater good in that it entails our acting not only in our own best interest in situations but also in the best interest of other as far as we understand their intent , motive, point of view and needs. So from Kelly’s vantage , the other can’t do wrong morally. Every situation is like that of the bear mauling. Our blaming the other is just our failure to understand his actions from his own point of view.
I realize from your vantage this is an extreme model that jettisons the concept of moral wrong, and thus you would be inclined to label it either pathological or hypocritical. I mention it , though, because even though Kelly makes the point of choice as personal, unique to the individual, his construal of choice in terms of his model of the elaborative choice is theoretical. That is, if Kelly is the one making the elaborative choice, the reason he will refuse to think of it as assessing moral blame is due to the theory that informs his understanding of it. More broadly, the theory’s understanding of the nature of human motive and affectivity , and how these relate to the overall organizational dynamics of human cognition, enter directly into how any situation of choice of whatever kind will be construed by Kelly.
In your terms , how he relates to any particular incident , such as being beaten and robbed, is not just a function of the circumstances , but how the circumstances are interpreted in relation to what Kelly understands about the nature of human choice and motive.
Kelly wouldn’t label the act as ‘wrong’, ‘criminal’ because he would believe that from the robbers’ perspective the act WAS sufffused with a sense of ethical primacy.
He would argue that there are many ways we justify our own acts of violence against others as morally defensible , and these are not mere rationalizations. For instance: The victims deserve punishment , they are responsible either directly or indirectly for our bad circumstances. We needed the money and didn’t intend to harm them but things got out of hand and we panicked. We were raised in an inner city environment of survival of the fittest, etc, etc.
You say that in a moral act , “whether the act was objectively, universally wrong is simply beside the point”. But objectivity, and universality do come into play in our very definition of wrongdoing and blamefulness. For instance, in your example of the robbers, your assessment that what they did was wrong pre-supposed not only that the robbers did the act , but that they intentionally meant to cause harm and to steal what wasn’t theirs. So your definition of wrong implies intent. Many older tribal cultures did not include intent in their definition of moral wrong because their psychological understanding did not grasp the concept of intent. It is a more recent empirical discovery . So a certain culturally and scientifically informed notion of wrong as requiring psychological intent is not beside the point in your example, but an important part of your definition of blameworthiness. I assume that you would not recommend that body parts be cut off of the robbers or that they be executed for their crime of robbery and assault But that’s how religious fundamentalist cultures have commonly dealt with such crimes. If both those cultures and you believe that robbery and assault is wrong and worthy of blame , what accounts for the difference in method of punishment? Could it be that a fundamentalist worldview understands the notion of moral blame in a different way than you do, which includes a model of human psychology, motivation and will that also differs from yours? Is such a difference in assimptions about what is objectively or universally operative in human behavior besides the point or is it directly pertinent to the very notion of moral blame?
In our era, there are all sorts of debates between conservative and liberal factions over what sort of response to crime is just or appropriate , whether harsh measures or more leniency is called for, whether rehabilation is useful , etc. And these debates reflect differences in larger frames of understanding concerning what is objectively true concerning human behavior.
So there is a wide range of viewpoints on what constitutes moral wrong , from blame with a capital B to notions of blame as a small b, that consider it always mitigated and complicated by the way each of us is socialized And as I mentioned with Kelly, they are even approaches that don’t find the notion of blame useful at all.
Given the fact that in an important sense, Gergen , Foucault and a host of other postmodern thinkers do believe that all acts of criminality are performed by actors with a sense of ethical primacy, and you clearly disagree with that position, I made the tentative guess that you do not identify with philosophical
postmodernism , or at least not with social constructionism and poststructuralism. Generally , those who are not postmodernists are modernists, and that usually entails a commitment to some form of realism( if not ‘moral realism’ then at least scientific realism. ).
You can correct me if I’m wrong, or just throw sarcastic hostility my way. Whichever makes you feel better.
I agree with this, but it’s missing my point somewhat. I’m wanting to know how you justify that there is only one absolutely correct answer in any given circumstance. There always appears to be more than one acceptable answer, but you seem to try to claim that out of all the acceptable answers, there is one that is clearly better than all the others. I guess something like “limited relativity” is more in line with what I meant. But what is the criteria you use to determine which answer out the the acceptable ones is best? Assuming listening to music and exercising both relieve my anger equally, what could there possibly be to make one of these options better than the other?
Ah, I see. For me, philosophy is a means to an end - and that end is the continued existence of the human species.
— counterpunch
Quoting Pfhorrest
I take a materialist view because that's all I can speak intelligibly about, and in those terms - existence is a pre-requisite to everything else. The continued survival of the human species is what makes anything else matter.
But phenomenalism? Phenomenalism is essentially subjectivism. "Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects cannot justifiably be said to exist in themselves, but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli." Do you run back into rooms to see if everything is still there? Science is objectivism. Science assumes an objective reality exists independently of our experience of it.
— counterpunch
Quoting Pfhorrest
I thought that's what you were doing; I don't remember why I thought that. My objection is that science is not phenomenalism - because phenomenalism is subjectivism, and science is objectivism. Science assumes that objects exist independently of our experience of them. Phenomenalism does not.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Epistemically, as in the knowledge it seeks to establish in general universal principles or laws that describe the way things are, and the way things act and interact. Sure!
Quoting Pfhorrest
How so? I think you're conflating senses here.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. Take light - and the famous experiment by Newton with a prism. I'm sure you've heard of it. If science were subjective, it would be satisfied that light is white - but instead, Newton uses a device to begin to break down the electromagnetic spectrum, much of which is not apparent to the senses at all.
Science seeks to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to account for observer bias and eliminate the subjective from the universal in the formulation of universal laws that apply to how things really are, not just how they appear. True, human beings subjectively experience reality - but that's not a welcome fact. Subjectivism is a methodological problem science seeks to account for, and eliminate from its findings.
Consequently, science is not phenomenological. You've conflated senses - as I might have done had I said something like: "but the theory of relativity is science" - when you said "science is universalist, as in not relativist."
I've no qualm with this as an aim, but you used the word 'should'. What do you think 'should' means here? It can't mean 'it would be morally right too...' because what is morally right is what you're trying to establish, so an argument assuming it would be begging the question. What is the normative force of the above argument - we certainly could think of 'morally right' as being synonymous with matching the world to it's current and future population's appetites... but why should we?
Quoting Pfhorrest
We could instead see that consequent suffering as the problem, that's the point I was making (as you later allude to). So normalcy does have something to do with it, it's partly how we choose which suffering to treat.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Not really. It depends how you define 'enjoyment'. Both neurologically and phenomenologically, maximum enjoyment is not obtained by getting things you want. Gamblers aren't addicted to the payoff, they're addicted to the chance of a payoff. Even in mice, maximum dopamine response is achieved at the anticipation of a reward (of which there's a just above 50% chance of achieving), not the reward, or even the certainty of it. The human brain is extremely complex and this disneyfied 'eliminate the bad things and make all the good things' version of the way the world should be may well not match the actual neurological mechanisms behind our subjective judgements of state.
To take the example above, the theory is that this particular dopamine system is evolved to sustain striving, to reward risk-taking (in a limited fashion). But we don't necessarily recognise that phenomenologically, nor did we know it neurologically until about a decade ago. But we did know it intuitively (if we didn't the evolutionary advantage would not have manifested. One of the reason I'm so opposed to any systematising of morality is that it's like tinkering with Formula One engine based on a superficial knowledge of how lawnmowers work. I know you're only advocating a meta-ethic here, and the actual ethic might well be 'don't do anything until we know more', but the advocacy of a rational (as opposed to naturalistic) meta-ethic has such implications whether you intend them or not.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, I understand that. I come from a very different environment I suppose. I do regularly forget the efforts some people go to to try and rationally disprove positions which were never rationally arrived at in the first place. It's not something that's even on my radar. If you want to construct a rational argument that says one shouldn't follow the instructions in a 2000 year old book as one's sole moral guide then be my guest.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You see, there's that duplicity again - when pushed on the problem of under-determination, you admit that it only eliminates extremes and that outside of those physiological limits your system offers no guide (should we match the data points to the preferred line, or match the line to the data points). Then you keep coming back to "my ethics ... is more useful for resolving ethical dilemmas". It's not. We've just established that. It provides nothing whatsoever by way of guidance in the resolution of such ethical dilemmas. Don't be a psychopath, and don't be a religious fanatic are the only positions your ethical system advises. Everything in between is arguable on the basis of being some form of matching world to appetites.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm not sure what's given you that impression, but that's not my meta-ethical position.
Such "limited relativity" is just universality plus uncertainty (which is what I'm advocating). It accepts that everything is either permissible or impermissible in an objective/universal sense, and among the permissible things, it's possible for one to be objectively/universally better than another even though both are permissible, and when that is the case it's still possible that we may have no idea (and practically speaking very little hope of determining) which is better than the other even though one is.
Quoting Pinprick
All of the innumerable consequences that come from doing one vs the other, that practically speaking you'll probably never know or care to know about.
The point of liber(al|tarian)ism, like falsificationism, is to stop from focusing on pinning down one exactly correct solution, since we'll never get to there, and instead just focus on staying within (and narrowing down) the range of permissible/possible (respectively) solutions.
Quoting counterpunch
Sure, and I agree, but my point is that in defending that view you're already doing philosophy. Philosophical issues like what is a good end to strive for are logically prior to issues about practical means to particular ends.
Quoting counterpunch
Distinguishing different kinds of "objectivism" and "subjectivism" is what I was doing, and that's what you seem to not be doing here. The point is that "objects exist independently of our experience of them" can mean (at least) two different things:
- There is something about those objects that transcends experience, such that nobody could ever tell from empirical observation whether those aspects or qualities or whatever of the object were there or not. This is "objectivism as in transcendentalism", which I'm against. (Phenomenalism is its negation, saying that there is nothing about the objects besides the observable properties of them, which is also the position that science takes.)
or
- The existence of those objects is not just relative to any particular person experiencing them at a particular time, but continues as the potential to be experienced even when not actively being experienced. This is "objectivism as in universalism", which I am for. (Relativism is its negation, saying that the objects are only real to those who are actively observing them, and science of course generally takes a position against that).
Quoting counterpunch
I'm doing the opposite of that, I'm de-conflating senses that it seems you are conflating. See above for the two senses of "objective" I'm differentiating from each other. Their negations in turn are the two senses of "subjective" I'm differentiating from each other. You can have one without the other: universalism doesn't require transcendentalism, so phenomenalism in turn doesn't require relativism. You can have a universalist phenomenalism, which is what science generally assumes: an empirical realism, where there is a reality independent of it being actively observed, but in no part beyond the potential for observation.
Quoting counterpunch
And we learn about that by observing the output of the device with our senses. That's like "seeing the wind" (which is invisible) by its effects on the motion of leaves in the trees. That's indirect observation, which is still observation, and so still "subjective" in a sense that doesn't mean "relative" but just "phenomenal".
Quoting Isaac
I take all moral language, including my use of it there, to be essentially exhortative in function, so in saying that that kind of state of affairs 'should' be, I'm saying something to the effect of "let it be the case that [that state of affairs]".
Quoting Isaac
In that case I was just clarifying what it is that I take a morally right state of affairs to be, which is to say, what state of affairs I would exhort to be. I was not just then arguing that it should be, just clarifying the conclusion of my argument.
Quoting Isaac
Because that view is essentially composed of the negation of two positions (as discussed further below), and assuming either of those two positions would leave us operating under assumptions that would render us unable to conduct a rational investigation of what ought to be.
On the one hand, the position that what is good or bad can be wholly unrelated to what what feels good or bad in our experiences would leave us stuck having to just take someone's word on it, leaving nothing to do but pick for no rational reason whose word to take without possibility of question.
On the other hand, the position that what actually is good or bad can differ between different parties just because those parties differ in their opinions obviously leaves no room for rational reconciliation because all you'd have to appeal to is your own opinion and the other guys already disagree with that so that gets you nowhere.
So if we hope to have any rational discourse about what ought to be, we have to assume the negations of those both (and at this point in our reasoning, assuming one way or the other is all we can do, because we haven't even established grounds for justification yet).
Reconciling the negations of those both, figuring out some way of having a universal morality nevertheless grounded in phenomenal (hedonic) experience, in turn requires differentiating appetites from desires, because of the obvious impossibility of reconciling conflicting desires without a deeper concept like appetites to turn to.
Quoting Isaac
I don't follow the connection between these two sentences. I agree completely with the first one: the reason why drug addiction, overeating disorders, etc, are problematic is because they cause later suffering, and we don't currently have the ability to prevent that consequent suffering, so we can only treat the behavior that causes it, even though that behavior is in the pursuit of enjoyment, as behavior should be.
If it were possible to avoid that consequent suffering, or if there just wasn't consequent suffering at all, then those behaviors being unusual (abnormal) wouldn't be any reason for concern.
It's like homosexuality no longer being classified as a mental disorder: it is unusual (statistically speaking), but harmless, so it's rightly no longer considered a problem. Or, I don't know if anything like "sexual promiscuity" was ever considered a mental health problem per se, but it's certainly been socially condemned, and for much of human history that may have been for good reason (there is plenty of suffering it could cause), but nowadays with birth control and disease prevention and treatment technologies, it's possible to be sexually promiscuous while avoiding the consequent suffering, which makes it no longer anything to condemn.
Quoting Isaac
I was actually alluding to a phenomenological take on this very thing when I said that. Just not having any appetites for anything, not caring about anything, is not, phenomenologically, a very enjoyable state to be in. It's basically depression, speaking from experience as someone clinically diagnosed with that. It doesn't feel good to not want and not care about anything. In contrast it feels good to want things, to strive for them, to work up an appetite for a good meal, to look forward to an adventure, or a piece of entertainment, or to your favorite hobby, to get horny and want to fuck your significant other, etc.
But then if you are denied those things you were longing for, it feels bad. You could avoid that bad feeling by not wanting them... but while that's often better than the disappointment, it's still not great. What feels best is to want for things... and then to get them. And then to keep wanting for things, and keep getting them, and keep that feeling of striving and winning and moving forward and making progress going.
Quoting Isaac
Not being a psychopath or religious fanatic is more useful for resolving ethical dilemmas than being either of those, I think you will agree.
But that aside, you're missing part of the very thing you quoted to respond to with this. The "don't be a relativist or transcendentalist" thing is just the first layer of my ethical system. That's my "moral ontology". There's another layer, my "moral epistemology". And then a political philosophy modeled after the usual (ideal) practices of modern academia, what you might call a "moral peer review". But all these things build on top of each other, and whenever I try to work toward laying them out I can't get past the first part with you, the part about agreeing on the investigation into a morality that is both universal and phenomenalist, an altruistic hedonism. None of the rest of it is applicable if we can't even agree on that. But there is a "rest of it", I just never get to move on to that because you get all hung up on disputing the basic groundwork.
Quoting Isaac
That's the negation of my principle of objectivism/universalism, and you keep objecting to that principle, which makes it sound like you favor its negation.
How can moral language be exhortative if the meaning of moral terms is objective. Moral language must surely be propositional in that case?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I've perhaps not made myself clear. You seem to be saying that we 'should' take 'morally right' to be that which maximises appetite satisfaction. It's like you're imploring us to accept that something ought to be the case on rational grounds, but then saying that something is that things ought to be the case on hedonic grounds. It's not the case that we we consider maximising hedonic values to be our utmost objective. Some people are more about maximising the virtues, others obedience to God etc. so you're not describing what is the case, you're describing what ought to be the case - which sounds like you've already got a system in place for deciding what ought to be the case.
Notwithstanding that, your actual rational argument falls short. Firstly...
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Pfhorrest
These are not the only two options. For example following one's sense of virtue (for, say and ethical naturalist) would be an option which neither satisfied hedonic values nor differed between people.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It is possible to treat the consequences of obesity. It's also possible to manage drug use without resort to weaning. We don't partly because of a presumption in favour of normality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This is what I'm telling you is not true. We do not gain maximum happiness by any measure from the obtaining of that for which we're longing. It's just not the case.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Then I'll take your word for that.
Quoting Pfhorrest
As I said above, I don't believe it's the only remaining option.
I f we don’t it’s only because we sacrifice a particular longing for the sake of a richer and more fulfilling longing.
No, it's not. It's because our limbic system responds to anticipation of potential reward more strongly than the receipt of it. You can't just make this stuff up, it's a biological mechanism you're talking about here. It behaves the way it behaves regardless of what you think about it.
The neuronanatomy and neurophysiology of brian structures associated with affectivity offer o my impoverished models of how affectivity relates
to cognition. I think the most promising accounts which integrate neurology of affect with conscious processes stem from Damasio and Panksepp, but even more so with researchers who have incorporated their work into new comprehensive modes which also tap into phenomenology. Matthew Ratcliffe in particular offers a particularly satisfying account.
ur experience of the world.
“...affect binds us to things, making them relevant and ‘lighting up' aspects of the world in such a way as to call forth actions and thoughts. Without the world-structuring orientation that they provide, we are disoriented, cut off from the world, which no longer solicits thoughts and actions and is consequently devoid of value. In effect, [William] James is saying that our very sense of reality is constituted by world-orienting feelings that bind us to things .” (Ratcliffe 2005)
“...emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focused and relevant in our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia. Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so that we only consider from a pre-structured set of options. Damasio's (1995, 1996) more specific hypothesis is that emotions are cognitively mediated body states. He christens this theory the “somatic marker hypothesis”. The idea is that somatic (body) signals are associated with perceptual stimuli, either as a result of innate or learned neural connections, and thus “mark” those stimuli. Different perceptions can be associated with various kinds of body states, which may serve as alarm signals or, alternatively, as enticing invitations. According to Damasio, a complex of such signals focuses and structures our cognitive interactions with the world. Once we incorporate complex learned associations between perceptions and body states, a vast web of somatic markers can develop. These signals serve to eliminate certain possibilities, which feel bad, from a choice set and focus deliberation upon other feel good signals. Thus cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states.”(Ratcliffe 2002)
I don't know of anything in Damasio's or Panksepp's work which contradicts Knutson's work, nor that supports the assertion of yours I was commenting on, nor can i see how your quote relates to either. Perhaps you could cite some of Damasio's or Panksepp's work, or explain how the quote relates.
significant to us, how salient they are for us. For instance , severe depression isn’t marked by affective ‘pain’ so much as a deprivation of relevance and meaning in the world.
I notice that you seem to focus on affect as a mechanistic causal circuitry that bypasses or precedes complex cognitive assessment , such as in your exampleof the causes of obesity. It seems to me that this misses the the complex and reciprocal interplay of affect with attitudes, beliefs and intentions.
Philosophical claims like we're discussing here are properly speaking neither descriptive nor prescriptive in the sense that claims about reality and morality (respectively) are, but have some characteristics of each. In arguing for empiricism, against someone who rejects empiricism, would one be making an "ought" claim of the same sort as an "ought" claim that e.g. one ought not rape? No, but then again one would also not be making merely an "is" claim that we do use empiricism, either.
Philosophical claims are logically prior to either of those kinds of claims; they're a mix of analytic claims, which superficially seem descriptive but don't actually tell us anything about reality, and pragmatic claims, which superficially seem prescriptive but don't actually tell us anything about morality. They're about what we mean by our questions and proposed answers, and what we're aiming to do by asking them and what is effective toward that end.
Quoting Isaac
It is propositional, it's just not indicative: moral language proposes that something be, not that it is, and such propositions can still be the correct or incorrect ones to make, though they of course must be made correct or incorrect by a different kind of criteria than indicative ones are. It's a kind of non-descriptive cognitivism, which I've tried to go into much detail on before (and is not my original invention even), but you just got hung up on the universalist implications of it and derailed that whole thread.
Quoting Isaac
It's not at all clear to me what you mean by this, but the best sense I can make out of it is that "following one's sense of virtue" means doing what you think is the characteristic behavior of a good person, which then raises the immediate question of what to do when someone else thinks something different is the characteristic behavior of a good person.
It looks like you've then just got two irreconcilable bare opinions that can't be analyzed into some deeper components that could potentially be reconciled by building a new opinion that factors in all of those deeper components together. So either both of your irreconcilable opinions are correct to each of you respectively, just because they're your opinions, in which case you've got relativism, one of the two options you say this avoids; or else there is some correct opinion on that matter but there is no way of telling which if either of your different ones is that, in which case you've got transcendentalism, the other of the two options you say this avoids.
The "ethical naturalist" bit in there makes me suspect that you might say the way to reconcile differences of opinion about what is the characteristic behavior of a good person is to look at some empirical facts about what people do actually (tend to) do (on average), or perhaps what they (tend to) think is morally laudable (on average), but that's just falling into the naturalistic fallacy. What exactly about the fact that people do do or think that way implies anything at all about what anyone should do or think? You can't get an 'ought' from an 'is' like that.
If you're not trying to make such an inference, but just saying what is, then you're refraining from moral commentary entirely, and if that reflected a lack of moral judgement entirely, that would leave you a moral nihilist, which in practice can't help but be a moral egotist, which is the most extreme form of moral relativism, which is one of the two things you say this isn't.
And if you were trying to get an 'ought' from an 'is' in that way specifically, never mind for the moment that that's not a valid inference, you would end up either appealing to the authority of the largest group, where avoiding appeals to authority like is the very reason to reject transcendentalism; or else you might say that each different group that has agreement within itself on the question is right relative to itself, in which case you're back to relativism again.
One way or another I don't see a way of avoiding both transcendentalism (or the dogmatism that is the reason to avoid it) or else relativism with this approach.
Quoting Isaac
Sweet, so there's some way I can eat all I want and not suffer any negative consequences from it? Do tell! Why doesn't my doctor seem to know about this?
Quoting Isaac
I'm acknowledging what you said about the wanting being more pleasurable than the having. But when you want for something, you eventually end up either (A) not getting it, or (B) getting it. Are you saying that wanting for things and then having yours wants dissatisfied is observably more pleasurable than wanting for things and then having them satisfied? Granted that in either case the main pleasure comes from the wanting, from the pursuit of the thing. But that ends eventually. The question is which way of it ending is more enjoyable.
Quoting Isaac
Here's a very short (and so necessarily incomplete) overview of my answers to the whole stack of ethical questions:
Moral semantics (what does moral language even mean?):
Moral language is not indicative, but exhortative. Exhortations can still be correct or incorrect, just like indications can be, but they're made correct or incorrect by different criteria than indications are.
"Moral psychology", or philosophy of will (what is the nature of willing and moral judgement?):
To will or to intend something is the same thing as to judge it to be morally good: it is to reflexively evaluate your own desires and judge whether they are the desires you should have or not, by the same standards you would judge someone else's desires in your same circumstances. Your will is free when and to the extent that such self-judgement is effective upon your future behavior.
"Moral ontology", or "teleology" (what makes for a good state of affairs?):
States of affairs are good when they satisfy all appetites, and bad to the extent that they fall short of that; there is nothing more to a state of affairs being good besides everyone feeling good, and nothing short of everyone feeling good is a wholly good state of affairs. (This is where you and I always get stuck).
"Moral epistemology", or "deontology" (what is a just or right action or intention?):
Just actions are "good-preserving" in the way that valid inferences are "truth-preserving": a just action must not have any badness in its consequences that was not already there in the prior circumstances, and new goodness produced in its consequences does not excuse any new badness introduced, just like a true conclusion doesn't automatically make the inferences used to get there valid.
"Moral peer review", or political philosophy (who gets to judge what's good or just?):
This is really hard to write a short summary of, but I basically advocate for a kind of anarcho-socialism with people turning to independent defense and adjudication organizations to protect them from other people, where those organizations in turn use the product of a global collaborative process of moral investigation based on the earlier parts of the stack as their "law books" when adjudicating these conflicts, in the same way that schools use the product of a global collaborative scientific investigation as the basis of their textbooks that they teach from.
Moral praxis, or empowerment (how to get people to do things that way):
By showing people that supposed authorities can be not only insufficient but positively counterproductive, but that progress toward good things is nevertheless possible, by helping the people let down or violated by those supposed authorities, helping them to help themselves, helping them to help others, and to help others to help themselves, and others, in a positive feedback loop.
No, that's not Knutson's model, the experiment is just isolating one element in a wider system in order to inform that system, not replace it. If you can track it down, you might be interested to read his 2007 paper "Affective Influence on Judgments and Decisions: Moving Towards Core Mechanisms" (I only have a paper copy). I don't personally agree with all of his conclusions there, but it's basically a really thorough outline of his approach and the way in which he sees affect integrating with cognition and intention.
Quoting Joshs
The trouble with this is that it is so vague as to be difficult to find anything to either affirm or deny in it. No-one is suggesting that the consequences of changes in affect valence do not pass through areas of the brain responsible for conscious semantics. I don't think you'd find a single neuroscientists making such a claim. Nor would you find any (nowadays) who deny the feedback, inference and suppressive roles that these higher conscious cortices can have on signals from cortices below them in the hierarchy.
If Ratcliffe is making a unique claim, then it would have to be accompanied by a good deal more specificity as to what constituted 'central', and how that differed from the integral role everyone already agrees semantics plays.
OK, so could you describe how those elements apply to you 'philosophical claim' that we ought to see morality as a sort of matching of affect to world (or vice versa). What part of that claim is analytic and what part pragmatic?
Quoting Pfhorrest
But surely the key element is such a claim is it's correctness. The implication is "it is correct that such-and-such ought to be the case..." otherwise it's nothing but an emotional exclamation.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Surely the implications of it are the only relevant factor? That it is at least plausible is a given from the start (intelligent people have thought it through enough to publish papers on it, we can assume it's at least plausible).
Quoting Pfhorrest
What I'm saying is that for an ethical naturalist, something like that certain characteristics are virtuous is a fact about the physical state of our brains and the consequences thereof on our beliefs. A sort of 'evolutionary encoding of morality' approach could quite easily make claims about what is and is not moral as cognitive claims without reference to affect valence. Equally, a purely linguistic approach can make objective, factual claims about what is 'virtuous' or 'morally right' based on how we use those terms and still not reference affect. The re are numerous versions of ethical realism which are neither subjective, nor related to affect. It is not a matter of having to choose the latter by eliminating the former, they're not exhaustive.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, in theory. There are medicines which interfere with the absorption of fat, there's bariatric surgery...
Quoting Pfhorrest
It depends. Pleasure is largely generated by the same system (unlike displeasure which is very widely distributed across the endocrine response), it's may well be that some reward stimulates this system, it may be that it doesn't. That you interpret your current state as desiring something is not a reliable measure of how the receipt of that reward is going to affect your pleasure generating systems. Not only are these systems complex even unilaterally, but they are exposed to several suppressive and inhibitory feedback loops from higher cortices which may cut off an initially pleasurable response before we're even consciously aware of it. The question of which way of ending the wanting is more pleasurable is one which is highly dependant on both circumstance and upbringing, let alone biological underpinnings.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I appreciate that, but obviously it would be outside of the scope of this thread for me to respond to them all. Nice to know though.
It's not that one part of it is analytic and another is pragmatic, but that the whole thing lies at the interface between the two. Basically we're asking what exactly we are trying to do with an answer to the question "what is moral?" The importance of the question, its pragmatic import, what we need to know the answer for, narrows in on which of the possible meanings of the question matters to us in that context, and with that understanding comes the start of the means of answering it.
I'm taking the pragmatic import of the question to be one of selecting goals to direct our actions toward, basically building a blueprint for the world we want to make. The world we want to make is, tautologically, one where things are how we want them. The problem then is reconciling different ideas of what such a world would be like, because we're not just aiming for a world like I want or you want but a world like we want, so we have to reconcile those different wants somehow.
The "we" part basically gives you the universalist aspect: what we're aiming for is independent of any particular person, we're not just asking what you or I or a majority or a particular authority figure want, but what is "wantable" some a more impartial sense than any of those. And the "want" part basically gets you the hedonistic aspect, the satisfaction of... I don't know what best to call them, maybe "imperative" states of mind, the umbrella category including intentions, desires, and appetites.
The need to reconcile those two different things with each other then requires analyzing those "imperative" states of mind to a level that is potentially reconcilable, unlike intentions or desires, which brings us down to appetites.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, and I'm affirming that such claims are capable of being correct and incorrect (rather than just expressions of emotions), and elaborating on what criteria by which to judge them thus.
Quoting Isaac
When I brought it up I was hoping more for discussion on its merit as a theory of moral semantics, on whether it's a reasonable account of what moral language means that can accomplish the goals it tries to accomplish: an account of moral language that can support calling moral claims objectively or universally correct or incorrect, without either reducing them to claims of natural facts, or else introducing some kind of non-naturalist ontology. Objecting that it would imply that morality is objective then sort of misses the point...
One prominent criticism of the concept of objective morality is that it would require either collapsing the is-ought gap, or else violating naturalist ontology, since (it's thought by such critics that) only descriptive claims, which must then refer either to natural or non-natural things in reality, are capable of being objectively true or false. If one then holds that naturalism is true (so there aren't non-natural things to refer to) and that the is-ought gap cannot be crossed (so moral language can't be referring to natural facts), one would then be forced to conclude that moral language cannot be of the type that is capable of being true or false, but must be something like expressions of emotions, or else that it is all categorically false attempts at referring to non-existent non-natural things.
If, therefore, an account of moral language can be given according to which moral claims can be true or false in a way that doesn't violate either of those other principles, that particular argument against moral universalism bites the dust. So to say that such an account is then problematic because it would imply moral universalism... yeah, that's what it's for. It's a way of enabling a universalist account of morality without running into these particular semantic problems.
Quoting Isaac
That approach runs into the is-ought problem that I detailed in my previous post, along with how that then runs into either relativism or transcendentalism(/dogmatism). I'm aware that there are other ethical theories like that that claim to wiggle out of this trilemma (of universalist phenomenalism else relativism or transcendentalism), but I'm arguing that they actually cannot do so.
Good question, but since you've used 'we' not 'I', the answer would seem to be an empirical one, no?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I agree, but again 'us' not 'me'. I'm not seeing how you answer these questions for 'us' only by introspection of 'you'.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You've jumped here from the way we want the world to be (independent of any other people's wants) to the way we want the world to be (including other people). We're social beings, no? Why would you separate out our affects and those of others and then seek to reconcile them rationally. Would you not expect evolution to have had at least a significant impact on social cohesion by those very affects? Is not the seeking of a compromise solution (rather than bashing one's opponent's brains out) already the satisfaction of a affect valence embedded by evolution to help us co-operate. It seems somewhat superfluous to convince people of a met-ethical position by arguing that it provides us with a toll that only people of a certain ethical position would even want. It's a done deal by then.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I thought that's how it seemed. But affirming something is a propositional claim, not an exhortative one.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying that you've failed to cross the is-ought divide in your account. You've declared that there is a state of affairs which represents the best fit for all appetites. You've told us that this is what you mean by moral, you've told us that it is what you think would make a trouble-free meaning for moral. None of this has yet approached an 'ought'. Why ought we seek that state of affairs? Why ought we have trouble-free meanings? Why ought we even have only one meaning for morally right?
To answer any of these questions you have to assume an audience who have a natural understanding of what 'ought' means. Thus rendering an account of it rather useless.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That depends on what you take 'ought' to mean.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't see such an argument.
Let's say actions which are virtuous cause neurological effects which attract us toward them and repel us from their antipode. Let's say that as our language developed we came to use 'morally right', in some contexts, to refer to such behaviours. In such a case, a person using the term 'morally right' to refer to some other behaviour would be objectively wrong. Even if they themselves (perhaps due to some genetic flaw) found themselves attracted to some unseemly activity, the term 'morally right' doesn't refer to their private feelings but the the general case.
How would you oppose such a position?
I found Quoting Isaac free online and read it.
The paradigms of cognitive- affective interaction the article is operating from ( ther are more that one cited but they are related in their superordinate aspects) takes me back to my grad school days in experimental
psychology. My focus was then and still is on the relation between affectivity and cognition. I was unsatisfied by the larger framework of suppositions that informed the models( they seem to be glorified versions of stimulus response reductive positivism) , but before I get into that I want to say that of all the commenters on my OP , you seem to be closest to my position on the origin and basis of moral thinking. Like me you reject metaphysical groundings of moral blame, either religious or rationalistic.
So where I want to focus with you is the relation between your preferred model of cognitive affective neuroscience and a set of underlying suppositions that organizes your empirical worldview. I suppose we could start with what I just said , which reveals it’s own pre-suppositions concerning how empirical claims justify themselves.
To be brief, I follow Kuhn and Feyerabend rather than Popper in terms of my philosophy of scientific practice and change. I am not a scientific realist. Whereas Popper beliefs one can falsify an empirical
model by making reference to standards of method , validation, etc that transcend local
practices, I agree with Kuhn and there are no such universally justifiable standards, so that scientific change has much in common with changes in political culture and developments in the humanities. How does this relate to your psychological model? I notice
that Knutson describes the brain in the old cognitive language of encoding, storage and processing. And I notice you referring in a previous post to stimuli that are received by a cognitive system. So I’m wondering what your understanding of perceptual
process is. Do you take a representationalist view of perception and cognition, wherein we encounter ‘raw’ stimuli that we then process? Non-representationalist accounts replace the idea of mind corresponding with an indepdendently existing external
world with an enactivist embodied framework .Perception not as representation but as interaction. ( Varela, Thompson, Alva Noe). According to this view there would be no raw uninterpreted stimuli. Instead, our expectations drive what is considered a stimulus. I also saw that you mentioned theory of mind. This connects with another debate within psychology between those who advocate theory of mind models
to explain empathy with other minds, and those who embrace interactionism.
These differences with the field are reflective of metatheorical , philosophical differences. On the one side are realistic positions(Dennett) and on the other postmodern accounts(Rorty, Shaun Gallagher)
Quoting Isaac
In those passages I'm using the first-person plural the way a mathematician would, or as philosophers sometimes do, the writer walking through a problem together with the reader in a shared first-person perspective.
Then when I switch to first-person singular, then I'm no longer talking about general how to do philosophy stuff, but identifying the particular philosophical question (singled out in the way advised in that general philosophy stuff) that I am addressing for the rest of it. I'm not saying that that's the only question -- other people might be asking other questions, and those could be worth answering too -- I'm just identifying which one I'm talking about here.
Quoting Isaac
I do expect that we have evolved tendencies that already lean in the general direction that I'm advocating. We have empathy, we often care not to see other people suffer, we often enjoy making other people feel good.
But we've similarly got a pretty good-enough intuition about what is real, because of evolution, and that doesn't negate the usefulness of the scientific method as a way of improving on those intuitions. I'm likewise seeking to build a way of investigating more rigorously into the kind of topic that we already generally consider morality, to do better than those intuitions, just like the natural sciences do better than our intuitions about reality.
Quoting Isaac
You've apparently missed the part where exhortations are propositional (albeit with a different direction of fit to their propositions), they're just not indicative. But in any case, assuming you meant "indicative, not exhortative", that goes back to what I was saying about philosophical matters like this being logically prior to either of those kinds of things.
Quoting Isaac
I'm not trying to cross the is-ought divide. I don't think that's possible. I'm trying to establish a means of figuring out "oughts" entirely on their own, just like we have a means of figuring out "ises" entirely on their own.
Quoting Isaac
Assuming we each already feel like we ought to seek states of affairs where we ourselves each find our appetites satisfied, seeking a state of affairs that fits that criteria for ourselves as well as others eliminates conflict with others and gives us something to cooperate toward, which is more efficient than fighting over it.
Quoting Isaac
"Trouble" is itself a normative word, so it's basically tautological that we ought to avoid troublesome things, because "troublesome" things are things to be avoided, by the nature of the words. Calling the meanings "trouble-free" means that they avoid things we're aiming to avoid.
Quoting Isaac
I'm not saying that we ought to have any meaning or other, or how many of them we should have. I'm saying that here is one objective these kinds of words are often used to name, and here is an analysis of the a priori practicality of different ways of pursuing that objective.
Quoting Isaac
A vast swath of majority is about giving a more rigorous account of things we already have an intuitive understanding of, usually to resolve some kind of problems that arise from the use of that intuitive understanding. We all have an intuitive notion of what "a set" of things are, yet naive set theory runs into problems so mathematicians more rigorously defined what exactly they mean by "set", in a way that still fits the use of the word we intuitively understand, without running into those problems that our naive understanding of it leads to.
That's what pretty much all of ethics is doing. Everyone has some notion of what good, bad, right, wrong, etc, mean, in a naive sort of way, but then all kinds of dilemmas and other problems crop up when applying those naive conceptions. The point of ethics is to sort out exactly which rigorously formulated concept both generally fits with our naive use of such words and also avoids the problems that that naive conception leads to.
Quoting Isaac
I just gave it two posts ago, so I'll just quote it here again:
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Isaac
That would be a merely quotational sense of "morally right", as in "the kinds of things that are called 'morallly right'", without that entailing any kind of endorsement of those things by applying that label to them. For illustration, consider terms like "bad boy" or "bad girl". Plenty of people think that a "bad" boy/girl is good in a way, they like "bad" boys/girls more than "good" boys/girl, and they don't actually think that the things the "bad" boys/girls do are actually wrong in their own honest evaluation, as in, they don't see any cause to condemn their "bad" behavior, if anything they might laud it.
It's a kind of performative contradiction to say something like "that behavior is morally wrong, but that's perfectly okay", or "that is good but I don't intend it", in exactly the same way that "that is true but I don't believe it" is a performative contradiction. It's certainly possible for people to believe things that are false, or disbelieve things that are true, or to intend things that are bad, or not to intend things that are good, but in saying that something is true/false or good/bad you're demonstrating something about your own attitude toward that state of affairs, so if you also say something contrary about your attitude toward that state of affairs, you're saying something about yourself contrary to what you're demonstrating about yourself.
An account of moral language that doesn't include that kind of demonstration of one's own attitudes toward the thing being called good/bad/etc, therefore is lacking something that moral language as we usually use it has.
I think it's probably best if I very briefly outline my preferred models as they seem to be crucial to answering your questions.
Firstly, my preferred model of cognition in general is the active inference model (or you might have heard it referred to as the Bayesian Brain theory). Basically that the brain is a system for minimising the free energy associated with surprise, it is trying to make ever more surprise-minimising models of the hidden states which cause sensation. This models the brain as a set of hierarchically related areas each of which filters and modulates the signals from the areas below it using a a model of the signals it is expecting them to deliver, then feeding back to our interaction with those hidden states with actions aimed at reducing the surprise in the models. Basically we and the world (including our sensory organs as 'the world' here, are in a constant dynamic relationship whereby we interpret it according to prior models, manipulate it to match those models and it passively resists those attempts where those models are too inaccurate. Something like that anyway. Here's the seminal paper on the approach which explains it much better.
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Active%20Inference%20A%20Process%20Theory.pdf
As far as affect goes, I'm broadly in line with Lisa Feldman-Barrett's integration of active inference with affect. She treats our interocepted sensations as hidden states in a Bayesian model and emotions as the interpretive model attempting to minimise surprise in those states. The main paper is here.
https://www.affective-science.org/pubs/2017/barrett-tce-scan-2017.pdf
Both of these approaches integrate conscious thought in the modelling process, but without giving it any authoritative position. It's a modelling tool, used as an when it's pragmatic to do so.#
So, your questions
Quoting Joshs
Yes. I don't think scientific theories have any privileged place over any other models, they are just highly formalised versions of predictive models with resultant actions aimed at confirming them. Popper was mistaken, I think, in that he assumed it was possible to simultaneously hold a model to be true and yet attempt to falsify it. I don't believe that to be psychologically possible. The state of holding a model to be true integrates it into our perceptive process in such a way as to direct our interpretations of hidden states in favour of that model to the extent that is possible. Hence Kuhnian paradigm shifts.
Quoting Joshs
No. The active inference model was actually developed initially using perception. Anil Seth at Sussex has really carried the torch on this now though and his papers are well worth a read (if you haven't already). I broadly follow a 'Controlled Hallucination' approach to perception where we see what we expect to see according to our priors and seek only that information which could confirm it, or, in the case of catastrophic failure of that model, that information which caused the failure. The stimuli are from our sensory organs, but the brain has to interpret those, those the 'raw' signals are hidden states, we do not have access to them to interpret, we can only infer from them, but we do so not from a 'raw' data set, but from a filtered and even, at times, downright fabricated data set.
Quoting Joshs
I do think Theory of Mind models have an important place in psychological modelling of empathy. I have some sympathy with interactionist approaches but I don't think they can replace theory of mind, only add another mechanism. I see the two as overlapping systems, not as one replacing the other.
I'm going to start with this because I get the feeling it might be central to the disagreement, but I need some clarity first on what you mean. By introducing someone saying the opposite in the same sentence you've added an element to my scenario which was not there in the original and I'm not sure why, so I want to explore that before answering the rest.
My scenario was one where 'morally right' is a public definition which encompasses certain behaviours, such even if a person thought they ought to do X, if X is termed 'morally wrong' they'd be objectively mistaken to label such behaviour 'morally right'. You added that they would verbalise this state as "X is something I ought to do, but it's morally wrong", which would indeed be a contradiction. I, however, was referring to someone who intended to do X, and saw no morally relevant problem with that intent, in a society where the correct label for X is 'morally wrong'.
I agree, now that I know you're an ethical naturalist, because I think the whole problem with ethical naturalism or any kind of ethical descriptivism is that it ends up not saying anything at all about what is or isn't moral in the sense I'm talking about, instead talking entirely about a specific subquestion of what is or isn't real, and merely labeling that fact about reality "morality", while entirely missing out on the function that distinguishes prescriptive, moral language from descriptive language.
Quoting Isaac
That would be a society where the words "morally wrong" didn't function the way they do in our society, where they didn't have any imperative, normative, prescriptive force, where something being "morally wrong" was as dry a fact as something being red or triangular or, closer to the point, unpopular. That would be a society where the words "morally wrong" were purely descriptive, and one could coherently say that something was morally wrong without in the process condemning it or otherwise discouraging anyone from doing it. In that society, "X is something I ought to do, but it's morally wrong" would be a perfectly coherent thing to say, if "ought" meant what it does in our society -- i.e. if using it demonstrated a specific attitude of the speaker approving of the action, such that thinking something ought to happen entailed intending for it to happen -- but "morally wrong" only meant a description of common attitudes toward it without any implication about the attitudes of the speaker. In that society, saying that would be much like someone in our society saying "X is something I ought to do, but it's unpopular", which makes perfect sense in our language.
It can of course be an objective fact that something is unpopular, or red, or triangular, and in a society that used words like "morally wrong" in the way you describe, it could be an objective fact that something fit that description. But that would not constitute an objective morality, in the sense of that word used in our society, because it would not constitute any commentary on morality at all. People calling things "morally wrong" in that society would not be performing the prescriptive kinds of speech-acts typical of moral language in our society.
It's the fact that sentences like "I intend to do something I shouldn't do" seem somehow contradictory in our language that shows that a purely descriptive account of moral language is insufficient.
I'm not an ethical naturalist. You didn't ask me what my own meta-ethical position was. I'm simply presenting challenges to yours in order to draw out aspects of it that I can't make sense of.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This doesn't make sense. It seems to presume that 'labelling' behaviour has no consequences. Labelling behaviour has a function. It's not just a tourettes-like exclamation. People apply labels for reasons, the same as any other speech act. With moral language, that reason is mainly to try and persuade the other person to act how you want them to act. Implying social pressure, by giving their behaviour it's label is one way to do that. Basically, if someone's acting in a way I don't like, and that behaviour happens to be behaviour which is publicly defined as 'morally bad' then one speech act I have at my disposal to get them to stop is to label their behaviour as such. If, on the other hand, their behaviour is not so classed, I'll have to think of some other speech act to get them to stop. In neither case does the speech act have no functional element. It's all functional element. there's nothing else to language apart from its function.
Quoting Pfhorrest
As above, it's demonstrably wrong to assert that labelling something has no normative force.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't agree that that's what 'ought' generally means. We have many uses of 'ought' where we're referring to social conventions, for example, that the speaker might have no intention of causing to happen. "I ought to help, but I can't be bothered" is a perfectly understandable sentence.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You're begging the question. You claimed to be investigating moral language whilst having a premise which assumes all along what moral language is. What evidence do you have that moral language is universally (or even majoritatively) used this way?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't find that sentence remotely contradictory.
Beauty will save the world
If everyone of us were as beautiful as Delon, would we be philosophizing or enjoying our finite life instead
Can you explain? The way it sounds to me is that every individual always seeks to accommodate everyone else around them to the best of their understanding and ability. But that can't be true.
I understand that we are constantly construing the world in order to make sense of it. And since our world includes other people, we include them into our construals. This is indeed where ethics comes into play.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
This doesn't make sense to me. The preposterous notion that everyone at all times is "suffused with a sense of ethical primacy" isn't even the worst of it - let's grant that for the sake of an argument. The most confusing part is what I pointed out earlier: an attempt to construe moral valuation as an objective, deperspectivized view from nowhere. One is supposed to evaluate a situation from everyone's perspective, not just their own. If you disapprove of someone's actions, but that person (being "suffused with a sense of ethical primacy") takes the opposite stance, then your two positions cancel out and no one is either right or wrong! Whose construct is this? What does it have to do with how people actually think?
"The damned thing about life is that everybody has their reasons," said a character in Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game." True enough, and understanding other people's reasons certainly affects our judgement of their actions. But understanding, when it happens, doesn't displace moral valuation, much less replace one's valuation with someone else's.
Quoting Joshs
Let's take this in parts. How much does intent matter in assessing culpability? I am rather skeptical of your claim that some cultures don't grasp the concept of intent; or rather, I am skeptical of the relevance of this claim. Attributing intent is such a basic cognitive skill that it is not even specific to the human species. Whether one can articulate a concept of intent doesn't matter; what matters is being able to read it and act on it. But I take your point that the role of intent in assigning blame can vary, and that culture has a part in this.
Now, how does this observation relate to what I said?
Quoting SophistiCat
There is a fact of the matter that I am holding someone responsible for an action. How I came to this conclusion is no longer relevant - it already happened. Whether someone else in my place would have come to the same conclusion doesn't matter either. I am me, not someone else. I don't need to integrate over every mind in the history of the world before I conclude anything.
Quoting Joshs
This isn't remotely controversial. So what? A modest conclusion that such diversity of opinion may suggest, in the absence of any generally recognized moral truthmakers, is that there are no objective moral facts - only facts about moral attitudes. But that isn't an argument against anyone's moral attitude.
Quoting Joshs
Well, yes, it's a ridiculous position. But even in an imaginary world in which this was true, I don't see what difference this would make to the matter of assigning blame.
model is consistent with Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy or Albert Ellis' rational emotive therapy, in that each of these involves a predictive processing in which
interpretive schemes attempt to anticipate environmental-social events ? mismatches result in negative emotional responses such as depression, and the cognitive system can also produce distorted interpretations of environment input , which can result in ‘pathological’ forms of depression , etc.
That presumes that they care to avoid behavior that's labelled that way, which in turn is to assume that they are a relativist, who already thinks that whatever other people approve of is the thing they ought to do.
That's the general problem with all descriptivist accounts of moral semantics (NB that we're now off the topic of which states of affairs are good, and on to what it means to say that something is or isn't good). All you're ever stating is an "is", and letting your interlocutor supply their own "oughts" to combine with that. You never actually say anything about what you think actually ought to (or ought not) be, you only ever inform your interlocutor of what you think that thing is, and let them do with that information whatever they will.
The general rebuttal to all accounts of this type is G.E. Moore's Open Question Argument.
I explained why it would make a difference in assigning blame. The very definition of blame is inseparable from , and incoherent outside of the pragmatic use of the concept in terms of determining punishment or recompense, the types as well as what magnitude is propoetionate to the ‘ crime’. Gergen’s concept of blame in all these pragmatic respects is almost unrecognizable in relation to more tradition a notions of moral blame.
Quoting SophistiCat
It’s an argument against an individual’s general concept of blame ( not their application of the concept in a particular situation) in the same way that a new scientific paradigm is an argument against a scientific paradigm it purports to overthrow. General concepts of moral blame belong to eras of thought just as scientific paradigms do.
Yes, definitely. As Feldman Barrett says...
Basically, she's suggesting almost exactly what you posit, that CBT may have an effect on our priors in such a way as to make alternative predictive models more available in response to the usual interoceptive triggers. She goes on to demonstrate some confirmatory evidence for this...
So it seem likely that not only does the interoceptive inference approach predict the effectiveness of CBT, but it even predicts the situations in which it is less effective.
Why on earth would that be the case? If suggest to my colleague that we go to the cafe after work and he says "Yes", does that prove that my colleague only ever does things because I suggest them to him? Of course not, what a ridiculous thing to say - just when I though we were starting to have a decent conversation about your ideas you go and throw in this kind of rubbish. People take into account all sorts of factors in determining what they 'ought' to do, one of which might be whether that action is sanctioned or proscribed by the community one is acting in.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Those are the same thing. The meaning of a word is the use it is put to. In this case labelling certain behaviours or states of affairs. If you, alternatively, have some God-given source for the 'proper' meaning of words I'm sure we'd all be keen to know it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Informing someone of what 'is' can imply that it 'ought' to be depending on the context. again, you're importing your own very specific definition of 'ought' and assuming it applies to all contexts. If I say "Swearing in front of children is bad" I mean that you ought not do it, but the 'ought' in that case might mean any one of three different things depending on the context.
It might reflect my personal preference that you don't. That I would be happier without you doing so.
It might reflect my assumption that you want roughly the same ends as me and this behaviour is contrary to those ends. A purely pragmatic 'ought', like "You ought to use the right size spanner if you don't want to round the bolt heads".
It might reflect a warning that the society you're in does not condone that behaviour - given either out of kindness (to help them avoid recriminations) or as a method of correction (to make them fear recriminations).
Quoting Pfhorrest
This would be no different in any case if you informed them of your state of mind. That I have a state of mind wherein I think X is a state of affairs that would satisfy all our hedonic appetites is still an 'is'. It's making a declaration about my state of mind which is simply a fact about reality. They still then do whatever they will with that information.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't see how that's at all relevant here. Notwithstanding the sense/reference objection, I've just outlined how at least three different interpretations can be shown to the use of words like 'good' and 'ought', thus making any and all propositions of the form X is Good, merely translational between senses.
The point I'm trying to make is that there is an important kind of speech-act, often even if not necessarily always associated with moral/normative/ethical/prescriptive language, that the kind of speech-act you're equating all moral speech to does not perform. The earlier thread about this where we got sidelined talking about moral universalism was not even specifically about moral language, but about language more generally.
The key point of that thread was that there are a lot of different things that we can do with words than the thing we usually do with indicative assertions:
- One the one hand, rather than making a statement, we can ask a question; which is to say, rather than pushing some ideas or attitudes toward such ("opinions" as I broadly term them) from ourselves onto others, we can solicit them from others to ourselves.
- Additionally, rather than pushing our opinions onto others, i.e. rather than effectively telling them to think something (what I call "impression"), as assertions usually do, we can also merely show that we ourselves think something (what I call "expression"). (Or parallel in the case of questions instead of statements, rather than soliciting an opinion directly from someone in particular as in a usual direct question, we can merely show our own lack of clear opinion and openness to input from anyone, wondering aloud).
- And lastly, rather than pushing (or soliciting) opinions with mind-to-world fit, i.e. descriptive opinions, beliefs, we can also push (or solicit) opinions with world-to-mind fit, i.e. prescriptive opinions, intentions.
It is that function of impressing an intention that moral language in the way you would account for it would utterly fail to do. Some other positions in moral semantics, like expressivism, also fail on that point in different ways: expressivism would have it that we're only ever expressing our prescriptive opinions, never impressing them. On the other hand you would have it that moral language merely impresses a belief, describes something to someone, and then they take that belief or description and combine it with whatever intentions they already had, whatever prescriptions they already endorsed, to guide their actions. Which is something people totally do when given descriptive information like that, yes. But if you would have it that that is all that moral language ever does, you miss out on the function that is truly unique to moral language, and not found elsewhere: impressing intentions onto people. Prescriptivity.
That's the main thrust of the Open Question Argument. If you tell someone that something or another fits into the purely descriptive category "good", you're telling them to believe that the thing is in a category of things called "good things", but you're not at all telling them whether or not to intend for those things to be the case. If all you're doing is describing, then that always remains an open question: "am I to intend that this be the case, or not?"
It's really hard to find a way to even phrase that question without using any kind of moral language, because only moral language serves that linguistic purpose. Even that phrasing I just used, "am I to...?", is just an obscured way of phrasing "ought I...?" or "should I...?" Consider, although we can in a way impress intentions via commands, how would you ask a question to which the answer is to be a command, other than moral language? Your superior could tell just you “do this” or “do that”, without any “ought” or “should”, but if he hasn’t yet and you need him to direct you, what can you ask him besides “should/ought I do this or that?”
Furthermore: When someone asserts a descriptive opinion to you, tells you something supposedly about reality, it's not given that you definitely will believe the belief that they're pushing at you. The question of what makes such an assertion true is the question of when it is warranted/justified/correct/right to believe the thing they're trying to make you believe by asserting that; what are the truth-makers of such claims? That is a different question than the question of what it even is to make a descriptive assertion in the first place.
Likewise: When someone asserts a prescriptive opinion to you, tells you something supposedly about morality, it's not given that you definitely will intend the intention that they're pushing at you. The question of what makes such an assertion true is the question of when it is warranted/justified/correct/right to intend the thing they're trying to make you intend by asserting that; what are the truth-makers of such claims? That is a different question than the question of what it even is to make a prescriptive assertion in the first place.
Empirical realism is an answer to that question of what the truth-makers of descriptive claims are, i.e. when to believe the beliefs that other people push at you: when those beliefs satisfy all empirical experiences (sensations, observations, etc).
Likewise, my hedonic altruism you're always criticising is put forth as answer to that question of what the truth-makers of prescriptive claims are, i.e. when to intend the intentions that other people push at you (via moral assertions): when those intentions satisfy all hedonic experiences (appetites, pains, hungers, etc).
Seems in contradiction to
Quoting Pfhorrest
Claiming that there is a certain speech act is the same thing as making a claim about the meaning of a word. Speech acts are what words mean, there's nothing more to meaning that the act associated with utterance.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I gave an account of how it might impress an intention.
Saying that, for example, X is considered unacceptable by one's community might be a causal factor in the development of an intention in another person to avoid or proscribe X.
Saying that I intend X might be a causal factor in the development of an intention in another person to do X if they, for whatever reason, want to emulate or ingratiate themselves with me.
Saying that X will cause harm to some other might result in the development of an intention in another person to avoid X so that they avoid the empathetic pain associated with knowing about the pain of another.
All these are ways in which moral language, exactly as I described it, can result in intentions in another. I'm not seeing the distinction you're trying to make. It sounds like you're invoking some kind of mind-melding woo whereby intentions can get directly transferred without having to go through the beliefs and goals of the person listening. Elsewise any language is simply saying "I'm in this state of mind (fact about the world)", and the listener does with that what they will.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes you are. We usually intend for the things in the category 'good'. If I say my local is a 'great pub with a really warm and friendly atmosphere, welcoming staff and an excellent range of ales" are you seriously telling me that because what I've provided is merely a 'description' you remain confused as to whether you should go there or avoid it like the plague. We're social creature who share a world and a response to it, usually, we all hate getting hurt, we all dislike being abused, we all think Justin Bieber is shit... I only need to make a descriptive statement "Touching that hotplate hurts" and I can reasonably expect to have communicated the proscription "Don't touch that hotplate".
Quoting Pfhorrest
"What are my orders?", "What are the rules of this game?", "What is the man with the big gun telling me to do?"
Quoting Pfhorrest
You can't tell someone when to intend something. No facts or reasoning can get someone to intend something from scratch. People respond to affects (leaving aside the predictive feedback loops for a minute) by altering their environment to raise/lower the perceived source of the affect to a more tolerable level. People in turn respond to their environment by raising or lowering the their tolerable levels of affect to more closely match those which are available. You cannot simply tell someone that they ought to desire a certain target tolerable level and expect it to cause such a change. It won't. Tolerable levels of affect are not decided by the rational brain (in that instance), they are a biological consequence of the endocrine system. So all you're left with is the method by which they meet those target levels (and changes to the environment to encourage new target levels in the long term, which may include speech acts). Making a case that behaviour X will not meet those targets in the way the person thinks is a moral argument, but it remains a descriptive one (about the processes of the world consequent to behaviour X). Implying that there's a type of language which somehow directly impresses an intention on another is just woo, there's no support for such a notion in any of the literature I've read.
I was being a little underhanded there, setting up CBT for critique. Now, this may not apply to Barrett’s model, but let’s see. The aspect of CBT that I find problematic is the assumption that the brain’s conceptual representations of the world can ‘distort’ environmental cues. Le me explain why that is an issue for me.
(BTW, I must confess I found it more fun to read this by Andy Clark than the Barrett piece:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/andy_clark-perception-as-controlled-hallucination
Would you agree that Clark and Barrett are on the same page concerning Bayesian theory and predictive processing? )
It seems to me that Barrett’s and Clark’s ideas can be placed on spectrum of psychological-philosophical theorization with S-R theory at one extreme and the phenomenology of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger at the other extreme.
As Barrett takes pains to mention, predictive
processing avoids the reductionism of S-R theory by being action ( the brain is always active, even when not engaged with outside stimuli) and interaction oriented , and by avoiding treating affectivity as located in fixed neurological contents.
But let’s compare Barrett’s approach with that of George Kelly’ s personal construct theory.
One of the most striking features of Kelly's theory is his declaration that “the classical threefold division of psychology into cognition, affection, and conation has been completely abandoned in the psychology of personal constructs. “(Kelly 1955) .It is not that affect, emotion and intention vanish from personal construct theory , but rather that Kelly finds a way to integrate the aspects of behavior these terms point to.
Like Barrett, for Kelly a person’s psychological
system is organized hierarchically and experiencing oriented toward anticipation of events. “In some respects validation in personal construct theory takes the place of reinforcement, although it is a construct of quite a different order, Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, whereas in conventional theory reinforcement is a value property attributed to an event.
Whereas Barret organizes the cognitive apparatus in terms of concepts , Kelly’s system is based on the construct, a differential dimension. of appraisal that organizes events in terms of the contextually relevant ways they are like aspects of one’s system and differ from other aspects. So unlike a dictionary definition of a word concept, which assumes a non-Wittgensteinian way in which a word refers to a picture-like meaning, a construct expresses a meaning idiosyncratic to each person’s construction system, as a well as reflecting contextual specificity.
So far Kelly doesn’t sound appreciably different from Barrett or Clark , but here is where I find the crucial difference . For Kelly the construct system is functionally integral , operating at all times holistically as a gestalt.
Furthermore , every event I construe doesn’t just engage my system to attempt to match internal
pattern with external (‘bottom up’) input, every event is a change in my system to accommodate what is always a unique feature of that input. As Piaget would say, no matter how familiar a perceptual or conceptual event , to assimilate it it to accomodate one’s system to it. and therefore in some small fashion one’s entire network of constructs must be subtly realigned and expanded.
So to experience is always to change o e’s
entire
system in an integral fashion. The second crucial point is that construing is not pattern matching. Pattern matching or predictiveprocessing suggests that one’s system first apprehends at some incipient or peripheral level a bottom up environmental pattern , and then makes a decision concerning its fit or lack of fit with an internally generated pattern.
But for Kelly as far as the construct system is concerned there is no external world ( no botto
up) that can be isolated from the construct system’s expectations. An event is both a discovery and an invention , not because the system ‘fills in’ what is out there with its own content , but because there is no aspect of what my system experiences that is the same everyone, no world of stimuli essentially identical for every one but only processed differently, no ‘out there’ that is not co-constituted as a referential-differential.
To his credit , Clark acknowledges this phenomenological insight :
“In a striking image, Merleau-Ponty then compares the active organism to a keyboard which moves itself around so as to offer different keys to the “in itself
monotonous action of an external hammer” (op cit)12. The message that the world ‘types onto the perceiver’ is thus largely created (or so the image suggests) by the
nature and action of the perceiver herself: the way she offers herself to the world. The upshot, according to Varela et al (1991, p. 174) is that “the organism and
environment [are] bound together in reciprocal specification and selection
When Wittgenstein describes how words are understood as contextual senses( there is no matching of external pattern with internal model but a creative invention) , this captures the way an event is construed. Does this mean anything goes? Absolutely not. Even though a construed event is my own personal ‘invention’ it is designed to anticipate as effectively as possible what is to come next.
So even though the very definition of what an event is is unique to the organizational aspects of my own system , that event can surprise , disappoint my expectations.
This is where affectivity comes into play for Kelly. I have said that every time we construe an event we experience the new event as not only unique to our own system , but as varying in how effectively I can make sense of it , integrate it with what I already know on some dimension of similarity , recognizability and familiarity. These are the organizational dynamics that represent what we call affect or feeling or emotion. A event that cannot be effectively assimilated is essentially the impoverishment of meaning , not simply an extant externally defined pattern that my system doesn’t ‘march itself to’, but a chaos of near meaninglessness. For Kelly affects like fear and threat are my awareness that an impending event lies partly outside the range of my system. Anxiety is the current experience of chaos and confusion due to the impermeability of my construct system to experience confronting me. The kicker here is that validation or invalidation , the experience of coherence or chaos , fulfillment or disappointment, doesn’t have to be filtered and processed through some bodily mechanics in order to arrive at ‘feeling’, ‘affect’ and ‘ emotion’. The organizational integrity of my construing of events , how effectively and assimilatively they make sense to me moment to moment, just IS affectivity, before any feedback from a homuncular bodily apparatus.
This idea of feeling as bodily states harks back to a long-standing Western tradition connecting affect, feeling and emotion with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.
For Kelly, these dichotomous features: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as belonging to interacting states of being; they are instead the inseparable features of a unitary differential structure of transition, otherwise known as a construct. In personal construct theory, there are no self-inhering entities, neither in the guise of affects nor intended objects.
Compared to where Kelly’s model sits on the spectrum ,
Barrett’s appears to make interaction secondary to in-itself content. The sense-making system she offers is filled with terms like sensory data, standard/input mismatch, energy emitting events, registration of discrepancy, and feedback from physiological arousal reactions, which refer to patterns which exist discretely as themselves first and only secondarily interact with other internal and external patterns. Alllostasis conveys this priority of state over transformative , anticipatory interaction, since anticipation is just a means to an end , that end being alloatasis by and darwinian adaptive survival.
The lesson that a comparison of Kelly and Barrett may teach ( imho) is that when dispositions to act and acts themselves, being and becoming, feeling and intention, state and function, body and mind are treated as separate moments, then their relations are rendered secondary and arbitrary, requiring extrinsic causations to piece them together. As DeJaegher says “ first we carve nature up at artificial joints – we split mind and body apart – and then we need to fasten the two together again, a task for which the notion of embodiment is, according to Sheets-Johnstone's assessment, used as a kind of glue . But glueing the two back together does not bring back the original ‘‘integrity and nature of the whole”“ (De Jaegher 2009, Sheets-Johnstone ,in press).
Specifically with regard to affectivity and emotion , I get the sense that for Barrett , one could hypothetically( or at least imagine doing so ) sever the communication between regions of the brain-body dealing with feeling and those which purportedly don’t , and still be able to talk coherently about a cognitive system.
For Kelly , imagining intention or cognition or perception without feeling is as non- sensical as talking about experience without time, because they are not interacting systems but inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon.
I suspect we were done the minute I challenged your ego.
I was differentiating there between a priori and a posteriori questions about language. You're talking about what particular words that particular people actually say are meant by them to do or have the effect of doing. I'm talking about what general kinds of things we might want to do with our words. I said "there is a kind of speech act" as in there is a kind of thing that we could want to do with our words, not that any particular words are meant by any particular person to do that.
Quoting Isaac
It can result in the other forming new instrumental intentions toward the fulfillment of intentions that they already have, sure. But it never even tries to simply tell someone to intend something.
It’s like if you never made any direct claims of facts, but instead only said what various sets of people believe, or what the implications of certain beliefs would be if one were to believe those things, but never actually said “x is the case”. You would still be saying things that would indirectly influence what your audience believes, but you would be conspicuously avoiding ever actually claiming yourself that something is true.
If you spoke that way, there would always be an open question of whether the belief you’re talking about is true or not: “Yes, I get that it’s widely believed, and its negation would imply things that I find counter-intuitive, etc, but is it actually true or not?”
Quoting Isaac
It's not about any wooish direct transfer, but it is about directness in our speech-acts. As just described above, it would be weirdly evasive to never just straightforwardly say anything to the effect of "X is the case", but rather only talk peripherally about people's thoughts on or the implications of X.
It's similarly evasive of taking a prescriptive stance, of making a direct prescriptive statement, if all you ever mean by "ought" or "good", etc, is something about people's thoughts on or the implications of some X, and never anything straightforwardly to the effect of "make X the case".
Quoting Isaac
You can -- that's what commands do -- it just won't necessarily be effective. The person does always have a choice on whether or not to intend what you tell them to, but you can still directly tell them to make something so, rather than just talking around it.
Similarly, when you tell someone that something is the case, that doesn't force them to believe it. They still have a choice on whether or not to believe what you tell them. But making direct assertions of facts rather than talking around the issue is still a normal thing to do with language.
And so is making direct prescriptive / normative / moral / ethical assertions, to the effect of "make this so", rather than anything like "this is unpopular" or such.
Broadly, yes. I'm sure there are nuances of difference, bur Clarke references Barrett's work favourably, so I expect they're roughly in agreement.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not sure how you see this as being any different from the active inference concept. Have you read something suggesting proponents of active inference consider it to act non-holistically, or only at some times?
Quoting Joshs
Then what is it we're predicting? IF there are no states outside of our Markov blanket then we need not predict the causes of the internal states, we simply know them? In order for prediction to have any meaning we have to have hidden states.
Quoting Joshs
I don't see how this would be possible without an external source of surprise.
Quoting Joshs
I think this is good. I don't see it contradicting active inference approaches though. This may well be one of the responses to sensory data which doesn't match any model we have of it. But 'fear' and 'anxiety' are constructed emotions, the actual source affects are before those interpreted labels and they vary quite a lot - this much can be proven empirically - so whilst I think this is a really good way of describing many of our experiences of fear and anxiety, it's doubtful that this represents a definition of those states.
Quoting Joshs
This you'd have to support with some neurological evidence because as it stands it flies in the face of everything we've seen so far which indicates that these 'emotions' are 100% associated with endocrine activity.
Quoting Joshs
Not just hypothetically, no. We can literally sever certain connections between brain and body and get pretty much the results we'd expect from our model of hidden state prediction. If you're interested I can drag out some papers on experiments of exactly that sort come Monday, but basically we've already thought that this would need to be done to prove the model, we've done it, and the model works as expected.
Yes, I get that. My point was unless you're just making stuff u[ out of thin air you wouldn't be able to say that such speech acts exists without saying that the actual words (the ones you must have heard being used as your empirical evidence for this claim) have that meaning. Thus you're making a claim about the meaning of certain words - the one you heard such as to give you this impression of certain speech acts existing.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No one could answer that question with the meaning of 'true' you're implying. The only way they could possibly answer it is with the meaning of 'true' as in "I believe it strongly". If they were to answer it using the meaning of 'true' as in 'actually is the case', they'd have to say "I don't know". Again you're failing to see how the different meaning of words in different contexts affect what is meant.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again, these are just expressions, they don't literally mean the words used, any more than "That's not my cup of tea" literally means anything about tea.
What is meant by a speech act is determined by what the speech act does, not the words or the grammar constituting it. To claim the latter has the tail wagging the dog (and I don't mean anything about tails or dogs here).
So a command is no different in type to a statement of fact. "I'd like you to turn around" and "Turn around!" are both just ways of getting a person to turn around by giving them facts about your state of mind, your preferences toward their actions. The latter is simply communicating a change in either degree, or authority, or urgency depending on the context.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It won't ever be effective. It literally cannot be done. There's zero neurological support for a direct connection between speech interpretation and intent. You can only provide data which is modelled and used to inform intent.
If you want to construct an entirely new model of his intent works then by all means do so, but don't expect anyone to take it seriously unless you submit it to the same empirical challenge that all the other competing models have submitted themselves to.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Notwithstanding all the above, let's assume there's at least a form of speech act where "X is good" means to get one's audience directly to will X. How does that make "X is good" anything like an objective statement. If anything it detracts from objectivity. "X is the case" is less persuasive of objective truth than "lots of very clever scientists believe X is the case after having tested the matter thoroughly".
If you're going so far as to claim this, that there's is no meaningful, pragmatic difference between indicative and imperative sentences, just some superficial grammatical difference, then I don't think there's any hope for progress in this discussion. You seem to live in a different world than I do.
I didn't claim there was no difference, only that the difference was not categorical, but one of degree, or of conveying additional information (such as urgency, or the authority of the speaker). I thought I'd made that fairly clear.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That much has been evident right from the start, but that's the very reason why I continue. I want to know how you construct and defend these positions you proclaim.
That difference doesn't seem to me (in my experience speaking and listening to people in my native English for a handful of decades) to be made by the grammatical mood, but by other pragmatic aspects of the speech act. One could bark an indicative sentence like a drill sergeant would bark a command to convey urgency or authority on a matter of fact, and one could softly phrase an imperative sentence to give a gentle suggestion. Shouting "X is wrong!" at someone has the same pragmatic effect as shouting "Don't do X!" at someone, but gently saying "you shouldn't do X" has the same pragmatic effect as the softly-put imperative.
And all four of those, the two different tones of imperative and the two different tones of moral sentence, have something in common that differentiates them from descriptive sentences, whether those descriptive sentences are barked with authority or urgency, or spoken gently: the imperatives and moral sentences are all pushing or at least nudging the listener to do something, directly, while descriptions at most point out things that the listener might want to take into account when deciding what to do, and might even be spoken or received without any behavior-guiding implications at all.
Plain indicative statements, regardless of tone, do imply at least some level of authority assumed on the part of the speaker. If I tell you just "X is the case", I must expect that there's some chance you will believe me at my word. Likewise if you ask me "is X the case?", you're showing some willingness to take me at my word. If that trust isn't there, then maybe I'll tell you (or you'll ask me to tell you) other things to make an argument to back up that statement, like who else of what status believes it and what its implications are and what other things have implications about it, etc, but merely making the statement doesn't mean the exact same thing as all those things I might tell you to back up the statement.
Likewise with moral statements, and imperatives, exhortatives, etc, things in this intention-impressing category of speech acts, rather than the belief-impressing category in the paragraph above. If I tell you "you should do X", or "do X", or "O would that you did X", or anything like that, I must expect that there's some chance that you would do as I say just because I said it. Conversely, if you ask me "should I do X?", you're showing some willingness to do what I say to do. If that trust isn't there, I could give (or you could ask for) an argument why you should, but just saying "you should" or similar doesn't simply mean the exact thing as the other things I might tell you to argue why you should, like "most people will laud you for doing so", or anything like that.
How? That's the question I don't seem to be able to get a clear answer to. What is the neurological ( or psychological if you prefer) mechanism by which one supposes this push to take place?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Why would I? I don't mean this as a rhetorical question, I mean it literally by way of hopefully getting at the difference here. What thought process would lead me to believe X is the case directly as a result of you saying "X is the case"?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again, why? Same as above. What is the thought process you image taking place between my hearing your words "Do X" and my forming an intent to do X?
If I ask you a technical question about psychology, that I genuinely have no idea of an answer to, I expect that you can give me a straightforward answer. E.g., if I didn’t already know this, I could ask “what does the parasympathetic nervous system do?”, and you could just say “it’s responsible for rest and digestion”, and since I trust that you know what you’re talking about on that topic, I would believe you. I’d only believe you because I imagine that you have seen, and been taught by many people who have seen, much empirical evidence of that, and if I didn’t trust your answer I could ask you to tell me how you know it (and then I’d have to trust that your supporting claims are true)... but the initial claim itself doesn’t mean the same thing as that argument you might be able to give to back it up. It just means what it says on the surface, it’s just an assertion of your belief at me, pushing me to believe the same.
Likewise if you tell me to do something, or that something should be, or that something is good. I read that as an assertion of your intentions at me, pushing me to intend the same. If I trust you I might just do what you say. Otherwise I might ask “why?” and you could try to give an argument to back that up. But the initial assertion doesn’t just mean the same thing as that argument you might give to support it.
OK, so what do you think trust is, psychologically? We have this input (the words "Do X") and an output (an intent to do X). How does trust get us from one to the other without importing any descriptive facts? As I see it we've still got [A says "Do X"] and [A is a trustworthy expert in X-types-of-thing]. Those still seem to be two descriptive facts about the world which I might use together with my desire (not to get these types of thing wrong), to arrive at the pragmatic conclusion to intend X. Which is exactly the description you rejected (supply of facts for me to do with what I will).
As a side issue, I'd also like to know how someone might squire the status of trust within the field of these ethical pronouncements. You've laid out quite clearly why we might trust someone in their descriptive statements, but you left out the equivalent in your paragraph on proscriptive statements. Everything else you mirrored sentence-for-sentence, but you left that out, why?
That A intends for me to do X (i.e. "thinks that I should do X"), and that A is a person I expect to have the right idea of what I should do, constitute a reason why I could decide that I should do X / intend to do X, but it doesn't say what it means to think that I should do X.
Consider for comparison again the purely descriptive case. A tells me that X is the case, and A is a person I expect (for whatever reason) to be right about whether or not things are the case, so I decide to take his word on it that X is the case. But my thinking "X is the case" doesn't flesh out to my thinking "A thinks X is the case", which in turn would then have to flesh out to "A thinks that A thinks that A thinks that A thinks that [...ad infinitum...] X is the case". In telling me that X is the case, A both demonstrates his belief, and basically tells me to believe it as well, but the content of his belief, or mine if I accept what he says, isn't just that he believes it, nor is it any of the reasons there might be to believe it: the content of the belief is the state of affairs it's about, and the attitude to treat that state of affairs as a depiction of how the world is.
Back in the prescriptive case again, when A commands or exhorts me to make X the case, and A is a person I expect (for whatever reason) to be right about whether or not things should be the case, I might decide to take his word on it that X should be the case, i.e. to adopt the intention to make X the case. But my thinking "X should be the case" doesn't flesh out to my thinking "A thinks X should be the case", which in turn would then have to flesh out to "A thinks that A thinks that A thinks that A thinks that [...ad infinitum...] X should be the case". In telling me that X should be the case, A both demonstrates his intention, and basically tells me to intend it it as well, but the content of his intention, or mine if I accept what he says, isn't just that he intends it, nor is it any of the reasons there might be to intend it: the content of the intention is the state of affairs it's about, and the attitude to treat that state of affairs as a blueprint of how the world should be.
Quoting Isaac
Because that's the separate question of why or why not to accept that something ought or ought not be the case, i.e. when to do as commanded or exhorted, which is where we usually get hung up, so I didn't want to open up that rabbit hole for us to go down again yet, until we've settled this question of whether or not the contents of moral claims, commands, exhortations, intentions, "moral beliefs", etc, are just descriptions of other people's states of minds, or what.
Even if I got you to completely agree on this topic that saying that something is good, or that it ought to be the case, is basically the same thing as commanding or exhorting that it be the case, and that all of those speech-acts are not just describing to someone else what you (or someone else) think, but trying to make them think the same thing as you, where the thing that you think is not in turn just a description of what other people think, but a different kind of thought entirely from a description of a state of affairs, rather it's a prescription of a state of affairs... even if we were 100% in agreement on all that, there would still remain the question of when (and why) someone on the other end of such a speech-act should go along with it, should agree with what someone tells them ought to be.
There's the same distinction in purely descriptive speech-acts too. If, as I reckon it, telling someone that X is the case is basically trying to get them to believe that X is the case, and even if you agree with me that that's what descriptive speech-acts are doing, there still remains the question of when (and why) to believe what you're told.
It's basically the distinction between:
1) what it even is to think that something is the case, vs to think that something ought to be the case,
vs
2) what would be good reasons to think one of those things or the other.
My answer to the first type of question is basically that:
- to think something is the case is to have an "idea", a mental "picture", not just a simple 2D visual picture but a complex immersive multisensory "picture", that you are treating as a depiction of the world;
- while to think that something ought to be the case is to have a similar such "idea", or mental "picture", that you are treating as a blueprint for the world.
My answer to when and why to accept those kinds of attitudes toward various ideas is:
- in the first case, if you can "walk around" the idea in your mind and examine it from all different perspectives and from every perspective it consistently matches the sensations you've had of the world, as well as any that you personally haven't replicated but trust others' reports that they have had;
- and in the second case, if you can "walk around" that idea in your mind and examine it from all different perspectives and from every perspective it consistently matches your appetites, as well as any that you personally haven't replicated but trust others' reports that they have had.
Quoting Isaac
Kelly’s model isn’t dealing with causes but intentional motivations (construals). And he isn’t dealing with states but processes of transformation. And he isn’t dealing with anything simply ‘internal’ because there is never simply an internal state apart from its exposure to, interaction with and transformation by an outside. Just because it doesn’t make sense to talk about a external world independent of one’s expectation of it doesn’t mean that the outside which the system encounters as an event is nothing but that anticipation.It is an external source of surprise, but it is never fully independent of that anticipation. It is a surprise RELATIVE TO and partially formed and defined by my expectation, so it is always unique to my system.
This what the autopoietic and enactivist concept of structural coupling between organism and environment implies.
We don’t need ‘hidden states’ in order to have an anticipatory system. Our system which participates in the formation of construals is one pole( the subjective pole) of the subject-object dynamic but it can’t be said to ever exist apart from or independent of this indissociable interaction. Nothing takes place simply ‘inside’ such a brain-body-environment system but always between it and environment.
Clark discussed this difference between predictive processing and enactive models influenced by phenomenology.
“ There remains, however, at least one famously vexed issue upon which PP and the (at least if history is any guide) seem doomed to disagree. That is the issue of ‘internal representation’. Thus Varela et al are explicit that, on the enactivist conception “cognition is no longer seen as problem solving on the basis of representations” (op cit p.205). PP, however, deals extensively in internal
models – rich, frugal, and all points in-between - whose role is to control action by predicting complex plays of sensory data. This, the enactivist might fear, is where
our promising story about neural processing breaks bad. Why not simply ditch the talk of inner models and internal representations and stay on the true path of
enactivist virtue.”
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/82337/1/SpindelRPP2march17%202.pdf
Clark proceeded to attempt to show how , even though pp relies on the notion of internal representation it somehow evades enactivism’s critique. It seems to me , though, that Clark isnt fully grasping the enactivist argument about what it means for a psychological system to be fully embedded in a world, and so falls back on a Cartesian computationalism of inner processes.
Quoting Isaac
I have no doubt these emotions are associated with endocrine activity. That doesn’t prove a specific pattern of causation though , merely association. And the central question is, exactly what from a phenomenological experiential vantage is the endocrine activity contributing to the meaning for us of something like an emotion?
This depends to a profound extent on how we tease out the aspect of emotion that includes involves cognitive appraisal from that which supposedly acts outside of appraisal.
Quoting Isaac
I’m sure the model works magnificently , but then that’s what we expect of our models. Kelly once wrote that one should ‘t wait until a scientific model has been disproved in order to search for a better one. The point he was making is that many different empirical accounts of a phenomenon can all ‘work’ , that is, satisfy predictive hypotheses. But what it means for a model
to work predictively can vary widely in terms of how arbitrary the interrelationships which the model is designed to describe are assumed to be.
That is why lots of different accounts can describe the same anatomical and functional neural data.
Because we are structurally couples with our world, there is no ‘way in which things really are’ that constrains our accounts, only pragmatically more or less intricate and interrelational ways of describing the ‘same’ phenomenon.
But let me ask you this. If we sever certain connections between brain and body , can we eliminate certain kinds of emotion? Could we hypothetically eliminate all kinds of emotion ? If so, given me an example of what it would be like to have a conversation with someone in this situation.
Describe for me what someone would sound like, how they would be motivated , what their words would ‘mean’ to them without emotion, what you think meaning without emotion could possibly be like.
Right. But I didn't ask that. This and the following long-winded explanation of it have nothing whatsoever to do with my question, so either your reading comprehension is terrible or you're avoiding it for some reason. I asked how 'trusting A' caused me to intend X when A says "Do X" without my simply drawing a conclusion from descriptive facts [A has said "Do X"] and [A is knowledgeable in this area].
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, I agree. Which is why I'm trying to get you to explain to me how their deciding to do so is not just a pragmatic decision based on descriptive facts (and their own desire/intent). You're claiming that the speech act "Do X" does something more than simply communicate the fact about the speaker's state of mind, that it somehow communicates something more. I'm asking what that more is and by what mechanism is affects my intent.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't agree that this encompasses all that there is to thinking something ought to be the case - and I can present a wealth of cognitive science to prove that, if you're interested. But I can agree that this might sometimes be what it means to think that something 'ought' to be the case.
But that's utterly irrelevant to the discussion about moral speech acts because they are about the method by which my having a blueprint caused you to have a similar blueprint without simply presenting you a set of descriptive fact. You've invoked some other magic essence I somehow transfer in my speech act which is not a descriptive fact but which nonetheless somehow might get you to adjust your blueprint to more closely match mine. I'm asking what that thing is and how it works.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I completely agree, this is something you could do. But
a) it would not, by that method, be able to effect your desires beyond their physiological boundaries - the frontal cortices simply don't have that level of control over the endocrine system, it's not physiologically possible. It's like saying that if you thought it was a good idea for your heart to stop beating, or for serotonin to no longer act as neurotransmitter you could just think it and make it so. You can't.
b) The fact that I could do this has absolutely no bearing on whether I should do this, nor on whether moral language actually is trying to make me do this in common use.
Then it is not an external source of surprise. Variables outside the Markov blanket are defined by that property. Anything which is not independent of that variables in question in the direction we're concerned about is inside the Markov blanket. You cannot have surprise if nothing is outside of that blanket (it's a fully knowable system), so you need hidden states. It doesn't matter how far you push them back, the boundary (the edge of the Markov blanket) is the edge of the system.
Quoting Joshs
The fact that you haven't read the research on this is not that same thing as the central question remaining. It may remain to you. To most neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists it doesn't remain because they've read the vast acres of research which has gone into resolving that exact question. I realise that there seems to be some great difficulty among lay philosophers to grasp this point, but scientists are not idiots, they too can think "It might be that these things are just correlated, not causally related" It's not genius-level revelation, it's a basic realisation anyone remotely intelligent would have, act on and test. Which is why that possibility has already been had, acted on and tested. That's basically what the decades of study in the field have been doing.
Quoting Joshs
What predictive hypothesis has Kelly's model made and had empirically supported. If you can supply the papers I'd be interested to read them.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. Without a doubt. Although no study to date has knocked out all emotional states, all the evidence from lesion studies seems to indicate that it is theoretically possible although it would require hundreds, if not thousands of lesions.
Quoting Joshs
Tourette's, echolalia, Wernicke's aphasia induced logorrhea, Progressive Jargon Aphasia...
Quoting Joshs
There's no simple single answer to any of that.
Motivation can occur by a single neurotransmitter. Adjusting the serotonin levels in flatworms gets them to behave with different apparent motivations than untreated flatworms in the same environment, and they don't even have a brain, so motivation sensu lato is certainly not emotion-driven.
Words 'mean' what they do, so I would imagine if someone learned that the word 'cup' brought them a cup then that's what the word would 'mean' to them. A simple computer could do this. again, I don't see how even a brain would be required, let alone emotion.
The words that I emphasized in that response were supposed to draw attention to how I'm not disputing that those descriptive facts -- NB though that they are descriptive facts about prescriptive opinions -- can, as you're saying, be reason to adopt the same prescriptive opinion that A has. I'm not disputing that. I'm saying it's beside the point, which is about the meaning of that prescriptive opinion that A holds, which you also might choose to adopt because of your trust in A.
There's a descriptive fact that A holds an opinion (that you should do X), and a descriptive fact that A is a reliable source (on what you should do), and on those grounds you may conclude that A's opinion (that you should do X) is correct, and so you yourself adopt that opinion (that you should do X). That's all fine and dandy.
But what does it mean to think (or say) that you should do X? What is the content of A's opinion that you have now adopted? It can't just be that A thinks that you should do X, because then you never get to the "you should" part through the infinite regress of "A thinks that A thinks that A thinks..." that would erupt if that were really the content of A's opinion about what you should do.
Quoting Isaac
Not so. I think that all assertions only communicate the speaker's state of mind. "X is the case" only communicates the speaker's belief that X is the case. "Do X" or "you should do X" only communicates the speaker's intention for you to do X (and any other "X should be the case" only communicates the speaker's intention for X to be the case, which may not be directly translatable to an imperative command, but would still be translatable to an exhortation, like "O would that X were the case").
What I'm on about is that the content of that state of mind being communicated is not itself just a reference to a state of mind. The speaker's intention for you to do X is not just a belief that he believes that he believes [...ad infinitum...] that "you should do X", the meaning of which we'd never get to through that infinite regress. Nor is it a belief that someone else believes that a third person believes [...etc...] that "you should do X", because even if that's a finite chain of references you still end up never elaborating on what it means to think that "you should do X".
My position is that the content of the thought "you should do X", or more generally "X should be the case", "X is good", etc, just is the intention that you do X / that X be the case. No more special reference to the mental states of people need be made than with descriptive assertions, where that kind of reference only needs to be made at all in the context of understanding what it is to make an assertion of any kind. To assert that something is the case is to communicate a belief that X is the case, but the contents of that belief being communicated do not consist of references to someone's beliefs. Likewise to assert that something ought to be the case, or to command or exhort that it be so, is to communicate an intention for X to be the case, but the contents of that intention aren't references to anyone's states of mind.
Quoting Isaac
That's enough for me.
Quoting Isaac
Good thing I'm not claiming that to be the case then. This is an important aspect of my differentiation between desire and intention. It's exactly like the analogous differentiation between perception and belief. You can perceive a pond of water in the desert, but because you know about mirages, disbelieve that there is actually a pond of water in the desert -- but that doesn't make you stop perceiving it. It still looks like there's a pond of water there, even though you have judged that perception to be incorrect.
Likewise, to have an intention, on my account, is to have a judgement about your desires, but that won't necessarily force them to change. If for some strange reason you thought your heart ought to stop beating, i.e. if you intended for your heart to stop beating, of course that wouldn't make that happen as though by magic. That intention would just consist of your judgement that it shouldn't be happening, even though you're powerless to do anything about that.
Quoting Isaac
I don't think that moral language is necessarily trying to make you evaluate your intentions like that. I think moral language is just trying to make you intend something, period. That's my answer to the question about the meaning of moral claims.
This bit you're responding to here is instead my answer to a different question: when to accept moral claims. I've already given many variations on my argument for why that's a good answer to that question before, but earlier today I was thinking about this and I thought of a way of phrasing it that seemed like it might appeal to you:
You can't help but feel like having your appetites fulfilled is good. That's pretty much the definition of an appetite: something the fulfillment of which feels good. You can try to fight against it, just like you can try to disbelieve your senses if you're a modern Plato who thinks that real reality is some transcendent realm only accessible through navel-gazing and that the world you observe is just shadow puppets trying to distract you from that. But you're just going to be fighting yourself and you won't get anywhere that way; at the end of the day you have to live in the world of your senses whether you think they're telling you the truth or not, and you're equally beholden to your appetites whether you think they're good or not. (This is like your thing about the physiological limits you were just saying above, which is why I thought you'd appreciate this approach).
And there can be literally no sound reason to think that either the truth or the good are somehow transcendent of experience like that: you couldn't learn that they were like that through experience, a posteriori, and a priori reasoning can't positively prove anything, only disprove things through contradiction. So you're stuck with no sound reason to ever think that anything is either true or good... other than that you can't help it that some things look true, and some things feel good, no matter how hard you try to tell yourself that those experiences are leading you astray.
That's why phenomenalism (empiricism plus hedonism).
And other people are all stuck in that same situation as you, except from their different perspectives, so things look and feel different to them. If you're trying to talk with other people to sort out which of all your differing thoughts and feelings about what's true/false or good/bad are the correct thoughts or feelings, you could just ignore everyone whose opinions disagree with yours, but that'll never get you anywhere toward agreement. Or you could instead look at each other's reasons for thinking and feeling the way you all do -- those experiences you're each stuck with as the only things you have to go on, as above -- and try to put together some picture that's consistent with all of those. That has a chance of reaching agreement, if you can figure out which picture fits that bill.
That's why universalism (realism, or anti-solipsism, plus altruism, or anti-egotism).
Opinions don't have meanings, their just not the sort of thing it would make any sense to ascribe a meaning to. Words have meanings. Art has meanings, even actions sometimes have a meaning. Opinions don't.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Another previously hidden crux of difference. It 'means' a completely and utterly different thing to think something than it does to say something.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It's all starting to fall into place now. Let me guess, you've either never read Wittgenstein or were unmoved by his arguments, yes?
Words don't transfer the contents of a state of mind. They do things. When I speak words to you it is with intention that they have some effect on you, not that they faithfully carry the contents of by state of mind like some binary code. It would be categorically impossible for them to do s because if they did you wouldn't know what they meant. It simply doesn't make sense to talk about words transferring anything.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You've either mixed subject here or this doesn't make sense. The thought "you should do X" seems to be referring to a second person, like "John should do X", but then you say it is equivalent to having the intention. One cannot have an intention for another. I cannot intend for John to do something. I can only only hope or strive to get john to do something. It doesn't make any sense at all for me to intend for him to, I don't control him.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. To assert that something is the case is to act on a belief that it is, not to communicate it. Your audience may or may not adopt that belief. all you do is tell them that you have such a belief. you can do no more, your words don't magically contain the belief, to be injected into your audience's ear.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I can go along with all that you've said above this, and I think I understand why we disagree as to the function of moral language (you either haven't heard of or disagree with things like speech act theory and meaning as use)...but the above is also another, separate area of disagreement. I think you just don't understand how people form beliefs. It's not a field in which evidence is very robust, so I'm not going be as assertive as I might be with neuroscience, but it is the case that almost all the (weak) evidence we have collected to date tells us that humans do not form beliefs via the process you outline here, so your assertion that it is the best of the available methods is as wrong as such assertions can ever be in this pseudo-scientific area.
People do not assess their own reasons for thinking and feeling the way they do in a consistent manner, and they do not do so outside of influences like the very fact that you're speaking to them about it. You do not judge their given reason in a consistent manner, nor is that judgement unaffected by outside influences such as your opinion of the person's social status. Basically, any such assessment is unlikely to yield anything other than the conclusion you wanted it to yield at the start, you'll simply interpret all the evidence you thus gain in a way that supports your initial feelings. I'd be very surprised if, after some global effort to do exactly this, a single person changed their behaviour as a result, certainly no large number would.
The trouble is desires and affects are not at all like perceptions and sensory inputs when it comes to social interaction. I already expect other people to see and hear the same things I do. It's hard-wired into my brain to expect that. so when I use their judgements as to what's out there to inform mine, I'm doing so according to a paradigm which is deeply embedded in my psychology. There's no such equivalent with desires and affects. I don't expect other people to have the same physiological state as me, so I've no reason at all to trust their judgement on it, we're not sharing our desires (judgements as to the cause of our affects), we are sharing our perceptions (judgements as to the causes of our sensory inputs).
We expect to be pleased and displeased by different things. We do not expect to see and hear a different reality. To the extent we are pleased and displeased by the same things, then I think there is some ground for ethical realism, but that's basically ethical naturalism. the argument goes "I have very strong evidence that you will feel better if you intend X so I advise you to do so".
In addition I think you're mistaken to imply that it is only at the level of affect that we can no longer easily intervene. We have hard-wired desires too. Many of the methods by which we think we'll most likely reach our target affect levels are either hard-wired from birth or are wired in very early childhood and practically impossible to budge later. In some cases this extends even to intentions (to use your terminology). It's this physiological reality which I think virtue ethics seeks to encapsulate.
Lastly, there are many intentions that are simply the result of society's mechanisms - emergent properties, and this is what the naturalism of people like Anscombe seeks to capture. You ought to pay the grocer after he delivers you potatoes, not because of any hedonic reason whatsoever, but because that's what 'ought' means in that culture. It means the position you're in after the grocer has delivered the potatoes. It's a function of culture, not of individual hedonic values.
Let me put that differently . Can a variable outside a markov blanket be defined by a property in an objective sense, the way we would define a physical stimulus in terms of its own properties, independent of its interaction with a specific organismic system?
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of structural coupling , but it specifies that the environment with which an organism interacts , including all of the outside variables that it can surprise an organism with, cannot be defined independently of the functioning of that organism.
Evan Thompson explains:
“ Whereas physical structures, such as a soap bubble, obtain equilibrium in relation to actual physical condi-
tions of force and pressure, living systems seek equilibrium, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “with respect to conditions which are only virtual and which the system itself brings into existence; when the [system] . . . executes a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes a proper milieu for itself.”
“ Thus, Merleau-Ponty says, whereas physical structures can be expressed by a law, living structures have to be comprehended in relation to norms: “each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium,”and every living being “modifies
its milieu according to the internal norms of its activity.”
“...autopoiesis (in a broad sense that includes adapativity) is the “self-production of an inside that also specifies an outside to which it is normatively related,” and thus that autopoiesis is best seen as the “dynamic co-emergence of interiority and exteriority.” “the (self) generation of an inside is ontologically prior to the dichotomy in- out. It is the inside that generates the asymmetry and it is in relation to this inside that an outside can be established.”
Do you agree with the above?
Quoting Isaac
Keep in mind that cognitive psychology is a broad tent, and there are many disagreements within different segments of the community. For instance , you may disagree with the concept of structural coupling as an alternative to a markov blanket, and with the idea that internal representations and a computational approach to models of affectivity and cognition are relics of a reductionist positivism that needs to be jettisoned. But if you do disagree, do you think most cognitive psychologists also disagree, based on ‘empirical evidence’? If so, you should also keep in mind where the embodied approach to cognition that researchers like Barrett embrace got its start. One of its key inspirations was the 1991 book, The Embodied Mind , co-written by Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, who happen to be leading the segment within the cognitivist community advocating for the changes in psychological modelling I’ve described.
Quoting Isaac
I can direct you to papers by enactivist researchers
like Francisco Varela , Matthew Ratcliffe and Shaun Gallagher on the role of disruption of existential feeling in depression and ptsd, pathologies of agency in schizophrenia, interaction models of autism that critique theory theory , and visual perception, among other topics. Quoting Isaac
These are not examples of selective disruption of affectivity, rather they involve an inseparable entanglement of affect and cognition. A better example would be one where feedback from the body was curtailed, leading to the absence of autonomic cues associated with emotion.
Quoting Isaac
Why would they care if the word brought them a cup? Because they wanted a cup. The aim and purpose and relevance of the cup is built into the meaning of the word in that context. It is not merely ‘this cup’ in some generic sense , but ‘ this cup that I need in order to accomplish some aim.’ All of that is implied in the use of the word in that instance. Even the most seemingly arbitrary, trivial and unmotivated cognitive activities belong to larger contexts of significance for us.
You said you agreed a psychological system functions as an integrated gestalt , but that implies that we always find ourselves in the midst of activities that matter to us for the sake of some purpose. Is this larger aim that word meanings imply and serve not affective? That is , are goals and desires ever devoid of affectivity? I guess that depends on how narrowly you want to define feeling, affect and emotion. For instance Kelly has a peculiar definition of anger. He says that it is a response to someone who disappoints us by violating an expectation we had of them, for instance when a spouse cheats on us. The anger is an attempt to coax or force them back to behaving the way we initially expected them to behave. So anger involves a two step process of assessment of a situation. First there is disappointment , and then the hope that I can get the other to return to my original expectation of them( mend their ways) .
Where do bodily states come into play in this model?
They are implied by the intentive direction of the anger. The clenching of my fist and other physiological changes are summoned in support of the needs of the situation based on my assessment of what need to be done. That is to say, these bodily preparatory behaviors are in service of and get their meaning from my anger construal of the situation.
What if the connection between my intentive experience and the bodily accompaniments of anger are severed by an injury? Patients have reported that they lose the normal ‘feeling’ of anger , but are these supportive boldily behaviors the core of what we mean by the emotion of anger?
Many have argued that what is left in this instance is merely a neutral , sterile intellectualized cognition devoid of feeling. But I would argue that almost all of what is essential in what we call feeling is already in this assessment, and all that has been lost is a certain bodily supportive energetics that aids in accomplishing the goals that the anger is directing us toward. Without the organized purposive assessment of the anger , all
that is left is an arbitrary concatenation of reflexes with no inherent meaning. I would make the same point concerning fear or sadness. Fear is not primarily the adrenaline surge and quickened reflexes. Theses are merely the peripheral supports in service of an intentional assessment of a situation as threatening. The core of the feeling is the assessment , not the adrenaline rush.
If your model defines emotion exclusively by reference to the peripheral reflexes and endocrine changes that accompany and serve the needs of affective assessments , then it will appear to you that emotion can be selectively eliminated from an experience without affecting the intentional meaning of situations.
But I argue that thinking this way about affect leaves you with a hollow shell of arbitrary reductive causal mechanisms and misses the heart of the matter.
Quoting Isaac
I think this is just another difference in our uses of language. When I talk about what it means to be of some opinion or another, I mean to talk about how to analyze the (phenomenological) state of mind of assenting to some proposition; which consequently is the same thing that that proposition means, since asserting that proposition is an attempt to get someone to adopt that same state of mind.
Quoting Isaac
I'm not claiming that the words magically transfer the actual mind-contents like you seem to think I am. I'm talking about the same thing you were talking about when you said that A telling you to do X only communicates that A wants you to do X. (And then I'm asking "what is it for A to want you to do X? It can't be just A thinking that A thinks that A thinks [...] that he wants you to do X"... etc).
My take on assertions of all kind, descriptive and prescriptive, is that they are trying to show the listener what attitudes toward what states of affairs the speaker holds, and pressure the listener to adopt those attitudes toward those states of affairs as well.
(NB that "an attitude toward a state of affairs" is how I analyze "opinion" generally, where beliefs and intentions are two broad types of such opinion, differentiated by the direction of fit in their respective attitudes).
Quoting Isaac
This sounds like a difference in our uses of language again. It sounds perfectly natural to my ear to speak either of desiring or intending to do something oneself, or desiring or intending that something be the case, including that someone else do something. I analyze the former into a subset of the latter, actually: to desire or intend to do something is to desire or intend that you be doing that thing.
I'm saying "desire or intend" here not to suggest that those are the same thing as I understand them, but because I understand their usage to be parallel in this way (either can be to or that), and I'm curious if your (apparent) understanding that intent can only be to, not that, is paralleled in your understanding of desire. I.e. as you understand the words, can you only "desire to" do something, not "desire that" something be the case?
Quoting Isaac
That's all I mean by "communicate" it. To convey to them what it is that you believe. And also, in the case of assertions (rather than merely expressions), to pressure them to believe likewise, though of course that's not going to magically force them to believe likewise.
And likewise with intentions as with beliefs. My view is that moral assertions convey to others what you intend to be the case (i.e. what you judge to be proper to desire to be the case), and pressure them to intend likewise.
Quoting Isaac
Well that's huge progress! :party: (No sarcasm, that makes me quite happy).
Quoting Isaac
My entire philosophy of language hinges entirely on speech act theory. And my epistemology of analytic a posteriori facts, i.e. facts about the meaning of words, is heavily about use as well. (More on this below).
Quoting Isaac
I don't see how you can infer from "it is not the case that humans tend to do this" to "it is not the case that humans should try to do this". That seemed to be the crux of our whole pattern of disagreement before, which I thought we had already cleared up earlier in this thread: that I'm not making claims about how people do actually think or behave, but advocating a way to try to think and behave.
Quoting Isaac
If this was true it would seem that science should be impossible. Yet I don't think you think science is impossible, do you? The scientific consensus can change, as people honestly consider new evidence and change what they believe in light of it, right?
Quoting Isaac
I'm glad you admit that we are pleased and displeased by the same things sometimes, so I don't have to argue that. Do you think that we do not expect to be pleased and displeased by those same kinds of things, or are you also affirming that in those cases we do also expect it? In my experience people seem to expect other people to have many of the same experiences of pleasure of displeasure at the same states of affairs, e.g. we see someone else undergo something that would hurt us and expect that it also hurts them, rather than just expecting that they're a different person so maybe they don't mind a fastball to the nose like we would.
We do of course still have differences in what things do actually please or pain us, and I think that failing to properly account for those differences is part of the cause of some of our moral failings: sometimes people think "I wouldn't mind that, therefore they shouldn't", disregarding that the other person maybe is differently built and so experiences the same states of affairs differently, feels pain when they wouldn't, etc.
But we also have differences in our sensations. The existence of colorblindness and tetrachromaticity doesn't undermine the objectivity of visual observation, it just means that we have to take note that the same things appear differently to people with differences in their vision. In more advanced kinds of observation than the naked eye, we routinely take explicit note of the measurement apparatus -- the observation just is the reaction of the apparatus to the system under study -- and our native senses are just our basic measurement apparatuses.
In my vision for an ethical science, I advocate that we do just that for different kinds of hedonic experiences as well. It's actually not an objective fact that a certain apple looks red simpliciter, it's only a fact that it looks red to people with certain kinds of color vision, but that relationship between the people and the apples is objectively real. Likewise, in my moral system it would not be correct to claim that for anyone to undergo some particular event is always bad simpliciter, but only that it's bad for certain kinds of people to undergo those things, when they are the kinds of people who are hurt by undergoing those things. But it's still objectively bad for those kinds of people to undergo those kinds of things.
Like I said earlier, both empirical and hedonic experiences tell a person both something about the world they're experiencing and something about themselves, because the experiences are all about, even constituted of, the interaction between the subject and the object of the experience. Empirical experiences tell us what looks true to a person like us. Hedonic experiences tell us what feels good to a person like us. Being objective about either just means giving an account that fits with all those different kinds of experiences of all those different kinds of people, in all their different situations, etc.
Still, in a lot of cases, things would generally hurt most everyone, like the aforementioned fastball to the nose, so we could omit the qualifiers, just like we usually do with the colors of things assuming normal three-color vision. But the system can handle differences in the subjects undergoing the experiences and yet still aim for objectivity, in either case.
Quoting Isaac
That doesn't prevent us from judging those desires to be the wrong ones to have, in others or in ourselves. Even if our self-judgement can't be effective in changing our desires and thus our behavior, in the cases you're talking about, we can still sometimes be effective in preventing other people from acting on those desires, and a large part of the purpose of casting moral judgement is to decide when it's appropriate to interfere in someone else's behavior like that.
Quoting Isaac
I don't understand what this is supposed to mean at all, unless it's just begging the question that complying with social expectations is what you ought to do.
Or else, on second consideration, it may be something like my take on the assignment of ownership, part of the deontological level of my ethics (which we haven't gotten to yet), which is parallel to my take on the assignment of meaning to words in my epistemology. A part of that deontology deals with what we might loosely call "analytic goods" (not that I actually call them that -- I say "procedural duties", but that's not important right now), which hinge entirely on the assignment of ownership, in the same way that analytic truths hinge entirely on the assigned meaning of words.
[hide="(An aside about the relationship of procedural duties to hedonic goods, and the analogous relationship of analytic to empirical truths)"]Both of these are only instrumental ways at arriving at an account of what is experientially true or good; neither of these are transcendent, they're just symbols, representations, proxies, of experiences. In my epistemology, we are to deal primarily in synthetic a posteriori knowledge, but can also abstract that into synthetic a priori knowledge, except that can't be publicly dealt with until it's translated into analytic a priori knowledge, which in turn depends on synthetic a posteriori knowledge of the meaning of words.
Likewise, in my deontology, we are to deal primarily in distributive imperfect duties, which regard hedonic experiences in the same way that synthetic a posteriori knowledge regards empirical experiences, but we can also abstract from that into distributive perfect duties, which is basically "the golden rule", an exercise of empathy; except that can't be publicly dealt with until it's translated into procedural perfect duties, regarding rights, which in turn depends on procedural imperfect duties, regarding the ownership of property.[/hide]
Just as in my epistemology, the "true meaning" of words is determined by a history of uncontested usage or else explicit agreement on a change of meaning, so too in my deontology the "true ownership" of properties is determined by a history of uncontested usage or else explicit agreement on a change of ownership. And just as agreeing to change the meaning of the word "bachelor" can change whether it's analytically true that "all bachelors are unmarried", agreeing to change the ownership of property can change who has what rights over what. If you and the grocer agree to trade some potatoes for some money, you have agreed that upon delivery of the potatoes the money becomes his property, so when he delivers the potatoes, the money now just is his property, "analytically" (by analogy), and you have no claims over it anymore.
If that's what Anscombe means then I agree with that, but I don't see that as a kind of naturalism, because just as the meaning of words is not a natural fact but only a social construct (you can't examine a word and figure out what it means; you can only examine what people take it to mean), so too is the ownership of property (if we all forgot and lost all other record about what we decided to treat as the property of whom, there would be no way to examine the property itself and see who it belongs to). That words mean things and property belongs to people are kind of like useful fictions, and it's a natural fact that people tell those fictions, just like it's a natural fact that Ancient Greeks told the myths they did, but the content of those social constructs is no more a part of nature than the behavior of mythical unicorns is: they are all strictly unreal.
No. The act of definition would only be possible by inference and so be dependent on the last variable node inside our Markov blanket. This doesn't prevent us from assuming it in our models though.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, I'm familiar with the approach, but there's a difference between definition and nodal location in a systems model. Active inference approaches are not trying to define hidden states, they are assuming their existence as a model of how we interact with our environment.
Quoting Joshs
I can't say as I can make much sense of the above, but I'll have a go
Quoting Joshs
...this seems to be laying out active inference, just in a more philosophical sense. The system seeks equilibrium, not with hidden sates (it can't access them) but with interpretations of hidden states, using Bayesian models.
Quoting Joshs
...sounds like social constructivism. again, I don't have much of a problem with that, but our models must interact with something, they must be initiated by something, and so that something's properties will be somehow imprinted, even if neither accurately nor exhaustively.
Quoting Joshs
...same caveat as above, we act on something to do this and that something will leave it's print. This is not idealism.
Quoting Joshs
I don't read Thompson as advocating anything in opposition to people like Feldman Barrett and Seth. enavctivism is almost exactly what is being described in active inference approaches to perception, and the embodied mind concept is referenced frequently by Feldman Barrett. I've read Thompson, I'm just not seeing the differences you seem to be seeing.
Quoting Joshs
I've read some of Varela's work, but if you've anything relevant I'd appreciate it. The other two are philosophers. Not that that's a bad thing, but we were talking about predictive hypotheses arising from Kelly's model which have been successful in some way, so we're not going to get that from philosophers are we?
Quoting Joshs
No. That's not what you asked for. You asked for "an example of what it would be like to have a conversation with someone in this situation".
Quoting Joshs
Asking for a cup in consequence of wanting a cup is not the same as caring about getting the cup. If I program a computer to make the noise "battery" every time it's low on power, it will have the effect of ensuring the computer remains powered (assuming a compliant human listening). The computer may or may not care whether it gets power, depending on how it's been programmed.
This is a central issue I have with phenomenological approaches. they take, quite unreasonably, the starting point that they way one thinks one's mental processes function, is in some way informative of the way they actually do function. I just don't see any good reason for that assumption.
Quoting Joshs
I don't see any necessary link, no.
Quoting Joshs
It isn't. The whole reason why Feldman Barrett began her investigation is that there was no empirical support (despite decades of effort) for the concept that any emotions come from any particular triggers, social ,psychological nor physiological. there's just no consistent pattern of relationship with any factor or set of factors that have been tested for.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. I have some sympathy with that way of looking at it, so I suppose in that sense one could say that if an 'emotion' is a combination of cognitive a physiological sates, then just as we could remove the physiological states and say the emotion is no longer there, we could do say and say it is (on the grounds that most of it is). I supposes it just depends on how many component parts you're willing to lose. A ship without a sail is still a ship, but without a sail, a hull, a rudder and a deck, it's starting to look less and less like one.
Quoting Joshs
It doesn't. You've either misunderstood or misread Feldman Barrett. The point is not that emotions 'are' these endocrine states, it's that emotions are our models of the causes of them, and crucially, interactive models - ones which themselves modify those states to better fit the model as much as the modify the model to better fit the states.
That's then not speech act theory or meaning as use. It's claiming that the meaning of a word is the psychological state it somehow embodies. Just because sometimes I might use a word to get someone to an intent, it doesn't make the meaning of that word the same as the intent I'm trying to get them to adopt. Let's say you're right and the meaning of the expression "do X" was the same as my intention 'do X'. How would I ever learn how to use the expression "do X"? I can't see inside other people's minds to compare intents, I can't show people my mind and ask them if I'm using the term correctly. So how could I possibly know that "do X" would refer, in conversation, to the intent 'do X' in my mind?
Quoting Pfhorrest
How? As above. If I wanted to do this, how would I ever learn what words to pick to achieve the task?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I agree, but that's not what you said. Desiring that John do X is not the same as intending that John do X. If I desire that John do X I might intend to persuade him, show him, or force him, but I can't simply intend that he does. Intent is a plan of action, it can only refer to that which is in my control.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Hopefully answered above.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Right. But earlier you expressly denied that such moral language only gave the listener fact for them to do with as they will."what it is that you believe" is just a fact about you, as is your trustworthiness. So all we have is facts about the world.
Quoting Pfhorrest
See my opening paragraphs for why I don't think your approach fits with either philosophy.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Relatively straightforward answer to this...ever come across the well-quoted definition of madness?
Quoting Pfhorrest
See below about the difference in what we expect. we expect a shared world as an external source of perceptions, we don't expect a shared external source of hedonic satisfaction. It's a simple as that. We're born that way (or at least as far back as we can test - six month old so far).
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, we learn to expect it, but it's not hard-wired like the expectation of an external source of sensory inputs seems to be. The expectation can take as much a three or four years to develop.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Many two year olds would expect exactly that (the latter), yet none expect that, say, nociception is caused by their skin and not by some external object interacting with it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Those differences are not fully systemic though. People with colour-blindness still have the same occipital cortex areas linked in the same way to object recognition and spatio-temporal areas, which, in turn are linked to motor control areas to interact with the external world. they're still wired to assume a shared external-world source of their greyscale scene. so when people talk about colours and seem to act differently to what appears to be the same shade of grey, the colour-blind person starts to assume they're missing something. Which is how colour-blindness became know as a condition. Otherwise, how would the colour-blind person know there was anything wrong?
This is not the same as difference in affect valence targets. There's no connections to sensorimotor systems with the intent of manipulating some external-world source. we expect, and are wired to expect, that these are internally caused, specific to us, not necessarily shared, and so we've no cause to assume our desires in that respect have any source other than our own bodies.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The difference here, and it's really important, is that the apple looks red to certain people on account of some property of the apple (in this case the response of its skin to light). This si not the case with the bad event. the bad event does not feel bad to certain people because of some property of the event. The event is largely immaterial. It feels bad mostly because of the response of the person at the time. It might easily have not, even to the same person. There are parameters which are very likely to feel bad to all people (though to different degrees), but calling them 'bad' on this basis would be arbitrary. Why not call our response to them 'bad'. why change the events and not our response? we don't care if the apple is red or blue, so changing our response to believe the apple to be blue (this can actually be done with some senses), is pointless. Not so with negative hedonic responses. We've an incentive to avoid them, but we've two methods available to us. Change the event, or change our response. How do we choose which?
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. See above. There's neither the incentive nor the 'wiring' to change our response to empirical experiences such that things feel true. The feeling of truth is aimed at predictive success. There is both the incentive and the 'wiring' to feel 'good' about whatever hedonic experiences we're exposed to, rather than simply accept their first impression.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It does really. What would a 'wrong' desire be other than a desire not to have that desire?
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. But an interesting read nonetheless. I won't comment on it her as it's off-topic.
Quoting Pfhorrest
So this is true, but...
Quoting Pfhorrest
Not only that, but that the word 'ought' picks out this naturally/culturally occurring state. what we mean by 'ought' is that state. Thus the question often asked of naturalist ethical approaches "yes, but did we 'ought' to behave that way, just because it's social convention that we do" is dissolved. The question makes no sense because it's using the word 'ought' whilst at the same time claiming to not know what the word means.
Quoting Isaac
Thompson seemed to be pretty thrilled when he announced on his twitter feed a research paper which he co-authored purporting to show that predictive
processing can’t account for affective selection bias.
He wrote:
“ Exciting news: predictive processing theory can't explain affect-biased attention: “
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001002772030189X?via%3Dihub
As you would expect, defenders of pp almost
immediately denied that the paper represented
any sort of refutation of the model as a whole. I’m just pointing g out that , while Andy Clark hopes that active inference models will unite representationalist and dynamical, non-representationalist factions within the cognitivist community, phenomenologically-oriented enactivists like Thompson believe that active inference suffers from the drawbacks they associate with predictive processing.
“ What goes on strictly inside the head never as such
counts as a cognitive process. It counts only as a participant in a cognitive process that exists as a relation between the system and its environment. Cognition is not an event happening inside the system; it is the relational process of sense-making that takes place between the system and its environment. In Maturana and Varela’s language (1980, 1987), cognition belongs to the ‘relational domain’ in which the system as a unity relates to the wider context of its milieu, not to the ‘operational domain’ of the system’s internal states (e.g., its brain states). Of course, what goes on inside the system is crucial for enabling the system’s cognitive or sense-making relation to its environment, but to call internal processes as such cognitive is to confuse levels of discourse or to make a category mistake (neurons do not think and feel; people and animals do).
Intentionality is always a relation to that which transcends the present state of the system (where what
transcends the system does not have to exist in the sense of being a real entity). In saying that the mind is intentional, phenomenologists imply that the mind is relational. ‘Being- in-the-world’ (Heidegger) and the ‘lived body-environment’ (Merleau-Ponty) are different ways of articulating this kind of relation. The spatial containment language of internal/external or inside/outside (which frames the internalist/externalist debate) is inappropriate and misleading for understanding the peculiar sort of relationality
belonging to intentionality, the lived body, or being-in-the- world. As Heidegger says, a living being is ‘in’ its world in a completely different sense from that of water being in a glass (Heidegger 1995, pp. 165–166).“
Quoting Isaac
Let’s change the wording of this statement to make it about science: the way one’s theory makes sense of empirical phenomena is in some way informative of the way phenomena actually function. You might be inclined to add, yes, as long as the theory undergoes proper experimental validation. The key concept here, then, is ‘actually function’. So hypothesis and assumption is being contrasted here with the actuality of empirical reality. This doesn’t sound particularly Kuhnian to me. I think he would argue that the ‘actuality’ of empirical fact is not something that we can separate from a value system within which such facts emerge as what they are. He would add that within a particular meta-theoretical framework it is useful to make use of empirical results to adjudicate between competing hypotheses, but between meta-theories , deferring to the ‘actual’ facts is not helpful since the competing meta-theories will not agree on what constitutes the relevant data, not to mention method.
Phenomenology doesn’t ignore the empirical facts, it investigates the conditions of possibility making something like empirical objectivity possibility. It does this neither in the guise of an idealism nor a realism but as a radical interactionism. The idea of the true world being hidden behind the veil of apparent experience is a very Cartesian notion , but in postmodern thought , it turns out the only true world is the apparent world , that is, the constructed one.
Quoting Isaac
I’m not sure what your point is here. Are you saying that we don’t know whether someone is a machine rather than a human merely on the basis of their asking for a cup? I’d agree with that. The point is that the difference between a living system and a computer is that a living system is a self-organized anticipatory whole. The human asking for a cup is making a request against a background of concerns and goals. I can’t assume I know beforehand in what sense they ‘care’ about the cup, but it has some relevance to their ongoing concerns or else they wouldnt have mentioned it.
Motivated behaviors don’t exist in humans as disconnected modules of activity , but as reciprocally interrconnected aspects of an integrated holistically functioning system.
I would say the feeling of truth and the feeling of hedonic satisfaction are inseparably co-implied. Truth isnt a match between inside and outside, it’s a teleological oriented goal of fulfillment of expectations that is never fully satisfied, but can be progressively approximated. Things that are true can always appear truer, because we have an inexhaustible ability to reconstrue our interpretations of the world of events to make them more and more intricately and multi-dimensionally consistent with our anticipations. Theprogressive satisfaction of anticipations is precisely what hedonic valence is oriented around. So if you want to know the path of true happiness, it is the identical path and vector of anticipatory sense-making. I know we’ve already hashed this out, but I have an impulsive need to be a pain in the ass. But this is my op, and if I can’t be a pain in the ass in my own op, where can I be one?
That's fair enough, if those are the arguments you're making (It didn't seem to me that this is what you were arguing - your style is somewhat opaque for me). My comment was really about the prevailing trend, not the complete absence of outliers (Thompson's article has 4 citations, Seth and Friston's latest article on the same topic has 86 - to give some idea of the take up of these ideas in the community)
Needless to say, I think the paper does not show what it purports to. Thompson Gives a good summary here.
Firstly, he's misunderstood the scale of surprise-minimising perceptive attention. Most studies like Seth and Friston's are dealing with individual saccades, not large-scale decisions. It's about where to move focus in the next saccade to minimise predictive error about the object (of even just edge/corner feature). It's not about a decision to look into a yard to check for a Doberman.
Second, he's misinterpreted the position on voluntary actions (which is about looking into a particular yard to check if there's a Doberman). No-one in active inference is claiming that a reduction of surprise in a single model can account fo any macro scale behaviour. So defeating such a claim is defeating a straw man. Friston, for example, is abundantly clear that "There are multiple hierarchical models all interacting to produce the final action state". And when he says multiple he means literally hundreds, not just two or three.
As I said before, this is the problem with phenomenological approaches. They confuse the effect, as it seems to us, with the mechanism that produces that effect. That it feels like we're paying attention to the yard with the doberman in it, doesn't therefore mean there's this single property of our brain called 'attention' which is somehow neurologically directed to the single entity called 'yard with a Doberman in it'. That's how we experience it. Theories like active inference are trying to understand the mechanisms, they means by which the brain makes us feel that way. To simply assume the means must be representative of the end result is naive at best, if not downright lazy thinking.
I'm not claiming that the meaning of any particular word just is identical to a psychological state, but only that some of the many different things you can do with language generally, with your combinations of words, is to convey to someone else an understanding of what you think or feel about something, as well as try to get them to think or feel likewise, or try to get them to convey to you what they think or feel about something, or just convey your lack of commitment to (and openness to suggestions about) any particular thoughts or feelings about that.
And in any of those cases, the thoughts of feelings being imperfectly bandied about by proxy of our various grunts and scribbles might be thoughts or feelings either regarding what is the case, i.e. thoughts or feelings that some picture we've tried to paint with our words is to be used as a representation of the world; or they may be thoughts of feelings that some such picture is to be used as a blueprint from which to remake the world.
That last distinction is the "direction of fit" distinction that my entire moral semantics hinges on, and it comes directly from speech act theory. Austin was the first to use the term as such, Searle did most of the development of it since, and he claims that Anscombe gave perhaps the best illustration of it, in this passage:
Quoting Isaac
Rather than me speculating about how people learn the meanings of words, I'd like to ask you what exactly you think is so strange about what I'm suggesting, because it seems to me that you think I'm saying something very weird while I'm trying to say something very mundane. We have words that refer to things like rocks and trees and tables and chairs and cars and houses, and actions like walking and talking and fighting. I imagine you have no problem with those kinds of words being learnable somehow or another, right? We also have words that refer to mental things, emotions like joy, anger, sorrow, calm, and states like certainty, doubt, and yes belief, and intention. You don't think that it's impossible to learn what those words mean because they refer to psychological things, do you? (I imagine not).
If you have no problem with it being possible to learn those kinds of words, then consider this hypothetical conversation. Alice says to Bob, "people killing each other". Those words provoke Bob to imagine some groups of men shooting at each other, the first example of people killing each other that comes to his mind; but that's not a complete sentence Alice said, so Bob isn't sure of Alice's meaning, and he asks her "What about people killing each other?"
Alice says "It happens." Bob understands now: Alice is asserting that people do kill each other. (We could analyze this as that Alice is showing that she thinks the picture of people killing each other painted by the words "people killing each other" is fit for use as a representation of the world, and that she is suggesting that Bob think likewise.) Bob agrees, so he says "Oh yes, that's true. People kill each other."
Then Alice says "But that shouldn't happen." Those words, plus the pre-established image of people killing each other they're referring to, prompt Bob to understand that Alice is also asserting that people ought not kill each other. (We could analyze this as that Alice is showing that she thinks the picture of people killing each other painted by the words "people killing each other" is unfit for use as a blueprint for how to remake the world, and that she suggesting that Bob think likewise.) Bob agrees with that too, so he says "Yeah, it's bad. People shouldn't kill each other."
The potential state of affairs gestured to with the words is the same in all the cases in that conversation: some people somehow killing some other people. What is it about the meaning of the whole series of words that you think changes when the word "killing" gets changed to "do kill" or to "ought not kill"? I think it's the attitude toward that potential state of affairs that is being conveyed, the use that the picture painted by the words is being put to.
All of this is completely separate from whether or not Bob would be right to adopt either of the attitudes that Alice is suggesting he adopt toward that state of affairs. I think the criteria Bob should rationally consider would be different, but in important ways similar, for each of of those two different attitudes toward that state of affairs that Alice is suggesting he adopt.
Quoting Isaac
As I said, I think this is just a difference in our understanding of language. To my ear it would not sound strange at all if, say, the writer of a movie said on a commentary track "I intended that this scene would be the exact center point of the film, but an executive producer insisted on cutting a bunch from the end and re-inserting some of it as foreshadowing at the beginning, so now this scene that should have been the midpoint is almost at the end." He intended that something be the case, but it was not completely within his control to make it the case, so it ended up not being the case. He himself did all the things he intended to do, but the state of affairs he was aiming for by those actions nevertheless was not realized because of factors outside his control.
(Note also the use of "should" there, to indicate again what his intention, the state of affairs he was aiming to bring about, was. I didn't put that in on purpose or to make a point, that's just the first and most natural way of phrasing the sentence that came to mind.)
If this use of "intent" sounds weird to you, what can I say, but FWIW the first entry of the first dictionary that pops up when I just google 'intend' says "to have in mind as a purpose or goal", and in any case that's the sense that I mean, so please understand the words I write in that sense and not another. (Also please keep in mind my own technical differentiation between "intent" and "desire" in my philosophical system that we're discussing. If you have suggestions for better words to encapsulate the difference between them, my ears are open.)
Quoting Isaac
But if one of those facts about the world is about someone holding a prescriptive attitude toward some state of affairs, and the other fact is about the odds of that person's attitudes towards states of affairs being the correct ones to hold, then what you end up with is the adoption of a prescriptive attitude toward a state of affairs, not merely a descriptive attitude toward the state of affairs of another person's mind. The fact of the other person having a particular state of mind is not the thing they are trying to convince you of by their speech, that's just the packaging. The content of that state of mind they have is the thing they're trying to convince you of, and if you don't understand what it is to adopt that state of mind, you can't unpackage the contents of the fact it's delivered in: if you don't know what it is to think "this ought to be the case", you only know what it is to think that someone thinks "this ought to be the case" without having any idea what that means, then it will be impossible for them to communicate that to you.
You, Isaac, talk here like you are not capable of understanding "what's in the box", so to speak, or even that there is anything in the box, but I can't imagine that that could actually be the case and yet you somehow manage to function well enough in society to live the life it sounds like you've lived. Instead, I can only speculate that you're willfully refusing for ideological reasons to talk about what's in the box, and insisting on treating the box like it is the content rather than just the packaging.
Quoting Isaac
Are you suggesting that it's madness to try to get you to ever explain this inexplicable jump of the is-ought gap? Because I'm starting to agree.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
All you're saying here is that people are more naturally inclined to do similarly to what I advise regarding empirical realism than regarding hedonistic altruism; but, as you say, we can learn what we're not born with. That's not contrary to any of my claims, and is actually a great explanation for why socio-philosophical development in the latter case has lagged so far behind what's happened in the former case: there's a lot more ground that we're not pre-programmed for that has to be covered to get to a working methodology going in widespread practice.
Speaking of "programming", what I'm advocating is not meant to be a description of how people are inclined to function, but rather it's meant to be something we would teach people to do, or program AIs to do. I think AI programming is a perfect context for understanding what the use of philosophy in general is. Philosophy is about coming up with ideal or optimal methods of pursuing answers to questions of various kinds, and all the conceptual framework necessitates by such frameworks, and thinking of it like an AI programming exercise really brings that to the forefront.
Quoting Isaac
As I've already said, I don't advocate for either one or the other. Either would suffice, and which is better in a given case would depend on other factors. (Well, mostly one: efficiency. Which is the parallel to the parsimony I never got a chance to talk about in my epistemology). It's all about the relationship between them, both in the descriptive and the prescriptive cases.
The descriptive case is all about figuring out what kinds of observations would be made by what kinds of observers in what kinds of contexts. If you change the system under observation without changing the observer, you'll get a different observation, and your model should say so; and also if you change the observer without changing the system under observation, you'll get a different observation, and your model should say so. The model should say only that it's true that a particular kind of observer in a particular context will make a particular observation; observer-independent models cannot be objective because the observations depend on the observer as much as the system under observation, and trying to be "observer-independent" in this way (independent of their observations, rather than just their perceptions or beliefs) ends up just assuming things about the observer. You can only approach objectivity by trying to account for what all observers would observe in all contexts.
(This is simultaneously being said by others in the intersubjectivity thread).
Likewise, the prescriptive case is all about figuring out what kinds of appetites would be (dis)satisfied for what kinds of subjects in what kinds of contexts. If you change the event being experienced without changing the subject, you'll get a different experience, and your model should say so; and also if you change the subject without changing the event, you'll get a different experience, and your model should say so. The model should say only that it's good that a particular kind of subject in a particular context has a particular experience; subject-independent models cannot be objective because the experiences depend on the subject as much as the event being experienced, and trying to be "subject-independent" in this way (independent of their experiences, rather than just their desires or intentions) ends up just assuming things about the subject. You can only approach objectivity by trying to account for what all subjects would experience in all contexts.
Quoting Isaac
It seems like you've forgotten already the technical definitions of "appetite", "desire", and "intention" that I use in my philosophy; as well as the parallel set of "sensation", "perception", and "belief". Ignore for the moment appetites and sensations, it's the second and third of each set we're focused on here.
In my scheme, an "intention" and a "belief" are each reflexive or second-order forms of "desires" and "perceptions", respectively. Each of them requires that you have awareness of your first-order states of mind, that you can perceive that you are perceiving and desiring certain things; and then also that you pass judgement on those first-order states of mind, that you desire to perceive and desire in that way or else differently.
So yes, on my account an intention, i.e. a "moral belief", is a second-order a desire, it's a desire that you desire to desire. This is more or less the same as Harry Frankfurt's conception of "will": your will is what you want to want. And yes, you could in turn have desires about your desires about your desires, ad infinitum, the more you thought over your decision-making process. Your intention, or will in Frankfurt's terms, is whatever the top level of that is: whatever you've concluded, after however much thought you've given it, that you want to want to want... etc.
Why to want things, and thus what to want to want, i.e. what to intend, i.e. what "moral beliefs" to hold, is a separate question from just what it is to have a "moral belief" / intention. Just like what to believe generally, descriptively, is a separate question from what it is to have a belief. (My answer in both cases, to the "what to think" questions, which we've been over and over already, could be summarized as "heed your experiences... and everyone else's too".)
(Again, think back like you are raising a child, or programming an AI. How do you want the child or AI to go about making these decisions, either about what is real, or about what is moral? How, generally, do you intend people to make those kinds of decisions -- regardless of how you believe that they in fact do make them? Now look at yourself in the third person, like you are parenting yourself, and ask: are you making those kinds of decisions in the way you want people in general to make them? Would you try to get someone else, who makes decisions the way that you do, to change the way they do that? If so, try to get yourself to change the way you do that, like you would anyone else.)
Quoting Isaac
This part of the conversation is getting a bit ahead of the rest of it, but I want to clarify that my account that I gave there is very much not just about any arbitrary social convention, but rather about methodological justification in the pursuit of hedonic goods, a part of which involves mutual agreement to divide up who gets to make decisions about what. (The link between those was the part you didn't comment on). Here you seem to be saying that Anscombe means the same thing that I mean, but then describing her meaning in a way contrary to what I meant.
In any case, regardless of what Anscombe meant, I see here a parallel with different senses of "true". Is it true that all bachelors are unmarried? Is there anything in actual reality that could confirm or deny that? It is true, but it's a kind of "truth" that's completely detached from empirical reality. Yet we can nevertheless be hardcore empiricists, and still acknowledge that it's true -- somehow in a way seemingly unconnected to empirical reality but also not at all contrary to empiricism -- that all bachelors are unmarried. In a way that still doesn't license people to get together and arbitrarily agree that any old thing is true and thereby "make it true".
Likewise, on my account of rights and their relationship to property, and the relationship of all of that to hedonistic altruism, the shopper "ought" to pay the grocer the agreed-upon amount, in a way that's completely detached from hedonism, yet we can nevertheless be hardcore hedonists and still acknowledge that he ought to -- somehow in a way seemingly unconnected to hedonistic morality but also not at all contrary to hedonism -- pay the grocer. In a way that still doesn't license people to get together and arbitrarily agree that any old thing is good and thereby "make it good".
Right, but this is what you denied earlier, which is why I'm getting confused about your argument. You specifically said that moral language was not just providing the other person with some facts about the world for them to do with what they will, yet if moral language is just as you say above, then all it is doing is exactly that, providing facts (about the speaker's state of mind). So which is it?
Quoting Pfhorrest
No we don't. That would require a private language which would be impossible to learn. We have words which refer to public effects of what we take to be 'emotions' which we use to convey our own propensity to those public effect. If there were no mediating public effects we could not possibly learn the words. The relevance of this to our conversation here is that the word 'ought' can't be learnt as "the feeling I have in my head that wants X to be the case" because we could not possibly have ever heard such a relation in order to learn it. The word 'ought' can only, like emotions, be learnt by reference to a mediating public activity. So what is that activity? It's paying the grocer when he delivers your potatoes, it's helping the old lady across the road... Social conventions you see all around you being referred to as stuff yu 'ought' to do => "Oh! That's what 'ought' means".
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yep. No problem with the language telling Bob what it is that Alice thinks in terms of their shared language.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No problem here either - Alice is still just providing Bob with facts about the world (her attitudes - both to the blueprint, and to Bob's agreement with it) for him to do with what he will.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It's your technical definition that I'm trying to work with. It was this which distinguished intent from desire. I desire state X, I intend to do Y to get it. If intend refers to the state we want to be the case, then what's left for 'desire' to do?
Quoting Pfhorrest
People are not automatons. Those two factors alone would not be sufficient to end up adopting the belief. We have a thousand other factors coming in to play at once.
Quoting Pfhorrest
And it didn't occur to you that it's because of the life I've lived? "what's in the box" is a matter of psychology, yes? I'm a professor of psychology. I'd like to think it's quite obvious from my posts that I have at least a better than average understanding of "what's in the box". the problem is that you don't. It's way, way more complicated than you're making it out to be, we don't even know ourselves what we want most of the time, there's half a dozen competing desires at any one time, none of which are compatible with each other, the winning desire is not the one we 'rationally' work out (that's almost always rationalised post hoc), our physiological state changes what we think best from moment to moment, an idea you think ideal when you're hungry will seem unattractive when you're not (judges deliver harsher sentences before lunch that they do after it)...and we haven't even got on to language yet, there's no simple relationship between our spoken words and the thoughts which prompt them, we change our language in different social environments, we process whole sentences which are often only 'checked' by the rational brain, not formed by it, we say things for any one of scores of different reasons, many of which, again, we only rationalise post hoc...
The picture you're trying to paint of moral judgement not only is woefully simplistic, but even as a goal it would be throwing away millennia of evolved, finely tuned mental processes in hubristic favour of something you came up with.
It is simply not true that when we use moral language we aim to transfer some picture of how the world should be to some other person. Absolutely, categorically not what's happening. It may, on some occasions be a part of what's happening. And as a goal it's like throwing away Deep Blue in favour of some moves you worked out on the bag of a fag packet.
Yes, they are quite popular. During its long reign as the dominant paradigm, S-R psychology represented an overwhelming percentage of citations in experimental psychology. Meanwhile , during that era, the work of Dewey and James was all but ignored( I should
mention that Kelly, whose major work came out in 1955 was ignored too. His constructivist approach is now
belatedly recognized as anticipating cognitive science as well as cognitive therapy.). I think you’ll find writers like Clark and Barrett declaring much closer allegiance to the pragmatists than to Skinner and Watson. It only took the field 80 years to catch up .The problem wasnt empirical validation , it was making the conceptual shift. My anticipation is that it will take another 20 years or so before enactivism sheds the remnants of representational realism.
In that light, I have another link for you, from Anthony Chemero and Michael
Anderson. I prefer this paper to Thompson’s. Rather than trying to empirical ‘prove’ anything on Clark’s
turf , they are critiquing it from a meta-theoretical standpoint. They are making the points I was trying to make concerning the limitations of representational
realism , but using a vocabulary that is more familiar to you.
https://www.academia.edu/39326657/M_Anderson_and_A_Chemero_The_world_well_found_in_M_Colombo_L_Irvine_and_M_Stapleton_eds_Andy_Clark_and_his_Critics_Oxford_University_Press_161_173
I particularly like their point that the use of Markov blankets and Bayesian theory in a psychological model is mot in itself problematic , the issue is HOW they are used.
“ We absolutely accept that Markov models and Bayesian inference are hugely important and successful tools in the study of mind, brain and behavior. But we find the philosophical inferences about the nature of the systems to which these models have been applied to be deeply problematic. Admittedly, it can be hard to resist mapping entities in one’s model of a system to elements in the system itself, but prudence dictates special care when doing so, and we believe that insufficient caution has been exercised by many proponents of predictive processing.
By way of closing, we also wish to urge something further on the field in general, and on Clark in particular. Hohwy (2017) wonders aloud if the EEE tactic to avoid skepticism may also cost us the very conceptions of belief, knowledge, and justification that lie at the center of a good deal of philosophy of mind. We hereby confess that it probably does. This is a development we embrace. For us, agency is about disposition and action, and not about belief (Anderson 2014; Chemero 2009).10 In this we follow the traditions of American Pragmatism and Continental Phenomenology in their critiques of a belief-oriented, representation-centric, model-building mind, in favor of an action-oriented, affordance-centric, world-navigating mind. The first step on this path is the recognition that organisms have access to ecological information. Take that step, and a whole world opens to you.”
Quoting Isaac
I’m not going to let you get away with this ( he said half in jest). As a good empiricist you should know better than to pronounce a verdict on a theory without first demonstrating that you know what it is saying.
One might even call that lazy thinking. For instance, are you familiar with how Husserl’s model of perception constitutes a real spatial object, like a ball? You know those 86 citations in Seth and Friston’s
article? I can show you 100’s upon 100’s of citations mentioning phenomenology in the psychological
literature that grotesquely misread its aims and methods.
We should probably leave it aside for now and focus on the points that Chemero is making, unless you want to attempt a cursory summary of what you think phenomenology is all about and how it relates to the construction of empirical theory. I notice you didn’t comment on my observations concerning the incommensurability of rival meta-theories concerning agreement on what constitutes empirical evidence. Maybe you could start there. Would you be able , for example, to justify the Kuhnian claim that one scientific theory ( for example, phenomenologically oriented enactivism) can replace a rival one without invalidating -disproving any of that rival theory’s empirical predictions?
We do create private language all the time , for instance
when we create new theoretical ideas.
‘ Private’ here is a bit of a mis-nomer though. When I reflect in solitude , what is creatively generated is already social in the sense that it is still my being exposed to an outside, even when I am not in contact with other people.My talking to myself is social and an exposure to an outside.
I can create an entire vocabulary that others will not understand in the way that I will and that I use not to share with others but to share with myself. Did I create thewords de novo, with no background competence or familiarity with conventions of grammar? Well, no , of course not. They pre-suppose my already having been socialized into a publicly shared language , but their sense can then move on from and exceed that socialized meaning.
I agree. I used to take a behaviourist approach way back at the beginning of my academic career (methodological, not Skinner), and over the course of it I've shifted to a more cognitive approach. That there are such conceptual shifts can be used as justification for any potential one though.
Quoting Joshs
Thanks. I'll have a read (with hopefully an open mind!), but your quote does sound like more of the same vague philosophical readings as in the previous piece. I don't object to these views at all (I'm on a philosophy forum after all), but they are only frameworks, not models. They don't have predictive power and their utility is not universal, it's personal. If you personally find that framework useful, then that's great, it does sound like it's not inconsistent with the empirical evidence (at least not universally so), but I don't think we should confuse the framework for the matter being framed.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, fair enough, but that cuts both ways. Would you like to stand by a claim that your understanding of the neuroscience behind active inference models was better than my understanding of phenomenology?
The point is these are not two equal fields of enquiry. Both have methods and aims about which it is possible to be wrong, but science also has a body of knowledge about which it is possible to be wrong. There's no such body of knowledge in phenomenology.
Quoting Joshs
If you'd read any of the arguments I've had about epistemology on here you'd see that I've already done so (to the best of my ability). I have no problem at all with underdetermination, I regularly make that case. What I dislike, however, is the move (often made) from approach A, with all it's empirical evidence, cannot found it's own premises, cannot demonstrate the validity of it's own frame...therefore approach B. It doesn't follow. None can. Yet we still must choose, and I'll take the one yielding the results.
...as is 'language'.
I'm trying to make clear a differentiation between different facets of the communicative act, what I called in that last post the "packaging" and "content". The most straightforward way of clarifying that differentiation is to consider first purely descriptive assertions. If I tell you "sequoias are a species of tree native to the California Sierras", my aim is not just to get you to believe that I believe that, but to get you to believe the same thing that I believe. If you accept my assertion, for whatever reason -- if you decide to agree with what I said to you -- then what you end up with is not just a belief about what I believe, but a belief about sequoias. Expressing what it is that I believe is merely the "packaging", in which I'm attempting to deliver the descriptive "content" about sequoias. I'm not just trying to talk to you about my mind, in that hypothetical speech-act, but about sequoias. Something descriptive about sequoias, specifically: something about their place in a model meant as a representation of the world. I'm trying to get you to adjust your representation-model to feature sequoias in the same way that mind does.
In parallel to that, if I tell you "a doctor should not kill one healthy patient to harvest his organs to save five dying patients", my aim is not just to get you to believe that I disapprove of that happening, but to get you to disapprove of that happening. If you accept my assertion, for whatever reason -- if you decide to agree with what I said to you -- then what you end up with is not just a belief about what I like or dislike, but a dislike of doctors doing that thing I'm talking about. Expressing my disapproval of it is merely the "packaging", in which I'm attempting to deliver the prescriptive "content" about murderous doctors. I'm not trying to talk to you about my mind, in that hypothetical speech-act -- nor about anybody else's minds, for that matter -- but about doctors murdering healthy patients. Something prescriptive about that, specifically: something about its place in a model meant as a blueprint for the world. I'm trying to get you to adjust your blueprint-model to feature murderous doctors in the same way that mind does.
Quoting Isaac
Packaging and content again. If you tell me you're feeling sad, do you expect that I merely take that as a description of some externally observable behavior you're doing, rather than remembering the way I feel when I describe myself as "feeling sad" and imagining that you feel that same way? Sure, we need shared public experiences to learn what the words mean, but once we've really learned the words, we understand them in terms of mental experiences -- unless you perhaps really have no theory of mind and are unable to attribute mental states to others, only to observe their behavior? That would seem a very strange deficit for a psychologist to have, but it could explain a lot, and I'm lead to understand that many psychologists go into the field because of interest in remedying their own psychological issues.
Quoting Isaac
I don't know how I came across as thinking that intent was about what to do to get a state of affairs. I do differentiate between ends and means, of course, but "desire" and "intent" as I use them aren't about that distinction. They're about first- and second-order prescriptive attitudes toward states of affairs. I elaborated on that in the previous post:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I also gave an example of the differentiation between "perception" and "belief" for analogy even earlier:
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Isaac
The point of the passage you're responding to is not that those two factors would be sufficient (nor necessary) to cause the adoption of the prescriptive attitude toward the state of affairs, but that in the event that the communicative act is successful, and the listener adopts the view that the speaker is trying to get them to adopt, then the view that the listener ends up adopting is a prescriptive one, not just a descriptive one. Packaging and content again: the packaging may be "speaker holds this view" plus "speaker is reliable", but if the view is a prescriptive one, and the the listener accepts that package and unpacks it, they will end up with a prescriptive view, not merely a descriptive one.
If I tell you "you shouldn't do X" and all you take away from that is the fact that I don't want you to do X, without taking away any intent of your own not to do X, then you haven't accepted or agreed with what I told you. Which might be fine, you don't have to agree to everything everyone tells you, that's not the point here. The point is that if you do agree, you're adopting the same intention I'm expressing. If I told you "you shouldn't do X", and you said "got it, X would be bad", and later on I heard you tell someone else that they shouldn't do X -- and so on, such that it really seems like you have agreed with my moral assertion -- and then later still I find out that you did X, and in surprise I ask "I thought you agreed that you shouldn't do X?", and you say "yeah but I thought you wouldn't find out, sorry you did" ... it'd be clear there was some big misunderstanding there. I said you shouldn't do X, and you agreed with that moral claim, but then you thought it was fine to do X so long as I didn't find out, because you thought the moral claim only meant that I don't like X? That sounds to me like you never actually agreed that you shouldn't do X at all, but only lied about agreeing to placate me.
If I say "murder is wrong" and you say "oh yes of course, murder is horrible!" but then think to yourself "mental note: don't let Forrest find out about any murders I do", that's clear that you don't actually agree with the moral claim, and all you took away from my asserting it is that I feel some way about something. Even saying "I disagree, murder is fine" instead, as morally abhorrent as that would be, at least would show more comprehension of the speech-activity we were even engaging in. Even saying "I don't mind murder" would be clearer communication, because you'd at least be showing that you understand that what we're exchanging here are our prescriptive attitudes about things. OTOH if you said "right I understand, murder is wrong, but I have no objection to it", that would be a confusing response: you "understand" that it's "wrong", yet you have no attitude of disapproval toward it? Are you just saying that you're aware that other people disapprove of it? Cause that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about whether or not to (dis)approve of it, not whether or not anyone does (dis)approve of it.
Quoting Isaac
Just like in my epistemology, I'm not at all suggesting that people should completely abandon their natural processes for deciding, either about what is or what ought to be. I'm not even putting forth a complete and precise mechanistic process for how to do either of those things. I'm putting forth reasons why -- when those natural processes fail us and we find ourselves trying to figure out things that aren't coming easily to us and sort out disagreements between each other about what's "obvious" according to those natural processes -- there are some broad limits on the kinds of processes we should turn to to resolve those quandaries.
Namely, in either case: that we shouldn't disregard the relevance of our experiences; that we should try to regard everyone else's as equally as we can too, and figure out something consistent with all of them; that we should be willing to toss away any suggestion as to what that something might be if it's shown to fail at that; but that we shouldn't demand that any such suggestion prove itself immune to all failure or else be tossed away immediately, but rather let float different such suggestions so long as none of them has failed at that yet.
There is a lot of wiggle room inside those broad limits, I'm not specifying exactly where in there is the best route and I'm not sure even sure there is a best route within there (only that somewhere within there is better than outside those bounds), and I expect most of the time in day-to-day life our natural inclinations will stay well within those limits. But it's when those fail us that the cases become philosophically interesting, when people get tempted to appeal to the supernatural, or to say that there is no right answer so shut up and stop talking about it, or that some answer is unquestionably the right answer, or that since nobody has yet proven beyond all shadow of a doubt that their answer is unquestionably right they're all wrong... that's when people start doing bad philosophy, that they think excuses them hide away from practical ways of working around those failures of our natural inclinations. That kind of bad philosophy is the thing that I find interesting and worth arguing against.
Quoting Joshs
I think this point in the linked paper is worth throwing some words at.
I'm gonna try and summarise the argument in my own terms.
So what's the brain being the appropriate target for this Markov-blanketing operation doing? It's placing the brain-body system inside a Markov blanket; and what that means is that the brain-body system has sensory inputs from the environment and the body, and effector outputs - your actions are the outputs, they are proposed relative to the inputs and the current task. That might seem like a theoretically inert operation, but it's very easy to go from this interpretation of the Markov blanketing device to an internalist+representationalist conception of the mind. What makes this suggestive?
Imagine this chain of states:
S->M->R->S->M->R
With latent inputs:
H1->S
And latent outputs
H2<-R
Where S is a vector of sensory states, M is a vector of mediating states and R is a vector of output response states. H1 can be thought of as the hidden states of the environment + body insofar as they impact sensory foraging, H2 can be thought of as the hidden states of the environment insofar as they are causally impacted by the agent's responses R.
The "internalist/cognitivist" interpretation thinks of the M states as constitutive of the agent, so the "Markov boundary" of the M states is the sensory states+the response states, and the equation of the agent with the M states then yields the "sensory veil" hypothesis and vulnerability to skepticism.
How to get around this?
Instead, while still granting the chain as an adequate description, which states are thought of as the agent are changed from only M states to M states + some S states and some R states, the directness of contact is restored, and the "Markov boundary" of the agent comes to include some H1 and H2 states.
Edit: effectively, that internalism seems to follow from the fact that M states have S and R states as their blanket turns on the proposal that the agent consists only of M states, whereas the model is also consistent with interpreting some S and R states as part of the agent.
This is a repeated tactic in your thinking and I've not understood it from the outset. Simply saying that X is like Y does not make X like Y, yet this seems to be the substance of your argument. You say "like with perception and reality we can..." I've given probably half a dozen reasons why moral talk (or moral thoughts) are not like perceptions and models of reality, yet this seems to have had absolutely no impact on your use of this strategy. So, is there a thing that is not like perceptions and reality, for you? Can everything be likened to it, just by saying so, do you have any criteria at all for these analogies?
I'll try again.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, because we're hard-wired to assume a shared exterior source of our sensations, so our common language uses that when making declarative statements.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, because not being hard wired to expect an external source for our hedonic affects, our language does not make use of that, and we do not make moral declarations with that in mind. Some people might sometimes want you to disapprove, other times they might not care if you disapprove so long as you comply, other times they might simply be informing you and be indifferent to your reaction, other times they might be identifying their own values for group identity.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, because we expect sequoias to be something which exists outside of ourselves, to have consistent properties which do not vary depending on who is looking at them.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, because we do not expect our likes and dislikes to be set by values external to ourselves which are invariant between people. Firstly I could 'accept' your assertion in any of the contexts mentioned above, only one of which would result in my disliking doctors doing that, and second, my likes and dislikes, being internally sourced, are not something which is generated by higher thoughts like understanding what my friend has said about their view. Unlike perceptive models which areinfluenced in that way because we expect shared external sources of them.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, because we all believe that sequoias are external-to-us objects with properties that do not vary depending on our physiological state.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, that would be to assume the rightness or wrongness was a property of the doctors not of the mind perceiving them and we do not assume such a thing. So you can't talk about the 'badness' of an event without including in that the state of mind {feeling bad about it}. You can talk about the 'tallness' of sequoias without including the state of mind {thinking that sequoias are tall} because we expect tallness to be an invariant property of sequoias in a way that we do not expect 'badness' to be an invariant property of doctors killing people
You can't just claim things can be treated the same without addressing the ways in which they are different and showing those ways to be irrelevant.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Sometimes, yes. You overestimate the narrative of what you think you're doing. But that wasn't the point. The point was that we cannot do this with thoughts that have no external behavioural reference because it would make them impossible to learn. What's the external behavioural referent which distinguishes thinking X is morally wrong and not wanting anyone to do X?
Quoting Pfhorrest
If so, then how? Presumably you agree that all of this takes place in a physical brain, so if you want to assert that this is possible, you'll need to posit a mechanism.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It really does.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again, you're assuming your conclusion in your argument. You've not established that this is what moral claims mean, so how can you say that I wouldn't have agreed with it on those grounds? If the moral claim "murder is wrong" is to mean "murder is something which people will generally punish you for" then me thinking "don't let Forrest find out about any murders I do" is exactly me having agreed with it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I get it, but just like in your epistemology, you're underestimating the degree of underdetermination your method yields - namely that none of the views you'd want to eliminate will actually be eliminated by it.
Why, because communicating with oneself is so profoundly different from communicating with others in terms of its goals? Only if you start from a separation of organism and world. Then talking to oneself
is idealist solipsism.
Yes, absolutely! But I realize I’d have to prove that to
you. I’ve been reading more Barrett and Clark, and listening to her youtube lectures. I’m getting a pretty good sense of where she stands. Keep in mind , my graduate degree was in experimental a cognitive science. Even though that was the 1990’s there is an awful lot that is familiar to me in her model. Connectionism and parallel distributed processing had already come into vogue , and I had been familiar with the James-Lange theory of emotion ( we interpret physiological effects to determine causes in the world) , and with Schacter and Singer’s studies on how we attempt to interpret arousal aa emotions of one sort or another( or as something other than emotion) based on situation.Eleanor Roesch’s work on conceptual category formation I think also bears similarities with Barrett’s modeling of on-the -fly conceptualization. I was also familiar with the work of Neisser, Gibson, Mclelland and Rumelhart.
Quoting Isaac
My expertise in psychological theorizing is concentrated in clinical psychology, psychotherapy and personality theory. Since Barrett ventures into this territory from
time to time , we could use this as a source of comparison with cbt and other approaches to psychotherapy. Of course the sort of evidence that must be accepted in this area is different from that which neuroscientific models make use of, but it is nonetheless does have predictive power ( it must since it is results oriented rather than just abstract theory).
Quoting Isaac
And yet you said that you abandoned S-R theory for cognitivism not on the basis of the empirical evidence but on the basis of a conceptual shift. Would it be fair to say that results matter because they speak to the ability of an approach to define what it stands for clearly , comprehensively and in a coherent manner ? In other words, if a pretender to the throne of new psychological paradigm impressed you on these terms, then you could embrace it even if it hasn’t yet been translated into a thriving research community? My concern is that William James’ work was likely ignored by many who used the rationale that it hadn’t produced clear predictions or a body of empirical results backing it up. It is often difficult and frustrating to make sense of ground-breaking new ideas in psychology or philosophy, precisely because they have to introduce a mew vocabulary , and because the empirical research stage has to wait for a community to form around the ideas.
To be fair , I think that Thompson, Varela, Ratcliffe and Chemero aren’t as far removed from Clark and Barrett as they would like to think, and that maybe any differences in empirical findings from them will be subtle and their significance may only be appreciated by linking it back to the phenomenology( kind of like a work of modern art which is indecipherable without the text on the wall next to it ). ( I’ve written papers critiquing Thompson, Varela and Ratcliffe’s reading of phenomenological authors).
Nevertheless , I think Ratcliffe makes an interesting and somewhat significant distinction between accounts of emotion that make it an interpretive construction oriented to bodily states , and an interpretive construction that takes into account these bodily states but is primarily oriented toward the world. It is the glass which feels cold, not my bodily sensation of it.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228165528.pdf
Well I admire your pluck, if nothing else! But now it's on me to respond, so were I to have the courage (I don't) how might I rise to the equivalent challenge? How could you test my understanding of phenomenology in the way I could test your understanding of cognitive psychology? The people you cite as 'misunderstanding' phenomenology have read the relevant books, to no less a degree than you've read Barrett and Seth.
That their conclusions about aim and methods differ from your can't be held as a measure of understanding surely? Otherwise I could use the same measure to claim you don't understand Barrett ans Seth.
That their conclusions differ from mainstream interpretations cannot be used either, otherwise, again, I could use the same measure to claim you don't understand Barrett and Seth?
Maybe you could quiz me on what was actually said? But I could pass that no less than you could with a Google search - again we're no closer to understanding here.
The problem is, we're talking about apples and oranges. In the case of Barrett and Seth they're presenting experimental results and postulating the implications, then trying to find a model which fits the result, make predictions from it and test those. With phenomenology people are just postulating the model alone, or often not even the model, but a way of talking about the model. I'm not sure in this latter case there's even any body of information of which it is coherent to use the term 'understand'.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, that's certainly something which would contribute to the discussion, but again, it's apples and oranges. That a therapeutic approach works is a different evidential data-point from a neural response helping us understand why it worked. Otherwise we'd not distinguish between placebos and medicines.
Quoting Joshs
No, I abandoned methodological behaviourism because I felt it's tenets no longer applied. Methodological behaviourism was simply the admission that all we had available to us were stimuli and responses. It would therefore be unscientific to pretend otherwise. The study of psychology at the time was a study of what stimuli caused what response, not because we considered the 'black box' to be a simple switch, but because we had no accurate way to look inside it and so any speculation as to it's workings was unscientific. I gradually switched approach as the data coming out of neuroscience made that less and less the case. The more accurate data we have about the 'black box' the more we can make good models of computational cognition. I still think methodological behaviourism is appropriate for many areas of investigation, particularly with very young children.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. I think that whether one embraces a particular paradigm is a very personal and intuitive thing. It might be a coherency, it might be some quality of it's advocates, it might be because you fancy the lead researcher... I really don't think it matters. What I'm objecting to here is the idea that some paradigm which is entirely consistent with the evidence, can be called 'wrong' simply by pointing out that it has paradigmatic assumptions and then loosely hand-waiving and one or two of those and calling it a critique. considering the depth of, say, Barrett's modelling detail and the extent of physiological corroboration, I found the attempt to undermine with an anecdote about a Doberman pretty insulting really. It's something I find all too often where cognitive psychology and philosophy meet. Detailed intricate and complex models are dismissed with the most trite "well it doesn't feel like that to me"...as if it would!
Let's see some saccade studies, some time series EEG, some micro-electrode investigations...anything serious and detailed showing the way in which the outside world forms part of the Markov blanket for our mental models. Then there'll maybe be some cause to rethink the paradigm. The gut biome idea, for example is a good potential route, but it would need far more than the speculative connection given thus far. We'd need to see a clear single path from biochemical marker to specific neural signal, otherwise the biochemical marker is simply being modelled, not integrated and we're back to it's actual state being hidden.
Quoting Joshs
I think this misses the point of the place in which Seth, Friston and Barrett see their model. I'm not sure I've read it right, but I think this is the point has made above. That there is a risk, even a tendency, to associate the Markov blanket with the limits of agency has no bearing on either the utility or the accuracy of the model. what we talk about and the reality thereby created ("The glass feels cold") need not be reflected one-to-one in a model of how such talk comes about in the machinery we assume constructs it.
The way we feel our thought processes to take place and be oriented toward, is a result of the actual processes, not a report of them.
The analogies are meant to be for illustration of what I'm trying to say, not for persuasion (except inasmuch as clear understanding is necessary for persuasion). I'm not saying "this is analogous to that because I said so". I’m just starting with very general principles that make no reference whatsoever to the direction of fit of the kinds of opinions or assertions they are applied to. Then I apply them equally to opinion or assertions with the two opposite directions of fit, and what do you know, out of that emerges familiar positions on philosophical topics both about what is real and about what is moral. So yeah everything can be linked to something with the other direction of fit: just take the same principles, that are fit-agnostic, and apply them to something with the opposite direction of fit.
I note that something like this at least subconscious seems to have been going on in other philosophers who never explicitly (to my knowledge) called out the parallels. Mill’s ontology is the same as mine, and his ethics, though focused too much on ends alone, agrees with mine on what the correct ends are. I get to both of those conclusions via the same principles of universalism and phenomenalism, applied in opposite directions of fit. Kant’s epistemology is quite similar to mine, and his ethics, thoughts focused too much on means alone, approaches means in a similar way to mine. I get to both of those conclusions via the same principles of liberalism and criticism, applied in opposite directions of fit. Etc.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
First of all, I’m not talking about empiricism or hedonism at all here yet. We've stepped back to the topic of what we’re trying to do when we tell someone something, not the (chronologically earlier, logically later) topic of how to decide whether to agree with something we’re told. Empiricism and hedonism are only part of my answer to the latter question, not the former. For all I'm concerned about this topic of language alone, the descriptive claims could be about supernatural things being real, and the prescriptive claims could be about ritual purity being morally obligatory, even though my principle of phenomenalism would say to reject both of those claims. They are still the kind of claims, about something being real or something being moral, that we're talking about here, even if I think they're categorically incorrect claims.
Secondly, I phrased those examples in the first person there for a reason. Other people might mean different things by the same words I would use than I would mean, but I’m telling you in those examples what I would mean if I said them, and what state of mind in you would constitute, from my perspective, agreement with what I had said. It’s of course totally possible that people could use words differently than this way, which is why I’m not making any claims about what particular people mean by particular words, but about a kind of speech-act that can be performed by such words or perhaps others.
I am a native English speaker though, and except in philosophical contexts where people seem to go out of their way to interpret things in line with their ideologies, I never have trouble reaching understanding with people by using these words in this way, so this is clearly a way that they can be used, and this is the kind of speech-act I am discussing here, not some other speech-act someone might try to perform with similar words.
(I know an anecdote is not data, but I polled my gf, who is not otherwise privy to this conversation, about what she would think if someone said that they thought something was morally wrong but that they aimed to do it anyway, and she said that would sound weird, that such a person seems like a sociopath who doesn't understand what it means to think something is wrong, and only understands avoiding retribution from others.)
Quoting Isaac
See above about the first person.
Quoting Isaac
You’re mixing up two different parts of what’s being communicated by the speech-acts here: the state of affairs being talked about, and what’s being said about it (that it is or isn't a true or real state of affairs, or that it is or isn't a good or moral state of affairs). We can talk about sequoia trees being short, for example, without saying that they are short, so saying that they are (or aren’t) is no less expressing a mental attitude than saying that they should be (or shouldn’t be).
This was the point about the example dialogue between Alice and Bob a few posts ago, where Alice initially just said the sentence fragment "people killing each other" and Bob didn't yet know what she was saying about that sort of event: that it happens? or doesn't? or should? or shouldn't? As it went, Alice expressed two different attitudes toward that same state of affairs: that she thinks it happens, and that she thinks it shouldn't.
Quoting Isaac
You can't just claim that the same principles don't apply to different situations without addressing what about the differences between them makes those principles inapplicable to them. I get that that's what you're trying to do, but so far you seem unsuccessful to my judgement, so I remain justified in thinking that they are applicable to both.
Some of the things you're saying would have been successful if I had been saying the weird things you seem to take me to be saying, but I'm not saying those things.
Quoting Isaac
Sure, and I agreed as much. We learn them through the behaviors people do when using words to report their states of mind, but once we have learned them we can take them to refer to the states of mind themselves.
And NB that there absolutely is a behavioral difference in holding a descriptive or prescriptive opinion, on my account, because descriptivity and prescriptivity are defined almost if not entirely by the role played in our behavior. By watching their behavior we can infer things about how people think the world is, from the things they seem to expect, and how they think the world ought to be, from the things that they seem to strive to make the case. By hearing the words they use, like "is" and "ought", etc, in correlation with the states that bear those relations to their behavior, we can learn that when someone says something "is" the case that means they expect to see the world be that way, and when they say something "ought to be" the case that means they aim to make the world be that way.
For either of those kinds of states, we can ask ourselves whether they're erring somehow in thinking what they think, in either of those two ways; and we can ask ourselves whether or not to think likewise, in either of those two ways. That asking what is or isn't correct to think, in those two different ways.
Quoting Isaac
This is really getting at my whole point here, about moral language at least. I think that there isn’t any difference between those at all. (NB this is not the same as me taking X being morally wrong to be the same as anyone disapproving of it; I’m only equating two states of mind. To think X is morally wrong is to not want anyone to do it; for X to actually be morally wrong is for that thought that X is morally wrong to be correct, whatever that turns out to mean.)
So if I think X is morally wrong, I want nobody to do X. If I tell you that it’s morally wrong, and you agree with what I say, such that you now also think that X is morally wrong, that should this mean that you now also don’t want anyone to do X. Otherwise the thing you’d be agreeing to would not be the same thing I was claiming; you’d have misunderstood me.
If I take myself, Forrest, thinking X is morally wrong, to be the same thing as me, Forrest, disapproving of X, and I tell you that X is morally wrong, and you, for whatever reasons, take away from that something that you call yourself, Isaac, also thinking X to be morally wrong, such that you say you agree with me about that proposition as stated, but you take you thinking it’s morally wrong to be the same thing as you thinking that I, Forrest, disapprove of it, then you haven’t actually agreed with me. You haven't adopted the same attitude toward the same state of affairs as I have.
If I disapprove of something, and you agree, that means you also disapprove of it, not just that you’re aware that I disapprove of it.
Quoting Isaac
Me speculating on the physical mechanism is beside the point. It's clear in the first person that the mental phenomenon happens. I routinely have desires, and also want not to have those desires.
Sometimes I have at least a third layer there: for example, I momentarily allow myself to feel uninhibited happiness or excitation, looking forward to (more of) some good thing I want that it looks like I'll have opportunity to get, in a kind of situation where I've been hurt before; then I realize that my emotional guard is down and I try to tamp down on that happiness so I'm not blindsided by the "inevitable" bad thing that's about to happen; then I realize that that secondary response is an unhealthy trauma pattern that I don't want to be doing anymore.
So I find myself wanting to not want to not want whatever thing I was initially inclined to want. I see no reason why that kind of stack of wants about wants would have a hard limit in principle, though of course there are physical limits of one sort or another on mental capacity and I would expect taller stacks to be rarer anyway.
In any case, the only reason I mentioned higher than second-order desires is because that's a common critique of Frankfurt's conception of will as higher-order desire: people ask why is it specifically the second-order desire that's your will, why couldn't you have a third, fourth, etc? I see no problem with the possibility of having more than two orders, and I don't specify precisely the second order of desire as "intention", just the highest of however many orders you happen to have. If you have only the first-order desire, then your intention and desire coincide, by my account. Likewise with perception and belief, which now that I think about it also accounts for you seemingly wanting to treat those as synonyms: in the most common case, of not questioning your perceptions but just running with them naturally, your beliefs and your perceptions do coincide. It's only when you doubt your own perceptions that they become separate.
Quoting Isaac
I can only imagine you must be using words in a different way than I am here again, because if you take those words to mean what I take them to mean then you're denying something I've seen with my own eyes. I've seen what appears to be water on a hot road ahead of me that then disappears as I drive over it, and that continues happening over and over as I drive down the road. So of course I'm not constantly surprised that it disappears, because I know it's a mirage, I don't believe that there's really vanishing water all over the road. But it still looks like water, just as much as it did before; disbelieving that it's not water didn't make me stop perceiving something that looks like water.
Or consider for another example, someone's about to show you a deep fake of your favorite celebrity saying something they'd never say, and they tell you ahead that it is a deep fake. Then they play it, and sure enough, it looks like that celebrity saying the thing. But you already know it's a deep fake, or at least you believe it to be so, so you don't believe that that celebrity said that thing, even though you perceive something indistinguishable from that being the case, so far as you can tell.
Why not aesthetics then? What's different about the statement "X is beautiful"? When I mentioned this before, I'm sure you said it was to do with what people expected (ie an actual psychological fact about the world). Now, when I point out actual psychological facts about the world with regards to morality, you say it's nothing to do with such facts and only about what you personally mean in the abstract. So perhaps I've misunderstood your original objection, perhaps you could restate. What would be the problem with making this exact same analogy with "X is beautiful". "X is tall", "X is good", "X is beautiful", "X is the best!"... All could be treated in the same way - unless you're taking into account actual real-world facts about how we deal with aesthetics and personal judgement. But if we're to do that then we must also do so with morality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yep, that's still what I'm talking about too. Our language is dictated by our models of life, so it reflects our psychology.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yep. And the same problem would apply. In the former you're making a claim about an object (some supernatural thing) which we then expect to have invariant properties. In the latter you're giving an opinion which we expect to vary between individuals. If, instead one were to make the second claim something like "The bible says you should not X" then it would be a claim like the former. We don't expect what the bible says to be different for different readers.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You know the story of Humpty-Dumpty, yes? You've read Wittgenstein? There's no such thing as 'what you mean' by a word. There is only what the word means. It's a public definition, not a private one.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Ha! Unfortunately my wife's also a psychologist, so I don't think we'd have a fair sample if I asked her!
Quoting Pfhorrest
See Ramsey on truth. "P" and "It is true that P" express the same thing (broadly). Saying that "sequoias are tall" is the same as saying "I believe that sequoias are tall". The property 'tallness' is being connected to sequoias by the statement. This is not the case with "Helping the poor is good", although you're still importing the same "It is true that helping the poor is good".
But 'tall' is a property of sequoias. 'Good' is not a property of 'helping the poor'. It's a state of mind, an attitude toward helping the poor, it's a property of your mind, not the event.
In one you're saying a tree has the property of tallness, in the other you're saying your own mind has the reaction of feeling goodness in response to thinking about helping the poor.
In the one the property would continue to be true even if you and everyone else in the world ceased to exist, it is an invariant property: sequoias will always be tall. In the other your mind is the vehicle of the property concerned, not the event that is the subject of the sentence. So unlike the first, where the subject of the sentence is also the vehicle of the property, it would not continue to be the case in the absence of your mind. without your mind to feel it's 'good', helping the poor would have no such property. Without your mind to believe it, sequoias would continue to be tall.
Quoting Pfhorrest
What about if your statement means that you think of the action in a certain way 'wrong', but as a result of you saying it, I now think of that action in that same way? The property 'wrong' is still a property of our respective minds, not a property of the action. So the linguistic exchange has been about the states of our minds, not the action.
So with "the tree is tall" it's rightness is in the tree. It's right if the tree is, in fact, tall. We might judge that rightness with our flawed senses, we might use widespread agreement to better judge, but the truthmaker is the tree, an external, invariant object - whether it is or is not tall.
With "helping the poor is good" it's rightness is not in 'helping the poor'. It's in the mind of someone thinking about helping the poor. We still might judge that by our flawed senses (listening to them tell us they feel that way), but the truthmaker is not 'helping the poor', it's the mind of the person thinking about it.
The key difference. There's only one tree we all share. One truthmaker, therefore one truth.
There's not only one mind thinking about helping the poor, there's seven billion. Seven billion truthmakers, seven billion truths.
That’s a tough one.First, I should say that the disagreement I have with writers like Varela
and Thompson over their reading of phenomenology is what I’d call a family disagreement. Husserl was the one who introduced modern phenomenology around 1900, but each writer who came after him and who called their work phenomenological diverged from his approach in one way or another . For instance , many in the community might say Sartre’s version falls short of Husserl whereas Merelau-Ponty and Heidegger go beyond him. Many of those attempting to integrate phenomenology with cognitive science make use of a mixture of different phenomenologists. So I think that even though there are all sorts of internal disagreement about interpretation within that community, they would be in the same page concerning Chemero’s critique of Clark, because I think it’s general enough to capture what is common to all these versions.
I should also mention that it isn’t just phenomenology that would claim to find core philosophical pre-suppositions of Clark and Barrett problematic. A whole range of broadly postmodern schools of philosophy would do the same : hermeneutics , radical constructivism , post structuralism and deconstruction. From the vantage of this larger philosophical community, Barrett and Clark’s philosophical framework places them among the leading Neo-Kantian thinkers of the mid 19th century like Dilthey, Brentano , Helmholtz and Peirce. Not that this should mean anything to you. I’m just pointing out that the stakes are higher here than just a debate between phenomenology and pp.
I get the impression that it seems to you that phenomenology wants to avoid the ‘inner workings’ of the sub-personal domain, the ‘guts’ of the
system where I think you like to begin from, and just focus on apparent surface behavior.
I like doing that too. My B.A. was in cognitive neuroscience. What makes it tricky to see what phenomenology is about is that it begins from a claim that when we begin from even the smallest , most irreducible starting point for our model, for instance the neuron and its interconnections ( we could go further in the direction of ‘smallism’ : yes, smallism is a thing, and begin from the molecular or sub-atomic level, but then we’ve switched to an account which will hide everything useful from a psychological perspective) , we run smack to philosophical pre-suppositions that it is not the job of an empirical science to examine.
For instance, we owe the notion of empirical objectivity to a certain geometrization of the world into mathematical objects that took place between the time of Aristotle and Galileo. Implied in this formation of modern empirical science are assumptions such as the definition of the real world in terms of the calculable behavior of objects in motion. Phenomenology attempts to burrow beneath these assumptions in order to make explicit what is implicit in models like Barrett’s. An important point to make is that phenomenological analysis leaves intact all of the results of pp. It’s job isnt to refute or falsify , but to enrich.
Quoting Isaac
Except that Ratcliffe’s point depends on understanding the machinery that constructs it in a difference way than does pp.
Pp’s machinery isnt all that mysterious and opaque. Even just from listening to a few of Barrett’s youtube lectures I already had a pretty good idea about what the machinery must be like in order to support her claims concerning behavior and why it runs counter to older views about pre-wired emotion modules in the brain.
I mentioned ‘smallism’ above. I think smallism and localism may apply to pp’s meta--theoretical assumptions:
“ It is our contention that even where smallism and localism are not openly endorsed, it is not the evidence but rather conceptual divergence that is responsible for the continuation of the extended cognition debate.
This is because, given the explicit or merely implicit commitment to smallism and localism (which are not empirical claims), no quantity or quality of evidence could possibly settle the debate. Rather than riding on empirical results and interpretations of those results, the extended cognition debate is therefore a debate about how to define the word “cognition”. For internalists in the debate (Rupert, Adams, Aizawa), cognition is defined in terms of computational manipulations of representations.But computational manipulation of representations is not part of the explanatory toolkit of those who gather evidence on extended cognition. These cognitive scientists work outside the paradigms of smallism and localism. When the debate is framed, as it usually is, as essentially an empirical one, then
critics react as if those working in extended cognitive science are dealing with defective evidence and/or incorrectly interpreting the evidence. But if the extended cognition debate is, as we claim, not empirical but one of definition, then critics might wonder: are advocates of extended cognition simply changing the subject? If the debate really is a disagreement about how to understand the word “cognition”, then the critic might think that, by adopting a different definition to begin with, those who go against mainstream smallist/localist cognitive science are not offering a competing account but are simply doing something else. This is a mistaken view: not only is extended cognitive science not changing the subject, but mainstream smallist/localist cognitive science itself might instead more justly be charged with changing the subject. We will elaborate on this point in the final section.”
https://content.sciendo.com/downloadpdf/journals/slgr/41/1/article-p9.pdf
You asked me how I could test your understanding of phenomenology. Why don’t we start instead with testing your understanding of the philosophical pre-suppositions grounding your own psychological
models . For instance, tell me more about how we can talk about what lies outside of a psychological system in its environment. I can see the influence of Kant on pp, but what is it about the difference between an outside and an inside that makes i it necessary for you to insist that they not be already co-implied in each other. Try to explain this without recourse to markov blankets but unsung a more fundamental language.
Also @Isaac.
I think that's a good challenge. Do you believe it relates to the point about cognitivism+internalism from the paper I elaborated on here? In which the state collection the Markov blanket is computed for is tacitly identified with the body (fine) and the causal paths which bodily processes mediate are thus construed as internal to the body (not fine simpliciter, but consistent), and the environment is then construed as "outside". I think it's a question of whether you see the coupled system of body and environment as shot through with causal chains that penetrate right through the body and go out the other side; being neither in it nor out it, vs whether you see it strictly in terms of the partition into bodily and environmental (and locale) states. The latter is an internalist construal (models inside the body = content inside the body), the former is an outside without an inside style externalism (undermining the existence of the inside, models inside the body = stages of already environmental relations).
Doesn't this fall foul of my first hurdle? We've already dismissed commonality as a measure, Remember Thomspon's 4 citations compared to Seth's 86 did not carry weight as a measure of understanding in psychology, so why would widespread agreement carry weight in any particular interpretation of phenomenology? Do you doubt that, should I trawl the papers, I could dig up an interpretation contrary to that general agreement and cite it, just as you did Thompson?
Quoting Joshs
Right. But when we drill down into that claim, I'm getting nothing by way of evidence. The claim, as you cite it here, invokes what is 'useful'. How are you judging what is 'useful' - especially "everything useful"?
Quoting Joshs
This is a common complaint. Again, one I've never really understood. Any scientific model has philosophical pre-suppositions which it does not examine. I get that. A philosophical model could examine them. I get that. But a philosophical model could not examine them without philosophical pre-suppositions. Philosophers are not super-human, they don't get to see things without those pre-suppositions. So how is it helping at all? We replace one set of pre-supposition infused ideas for another. Where does that get us?
For example...
Quoting Joshs
...Where the first half of the argument is itself a pre-suppostion on which the second half is based. As is the pre-suppostion that thinking about something can reveal a truth about it (the central pre-suppostion of philosophy).
Quoting Joshs
Well, @fdrake has already done a good job, so I won't repeat that ground. Instead I'll add...
In order to talk about 'a ball' we have to, at the same time as labelling it, know what it's boundaries are. To know it's boundaries is to know that it is 'a ball' because the boundary is the point where 'ball' stops and 'air' begins. The ball interacts with the air, but it is not part of the same thing as the air. If it was, it wouldn't be nameable. It's the same with 'me', you' , 'a person' etc. If we don't have boundaries we can't name the objects. If there's nowhere where 'me' ends and 'everything else' begins, then your statement that "the mind is intentional" has no referent. To make a claim about what 'the mind' is, you have to have a boundary to 'the mind' to know that you're making a claim about it and not about just everything. That boundary is the Markov blanket (damn, I nearly got to the end without mentioning Markov blankets!)
Because the particular widespread agreement I’m talking about is informing the Chemero link I sent you as well as the ‘smallism-localism’ link. The latter paper mentions a thriving, productive extended mind research community oriented around shared conceptual assumptions, and this general interpretation of phenomenology is a core one
of theirs. You’ll notice Gallagher, Chemero and Slaby in the references, all of whom have written extensively on phenomenological authors. These same authors and others I’ve mentioned (Ratcliffe, Thompson, Zahavi) recur frequently in research papers of this community. Meanwhile, few to no citations of Clark or Barrett will appear. So this general interpretation carries weight in the sense that you will have a hard time understanding what this community is about , what conceptual difference they’re referring to with respect to the computationalist representationalist community, without knowing a bit about their shared phenomenological commitment.
But I suspect what you mean by ‘carrying weight’ is:
is it true ( not in some ultimate metaphysical sense)? My answer won’t be very satisfying to you. You simply have to do your best to read Husserl, Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger and decide for yourself. Either it will make sense and produce a gestalt shift in your thinking or it won’t. If it produces that shift , you won’t need an iota of empirical evidence in order to know what is missing from pp models.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, but that won’t help you understand what shared conceptual commitment is guiding the non-representationalist, post-computational
extended mind community.
Quoting Isaac
It is quite helpful when there are two competing research paradigms in psychology and one of them is claiming that the disagreement is a conceptual one rather than a dispute over evidence. Quoting Isaac
Let me introduce Husserl’s analysis of the perception of a ball. I suggest at first you just treat it as a story and then we can see how it offers a different account of inside and outside and how this relates to Husserl’s notion of intentionality.
I can then point out what aspects of this ‘story’’ have had a profound influence of perceptual researchers like Varela, Thompson , Noe and O’Reagan.
Quoting Joshs
Ah, then we have crossed-wires a little. I was referring to the slightly more general sense in which you claimed to 'understand' the arguments of Seth and Feldman Barrett (despite holding an unpopular interpretation of them). I'm making the analogy that I could make the same claim about phenomenology (or even a certain brand of it). Simply because I hold the (unpopular) view that it's methods and aims are such-and-such, cannot be held as evidence that I don't understand the approach. You can't cite more popular sources explaining that it's aims and objectives are not such-and such as evidence that I don't understand. Otherwise I can do the same for your unpopular interpretation of Seth and Feldman Barrett. Sort of veering wildly off-topic here, but it's a common theme and so of interest to me. A popular response (particularly in the more 'continental' philosophies) is to claim one's interlocutor doesn't understand. I've never really understood what measure of 'understanding' was being used.
Quoting Joshs
A nice answer. One I have a lot of sympathy with. But the last section seems out of place with the approach. I wouldn't 'know' what was missing would I? Knowledge is not gained by gestalt shifts, only perspective.
Quoting Joshs
There's that 'understand' again. Grrr!
Quoting Joshs
OK, How so?
Quoting Joshs
It sounds entirely consistent with active inference accounts of perception. I'm not seeing the difference. You might need to provide me with a little exegesis.
Not sure I’m following you here. Can we just say that a gestalt shift not only opens one up to a new approach but changes their interpretation of their currently held model?
Now suddenly , in the light of this changed perspective, that current model appears ‘lacking’. I realize there are implications here of a direct comparison between the older and newer model that would have to be justified.
I’m going to take a page from Kelly and say that when I achieve a gestalt shift in my thinking it allows me to ‘subsume’ the older model within the newer one. Kelly used the notion of subsumption in the therapist-client relationship. In order to be helpful, the therapist must subsume the client’s construct system as a variation within the therapist’s system. This doesn’t mean that the therapist must begin thinking like the client, only that they be able , from within their own perspective , to effectively anticipate the client’s ways of construing situations.
That’s how I’m using the word ‘understanding’ with regard to adjudicating between conceptual systems.
As a good postmodernist( or maybe I should say a good Kellyan) , I could claim to ‘understand’ phenomenology (or any other set of philosophical presuppositions) by either subsuming it within a more superordinate model of mine or using it to subsume other perspectives. In either case I would be treating it as a valid and useful body of knowledge that functioned as either a foundation for my preferred perspective or as the cutting edge of thinking for me. If instead I simply argued that it was ‘wrong’, incoherent, nonsensical, irrational or falsified , I would run the risk of being called a modernist or realist. Don’t know if that was helpful.
Quoting Isaac
Here’s my attempt at exegesis. I’m going to use Clark as representative of the pp position. Let me know if that’s not a good idea. Clark declares that he does not believe in a correspondence theory of mind:
“ This perspective leads to a rather profound shift in how we think about mind and cognition- a shift I characterize as the transition from models of representation as mirroring or encoding to models of representation as control (Clark 1995) . The idea here is that the brain should not be seen as primarily a locus of inner descriptions of external states of affairs; rather,
it should be seen as a locus of inner structures that act as operators upon the world via their role in determining actions.”
So Clark maintains the idea of perception as a meeting of the inner with the outer, but replaces passive mirroring with the organism’s active navigation of the world. But I don’t get the impression that for Clark the organism co-constructs and co-defines the very environment that it navigates by virtue of its interactions with that world, except in certain circumstances, and then it is an emergent function. Usually, the organism selects what is salient to it from an environment that exists independently of it. Clark seems to consider cultural creations not so much as manifestations of human-environmental reciprocal determination but as only additional tools (external props) for navigating a world definable independently of the subject’s activities.
“ our behavior is often sculpted and sequenced by a special class of complex external structures: the linguistic and cultural artifacts that structure modern life, including maps, texts, and written plans. Understaading the complex interplay between our on-board and on-line neural resources and these external props and pivots is a major task confronting the sciences of embodied thought.”
How might this differ from Husserl?
Husserl writes:
“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within what is for me real or possible?”
Is Husserl just agreeing with Clark here that the world has meaning for me by virtue of my goal-directed actions in it ? I think the difference is more significant that this.
One way to look at what Husserl is after with his notion of the intentional act is that what the organism encounters in the form of an external ‘stimulus’ belongs to a gestalt that includes the oeganism’s activity.
Let me bring in this quote from Merleau-ponty:
“When Gestalt theory informs us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply that this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception, which leaves us free, in an ideal analysis, to bring in the notion of impressions. It is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be perception at all. The perceptual ‘something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field'.” (Phenomenology of Perception, p.4)
That field includes my embodied mind. Any change in my perception , any introduction of a new stimulus is a deformation of the entire embodied perceptual field , a gestalt shift.
In sum , when I perceive , the ‘stimulus’ I perceive doesn’t stand outside of me , over against me , it isn’t ‘matched’ against internally generated
action -oriented representations. Rather, it appears directly as a figure standing out against but defined in its very meaning by its role with respect to that background field. Husserl’s intentional act is not a ‘ ‘combining’ of external and internal . It is the creation of a new dimension of sense composed equally of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects. . Each intentional perceptive act is at the same time an anticipating forward from previous experience ( what Clark would call an internally generated prediction) and an occurring into that anticipation of the perceptual object. The anticipation co-shapes the objective sense of the perception at the same time that the objective ‘external’ aspect of it addresses the anticipation.
What is crucial to note here is that there is no object in itself and no anticipational ‘prediction by itself, no guess that takes place PRIOR TO encounter with an outside (and thus no moment of matching outer with inner) These are not separate moments, structures or processes:the internally generated prediction and the stimulus that enters from the outside. the subjective ‘prediction’ and the objective ‘outside’ are not separate entities or processes. They are the inseparable poles of a single intentional act. I anticipate into what intrudes upon me. That bifurcated act IS the intended object. An intentional act may have as its meaning a perceptual object that is recognizably familiar and identifiable, or one that appears foreign , unlike what came before , unidentifiable in some fashion. This is what Clark would call an error , but doesnt error imply a correct template to compare the erroneous to? For Husserl ,a surprising perception isnt an error in the sense of a failure to correctly match owns predictions to a supposedly independently existing external pattern. It is a positive and substantive new sense, which may or may not lead to a new form of harmoniously anticipated perception.
Husserl agrees with Clark that the organism strives toward harmonious anticipation of events , but this striving isnt oriented around a conformity of internal inferences with external ‘information’. Rather , it is a moving forward on the basis of the substantive meaning of the ‘failed’ perceptual act. If such ‘error ‘ is followed by a new harmony it will not be because néwly generated internal pattens formed a better match with pre-existing external information, but because a new mutually co-detemined subjective-objective gestalt shift produced such a harmoniously anticipatory situation.
Clark offers that there are situations in which the organism and environment exhibit emergent properties of a single non-decoupleable system, but he makes such circumstances secondary to those in which he still
feels that an internalist representationist model is appropriate.
“ Where the inner and the outer exhibit this kind of continuous, mutually modulatory, non- decouplable coevolution, the tools of information - processing decomposition are, I believe, at their weakest. What matters in such cases are the real, temporally rich properties of the ongoing exchange between organism and environment. Such cases are conceptually
very interesting, but they do not constitute a serious challenge to the general role of representation-based understanding in cognitive science. Indeed, they cannot constitute such a challenge, since they lie, by definition, outside the class of cases for which a representational approach is most strongly indicated.”
Yes, I think that makes sense, but 'knowledge' seems a much bolder claim than that. A new perspective can indeed show areas where the previous one is deficienct. So now imagine a person whose first experience is with this 'new' perspective and who now comes across what, to us, is the 'old' perspective. Are they not going to have the same experience?
Quoting Joshs
Applies both ways though, yes? Active inference does account for the Doberman. It just does so differently, from a different perspective. Either we're realists about our models (in which case there's got to be a truthmaker), or we're constructivist, in which case the Doberman example is a category error.
Quoting Joshs
Not that it's a bad idea, but I'm much more familiar with Friston, Feldman Barrett, and Seth, so I may not always be faithful to his ideas specifically.
Quoting Joshs
OK, so here's the first hurdle. Friston, Feldman Barrett, and Seth definitely do see co-construction as central to active inference. Hidden states are just that. 'States'. Not objects, or scenes, or environments. All of those are constructed as part of the active inference process. I'd need to work more directly from Clark to see if the disparity is your interpretation or his version, but either way, it's not the version I subscribe to.
Quoting Joshs
What active inference accounts of perception are acting on is signals, not objects of perception. So that which is 'matched' is an edge, a lightness, a movement... I don't see how such perceptive elements could possibly be already 'defined in meaning'. They're handled by the V1 and V2 cores, these don't even have direct connections to semantic cores.
Quoting Joshs
Again, this concept is core to Friston's active inference.
Quoting Joshs
Not seeing how this follows.
In general, the more you explain phenomenological approaches to me, the more impressed I am by the way they presaged active inference approaches. Which, although not your objective, I'm very grateful for. But I'm certainly not seeing any divergence. Quite the opposite.
That’s good. According to my definition of understanding as subsumption I’d have to say that you do understand phenomenology in some form in that you’re seeing it as a legitimate and substantive precursor or foundation for pp models. The question now is whether the more radical interpretations of phenomenology represented by Merleau-Ponty, Varela, JJ. Gibson and Heidegger can enrich pp accounts.
I singled out the above authors because Clark specifically mentions them as anti-representationalist , anti-computationalist approaches that share many features with pp.
I’m going to quote a long passage from Clark’s ‘Putting, Brain, Body and Mind back together again’ because I think you might find his take on these figures interesting:
“ Heidegger (1927) wrote of the importance of Dasein (being there) - a mode of being-in-the-world in which we are not detached, passive observers but active participants - and stressed the way our practical dealings with the world (hammering nails, opening doors, and so on) do not involve detached representings (e.g. of the hammer as a rigid object of a certain weight and shape) so much as functional couplings. We use the hammer to drive in the nail, and it is this kind of skilled practical engagement with the world that is, for Heidegger, at the heart of all thought and intentionality .A key notion in this analysis is the idea of equipment- the stuff that surrounds us and figures in the multiple skilled activities underlying our everyday abilities to cope and succeed.
Thus, Heidegger's work prefigures skepticism concerning what might be termed " action-neutral" kinds of internal representation, and it echoes our emphasis on tool use and on action-oriented couplings between organism and world . Some of Heidegger's concerns, however, are radically different from those of the present treatment. In particular, Heidegger was opposed to the idea that knowledge involves a relation between minds and an independent world (Dreyfus 1991, pp. 48- 51) - a somewhat metaphysical question on which I take no stand. In addition, Heidegger's notion of the milieu of embodied action is thoroughly social. My version of being there is significantly broader and includes all cases in which body and local environment appear as elements in extended problem- solving activity.
Closer in spirit and execution to the present project is the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was concerned to depict everyday intelligent activity as the playing out of whole organism- body- world synergies. In particular, Merleau-Ponty stressed the importance of what I have called "continuous reciprocal causation "- viz., the idea that we must go beyond the passive image of the organism perceiving the world and recognize the way our actions may be continuously responsive to worldly events which are at the same time being continuously responsive to our actions. Consider a lovely example, which I think of as "the hamster and tongs"
:
When my hand follows each effort of a struggling animal while holding an instrument for capturing it, it is clear that each of my movements responds to an external stimulation; but it is also clear that these stimulations could not be received without the movements by which I expose my receptors to their influence. . . . The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject are not only intermingled; they also constitute anew whole. (Merleau-Ponty 1942, p. 13)
In this example the motions of my hands are continuously responsive to those of the struggling hamster, but the hamster's struggles are continuously molded and shaped by the motions of my hand. Here action and perception, as David Hilditch (1995) has put it, coalesce as a kind of " free form interactive dance between perceiver and perceived.
" It is this iterated interactive dance that, we saw, is now recognized in recent work concerning the computational foundations of animate vision. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty also stresses the way perception is geared to the control of real-time, real-world behavior. In this respect, he discovers something very like the Gibsonian notion of an affordance- a notion which, in turn, is the direct inspiration of the idea of action-oriented internal representations discussed above in chapter 2 and in section 8.3.
An affordance is an opportunity for use or interaction which some object or state of affairs presents to a certain kind of agent. For example, to a human a chair affords sitting, but to a woodpecker it may afford something quite different. Gibson's special concern was with the way visual perception might be tuned to invariant features presented in the incoming light signal in ways that directly selected classes of possible actions- for example, the way patterns of light might specify a flat plain affording human walking. To the extent that the human perceptual system might become tuned to such affordances, Gibson claimed that there was no need to invoke internal representations as additional entities mediating between perception and action. In section 8.3 I argued that such outright rejection often flows from an unnecessary conflation of two properly distinct notions. One is the fully general idea of internal representations as inner states, structures, or processes whose adaptive role is to carry specific types of information for use by other neural and action-guiding systems. The other is the more
specific idea of internal representations as rich, action-neutral encodings of external states of affairs. Only in the latter, more restricted sense is there any conflict between Gibsonian ideas and the theoretical construct of internal representation.
Finally, the recent discussion of "the embodied mind" offered by Varela et al. (1991) displays three central concerns that likewise occupy center stage in the present treatment.First, Varela et al. are concerned to do justice to the active nature of perception and the way our cognitive organization reflects our physical involvement in the world . Second, they offer some powerful example of emergent behavior in simple systems.Third , there is sustained attention to the notion of reciprocal (or "circular") causation and its negative implications for certain kinds of component- based reductive projects. These themes come together in the development of the idea of cognition as enaction. Enactive cognitive science, as Varela et al. define it, is a study of mind which does not depict cognition as the internal mirroring of an objective external world . Instead, it isolates the repeated sensorimotor interactions between agent and world as the basic locus of scientific and explanatory interest.Varela et al. are thus pursuing a closely related project to our own.
There are, however, some important differences of emphasis and interest. First, Varela et al. use their reflections as evidence against realist and objectivist views of the world . I deliberately avoid this extension, which runs the risk of obscuring the scientific value of an embodied, embedded approach by linking it to the problematic idea than objects are not independent
of mind.My claim, in contrast, is simply that the aspects of real-world structure which biological brains represent will often be tightly geared to specific needs and sensorimotor capacities. The target of much of the present critique is thus not the idea that brains represent aspects of a real independent world, but rather the idea of those representations as action-neutral and hence as requiring extensive additional computational effort to drive intelligent responses. Second, Varela et al. (ibid., p. 9) oppose the idea that “cognition is fundamentally representation." Our approach is much more sympathetic to representationalist and information- processing analyses. It aims to partially reconceptualize ideas about the contents and formats of various inner states and processes, but not to reject the very ideas of internal representation and information- processing themselves.
Finally, our treatment emphasizes a somewhat different body of cognitive scientific research (viz., the investigations of real-world robotics and autonomous- agent theory) and tries to show how the ideas and analyses emerging from this very recent research fit into the larger nexus of psychological, psychophysical, and developmental research which is the common ground of both discussion geared to specific needs and sensorimotor capacities. The target of much of the present critique is thus not the idea that brains represent aspects of a real independent world, but rather the idea of those representations as action-neutral and hence as requiring extensive additional computational effort to drive intelligent responses. Second, Varela et al.
(ibid., p. 9) oppose the idea that cognition is fundamentally representation." Our approach is much more sympathetic to representationalist and
information- processing analyses. It aims to partially reconceptualize ideas about the contents and formats of various inner states and processes, but not to reject the very ideas of internal representation and information-
processing themselves. Finally, our treatment emphasizes a somewhat different
body of cognitive scientific research (viz.,
the investigations of real-world robotics and autonomous-
agent theory) and tries to show how the ideas and analyses emerging from this very recent research fit into the larger nexus of psychological, psychophysical, and developmental research which is the common ground of both discussions.
:up:
Also @Josh.
That's my take too, active embodied inference resonates very well with phenomenology. The nexus of conflicts between the two approaches; at least from the phenomenological side; seems to be the notion of perception as a representation. Heideggerians don't like representational accounts of perception very much for reasons of the task relativeness of representations, for reasons of alleged over reliance on cognitive categories and lastly for the Heideggerian commitment to holism. I'll write a little on those, though it is a hot take. The three are related.
Task relativeness: representations are typically construed as accurate/less accurate, purposiveness doesn't fit % accuracy, % accuracy instead is evaluable relative to a purpose - an analogy there might be the relationship of a salience map of the face to a face classification task.
Holism: that task relativeness is also a context sensitivity, and finding ourselves in the right context + recognising that we're in the right context for our acts is a meaning imbueing/discovering activity. Representation construed in terms of efficiency and accuracy alone can allegedly create a drought of semantic information; something has to make perceptual features and actions meaningful chunks of body+environment, not just accurate and task fit.
Over reliance on cognitive categories: a representation is theorised as a state vector tuned to be fit for a task, but there's little work on the vector comes to having moving parts - what work is done specialises on what parts of the brain are specialised for what task, not what parts of the active inference machine cotton onto meaningful causal structures. The over reliance on cognitive categories is that we end up feeding enough context into the active inference machine for it to work in a domain; like Friston's saccade experiments facial recognition study; but we don't learn how to evaluate which domain we're in using the same procedure. So we've fed in a cognitively demarcated context without paying attention to the demarcation of contexts, and we end up manipulating representations within a domain rather than tuning a representation generator that varies over domains - like what long term Friston's free energy approach aims to do but hasn't yet (@VagabondSpectre for central pattern generators being another framework).
As I was saying, the question now is whether the more radical interpretations of phenomenology represented by Merleau-Ponty, Varela, JJ. Gibson and Heidegger can enrich pp accounts. As you saw in my long quote , Clark thinks they unnecessarily close the door on internal
representations. If phenomenological and pp accounts have so much else in common, does this one difference
amount to anything significant? I suppose to some
extent it depends on the aims of the model. Clark likes to build machines , and I think it would be a lot more difficult to simulate psychological processes vi an A.I. system at present without invoking computations and representations. I think if Clark were a personality theorist, psychotherapist, researcher in psychopathology or social psychologist he might look at matters differently.
In this vein , there was something that struck me about Barrett’s youtube lectures on emotion. She decided to spotlight what I consider to be a relatively minor feature of emotion processing as a prime example of how pp differs from older, essentialist approaches to emotion. In her examples , the brain uses active inference to decide whether certain physiological sources of information amount to anxiety as opposed to indigestion , a heart attack or some other physical malady. I understand her aim is to show that deciding that one is experiencing an emotion is the end product of a complex process of prediction testing that takes into account as many sources of information as are available from the person’s interaction with the world as well as their interoceptive states. In enactivist approaches like that of Matthew Ratcliffe and Varela, the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett
describes, but on HOW one has it, in the sense of how one is finding oneself in the world, one’s comportment toward events. It is not that they are denying feedback from bodily states needs to be interpreted in order for one to have an emotion. I think it is that the various forms of input into affect , the hormonal , physiological-kinesthetic, behavior and social, are so tightly integrated through reciprocal causality that the question of WHAT one is feeling ( angina vs anxiety) is usually much less pertinent than the issue of how the world as a whole is altered for us when we are anxious or sad or elated. It isn’t that pp doesn’t have the tools necessary to account for mood as global attitude , but I wonder if beginning from computational representation turns integrated holistic comportment into a struggle rather than a given in most situations, something that has to
be wrung out from the data first as a what question and then as a how question. Representational models just seem to me to be clunky when it comes to handling full-fledged ongoing , real-time reciprocal causality.
When Barrett was describing the butterflies one feels when giving a public talk, instead of suggesting it could have been mere indigestion( which of course it could have) , she could have talked about how one’s heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes , how it races again when looking back up and then calms when one remembers to imagine the audience naked, how one’s reflexes seem to be in overdrive at every noise from the crowd, how one’s legs seem primed to race one’s body out of the room. She could have talked about this constellation of thoughts , feelings, sensations as a coordinated dance, each component implying the next as a meaningful whole rather than a combination of arbitrary elements. Most importantly, she could have talked about the particular ways in which this anxious comportment shapes and orients one’s inclinations to relate o to other people. I recognize that the dance of emotion is composed of differences in equal measure to similarities , but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole.
I agree so far as object recognition is concerned, but this comes back to the point I made to Joshs about the features of perception being more fundamental that objects. active inference begins to work at things like edge recognition, contrast detection...and I just don't see how those sorts of things could be task oriented. By the time we get up to object recognition, I think salience matters, but active inference authors, certainly Seth, have already concluded the same and speak of multiple models. For Friston as well, the 'surprise' the model is trying to minimise is the signal it is receiving, which, for higher models like object recognition, will be inputs from other cortices, so task salience has already been subsumed in the model by then - one of the hidden states in the object recognition model will be signals from the parts of the brain tracking things like objective. Like if you're thinking "Where have I put my keys, I'm sure I left them on my kitchen table", the expectation that your keys are on the kitchen table will be an input into the system modelling the objects there.
Quoting fdrake
I don't think this is the case, but I get that I'm straying away from the core of active inference in saying so. I don't think the chunks have to be meaningful. In fact I think they often aren't. I think 'meaning' is a post hoc activity of higher models to try and minimise surprise from the lower models. I don't see any use for it in the act of perceptions. I think it's sue comes in reviewing that act seconds later for efficient recall, or conversion into things like speech acts or object-oriented actions. Obviously the meaning-infused recall will then figure heavily in the next saccade, but only as one of many signals, not as an overarching control.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, that seems like a valid criticism. Perhaps it reflects the limits of a scientific approach. I can see the problems, but not necessarily the solutions in the lab. It may be time to let us wishy-washy psychologists loose on the subject, something more like Feldman Barrett is doing with emotion?
Besides... give us a questionnaire and a statistics suite and we'll prove anything*!
*(to p=0.05)
What makes you believe they're not task oriented? Or in other words - what makes the sensible default hypotheses non-task relativeness for edge recognition and contrast detection; or whatever broader category they lay in; when the rest of the procedure is task-relative?
Quoting Isaac
So I can agree that it looks like the things we end up saying are meaningful upon reflection are post hoc constructions, but I do think there's another flavour of meaningful information which is embedded in the functionality. The type of semantic information being that perceptual features are foraged under some model of hypothetical cause; the hypothetical causal structure ascribes an explanatory space of meanings/reasons consistent with the act. EG, when someone's perceptually exploring a face, they look at the bits of the face which are most informative regarding its global structure assuming it were a face, you can see the general model of faces at work when looking at someone's scan paths over faces. As for why it maybe counts as semantic, it's like like instructional information.
While the extent to which perceptual feature formation is saturated by meaning "all the way down" is likely to be largely a philosophical dispute; the fact that it is largely a philosophical dispute should give us some pause.
Quoting Isaac
I dunno how to evaluate this!
Only that tasks (in the sense I think the phenomenologists meant it - 'doing the shopping', eating a sandwich'...) are modelled by areas of the brain several steps removed from the primary visual cortices. They'll have an influence by virtue of several stages of signal suppression, but it will be so watered down by that point that I wouldn't necessarily see it as a pragmatic influence.
I suppose one could take a much broader view of 'task', where a task might be to determine shape, or distinguish background from foreground - in which case I'd agree these can be task oriented, but From the quotes I've been given, that doesn't seem to be what the phenomenologists are on about. You'll know much better than I though, I may have gotten the wrong impression.
Quoting fdrake
That's really interesting. I'd not thought of it that way, but I can definitely see the link. I suppose one concern I'd have is whether we lose something in lumping meaning as post hoc story-telling and meaning as sub-conscious purpose in the same boat. I think they're radically different in normal use, even though I can see the similarities here.
Quoting fdrake
Ha! Self-deprecation comes off sounding weird, I obviously think psychologists are brilliant (or am I being self-deprecatingly honest about my flawed egotism?)...sorry, I'll stop now.
The point was that I think neuroscience can only ever to categorised work. It's so fiendishly complicated that any attempt to draw wider, more holistic conclusions on the basis of it's results alone will fail (currently). Seth's lab at Sussex, for example, is getting more and more into the fine detail of perceptive processing (and now including interception too) and the papers coming out are really cool, but he'll never be able to work that back up again to integrate higher cortices using the methods he does. It's a huge computational task just to deal with the data in that very specific region. He'd need a new method. Maybe psychology, maybe something else.
Realised I'd missed replying to this.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. I think perhaps Clark is not such a good envoy for active inference. Friston is the Messiah of active inference, although some if his stuff can be a little impenetrable, it's worth persevering with, it'll give you a more solid foundation without what may be some idiosyncrasies of Clark's approach.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not sure I follow. 'How' in what sense? (I'm afraid 'finding oneself in the world' hasn't made it any clearer).
Quoting Joshs
I think that question is subsumed under subsequent models of inference. Afterall, the world is not altered for us in any one unique way when we're anxious, any more than our physiological states are in any one unique set up. What Barrett is trying to say is that the way the world appears to change is one of the factors involved in the model.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, I grant that. The models themselves would be way too complex, and using them in our conscious thought would be pointless repetition (we're already doing so subconsciously), but understanding that we process things this way as a 'big picture' can be helpful therapeutically, I think.
I don't really know how Heidegger would deal with objects showing themselves out of a background mechanically, certainly don't recall anything about it. The mechanics, so to speak, aren't the kind of thing a Heideggerian often wants to talk about. So I don't know if you've gotten the wrong impression or not. Perhaps @Joshs knows better regarding what produces the particular "objectivities of the objects" for a Heideggerian so to speak.
Quoting Isaac
That seems to be within task, like within "eating a sandwich", do you think previous task information is blocked from influencing the current task? Or, in other words, does the task unfold along with the doing, so to speak? I get that you can partition off the regulatory signals once you've fixed a task you're describing, and it becomes somewhat post hoc, but can you partition of the regulatory signals in the agent's history from informing them what the current task is?
Quoting fdrake
Heidegger agrees with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty that there is no such thing as a task-neutral sensation. But his reasoning differs from these authors. MP and Husserl ground experiencing in perception and argue that even the most primitive perceptual features are the result of constructive processes in which expectations are crucial. Heidegger, however, believes all new experiences are bound up so directly in holistically organized pragmatic aims and significances that trying to ground Being in perception produces an artificial abstraction. Instead, he founds all experiencing on what he calls the ‘as’ structure. We see something ‘as’ something , that is, as the contextual, pragmatic way it matters to us in relation to our ongoing concerns.
“Da-sein hears because it understands. On the basis of this existentially primary potentiality for hearing, something like hearkening becomes possible. Hearkening is itself phenomenally more primordial than what the psychologist "initially" defines as hearing, the sensing of tones and the perception of sounds. Hearkening, too, has the mode of being of a hearing that understands. "Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initially hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world." Essentially understanding, Dasein is initially together with what is understood. In the explicit hearing of the discourse of the other, too, we initially understand what is said: more precisely, we are already together with the other beforehand, with the being which the discourse is about. We do not, on the contrary, first hear what is expressed in the utterance. Even when speaking is unclear or the language is foreign, we initially hear unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone data.”
“ But why is it that this as-structure is already present in a direct act of dealing with something? The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure.
Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122)”
For @Isaac, translation of the as structure and highlighting an issue. The as-structure is a component of active perception that takes a thing as a thing. That configuration over there? That's seen as a bird. It is a bird. Maybe an analogy for it is if we think of perception as an object classification task, the "as" is the classifier sorting the environment into perceptual categories. Classifiers are (arguably) representations though; the predictors on the right of the equation prescribe the classifier value for the thing on the left of the equation. The as structure is sort of how the sensorium counts as the world, but the elements of the as structure are not applied on like "paint" to indifferent objects, it's more like a negotiation - you've learned to see stuff as stuff by interacting with it, so the world impresses upon the sensorium just as the sensorium impresses upon the world - to the extent even that there's no point making a strict distinction between them in all contexts, what I'm typing on counts as a keyboard -> what I'm tying on is a keyboard.
The "as" is also not necessarily derivative of perceptual information, it's conceived of as a component part of perception - like how old perceptual features are priors for new ones. It's a component of an ongoing "lived flow", it's the name for the feature that chunks it into meaningful bits.
You can suppress that basic meaningfulness through an intellectual/practical act in a restricted way, as you might while considering unclassified objects in the classification task (hiding what the objects are classified as, what labels they have and so on), but it's a suppression of a basic functioning in a restricted way - stuff still counts as stuff elsewhere in the act.
As I've read @Isaac's points, he was talking about spatial and temporal aspects of objects; boundaries, relative positions, evaluations of where, the kind of low level object recognition stuff our brain does. What "counts as" an object in this regime is more like spatiotemporal locale than a contextualised role. To use the classic example, Heidegger's hammer includes its for-hammering as a component of what it counts as (a hammer), the ecological affordance of hammering is part of the hammer, whereas for the object recognition stuff Isaac was talking about, it's much more about the object as a "object in space and time", a spatiotemporal locale, a solid trajectory through spacetime, boundaries, edges, that kind of thing.
It seems to me the relevant dispute regarding perception is whether, when you functionally split off those low level things from the upper level things, do you render the account which uses that functional distinction inaccurate, since "upstream", higher in model's hierarchy, the two are actually integrated interactive processes? There's doubtlessly contextual questions; to what degree can you split them? To what degree can you split them in what contexts? What is lost/gained from considering things like that?
Quoting fdrake
Quoting Isaac
Let me suggest the way that Husserl and Merlea-Ponty would answer the question of whether there can be any such thing as a non task-relative sensation. But first, I’m wondering whether such a concept would fall under Sellars’s myth of the given.
Varela summarizes Goodman’s version of this:
“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.
A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:
If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”
Now let me analyze a notion like ‘edge’ in the way that I think Husserl might. Imagine that we are a
creature recently emerged from the womb and just beginning to make perceptual sense of the environment via our various modalities of reception and action. Husserl begins with the assumption that we only experience a sensation as that sensation if it is meaningful to us, and its meaning is bound up with usefulness , that is, how perceiving something helps us to navigate our environment , to pick up and handle
objects, to recognize and pursue sources of food, shelter, danger, etc. It might seem obvious , even primitive, how the perception of edges are useful to us(there can be no object differentiated from a background without contrast). But is an edge
the same thing as a contrast? Let’s think about what is necessary in order to have an edge. First of all, an edge is not the same thing as a point in space. It implies a multiplicity of points or contrasts of some sort. Could we say the that it requires recognizing a surface? What is it that composes a surface? Our geometrical knowledge tells us that a surface has such and such characteristics, but isnt this a higher order abstraction? There can be no such thing as an abstract surface in nature any more than there can be a straight line. The point isn’t simply to question the primordiality in nature of perfect lines and surfaces but to question the very concept of a line or surface as a sensory given rather than a relative constructive hypothesis.
Surfaces are imperfect in shape, color , hue, brightness, texture, etc, notnbecause the are imperfect exemplars of the category ‘surface’ but because the very notion of surface as a unitary entity is an idealization subjectively constructed. And if this is true of a surface it is also true of its boundary. Often our visual sense cannot confirm a boundary that fades and disperses and gets lost and blended with changes in light, shadow, color , depth, etc. Sometimes only the recourse to movement and touch allow for a construction that leads to a notion of something like a boundary. And how many different meanings of boundary might there be, depending on how we are seeking to interact with it?
A ball has a boundary which appears as an edge visually but only when we attempt to interact with it do we discover the notion of sphericalness. There are boundaries between planes which pre-suppose
the notions of ‘in-front-of’ and behind. Recognition of such ‘edges’ protect us from falling off cliffs. Sometimes we don’t need to know what’s
behind or in front of. Instead we need to know what is above or below, to the left of or to the right of. Perhaps it is the boundary itself we are pursing in a directional fashion. And of course, the orientedness in space of a perceptual feature does not originarily take place in objective space but in the subjective space
of embodiment. My body is the zero point relative to which everything that I perceive is correlated and is orientated.
These orientation concepts are complex constructions , as we know from brain pathologies in which one loses the ability to process left from right. There are also brain injuries that cause neglect of one side of the field of vision or of the body. This is not due to damage to sensory reception but to a kind of apathy. (In Schizophrenia we often find a failure to demarcate where one’s body stops and the world begins. This bleeds over into the a failure to recognize boundaries of other objects. The issue here with edges isn’t one of sensory input but of significance, the relations between the object and my aims. If purposiveness becomes fragmented, the world and its contours fragments along with it. )
So are all these examples of goal-oriented tasks just different constructions based on a task-neutral sensory primitive called an ‘edge’? Husserl would say that none of them are, and that in fact there can be no such singular category like ‘edge’ that encompasses these varying contextual constructions. Each is telling the organism something original and invaluable to their present need to interact with an aspect of the world , about the way a new feature contrasts with the previous(aboveness, belowness, behind or in front of, sphericalness) in relation to one’s bodily position and in the context of how one is specifically intending to interact with an aspect of the world.
The question then becomes, from Husserl’s vantage, where do we get the idea that there are such subject-neutral things in nature called edges or points? His answer was that these are the product of an abstract idealization of the perceived world that was invented between the time of Aristotle and Galileo in the form of objective geometrical mathematization. This idealization was itself
designed to perform certain tasks, but has been taken as the foundation for the analysis of the perceived world, in the form of objective sensation primitives. The examples I gave above become imperfect variations derived from a gemotricized subject-independent space-time model of sensation.
Yes, I agree, but I'm not sure how relevant the salient features of the task are by the time it's just one of many signals competing for attention - we're never just eating a sandwich. In fact the task we think we're engaged in is more often than not a trivial distraction as far as the rest of the brain is concerned - which is far more engaged with standing up, digesting, checking we're not under any threat etc...
Quoting fdrake
No. That's a good point. Basically goes back to what I said above. We're never doing one thing at once, there's never 'a task' for our brain to be holistically oriented toward. Any sense that there is is post hoc narrative creation, not a live modification. When I'm 'eating a sandwich' not only am I also engaged in the things I mentioned above, but I'm engaged in filtering and processing the memories form the previous task or set of events, I may be still creating that narrative and some of the salience-related filtering in perception will result from narratives of previous tasks being 'replayed' for the sake of memory creation, rather than the actual task at hand.
Quoting fdrake
You can, but only to the same extent. In that tasks are always legion. Rescheduling is a case in point here, I think. when you turn on the light switch, you actually see the light before you fell the switch click (light, and the signals from your occipital nerves travel faster than the feedback from your pressure-sensitive nerve endings), but the signals from your occipital nerves are 'held back' from their pathways to scene-construction until the signals from the pressure-sensitive nerve endings get to the brain (which, on it's modelling assumption, is expecting them). The signals then get sent to to areas like scene construction and event narratives in the right order "I switched the switch and then the light came on". Various optical illusion like the violet chaser mess with this feature. The point is, it works because I reached out to switch the switch (previous task). Knowing I did that, has rearranged the events of the current task (checking the status of the lighting/room etc).
Quoting Joshs
See above. How does this square with the multiplicity of tasks and saliencies we have? We don't see something 'as' something, we see something 'as' many somethings, relevant to many different tasks, we only unite them later when creating the unifying narrative. I'm sure I don't, with you, need to go through the acres of evidence for post hoc narratives as unifying memory initiators out of dissonant sensory or interoceptive interpretations do I.
Quoting fdrake
I think this depends on the influence the upstream priors have on the accounts rendered by the lower level models. The answer, at the moment, seems to be fairly little - tinkering at the edges stuff.
Basics like foreground/background, container/contained are distinctions made very early on in visual processing and are powerful (by which I mean higher models are more likely to re-interpret to match these outputs than suppress those outputs to match their priors). There's even some speculation that the container/contained distinction suffuses much of our higher conceptual thought...bu that's another thing. Point is there's very little the higher models can do to switch a background/foreground decision, or a container/contained decision. There's a paper by Seth exploring some of the hoops the higher models will jump through when he uses virtual reality headsets to switch these basics.
I think a good analogy of the relationship between models in the hierarchy is a well-managed company. The CEO might not even know how the accountants are working out how much tax the company owes, but he'll definitely asset his influence in hiring and firing them, in showing displeasure at a high bill and pleasure at a low one, the accountants will be well aware what their aim is, but nonetheless, the CEO hasn't the faintest idea what they're actually doing, and certainly wouldn't personally re-arrange a few columns.
Quoting Joshs
I think you've read 'task-independent' where I'm talking about 'not the task you think you're focussed on'. All signals have to be interpreted according to priors and those prior will be influenced by the current state (which, given the nature of the dynamic environment to which we must respond, will always be some task or other). The point I'm making is that we can't (as the phenomenologists would have us do) reverse-engineer this effect, because the 'task' that's relevant to the priors is not necessarily one we're even aware of, and certainly one on many going on at the same time.
Quoting Joshs
Again, I think you're misconstruing the active inference approach as implying objective properties when it's doing the exact opposite. It's using the exact same constructive hypothesis of 'edge' are you're describing here. The difference is the modelling assumption it's using is not a 'higher order' one accessible to introspection, It's a very basic one (probably at least partly hard-wired).
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
This needs to be clarified. First, there is a distinction to be made between the views of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and the current crop of writers( Varela, Thompson, Gallagher , Ratcliffe ) who incorporate elements of their work in their own models. I don’t think any of these current writers would disagree with the idea that partially independent subprocesses functioning in parallel underlie, and are hidden from conscious awareness.
Varela writes:
“...the overall picture of mind not as a unified, homogenous entity, nor even as a collection of entities, but rather as a disunified, heterogenous collection of networks of processes seems not only attractive but also strongly resonant with the experience accumulated in all the fields of cognitive science.”
On the other hand, you would be right to claim that Heidegger, Husserl and MP would argue that the idea of partially independent subsystems functioning in parallel violates the organizational grounding of phenomenology in temporality. But I don’t think this is relevant to the critiques being leveled against pp models from enactivist writers.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
But how is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all
for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain’s interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the ‘body budget’). I imagine Barrett as a psychotherapist treating the client’s aims, goals, desires and feelings as being at the mercy of internal and external circumstance, and in fact signifying nothing more than an arbitrary transition from dominating circumstance to circumstance. Better yet, to the extent that her model is in line with that of Friston, the reductionistic plumbing metaphors of Freud’s id-ego-superego paychodynamics seem to be a good fit for her approach.
(The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy: a neurobiological account of Freudian ideas.
R. L. Carhart-Harris, K. J. Friston. Brain, Volume 133, Issue 4, April 2010)
The ‘how’ of finding oneself in the world that enactivists talk about depends on their viewing a cognitive-environmental system as normative in character, that is, as functioning as an autonomous whole in a certain reciprocal causal exchange with its world. This normativity creates the criteria for what perturbs it , not discrete packets of environmental information that it has to match itself to. And this normativity allows us to talk of emotions as just special versions of an affective attunement toward the world which is always present in cognitive functioning, indicating how interactions with the world either facilitate or degrade the system’s autonomy.
I could be wrong, but I don’t see how one could call a cognitive system’s attempt to match external input with internally generated representations fully normative.
Friston’s free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It’s not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud’s realist model ( Friston’s characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief’ indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal’ environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here:
“ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world’s marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain’s point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”
By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect.
“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity.
Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it.
Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
From my current knowledge of cognitive science, all this sounds like nothing more than wishful thinking. I've not read (nor here been presented) with any actual empirical evidence of this holistic normative actually taking place in cognitive functions. The work for Feldman Barrett, Seth and Friston is based on what they see happening inside the brain, It's not an overarching philosophical model, it's a theory posited to explain the neurological phenomena they have observed. I'm left, after multiple pages, still unclear as to what neurological phenomena the approaches you're describing are trying to model.
.Quoting Isaac
Barrett, Friston and Seth’s work doesn’t amount to an explicitly conceived overarching philosophical model, because they are not philosophers. But it implicitly rests on such overarching philosophical assumptions, just as does every empirical enterprise.
What’s at stake here is not what neurological phenomena enactivist approaches are trying to model, but a more fundamental questioning: what is a natural object like a neuron, a brain or a body, what do we mean when we talk about observing such phenomena, what is an internal and an external environment and how do these all relate to each other? These are primarily philosophical and not empirical questions and they require a philosophical investigation. I’m not saying there’s no room at all for empirical clarification, but that must come after the conceptual work.
The work for Feldman-Barrett, Seth and Friston, is, prior to being about any phenomena like the ‘inside of a brain’, based on a certain set of philosophical pre-suppositions that make such notions as ‘inside brains’ and ‘computational representations’ meaningful in the way they are to them in the first place and justify their research project.
I have now read carefully a number of writings by Clark , Friston and Barrett, and I can say with confidence that their thinking is squarely within the realist tradition( not naive realism, as Barrett points out, but a more sophisticated neo-Kantian version which distinguishes between real sense data and constructed human realities.
So, far from being mere ‘observation’ (observation, I suppose, in Barrett’s sense of looking at ‘real’ natural phenomena. As she writes “...concepts exist in your human mind that is conjured in your human brain, which is part of nature. The biological processes of categorization, which are rooted in physical reality ...are observable in the brain and body”) , the natural phenomena to be observed come already-pre-interpreted.
You have said things over the course of our discussion that led me to think that perhaps your view of the basis of science is a full-going post-realist one. But I have to assume your philosophical assumptions underlying your thinking about psychological phenomena jibes with the authors you follow.
If the following quotes from Barrett don’t raise red flags for you, or strike you as in any way problematic , then no amount of empirical evidence from enactivist quarters will make any difference.
“If you talk to a chemist, “real” is a molecule, an atom, a proton. To a physicist, “real” is a quark, a Higgs boson, or maybe a collection of little strings vibrating in eleven dimensions. They are supposed to exist in the natural
world whether or not humans are present—that is, they are thought to be perceiver-independent categories. If all human life left this planet tomorrow, subatomic particles would still be here.”
“ Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. Common sense leads us to believe that emotions are real in nature and exist independent of any observer, in the same manner as Higgs bosons and plants.”
I know that your field is neuroscience, not philosophy, but if the only thing that would make the enactivist perspective( or any of a whole slew of post-realist arguments ) convincing to you is empirical evidence or a model written in the language of neuroscience, then you’re missing the point. This is a philosophy forum, not a neuroscience blog. As Jerry Fodor pointed out, "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.”.
If I were to start this discussion over from scratch , I would collect quotes like the above from Barrett, Friston and Seth and simply ask you which philosophical perspectives you think would find them troublesome and why. If your answer is you’d prefer to remain within the confines of contemporary neuroscientific discourse, we could end the conversation there because, while there may be a bevy of such activity, I’m not familiar with its details. More importantly , as I mentioned, whatever neuroscientific work is being done within post-realist approaches will not be decipherable without an understanding of the philosophical pre-suppositions undergirding it. That means it should not be necessary for this discussion to delve into the world
of neuroscience. To help make my point, Barrett’s writing, and Clark’s also , is loaded with references to philosophical frameworks that their thinking breaks free of ( for instance, Barrett’s mention of naive realism, and Clark’s references to Cartesian dualism and essentialism). So it seems to me they are quite awareness of the philosophical underpinnings of approaches they are rejecting. As impressed as I am sure they have been with empirical findings that surprised them or seemed initially counterintuitive, I believe they would acknowledge that
the neuroscientific evidence alone could not have formed the backbone of pp models. If you asked Barrett or Clark what a neuroscientific model looks like that is grounded in naive realism, essentialism or Cartesian dualism, I think they could tell you.